About Fate Magazine

Fate Magazine

Fate is an American magazine devoted to paranormal phenomena, founded in Chicago in 1948 by Raymond A. Palmer and Curtis Fuller and published by Clark Publishing Company. Its first issue carried Kenneth Arnold's account of his 1947 flying-saucer sighting — the encounter that began the modern UFO era — and the magazine went on to become the longest-lived and most influential American periodical of the strange and unexplained, covering UFOs, ghosts, psychic phenomena, cryptozoology and Fortean mysteries for decades in its familiar digest format.

Later published by Llewellyn Publications and then by Galde Press of Lakeville, Minnesota, Fate earned a reputation unusual among paranormal publications: it promoted inquiry into psychic, occult and Fortean subjects while also exposing hoaxes. The scholar J. Gordon Melton called it the preeminent American journal in its field.

Founding in the Flying-Saucer Moment

Fate was established in 1948 by Clark Publishing Company, and its first edition reached newsstands in the spring of that year. Its co-founders were Ray Palmer, the editor of the science-fiction pulp Amazing Stories, and Curtis Fuller, himself an editor. Palmer had already helped shape the postwar fascination with flying discs through Amazing Stories and its promotion of Richard Shaver's tales of underground civilizations, and he recognized that the wave of sightings in 1947 had created an audience for a magazine devoted entirely to unexplained phenomena.

The timing was exact. In June 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold had reported seeing objects moving near Mount Rainier that "skipped like saucers," giving the world the phrase "flying saucer." Arnold's own account appeared in Fate's inaugural issue, alongside the Rhodes flying-disc photographs of Phoenix, reprinted in that issue. The association with the founding event of the UFO age propelled the new magazine to national recognition.

Ray Palmer and the Shaver Background

Palmer's role explains much of Fate's character. As editor of Amazing Stories from 1938, he had blurred the line between science fiction and claimed fact, publishing the Shaver Mystery stories as if they might be true recollections of an ancient underground world. Historian Fred Nadis, in his biography of Palmer, The Man from Mars, argued that Palmer's obsessions helped shape modern UFO mythology itself — the sensibility of an underground community of believers and skeptics arguing over strange reports.

Fate carried that sensibility into nonfiction. It treated witnesses' stories as data to be reported and debated rather than as fiction, and it built a community of correspondents who sent in accounts of encounters, hauntings and coincidences. Palmer sold his interest in the venture in 1953, but the magazine he co-founded retained the approach he had pioneered.

The Fuller Family Years, 1953–1988

In 1953 Curtis Fuller and his wife Mary took full control of Fate when Palmer sold out. Under the Fullers the magazine expanded its scope and its readership grew to more than 100,000 subscribers. Mary Fuller took over editing the magazine in 1966, and the family operated it for thirty-five years — an unusually long, stable proprietorship that gave Fate continuity while other paranormal titles came and went.

Curtis Fuller's farewell column in 1988 summarized the editorial creed of those decades: the magazine's purpose had been to explore and report honestly the strangest facts of a strange world, including the ones that did not fit general beliefs about the way things are. That combination — openness to strange claims, joined to a stated commitment to honest reporting — defined the magazine's standing among both believers and researchers.

Contents and Fortean Range

Fate covered a wide range of paranormal topics: UFOs and alien encounters, ghosts and poltergeists, psychic powers and prophecy, lost civilizations, sea and lake monsters, spontaneous human combustion and the other anomalies Charles Fort had catalogued decades earlier. Its publishers later boasted that Fate had been a journalistic pioneer, covering subjects such as electronic voice phenomena, cattle mutilations, life on Mars and telepathic communication with animals when discussing them was neither fashionable nor mainstream.

The magazine was also known for its extensive advertising section, a marketplace of books, courses and materials for the paranormal scene that functioned as a bulletin board for the subculture. Historian Andrew J. Rotter described Fate in The Journal of American History as a kind of occult Reader's Digest — a comparison that captures both its digest format and its role in condensing a whole world of belief for a general readership.

