Mathematician and author
Dr. DONALD R. BURLESON

LEFT: December 2006 in his office at Eastern New Mexico University at Roswell,
just after discovering and proving a new theorem in matrix theory. (Photo by Mollie Burleson.)
RIGHT: (Dec. 31, 2021) Don Burleson on his 80th birthday.
He says that with the help of his wonderful wife Mollie,
he does his best to age gracefully.




(April 9, 2022) Don and Mollie Burleson celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary
at Red Lobster. Anniversary was actually on the next day.
Forty years, and even more in love than ever.


To go to the SITE MAP, click here.



Photo of author Donald R. Burleson Second photo of author Donald R. Burleson
Third photo of author Donald R. Burleson
TOP LEFT: Author Donald R. Burleson, Ph.D., at home in Roswell with feline chum Schroedie,
also called "the Schrode," named after "Schrödinger's Cat" of quantum-theory fame;
TOP RIGHT: Relaxing at the "haunted arroyo" that inspired the setting
of his UFO-related New Mexico novel ARROYO;
BOTTOM LEFT: Playing drums at an event in Roswell, New Mexico; and
BOTTOM RIGHT: Speaking at a meeting in Albuquerque of the Mutual UFO Network.




LEFT: Author's wife, best friend, and fellow UFO investigator and writer Mollie L. Burleson,
with prairie-handy Jeep Cherokee, otherwise known as the UFO-mobile,
shown here at a UFO investigation site in Lincoln County, New Mexico.

RIGHT: Don and Mollie Burleson at the now famous Hangar 84
on the former Walker Air Force Base in Roswell.
According to witness accounts, alien bodies and flying saucer debris
were crated and shipped from this location in July 1947.




LEFT:The author at the Coronado historical marker near the Pecos River.
RIGHT:The author's wife Mollie Burleson at the exact spot on the Pecos River
where Coronado and his men crossed the river in 1541 on their way
across New Mexico. This spot figures into Don Burleson's novel
Arroyo.




Don and Mollie Burleson at a book signing on 31 January 2009
at Hastings Bookstore in Roswell, New Mexico.
Mollie, a fiction writer and poet, is also the cover artist who did
the sketches of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Oppenheimer
on the covers of the Black Mesa Press books.




Donald R. Burleson's writing spans both fiction and nonfiction.
His short stories (to read one, click here)
have appeared in many magazines, including
Twilight Zone, 2AM, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Deathrealm, Terminal Fright, Lore, Wicked Mystic,
Innisfree, Potpourri,
and The Roswell Literary Review.
His work has also appeared in numerous major anthologies, including
Best New Horror, Post Mortem, MetaHorror, 100 Ghastly Little Ghost Stories,
100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, 100 Vicious Little Vampire Stories,
100 Wicked Little Witch Stories, 100 Tiny Tales of Terror, Made in Goatswood,
The Azathoth Cycle, The Cthulhu Cycle, The New Lovecraft Circle,
Gathering the Bones, Disciples of Cthulhu II,
Deathrealms: Selected Tales From the Land Where Horror Dwells,

and others, including anthologies from Triad Entertainments:
Return to Lovecraft Country and Weird Trails.
His novella Papa Loaty is included in the anthology Poe's Progeny,
and was recommended in 2006 for a British Fantasy Award.
He is also the author of the short story collections
Lemon Drops and Other Horrors (Hobgoblin Press), Four Shadowings (Necronomicon Press),
Beyond the Lamplight (Jack-O'Lantern Press), and most recently
Wait for the Thunder: Stories for a Stormy Night,
from Hippocampus Press (2010).
Scott David Aniolowski, for Deathrealm Magazine, has called Burleson
"the finest living author of the short horror story in America."

Burleson's novel Flute Song (from Black Mesa Press, reissued as The Roswell Crewman )
was nominated for the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Award in 1996.
His other novels with Black Mesa Press include Arroyo, A Roswell Christmas Carol,
and A Capitalist Christmas Carol.

