From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 12:06:51 -0600
Fwd Date: Fri, 23 Feb 2001 12:23:08 -0500
Subject: Re: Lakenheath Pre-Judgment - Clark


 >From: Mendoza - Peter Brookesmith <Mendoza@appleonline.net>
 >To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@sympatico.ca>
 >Date: Thu, 22 Feb 01 00:25:59 +0000
 >Subject: Re: Lakenheath Pre-Judgment

 >The Duke of Mendoza presents his compliments:

 >>From: Jerome Clark <jkclark@frontiernet.net>
 >>Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2001 18:51:51 -0600
 >>Fwd Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 09:22:39 -0500
 >>Subject: Re: Lakenheath Pre-Judgment - Clark

 >>>From: Andy Roberts <AndyRoberts@ancientassociates.fsnet.co.uk>
 >>>To: UFO UpDates - Toronto <updates@sympatico.ca>
 >>>Subject: Re: Lakenheath Pre-Judgment
 >>>Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:43:18 -0000


With all due apologies to patient and gentle listfolk:

 >In this exchange, we find Jerome giving Andy a bit of lip, as
 >follows:

 >>I'm sorry that, from every indication betrayed by your
 >>childish taunting and boasting, it appears you may not
 >>possess the temperament that would give any objective
 >>observer confidence in your abilities or conclusions. And
 >>if you can't see that, if you can imagine a critic only as
 >>a foolish or venal character - a depised enemy - whom you
 >>have to trounce at all costs, you are in some serious
 >>trouble.

 >Jerome warns Andy: "if you can imagine a critic only as a
 >foolish or venal character - a depised enemy - whom you have
 >to trounce at all costs, you are in some serious trouble."
 >Jerome should know, having got into trouble by taking such a
 >line himself. It remains an open question whether he has learned
 >anything from this experience, or whether he merely thinks he
 >can get away with similar ploys on the Internet. What am I
 >talking about? See beneath.

Yes, see beneath, by all means. PB reprints a self-serving
screed from militant debunker Gary P. Posner, who once
threatened to sue CUFOS because of an editorial I wrote critical
of debunking excesses. (By the way, amusingly, PB has shown, by
a whole lot of tactful silence on the subject, not to mention
his own, er, distinctively colorful outburst, that he believes
"debunking excesses" to be logically and rhetorically
impossible.).

Make no mistake about it: I am proud of the IUR piece - one of
the best short articles I have ever written - and stand by its
accuracy, which till now no unpaid outside observer ever
challenged (Posner did so, ofcourse, only because he was one of
those criticized therein and, like all debunkers, can dish it
out but can't take it in return). I note that in 1992, in an
interesting Journal of the American Society for Psychical
Research paper on CSICOP's history of excesses, George P.Hansen
-- who is no more a friend of mine than Posner is - also
mentioned the "ambulatory schizophrenia" assertion Posner made
in a letter published in a 1978 issue of CSICOP's magazine.

Posner's curious claim was widely remarked on at the time among
observers of the newly organized CSICOP. I recall conversations
in which even skeptics laughingly or concernedly cited it as
evidence of extremism in CSICOP's ranks and as evidence there
might be problems down the road (as there were). If memory
serves, it was no less than CSICOP co-founder (and early
defector) Marcello Truzzi who first drew the letter to my
attention. No wonder, in retrospect, Posner found it so
embarrassing and sought to silence anyone who reminded the world
of what he had written, one hopes (charitably) in the enthusiasm
of the moment.

In any event, CUFOS' attorney told us that we would win if we
went to trial, but urged us not to fight it because, even if we
"won," we'd lose in effect because of the enormous legal
expenses. The usual story, in other words.

IUR, with the attorney's vetting, drafted a
nonretraction/retraction, essentially stating that because of
legal threats we could not publish a defense or rejoinder to
Posner's letter. Even Phil Klass and CSICOP refused to back
Posner and encouraged him to drop the matter. No one besides
Posner (and now, I gather, PB) ever professed to believed I'd
said anything libelous.

