from Delta Green, pg. 118
SaucerWatch is a private UFO investigation group that had its start with the UFO craze, which began with with Kenneth Arnold's June 24,1947, sighting of "flying disks" over Mount Rainier in Washington state. The 1950s was a period of rapid growth for the UFO "contactee" community. Contactees claimed either to be in or to have had communications with various intelligent and benevolent "space brothers" who were coming to Earth to spread the message of intergalactic peace and enlightenment.
Howard Fender — a retired newspaper reporter and the founding father of SaucerWatch — took a different perspective. Perhaps he had read too many issues of Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, but Howard Fender worried about the unguessable motives of the mysterious beings who were visiting Earth. Fender began SaucerWatch in 1951 as a network of similarly concerned observers of UFO phenomena who wanted to share information. Beginning in 1953, SaucerWatch published a newsletter called Semper Vigilus ("Always Watchful"). The newsletter was a financial drain but continued nonetheless on an irregular publication schedule.
SaucerWatch concentrated on the darker aspects of the UFO phenomena: abductions and mysterious experiments, "missing time" and repressed memories, livestock mutilations, and unexplained disappearances. SaucerWatch supported Semper Vigilus through volunteer work and the contributions of its members. SaucerWatch was always underfunded and understaffed. After Fender's death from lung cancer in 1961, SaucerWatch stumbled along in one form or another for twenty years, its fortunes and credibility waning and waxing depending on which of Fender's protegés was running the organization.
In 1980, SaucerWatch gained the support of Harvard-trained psychiatrist Dr. Denton Shaeffer. Dr. Shaeffer supported the claims of several UFO abductees and brought new attention to the phenomenon of "missing time." Unfortunately, in 1983 Dr. Shaeffer lost his medical license when he was accused by two alleged ex-patients of molesting them while they were under hypnosis. This seriously damaged SaucerWatch's credibility despite the fact that there was no evidence that either accuser had ever been a patient of Dr. Shaeffer's. Despite that disaster, SaucerWatch (and Dr. Shaeffer) continued to investigate UFO phenomena. To restore their credibility, SaucerWatch became very skeptical and conservative. Polygraphing witnesses became standard procedure. SaucerWatch's investigators became proficient in the fields of photographic analysis, special effects, and stage magic. On several occasions during the 1980s, SaucerWatch even debunked UFO hoaxes. By the 1990s, this network of people working out of their homes and in their spare time had managed to reestablish the group's reputation as a serious investigator of UFO phenomena.
Today, SaucerWatch is one of the best-funded UFO investigation groups in the country. This is due to the financial assistance of Sheridan Dunwoody-Smith, a UFO abductee from an East Coast, old money family. She joined SaucerWatch in 1991 and set up an endowment of three million dollars to fund the group. The SaucerWatch endowment's annual income- usually around three hundred thousand dollars- comprises nearly all of the group's annual budget. SaucerWatch now has offices in Topeka, Kansas, first-class desktop publishing facilities, data processing facilities with fax and Internet access, teletype machines hooked into most news services in North America, a fleet of three vehicles (including a motor home decked out as an investigation unit), and an impressive forensic laboratory. SaucerWatch even has the use of a twin-engine Beechcraft aircraft provided by SaucerWatch member and pilot Donna Larkin.
Other financing comes from members who contribute money and information to SaucerWatch, sales of reports on the various UFO and abduction cases SaucerWatch has investgated, and sales of Semper Vigilus. With the new financing, Semper Vigilus has expanded to a bimonthly magazine with a worldwide circulation of about 75,000. The popularization of the Internet led Semper Vigilus to add a World Wide Web site and Usenet forum. All this has forced SaucerWatch to hire a permanent staff to manage the office, get Semper Vigilus out on schedule, and generally keep things running smoothly. Besides the five-member investigation team, there are eight paid employees. Global membership in SaucerWatch numbers about thirty thousand.
SaucerWatch's files contain hundreds of hours of videotape with recorded interviews and hypnotic regressions of witnesses and abductees, as well as thousands of photographs of "landing sites," mutilated cattle, and unidentified lights in the sky. These cases are filed under four classifications: "Credible Physical Evidence," "Credible Circumstantial Evidence," "Credible Testimony," and "Bullshit." Naturally the "Bullshit'' file takes up too much room.
The members of SaucerWatch feel that they may be close to something, but they are not sure what. The circumstantial evidence suggests that some people are genuinely abducted by aliens and subjected to psychological and physiological examinations, some of which focus on human reproduction, but for what purpose only the aliens know for sure. The use of Larkin's plane has dramatically increased the investigative team's response time, allowing them to get to sites of UFO phenomena before they are trampled by the press, the curious, or (worse) bumbling UFO enthusiasts. As of yet, they have not obtained a single clinching piece of physical evidence, but their investigations continue.