Saturday, June 27, 2020

Richard Dolan - Three Strikes, and You're Out!! - Strikes Two and Three.



Strike Two: Philip J. Klass Blackmailed by Gay Russian Boyfriend!!


Philip J. Klass (1919-2005) was indisputably the Dean of UFO skeptics. Never has anyone had so much influence as a skeptical investigator of UFOs, or as a "debunker" of unsound UFO claims. (Klass found nothing wrong with the label "debunker": He explained that "a thing can only be 'debunked' if it is filled with bunk in the first place!"

"The Truth", according to Marden and Dolan. ("Crazy Speculation" is more accurate.)

Philip J. Klass, 1977
(photo by author, taken in my house)


Wikipedia describes Klass as:
an American journalist, and UFO researcher, known for his skepticism regarding UFOs. In the ufological and skeptical communities, Klass inspires polarized appraisals. He has been called the "Sherlock Holmes of UFOlogy".[1] Klass demonstrated "the crusader's zeal for what seems 'right,' regardless of whether it brings popular acclaim," a trait he claimed his father instilled in him.... For ten years, Klass worked for General Electric as an engineer in aviation electronics. Dissatisfied with his job, in 1952 he moved to Washington, DC, and joined Aviation Week, which later became Aviation Week & Space Technology. He was a senior editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology for thirty-four years... Klass wrote some of the first articles on inertial guidance systems, infrared missile guidance, and microelectronics....
Aviation Week is fondly known in Defense circles as "Aviation Leak," because it was the first to 'leak out' information about many new military programs and weapons, like the Stealth aircraft. As we will see, the FBI was not pleased with Klass' role in this.

But, according to Dolan and Marden,
In the history of the study of UFOs, Philip J. Klass takes the title as the leading debunker of the subject. For forty years, his name was practically synonymous with the idea of UFO skepticism. He was regularly cited throughout the mainstream media as an authoritative voice on the subject, and his work helped to stifle acceptance about the reality of UFOs. But Kathleen Marden has investigated the background of Philip Klass and found it to be highly questionable. Back in the 1960s, Klass developed a close relationship with a member of the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC and was suspected by the FBI to have been a Soviet asset. What it looks like is that the intelligence community used this against Klass to enlist his services toward full-time UFO debunking efforts. Without a doubt, Klass's knowledge of the UFO subject was superficial, but his relentless smear campaigns and personal attacks against leading UFO researchers more than made up for that. To this day, Klass is lionized by the skeptical community, but in fact, has left them with a shameful legacy.

Just before the show aired, I left the following message on Dolan's "Intelligent Disclosure" website:
Richard, what you say about Phil Klass is full of shit. I knew him and worked with him for many years. "Without a doubt, Klass's knowledge of the UFO subject was superficial" is one of the stupidest things I've read in a long time. Klass' knowledge of UFO cases was encyclopedic, far better than mine; see any one of his books to dispel that notion. "In his memoirs, Moseley contended that, when pressed, most leading ufologists would admit that Klass knew the subject and the people involved and was welcomed, or at least pleasantly tolerated, at UFO meetings" (Wikipedia).

I have placed a great deal of Klass' unedited papers and correspondence on my Debunker website, http://www.debunker.com/historical/historical.html . Read them for yourself and see if you still think he was a UFOlogical simpleton (like Tom DeLonge and Elizondo). A complete collection of Klass' papers is available to researchers at https://search.amphilsoc.org/collections/view?docId=ead/Mss.Ms.Coll.59-ead.xml

