Klass act, no principles

DeVoid 'blog ^ | Monday, February 20, 2012 | Billy Cox

[SunkenCiv]

A blast from the past animated the blogosphere earlier this month when a buddy of famed "Fire in the Sky" UFO abductee Travis Walton accused a dead debunker of attempted bribery. Steve Pierce said he -- Pierce -- had been offered $10k to say Walton had hoaxed the whole thing back in 1975...

Klass was a prolific writer who dismissed the Walton controversy as confabulation in his 1983 book UFOs: The Public Deceived... Klass' take on what became known as the Cash-Landrum incident stopped me cold. Because I'd actually done my homework on that one. And that's when I got that first queasy feeling that the American press was routinely quoting a man who had a pathological disregard for truth...

For years, Klass had badgered the victims, and Schuessler, for access to their hospital records. Aware of his proclivities, they refused to comply. "I said, look Phil, why don't you come up with what you think happened, publish it, and after you do that, we'll be happy to supply you with the records," recalls Schuessler from his home in Colorado.

Klass condensed Cash-Landrum into a single page. Rather than posit an alternative scenario, he simply ascribed the whole thing to a hoax founded upon pre-existing medical conditions. Even the Army's own Inspector General investigation specifically cited a lack of evidence for a hoax.

"Klass was a low-life and a bully who used his Aviation Week credentials to hold himself up as an expert," says Schuessler, retired project manager for space shuttle flight operations at Johnson Space Center. "He just made up stories any way he saw fit."

[SunkenCiv]

There’s an old saying, “clever liars give details, but the cleverest don’t.” Or maybe that’s not an old saying, but I can’t remember where I read it years ago, so, it’s unattributed and, well, old, so, still counts. ;’) The gabby ex-guv people usually don’t know much, but talk a lot (and make up a lot); those in the know got to be where they are by virtue of the fact that they don’t talk about any of it.