James W. Moseley

Early life and family

James Willett Moseley was born August 4, 1931, in New York City, into a household of considerable means and considerable strangeness. His father, U.S. Army Major General George Van Horn Moseley, was a decorated officer with an unsavory second act: in retirement he became an outspoken antisemite and eugenics advocate who flirted with pro-Nazi sympathizer circles in the late 1930s. James, by all accounts, rejected his father's politics outright, but he inherited something else from his family: financial independence. His mother, Florence Barber Moseley, came from the family behind the Barber Steamship Lines, and her death in December 1950 left her son a trust fund substantial enough that he never needed a conventional job. That inheritance is the hinge on which his entire biography turns — without it, there is no cross-country UFO odyssey, no magazine empire, no forty-two years of Saucer Smear.

Moseley enrolled at Princeton University but left without a degree, drifting instead toward amateur archaeology in South America, where he collected pre-Columbian antiquities — a sideline that would eventually become his day job. In October 1955 he wrote in Fate Magazine about the mysterious origins of the Nazca Lines, a topic that later fringe writers (Erich von Däniken among them) would ride to far greater fame. It is a small, telling footnote: Moseley was often first to a strange idea and rarely the one who got credit for it.

Entry into ufology

Like so many of his generation, Moseley's fascination with flying saucers traces to two events: Kenneth Arnold's 1947 sighting over Mount Rainier, which coined the term "flying saucer," and the 1948 death of Air Force pilot Thomas Mantell, killed when his P-51 crashed while chasing an unidentified object. In 1953, with time and money to spend, Moseley set off on a cross-country research trip that would define his career before it had properly started. He interviewed more than a hundred UFO researchers and witnesses, toured the Pentagon, and made contact with the Air Force's Project Blue Book staff. In a stunt typical of his lifelong taste for audacity, he also talked his way into a press conference held by former president Harry S. Truman using improvised credentials. On returning east he founded a short-lived group called S.A.U.C.E.R.S. and began plotting a magazine.

Saucer News and the golden age of UFO publishing

In July 1954, Moseley co-founded Saucer News — initially titled Nexus — with August C. Roberts and Dominic Lucchesi. From the outset it broke from the earnest, quasi-scientific tone of contemporaries like NICAP's bulletins or Donald Keyhoe's exposés. Saucer News was, in the words later used to describe it, "unorthodox" and "freewheeling" — genuine field reporting sat next to satire, manufactured feuds, and the occasional outright hoax. Moseley loved to publish the vitriolic letters that UFO researchers fired at one another, turning ufology's internal warfare into serialized entertainment for his readers. He built a national profile through appearances on Long John Nebel's all-night New York radio show and, for a period, on James Randi's WOR program — a working relationship that later curdled into open hostility, with Moseley coming to regard the famed skeptic as an adversary.

His organizational ambitions peaked in 1967, when he staged the "NYC Saucer Con" at the Hotel Commodore, drawing crowds estimated anywhere from one thousand to six thousand people, with speakers including Gray Barker, John Keel, and actor Roy Thinnes of television's The Invaders. In 1971 he became Permanent Chairman of the National UFO Conference (NUFOC), a title he treated with the same half-serious pomp he brought to everything else.

Moseley's most consequential piece of straight journalism came at Adamski's expense. He had interviewed the contactee George Adamski in 1953 and came away unconvinced. Over subsequent issues he assembled a genuinely damaging case, culminating in the October 1957 "Special Adamski Exposé Issue," whose cover illustrated how Adamski's celebrated "scout ship" photographs could have been staged using nothing more exotic than a Chrysler hubcap, a coffee can, and ping-pong balls. The issue included interviews with people who admitted helping fabricate Adamski's evidence. Decades later, UFO historian Jerome Clark called it the "definitive" debunking of Adamski's claims — a rare instance of Moseley's showmanship in service of pure, unglamorous fact-checking.

The Straith letter and the ethics of hoaxing

Moseley's relationship with the truth was never simple, and nowhere is that clearer than in the affair of the Straith letter. In 1957, he and Gray Barker — by Moseley's own later account, "emboldened by the evil of alcohol" — typed up a forged letter on stolen State Department stationery, purportedly from a nonexistent official named "R. E. Straith," implying that the U.S. government privately credited Adamski's contact claims. Adamski, delighted, circulated the letter as vindication; it reportedly drew FBI scrutiny and lingered as an unresolved mystery in UFO lore for nearly thirty years. Moseley denied any involvement throughout that time. He finally admitted authorship in the pages of Saucer Smear on January 10, 1985 — pointedly, just one month after Barker's death in December 1984 made the confession safe to give without implicating a living co-conspirator.