Klass told me all about the Russkies who tried to cozy up to him. He informed the FBI about this. Klass worked at Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, where he reported on the latest developments in aviation electronics. They hoped that by hanging out with him, they would get some useful unpublished "leaks". I doubt if they did. The FBI is totally candid about this: http://www.cufon.org/cufon/Klass_FBI.pdf . It talks about disputes and arguments he got into, but says nothing about him being suspected as a Russian agent. (Wait: if the FBI and CIA were covering up aliens, wouldn't Russian agents want to do the opposite, and expose them? This makes no sense.) Klass was indeed a difficult guy to deal with - as I found out on several occasions - but he was not an agent of the KGB, the CIA, or anyone else.
Kathleen Marden worked closely with the late "Flying Saucer Physicist," Stanton Friedman.
Here we are at the 2011 MUFON Symposium in Irvine, CA.
In the podcast, Dolan and Marden take turns picking on Klass. At about 13 minutes in, Dolan said,
It is very likely that Klass was having, let us put it delicately, an inappropriate relationship with a member of the Soviet staff in Washington, DC... In an era where gay relationships were absolutely not out there.
According to Dolan, Klass was "potentially giving secrets to the Soviet Union." If Klass were still alive to hear this, he would punch Dolan in the mouth. Klass was very much an old-fashioned patriotic American. He was a "hawk" during the Viet Nam war - not surprising, since his employer Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine was a pillar of the "military-industrial complex" that was so derided by the Left. As a college student at the time, and potentially subjected to the draft, I disagreed with him about the wisdom of fighting that war. To anyone who knew him, the suggestion that Klass would have done anything to help the Soviet Union was completely ridiculous.

A possibly even bigger absurdity is Dolan's claim that Klass was engaged in a clandestine gay relationship with a member of the Soviet embassy, and was blackmailed. Anyone who knew Klass well can tell you how absurd this is. Klass was, in fact, something of a ladies' man. I remember asking him one time why he hadn't married. He replied something like, "I never wanted to limit myself to one woman." When I first got to know Klass well, after I moved to the Washington, DC area in the fall of 1972, I often visited Klass in his apartment. He lived in a studio apartment, a "bachelor pad," in the Harbour Square apartments in Southwest DC, a pretty "toney" place. I remember him telling me about all the Cabinet members, Congressmen, and other officials who lived there, who he would sometimes encounter. His apartment had a beautiful view of the Washington Monument in the distance, and the Potomac River. He prominently displayed a travel poster for some Carribean destination, showing a bikini-clad woman in a provocative pose. "That is my mother," he would jokingly tell visitors. In the early 1970s,  Klass was seeing a French woman, who I met a few times. When at meetings, if there was an attractive woman who appeared to be unaccompanied, Klass would typically go over and chat her up. The claim that Klass was secretly gay is an obvious non-starter. (By comparison, I also met James "The Amazing" Randi in the late 70s. I soon noted his lack of interest in women, and concluded privately that Randi was gay. But it was not something to talk about: I didn't ask, and he didn't tell. Randi has since publicly "come out" about his sexuality - the documentary movie An Honest Liar tells the full story of that.)

Klass married late in life, at age 60.
I attended his wedding.
Klass finally did marry in 1980, when he was sixty. His wife Nadya was originally from Bulgaria. She managed to escape from the Communist East, and found refuge in the U.S. She worked for the Voice of America in Washington, DC as a broadcaster, reading the news in Bulgarian to the "captive nations" of the Soviet bloc. She, like Phil, was staunchly anti-Communist. After their marriage, Phil and Nadya moved into a larger apartment, in the same complex. I moved to California shortly after  their wedding. Phil and Nadya visited San Jose in the early 1980s, and stayed in my house.

The FBI files on Phil Klass are interesting to read. Frankly, nothing in them surprised me much. On p. 7 of that file, it states that in January, 1958 Klass was referred to the FBI for possible prosecution for "the unauthorized disclosure of information classified 'SECRET' in 'Aviation Week Magazine' article" on "Counter Measures." They don't call it "Aviation Leak" for nothing! Klass was just doing his job. However, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote that the secrets in that two-part article "could not be declassified for purposes of prosecution." In 1964, an unnamed woman (undoubtedly named "Karen" 😏) reported to the FBI (p. 10) that Klass, at that time not yet moved into Harbour Square, allegedly had illicit radio transmitting equipment in his apartment, presumably for purposes of sending spy messages. An investigation failed to confirm this in any way. (I never knew Klass to have any radio transmitting or ham radio equipment, although he did have an electronics desk for little projects. He was, after all, an electrical engineer. But I don't think he used it very much)

The matter of Phil's contacts with someone in the Soviet Embassy is at the heart of Dolan and Marden's accusations. P. 13 of the FBI file tells how, on January 29, 1963, Klass telephoned the FBI office in Washington, to tell them he was having a lunch meeting with [redacted], obviously someone from the Soviet Embassy. Klass himself told me how he had informed the FBI of his visit there, so they would not think anything clandestine was going on. Klass became friends with a guy from the Embassy, they would meet up occasionally on the weekends. I think I even met him once, when I was invited to join them in Phil's sailboat on the Potomac. He didn't say all that much. Why did Klass occasionally hang around with him? I think that each was hoping to glean tidbits of information from the other.

