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From: clark@canby.mn.frontiercomm.net [Jerry Clark]
Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 11:27:47 PDT
Fwd Date: Sat, 21 Jun 1997 14:06:39 -0400
Subject: 'Debunkers vs. UFO Menace' - Part 1

The Debunkers vs. the UFO Menace; or, Is Ufology
Tantamount to Communism?
by Jerome Clark
(written in 1992)

On August 23, 1983, an administrator at the University of
Nebraska at Lincoln took a strange phone call from a man who had
a complaint which he expressed at some length.  When he finally
got offf the phone, the administrator summarized the conversation
in a memo to another university official:

"Mr. Phillip [sic] Klass ... is a member of the Committee for the
Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal [CSICOP].
This committee has a much different view of unexplained
phenomena than those groups we are working with as sponsors of
"this conference [titled Exploring Unexplained Phenomena]. He was,
in fact, quite adament [sic] in  his position regarding the
credibility of the conference presenters. Further, Mr. Klass has
a personal feeling that the nature of this conference seriously
questions the integrity of the United States Government. He feels
that there is no scientific evidence to support the claims of the
presenters and indicated that these organizations, by publicly
questioning the government, lend support to the Communist
movement."

All ufologists, of course, know who Philip J. Klass is. A
Washington-based aerospace journalist, Klass is the world's best
known (and, some would say, most obsessed) critic of UFO reports
and ufologists, the author of books with self-explanatory titles
as UFOs Explained, UFOs: The Public Deceived, and UFO Abductions:
A Dangerous Game -- all sacred texts of the debunking movement.

That same day the administrator phoned conference organizer Ray
Boeche to inform him of the conversation. The administrator said
Klass had called the chancellor's office and talked with someone
there. When Klass hinted that he was considering legal action
against the university, the call had been transferred to the
administrator, who told Boeche he thought he had been able to
mollify Klass.

The university sent Klass a letter, thanking him for his
interest, and assumed that would end the matter.  It was wrong.

At the conference, held between November 11 and 13 at the
university conference center, Boeche showed some of us a copy of
the memo in which the administrator paraphrased Klass' suggestion
that UFO cover-up proponents were serving the ends of Soviet
foreign policy. Of course by now we were used to the sort of
overheated rhetoric that flows in an unending stream of vitriol
from the mouths and keyboards of CSICOP's bombast artists. After
all, Klass and his CSICOP colleagues had already characterized us
ufologists as antiscience cultists, cryptofascists, mental cases,
money-grubbing exploiters, and raving irrationalists, and CSICOP
chairman Paul Kurtz had repeatedly assured the press that
societal acceptance of anomalies and the paranormal threatens the
fabric of civilization.

Still, Klass' linking of ufologists with Communist subversion was
a new wrinkle.  Klass, we knew, would not be happy to learn that
these peculiar private pronouncements were now peculiar public
pronouncements.  As it turned out, he wasn't just unhappy.  He
was livid.

On November 23 Klass wrote the administrator, who was startled to
see large chunks of Klass' words from their three-month-old
conversation quoted verbatim -- indicating, the administrator
correctly surmised, that Klass had taped the two without
informing him  he was doing so.  Klass said that since a "copy of
your memo was 'leaked' to outsiders," he wanted to "clarify and
expand upon statements" he had made.  He said "we" -- presumably
meaning himself and CSICOP -- did not seek to "prevent
conferences or meetings by those who want to propose UFOs" but
that he had some trouble with the university's sponsorship of a
conference on the subject.  What, he asked, would the university
do "if the American Nazi Party came in and said they [sic] wanted
to hold a conference?"

"I emphasize to you that I am not, repeat not, suggesting that
any of the people or any of the organizations are in any way
affiliated with Communist Fronts or with the Soviet Union. But as
a patriotic American, I very much resent the charge of 'coverup',
of lying, of falsehoods, charged against not one Administration,
not two, but eight Administrations going back to a man from
Missouri named Truman, a man named Dwight Eisenhower. Because if
this charge is true -- Cosmic Watergate -- then all of these
Presidents were implicated, and all of their Administrations....
[In making this charge, ufologists] seek what the Soviet Union
does -- to convey to the public that our Government can not be
trusted, that it lies, that it falsifies. Now I'm not so naive --
remembering Watergate -- to say that never has happened in
history. But from my firsthand experience (i.e., 17 years in the
field of UFOlogy), I know this charge is completely false. And I
resent it as an American citizen."

Remarkably, Klass distributed copies of this letter to others,
including me, on the evident belief that it would exonerate him,
in other words demonstrate that when read in context his
sentiments would sound rational.  He would even charge that the
administrator's paraphrase had been "inaccurate," when if
anything it made Klass' charge sound marginally less nutty. As I
wrote Klass on December 6, "In the past, when your critics have
accused you of engaging in McCarthyism, they were using the term
in a metaphorical sense. Now, it seems, they will be able to use
it in the most literal sense."

