Jerome Clark

Early life and introduction to UFO research

Jerome Clark was born on November 27, 1946, in Canby, Minnesota, a small town near the South Dakota border. He attended South Dakota State University and Moorhead State College, though it was not academic credentialing but decades of hands-on editorial and archival labor that eventually made him, in the words of longtime ufologist James W. Moseley, "the UFO field's leading historian." Clark came of age as a researcher during the tumultuous UFO controversies of the late 1960s and 1970s — the era of Project Blue Book's closure, the Condon Report, and a proliferating civilian research movement searching for intellectual footing. That vantage point, arriving early enough to have watched the field's foundational institutions rise and fall, shaped his lifelong preoccupation with getting the history right.

Throughout his career Clark has maintained an entirely separate creative life as a country and folk music songwriter. His compositions have been recorded or performed by artists including Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Tom T. Hall, and he has long reviewed folk and roots albums for the online music magazine Rambles.NET. The pairing of a meticulous documentary historian with a working songwriter is unusual even within ufology's ranks of eccentric polymaths, and it points to a mind equally comfortable with narrative craft and forensic skepticism.

The Coleman years: psychosocial theory and cryptozoology

Before Clark became known as the field's dispassionate archivist, he spent the 1970s as half of one of ufology's more theoretically adventurous partnerships. Working with folklorist and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, Clark co-wrote The Unidentified: Notes Toward Solving the UFO Mystery (1975) and its follow-up Creatures of the Outer Edge (1978). These books fused UFO reports with cryptid encounters, Men in Black lore, and other "high strangeness" phenomena under a single interpretive umbrella, drawing heavily on Jungian psychology and sociological analysis rather than treating UFOs as straightforwardly nuts-and-bolts spacecraft. The Clark–Coleman collaboration helped seed a wave of psychosocial theorizing about the UFO phenomenon that would later flourish, especially in Europe, among researchers associated with the British journal Magonia, even though Clark himself never fully embraced their conclusion that UFO reports are best explained as psychological or folkloric rather than physically anomalous events.

The cryptozoological side of that partnership endured. Two decades later Clark and Coleman co-authored Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature (1999), applying the same entry-by-entry, encyclopedic methodology Clark would make his signature to the study of unrecognized animals — evidence that his organizing instinct as a documentarian preceded and outlasted any single theoretical commitment. The two men's careers subsequently diverged in emphasis — Coleman went on to found the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, and concentrated increasingly on cryptid fieldwork, while Clark turned his attention back toward UFO history proper — but the collaboration left a permanent mark on both fields' reference literature.

Editorial leadership: Fate and the International UFO Reporter

From 1976 to 1989, Clark served as editor of Fate, one of the oldest continuously published periodicals covering UFOs and paranormal subjects in the United States, founded in 1948 in the immediate aftermath of Kenneth Arnold's sighting and the Roswell affair. Over thirteen years at the helm, Clark pushed the magazine toward more careful sourcing and away from uncritical sensationalism, without abandoning its populist, reader-submission-driven character.

He went on to edit the International UFO Reporter, the flagship publication of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), the organization founded by J. Allen Hynek after his own break with the Air Force's Blue Book project — a project on which Hynek had served for two decades as scientific consultant before concluding that the government's dismissive handling of cases warranted an independent civilian body. Clark has remained affiliated with CUFOS as a board member and consultant for decades, giving him a continuous institutional foothold in the civilian research establishment stretching from the Hynek era through the present disclosure era.

The UFO Encyclopedia: building the standard reference

Clark's defining achievement is The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning, an A–Z reference work whose first edition appeared across three separate volumes:

• UFOs in the 1980s (1990)
• The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959 (1992)
• High Strangeness: UFOs from 1960 through 1979 (1996)

Each volume combined narrative history with entries on individual cases, organizations, investigators, hoaxes, debunking campaigns, and the conspiracy theories that had accumulated around the subject, footnoted to primary sources wherever they existed. In High Strangeness, Clark tracked how the UFO debate mutated over the 1960s and 1970s "from a debate about aerial phenomena into one about experiences at ground level," as abduction claims and close encounters pushed the field toward ever more baroque territory — a shift he chronicled without either dismissing or fully endorsing the wilder claims involved.

In 1997 Clark distilled the three-volume set into a single abridged trade paperback, The UFO Book: Encyclopedia of the Extraterrestrial, which won the Benjamin Franklin Award in the Science/Environment category in 1998 — a rare mainstream publishing honor for a UFO title. He returned to the subject repeatedly in later years, publishing Extraordinary Encounters: An Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrials and Otherworldly Beings (2000) and Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs (2003), the latter narrowing his encyclopedic method to the specific and evidentially strong subcategory of aviation sightings. A fully revised third edition of The UFO Encyclopedia appeared in 2018, expanded with over a hundred new entries reflecting decades of subsequent developments, and Clark has been reported to be at work on a fourth edition — an indication that he still regards the project as a living document rather than a closed body of work.