On Feb. 10, 1975, Klass again telephoned the FBI (p. 17) . And "in strong terms laced with sarcasm,  he derided our publication of the article by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, 'The UFO Mystery,' in the  LEB" (Law Enforcement Bulletin). But the FBI was not chastised. "Mr. Klass was politely reminded" that nowhere in the article "does Hynek suggest that UFOs are extra-terrestrial in origin." The report concludes, "In view of Klass' intemperate criticism and often irrational statements he made to support it, we should be circumspect in any future contacts with him"!!

This was what Klass was complaining to the FBI about.
One thing that is is puzzling is the repeated presence in the FBI files (p. 27) of one "Philip J. Klass, Box 6030, Dallas, Texas 75222." This is obviously a different individual, and apparently one who was impersonating the "real Klass." At no time did Klass live in Texas, and so far as I know he never spent much time there, although he visited a lot of cities on Aviation Week business, speaking with manufacturers of avionics devices. In 1976 this pseudo-Klass apparently mailed 28 pages of crackpot stuff to the FBI which was supposed to be "secret" but was actually just nonsense. "The writer is most likely not in full possession of his faculties, e.g. the reference to 'psychic time bomb,' 'Jewish subconscious transformation,' " etc.  The FBI sent those papers to an expert in the Department of Defense, who concluded that "this information was probably conjured up as a hoax" (p. 46). The FBI expressed doubt whether the Texas "Klass" was in fact the real one.

What is funny (and revealing) is the FBI's comment that Klass "displays a sardonic attitude when he contacts WFO" (Washington Field Office, p. 41). I can absolutely believe that.

The most recent items in Klass' FBI file pertains to some queries Klass made to the FBI in 1987 (p. 52). Noting that numerous articles had appeared in different publications discussing the use of "psychics" in law enforcement, Klass asked about the FBI's policy on the use of "psychics" in its investigations. The reply was, "Currently, the FBI has no rules or regulations concerning the use of clairvoyants in conducting investigations." In a later letter, Klass pointed out how a woman was boasting of giving several lectures to the FBI Academy on the use of 'psychic powers' in investigations. This time, the FBI's reply stated, "the FBI National Academy, as an educational facility, has an obligation to offer a full range of courses, which are responsive to the needs and interests of its students," noting that this does not constitute an "endorsement" of such claims. ( The "psychic detective" was Noreen Renier, whose name we see through a 'failure of redaction' on p. 59!)

Noreen Renier, the "Psychic Detective" who lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia

And that is essentially everything in the FBI files pertaining to Philip J. Klass. Nowhere does it suggest that Klass "was suspected by the FBI to have been a Soviet asset," as Dolan claims. But Marden and Dolan will live to regret their foolish slander. They will fall victim to the full force of Klass' famous UFO CURSE!!
THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF PHILIP J. KLASS

To ufologists who publicly criticize me, ... or who even think unkind thoughts about me in private, I do hereby leave and bequeath: THE UFO CURSE:

No matter how long you live, you will never know any more about UFOs than you know today. You will never know any more about what UFOs really are, or where they come from. You will never know any more about what the U.S. Government really knows about UFOs than you know today. As you lie on your own death-bed you will be as mystified about UFOs as you are today. And you will remember this curse. (published in James Moseley's newsletter Saucer Smear, October 10, 1983)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                        Strike Three: The Roswell Slides