His nonfiction works in the field of literary criticism include
H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Greenwood Press)
and Lovecraft: Disturbing the Universe (University Press of Kentucky),
as well as numerous articles in the professional journals.
He wrote the article on the "alien icon" in the reference set
Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (Greenwood Press) and
the article on Oxford biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins
in Icons of Unbelief (Greenwood Press).

Dr. Burleson's works have been translated
into French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Czech, and Japanese.

In the field of UFO studies, his nonfiction works include
The Golden Age of UFOs,
UFOs and the Murder of Marilyn Monroe,
and
UFO Secrecy and the Fall of J. Robert Oppenheimer,
all from Black Mesa Press,
as well as many articles in the journals MUFON UFO Journal and IUR,
the journal of CUFOS, the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in Chicago.

To see a list of all Donald R. Burleson's books, click here.

Dr. Burleson studied at Yale University (with the Institute of Far Eastern Languages),
and pursued graduate studies at Midwestern State University (Texas),
the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Rivier College (New Hampshire),
and Columbia Pacific University (San Rafael, California).
He holds Master's degrees both in mathematics and in English,
and a Ph.D. in English literature, with a dissertation on H. P. Lovecraft.
He has taught at many colleges and universities,
most recently at Eastern New Mexico University in Roswell.
He once held a Top Secret security clearance in U.S. Air Force Intelligence
as a Chinese language specialist. He is also fluent in Spanish
and has a reading knowledge of French and smatterings of several other languages.

Dr. Burleson has two sons Bruce and Brian Burleson,
and a stepson and daughter-in-law Brian and Vera Werba.

Since 1996 Burleson and his wife Mollie, herself a widely published fiction writer and poet,
have lived in Roswell, New Mexico, the UFO capital of the world,
where Burleson for eight years was the director (and network administrator) of one of the computer labs
at Eastern New Mexico University, until resigning from that position in August 2005
to accept a faculty position in the Mathematics Department at the same university.
He retired with Emeritus Faculty status in August 2007, continuing to
teach some mathematics courses on a parttime basis and continuing to
conduct research in the theory of matrices and linear transformations.
(To see some of Dr. Burleson's mathematical work,
in the area of applied eigenvector theory,
in particular to see his new theorem about semi-inversion operators
on a subclass of the full linear group
including the Pauli "particle-spin" matrices, click here.
Or to see a more general theorem from Dr. Burleson's research, click here. )
He is a certified UFO field investigator, research consultant,
and New Mexico State Director for MUFON, the Mutual UFO Network.



Burleson is an admirer of the writings (both fiction and nonfiction) and the
philosophy of Ayn Rand. For an essay reviewing her novel Atlas Shrugged,
click here. For another essay commenting on certain aspects of
Ayn Rand's philosophy of objectivism, click here.

Aside from his professional interests in mathematics, literature and literary criticism,
and the field of UFO studies in which he is increasingly immersed, his hobbies
include chess, languages, Sudoku, diagramless crosswords, jazz drumming,
cooking, collecting Haldeman Julius Little Blue Books,
and cryptography; he and his wife Mollie are longtime members of the American Cryptogram Association
and Don has done research in statistical cryptanalysis.
To see a vowel-finding method resulting from this research, click here.

Of his wife Mollie he says, "Mollie is my very best friend in the whole world.
That's the way it should always be. As I see it, if you're married,
and you're not married to your best friend, you're in a lot of trouble."



Mollie and Don Burleson, Valentine's Day 2015, ready to go for pizza!






August 2015, a memorable time for Mollie and Don Burleson,
as each had a book published in the same month!





Click to read an essay about the author's views on religion.
(Or have a look at a more whimsical piece on religion by clicking here.)
Dr. Burleson is an atheist, making him a member of what he calls
"the most hated and distrusted group of people in America";
he likes to characterize himself as a person whose sense of right and wrong
correlates with the very fact, contrary to popular ways of thinking,
that he does not have any religious beliefs of any kind whatever,
religion being the source of most of the world's evil, turmoil, and misery.
Burleson says his favorite movie line comes from a 1971 horror film called
The Devil's Nightmare , also known as The Devil Walks at Midnight,
in which one of the characters tells a priest seated near him at the dinner table:
"I'm an atheist, thank God for that!"


