Ted Bloecher

Theodore Bloecher was born on August 22, 1929, in Summit, New Jersey, and died on January 22, 2024, in New York City at the age of 94. He pursued studies in Fine Arts at Cooper Union on scholarship before attending Columbia University, where he majored in dramatic literature with a minor in music. His earliest stage work was with the Provincetown Players.

Bloecher began his professional career as a singer and worked as a theater actor from the late 1950s through 1973. His stage activity in the early 1950s included a profiled role in a production of Street Scene in 1953, and in 1957 he co-authored a musical titled The Money Colored Rainbow. In 1959 he took the title role of Feathertop in The Clarkstown Witch, an opera drawn from the Nathaniel Hawthorne story Feathertop. His 1961 work included appearances in productions of Tenderloin and Destry Rides Again, followed in 1963 by roles in The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Irma La Douce.

His Broadway career spanned from 1957 to 1971 and included the productions Ari, Oliver Oliver, My Fair Ladies, Half a Sixpence, and Hello, Dolly!. Beyond Broadway, Bloecher was also part of national touring companies for Oliver!, My Fair Lady in the 1960s, and Hello, Dolly in 1972.

In 1985, Bloecher joined the New York City Gay Men's Chorus as a tenor and served the organization as its librarian. He was a pioneering figure in New York City gay culture. In retirement he volunteered at the Museum of Modern Art. His memoir Coming of Age in Provincetown was published in 2019, and in 2020 his journals and artwork were featured in a retrospective examining the role of queer people in New York's history, which Bloecher, then 90 years old, attended in person.

Parallel to his arts career, Bloecher was a prominent figure in American ufology. His interest in the subject began in the summer of 1952, and in 1954 he co-founded Civilian Saucer Intelligence. He also served as an officer of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. In 1967 he published a historical study exhaustively documenting reported UFO sightings during the 1947 flying disc craze, and the following year that report was adapted into a nationally syndicated comic strip by Supergirl creator Otto Binder. Bloecher spoke on UFO topics at meetings in Britain, Arizona, and at the 1978 MUFON symposium in Dayton, Ohio, before retiring from ufology in the 1980s and donating his files.