"History Changes" when Maussan (and his pals, including Richard Dolan) reveal "the Roswell Slides."
To longtime UFOlogical observers, it seems like just yesterday that everyone was talking about the "Roswell Slides," supposedly two slides showing a dead alien that turned up in somebody's estate sale. But since many people were recently lured into the "Land of UFOria" (as Uncle Phil used to call it) by all of the publicity about Tom DeLonge, TTSA, AATIP, etc., the newcomers may not be aware of this.  It was just five years ago on Cinco de Mayo that Richard Dolan enthusiastically participated in the now-infamous "BeWitness" presentation, organized by the sensationalist UFO huckster Jaime Maussan in Mexico City. As one news story explained,
On May 5 at an event called Be Witness at the National Auditorium in Mexico City hosted by Jaime Maussan, never-before-seen images of the alleged Roswell alien were released with claims that the images have been verified for authenticity and that they prove that aliens do exist...

Maussan revealed during the event that the photos show that extraterrestrial life exists. “That is why the presentation of two slides, two transparencies, where a being with non-human features can be seen, is very important, especially if these photos were dated by experts during a period, where the model of the archetype extraterrestrial we know today did not exist, but also because it was also impossible to doctor these type of images in such a way,” Maussan said.

Other experts who attended the event included Richard Dolan, a leading US researcher and writer on UFOs, Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut who was the sixth person to land on the moon, and other experts in the field of UFO and space. All of them unanimously voiced their support for the authenticity of the photographs and said that they haven’t been doctored.
Richard Dolan (seated at right), participating in Jaime Maussan's "BeWitness" clown show.

After months of breathless promotion, the "Roswell Slides" came crashing down quickly, after a sufficiently clear photo was leaked to outside researchers. When competently analyzed by researchers outside of Maussan's clown show, the placard next to the body was clearly shown to read, "MUMMIFIED BODY OF TWO YEAR OLD BOY." The slides showed the preserved body of a young Native American boy that had once been on display in the Mesa Verde Archaeological Museum, and not a space alien.


             Richard Dolan: Three Strikes, and You're Out!

You now join Steven Greer, Bob Lazar, Billy Meier, Linda Moulton Howe, Corey Goode, etc., in the exclusive Club of UFOlogists whose credibility has plunged to Zero. Congratulations!

Sunday, June 21, 2020

Richard Dolan - Three Strikes, and You're Out!! Strike One - the "UFO Leak of the Century" Collapses


For years now, Richard Dolan has promoted himself as a 'sensible,' or 'thoughtful', or 'conservative' UFO researcher and commentator. How he has gotten away with this branding is puzzling. As I wrote back in 2013 after hearing Dolan speak at the National UFO Congress:

Dolan managed to bring in just about every loopy idea that has come up in recent years: ancient pyramids, crash retrievals, reverse-engineeered alien technology, a "secret space program," alien hybrids, telepathic alien contact, and mind control. Mention this the next time somebody refers to Dolan as a "conservative UFOlogist." The reason for the UFO cover up, he suggested, is because the secret of the UFOs' alien propulsion system threatens petroleum interests, the same claim that Steven Greer makes in the wild conspiracy movie Thrive.
In recent years Dolan has managed to get himself quite tangled up in three major gaffes that completely refute the notion that he is careful or credible in any sense. These are not minor errors or oversights or misquotations, but extended gaffes of colossal magnitude. He has enthusiastically leapt with both feet into making sensational, foolish claims, where wise men fear to tread.


Strike One: Dolan's "UFO Leak of the Century" Collapses


In 2019 Dolan pretty much 'bet the farm' promoting what he called the "UFO Leak of the Century." It's a rather confusing narrative, based on  some leaked notes apparently written by Dr. Eric Davis, after a supposedly clandestine meeting with Admiral Thomas Ray Wilson, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1999 until 2002. Prior to that Wilson served as Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs from 1997 to 1999.

Dolan writes,
So what are we talking about?

