Richard H. Hall

Early life and NICAP

Richard H. Hall (December 25, 1930 – July 17, 2009) was an American ufologist and one of the most persistent advocates of the extraterrestrial hypothesis. He held a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tulane University and spent most of his life in the Washington, D.C. area. According to a tribute by Jerome Clark, he first became interested in the subject after reading Donald Keyhoe's The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) while serving in the U.S. Air Force.

Hall joined the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in 1958 as executive secretary and later rose to assistant director. He worked alongside director Donald Keyhoe to press Congress for public hearings and an official investigation. Sources differ on when his tenure ended: Wikipedia gives 1969, when Keyhoe was ousted as director; Clark's tribute gives 1968. After leaving NICAP he worked as a technical writer and editor while continuing to investigate sightings.

Books and organizational work

Hall's most important publication was The UFO Evidence (NICAP, 1964), which he researched, edited and largely wrote. NICAP treated it as its strongest collection of incidents it considered hard to explain, and a copy went to every member of Congress. A second volume, The UFO Evidence, Volume 2: A Thirty-Year Report, appeared from Scarecrow Press around 2001 (listings differ between 2000 and 2001). His popular overview Uninvited Guests: A Documented History of UFO Sightings, Alien Encounters & Coverups was published by Aurora Press in 1988.

He later directed the Fund for UFO Research, which made grants to researchers, edited the MUFON Journal for the Mutual UFO Network, and founded the Journal of UFO History, which has since ceased publication. He also wrote unrelated history books on women in the American Civil War, including Patriots in Disguise (1994).

Government contacts and the CIA

Hall's work brought him into contact with official channels. In 1964, CIA officers interviewed him and drew on NICAP's records during an internal review of whether UFOs posed a threat to the United States. That review was prompted by White House discussions the same year.

When the CIA released a 1997 internal history acknowledging that the agency had misled the public about UFOs for decades, William Broad reported it in the New York Times. Hall told reporters: "Certainly they've lied about not having any interest in the subject." He continued to believe that officials were concealing evidence of an extraterrestrial origin, even as many other researchers accepted the official explanations for the earlier deceptions.

Assessment

Hall's reputation is mixed. Astronomer John B. Carlson, writing about the field, described him as "scientific, careful," and contrasted him with what Carlson called the "ding-a-ling fringe" that treats ufology as a faith. Hall's own conclusion, that the best cases point to spacecraft, was never accepted by mainstream science, and critics argue that NICAP's compilations gathered unresolved reports without establishing that they were physical objects. Wikipedia notes that the article on him leans heavily on primary sources, so claims about his influence rest more on the NICAP record than on independent scholarship.

His lasting value is as a record-keeper. The UFO Evidence remains a standard reference for 1950s and early 1960s sighting reports, and his later books document the NICAP era from inside the organization. He died in Brentwood, Maryland, at 78. Ted Bloecher, in a tribute in the International UFO Reporter, wrote that Hall died in poverty.