by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”James W. Moseley was a part of the UFO scene from the days of the first private investigators in the early 1950s up until his death in 2012. He ran the longest running saucer group, the Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society or S.A.U.C.E.R.S. (he and the group picked the acronym before they figured out what it could stand for) and steadily published a newsletter, known for most of its existence as Saucer Smear. Moseley has been called the Court Jester of UFOlogy due to his habit of poking fun at those who took themselves and the subject too seriously, and was involved in some hoaxes/pranks with his friend Gray Barker that became infamous. He wrote a book with Karl Pflock about his exploits in saucerdom that was published in 2002 titled Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing UFOlogist. In spite of his less-than-serious nature, he did do some serious investigation in his early days, and in one instance, looked into a saucer crash story and wrote an article about it that was published in the January 1955 issue of Gray Barker’s magazine, The Saucerian. Read more

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related