by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
Last week, we were looking into a case from Lewis County, Washington, involving Bigfoot and a UFO, and we came upon Flying Saucer News, published by James S. Rigberg, who ran the Flying Saucer News Bookstore (and Prosperity Clinic) at 359 West 45th Street in Manhattan. The story we were looking at was covered in the May 1972 issue (page 5 of the pdf) of the magazine. Also in that issue was an editorial by Rigberg suggesting that a solution to the crime wave affecting New York City at the time would be to put habitual criminals in suspended animation using cryonics until effective methods of rehabilitation were available. The back of the cover is devoted to a plea for funds to help promote this idea. This week, we’ll look into the history (how could we not) of Rigberg, his store, and Flying Saucer News.
Rigberg LetterRichard Aguilar posted a blog on his wordpress.com website on August 23, 2014, headlined “In Search of . . . James S. Rigberg and the Flying Saucer News Bookstore and Prosperity Clinic.” According to him, he discovered Rigberg’s store in the mid-1970s and made regular weekend trips from Queens to visit. He describes the store this way:
The store was about the size of a shoebox bodega on the street level of a five-story apartment building at 359 West 45th Street. The window display was a low-budget DIY affair—maybe a pie tin spacecraft hanging by a thread and some books. Inside, running along the two longer walls, you would find steel bookcases crammed with UFO, metaphysical, and self-improvement books and magazines. More books were neatly displayed on a table in the center. The space was so tight and the aisles so narrow, that it could only comfortably accommodate about three customers at a time. Usually I would have the entire store to myself.
In Aguilar’s research, he came across a 1977 UFO documentary, The Force Beyond, in which Rigberg and the store are briefly featured, and a Project Blue Book file on a UFO sighting reported by Rigberg (his one and only) that has the handwritten note: “We have file on the “Flying Saucer News.” The file contains a clipping from the February 7, 1955, New York Times in which Rigberg and his wife are profiled. Aguilar says that the following year, “Jimmy really made a national splash” when he was featured in a two-page article (page 28 of the pdf) in the March 10, 1956, Saturday Evening Post.
Rigberg CoverIn the Post article by John Kobler, headlined “He Runs Flying-Saucer Headquarters,” Rigberg is described as “a small, mild, balding man of forty-two, with pronounced psychic leanings.” According to Kobler, Rigberg ran the store six days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and, assisted by his wife, kept files on reports (some 200 per week) sent in to him from all over the country. Kobler highlights the books by contactees carried in Rigberg’s store with a good deal of the article devoted to the most famous of these, George Adamski. According to Kobler, “Rigberg regards Adamski with awe, and he was overjoyed not long ago when the professor paid him a surprise visit.”
Kobler provides some insight into the Rigbergs’ existence. According to him, they worked 14 hours a day at the store and lived in a “bedroom-kitchen unit at the rear.” Mrs. Rigberg (Margaret) is said to have to have worn no makeup “being a faithful member of the Pentecostal Church, an austere sect,” and they are both said to have frowned “on smoking and drinking as immoral.” Their main recreational activity is described as a walk around the block after work.
Kobler describes Rigberg’s childhood in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as “bleak.” According to Kobler, Rigberg’s father died when he was an infant, and his mother, being destitute, gave him up to be raised, first in an orphanage, and then by a Mennonite family. He studied agriculture at the National Farm School in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, worked as a farmhand in tobacco fields during the depression, and ended up in New York in 1947 as a counterman in a Manhattan restaurant.
According to Kobler, Rigberg had invested in a copy machine to augment his income and kept it in the boardinghouse where he lived. He quotes Rigberg saying he had a “psychic flash” to insure it the day before a fire destroyed the boardinghouse and says that this caused Rigberg to be “in a receptive frame of mind” as he read an advertisement for the Indianapolis based College of Divine Metaphysics Inc.
