FOIA Records: Informants Advised FBI on Subversive Saucer Groups

The FBI provided 48 pages of records responsive to the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America on Friday in response to a FOIA request submitted by Expanding Frontiers Research. The Bureau file was compiled as a result of a 1960 complaint lodged by a Southern California woman about what she deemed the suspicious activity of frontman Gabriel Green and his Los Angeles saucer group. The records further clarify circumstances explored by EFR in its investigation of the New York Saucer Information Bureau, as well as demonstrate there is little new under the sun when it comes to extremist rhetoric employed to manipulate the public. FBI memos from days gone by may frequently tell us as much about ourselves and current events as they tell us about the society and culture that are preserved on their pages.

Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs

According to a May 1960 FBI complaint form, Connie Urban advised the Bureau she responded to an employment ad seeking a “confidential secretary.” She then had an interview with Gabriel Green, who identified himself as the president of Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America (AFSCA). Urban reported the organization seemed Communist and offered to provide the FBI information on the group and the subject of the complaint, Gabriel Green.

“The basis for Communistic allegation is that the subject wants to run for President of the U.S. and do away with the present economic system,” the form further documents, “and that he is getting messages from outer space telling him how to operate.”

If you've read our work before and you're thinking this reminds you of Avi Loeb, Eric Weinstein, Paul Hynek, and others carrying on about cryptocurrency and throwing around terms like “decentralize” and “revolution,” all while alternately wooing audiences with talk of an extraterrestrial presence, you're right. Gabriel Green's bit involved promoting a system where acquisition of goods is eligibility-based, tallied over the course of one's lifetime of total productive work, when he wasn't distributing monologues attributed to wise and noble aliens. Green's economic platform was commonly known as Prior Choice Economics, but he and his supporters also liked to refer to the “Economics Security Party,” which was termed ESP because of course it was.

Concerning her generous offer, the FBI informed Ms. Urban it could not make personal decisions for her – but would welcome any further information. She seems to have proceeded to provide an entire packet that included material from the group's Thy Kingdom Come newsletters, promotional flyers, and similar AFSCA propaganda that she apparently felt would facilitate an adequate assessment. Her offering included info about events where self-described contactees would tell audiences about their hundreds of trips to outer space; solicitations for donations along with encouragement to write elected officials; and a two-page message from none other than the extraterrestrial Ashtar himself. Ashtar was a telepathic-communicating being, first attributed to dubious contactee George Van Tassel, but others graced Van Tassel with the highest form of flattery when they also alleged to pick up Ashtar's signal.

Green's material is essentially a mix of religious and political extremism spiced with paranormal narratives. The four-page “God's New Political Party and a New Birth of Freedom” is included in the FBI file, for instance. The moral and spiritual principles of the Economic Security Party are likewise archived.

The AFSCA “is listed as a non-profit Philanthropic, Educational, Religious and Scientific Research Organization,” according to a 1959 FBI memo. The Cincinnati FBI office further documented concerns expressed by a John Paul Vincent, who furnished the Bureau with AFSCA literature perceived by Mr. Vincent as anti-American all the way through. Vincent further stated the material had a political aspect which did not seem to have anything to do with flying saucers.

While anti-war sentiments and pleas for economic reform as commonly found among saucer clubs are not necessarily indicative of Communist sympathies or treason, the fact remains that motives are subject to question when ideologies are airmailed on the wings of a snow-white Venusian. During this same time frame, a 1954 FBI investigation of peculiarities surrounding UFO contactee Truman Bethurum led to Silver Shirts founder and convicted seditionist William Dudley Pelley. Informants advised the Bureau that contactee George Hunt Williamson, who wrote for Valor magazine, was in Cincinnati to promote speaking engagements for Bethurum. Valor, the FBI was aware, was owned and operated by Pelley after he was paroled from prison, having served eight years of a 15-year sentence. Further stirring the pot was the fact his conditions of parole included ceasing to distribute extremist political propaganda so, in some manners of speaking, Pelley replaced his supreme race with Nordic aliens, at least in his distributed literature. What that suggests about the UFO genre may be as interesting as any of the rest of it is.

Spacecraft Convention

Among the materials contained in the recently received FBI file is information concerning the 1959 Sixth Annual Spacecraft Convention held at Giant Rock, CA. Giant Rock is the home of much lore in addition to a seven-story high boulder. The history includes George Van Tassel taking control of the area in the 1950s along with his subsequent tales of rejuvenation, time travel and, of course, extraterrestrial visitation.

