Sunday, October 17, 2021

UFO articles from "Sir!" magazine, "A Magazine For Males" (1950s, USA)

Hopefully sexism has reduced in publications relating to UFOs since the 1950-1960s.  Back then, it was fairly common for UFO articles to be published in magazines such as "Sir!", which had the tagline "A Magazine For Males".  

I've been surprised how many of the UFO articles I've seen from magazines in the 1950s-1960s time period were aimed explicitly at men and had titles such as "Male", "Man to Man" and "For Men Only". A considerable number also appeared in magazines such as Playboy.  

I'm not sure what this says (if anything) about the sociology/demographics of the UFO readership at that time - or today.

Personally, I find some of the sociological issues relating to UFOs, and ufologists, to be pretty interesting and would like to see more material by academics looking into these issues .  I wrote an item back in 2014 on the PhD dissertations I'd found relating to ufology [see "Dr Who?? : UFO PhD dissertations - free online"- most of which had a sociological or psychological focus.  I may revisit that project now that I have more material and connections. 

Some of the pre-1964 material is, I think, now in the public domain under relevant copyright rules in the USA, but I'm slightly hesitant to post that material due to the nature of the covers of the relevant magazines.  (As some of you may have noticed, I tend to use covers of the publications when sharing material, to indicate at a glance the content of my post to those scrolling down a page).

For now, I've just uploaded a sample from a single publication - "Sir!" - with thanks to Mikhail Gershtein for these scans.

Click on the image below for a link to the relevant folder.




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