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.