The Encyclopedia's reputation rests on Clark's habit of grading cases rather than flattening them into a single undifferentiated mass of "the unexplained." He distinguishes explained misidentifications, demonstrated hoaxes, contested and ambiguous reports, and the smaller residue of cases he considers genuinely resistant to conventional explanation — a taxonomy that both believers and skeptics have found usable, even when they disagree with where he draws particular lines.

Beyond ufology: strange America and the paranormal at large

Clark's encyclopedic instinct extended well past flying saucers. Unnatural Phenomena: A Guide to the Bizarre Wonders of North America (2005) catalogs anomalous natural events and strange historical episodes across the continent, organized geographically in the same reference format he had honed for UFOs. Hidden Realms (2010) and a later revised edition of Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena (3rd ed., 2012) broadened the net further to ghosts, monsters, and assorted Fortean ephemera. Taken together, this body of work makes Clark one of the most prolific reference-book authors in the paranormal field generally, not just within ufology — nearly twenty books across more than four decades, two of which were Book-of-the-Month Club selections.

He also turned his documentarian eye toward specific religious movements adjacent to UFO belief, writing about the Heaven's Gate group, whose UFO-inflected theology and 1997 mass suicide he examined as a case study in how apocalyptic and extraterrestrial belief systems can combine with tragic consequences. That willingness to follow the UFO phenomenon into its darker religious tributaries, rather than confining himself to sightings and physical traces, distinguishes Clark's body of work from narrower catalogues of aerial anomalies and situates him closer to a general historian of twentieth-century American belief.

Reception and criticism

Clark occupies an unusually contested middle ground: he is respected by mainstream skeptics for his sourcing discipline while remaining, in his own account, a believer in the reality of an unexplained residue within UFO reports. The skeptic Paul Kurtz, founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, nonetheless characterized Clark as "easily impressed by questionable evidence," even while noting that Clark himself had criticized organized skepticism as closed-minded. From the opposite theoretical direction, contributors to the British psychosocial journal Magonia — heirs to the very Jungian, folklore-centered framework Clark helped popularize with Coleman in the 1970s — have generally rejected his residual endorsement of a form of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, even as they routinely cite his encyclopedias as indispensable reference sources. That double-sided friction, taken seriously by both wings of a polarized field while satisfying neither entirely, is itself a kind of testament to the evenhandedness of his documentary method.

Library and trade reviewers have been more uniformly positive, praising The UFO Encyclopedia as "thorough" and "much-needed" upon its various editions' release, and it is routinely cited in academic and journalistic treatments of UFO history as the reference of first resort.

That reputation carried Clark beyond the printed page. He has appeared as an on-camera authority on network and syndicated programs including ABC News Special Report, Unsolved Mysteries, and Sightings, called on precisely because producers needed a figure who could summarize a case's evidentiary status without either promoting or ridiculing it — a role few other ufologists of his generation were trusted to fill on mainstream television.

Awards and legacy

In addition to the 1998 Benjamin Franklin Award, Clark received the Society for Scientific Exploration's Dinsdale Award in 2008, given for work that brings "comprehensive and trustworthy information presented from a sophisticated perspective" to the public understanding of unexplained phenomena — an honor that, coming from a scientific society rather than a UFO advocacy organization, underlines how far his reputation for rigor extends beyond ufology's internal circles.

Clark's practical legacy is architectural: the case-by-case, sourced, graded-credibility encyclopedia format he pioneered in the early 1990s became the template later adopted, consciously or not, by nearly every subsequent attempt at a comprehensive UFO reference, including database projects built for the web era. His decades on the CUFOS board connect the Hynek-founded civilian research tradition directly to the disclosure era that began in 2017, making him one of the few living figures whose active career spans nearly the entire history of organized ufological research in the United States. Younger researchers assembling web-based UFO case databases in the 2010s and 2020s have, whether consciously or not, followed the same core convention Clark established in print: a discrete entry per case, a plain-language summary of what is claimed, and an explicit note on how well the claim holds up under scrutiny.

Personal life

Clark lives in a small Minnesota town and has three adult children and two grandchildren living in Chicago. He has continued to write about both UFOs and roots music into his eighth decade, reportedly still at work on a fourth edition of The UFO Encyclopedia — a project that, should it appear, would extend a documentary effort now approaching its fourth decade and covering nearly eighty years of reported UFO history, from the pre-Roswell era to the congressional hearings and Pentagon disclosures of the 2020s.