Jerome Clark

Jerome Clark is an American author and longtime editor within the Center for UFO Studies orbit whose defining contribution to the field is reference scholarship rather than field investigation. His multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia, first published in 1990 with an expanded second edition in 1998, compiled thousands of entries on cases, individuals, organizations, and concepts with a comparatively even-handed, source-citing approach that made it the standard desk reference for journalists, researchers, and skeptics alike, a rare achievement in a field often characterized by polemic. Clark served for years as an editor of the International UFO Reporter, CUFOS's journal, helping maintain the organization's relatively cautious, case-file-driven institutional culture as distinct from the more sensational wings of the UFO subculture. Over a long career he has written extensively on the intersections between UFO reports and broader anomalous and folkloric phenomena, reflecting an intellectual lineage closer to Jacques Vallée's high-strangeness approach than to strict nuts-and-bolts extraterrestrial hypothesis advocacy. While less publicly prominent than field investigators or media figures, Clark's encyclopedic and editorial work quietly shaped how two generations of researchers, journalists, and skeptics accessed and cross-checked the field's basic factual record.