James W. Moseley
| James W. Moseley | |
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James Moseley at the 1980 National UFO Conference in New York
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| Born | James Willett Moseley August 4, 1931 New York |
| Died | November 16, 2012 (aged 81) Key West, Florida |
| Citizenship | United States of America |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | UFOlogist |
| Known for | Newsletter Saucer Smear |
James Willett Moseley (August 4, 1931 – November 16, 2012) was an American observer, author, and commentator on the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). Over his nearly sixty-year career, he exposed UFO hoaxes and he engineered hoaxes of his own. He was best known as the publisher of the UFO newsletters Saucer News and its successor Saucer Smear, which became the longest continuously published UFO journal in the world.
Many in the UFO community considered Moseley to be a skeptic, as Moseley reported that over the years he accepted, then rejected, a number of explanations for UFOs. According to Jerome Clark, he "entertained just about every view it is possible to hold about UFOs," and according to Antonio Huneeus, "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, mis-identifications and just plain nonsense that pervades much of the field."
James Moseley was the son of U.S. Army Major General George Van Horn Moseley, chief of the 4th Section (supplies and evacuation) of General Pershing's Wartime General Staff, and Florence Barber Moseley (née DuBois) whose family owned the Barber Steamship Lines. His parents were married in July 1930, at which time his father was already 55 years old, and James was born the following year. His childhood was spent on army bases until his father's retirement in 1938.
James never got along with his father, taking particular exception to his outspoken racist and anti-semitic views, including his claims that America must "breed up" its own decaying population by copying Nazi eugenics practices, and launch a program of "selective breeding, sterilization, the elimination of the unfit, and the elimination of those types which are inimical to the general welfare of the nation."
His mother died in December 1950, leaving the nineteen-year-old James the beneficiary of a large trust fund. Moseley inherited sufficient money to be able to pursue his own interests, and he never worked a conventional career. He left Princeton University, and spent much of his time initially traveling to South America to engage in what he called "grave robbing" of pre-Columbian artifacts, then later travelling to UFO conferences, interviewing UFO witnesses and personalities.
Moseley took up amateur archaeology and he made many trips to Peru, and to a lesser extent Ecuador and northern Chile, purchasing and digging up pre-Columbian antiquities. The distinction between archaeology and treasure hunting or grave-robbing was not always clear, and some of his activities may not be approved today. Even so, he made some significant finds and several of the mummies he found were placed in Peruvian museums by professional archaeologists. After Nazca Lines were first discovered by the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe in 1927, Moseley was the first to suggest that there were intriguing Fortean phenomena in Fate Magazine, in October 1955, suggesting a mysterious origin, long before they interested alternative writers such as Erich von Däniken (1968), Henri Stierlin (1983) and Gerald Hawkins (1990). These South American trips indirectly led to his flying saucer involvement, when he agreed to collaborate on a book with Ken Krippene.
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