Saucer News
Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society.
Other titles: Saucer News Combined with The Saucerian Bulletin
1955--1970 Bimonthly, then 1960 on, quarterly
Fort Lee, NJ, then Clarksburg, WV.
Language: English.
Editor: James W. Moseley; Gray Barker.
Publisher: Saucer and Unexplained Celestial Events Research Society (SAUCERS)
Succeeds: Nexus (Nos. 1-11, July 1954-May 1955)
Succeeded by: Saucer Smear (23/16, 1976-59/9, October 20, 2012, whole number 455); Saucerian Bulletin (acquired 1963-1968); Saucer News Non-Scheduled Newsletter (Nos. 1-32, December 5, 1955-October 1, 1968); Saucer News Interim Speed Bulletin (Nos. 1-7, March 28, 1966-December 1, 1966)
2/5, July 1955- 17/1 Spring 1970.
$1.00-$2.00 a year, usually with an additional $2.00 for membership in SAUCERS.
16-48 pp.

This and its congeners were the product of James Willet Moseley (1931-2012), who came to style himself Editor and Still Supreme Commander of the journal. It was begun as Nexus and after the first year became Saucer News. At various times in the 1950s and 1960s Mosely also published short newsletters (Saucer News Non-Scheduled Newsletter, and Saucer News Interim Speed Bulletin) to fill in the interstices of his Saucer News with short alerts on subjects he deemed to be noteworthy. From 1963-1968 the journal was merged with his sometime friend Gray Barker's Saucerian/Saucerian Bulletin to form Saucer News Combined with The Saucerian Bulletin, and then sold back to Barker in 1968, who published it in West Virginia until his death in 1970. After a hiatus during which Moseley published scattered issues under various names, the journal reappeared as Saucer Smear (with a great number of variant, usually rhyming, titles) in 1976 and continued until Moseley's death in October 2012--more than 450 issues published over 59 years in all, making the journal the longest lasting and certainly most readable of UFO journals.

Moseley was a trust-fund endowed, Princeton-educated dilettante (in the true sense of the word) who devoted his leisure to South American antiquities (treasure hunting and grave robbing, as he confessed) and UFOs. On leaving Princeton without a degree he drove across the United States visiting many supposed UFO sighting and crash sites and interviewing many of the strange mixture of eccentrics, believers and confidence men involved in what would become the UFO craze – including George Adamski, one of the first "contactees," who had progressed from being the originator of the Royal Order of Tibet in Southern California in the 1930s to photographing flying saucers and meeting the Venusian Orthon and traveling with other Space Brothers on their ships. He was originally impressed by Adamski and his photographs but later criticized him regularly, culminating in a Special Adamski Exposé in October 1957, the cover of which showed how a flying saucer photo just like Adamski's could be made using a "Chrysler hubcap, a coffee can, and ping pong balls."

His first journal effort (Nexus) was closer to what was to become the standard model UFO journal, with regular reports of sightings and crashes and a veneer of objectivity in discussing them, but in later incarnations of the journal Mosely expanded his interests beyond the "Unexplained Celestial Events" of its subtitle to include ESP, ancient Lost Civilizations, Uri Geller, chupacabras, MJ-12, crop circles, skin walkers, Mothman, the West Virginia Flatwoods Intergalactic War, and the other of the innumerable fads of the period, all of which were noted with true Fortean objectivity, carefully dissected, and, usually, set snidely set aside with humor. "We seldom discuss (ugh!) flying saucer sightings . . ., as there are so many newsletters that do this. We prefer to stick to the Dark Underbelly of UFO research, namely feuds, gossip, etc., plus a bit of satire and Sick Humor on the side." "We feel that flying saucers exist and are probably interplanetary, and we also feel that we are as serious-minded about the subject as anybody. However, we cannot pursue our interest in saucers with a continual dead-pan expression, and for that reason Nexus is particularly slanted for those who, like us, can get a laugh out of a rather serious subject." Moseley was serious in his niggling belief that there was something going on with all these unexplained phenomena, but skeptical of both the believers' enthusiasms and the cold certitude of the debunkers. His journals were the longest running and most successful of UFO journals, readable, fun, carefully honest and devastating when critical of hoaxes, frauds and humbuggery. He waged long and detailed crusades against George Adamski and other frauds and confidence scams and never stopped scoffing at the interminable Roswell crash:

"The Roswell crash is here to stay
It will never Die
It was meant to be that way
Though I don't know why.
I don't care what the people say
The Roswell crash
is here to stay.
(Apologies to Danny & the Juniors)"v

His concern for the "Dark Underbelly of UFO research" (he dedicated his work, he gloated, "to all the 'Assholes' in Ufology, Whoever They May be") makes the journals the essential foundation for any history of UFOs. The circulation of the journal at the time Mosely reacquired it from Barker in 1968 was said to be almost 4,000. Mosely set out a version of his career in ufology in his Shockingly Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (2002). Under Barker's ownership 1968-1970 the journal began to accept advertisements of the more dubious kind (AMORC, Shaver Mystery, Eckankar, etc.) which indicates his more commercial view of the enterprise. The complete run of all his journals can be found online on jimmoseley.com and AFU Archives for the Unexplained (files.afu.se).