These are notes by Dr. Eric Davis from October 16, 2002. [uploaded anonymously to imageur on April 19, 2019]

Who is Eric Davis? He is a scientist, but surely qualifies as a very interesting scientist. For many years, during the 1990s, he was a member of the National Institute for Discovery Sciences, which of course was owned by billionaire Robert Bigelow. NIDS was a very important organization back then and brought scientific rigor to many interesting areas of research connected to UFOs and beyond. The mystery of the black triangles, for instance. And most famously the Skinwalker Ranch in Utah, something Davis was very much involved in studying.
Davis is also a close associate of Dr. Hal Puthoff, who owns the scientific company Earthtech. Dr. Puthoff of course has an extensive career in science and the world of intelligence. Along with Russell Targ he developed the protocols for America’s classified remote viewing program in the 1970s and 80s. He is an expert on Zero Point Energy and what is called spacetime metric engineering. Think about that for a moment. And he has also has worked closely with Bigelow on a number of occasions. Plus of course he is an integral member of To the Stars Academy (TTSA).
These notes "were written by Davis in the aftermath of a meeting he had with Wilson in October 2002. They concern a series of events that took place during the spring of 1997, when Wilson was Deputy Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What took place during this meeting was a discussion of very great importance. It concerned nothing less than a confirmation of the existence of deeply classified programs to study alien technology. That is, extraterrestrial aliens. Their craft and technology."

Dr. Eric Davis
Dolan writes that according to the leaked notes,
Wilson confirmed that he was able to confirm in June 1997 that “there is such an organization in existence” in relation to “MJ-12/UFO cabal – crashed UFO.” At that time, this is late June 1997, Wilson phoned [Lt. Commander Willard] Miller and apparently told him that yes, he was right. There is such a group, a cabal, that manages the crashed UFO program...

After reading this Wilson laughed and said that he “didn’t tell Miller EVERYTHING,” whatever that means. Then Wilson said “Miller can make good educated guesses on who (contractors) has alien hardware.” Then, “Miller can give good advice on which defense companies to look at – that’s all he knows.”

Clearly, Wilson knew a lot more.

Wilson was also angry that Miller, a fellow Navy officer, betrayed the trust of their conversation by relaying it to Greer and who knows who else. In reality, it doesn’t seem that Miller told many other people. Davis in his note added that Miller only told Edgar Mitchell, who was the one who told Davis about it in 1999. It’s possible that Miller told something to journalist Leslie Kean. At least this is what Wilson believed in his conversation with Davis in 2002.

Wilson was clearly nervous even in talking with Davis and said he was taking a risk just talking with him. And indeed, two decades later, the entire conversation is now out.
Most significant of all, Admiral Wilson allegedly tracked down the defense contractors who were supposedly working on the 'crashed UFO' program. He was reportedly told that he didn't have the necessary clearances to be told about it, even though Wilson was the Director of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff!

Edgar Mitchell
It may be of interest that "CE5" Steven Greer and the late astronaut Edgar Mitchell were also involved in this story. Dolan argues, in his own inimitable way, that "It’s will be impossible to debunk this leak as a hoax or fabrication. At most, skeptics might argue that somehow these men were given wrong information. But as you will see, this is also not a credible argument."

But this story/rumor has been kicking around for many years because of Steven Greer and Edgar Mitchell, although the pages uploaded to imageur in 2019 had not been seen before. Nonetheless, there were some obvious "red flags" associated with the story, which should have given pause to anyone who might take it seriously. First, Steven Greer is involved, whose history of promoting UFO absurdities should give pause to any rational person. Second, and more significantly, UFO researcher and blogger Billy Cox interviewed Admiral Wilson back in 2008, and wrote,
A former high-ranking military intelligence official rumored to have been snubbed in his attempts to obtain sheltered UFO data insists he never even bothered to look for it.

“Never,” retired Rear Adm. Thomas R. Wilson replied Tuesday when asked if he’d ever been barred from retrieving classified material, exotic or otherwise, during his career.

Wilson, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was head of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 when he agreed to meet at the Pentagon with advocates of UFO declassification. Among them, he confirms, was Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

The driving force behind that meeting was North Carolina UFO researcher and emergency-room doctor Steven Greer. Greer founded The Disclosure Project in an effort to grant amnesty to government whistle-blowers willing to violate their security oaths by sharing insider knowledge about UFOs.

At least seven years ago (http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc788.htm), Greer was telling audiences about extracting a pledge from Wilson during that meeting to investigate special access projects involving UFO technology. But shortly thereafter, Greer claimed Wilson reported that he didn’t have the proper security clearance to inspect those files.

