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Klass Act?

Billy Cox – writer of the Devoid column/blog that often covers stories on the UFO beat – has posted an interesting anecdote about his own experience with well-known UFO skeptic Phil Klass:

Klass was a prolific writer who dismissed the Walton controversy as confabulation in his 1983 book UFOs: The Public Deceived. De Void was just beginning this forlorn and dreary journey back then. No reason for a newbie to doubt him. Except for, well, maybe this one case in Klass’ book concerning three people who suffered acute UFO radiation burns in Texas in 1980. Klass’ take on what became known as the Cash-Landrum incident stopped me cold. Because I’d actually done my homework on that one. And that’s when I got that first queasy feeling that the American press was routinely quoting a man who had a pathological disregard for truth.

It’s a good cautionary tale about giving too much authority to leading skeptical voices. It caught my eye because it echoed my own experience with Martin Gardner’s ‘debunking’ of medium Leonora Piper – a story which I was very familiar with, and which thus allowed me to see how loose Gardner was with the facts in achieving his goal.

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  1. I think there should be an
    I think there should be an effort to dig deeply into the backgrounds of these more reckless skeptics who nearly always smell pysopish to me. One thing I come away with from watching all the ghost hunting shows on the telly now is that it is possible for many more people to develop ESP, and a more widespread ability would then make it harder for governments and mafias to keep secrets. I suspect that if one digs deeply there will be found traces of relationships with government and the military who may be keen on mocking and suppressing the potential efflorescence of psi abilities among the general population.
    I would start with “Penn and Teller” who so obviously use verbal abuse and “breakdown” as tactics of persuasion. They look like they were trained at Guantanamo or some place like that.

      1. Penn and Teller use classic
        Penn and Teller use classic psyop tactics we see employed in military boot camp to destroy personalities so that they can be made anew in someone’s image of a killer or whatever they want. It is the same psyop used to interrogate prisoners of war. In Guantanamo it was used to coerce the patsies of 911 to implicate themselves in the official version of 911. Had they been allowed to really spill the contents of their minds we would have discovered what a put up job 911 was. Guantanamo rounded up all the players and double agents involved in the stagecraft and made sure they were either uninterrogated or said things complimentary to the official false story. You can get people to say anything if they are tortured enough. With many of the Guantanamo prisoners the most effective coercement was to remind the prisoners that their family members could also be threatened with death. That was usually all it took to get someone to sing the right tune.
        Penn and Teller are professionally coached psychological debunkers. Their act has all the earmarks of having been trained and scripted.

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