At its arrival in 1987, The Skeptic joined an existing ecosystem of UK media and networks interested in the paranormal. First and oldest was the Society for Psychical Research. Second was the Fortean Times, inspired by the writer Charles Fort and founded in 1973 as the purveyor of “the world’s weirdest news,” which seemed to find us faintly comical in our seriousness. Third, and probably least-known outside of Britain, was Magonia, which began in 1966 as a stencil-duplicated bulletin published by the Merseyside UFO Research Group. John Rimmer, a now-retired librarian, took over as editor in 1973; he ended print publication with the magazine’s ninety-ninth issue in 2008. It continues as a book reviews blog, with the entire archive freely accessible alongside.

“It’s always been a very personal thing,” Rimmer explains. “It’s a very small group of people with similar views: we’re more skeptical of the investigators than we are of the people who claim the experience.” For much of its existence, the magazine bore the strapline “Interpreting vision and belief.” Rimmer is less interested in explanations for visions such as UFOs, the Virgin Mary, Sasquatch, or a ghost: “The mechanism of those visions isn’t all that interesting to us. We’re more interested in the nature of the vision.” Skeptics, he adds, have often struggled with this orientation: “We find somebody like Phil Klass as valid an interesting a person as someone who sees something. The thing we always wanted to make sure was that we didn’t lose our sense of humor.” The blog takes its name, “Pelicanist,” from Kenneth Arnold’s original 1947 UFO sighting, which some theorized was a flight of white pelicans.

Rimmer cites as the exemplar of Magonia‘s approach David J. Hufford’s 1982 book The Terror That Comes in the Night, which explores the many different manifestations of Newfoundland folklore about an old hag that comes out of your dreams, sits on you, and terrorizes. A skeptic might instantly recognize the story as an example of sleep paralysis, while Rimmer places it in the “supernatural assault traditions” category. “It’s the key to the Magonia approach to phenomena. It shows it as an experienced phenomenon, not an explanation. There is no question that people are experiencing this, and the way they interpret it is what the book is about. I have had many arguments with American UFOlogists about the significance of it.”

Rimmer finds that this approach provides context for many past beliefs. In espousing nineteenth century spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, subject of another recently reviewed book, was more the scientific version of religion: “It was a time when people were finding out about radio waves and radioactivity—intangible sources that had an effect on physical things and the idea of ether for transmitting information and light. So the feeling was at the time that it wasn’t all that unlikely that there might be some other strange, intangible force.”

The UFO community, he says, has always had secular and religious branches. The secular side is inspired by astronomical discoveries, sees UFOs as physical craft, and interviews witnesses. The religious side spawned some of the very first contactee cases, linked to the abduction phenomenon, and heralds change for mankind. “It’s a very anti-humanist attitude, that human beings are not very nice things … that there is something wrong with us and we can put it right by letting space people do it, or by getting religion and following the word of God.”

When told that in at The Skeptic‘s start some believed the UK was too sensible to embrace those phenomena, Rimmer dissents: “This is the whole thing about the Magonia approach. We’re looking at it as a cultural phenomenon, but also at how certain phenomena are common across all cultures but interpreted in different ways, such as bedroom visitors.”

Even so, Rimmer encountered the same problem skeptics have at times: neither the phenomena he was interested in nor the culture around them change very much over time. He decided to cease print publication, he says, after paying “nostalgic” visits to the Wiltshire village of Warminster, site of numerous 1960s UFO sightings, when it experienced a revival of interest around 2007. “I found everyone was saying the same things as 30 years earlier,” he says. Social media speeds up circulation, but generates no new ideas.

In recent years, researchers such as David Clarke have been trawling the UK’s National Archives for the government information that conspiracy theorists insist is being covered up. Clarke’s work “tells you an awful lot about how people, government, all different types thought about UFOs and what they thought they had to do about UFOs. It tells you a lot about how things work. The only thing it doesn’t tell you is how UFOs work.”

Hence Magonia‘s reinvention as a review journal of somewhat broader scope. Rimmer recently published reviews of book on Jack the Ripper and the social conditions in which he operated, for example, and another that speculates on the Ripper’s identity. “It gets in there because it’s something that will never be explained,” he says. “Ripperologists” can tell you every detail of the nineteenth century murders, but Rimmer’s interest is again, how people approach the mystery: “Everybody brings a solution to Jack the Ripper and who they would like it to be, much the same as people’s solutions to ghosts and UFOs.”