According to Kobler, Rigberg paid $200 for a correspondence course he completed in two years and ended up with degrees as a “doctor of metaphysics, doctor of divinity, and doctor of psychology.” He describes Margaret Lecon as Rigberg’s first student after he met her “while browsing through a religious library.” According to him, they were married a year later, and Margaret “meanwhile had acquired the degree of metaphysical practitioner of new thought, joined an astrological sect, the Church of Light, and a poetry center, the Avalon World Arts Academy, and written a booklet entitled God’s Greatest Gift.”
Kobler describes the couple opening up their store (then on 1597 Third Avenue) three years before, which at first specialized in “occult literature and paraphernalia,” and operating it in their spare time. Rigberg is quoted as saying, “Naturally, we attracted all sorts of people.” According to Kobler, one of those people “was a fifteen-year-old boy interested in flying saucer literature.” He says Rigberg “laid in a supply” of Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully and Flying Saucers From Outer Space by Donald Keyhoe, which sold well, and this encouraged him to add other saucer-based books. According to Kobler, Rigberg’s sighting of, in Rigberg’s words, “a dark, round, disk-shaped object” while walking home from the restaurant with a fellow employee prompted him to devote himself to flying saucers full time.
Rigberg published the first typewritten and copied issue of Flying Saucer News, price 25¢, in March 1955. It presents a slice of history with news of the saucer scene in New York City, which was a significant influence at the time due to the recently formed Civilian Saucer Intelligence Group of New York. Jim Moseley had been recently elected as its president. A meeting by the group is described as having taken place on November 19, 1954, at Steinway Hall on West 57th Street, and Moseley is said to have paid a visit to the store along with Gray Barker. Up until January 1956, there seems to have been a great deal of care put into the publication, and the covers on the three issues from August 1955 to January 1956 are, in this writer’s opinion (and at least one other’s), art museum worthy.
Just under ten years after the first issue, the magazine seems to be mostly the result of cutting and pasting. The January 1965 issue (still 25¢) contains: news clippings; advertisements for metaphysical and flying saucer books, a crystal ball, and a Ouija board; ads for publications by other saucer groups; and “Letters to the Editor From Out Of This World!” which include photos of the letter writers. It appears to have been created using a more modern copy machine and many of the ads appear to have been professionally printed. The Socorro case is described (the date is wrong) and there are photos of an alleged flying saucer ($3.00 for a set of seven) taken in Albuquerque, New Mexico, by A. A. Villa, who claimed he was directed to the location telepathically and met the crew of five women and four men, all 7-9 feet tall, from the “galaxie” of Como Bernices.
Over ten years later, the June 1975 issue (which has the 45th Street address) mostly consists of an article from the January 1, 1975, issue of the National Tattler (page 8 of the pdf) headlined “U. S. Air force Hiding Bodies of 12 Men From Outer Space” that investigates the tale spun by Robert Spencer Carr in 1974 at a UFO symposium in Florida that caused the resurrection of the Aztec, New Mexico, crash told by Scully in his book, although Carr’s version differs. To support the claim by Carr that the Air Force was hiding alien bodies from the public, Tattler investigators found a witness “who saw a UFO crash in a ball of fire” and claimed to have seen bodies in laundry bags at Malmstrom AFB after he was summoned there to fill out a report.
What we assume is the last issue (as it is the last one available from Archives for the Unexplained) published May 1982, is almost entirely made up of clippings and ads. There is, however, one report (page 3 of the pdf) out of Newport, Oregon, dated October 10, 1975, that seems to have been written by Rigberg where it is claimed that 20 people went missing after a UFO meeting. It is explained that “The missing people were advised by their speakers to discard all things of material value including their children if they did not care to remain here on Earth. They were guaranteed a better place to go by their speakers where there is no war, fear, and sickness.”
Aguilar sums up Rigberg’s life this way: “Jimmy was doing his part in helping to explore one of the big questions confronting humanity — ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ He was able to bring pleasure to many, provoke thought in some, and make a few bucks along the way. Not a bad life, not bad at all.”