Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America

views updated

Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America

Founded in 1959 by Gabriel Green (b. 1924), Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA) grew out of the Los Angeles Interplanetary Study Groups, which Green had started in 1956. That same year Green also began issuing a magazine, Thy Kingdom Come. A photographer, Green became interested in flying saucers after his own sighting of a UFO. He also claimed to have made telepathic contact with the Space Masters and the Great White Brotherhood.

Green intended the AFSCA to create public acceptance of flying saucers, and to further his aims he planned petitions to Congress and held national conventions. At its peak in the early 1960s the AFSCA had 5,000 members in 24 countries. In 1959 Thy Kingdom Come was renamed World Report (1959-61), then UFO International (1962-65). A second periodical, Flying Saucers International, began in 1962 and continued until 1969. Green assumed that the flying saucers were manned by friendly extraterrestrials and had a plan for imparting their advanced knowledge to the people of the Earth in order to resolve present world problems. AFSCA was quite active through the 1960s, but after 1969 became a paper organization and for all practical purposes ceased to exist.

Sources:

Biographical Sketch of Gabriel Green. Northridge, Calif.: Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America, 1974.

Clark, Jerome. The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959; The UFO Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1992.

Green, Gabriel, and Warren Smith. Let's Face the Facts about Flying Saucers. New York: Popular Library, 1967.

More From encyclopedia.com