William Leonard Moore (born October 31, 1943) is an author and former
UFO
An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are id ...
researcher, prominent from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. He co-authored two books with
Charles Berlitz, including ''The Roswell Incident''.
Career
Interested in UFOs since he was a teenager, Moore attended
Thiel College
Thiel College (, ) is a private college in Greenville, Pennsylvania. It is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and is one of the smallest colleges or universities in the region with about 100 full-time and part time faculty ...
, located in Greenville, Pennsylvania graduating in 1965. He taught language and humanities at various high schools. He became
Arizona state section director of the
Mutual UFO Network
The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) is a US-based non-profit organization composed of civilian volunteers who study reported UFO sightings. It is one of the oldest and largest organizations of its kind, claiming more than 4,000 members worldwide wi ...
and left teaching to pursue a career as a freelance writer.
Moore wrote ''The Philadelphia Experiment - Project Invisibility'' with Charles Berlitz in 1979, about an alleged naval military experiment popularly known as the
Philadelphia Experiment aboard the
USS ''Eldridge'' in 1943.
In 1980, Moore wrote ''The Roswell Incident'' with writing partner Charles Berlitz, which alleged the
Roswell UFO incident had involved the crash of an extraterrestrial space ship.
In May 1987, Moore along with ufologists Jaime Shandera and
Stanton Friedman circulated the
Majestic 12
Majestic 12, also known as MJ-12 for short, is a purported organization that appears in UFO conspiracy theories. The organization is claimed to be the code name of an alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officia ...
documents that purported the existence of a high-level policy making group overseeing UFOs and extraterrestrials.
At a 1989 MUFON conference, Moore claimed that he had been engaged in "disinformation" activities against
Paul Bennewitz on behalf of the
Air Force Office of Special Investigations.
Critical reception
According to author Barna William Donovan, ''The Philadelphia Experiment - Project Invisibility'' was "largely dismissed even by the most committed conspiracy and supernatural buffs as nothing more than a shoddy, uncritical repeat of a lingering and completely unsubstantiated urban myth." Donovan wrote that critics have deemed ''The Roswell Incident'' "a collection of wild hearsay" offering "second - and third-hand accounts Berlitz and Moore then use for fantastic speculation and to jump to a lot of unwarranted conclusions", and that when critics and skeptics characterized the Majestic 12 documents as fraudulent, "The accusing fingers were pointing at Moore."
Books
* ''The Philadelphia Experiment Project Invisibility'' (1979)
* ''The Roswell Incident'' (1980)
See also
*
UFO conspiracy theory
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Moore, Bill
American male non-fiction writers
American UFO writers
American conspiracy theorists
UFO conspiracy theorists
JFK-UFO conspiracy theories
Ufologists
Roswell incident
1943 births
Living people