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Jerome Clark on Richard Hall

Respected Fortean researcher Jerome Clark passed on this obituary for his good friend, and legend of ufology, Richard Hall. Thanks to Jerry for sharing these words at this difficult time:

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A musician friend often expresses amazement that when he grew up and made his own mark, the singers and pickers who were the heroes of his youth became his contemporaries and his friends. I felt the same way about Dick Hall, whose death yesterday is only now sinking into me. I have few heroes. As the old Carter Family song has it, “When I woke from my dreaming/ All my idols were clay.” Dick remained a hero to me, and he deserves to be remembered as a hero of ufology – a word, by the way, he detested for reasons I never entirely understood – at its most intelligent and thoughtful.

Born in Connecticut in 1930, Richard Harris Hall read Donald Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real (1950) while serving in the U.S. Air Force. A lifelong fascination grew out of that experience. While attending Tulane University (from which he attained a B.A. in 1958), Dick edited a small UFO bulletin called Satellite.. From 1958 to 1968 he was secretary of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), which Keyhoe directed. In that capacity, he wrote The UFO Evidence, a still useful compilation of reports and patterns of UFO data up to 1964. Many years later, The UFO Evidence II brought matters up to date. Both books are among the literature’s essentials, perhaps right under J. Allen Hynek’s The UFO Experience (1972).

Dick was a strong – well, fierce is more like it – advocate for reasoned analysis. He did not suffer fools gladly, and as fools he ranked those who speculate without solid empirical evidence grounding those speculations. He did not hold back, and not a few, including the young, John Keel-besotted Jerome Clark, found themselves at the receiving end of the sharp Hall tongue. In my own late life in ufology, I understand his impatience with ufology’s tendency to repeat its errors with each new generation and to disdain those who, having been there, try to sound the alarm. In his last years he was publishing an old-fashioned print-and-paper bulletin, Journal of UFO History, which reexamined issues and cases from decades ago from the perspective of today’s expanded knowledge.

Dick’s articulate, informed advocacy of the extraterrestrial hypothesis survived ufology’s various fads and passing enthusiasms, most of which sought to replace visitation theories with a kind of neo-demonology and supernaturalism. Dick argued that such “explanations” are dubious and unnecessary, based in little more than empty rhetoric. Certainly, as the discovery of life-friendly extrasolar planets (unknown for most of ufology’s history) accelerates and the likelihood of a densely populated universe grows, ET visitation may well be more likely than its opposite. It’s hard, in any case, to conceive of what the UFOs of CE2s and radar/visuals could be if not somebody else’s technology.

I loved Dick and was honored by his friendship and respect. Over time, as we got to know each other better, we learned that we had other interests in common, from an intense fascination with politics (both of us lifelong liberal Democrats) and American history (Dick wrote a couple of well-reviewed books on Civil War matters). Purely by accident, as we were chatting over lunch at a UFO conference in Chicago, we discovered another longstanding mutual interest in the life and career of Western lawman Wyatt Earp.

Beneath the sometimes brusk exterior in evidence, for example, in some of his UFO Updates postings, Dick was full of warmth and humor. He was as smart as they come. His career in our field was long, honorable, and productive, and his presence was a towering one. As we gaze out into whatever future ufology has, we all stand in his shadow.

Jerome Clark

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