Ted
Bloecher was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1929. He majored
in drama and literature,
with a minor in music,
at Columbia University. From the late 1950s
until 1973, he worked as a singer
and actor. In 1975, he embarked on a new career
as a computer data processor.
Bloecher's
interest regarding UFOs begins in 1947, the very first
year of the modern UFO wave: as a teenager, he becomes
fascinated by newspaper and radio reports on flying saucers.
Within a few years, he is a charter member and investigator
in one of the ealiest and most important UFO groups, Civilian
Saucer Intelligence, or C.S.I.
Besides
co-editing CSI News Letter with Mebane and Davis,
he helped them prepare Aimé
Michel's two French-language books for
American publication and write, under the by-line Civilian
Saucer Intelligence, the much-praised Shapes
in the Sky series, which ran from 1957 to 1958
in the science-fiction magazine Fantastic
Universe.
He
eventually begins a long and
successful career in the musical theatre. He
travels to dozens of cities in shows like My
Fair Lady, Oliver
and Half A Sixpence.
After
CSI
folded in 1959, Bloecher became involved with the National
Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena
(NICAP)
and even moved from a time from New York City to Washington,
D.C, where NICAP
was headquartered. Bloecher visits local area libraries
and begins to collect articles on 1947 UFO sightings from
the local newpapers. His painstaking work results in an
extremely important and unique survey of UFO reports from
that crucial year, Report
on the UFO Wave of 1947 (1967).
Bloecher's
friendships includes Dr.
J. Allen Hynek, Betty
Hill, Dr.
James McDonald, Richard
Hall, Isabel Davis, Donald
Keyhoe and virtually all of the major researchers
of those seminal years. As early as 1956, Bloecher gets
intrigued by the growing number of UFO
occupant reports and, along with
researcher David Webb,
starts to work on HUMCAT,
a collection of early humanoid sightings.
His
major interest was always in occupant
reports, or close
encounters of the third kind (CE3s),
as they would be called from the 1970s on. As NICAP
became moribund, Bloecher associated himself with the
Mutual
UFO Network and the Center
for UFO Studies (CUFOS),
concentrating his efforts on investigation of CE3 reports
with David Webb. In 1978, CUFOS
published his and Davis's Close
Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955, based
on the investigation of the Kelly-Hopkinsville case.
In
November 1975, Bloecher got a phone call from a New York
artist named Budd
Hopkins, who within a few years, would
be one of the world's best-known ufologists but who then
was simply curious about a landing report he had heard
from a trusted acquaintance. Bloecher and Hopkins together
investigated the multiple-witness event, which occurred
in a New Jersey park directly across the Hudson River
from 88th Street in Manhattan (Bloecher, 1976; Hopkins,
1981). The two then enlisted the services of several New
York psychologists and psychiatrists as they investigated
the emerging UFO-abduction phenomenon.
Bloecher
left Ufology in the early 1980s and later donated his
massive files to CUFOS.
Sources:
http://wiki.razing.net/index.php/Ted_Bloecher
http://www.ufopsi.com/articles/tedbloecher.html