Following the 1959 convention, Green and AFSCA informed readers that attendees were treated to a visit from a spaceship, or at least its force field, as asserted with the image below:

The May 22, 1959, edition of the Desert Sun informs us the spacecraft meet up featured Pelley former magazine writer George Hunt Williamson and presumed associate Bethurum, along with other unreliable narrators such as contactee Daniel Fry and editor Ray Palmer, a man often credited with inventing the flying saucer. NICAP Director Donald Keyhoe was also listed as an invited and well-known expert, circumstances that we might suspect he found both advantageous and belittling:

It is not clear if Keyhoe attended and spoke, but a public conflict of marketing strategies between NICAP and the contactee movement became more prominent by the time of the 1960 annual event the following year. It was then, according to the Capitol District Saucer Council, that Van Tassel announced during the convention that Keyhoe would not be attending because Keyhoe felt such events bring ridicule to the saucer subject. Van Tassel made his feelings clear about his disappointment in the omission of contactees from serious UFO considerations, or at least as serious as any considerations ever got. Such dilemmas were inherent to Keyhoe's job description, as they continue to be today for content creators who try to walk the line between evidence-based reporting and growing a paying audience.

Keyhoe's apparent adjacency is relevant for several reasons. The most glaring is because NICAP, like many UFO organizations before and since, promoted itself as dedicated to scientific investigation, yet a more accurate description would find that incorrect or lacking, at absolute best. There are subsequently a number of points that could be addressed about Keyhoe's incorrect uses of the term “science” while accusing others of incompetency and fraud. Let's just say a lot of his statements require pleading ignorance in order to allow him to evade suspicions of intentional deception.

Keyhoe's association is also relevant because he conducted a robust campaign against the U.S. Air Force and Central Intelligence Agency, not at all unlike perpetrated by the contactees. His general method of operation was to accuse the powers that be of a coordinated UFO cover-up and challenge them to prove otherwise. The contactees were ostensibly more about anti-war and community political values, but by the time it was all dragged into a saucer club meeting and attendees were told to write elected officials and demand less secrecy, the prevailing message was the U.S. government was the bad guys. Everyone from Vietnam protesters and Deadheads to saucer buffs and nationalist bigots came to share a common thread of opposition to authority. While FBI overreach and CIA human rights abuses are documented realities, it is also true that it would be naive to suppose all that opposition to government was completely organic and none of it was orchestrated by global adversaries and domestic enemies.

By the by, Keyhoe was also the tour manager for aviator Charles Lindbergh, an outspoken nationalist who opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. The further one digs into the circumstances, the more they might wonder how much involvement Pelley and associates had in organizing a substantial number of well-attended UFO events. Flying saucers seem to have been but one of countless subjects exploited for the purpose of manipulating the public and promoting covert agendas - then, now, and all points in between.

Here They Are!

An interesting aspect of this FOIA case is that a search conducted in response to a May 2025 request on Gabriel Green identified no responsive records. The file obtained Friday, arriving as the result of a request submitted in July 2025 on AFSCA, shows there were indeed records on Green that evaded a standard search. He was the subject of an FBI complaint, no less. As explored with MuckRock co-founder Michael Morisy in a January 2026 EFR blogpost, requesters may sometimes receive a 'no records' response, only to obtain records later on the subject when sought in a similar yet different way.

Researchers may find more success if they request files on a group that the individual was in, Morisy suggested, or a specific event or investigation the individual got caught up in, adding that "it's all more of a black box than it should be." That is exactly what happened in this situation, in that records apparently were not stored under the term Gabriel Green, but material responsive to the term Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America happened to produce Green records. As Morisy aptly suggested, we nonetheless do not really know exactly how or why searches for records happen the ways they do from one agency and request to the next.

While no records were initially provided in the FBI response to the May 2025 request on Green, FBI did indeed advise EFR of the existence of a file number in the custody of NARA. That was obtained and turned out to be a 1958 FBI memo that documented Ivan Sanderson and associate Hans Santesson informed the FBI of what they deemed subversive activity taking place in UFO groups in New York and Los Angeles. The two specifically named Daniel Fry, Truman Bethurum and Gabriel Green, among others, and noted how speakers seemed to travel the country to deliver their messages with no apparent means of income. That memo led EFR directly to a chain of FOIA requests submitted on the New York Saucer Information Bureau and Robert Stark and associates, as involved in a mid-20^th century espionage investigation conducted by the FBI.