My Friend Jerry – Jerome Clark – and “The UFO Encyclopedia”

Jerome Clark, The UFO Encyclopedia, 3rd edition.  Detroit: Omnigraphics, 2018.

I’ve never met Jerry Clark, the editor and for the most part the author of the monumental UFO Encyclopedia that’s about to come out in its third, updated edition.  Yet he’s one of my oldest friends and, for a few crucial years of my life, one of my best friends.  That’s the way things were, among the teen UFOlogists of 50-plus years ago.

He lived in Canby, Minnesota, a very long way from Levittown, Pennsylvania, where I grew up.  We first made contact, perhaps ironically, through a group called the New Jersey Association on Aerial Phenomena (NJAAP), of which I was afterward to become Director and Jerry the Assistant Director.  I was 15 years old in April 1963, when we started to correspond.  He was 16.

He didn’t write like a teenager, though.  His distinctive style, recognizable to me even without his byline–clear, astringent, slightly ironic and compellingly readable–was already there, although not quite as polished as it would later become.  Commenting on the “silencing” of Bridgeport researcher Albert Bender by the sinister “three men in black,” 16-year-old Jerry wrote:  “Actually the idea of organized evil as an end in itself is too naive even for the most avid Ian Fleming fan.”  I’ve never seen the thought put better.

At first he and I exchanged one- and two-page letters, on such subjects as the contactee George Adamski, whose tales of meeting friendly and didactic Venusians neither of us trusted.  (Although Jerry saw them as ideology-driven, while I regarded Adamski as a con man pure and simple.)  The letters grew in length as we turned to the “mysteries” with which early 1960s UFOlogy was studded.  The “Bender mystery”–what did Bender know that the men in black didn’t want him to reveal?  The “Allende mystery,” with its strange missives describing an impossible experiment …  its cryptic annotations, hinting at secret knowledge, scrawled into the margins of a book called Case for the UFO.

Our letters became testing grounds for wild and not-so-wild ideas about the cosmic enigmas we’d committed our young lives to exploring.  They might run to 10 or even 20 pages.

About our lives outside those enigmas, by silent consent we didn’t talk.  Perhaps what we didn’t say to each other was as fundamental to our relationship as what we did say.  When I pined through tenth grade for a girl who couldn’t have cared if I lived or died, Jerry didn’t hear about it.  When the (different) girl I had a crush on in eleventh grade showed up at school with another boy’s class ring, Jerry didn’t hear about that.  When, at the beginning of twelfth grade, I came back from a summer in Israel to find that my mother had died and no one had told me, Jerry didn’t hear about that either.

(Sometime that autumn, however, I did let slip in a letter to him that I’d been depressed lately.)

He went off to college, and the following year I did too.  We fell out of touch.  In 1970 we recontacted through UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, whom I’d met by accident in Stanford, California.  Jerry was then in Chicago, where over the next two decades he would become an editor and then the editor of Fate magazine.  I periodically flew East to visit my father, I wrote; perhaps I could stop over in Chicago so we could meet face to face?

By all means! Jerry answered.  “It sure would be a gas to meet you, such as we’d always hoped to and never succeeded in.”

But somehow the stopover and the meeting never took place.

I pursued a career in academic Judaica, my UFOlogy hidden behind the respectable masks of Ezekiel’s visions and ancient tales of heavenly ascension.  Jerry became the writer that teenage Dave Halperin had wanted to be–without, I hasten to add, any inkling of the brutal economic realities entailed.  In 1975, he and Loren Coleman collaborated on a book called The Unidentified, in which, influenced by Vallee’s Passport to Magonia, the authors broke with the conventional notion of UFOs as machines from outer space.  They opted instead for a Jungian approach to the UFO as a psychic symbol.

This was music to my ears, given that I already believed and still believe the same thing.  Toward the end of 1988, Jerry and I had a telephone conversation–our first contact in 18 years–in which I expressed my enthusiasm for this turn his UFOlogy had taken.  He broke the news to me: he’d long since recanted.  The old-fashioned “extraterrestrial hypothesis” was the best way to go after all.  He now spoke of The Unidentified as “naive” and “phenomenally silly.”

