James Moseley R.I.P.

I just learned this sad news earlier today.  One of the last icons of the Golden Age of UFOlogy, James W. Moseley, passed away thirteen days ago on the 16th of November at the age of 81.  Moseley, editor of Jim Moseley's Book of Saucer News (Saucerian Books, 1967) and co-author of the entertaining and informative memoir Shockingly Close to the Truth! (Prometheus Books, 2002), remained an active UFOlogist for six decades while wearing many different hats along the way:  publisher, editor, journalist, skeptic, believer, hoaxer, even pre-Columbian treasure hunter. 

Moseley's long-lived newsletter Saucer News (which, in more recent decades, morphed into Saucer Smear) published touchstone articles over the years by such UFOlogists as John A. Keel, Gray Barker, Allen H. Greenfield and Timothy Green Beckley.  It was through Saucer News that Keel's field reports about the now infamous West Virginia "Mothman" sightings first reached the general public.  (See, for example, pp. 24-25 of Saucers News #68, published in the Summer 1967 when the Mothman sightings in Point Pleasant were still in full swing.)

Perhaps most important of all, however, is the fact that Moseley was the first writer to study the people who investigated UFOs rather than the UFOs themselves.  One could say that this metacontextual approach to UFOlogy, combined with his puckish sense of humor and trickster-like sensibilities, made Moseley the first consciously postmodern UFO investigator. 

Rest in Peace, James Moseley (1931-2012)....

For further information about Moseley and his work, read Loren Coleman's obituary HERE.

"Less Sex Scandals, More War!"

"Less Sex Scandals, More War!"
--Official Tea Party Slogan (Reportedly Spotted on a Bumper Sticker on the 405 Freeway)

Ah, yes!  More war, indeed.  Far more disturbing than yet another tepid, extramarital sexual escapade committed by a high-ranking U.S. government official is General David Howell Petraeus' love of robot-controlled mass murder as reported recently by Tom Junod of Esquire Magazine.  Here's how Junod's article begins:

“I hear that Petraeus likes it,” a source told me. “I hear he likes to be in the room when it happens.”
He wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking to me a good six months before the revelation of the affair between General David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell, and so he wasn’t commenting on Petraeus’s bedroom enthusiasms. He was talking, instead, about killing. He was talking about drones.

Read more: David Petraeus Scandal - CIA Drone Attacks - Esquire 

Letters to the President

For nostalgic purposes, here’s a letter I wrote to President Obama on 3-29-09 (only 88 days after he took office)….

Barack H. Obama

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Washington, D.C.

Dear President Obama:

Before being elected President you pledged to repeal the Patriot Act and the Bush Administration’s official policy of illegal wiretapping, renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trades (GATT), and bring the troops home from Iraq on your first day in office.  Within your first 60 days in office you have instead announced that you might bring some of the troops home within 23 months, you’ve sent 30,000 Marines to Afghanistan, you’ve decided to move more missile systems into Eastern Europe to encircle Russia, you’ve voted for the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, you’ve legalized unconstitutional wiretapping, and your campaign has gone on record as saying that, in truth, you support NAFTA and GATT. 

Allow me to share a poem with you from one of my favorite mathematicians:

“’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

            Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

            And the mome raths outgrabe.”

--Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1871

Translated into English, this poem literally means:  What the fuck is up with you, Jim-Jim?  I’ve included a self-addressed stamped envelope for a response.  Thank you very much for your time. 

Lewis Carroll’s memory is kept alive by perpetual endowment of a cot in the Children’s Hospital, Great Ormond Street, London.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Guffey

"The Wedding Photographer" in POSTSCRIPTS

I just sold my 17,300-word novelette “The Wedding Photographer" to Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers at Postscripts Magazine.  The novelette will be appearing in a future volume, the exact issue still to be decided.  I'll post further details when I have them! 

The next issue of Postscripts (Postscripts #30/31:  Memoryville Blues) will include my short story "Selections From The Expectant Mother Disinformation Handbook" (5,800 words).  For more information about Postscripts--one of the very best magazines specializing in cutting-edge science fiction, fantasy and horror--click HERE.