SUBJECT: REBUTTLE TO SMITH, JERY CLARK CUFOS FILE: UFO707 ======================================================== (C) Copyright 1989 ParaNet Information Service All Rights Reserved. ======================================================== Recently ParaNet carried a controversial article written by Dr. Willy Smith regarding the 'State of Ufology Today' as seen by Dr. Smith. This article (Smith.TXT) lashed out at the two major UFO research groups in America today, CUFOS and MUFON. In the interest of providing a balanced viewpoint, we have asked these groups to rebut Dr. Smith's comments. My conversation with Walt Andrus, International Director of MUFON, yielded a curt 'no' to rebutting anything that Dr. Smith had to say, citing that it "would be beneath his dignity" to do so. CUFOS has, as represented by Jerry Clark, plans no rebuttal either. However, Jerry Clark, speaking for himself, and not officially for CUFOS, has prepared a rebuttal called the 'The Smith Principle' which appears here in this file. It is ParaNet's understanding that something of like material is forthcoming from Dan Wright, Director of Investgations for MUFON which will appear upon it's arrival. THE SMITH PRINCIPLE by Jerome Clark It has been my sad experience that to pay attention to Willy Smith is to encourage him in his excesses, and so it is with much reluctance that I respond, as after reflection I feel I must, to his attack on me in "The Decline and Fall of American Ufology," of which I was recently shown a copy. This is not an official response from the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies; there will be none. CUFOS as an organization has no desire to engage in fruitless personal dispute. CUFOS chooses to deal with issues, not personalities, and that of course is a wise course. Since, however, Smith has made a series of false personal charges against me, I feel obligated to set the record straight. The following is written not for Smith's benefit, since Smith always believes whatever he wants to believe, however bizarre or unverifiable; this is instead for ParaNet people such as Michael Corbin (whom to the best of my memory I've never met or corresponded with) who think that Smith's attack "is perhaps 'on target'" and that it "is time we start demanding the truth and get it." It is safe to say that Willy Smith's accounts are not the place to get it. Smith's basic charge is that I am the evil force that controls the organization; Mark Rodeghier, its ostensible head, is a mere cipher, unable to resist the demands of my strong personality. Yet at the same time, even as Rodeghier and the entire CUFOS board bow to my every whim owing to the sheer force of my personality, I also have a weak personality (perhaps on alternating days of the week) which bows to the prevailing winds, usually coming, Smith would have us believe, from Budd Hopkins and Jenny Randles. Smith can't have it both ways; I can't have both a strong personality and a weak personality, i.e., be a tyrant and obsequious subject at once. This sort of incoherence pretty much defines Smith's polemics. Apparently it doesn't matter that one paragraph doesn't follow logically from the next, or actively contradicts it. The important thing is to nail the sinister manipulator and the timid follower -- both of them me. The current CUFOS board, aside from me, consists of Mark Rodeghier, John P. Timmerman, George M. Eberhart, Don Schmitt, Michael D. Swords, Jennie Zeidman, and Nancy Clark (who happens to be my wife). (Names of current board members are published every year in IUR.) I will gladly furnish addresses and telephone numbers of any or all of these individuals to any ParaNet participant who wishes to contact them privately to get their views on me and on Smith's representation of CUFOS in general. I urge these inquirers to ask specifically if it is true, as Smith charges, that I dominate CUFOS, that Rodeghier is a weak-willed figurehead, based on my whims. Inquirers will find, I can state confidently, that these individuals will declare Smith's charges laughable, if not downright hallucinatory, and that they will proceed to relate instances explaining why we, in common with other UFO organizations and ufologists, have found Smith impossible to work with. They will also relate instances in which Smith has made bizarre claims which, if publicized, would call into question his judgment and perhaps his sanity as well. It should be noted that Smith's track record of reliability, even when he's describing something he knows about (certainly not the case with CUFOS), is pretty awful. It has recently been demonstrated, for example, that he has consistently misrepresented his educational background. Under the circumstances