The Paracast Newsletter
June 15, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Award-winning UFO Historian Jerome Clark Talks About the State of UFO Research and the Recent Controversial Wall Street Journal Article on UFOs This Week on The Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (June 15, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present a very special episode featuring UFO historian Jerome Clark. Among the topics to be discussed, the recent controversial article from the Wall Street Journal claiming many UFO events are really based on government disinformation. Also on the agenda: his career as a music lyricist. Jerome is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena. He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, Jerome received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena. He has been featured in such television programs as the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. In 2005, he discussed the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations on the prime-time special, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing." In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings. And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by June 14: Award-winning UFO historian Jerome Clark returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about a variety of subjects, including his many years of personal paranormal encounters and their impact. Topics include what Jerome considers to be the differences between "MIB" and "Men In Black" and his views about UFO abductions. He'll also talk about his history with well-known researcher John Keel, about the possibility of UFOs being sent by "Time Cops" to fix breaks in the timestream, and even his all-time favorite sci-fi films. Jerome is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena. He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, Jerome received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena. He has been featured in a number of television programs through the years, including the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
The Point and The Effect
by Jerome Clark
As we know, almost everything that happens to you in your daily existence is simple happenstance. Random events usually carry no larger meaning or consequence, and they fade out of memory as soon as something just as pedestrian replaces them. When something that will change everything falls your way, you don't ordinarily recognize it on the spot. More likely, to you it's nothing in particular.
It wasn't until I had grown up and fulfilled an ambition I'd entertained since I was a small child – to become a published author – that I fully appreciated the power of a book on a young, impressionable mind. I had started reading children's books before I entered primary school, and even then I had a wide-ranging curiosity. By the time I was 11 years old and in sixth grade, I had been reading at the adult level for a while. Like many adolescents, I developed an obsession with science fiction. On the back cover of Fantastic Universe I spotted an ad for something called the Science Fiction Book Club. The opening membership offer was your first selection and three free books.
Edward J. Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, the one nonfiction title in the bunch, ended up being the fourth choice, arrived at just as I was about to drop the envelope into the mail. I recall thinking, “This might be interesting,” but not being particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of reading it. The books must have arrived in October 1957 because I had consumed the Ruppelt title by the time in early November that national newspapers were recording a not-to-be-forgotten UFO wave in West Texas.
I was hooked. Soon I read The Books of Charles Fort after coming upon an article about Fort by Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York (consisting of such luminaries, all deceased now, as Isabel Davis, Ted Bloecher, and Lex Mebane). A smart lot, they gave my interest a good shove. I have long said that if instead of Ruppelt and CSI I had first read George Adamski and contactee associates, even at my tender age I would have dropped UFOs and gone on to something else. There have been times I wish I had.
But here I am, many adventures and frustrations and bewilderments later. By the time the 1950s were over, I had read Donald Keyhoe, M. K. Jessup, Harold T. Wilkins, and every other saucer author I could find, including – yes – Adamski, George Hunt Williamson, and other contactee/New Age advocates. By now, however, I had learned that the UFO phenomenon (a phrase that would come into usage only later) was not about friendly Venusians but about radar-visual sightings and credible testimony. To this day I don't understand how anyone could believe contactee tales to be true in any literal sense, but as with so much in saucer-land, I would in time discern that even what seem to be outlandish yarns sometimes contain elusive and ambiguous elements which force us to consider new meanings for an ostensibly uncomplicated word like “experience.”
I met John Keel in the mid-1960s before he was a Fortean celebrity, and he was a huge influence until I outgrew him. He didn't like that and proceeded to circulate malicious rumors about me (such as – really – that I had conducted my UFO business out of a mental institution, had never married, and was a social outcast; all, um, inaccurate). In the 1970s I became an editor of Fate following years as a subscriber. I worked for Curtis and Mary Fuller, two of the finest human beings I have ever loved. Allen Hynek asked me to edit International UFO Reporter and to join the CUFOS board. I am proud of what I was able to do, with the assistance of some of Ufology's brightest lights, to turn IUR from a newsletter to a magazine of outstanding quality, both intellectual and stylistic.
