Ted Bloecher Update 17 December 2024

I recently found out that Bloecher died in New York City on January 22, 2024, at the age of 94.

Theodore Bloecher 22nd August, 1929 – 22nd January, 2024

Bloecher, if all I have heard about him is true and it does seem to be, would probably insist that his colleagues, Isabel Davis and Alexander Mebane, from the early Civilian Saucer Investigation-NY, get a lot more credit than he. I have found very little information on either Isabel or Alexander but I intend to.  Along with Bloecher they were very possibly the best team of investigators in the United states.

c. 1970s

Bloecher began quite early to look into UFO and entity reports and yet there is very little published work from him. 

There is his Report of the UFO Wave of 1947 which for UFO historians is a must read and shows Bloecher's research capabilities.  Sadly, most modern Ufologists, I have found, have ever heard of this paper.

Probably, Bloecher will be better known for his work with Isabel Davis on the Close Encounter At Kelly And Others of 1955.  When I first heard of this I was told "It's just a booklet" and that is the most incorrect statement you can make. Maps, illoes as well as detailed background and reports; this is the publication that saw me take the Kelly "Goblins" encounter more seriously.  There is a current new edition so if you missed out on the 1978 book do not despair.

Considering its age this is a book I highly recommend as not just an historical publication (which it is) but just how to go about investigating CE3K/entity cases.

Dr Berthold Eric Schwarz called Bloecher "a pioneer UFO investigator" (Flying Saucer Review vol. 21 Nos 3 & 4, 1975).

I can only recall one case report in FSR by Bloecher and that was The "Stonehenge" Incidents of January 1975 (part 1 FSR 22/3, October, 1976 and part 2  FSR 23/4, November, 1976). If the Reader is not familiar with this case then I would suggest trying to get a hold of those issues it involves a great deal including UFO landing and "repair".  

Bloecher also presented a paper at the 1976 BUFORA UFO Conference. When I asked people who attended what they thought the standard response was "It was all little green men" which is so far from the truth. In fact I was asked to proof read the paper by BUFORA at the time. It is just a pity so many waited until it became "popular" to jump on the band wagon. A similar paper was presented to the MUFON Conference the same year.

 It is claimed that his creating the Humanoid Study Group had the biggest impact in Ufology. The HSG (Bloecher and David F. Webb) collected reports of occupant encounters from all over the world and led, it is said, to this aspect of Ufology -"the forbidden reports"- burst out into the light of day. All of the information was put onto index cards and this formed the data base which became the HUMCAT catalog. As far as I am aware there is no actual physical publication but the index card data base can be accessed via CUFOS's web site.

circa. 1990s

The philosophy behind the HSG appears to have been to collect everything that was not known to be a hoax or suspected to be such and then begin to sift through the data. Part of this "sifting" led to the emergence of a New York UFO investigator named Budd Hopkins becoming a working colleague of Bloecher's.  Very quickly this cooperation led to Hopkins first book, Missing Time (1988). It was Hopkins and then Jacobs who inherited Bloecher's files and we know where that led.

Bloecher over the years, until his retirement from UFOs  was what a UFO researcher should be; the model of discipline and restraint. He seems to have been content crediting others while shunning the limelight himself and though he is no longer active it was from his work and that of Davis that the Lorenzens began to take the CE3K reports seriously. It can be said, though he would probably be too modest to accept the accolade, that Bloecher was the father of Close encounters of the Third Kind research.