Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist. . – New Books – book review
Kendrick Frazier
Shockingly Close to the Truth! Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist. James W. Moseley and Karl T. Pflock. Prometheus Books, 59 John Glenn Drive, Amherst, NY 14228-2197. 2002. ISBN 1-57392-991-3. 371 pp. $25, hardcover. If you read John C. Sherwood’s article “Gray Barker’s Book of Bunk” in our May/June 2002 issue, you got a little flavor of what to expect from James Moseley. Moseley, longtime editor of the underground newsletter Saucer Smear, has always been part participant in, and part acerbic observer of, the sometimes wacky, weird, off-the-wall claims and behavior of saucer devotees and proponents. He wants to believe, but he’s seen a lot of strange people come and go. This is billed as the “first-ever insider social history of ufology.” Its approach is exemplified by the title of Moseley’s prologue “The Truth Is Out There, Maybe.” The tone is pure Moseley: candid, anecdotal, revelatory, tongue-and-cheek, willing to expose the passions, foibles, and foolhardiness of, in his words, “fifty years of UFOs, ufologists, ufology, and ‘ufoology.'” “This isn’t a scholarly work,” he warns at the outset. It’s a very personal recollection. … So we haven’t larded it up with footnotes and other stigmata of the scholar at work.” The organization, in five parts, is chronological: “The 1950s: S.A.U.C.E.R.S. and Space Brothers,” “The l960s: Swamp Gas and High Hopes,” “The 1970s: Crashed Saucers and Kidnappers from Space,” “The 1980s: Cosmic Babblegate,” and “The 1990s and Beyond: Virtual Reality” with its opening chapter, “Trust No One (Especially Your Abductologist).”
COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
