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

Part Two - Continued from the First Part

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

Richard Dolan, working with Kathleen Marden, the niece of Betty Hill and a tireless promoter of 'UFO abduction' claims, has come up with a doozy. The late Philip J. Klass, according to them, was blackmailed into promoting Russian disinformation about UFOs by his gay Russian boyfriend! Wow - What a discovery!!

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)

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                        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!