I disagreed, and continue to disagree.  The book is flawed, to be sure; it’s plainly the work of youth, and some measure of youthful excess was inevitable.  But there’s also real insight once the excess is trimmed away.  His and Coleman’s Jungian analysis of the Bebedouro abduction of 1969, in particular, strikes me as little short of brilliant.

By the end of 1988, Jerry was hard at work on the first edition of what was to be his magnum opus, the indispensable work by which he’ll be known (I hope) as long as humankind remembers the UFO.  This was The UFO Encyclopedia, which initially appeared in three volumes, each of them running from A to Z.  First, UFOs in the 1980s (Detroit: Apogee Books, 1990); then, The Emergence of a Phenomenon: UFOs from the Beginning through 1959 (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1992); and finally, High Strangeness: UFOs from 1960 through 1979 (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1996).  The second edition, with these three segments unified in a single alphabetical sequence and brought up to date, was published by Omnigraphics two years later, under the title The UFO Encyclopedia: The Phenomenon from the Beginning (in two volumes).

It’s an extraordinary achievement, and astonishment multiplies as we realized that Jerry wrote almost all of its nearly 1200 encyclopedia-sized pages himself.  (12 of its 273 entries are the work of other contributors, including Thomas Bullard, who wrote the articles on “Abduction Phenomenon,” “Anomalous Aerial Phenomena before 1800,” and “Waves.”)  The British folklorist David Clarke, who’s made no secret of his total disbelief in UFOs, gave a fair and courageous appraisal of it in the 2002 volume of the journal Folklore:

“Jerome Clark’s magnum opus is one of the few attempts to distil the extensive literature of the subject into a definitive, objective history of UFOlogy.  Although Clark himself is a believer in the ‘alien visitation’ hypothesis, his approach throughout is admirably even-handed and realistic, with extensive coverage of other viewpoints, such as the socio-psychological theory popular among European UFOlogists.  Clark has been a historian of the UFO mystery for four decades, and has turned a childhood fascination into a masterly command of the subject in all its many and varied manifestations.  Today he edits the highly respected International UFO Reporter and is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on the phenomenon. …

“As a standard reference work for anyone with an interest in the UFO phenomenon, this encyclopedia is indispensable.  Clearly and concisely written, it is a valuable contribution to a controversial field which cries out for objective study.”

And now a third edition is on the way.  Again published by Omnigraphics, it’s scheduled for release on August 21.

I’m sure I’ll have a great deal more to say on this blog about the new edition.  I know I’ll engage with it again and again in the book I’m now working on, Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO (to be published by Stanford University Press, probably in 2020).  Jerry writes me–we now communicate through email, as befits the modern world–that its new material confirms his nuts-and-bolts approach to UFOlogy.  The heart of the phenomenon lies in those cases where UFOs appear both visually and on radar, and in the documented instances of traces they’ve left behind.

Bad news for the skeptics.  Bad news for people like me who find the UFO in the human soul, the unconscious, the realm of dream and myth.  Just how bad the news is, I’ll have to wait six weeks to find out.

In the meantime I have the sense, melancholy yet in its way comforting, that the enterprise that the two of us began together, and pursued the next half-century along our different paths, is drawing to its close.  Both of us have reached our 70s.  That’s not quite time to write finis to our lives, but it is an age at which we’re apt to ponder what those lives have meant for us and for those we’ve touched.  For me, the UFO has been an essential part of that meaning.  With each passing year, I understand more deeply the part it’s played.

Jerry, and our enduring friendship, has been vital to it.  In a world full of bright people, he’s one of the most truly and deeply intellectual persons I’ve ever known.  It’s a privilege to exchange ideas with him, now as when we were kids.

A privilege to read one more writing from his pen.

by David Halperin
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