I wrote other books, most famously the UFO Encyclopedia series (1990-2024), which attracted attention from outside Ufology's confines and alerted me to prominent academics and scholars who privately hold an intense interest in the phenomenon. I wrote some Fortean books. I pursued other interests, such as my longtime immersion in history. I formed an intense fascination with folk, blues, and roots music. With a couple of musician friends, Robin and Linda Williams, I spent a couple of decades co-writing (as lyricist) songs which got covered by country, folk, and bluegrass artists such as Emmylou Harris, the late Tom T. Hall, Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Seldom Scene, and others. I no longer participate in the creation of songs, but it was fun while it lasted.
All the while life and its turmoils played out in the background: marriages, divorces, three children (and now two grandchildren), intense political involvements (I am a liberal Democrat), alarmingly expanding intellectual interests, the discovery of cats (in my second marriage), financial struggles (contrary to legend, there's no money in UFOs and anomalies, unless you happen to be the equivalent of someone whom lightning decides to strike).
Where my anomalies life is concerned, my engagement – which is to say my level of interest – has fluctuated over the decades. There have been times I've been nearly as thrilled as I was when I first passed through the door into the house of Ufology. On other occasions, when emotional gravity weighed me down, the Darwinian struggle forced my attentions elsewhere. But I have always come back, and the many questions that anomalies force us to confront remain in my head, to be examined and rethought every day while my brain continues to function. I have never doubted for a moment that high strangeness of all kinds is a part of being human. History will not be kind to those who have sought to bully us into thinking otherwise.
I moved into this house – built in 1910 – in a remote southwestern Minnesota town in 1998. Within two years I was encountering anomalous weirdness personally. Most was trivial, some dramatic, but always resistant to what we like to imagine are “rational explanations.” They have continued since, perhaps one or two a month, on at least one recent occasion delivering what felt (I insist on no stronger verb) like a telepathic message while I was fully conscious in the immediate wake of a poltergeist trick (a witty one, too). On occasion I've had extraordinary dreams communicating realities I would learn only later. One, in the summer of 2023, involved the death three days earlier of an old friend, with information about his last days I would learn in due course but at that moment in that dream seemed pointless and frivolous.
So far as I'm concerned, I don't have to prove any of this. All I need to do is to be receptive to it. A life spent among anomalists has made that easier. I don't know if that was the point. It certainly has been the effect.
• • •
Jerome Clark is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena.
He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, he received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena.
Clark has been featured in such television programs as the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. In 2005, he discussed the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations on the prime-time special, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing." In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings.
And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!
June 15, 2025
www.theparacast.com
Award-winning UFO Historian Jerome Clark Talks About the State of UFO Research and the Recent Controversial Wall Street Journal Article on UFOs This Week on The Paracast.
