James W. Moseley

Shockingly Close to the Truth: Confessions of a Grave-
Robbing Ufologist

by James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock

Prometheus, 371 pages, hardback, 2002



Once upon a time — a glorious time — publishers
used to release autobiographies by people who weren't just movie
celebs or ex-politicians or pop stars, but simply people who had
led interesting lives and who could write about them
interestingly. The autobiography — or at least a certain
subgenre of it — was thus almost like a variant form of the
novel, and readers tended to approach it in much the same way.
You might never have heard of Fred Gluggitt, but he'd climbed
Everest blindfold, slept with an Olympic belly-dancing team and
subsisted for a year in the Australian Outback eating nothing but
woodworms, and he could write in a way that had you bursting out
in laughter every few pages. That was what you looked for
in an autobiography: entertainment, a measure of education
(perhaps), a window into someone else's world, and, at the most
profound level, a certain level of identification with and
communication with all of one's fellow human beings, not
just with the individual who happened to be telling her or his
tale.

Books like that are hardly ever published any more. Instead
the tables in the remainder bookshops are piled high with the
heavingly fat, probably ghosted, certainly carefully spin-
doctored autobiographies of famous people whom you would run a
mile rather than have in your living room, or even be stuck in a
bar with.

Well, here's an exception — an old-fashioned
autobiography that captures the spirit right down to the
deliciously hokey cover illustration.

Jim Moseley (one assumes Karl Pflock is a sort of fully
credited ghostwriter) has been a ufologist for decades.
Correction: not so much a ufologist as what he calls a
"ufoologist", observing and commenting on the field of ufology to
a much greater extent than researching UFOs themselves. He
certainly has done some UFO investigation — coming to the
conclusion that, while every UFO case he has personally examined
is almost certainly unmysterious, nevertheless UFOs taken en
masse probably do represent a mystery — but essentially
he has been, as dubbed a while back, ufology's Court Jester. He
has published the long-running muckraker-sheet-cum-investigative-
journal Saucer News (now called Saucer Smear)
— a sort of ufological Private Eye — and he has
met and/or interviewed virtually all of the principal
protagonists in a certain segment of ufology: what one could call
the mainstream of US ufology in the second half of the 20th
century.

Oh, yes, and as a sideline he's occasionally gone on treasure
hunts to Peru, conducting a legally questionable trade in ancient
artefacts.

His reminiscences of all this are constantly entertaining,
and on occasion very funny. What's especially interesting about
them is that Moseley can, as it were, reach the parts that
professional UFO debunkers like Phil Klass cannot. This comment
applies both to his encounters with other ufologists and to his
studies of particular UFO cases.

To take the latter first: Moseley is open-minded about the
existence, physically or psychologically, of UFOs, and it is with
this attitude that he has approached any examination of a case.
This is in contrast with either the debunker or the devotee, each
of whom will go into the case expecting to have preconceptions
confirmed: the debunker will find plenty to ridicule, the devotee
plenty to believe. Moseley, on the other hand, has a good chance
of finding what is actually there. That he, as someone
who's a part of the scene, has found enough to convince him that
many famous cases are tosh is much more convincing than if, say,
the late Carl Sagan had found the same: Sagan (who was interested
in the subject in a minor way) or any other serious scientist
would have investigated only as far as the first few obvious
contradictions, whereas Moseley actually went on to probe such
cases in some considerable depth.

In other words, by dint of the extent of his research he's an
expert in a way that few outright debunkers can ever hope to be.
And this applies also to his observations of ufology. I can't
actually name any names here, because some of these figures are
astonishingly writ-happy, but various of the barmiest of the
ufology superstars have opened up to Moseley — despite his
known editorship of Saucer Smear (which must go to show
how barmy they actually are) — in a way they'd never think
to talk to someone who wasn't One Of Us. And Moseley, gleefully,
lets them show themselves as they are.

His demolitions are all the more effective for this. Here,
for example — there's a plethora of choice — is his
conclusion concerning Roswell, with a conclusion also about CUFOS
(one of the major organizations devoted to supposedly scientific
UFO study):

Whatever the original motivation, CUFOS has long since
dropped any pretense of objectivity about the case and is the one
UFO group that unwaveringly stands behind it without
qualification.

That single sentence tells us a lot about ufology and also a
lot about the representation of ufology in the media: anyone here
who hadn't gained the impression that most UFO buffs thought
Roswell was likely to be pretty kosher, please raise your hands.

As the social history of ufology the publishers claim it to
be in their cover blurb, even an informal one, this book is far
from adequate. As noted above, it covers only a small segment of
the field; plenty of really quite important ufological figures
and their ideas, sane or crackpot, get no mention at all. The
index lists only people, so there is no entry for, for example,
Roswell, even though there's quite a lot about the Roswell
fallacy in the book; bad indexes seem to be a Prometheus
speciality. I noticed that Hugo Gernsback is called "Gernsbach",
so for all I know there may be countless other individuals —
or places, or organizations, etc. — whose names are
incorrectly spelled. One could go on chipping away at the text on
such grounds for quite a long time.

But that's not really what it's about. What this constantly
entertaining book is about is a very haphazard (delightfully
haphazard) ramble through the life of someone who's been in the
ufology game primarily for the fun of it. He has teased;
he has hoaxed (often in tandem with his friend the late Gray
Barker, although Barker almost made a profession of it); he has
exposed (the whole of the 1957 issue of Saucer News
exposing Adamski is reproduced in the appendix); he has annoyed
(too many to name, but they're the sort of people you feel good
that someone's annoyed); he has been ufology's gadfly. At the end
of the day, he was delighted when "a certain Harry Lime" wrote
from Vienna, Austria (not Greeneland?), to tell him he should be
proud of, not dismayed by, the sobriquet he'd recently been given
in MUFON UFO Journal: "The Reigning Court Jester of
Ufology."

Revealing and entertaining by turns, Shockingly Close to
the Truth is a book you'll love or — assuming you're
especially po-faced — hate. This reviewer devoured it, and
with a grin on his face the whole time.



This review, first published by Infinity Plus, is
excerpted from my ebook Warm Words and Otherwise: A Blizzard
of Book Reviews, to be published on September 19 by Infinity
Plus Ebooks.


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