As Greer informed a Portland, Ore., audience in 2001, Wilson said, ” ‘I am horrified that this is true. I have been in plenty of black projects, but when we tried to get into this one,’ he was told, and I quote, ‘Sir, you do not have a need to know.’ The head of intelligence Joint Staffs. You don’t have a need to know. Neither did the CIA director, and neither did the president.”

This story has been circulating on the Internet ever since, and made it into Greer’s book “Hidden Truth, Forbidden Knowledge,” last year. But the thing didn’t sprout legs until Mitchell began discussing the meeting during what turned out to be a media blitz in July.

So, Admiral Wilson acknowledged that he had met with Greer and Mitchell back in 1997, but denied their claim that he had been refused access to classified UFO records. And this was known in back in 2008!
“What is true is that I met with them,” Wilson said in a phone interview. “What is not true is that I was denied access to this material, because I didn’t pursue it. I may have left it open with them, but it was not especially compelling, not compelling enough to waste my staff’s time to go looking for it.”
Remember that this refers only to a 1997 meeting, and has nothing to do with any alleged meeting in 2002, which claim had not yet been made.

But back to Billy Cox: After Dolan's big hoopla about the clandestine meeting supposedly taking place in a car in Las Vegas in 2002 between Admiral Wilson and Eric Davis, Cox contacted Wilson again. On June 15, 2020 Cox (who is certainly no "debunker") wrote,
The admiral at the center of controversial notes describing his inability to access a classified UFO research program says the documents are bogus. Furthermore, he says the alleged author of those notes, physicist Dr. Eric Davis, never interviewed him.

“It’s all fiction,” says former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Thomas Wilson, from his home in Virginia. “I wouldn’t know Eric Davis if he walked in right now”....
In his first public statement on Core Secrets, Wilson rejected the entire premise of the meeting and his role in it. The notes indicate that Wilson and Davis rendezvoused in Las Vegas, inside a car attended by three uniformed military personnel, in the parking lot of the Special Projects Building of defense contractor EG&G.

“I’m not saying that sometime, somewhere, I never met (Davis), but I certainly don’t know him, I don’t remember him, and I definitely did not sit with him in a car for an hour in Las Vegas,” Wilson told De Void.

“You may also see in those notes where I came with two other naval officers, a lieutenant and a lieutenant commander, and a petty officer who was driving the car. I was not even in the Navy then. And the Navy was certainly not ferrying me around in a car at that point.

“Those notes are really detailed – it’s like somebody wrote a fiction piece,” Wilson said.
Cox further notes that Davis "has never affirmed or denied his ostensible authorship of Core Secrets when pressed over the past year. He did, however, tell the New York Post in May that the documents were leaked by the estate of the late astronaut and Apollo 14 moonwalker Dr. Edgar Mitchell."

So what is going on here? Did Davis write up the 15 pages uploaded anonymously to imageur to promote a hoax? Did somebody else write them? That seems unlikely, since Davis was given the opportunity to disavow them, but did not.

Perhaps the most interesting suggestion for the origin of these pages comes from John Greenewald, Jr. of The Black Vault. In a Youtube video, Greenewald notes the similarity of the supposed Davis notes to a film script, pointing out that the enormously successful series The X-Files had ended just a few months earlier. From his experience in the film industry, Greenewald offers "my crazy theory" that the Davis papers were written as a scene for a TV or movie script. (Remember that Wilson himself had suggested "it’s like somebody wrote a fiction piece.")  In this view, Davis had sent Mitchell a copy of his notes for a proposed TV series. After Mitchell's death in 2016, somebody with access to his documents anonymously uploaded the proposed script to imageur, presumably  believing it to be factual. I don't think that's such a "crazy idea" at all.

Veteran UFOlogist Kevin Randle has just published his commentary on the Davis/Wilson matter. He notes how a number of prominenet UFOlogists have been attempting to contact Davis about this, but Davis is refusing to answer any questions. Even from the Executive Director of MUFON, Jan Harzan. Randle notes that since Davis was "a consultant to MUFON, you’d think that a response to the Executive Director would be forthcoming." Nope. This looks very, very bad for the credibility of Eric Davis. And of Richard Dolan.