All that's interesting in PB's verbiage, by the way, is
its gross hypocrisy. The posting implicitly defends Posner
as an innocent victim while putting forth the allegation that I am
guilty of holding one's intellectual adversaries to be, in my
words, "foolish or venal characters - a despised
enemy - whom you have to trounce at all costs." In fact,
it was precisely people who think like that whom I was
criticizing in the editorial that gave PB and his pal Posner
such a severe case of the vapors.

Let us now consider the case of Gary P. Posner, who considers
ufologists and other anomalists to be an unsavory lot indeed.
The following is a memorandum for the record I wrote in 1992. I
found it, appropriately enough, in a folder titled "Posner
Threats." The opening references are to the IUR editorial in
question:

***

"Posner is quoted in the lead paragraph (#1) on page 22. The
editorial mentions his remarks regarding ambulatory
schizophrenia in the context of a criticism of debunkers'
rhetorical excess - as one example of "strange charges against
ufologists." The following paragraph (#2) nowhere mentions
Posner and in fact sets up the paragraph after (#3); note the
opening "Thus" in #3, linking it directly with the sentiments in
#2. #3 concerns James Randi's attack on Uri Geller for
"appalling moral lapses, such as a role in what Randi alleges
was an American scientist's suicide."

In fact, on August 14, 1992, Jerome Clark wrote Posner as
follows: "In my IUR editorial, your ambulatory-schizophrenia
accusation was cited as an example of debunkers' 'strange
charges against ufologists.' Any other reading is
inconceivable." In fact, CSICOP, which was the subject of the
sentence to which Posner objects but in which he nowhere
figures, indicated in an unsolicited letter (from executive
director Barry Karr, September 3) to Clark that it found nothing
in his editorial (reprinted in the July 5 issue of Saucer Smear)
to merit legal action.

The following has no bearing on the published IUR remarks but is
concerned with subsequent personal correspondence between Posner
and Clark [and Ron Westrum] in which the former's views of
ufologists' character were discussed and debated:

It is Clark's view that other statements of Posner's displayed a
contempt for ufologists and their motives and suggested a belief
that they are dishonest and unsavory. In a June 29, 1979, letter
to Ron Westrum, Posner asked rhetorically, "Is [Allen Hynek]
dishonest?... I do not know the answers to these questions." In
other words, he deemed ufology's most prominent proponent's
dishonesty at least an open question. On September 9 of the same
year he referred, again in a letter to Westrum, to Philip J.
Klass's "repeated demands for some semblance of honesty and
professional morality among ufologists," implying that such are
in short supply in ufologists' ranks. On September 20 Posner
wrote Westrum, "UFO proponents seem invariably to assume an
evasive and/or deceptive posture." In a January 26, 1978, letter
to Hynek, he said, "If you continue your present course, your
personal finances may remain sound, and you may even eventually
get your own TV show, but I assure you that your credibility
among the 'logical' segment of the population (no matter how few
of us there may be left) will erode to zero, if it has not
already done so." The implication, of course, is that Hynek's
UFO interests were motivated by profits and publicity rather
than scientific curiosity.

In a September 19, 1979, letter to Clark, Posner went beyond
innuendo to state bluntly his belief in the unsavory character
of UFO proponents: "In a field in which the purported evidence
is so flimsy and subjectivre, one would be very foolish to trust
the opinions and judgement of anyone with an established pattern
of deceptive and evasive behavior - hence my present mistrust
of virtually all of the prominent UFO proponents."

Writing to Clark on August 17, 1992, Posner stated he still held
that view of UFO proponents. He said, "I now do appreciate and
freely acknowledge that the concluding paragraph of my 1/26/78
letter alluded to only one of several possible explanations for
[Hynek's] unscientific behavior (i.e., there may be more fame
and fortune in pro-UFO advocacy than in scientific pursuit of
the truth).... When even Allen Hynek ... began to exhibit
behavior that appeared evasive at best and deceptive at worst, I
found myself in an admitted state of 'mistrust of virtually all
the prominent UFO proponents.' Unfortunately, things do not
appear to have changed one iota for the better in the nearly 15
intervening years."

