Dennis Stacy

Dennis Stacy (September 10, 1946 – May 11, 2025) was an American UFO researcher, writer and editor who spent much of his career inside the organized UFO community and then helped build an independent fortean press. Born in Gorman, Texas, he studied journalism at the University of Texas. Sources differ on the exact degree: Patrick Huyghe's obituary describes a journalism degree, while a Legacy.com memorial cites a bachelor's in English from UT Austin. He died on May 11, 2025, at 78, after a long illness.

Career in organized ufology

Stacy edited the monthly MUFON UFO Journal, the magazine of the Mutual UFO Network, from 1985 to 1997. That period placed him at the centre of the field's dispute over how to present cases to a general readership. In 1995 he received the Donald E. Keyhoe Journalism Award for a six-part series on UFOs published in Omni magazine, one of the more visible mainstream outlets for ufology in that decade.

The Anomalist and independent publishing

Stacy met Patrick Huyghe at a MUFON conference in 1993. In 1994 the two decided to start a fortean journal, The Anomalist, which ran in print until 2010, and launched a companion website in 1996. The project covered a wider range than UFOs alone: ghosts, cryptids, anomalous places and unexplained phenomena, with a tone that favoured documentation over advocacy. From 2005 to 2021 Stacy was publisher of Anomalist Books, which kept a lot of out-of-print and niche material in circulation.

Books and fieldwork

His best-known book is The Field Guide to UFOs (written with Huyghe), a reference that catalogues sightings, witness types and cases in a manner aimed at general readers. He also wrote The Marfa Lights: A Viewer's Guide, a practical treatment of the Texas light phenomenon, and co-edited with Hilary Evans UFOs 1947-1997: Fifty Years of Flying Saucers. In the late 1990s he and Huyghe travelled to Scotland to interview Loch Ness witnesses and researchers, and wrote a series of Omni articles on the lake's monster.

Assessment

Stacy is best understood as a chronicler and editor rather than a claimant. His work tends to present reports, rival interpretations and the history of the field side by side, and the sources available for this entry describe no controversy about his own conduct. He is not to be confused with Dennis William Hauck, another founding editor of the MUFON Journal and a separate writer.