Journal Is Out of This World : Publishing: A midnight vision launched a magazine featuring UFOs and extraterrestrial contacts.

In the world of publishing, there seems to be something for everyone. There are magazines about ghost towns and guns, chain saws and rare coins.

Now comes “Unicus, The Magazine for Earthbound Extraterrestrials,” a Manhattan Beach-based publication put out by Irene Chen, a onetime free-lance graphic designer and art director who quit her job to launch this unusual venture.

And exactly what are “earthbound extraterrestrials?”

“There’s actually a double meaning to that phrase,” Chen said. “It could literally mean somebody from another dimension who is here on our planet interacting with us. The other meaning, which I feel I’m more qualified for, is that our souls came here from another space and dimension before incarnating here on this planet.”

To really understand Unicus, one has to know a few things about 30-year-old Irene--middle name Ya Ling--Chen.

The founding of the magazine is a story that requires even the most open-minded listener to suspend disbelief. That said, in 1990 Chen was asleep in her Venice apartment when “at 2 a.m. I was awakened in bed by this very strange feeling of this heat energy entering the top of my head, throughout my body, and out through the bottom of my feet, at which point, I immediately sat up alert, and I was shown this vision of Unicus magazine.”

“I describe this as a holographic 3-D slide projection because it was very real, full-color. It would flash, flash, flash, these images. One of them being the name of the magazine; the other was our circle of contents--we’re the only publication that actually has a circle instead of your linear table.”

With just five issues out so far, Chen said the quarterly magazine already enjoys national distribution and has about 30,000 subscribers. According to data based on their subscriber list, Chen said the average Unicus reader is a college graduate, age 41, with a median income of $37,000. Forty-six percent of these readers claim to have seen a UFO at least once in their lives.

The annual subscription rate runs about $15.

The Taiwan-born graphic artist not only saw the image of the magazine but was instructed, she said, to start publishing Unicus by aliens from the star system Pleiades. (Pleiades is an actual star cluster located in the Taurus constellation and named for the daughters of Atlas.)

“They (the extraterrestrials) told me telepathically that I would become a very successful publisher of this publication,” she said. “And they proceeded to tell me that there were literally millions of people on this planet who have already previously agreed to participate in the magazine, and all I had to do was just start it and the people would come aboard.”

Whether or not you buy the UFO origins of Unicus, Chen has certainly found help. Robert White Eagle Stanley, a Los Angeles native and former reporter, was among the first to come abroad Unicus.

He met Chen at a UFO seminar in 1990 and “immediately fell in love with her ideas.”

As editor of Unicus, Stanley explores some of his favorite subjects: channeling, UFOs and lost cities. Stanley’s research on a purported lost city in the Santa Monica Mountains will be featured as part of the Fox television series “Sightings” in the coming months.

Currently the-reporter-turned-editor spends most of his time contacting some of the leading figures in extraterrestrial research.

“Most UFO-related information has a spin to it,” Stanley said, noting that Unicus has no connection to any religious, political or philosophical group. “It’s very hard to get direct information unless you know somebody who is being contacted directly. The amount of information that comes out that is legitimate and useful is very little at this point in time.”

As far as Unicus’ far-flung editorial concept, Stanley is matter-of-fact on the issue.

“I feel that we are a little bit ahead of our time when we say earthbound extraterrestrials,” he conceded. “But we are becoming a race of extraterrestrials, slowly but surely. When we set foot on the moon, that was the first step, but it was a genuine step.”

Each week, the magazine receives 50 to 100 letters from enthusiastic readers in such places as Austria, Peru and Canada.

“We deal with unsolved mysteries and unusual phenomena,” Chen said. “And we provide a vehicle for alternative information.”

The articles are often attributed to extraterrestrial authors “as channeled by” earthling scribes. Much of the UFO-generated information consists of environmental warnings and maxims about human harmony.

Elizabeth Berg, a Texan who claims to have been contacted by a UFO, not only writes for Unicus but also participates in seminars the magazine sponsors. During the summer she came to Los Angeles and publicly shared her experience of what she calls her “hybrid star child.”

Unicus contributor Sheilaa Hite authors the “Ancient Archetypes for New World Guidance” section of the magazine. Her column is set up in a horoscope format, but based on the major arcana of the Tarot. Hite admires the broad spectrum of the publication.

“We need a sense of humor about everything,” she suggested. “Unicus manages to bring humor in a way that doesn’t denigrate the topic, and respects the topic and the reader.”

Stanley said they encourage everybody and anybody who has a story that’s out of this world, so to speak, as long as it’s from the heart.

Chen, who said she continues to be contacted by her extraterrestrial “spirit guides and teachers,” said she just wants the general public to know that “people who are interested in ETs are not airy fairy or superstitious.”

As far as plans for Unicus--the sixth issue recently hit the newsstands--Chen already has some idea of what’s in store.

Her vision came complete with the image of “a 17-story building off the freeway that said Unicus International on it.”