BSRA/Meade Layne Finding Aid for Researchers

A large collection of physical, 1940’s-1950’s era Public Domain Borderland Sciences Research Association (BSRA/Meade Layne) papers was recently acquired and digitized, and is now online at archive.org.

I decided to name it the Frederick C. Durant III BSRA Collection, because this specific name was on a surprising modern hand written note on the inside of the box containing the very rare and nearly complete collection of The Flying Roll issues. (There are ten total issues, and the box contained eight of them. The first two issues were not present, but luckily the BSRF reprinted these two specific issues a few years later.)

Interestingly, Durant was the Jan. 1953 Robertson Panel’s secretary. He was a lifelong member of the Society of American Magicians (see here). How he is actually related to this collection is a mystery itself. This was written in The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), by Edward J. Ruppelt , chapter 17:

To get a qualified opinion, I wrote to a friend, Frederick C. Durant. Mr. Durant, who is presently the director of a large Army Ordnance test station, is also a past president of the American Rocket Society and president of the International Astronautical Federation. For those who are not familiar with these organizations, the American Rocket Society is an organization established to promote interest and research in space flight and lists as its members practically every prominent scientist and engineer in the professional fields allied to aeronautics. The International Astronautical Federation is a world-wide federation of such societies.

Mr. Durant has spent many hours studying UFO reports in the Project Blue Book files and many more hours discussing them with scientists the world over — scientists who are doing research and formulating the plans for space flight. I asked him what he’d heard about the UFO’s during the past several years and what he thought about them. This was his reply:

“This past summer at the Annual Congress of the IAF at Innsbruck, as well as previous Congresses (Zurich, 1953, Stuttgart, 1952, and London, 1951), none of the delegates representing the rocket and space flight societies of all the countries involved had strong feelings on the subject of saucers. Their attitude was essentially the same as professional members of the American Rocket Society in this country. In other words, there appear to be no confirmed saucer fans in the hierarchy of the professional societies.

I continue to follow the subject of UFO’s primarily because of my being requested for comment on the interplanetary flight aspects. My personal feelings have not changed in the past four years, although I continue to keep an objective outlook.”

To my knowledge, this may be the most complete Flying Roll collection in existence. They are incredibly hard to find, in physical or digital form. It was a private publication at the time.

A Finding Aid for researchers is here:

[embed]GitHub - richgel999/bsra_meade_layne_finding_aid: 40's-50's era BSRA (Borderland Sciences Research… 40's-50's era BSRA (Borderland Sciences Research Association) Finding Aid for Researchers …github.com

Alternatively you can access the individual issues via archive.org:

[embed]Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine Edit descriptionarchive.org

Oddly a few pages containing references to the occultist “Gerald Light” were not present in this physical collection. These missing pages are not a scanning artifact. In these cases it appears someone in the past ~70 years had taken out the staples, removed the page(s), then re-stapled the publication. Luckily the AFU Shop in Sweden had the missing issues.

This digitized archive is a combination of scans from the Durant BSRA collection (purchased from a collector on eBay), along with issues acquired individually over the years from Amazon, eBay, Abe Books, the AFU Shop, or downloaded from the IAPSOP. I now have two copies of many issues from different collections/sources.

If you download the original .PDF files, it’s highly recommended to use Adobe Acrobat software to view them. Browser and non-Adobe PDF readers are not reliable for research use.