James W. "Jim" Moseley

James W. "Jim" Moseley (August 4, 1931 – November 16, 2012) was an American UFO publisher and critic who edited Saucer News and, later, Saucer Smear. He is less remembered for any single claim than for the tone he brought to a field that was often solemn: sarcastic, feud-prone, and willing to attack the people he was supposed to be covering. Whether he was a debunker or a hoaxer depends on which account one trusts, and his own work makes that ambiguity part of the record.

Early career and Saucer News

Moseley graduated from Princeton in 1953 and entered the field around the same time. In July 1954 he helped start a magazine, initially titled Nexus, with August Roberts and Dominick Lucchesi. It was renamed Saucer News the following year. The magazine mixed serious UFO reporting with gossip, letters, and personal feuds, and it became a venue where contactee claims and official explanations were argued in the same pages.

In October 1957 Moseley devoted a special issue to George Adamski's contact stories, which made him one of the earliest published critics to examine Adamski's account closely. That work is often cited as an early example of ufology policing its own celebrities, a role that would later be claimed by more systematic skeptics. Moseley's critique was not disinterested, however; he was a participant in the same small community whose reputations he was measuring.

Saucer Smear and the feuds

In 1968 Moseley sold Saucer News to the publisher Gray Barker. He then launched Saucer Smear in 1976, a satirical newsletter that, by his own account and that of the UFO press, ran continuously until his death, making it among the longest-running UFO publications in the world. The title and format signalled what he was doing: mocking the genre's pretensions while continuing to feed its readership.

Moseley's relationships with other figures were often combative. In a 1994 interview with Greg Bishop he said Donald Keyhoe "routinely made too much out of too little, at least in part just to sell books," and he later described both Keyhoe and Edward Ruppelt as men he had fallen out with. He interviewed Ruppelt alongside Al Chop, and recounted Ruppelt telling him that the Air Force had never confiscated film from the cases Ruppelt investigated for Project Blue Book. These anecdotes are useful primary-adjacent material, but they are one man's recollections of people who could not easily respond.

Hoaxer or debunker?

The hardest question about Moseley is what he was for. Several retrospective accounts describe him as an exposer of hoaxes and frauds, and his sarcasm did puncture real inflated claims. Other accounts note that he sometimes engineered hoaxes or provocations himself, and that his satire blurred the line between critique and mischief. Both readings can be true at once, and the ambiguity is why he is hard to slot into the usual skeptic-versus-believer frame.

His memoir Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (reviewed by Barry Greenwood on jimmoseley.com in 2014) gathers his account of the field and his place in it. Readers should treat it as an insider's testimony rather than a neutral history: it is vivid, self-aware in places, and frequently settling old scores.

Legacy

Moseley's significance lies in the archive and the attitude. Saucer News and Saucer Smear document decades of UFO culture, including the contactee boom, the Project Blue Book era, and the internal politics of the field. His refusal to take the genre's self-image at face value made him a useful, if abrasive, check on it. Credibility rating: contested. His factual claims about publication history are well documented; his characterizations of colleagues and his own motives are less reliable and should be weighed as such.