Robert Barbour Johnson’s interest in Forteana did not end with the end of the first Fortean Society.  I recently learned that he is a consulting editor on the journal of the Society’s successor, the International Fortean Organizations Fortean Journal, at least as early as 1974. (The International Fortean Organization was established in the mid 1960s.)

How exactly he became attached to INFO is unknown, but there is some evidence worth considering.  Ron and Paul Willis created INFO; they also owned a bookstore and published a science fiction magazine, Anubis.  Anubis republished Johnson’s critique of Thayer, which originally ran in the Berkeley fanzine Rhodomagnetic Digest.  In a letter to Damon Knight, Johnson said that he did not know how Anubis came to reprint the article, which implies he did not know the Willis brothers—but they obviously knew him.  It is possible that they approached him.  (It’s worth noting that INFO Journal said that there was a “Chapter Two” of their society in San Francisco, just as there had been with Thayer’s organization—but evidence of this Chapter Two is hard to come by.)