it seems peculiar he is busily accusing other people of assorted crimes (largely imaginary), unless he wants to draw attention away from the recent embarrassing revelations about him. Careful readers will have noticed that, while Smith declares dramatically that "CUFOS was precipitously departing from what had been the basic philosophy of its founder," owing to the evil schemes of strong personality/weak personality Jerry Clark, he provides no real specifics whatsoever. That is because there are none to give. All he can do is attempt a smear by association. I have a "dubious pedigree" because I worked for Fate. So what? Fate was, and is, a popular and widely read magazine on anomalies and the paranormal, and just about everybody who was ever anybody in these areas, whether skeptic, believer or neither, has written for the magazine at one time or another, including Allen Hynek, who used to tell me he liked the magazine. In fact, at one time about 10 years ago, when CUFOS was in financial trouble, Allen actually approached Curtis Fuller, Fate's publisher, to suggest that IUR be published as a Fate supplement! Neither Curt nor I thought this was a good idea -- CUFOS was a scientific organization, Fate a popular magazine with strange ads, not a good mix -- and told Allen as much. In due course IUR appeared for a brief while as a supplement to the short lived paranormal magazine Probe the Unknown. My thoughts about Fate are many and complex and one day I will write about them in detail, but that is not the question that need concern here. Suffice it to say that, at its best, for what it was (a popular magazine with all the limitations of that format), Fate under the Fullers and me was a good magazine, balancing good analysis with interesting anecdotal accounts of paranormal and anomalous experience. Even many members of CSICOP (Gardner, Klass, Oberg, Sheaffer, Frazier, de Camp, Nickell, Stein, Jerome and others) have contributed to it. Not everything it published was to my taste, as you will learn from Mary Fuller (with whom I used to vigorously debate manuscript choices, on which she had the final word up till the last few months of my employment there; the last issue I edited, May 1989, was the one of which I am proudest; my ideal of what the editorial content and slant should have been always), but I respected the magazine's honesty. It never hesitated to admit error and more than a few times ended up debunking claims it had printed previously. And it was never sensationalistic, Smith to the contrary. (I think that everybody except Smith would define sensationalism as what happens when supermarket tabloids deal with extraordinary claims.) Fate's regular writers included scientists, folklorists, psychologists, and religious historians as well as plain folks naively relating experiences that they sincerely believed had happened to them (and which are typical of such accounts worldwide, as has repeatedly been demonstrated in folkloric and parapsychological surveys it is safe to say Smith has never heard of). Smith says I regularly wrote UFO material for Fate but he wisely doesn't get specific about what I wrote in those articles and reviews. The reason is that anyone seeing those articles is going to see a sober, critical minded treatment of the evidence. There's nothing in there, in other words, to indicate that I'm crazy or credulous or anything but supportive of a scientific approach. The UFO material Fate published (others wrote most of it, although I usually solicited and edited their articles) was always some of the best stuff in the magazine, and the writers included most of the most respected people in the field. Smith's vagueness is especially amusing in light of a sentence in his very next paragraph, the one where he (as usual, falsely) accuses Jenny Randles "of unjustified attacks against FSR which are written in vague terms and not in a constructive manner amenable to rebuttal" -- a pretty accurate description of what he's tried to do with me and Fate. Smith claims that "even Dr. Hynek was not happy with his own choice of editor for the IUR." Oh, really? Allen repeatedly told me that he was very happy with what I was doing, and if fact that was the subject of the last letter I ever received from him. He told me, Mark and others that he felt he had left the organization in good hands. Since then we have not had a whisper of criticism from Mimi Hynek, who is surely a greater authority on Allen's legacy than the self appointed Smith. Smith, in fact, is the only person I've ever heard claim Allen wasn't pleased with us, and in this case we all would be well advised to consider the source. Amusingly, Smith cites an IUR reference which apparently is