Hall, Richard
Richard H. Hall (1930–2009) was one of the leading US ufologists.
He was born December 25, 1930, in Hartford, Connecticut. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1949 during the Korean War buildup, served into early 1951, then spent six years in the Air Force Reserve. He enrolled at Tulane University in New Orleans in 1954, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy. He first learned of ufology while at Tulane, when he worked as a scholarship student sorting and delivering mail — which is how he came across correspondence about NICAP.
NICAP career (1958–1969): He began as executive secretary and eventually became NICAP's assistant director, making him both an eyewitness and participant in much of the early history of the American UFO phenomenon. Working with NICAP director Donald Keyhoe, he helped lobby Congress to hold public hearings and investigations into UFOs. In 1964, he researched, edited, and wrote much of "The UFO Evidence," a compendium of UFO incidents from the 1940s–early 1960s that NICAP considered its most persuasive case for UFOs as a real physical phenomenon — a copy of which was sent to every member of Congress.
That same year, high-level White House discussions took place on how to respond if extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered, prompting CIA Director John McCone to review whether UFOs posed a threat to the U.S.; CIA agents interviewed Hall directly for NICAP's sighting data. Decades later, when a 1997 CIA report admitted the agency had long misattributed UFO sightings to phenomena like temperature inversions when they were often spy planes (SR-71s, U-2s), Hall - by then chairman of the Fund for UFO Research - was quoted by the New York Times calling the admission significant.
Later career: He left NICAP in the late 1960s (prompted by his impending marriage, which ended in divorce) and went on to direct the Fund for UFO Research and edit the MUFON Journal, later founding and editing the Journal of UFO History. Outside ufology, he also wrote books and articles on the role of women in the American Civil War.
Reputation: He was regarded as "the dean of ufology," known for a scientific approach and for rejecting what he called the "ding-a-ling fringe" of believers who treated the subject as dogma rather than inquiry. A colleague, astronomer John B. Carlson, called him "the last of a breed" — a generation that applied the scientific method rather than approaching the subject as believers, and Hall himself described his stance in a 1997 CNN interview as that of an open-minded but critical skeptic seeking evidence rather than assuming conclusions.
He died July 17, 2009, at age 78, at his home in Brentwood, Maryland, of colon cancer.
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