UFOs Over the Americas

About the Author

Jim Lorenzen (1922–1986) and Coral Lorenzen (1925–1988) founded APRO in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, in January 1952, making it the oldest civilian UFO research organization in the United States. Confirmed independently through Wikipedia and multiple ufology histories, APRO built a reputation for recruiting consulting PhD scientists, including physicist James E. McDonald, and for comparatively rigorous field-investigation standards; its membership peaked at roughly 1,500 in 1967, and the organization effectively disbanded after both founders' deaths in the 1980s.

Coral Lorenzen personally received the Ubatuba magnesium fragments from Dr. Olavo Fontes, APRO's Brazilian representative, in 1957, and retained custody of them for approximately three decades before transferring them to Stanford physicist Peter Sturrock in 1987 — a custodial role this site's own case file documents as central to the sample's chain of provenance, independent of whatever this specific 1968 book does or doesn't say about the case directly.

Historical Context & Origins

A bibliographic point worth stating clearly: the original 1968 Signet paperback carried the plain title UFOs Over the Americas, with no additional subtitle, and its own cover copy describes it as revealing "the facts we weren't told about flying saucers, by the founders of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization." A 2017 CreateSpace reprint retitled it UFOs Over the Americas: Flying Saucers, the CIA, and the Fight For Disclosure — a subtitle invoking modern UFO-disclosure-movement language that could not have been the Lorenzens' own choice, since both authors had died decades before that reprint appeared. This article treats the original, unsubtitled 1968 title as the authoritative one and notes the added subtitle as a later publisher's choice, not the authors' own framing.

This site's own case file already cites a different, earlier Lorenzen book, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion From Outer Space (Signet, 1966), as the source most directly documenting the Ubatuba case and Fontes's original chemical analysis. This article does not duplicate that citation's role; readers wanting the Lorenzens' actual Ubatuba-specific writing should consult that title and the case file's own extensive sourcing, not this book.

Readers encountering Ubatuba through this book's connection to APRO should also know how the case's central scientific claim has since fared: this site's own case file documents a 2022 peer-reviewed HR-ICPMS isotope re-analysis, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration by Robert M. Powell, Michael Swords, Mark Rodeghier, and Phyllis Budinger, which found the fragment's magnesium isotope ratios fall within the normal terrestrial range — the single most direct available test for non-terrestrial origin returning an ordinary, Earth-consistent result. The same case file also notes that the original 1957 claim of "impossibly pure" magnesium was an artifact of that era's cruder Brazilian spectrograph detection limits, since every more sensitive subsequent test found real trace elements the original analysis simply couldn't detect. None of this makes the Lorenzens' or Fontes's original work dishonest; it reflects the genuine limits of 1957-era instrumentation, resolved only by testing technology that didn't exist until decades after both authors' deaths.

Core Arguments & Key Concepts

Per bibliographic and reader-review summaries, this book is a broader survey covering multiple North and South American cases from APRO's own investigative files, including material on the Stefan Michalak Falcon Lake case, the "Snippy the Horse" cattle-mutilation case, a chapter addressing the CIA's historical involvement in UFO investigation, and appendices reproducing the Robertson Panel report and Air Force Regulation 80-17 in full. This article could not confirm a dedicated Ubatuba chapter within this specific title, and does not assert one.

The book's value for readers of this site is less in any specific new evidence about Ubatuba and more in what it reveals about APRO's own institutional worldview and investigative priorities at the height of its influence — the organizational perspective of the group whose Brazilian representative first handled the samples this site's case file treats as one of the most scientifically significant physical-evidence claims in UFO history.

Key Cases & Evidence Discussed

This site's own Ubatuba case file documents the full record in far greater depth than this book review needs to repeat: the September 1957 letter to columnist Ibrahim Sued describing an exploding disk, the enclosed magnesium fragments, Fontes's original spectrographic analysis, the unresolved chain-of-custody questions (the original letter-writer was never identified), and Peter Sturrock's later, more rigorous scientific review after receiving the samples from Coral Lorenzen in 1987. Readers wanting the complete, evenly weighted record should consult that case file directly.

What is specific to this book is proximity to APRO itself rather than to Ubatuba specifically: it offers a first-hand sense of how the organization's own founders framed the broader UFO question at a moment when Coral Lorenzen personally held the Ubatuba samples in APRO's own custody, even though this particular title does not appear to discuss that specific case in detail.

Critical Reception & Controversies

As of this article's research (August 2026), this article could not locate a substantial contemporary review of the 1968 edition, nor customer reviews of the 2017 reprint. APRO's own reputation, however, is independently well-attested across ufology histories as more methodologically careful than many contemporaneous civilian UFO organizations, lending baseline credibility to its founders' published work generally.

No skeptical rebuttal specific to this book's own claims was located; critical attention to the Lorenzens' broader work in the ufology literature tends to focus on specific cases they investigated (including Ubatuba's contested chain of custody) rather than on this particular survey title.

Influence & Legacy

The book's legacy is bound up with APRO's own historical role as the United States' oldest civilian UFO research organization: it stands as a snapshot of how the group's founders presented their broader investigative philosophy to a general readership in the late 1960s, at the height of APRO's institutional influence and while the Ubatuba samples remained in Coral Lorenzen's own custody.

Set alongside this site's own case file, which draws on the Lorenzens' earlier, more Ubatuba-specific 1966 book and on Peter Sturrock's later scientific review, this book is best read as institutional and biographical context for APRO itself — valuable for understanding the organization behind the Ubatuba samples' long custodial chain, rather than as a primary source on the case's own physical evidence.

The Book

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