supposed to prove that Allen was mad because I was taking a CUFOS from science. Those who follow up the reference (IUR 10[4],2) will find that it has to do with a disagreement Allen and I had about a particular series of UFO episodes. I was taking the skeptical position because I wasn't satisfied with the quality of the investigation; Allen felt differently. And that's fine. But Smith drops this into context that would lead the unsuspecting reader to think Allen was complaining because I was taking IUR and CUFOS into some wild blue yonder land of supernatural speculation. At any rate, the dispute about the particular case blew over, as disputes usually do that do not involve Smith, and in due course I came to feel (as did other CUFOS personnel who had shared my initial reservations) that Allen was probably right, that the case was an important one. Disagreements arise between intelligent, well meaning individuals and, except in Smith's universe, are usually not seen as evidence of conspiracy or venality. One disagreement some of us in CUFOS had with Allen concerned the alleged relationship between psychic phenomenon and UFOs. In his later years (see, for example, the Omni interview) Allen talked both privately and publicly about his increasingly esoteric perspective on the UFO phenomenon, which frankly made those of us who knew and cared about Allen uncomfortable. In some senses Allen seemed to have given up on the prospect of using science to solve the UFO riddle and in conversation with me (and I'm sure others) he sometimes sounded like Smith's pal Gordon Creighton, the occultist who edits FSR and who opts for magical solutions (believing, for example, that UFOs are djinn -- i.e., supernatural creatures from ancient folk belief; Creighton may be the only person in the West to believe in their existence). How much Allen actually believed this is another question; I liked to think he had an imagination that might be described (so to speak) as impish and perhaps he enjoyed being outrageous. But as time went by, I -- and many other people -- were less sure. Certainly we had grown concerned about his too ready acceptance of various cases and theories. Allen was getting lambasted in places like Discover and Skeptical Inquirer for incautious statements; one, as I recall, had to do with his seeming endorsement of the old occult concept of the "etheric realm." We were concerned, in short, about Allen's and CUFOS' scientific reputation. This is not in any way to demean the enormous contributions this admirable man made over many years to serious UFO inquiry; it is well to keep in mind that when these unhappy developments were occurring, he was old, tired, distracted and (though none of us knew it then) suffering from the brain tumor that would kill him. When Allen moved to Arizona, CUFOS and IUR took a sharp turn to the right, perhaps a bit too far as I think when I re-read some of my early editorials. But we felt we had to re-establish immediately CUFOS' conservative (i.e., scientific) credentials. An early editorial decision all of us involved with IUR agreed on was that there would be no discussion of psychic phenomena in the pages of IUR. Cattle mutilations would be treated with the skepticism we felt they deserved, especially following the publication of Kagan and Summers' devastating Mute Evidence. Cases published in IUR would be scrutinized far more closely, this in response to earlier articles in which possible IFOs had been treated as certain UFOs, mostly because Allen was no longer paying strict (i.e., scientific) attention to the material he was letting appear. Again, none of this was characteristic of Allen in his younger, vigorous years, but it was a problem toward the end. I should point out here that, though he pretends to expertise about my personality, activities and motivations, Willy Smith is barely an acquaintance of mine. Several years ago we exchanged a few letters. On one or two occasions we spoke over the phone. This is the extent of Smith's knowledge of me. He has never visited CUFOS headquarters during Mark Rodeghier's tenure as director and he knows no board members well, with the possible exception of John Timmerman, whom Smith calls a "gentleman" and who tells me (most recently in a phone conversation on July 29) that Smith's ideas about CUFOS are wildly off the mark. In fact, John says, recently he tried to set Smith straight, to no avail. I do find it hilarious, however, that Smith calls me a "weekend ufologist" (which is what 99 percent of ufologists are, by the way) when I happen to be one of the world's very few full time ufologists. So where does Smith get his ideas? He makes them up, that's how. For example, how does Smith know that