Posner expressed a comparable sentiment to Tom Zucco, a reporter
for a Florida newspaper, Naples Daily News. In its May 31, 1992,
issue Posner is quoted as indicating that ufologists researching
UFO abductions have questionable motives. They have created a
manufactured mystery because of their "interest in promoting UFO
stories or selling books." In other words, ufologists are not
interested in truth-seeking but in creating a sensation and
making money from it.

In an October 11, 1985, letter Clark asked Posner to cite five
"points of disagreement" he might have with fellow debunker
Klass. Posner said on October 16 that "I cannot think of any"
such disagreements - a pointed repeated in a November 5
communication. On August 26, 1992, Posner reaffirmed his entire
agreement with Klass's pronouncements and on September 2 wrote,
"I cannot think of any substantive UFO issues with which I
disagree significantly with Phil." A third affirmation appears
in a September 10 letter. In short, Posner indicates that, among
other things, he has no problem with anything Klass says about
the character of peresons with a sympathetic interest in UFOs.

In his many writings Klass has accused ufologists of a variety
of social crimes, not the least of them habitual deceit of the
public. One, made repeatedly, is that ufologists cover up
prosaic explanations of UFO cases to keep money coming into
their organizations. Thus he has used the phrase "UFO promoters"
rather than "UFO proponents" to describe their true, unsavory
motives. He has also compared meetings of UFO enthusiasts with
meetings of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party. He
has, moreover, called ufologists "kooks and cultists" who abuse
"honorable men ... for daring to speak well of this country and
its institutions and leaders" (December 12, 1983, letter to
Clark). He has accused ufologists of working for the same ends
as the Soviet Union (while stopping short of calling them
conscious agents of international Communism). In early 1984
Klass circulated the transcript of a phone conversation he had
with University of Nebraska administrator Robert Mortenson. In
it Klass says, referring to ufologists who believe the U.S.
government is concealing significant UFO secrets:

"[A]s a patriotic American, I very much resent the charges of
'coverup,' of lying, of falsehoods, charged against not one
Administration, not two, but teight 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.... I know this charge is completely false. And I
resent it as an American citizen."

In this instance Posner's endorsement of a Klass charge - in
this case that reckless and irresponsible ufologists are doing
such damage to their country that a "patriotic American" feels
compelled to protest - was not just implicit but explicit. In
the April 25, 1984, issue of Saucer Smear, Posner discussed the
matter and praised Klass aas a "highly respected journalist and
editor with a well- earned reputation for scrupulous honesty and
factual accuracy (among all but the 'pro-Weirdness' crowd)."
Referring to Klass's statements to Mortenson, Posner declared
that if he were Mortenson, he "would have appreciated Phil's
efforts to educate" him and other university officials
responsible for sponsoring a conference organized by ufologists.

***

A final note: In its early days (especially the late 1970s)
CSICOP defined its mission as no less than defense of democracy,
allegedly imperiled by irrational cults such as ufology. The
historical analogy most often cited was Weimar Germany, in which
occult groups (some of which included Nazis in their membership)
proliferated. That is where James Oberg's reference - in a 1981
book - obliquely linking ufologists and fascistically inclined
occultists came from. The analogy was so brazenly bogus that
CSICOP, after criticism from within its own ranks, dropped it.
After my IUR editorial appeared, Oberg sent me some
near-hysterical letters alleging that I had misrepresented his
views, which I hadn't. Like Posner, rather than admit that he'd
been wrong or that he had since changed his mind (which actually
would have made both men look good, since everybody makes
mistakes), he tried to silence the critic who'd pointed to the
unfortunate claim. As PB would put it, rather than accept an
embarrassing truth, Oberg, like Posner, sought to kill the
messenger.


Jerry Clark