The Paracast is released every Sunday and available from our site, https://www.theparacast.com, your favorite podcast app, and the IRN Internet Radio Network. All episodes from 2022 and later now feature better audio and fewer ads. We are also re-releasing some of our most popular classic episodes.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HAVEN'T SIGNED UP FOR THE PARACAST+ YET? PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO THE PARACAST+ SO YOU CAN SUPPORT THE SHOW AND ENJOY THE ULTIMATE PARACAST EXPERIENCE AT A SPECIAL LOW PRICE! We have another radio show and we’d love for you listen to it. So for a low subscription fee, you will receive access to an exclusive bonus podcast, After The Paracast, plus a special version of The Paracast with all the ads removed, when you join The Paracast+. We also offer a special RSS feed for easy updates of the latest episodes on your device. Episodes for subscribers to The Paracast+ are now released 24 hours earlier. Flash! Now includes over 100 classic episodes, so take advantage of our lowest rates ever! Act now! It's easier than ever to susbcribe! For the easiest signup ever, please visit: https://www.theparacast.plus
This Week's Episode (June 15, 2025): Gene and cohost Tim Swartz present a very special episode featuring UFO historian Jerome Clark. Among the topics to be discussed, the recent controversial article from the Wall Street Journal claiming many UFO events are really based on government disinformation. Also on the agenda: his career as a music lyricist. Jerome is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena. He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, Jerome received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena. He has been featured in such television programs as the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. In 2005, he discussed the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations on the prime-time special, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing." In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings. And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
After The Paracast — Available exclusively to Paracast+ subscribers by June 14: Award-winning UFO historian Jerome Clark returns to talk with Gene and cohost Tim Swartz about a variety of subjects, including his many years of personal paranormal encounters and their impact. Topics include what Jerome considers to be the differences between "MIB" and "Men In Black" and his views about UFO abductions. He'll also talk about his history with well-known researcher John Keel, about the possibility of UFOs being sent by "Time Cops" to fix breaks in the timestream, and even his all-time favorite sci-fi films. Jerome is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena. He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, Jerome received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena. He has been featured in a number of television programs through the years, including the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
Reminder: Please don't forget to visit our famous Paracast Community Forums for the latest news/views/debates on all things paranormal: The Paracast Community Forums. And look for @theparacast on Bluesky Social, Facebook, Threads and X.
The Point and The Effect
by Jerome Clark
As we know, almost everything that happens to you in your daily existence is simple happenstance. Random events usually carry no larger meaning or consequence, and they fade out of memory as soon as something just as pedestrian replaces them. When something that will change everything falls your way, you don't ordinarily recognize it on the spot. More likely, to you it's nothing in particular.
It wasn't until I had grown up and fulfilled an ambition I'd entertained since I was a small child – to become a published author – that I fully appreciated the power of a book on a young, impressionable mind. I had started reading children's books before I entered primary school, and even then I had a wide-ranging curiosity. By the time I was 11 years old and in sixth grade, I had been reading at the adult level for a while. Like many adolescents, I developed an obsession with science fiction. On the back cover of Fantastic Universe I spotted an ad for something called the Science Fiction Book Club. The opening membership offer was your first selection and three free books.
Edward J. Ruppelt's The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, the one nonfiction title in the bunch, ended up being the fourth choice, arrived at just as I was about to drop the envelope into the mail. I recall thinking, “This might be interesting,” but not being particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of reading it. The books must have arrived in October 1957 because I had consumed the Ruppelt title by the time in early November that national newspapers were recording a not-to-be-forgotten UFO wave in West Texas.
I was hooked. Soon I read The Books of Charles Fort after coming upon an article about Fort by Civilian Saucer Intelligence of New York (consisting of such luminaries, all deceased now, as Isabel Davis, Ted Bloecher, and Lex Mebane). A smart lot, they gave my interest a good shove. I have long said that if instead of Ruppelt and CSI I had first read George Adamski and contactee associates, even at my tender age I would have dropped UFOs and gone on to something else. There have been times I wish I had.
But here I am, many adventures and frustrations and bewilderments later. By the time the 1950s were over, I had read Donald Keyhoe, M. K. Jessup, Harold T. Wilkins, and every other saucer author I could find, including – yes – Adamski, George Hunt Williamson, and other contactee/New Age advocates. By now, however, I had learned that the UFO phenomenon (a phrase that would come into usage only later) was not about friendly Venusians but about radar-visual sightings and credible testimony. To this day I don't understand how anyone could believe contactee tales to be true in any literal sense, but as with so much in saucer-land, I would in time discern that even what seem to be outlandish yarns sometimes contain elusive and ambiguous elements which force us to consider new meanings for an ostensibly uncomplicated word like “experience.”