weak personality Jerry "has been strongly influenced by his friendship with Jenny Randles"? The answer is nowhere, since (all Smith's wishful thinking to the contrary) we aren't certifiable lunatics. Our position has been consistent from the start; that the paper deserves investigation, that thus far the critics haven't made a compelling case, that thus far the proponents have been able to produce only the thinnest and broadest of circumstantial cases. My own personal feeling is that the paper is probably a hoax and probably engineered by individuals within the intelligence community. But that's just speculation; we all would do well simply to await further developments and better evidence, pro or con. what could possibly be wrong with that? Of course "the existence of MJ-12 and the genuineness of the documents are two separate issues." Does Smith think he's the only person to whom this obvious consideration ever occurred? What on earth or in the heavenly firmament is Smith talking about when he says my alleged feelings about the MJ-12 document ("not based on the available evidence," naturally, since I could never do anything so unvenal as to base judgments solely on evidence) stem from my negative "feelings...toward Barry Greenwood"? What? I scarcely know the guy. I met him once briefly and have spoken with him two or three times over the phone, and exchanged probably as many letters. Our interaction, slight as it has been, has always been cordial, and I've always thought of him (from what I've read of what he's written) as sober, bright and reasonable. And he may well be right to be skeptical about the MJ-12 paper. Smith may not be a good critic, but he does have a great imagination. Smith's comments on my villainy vis-a-vis Gulf Breeze are typically incoherent. On one hand he says weak-personality Jerry was swayed by his friendship with Budd Hopkins. On the other hand, strong-personality Jerry was able to bully all of CUFOS into submission to his point of view. In point of fact, I don't know any CUFOS person who "believes" in Gulf Breeze; there are merely different degrees of skepticism, form hard (Rodeghier and Eberhart) to agnostic (mine). We all agree, however, that clear disconfirming evidence has yet to emerge (which is not to say it will never emerge), that the best proponent (Maccabee) has taken care to answer critics' objections and that much of the investigation was botched, by both believers and debunkers, who became wildly emotional when they should have kept their heads clear. Personally, I had learned from earlier experience that Smith's claims have to be taken with a large dose of sodium chloride; his attack on me, the one to which I am responding here (there have been others about which I've kept silent, with difficulty), demonstrates what might be called the Smith Principle: when a fact isn't available, make one up. Gulf Breeze is a case that may have been blown permanently because the debate was conducted, for the most part, incompetently by individuals (with a few honorable exceptions) who were unqualified intellectually and temperamentally. Much of what went on on both sides of the issue was, and is, a disgrace. It also must be said that if Gulf Breeze is an authentic case, those who from the beginning engaged in relentless character assassination of the principle witness, Ed, will have earned their place in the UFO Hall of Shame. Incidentally, my friend Budd Hopkins did not sway weak- personality Jerry. He and I conducted a vigorous, sometimes heated correspondence on the subject. We remained friends, however, and eventually decided to agree to disagree and to go on to other things. I don't see how any objective observer could be anything but confused about Gulf Breeze. Frankly, I don't know what to make of it and I don't think I am under any obligation to have a strong opinion. Like any sensible person, I have a tolerance for ambiguity and there's plenty of that to go around here. I envy Smith his absolute certainty even in the absence of evidence convincing to persons other than himself. Nothing is "missing" in IUR where Gulf Breeze is concerned. We have published pro (Maccabee, Stacy) and con (Rodeghier, van Utrecht). We intend to give the subject a rest, however, in the interests of not trying our readers' patience, until new and significant evidence comes along. Incidentally, I have no idea what Smith means when he writes that "lately the pages of the IUR...disclose Dr. Maccabee's adamant opposition to an independent computer analysis of the suspected photos..." No such statement has ever been made in the pages of IUR, by Maccabee or anyone else, and in fact CUFOS has called (in IUR's pages and elsewhere) for just such an independent