To get an idea how truly bizarre Dr. Burleson's sense of humor can be, click here.
But only if you have a strong stomach, and a perverse sense of humor yourself.




UFOlogist Don Burleson speaking on national television
about the Roswell UFO incident.









Mollie Burleson at home in Roswell, New Mexico, observing
Halloween, the Burlesons' favorite time of year.




The Burlesons at home in New Mexico, riding the tractor, cutting the weeds.









LEFT: Dr. Burleson lecturing on the StarChild DNA recovery project
during the 2013 UFO Festival in Roswell

RIGHT: (2008) Mollie Burleson at the Trinity Site in New Mexico.




As Halloween 2013 approaches, Mollie Burleson becomes a flesh-eating,
bone-gnawing zombie-- just one more thing that forever endears her to her husband Don.
Meanwhile Don, chainsaw in hand and a gleam in his eye,
gets ready to give a calculus exam.






The Burlesons at home, Thanksgiving 2015, Mollie with her splendid table, Don with his traditional sausage stuffing.




The Burlesons on Xmas Eve 2015, Don with a new t-shirt, Mollie with a new cookbook.




LEFT: (Sept. 10, 2018) Mollie and Don on a rare dress-up occasion, getting ready to attend
Eastern New Mexico University/Roswell's first annual Faculty Recognition Banguet,
where Don received a medal for having retired with emeritus faculty status.

RIGHT: (Spring 2016) Don Burleson stumping for fellow evolutionists everywhere.









LEFT: Mollie Burleson with her book HOME FOR CHRISTMAS AND OTHER HORRORS.
RIGHT: Don and Mollie Burleson each contributed a short story to the anthology BLACK WINGS V.





LEFT: Don and Mollie Burleson enjoy a 35th anniversary lunch at Red Lobster, April 10, 2017.
RIGHT: Don and Mollie each contributed a story to the 2017 anthology
GOTHIC LOVECRAFT.




(4 May 2017) Delivering his final lecture to his Calculus III class, Dr. Don Burleson
wraps up not only the spring semester at Eastern New Mexico University-Roswell
but a 50-year college mathematics teaching career as well. "One can retire from teaching,"
he says, "but a mathematician doesn't retire from being a mathematician."




(June 2017) Some of Dr. Burleson's favorite contentious t-shirts....




(Left mid-July 2020; Right late October 2021) Don Burleson having some fun with the otherwise irksome pandemic mask trend.




LEFT: Mollie Burleson at Bottomless Lakes State Park, start of summer 2017.
RIGHT: Don Burleson at the state park, catching some sun.



(Early July 2017) Mollie and Don with robot Gort at the 2017 Roswell UFO Festival.



Left: Fourth of July 2017 on the Burleson patio.
Right: (November 10, 2016) Mollie's birthday at Red Lobster.








Mollie and Don Burleson with certificates of achievement from the American Cryptogram Association
for correct solutions submitted to thousands of published cryptographic problems.










LEFT: (Halloween 2018) Mollie and Don Burleson with some of Mollie's Halloween decorations.
RIGHT: (27 May 2019) Mollie and Don sporting flags for Memorial Day.




Mollie and Don Burleson at the vendor table at the Roswell UFO Festival, July 6, 2021, selling their books.





(April 2020) Mollie Burleson receives her second Certificate of Achivement from the American Cryptogram Association
in recognition of having submitted 2,000 correct solutions.



LEFT: (November 10, 2022) Mollie Burleson, Don's beloved wife, on her 90th birthday.
RIGHT: (November 10, 2022) Mollie Burleson celebrating her 90th birthday at Red Lobster
with her husband Don and her stepsons (Don's sons) Brian and Bruce.





LEFT: Don Burleson soon after being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury. Yeah, right....
RIGHT: (Mid-March 2024) Don Burleson, more comfortably attired.




To go to the SITE MAP, click here.