I met John Keel in the mid-1960s before he was a Fortean celebrity, and he was a huge influence until I outgrew him. He didn't like that and proceeded to circulate malicious rumors about me (such as – really – that I had conducted my UFO business out of a mental institution, had never married, and was a social outcast; all, um, inaccurate). In the 1970s I became an editor of Fate following years as a subscriber. I worked for Curtis and Mary Fuller, two of the finest human beings I have ever loved. Allen Hynek asked me to edit International UFO Reporter and to join the CUFOS board. I am proud of what I was able to do, with the assistance of some of Ufology's brightest lights, to turn IUR from a newsletter to a magazine of outstanding quality, both intellectual and stylistic.
I wrote other books, most famously the UFO Encyclopedia series (1990-2024), which attracted attention from outside Ufology's confines and alerted me to prominent academics and scholars who privately hold an intense interest in the phenomenon. I wrote some Fortean books. I pursued other interests, such as my longtime immersion in history. I formed an intense fascination with folk, blues, and roots music. With a couple of musician friends, Robin and Linda Williams, I spent a couple of decades co-writing (as lyricist) songs which got covered by country, folk, and bluegrass artists such as Emmylou Harris, the late Tom T. Hall, Mary Chapin Carpenter, the Seldom Scene, and others. I no longer participate in the creation of songs, but it was fun while it lasted.
All the while life and its turmoils played out in the background: marriages, divorces, three children (and now two grandchildren), intense political involvements (I am a liberal Democrat), alarmingly expanding intellectual interests, the discovery of cats (in my second marriage), financial struggles (contrary to legend, there's no money in UFOs and anomalies, unless you happen to be the equivalent of someone whom lightning decides to strike).
Where my anomalies life is concerned, my engagement – which is to say my level of interest – has fluctuated over the decades. There have been times I've been nearly as thrilled as I was when I first passed through the door into the house of Ufology. On other occasions, when emotional gravity weighed me down, the Darwinian struggle forced my attentions elsewhere. But I have always come back, and the many questions that anomalies force us to confront remain in my head, to be examined and rethought every day while my brain continues to function. I have never doubted for a moment that high strangeness of all kinds is a part of being human. History will not be kind to those who have sought to bully us into thinking otherwise.
I moved into this house – built in 1910 – in a remote southwestern Minnesota town in 1998. Within two years I was encountering anomalous weirdness personally. Most was trivial, some dramatic, but always resistant to what we like to imagine are “rational explanations.” They have continued since, perhaps one or two a month, on at least one recent occasion delivering what felt (I insist on no stronger verb) like a telepathic message while I was fully conscious in the immediate wake of a poltergeist trick (a witty one, too). On occasion I've had extraordinary dreams communicating realities I would learn only later. One, in the summer of 2023, involved the death three days earlier of an old friend, with information about his last days I would learn in due course but at that moment in that dream seemed pointless and frivolous.
So far as I'm concerned, I don't have to prove any of this. All I need to do is to be receptive to it. A life spent among anomalists has made that easier. I don't know if that was the point. It certainly has been the effect.
• • •
Jerome Clark is the prize-winning author of more than a dozen books, including Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds; Strange Skies: Pilot Encounters with UFOs; the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia; and Unnatural Phenomena.
He serves on the board of the J. Allen Center for UFO Studies and is the co-editor of its magazine, International UFO Reporter. In 2008, he received the Dinsdale Award given by the Society of Scientific Exploration for significant contributions to the expansion of human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena.
Clark has been featured in such television programs as the 1997 A&E Network documentary "Where Are All the UFOs?," which examined the history of the UFO phenomenon. In 2005, he discussed the early history of the U.S. Military's UFO investigations on the prime-time special, "Peter Jennings Reporting: UFOs — Seeing Is Believing." In addition to the Peter Jennings special, Clark has also appeared on episodes of NBC's Unsolved Mysteries television series and on the syndicated television series Sightings.
And Gene and Jerome have been friends for nearly 60 years.
Copyright 1999-2025 The Paracast Company. All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy: Your personal information is safe with us. We will positively never give out your name and/or e-mail address to anybody else, and that's a promise!