analysis. Smith is blowing smoke again, when he writes that the "selection of the articles is not determined by a firmly established policy but by the predominant wind." Evidence? None. Nor is there evidence that IUR does not have scientific standards; Smith wisely cites no examples of foolish, scientifically-indefensible statements in the magazine, knowing they are not there. He writes, even more incoherently than usual, "Although the exact circulation of the IUR is not known, a secret maintained at the price of higher postage rates" -- could anybody explain what that's supposed to mean? -- "the publication delays seem to indicate a decreasing readership and a not very promising future for CUFOS." IUR's circulation is between 1000 and 1100. Renewal rates are excellent and the mail, both to the CUFOS office in Chicago and to my personal residence in Minnesota, is almost universally laudatory. (A typical letter arrived just last week, from a professor of philosophy at a California state university. He said that of all the magazines he reads, the IUR is the only one he reads from cover to cover.) IUR, a bimonthly, comes out regularly every two months; there are no "delays," and in fact we are close to having the issues out at the date indicated on the cover. CUFOS is doing quite well, thank you. We have more money in the bank than we`ve had in years; mail and inquiries are answered promptly; our files are all in order and available for the use of any serious researcher. We have reactivated the Journal for UFO Studies under the capable editorship of Prof. Michael D. Swords. The issue that came out earlier this year has been widely praised, and justly so. All this can be verified by a call to Mark Rodeghier or George Eberhart at the Chicago office; the number is 312-271-3611. If CUFOS is an organization with a "not very promising future," I'll take no promise any day. In the postscript of Smith's manuscript we finally learn the reason it was written at all; as a pre-emptive strike against a two-part article on UNICAT by Paul Fuller of England and Wim van Utrecht of Belgium. According to Smith, to whom those who disagree with him never operate from honorable motives (they're "vitriolic," suffering from "frustration," "destructive" -- never of course honest in their dissent), the critics of UNICAT "fear that we may be approaching basic results." Why would they "fear" that? No answer. In fact, CUFOS had nothing to do with the Fuller-van Utrecht project, though Mark Rodeghier had long said privately that he saw major methodological flaws in UNICAT. Nonetheless he remained silent, not wanting to irritate the volatile Smith even at the expense of letting stand a dubious enterprise. Fuller and van Utrecht were well into their work when they contacted CUFOS (the first we had heard of it) and asked if they could publish in IUR. They were corresponding with Smith, seeking information, opinions and explanations from him, and (as we urged them to do) they showed their manuscript to him prior to publication. We also made it clear (both indirectly, through Fuller and van Utrecht, and directly, through me) to Smith that IUR was open to his rebuttal of the piece (to appear in the next two issues of the magazine). Smith, however, claimed that we would never publish his response! Not unnaturally, we have concluded he has none. I apologize for taking up all your time (and frankly wish I hadn't felt compelled to devote mine to this). But there is scarcely a word of truth in anything Smith's piece says. I've learned, though, that if falsehoods aren't answered, they're seen as truths. Should Smith respond to the above, as no doubt he will, watch carefully to see if there's any evidence, any documentation, to buttress the bombast. Hold him to standards of fact. Make him cite chapter and verse. Ask him how he can know what's going on at CUFOS without knowing the people involved, the dynamics, the considerations that go into decision-making, and all the rest. If he claims to know it through psychic powers, you can rest assured there's plenty of static on the mental radio. Ask him to produce printed statements, letters, actual knowledgeable informants (anonymous -- i.e., fictitious -- ones don't count), anything to back up his fantastic charges. He won't be able to do it since none exist. But that will not, we can be sure, stop him; he'll just invent wild new charges. All that will stop him is if people stop paying attention to him. Ufology has enough problems. It doesn't need a Willy Smith. 612 North Oscar Avenue Canby, Minnesota 56220 August 1, 1989 ********************************************** * THE U.F.O. BBS - http://www.ufobbs.com/ufo * **********************************************