When diving into archives searching for answers about (for example) a specific person, you need to be in the right state of mind. To maximize success you have to place yourself in the era you're investigating and develop a model of the person you're researching.
#ufotwitter
#ufotwitter
If the person's name is too common you wind up with hundreds or many thousands of hits. With too many hits manual inspection is impractical, even on a computer. You have to figure out how to filter the hits to narrow down the results. Each person is unique and you need a profile.
Identifying a person's middle initial or name, their correct/proper first name, birthplace, exact birth date, and/or their exact death date are the top things I try to identify first. Once you have this data you can apply a whole bag of genealogical research techniques.
With the research methodology I've developed over time I've found verifiable public records for over ~90% of the people I've set out to locate. R. G. McFarland and "Gerald Light" remain unsolved, although I'm on his (their?) trail. 
For fun I started to pick random names from old newspaper articles from the 1920's-1940's, then build their family trees just using the info from the article/location. I did this over and over until I got better.
Note you have to be careful reading old newspaper articles. Some articles are absolutely horrifying.
This is a form of historical "skip tracing". You can find plenty of books about modern skip tracing on Amazon.
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