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offer of facilities for holding a UFO-research conference,
on the grounds tl1at some of the anti-UFO-secrecy confer-
ees might have communistic leanings?
As one of those conferees, l’ll always remember my own
close encounter with Klass in the public square during
that period. It came as we both accepted the invitation of
a Baltimore TV talk show to present a point-counterpoint
segment on the UFO issue.
In the Green Room as we were preparing to go on stage,
Klass tried his best to display his cordial side, as if he
merely were a harmless garden snake sunning himself
amidst the marigolds. His small talk focused on querying
me about where I’d attended school and who's my current
employer.
Uh-oh, I said to myself; here comes the (expected) tactic
by which he’s planning to, some day, subject me to the
same harassment he’d visited upon the late UFO-oriented
scientist Dr. James E. McDonald, whose effects from being
thus Klassi-fried became tragic.
Things went downhill swiftly. During my brief slide-show
presentation of some key cases from ufological history, Klass
seethed with anger and accusatory remarks, labeling each
case a hoax without providing any evidence thereof.
During a commercial break, the show’s staffers tried to
coax me into arguing Jerry Springer-style with this would-
be “expert on the UFO myth.” I declined, preferring to
just laugh at him whenever he deigned to ply his role as
professional bully.
I needn't have bothered to laugh, because the audience
already had summed up the event as a case of Klass-dis-
missed. I still have a videotape of that show, and I hope
it'll fetch some big bucks when my daughter puts it up for
auction on eBay.com upon my own demise.
Some day, historians might view Klass’s dossier as be-
ing more important for what it excludes than for what it
includes. In particular, where’s all the Klass-related docu-
mentation fueling the controversy over the 1980s-leaked
information about the so-called Operation Majestic-12,
the alleged supersecret twelve-member panel of high-
ranking military personnel and senior scientists set up by
President Truman in 1947 to conceal and technologically
exploit various knowledge/artifacts retrieved from one or
more crash-landed flying saucers?
In this regard, see Nick Redfem’s article “MI-12 and the
Bureau" in the Iune-Iuly 2003 issue (Vol. 18, No. 3] of UFO
Magazine. "According to [author Howard] Blum,” writes
Redfern, “on Iune 4, 1987 UFO skeptic Philip ]. Klass wrote
to William Baker, assistant director of the [FBI’s] Office of
Congressional and Public Affairs: ‘I am enclosing what pur-
port to be Top Secret/Eyes Only documents, which have
not been properly declassified, now being circulated by
William L. Moore, Burbank, California 91505.’ ”
Most of us familiar with Klass’s nasty tactics for coun-
tering his ufological opponents view his letter to Baker as
just another example of his obsessive, desperate campaign
to smear, intimidate, and assault the opposition.
Savor this irony: here we have Klass-himself an un-
abashed, pants-down-caught publisher of leaked defense
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information-—parading around town with his flag of righ-
teous indignation over certain ufologists‘ receipt of alleged
documentation confirming and exposing the government
cover-up of the Deepest Secret.
If his dossier settles anything important, it’s this: No
agency in its right mind would’ve hired him for so much
as file-clerldng, much less for leading any counterintel-
ligence effort to deflect researchers’ coming too close to
The Secret.
Perhaps the most charitable conclusion we can draw
from his dossier is that Klass, clueless about the value of
legitimate UFO research and classless in his interpersonal
relations, had become a caricature of scientism. As such,
he would have fared well in the Bush H administration,
making Karl Rove look like an angel.
Alas, he rightfully merited no respect from true scholars
and real gentlemen. Within that big cranium of his was
housed, along with an obviously high IQ, the smallest,
meanest of minds-—one that jinxed any chance he might
have had toward achieving greatness. um
From his home in Alexandria, Virginia, Larry W.
Bryant directs the Washington, D.C. office of the pub-
lic-interest group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. His
book UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally
‘round Iimmy Carter’s Promise is available from
Galde Press, Inc. (www.galde ress.com ). He welcomes
communication from the pubfic at his email address:
overtci@cavtel.net
American Demonology
continued from page 75
wall<ing—without a net—over a potentially consciousness-
shattering military secret—are not diflicult to imagine.
In An American Demonology, Bennett raises Ruppelt
to a mythically heroic level, as he did previously with
Adamski and Fort, in part by the often extremely poetic
use of language and the skillful sketching in of relevant
historical background that fixes Ruppelt’s story firmly in
those more innocent early days of Ufology. In terms of the
sheer beauty of his writing style, Bennett has few equals
in the field of UFO studies, and it’s a shame that this new-
est book is only a scant 166 pages.
Did Captain Edward Ruppelt knowingly conceal the
truth about UFOs from a gullible American public in his
time as head of Project Blue Book? And did ha, as the
book's dustcover claims, “try desperately to convince the
American Air Force that UFOs were real?” While Colin
Bennett cannot answer those questions completely, he can
at least entertain and inform us in a voice uniquely his
own, and offer us a fresh perspective on a sorely neglected
figure in American history, one who may who have held
the key to so many of the mysteries of the UFO phenom-
enon. As a history of our own militz-u'y's bewildered re-
sponse to interlopers from another world, An American
Demonology is an instant and essential classic. we
An American Demonology: Flying Saucers Over
the White House, by Colin Bennett, is available from
Headpress, U.K., on the web at https://secui-ehost2.zen.
co.uk/headpress/default.asp
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