As ufologists gleefully copied and circulated both the
administrator's memo and Klass' November 23 letter, Klass
complained to the university about its release of the memo and
threatened legal action. Late in January 1984 the administrator
told Boeche, according to the latter, that he feared losing his
job over the affair.

About six weeks later the administrator informed Boeche that the
university would not sponsor another anomalies conference. The
decision, he said, "came straight from the chancellor's office."
Pressed for a reason, the administrator responded evasively but
"strongly implied," in Boeche's words, that the decision had to
do with the troubles the previous conference had brought them. A
short time later Boeche received written notification of the
decision. The letter gave no reason for the decision.

Boeche, who had hoped to make the conference an annual event,
sought alternative funding without success.  In October 1984, in
a final desperate move, Boeche mailed a letter to all who had
attended the 1983 meeting and urged them to encourage the
chancellor to reverse his decision. One attender published a
letter to the editor of the Lincoln Journal about the episode.
Subsequently an Associated Press reporter interviewed the
administrator, who said -- for the first time ever -- that the
university had canceled sponsorship because it had lost money on
the conference. The university repeated the claim in a form
letter it sent to all inquirers.

Till now, in all of Boeche's discussions with university
officials re- garding the conference-related problems, not one --
least of all the administrator -- had raised the issue of the
conference's profitability. All those with whom Boeche spoke had
talked only of Klass' legal threats. At no time was Boeche shown
a financial statement documenting the university's belated
version of events. In a November 2 meeting with the chancellor's
assistant, who dutifully recited the new party line, Boeche asked
whom he should believe: an administrator who was afraid of losing
his job (and whose private statements had been markedly different
from his later public ones) or a chancellor's assistant who could
take that job away. "It was quite obvious that that was a
question he didn't want to answer," Boeche recalls.

In fact, the previous January 11 Klass had written this man
complaining about the university's failure to respond to an
earlier letter. Klass said he expected the university to express
"shock and disgust" over the leaking of the memo and to apologize
"for such irresponsible actions." If the university chose not to
act, Klass wrote, he would consider taking "appropriate legal
action to set the record straight and to clear my name."  Eleven
days later he wrote the chancellor's assistant again and asked
for a "list of the Board of Regents of your University, together
with their mailing addresses."  Soon Klass was hearing from the
university's attorney.

Meanwhile Klass and I were engaged in correspondence about this
strange ongoing episode.  Though not denying that he had
threatened to sue the university -- indeed he sent me a copy of
the just-quoted January 11 letter -- he continually tried to
change the subject, citing conferences he had not called sponsors
to complain about, as if these were relevant to anything or, even
more crazily, evidence of personal virtue.  He claimed not to
object to "pseudoscience" conferences in principle, only to those
that universities sponsored without bringing in speakers who
shared Klass' views.

As of March 31, a letter of his to me makes clear, the university
-- despite what by now had been a number of exchanges between it
and him -- had not claimed that it lost money on the conference.
To the contrary, Klass said it was his "understanding" that the
university had not contributed money to the organizers or allowed
uncompen- sated use of its conference facilities.  Writing on May
14, he emphatically denied believing or suggesting that the
university cancelled sponsorship because the conference lost
money.  He said he understood that the university shared neither
profits nor losses from the conference.

On April 4 I remarked that "you really never addressed the issue
I attempted to raise ... that you had a role, apparently the
deciding role, in the University of Nebraska's decision not to
sponsor next year's UFO/Fortean conference.  As you are well
aware, the threat of being sued is a powerful way of affecting
somebody's behavior.... It is hardly surprising that the
university did not want to involve itself in litigation and
entirely predictable that it chose to scuttle the Fortean
conference as a consequence. It just wasn't worth the hassle in
the university's view. You, by your threats and meddling,
apparently presented a problem the university did not want to
deal with.  It was easier to cancel next year's conference than
to risk further problems.  I am not aware that I accused you of
deliberately setting out to sabotage the conference. I said that
your acts had the effect of so doing."

In subsequent correspondence Klass insisted, ludicrously, that
his legal threats could have had nothing to do with the
university's decision because if they had, he implied, university
spokesmen would have said so openly.  He seemed to be suggesting
that the university had simply seen the wisdom of his argument
about the conference's lack of "balance" and acted accordingly.
He went on to compare university sponsorship of a UFO conference
to sponsorship of a Ku Klux Klan or Nazi Party meeting.  Klass
would also contend that proponents of a UFO cover-up were in
effect accusing Presidents of treason,  a "slanderous" charge.

All the while ufologists and the UFO press were having great fun
at Klass' expense, with his desperate clarifications and
rationalizations only fueling the merriment.  Finally and
hilariously, on October 18, notwithstanding his earlier
assertions that the university had not lost money from the
conference, Klass copied and distributed an October 14 AP article
from the Omaha World Herald, in which the university introduced
the loss-of-money yarn to the world.  He cited it as proof that
he had been right all along.

End of Part 1