The Straith letter was not an isolated lapse. On July 26, 1966, Moseley and Barker filmed a small ceramic saucer prop dangled from a fishing pole at Lost Creek, West Virginia — with local witness John Sheets holding the rig, Moseley driving, and Barker operating the camera — and for years afterward screened the footage at lectures and sold copies as if it depicted a genuine landing. In his 2002 memoir he further admitted to staging a fake UFO landing site in 1954 and assembling a phony UFO film for his lecture circuit, on top of the fabricated press credentials he'd used to crash Truman's press conference back in 1953. Taken together, this is not the record of a careless dabbler but of someone who treated hoaxing as an instrument — a way of testing, and often exposing, how easily the UFO community would believe what it wanted to believe. It is also, less charitably, the record of a man who enjoyed being the smartest and most cynical person in any room of true believers, even at the cost of muddying a field he claimed to care about clarifying. His investigation of the "Ralph Horton" saucer-crash claim ran the opposite direction: Moseley traced the supposed crashed object to a mundane Air Force weather-balloon corner reflector, and later regretted having lost the artifact, wondering if it might have been useful to Karl Pflock's subsequent Roswell research.

Saucer Smear and later life

Moseley sold Saucer News to Gray Barker in 1968. Two years later he launched a successor newsletter that cycled through several names before he settled, in 1981, on the title it would carry for the rest of his life: Saucer Smear. Its masthead crowned him "Supreme Commander," a joke that was also not entirely a joke — the newsletter remained a one-man operation, produced by typewriter, tape, glue, and photocopier; Moseley never owned a computer. Despite (or because of) this deliberately anachronistic production method, Saucer Smear became, by the time of his death, the longest continuously published UFO journal in the world, mailed and later emailed to a small but devoted readership of researchers, believers, and skeptics who all, apparently, needed to know what Moseley thought of them.

His income no longer depended on ufology by this point. In 1984 he opened an antiques and pre-Columbian art gallery in Key West, Florida, drawing on the archaeological collecting he had pursued since his twenties; he donated his Peruvian collection to the Graves Museum of Archaeology in 1992. In 2002, with Roswell researcher Karl T. Pflock, he published his memoir, Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (Prometheus Books) — a candid, score-settling tour through the contactee era of the 1950s to the abduction-obsessed 1980s and '90s, featuring his takes on Budd Hopkins, Adamski, J. Allen Hynek, and much of the rest of ufology's cast of characters, along with his own account of the Straith hoax and what he claimed was the real origin story behind the Men in Black legend.

Reception and criticism

Opinion on Moseley split sharply along the fault line of humor versus outrage. Ufologist Jerome Clark observed that Moseley "entertained just about every view it is possible to hold about UFOs," moving among extraterrestrial, secret-weapons, psychic/interdimensional, and flatly agnostic positions depending on the case and his mood. Writer Antonio Huneeus put it more pointedly: Moseley was "critical and sarcastic regarding just about everything and everybody in ufology. Yet Jim did believe a core of the UFO phenomenon was real and truly unexplained after filtering out all the hoaxes, conspiracy theories, misidentifications and just plain nonsense." That combination — a hoaxer who still thought something genuine lay underneath the noise — earned him the half-affectionate nickname "the Voltaire of American Ufology."

Not everyone found it charming. Mothman Prophecies author John Keel, no stranger to ufology's stranger corners himself, called Moseley "a boil on the ass of UFOlogy." UFO investigator Don Berliner was blunter still, comparing Saucer Smear to "a turd on the living room floor." Skeptic Robert Sheaffer, by contrast, noted after Moseley's death that he had maintained cordial, even warm relations with several prominent skeptics over the years — evidence against the assumption, common among true believers, that Moseley secretly despised debunkers. His long public feud with NICAP, meanwhile, was itself part performance, part genuine institutional grudge, and a fixture of UFO conventions for years.

Legacy

Moseley died of esophageal cancer on November 16, 2012, at a hospital in Key West, at age 81, closing out a sixty-year run as ufology's most reliable irritant. He left behind no grand theory of the phenomenon, no organization that outlived him, and a documented history of forgery, fakery, and confessed fraud that would sink the credibility of almost anyone else in the field. What he left instead was a running, unsparing account of ufology as a human subculture — its feuds, its frauds, its charlatans, and its rare moments of real evidence — written by someone who never let reverence get in the way of a good story or a good prank. Whether that makes him ufology's conscience or its court jester remains, fittingly, an unresolved case; Moseley himself would probably have insisted it was both.