Glen Lake graduate of 2003, Matthew Kibbey, has acquired FATE Magazine, known for covering the “True Accounts of The Strange And Unknown,” now resides in Leelanau County.
“I’ve always had love for these topics of the unexplained,” he said.
Decades before Disclosure Day, Coast to Coast AM, and countless websites, podcasts, blogs, books, and movies began captivating audiences with true tales of the paranormal — there was FATE — a first-of-its-kind publication dedicated to indepth coverage of mysterious and unexplained phenomena, according to Kibbey.
The former Laker moved back to the peninsula after living in Chelsea for several years and serving as a director for an international payroll company in Ann Arbor.
“It was a very corporate, global company. It was a great big position there, but I was getting a little bit burnt out, and really wanted to contribute and do other things,” Kibbey said. “When I had the opportunity, I jumped on it.”
Kibbey grew up in Traverse City and used to go to the old library on Sixth Street, captured among the numerous books regarding UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and more.
“My mom would go grocery shopping, and she would drop me off there. From a young age, I was into the topics that FATE magazine covers,” Kibbey said. “There’s a big pop culture push for UFOs and aliens and all these unexplained things when I was growing up. I don’t think it’s changed much, frankly, if you look at the new movie coming out from Spielberg.”
Kibbey went to Western Michigan after graduating high school, after he and his brother were dominant in cross country and track.
After being a teacher for a few years following his time at WMU, Kibbey moved into the corporate world as a director of a company for the past 15 years before taking a stab at his passion.
Since the very first issue of FATE Magazine, generations of writers have explored the unknown, beginning with the feature “The Truth About The Flying Saucers” by pilot Kenneth Arnold in 1948. The magazine has published over 740 issues and continues to publish today.
“From 1948 onward, flying saucers were like a household word. People were seeing them left and right, and FATE Magazine was right there alongside it, developing the whole culture and mythos around them. Not a lot of magazines have survived 80,” Kibbey said.
“There’s a long legacy. We’ve got subscribers all over the world. At one point, it was so big. They had a UK edition, and a Mexico edition,” Kibbey said. “This thing was huge during its heyday in the 1970s ... FATE has seen a lot of changes over the decades with the demographic of the readers, and everything has changed a little bit. The advertising has changed.”
Kibbey said they will strive to always have a print edition. Along with having a digital side “I want a little kid at a library pulling a book off of the shelf. I want to make sure a tactile thing can get into somebody’s hands. So that’s a big part of it with FATE Magazine.”
Kibbey struck up a relationship with the previous FATE owner and editor, Phyllis Galday, who ran the operations for the past 30 years.
Kibbey took a drive to the North Carolina mountains to visit Galday, who had her goats, cats, dogs, and guinea hens.
“I call it the FATE Farm where she lives … She kept this thing alive on her own for a number of years. My intent is to preserve the legacy of this American institution. I approached her and asked if she’d be willing to pass the torch to the next generation. It worked out, and I was able to come to terms with her. I took a few trips down to North Carolina with a big van and tried to pull every old issue out of there, over 80 years of publications. Every time I take a look in the box, there’s a new letter from somebody famous in the UFO world and beyond. There were UFOs and parapsychology and psychic stuff when it wasn’t necessarily seen as woo-woo. There was a period of time where people wanted to investigate and put it up to some scientific tests,” Kibbey said. “FATE Magazine was at the forefront of a lot of that with trying to bring legitimacy to some of these topics ... In fact, for any article they published, they made the person get an affidavit signed by a notary. They were not taking stories from people unless the person really put their name by it. Even for topics like UFOs and Bigfoot, there was a large lens of credibility that FATE made sure to shine on those topics, or else they wouldn’t run it.”
Kibbey has started digitizing the issues in all of his spare time as he balances a new life back in northern Michigan.
“I have a Substack page that is called the FATE Files where I’ve basically just picked one thing out of these 100s of tubs. I analyze it; scan it; digitize it ... It’s like a letter to the editor that was never supposed to maybe be seen,” Kibbey said.
“Whether you’re a believer or not, the fact that the culture talks about it, any movie you watch it coming out these days, they’re going to have some paranormal supernatural flavor to it. It is still part of our modern folklore,” Kibbey said. “I think what’s cool about FATE Magazine is we’ve documented it over 80 years ago. We’re documenting it still today. This proves the longevity of all these topics.”
While FATE magazine has an international readership, its new local ownership creates a unique opportunity to preserve and continue a publication that has been part of American popular culture for almost 80 years. At a time when public interest in UFOs, Bigfoot reports, and unexplained mysteries is growing, the story of FATE Magazine combines local entrepreneurship, publishing history, and a subject that continues to attract widespread public curiosity, according to Kibbey.