Debunking and Credibility

What distinguished Fate from simple credulity was its willingness to turn on its own subject matter. Melton noted in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology that the magazine took the lead in exposing hoaxes and in printing evidence for mundane explanations of supposedly mysterious phenomena. Its own institutional memory lists celebrated cases it helped debunk, including the Philadelphia Experiment legend and the book and film versions of The Amityville Horror.

This dual posture — chronicler and occasional debunker — made Fate useful even to skeptics and historians, and it is a large part of why the magazine is cited in serious reference works on UFOs and the paranormal rather than remembered only as a newsstand curiosity. Jerome Clark, one of the leading UFO historians, became its editor in 1988, a sign of the seriousness with which the field regarded the title.

Sale to Llewellyn and the Full-Size Experiment

In 1988 Fate was sold to Llewellyn Publications of St. Paul, Minnesota, the New Age publisher later known as Llewellyn Worldwide. Phyllis Galde served as editor-in-chief under Llewellyn from 1989 to 1994, and again from 1999. In 1994 Llewellyn changed the magazine from its traditional digest size to a full-size, full-color magazine, an attempt to modernize its newsstand presence.

The experiment lasted until after the next change of ownership. Fate's identity had been bound up with the pocket-sized digest format for half a century, and longtime readers associated the small format with the magazine's archive-like, reportorial character. The full-size years remain an interlude in a history otherwise defined by continuity of size and subject.

Galde Press and the Return to Digest Size

In September 2001, Galde Press, owned by editor-in-chief Phyllis Galde, purchased Fate from Llewellyn at a time when Llewellyn was laying off staff. Headquarters moved to Lakeville, Minnesota. In May 2003 Fate returned to its pre-1994 digest size, restoring the format of its classic decades, and in 2008 it moved to a bimonthly schedule beginning with the July/August issue.

Under Galde Press the magazine continued as a specialist title serving a loyal niche rather than the mass newsstand audience of the Fuller years. Its website, fatemag.com, maintained the brand online, and the magazine's back catalogue remained in demand: collections drawn from its files had been published for decades, and its archive became a resource for television producers developing paranormal programming.

Books and Collections from the Files

Fate's material had a long second life in book form. Paperback Library issued Strange Fate in 1965 and Strange Twist of Fate in 1967, both compiled by the magazine's editors, the first with an introduction by broadcaster Frank Edwards. Later collections included Exploring the Healing Miracle (1983), Terry O'Neill's Out of Time and Place (1999), Mysteries and Monsters of the Sea (2001), Strange But True — From the Files of Fate Magazine (2002) and True Tales of Ghostly Encounters (2006).

These volumes demonstrate the magazine's archival depth: by the time the earliest collections appeared, Fate had already published nearly two decades of first-person reports and investigations that could be mined, rearranged and resold — a model of content reuse that paranormal publishing has followed ever since.

Influence on Paranormal Media

Fate's influence extends well beyond print. The modern paranormal entertainment industry — documentary series about hauntings, UFO investigation programs and reality shows about ghost hunting — draws on a stock of cases, vocabulary and narrative forms that Fate helped establish and circulate from 1948 onward. Producers have optioned the magazine's archive for film and television development, and its files inspired series including Animal Planet's The Haunted.

Within print, Fate's success spawned scores of imitators, as its publishers have noted, but none lasted as long. The imitators' failure underlined what Fate had that they lacked: an archive, a correspondent network and a reputation for reporting strange claims in a consistent editorial voice across generations of readers.

Legacy

Fate is best understood as an institution of American vernacular culture. Founded at the exact moment the flying-saucer age began, it gave the paranormal a permanent periodical home — neither a pulp fiction magazine nor a scientific journal, but something in between: a record of what people reported experiencing, edited by people who took the reports seriously without surrendering the right to expose fraud.

That middle position, maintained from Chicago in 1948 through Minnesota in the twenty-first century, is why Fate survived when flashier competitors vanished, and why historians of UFOs, religion and popular culture continue to treat its back issues as a primary source for the beliefs of modern America.