Revenge of the termites

Organized debunkers launch full-court press against UFO evidence

If you’re not following the Wikipedia scandal being perpetrated by a network of cybervandals called Guerilla Skeptics of Wikipedia (GSoW), you really should. This is no joke. Especially for people who use Wiki as an introduction to subjects that challenge scientific orthodoxy. Under the guise of rationalism, a determined band of pseudo-skeptics is rewriting histories and biographies with an agenda so aggressive and unbalanced, it smells like religious cultism.

For the past few years, UFO/UAP researcher Rob Heatherly has been tracking curious edits, deletions and additions designed to discredit people, events and ideas crossing into a range of issues broadly regarded as paranormal. They’re pretty obvious – dismissive labels and context skewed in a way to discourage inquisitive minds from going deeper into independent research. But I had no idea how coordinated this propaganda campaign really was until I caught Heatherly’s evidence last month on Matt Ford’s “Good Trouble Show” podcast.

Wikipedia – the volunteer-edited online encyclopedia – was designed as an introduction, not as the sole or final source for a deep dive into XYZ. But the Heatherly/Ford tutorial on the systematic and intentional distortion of reputations by anonymous gangs of “experts” reveals more than cowardice. This is an authoritarian mindset actively suppressing knowledge.

The window into this dishonesty, according to Heatherly, opens by joining Wikipedia and clicking onto Page History - XTools and following the thread. That’ll get you into the page history tab of any entry, where you can see when and how the text and edits are created, the handles of who made the adjustments, and before-and-after comparisons of the copy (additions in green, deletions in red). In the UFO camp, Heatherly discovered that the exchanges and debates among the editors who tweak the pages were hidden in archive sections, but he managed to noodle them out.

From Wiki entries on folks like Pentagon whistleblowers Luis Elizondo and David Grusch, to investigative reporters Ross Coulthart, Leslie Kean and George Knapp, from the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and Skinwalker Ranch to the Roswell Incident, there is nothing arbitrary about the ham-handed agenda at work here.

Blunt-force trauma

Awards and accolades for journalists promoting real skepticism of the status quo are removed. References to mainstream news stories suggesting that something beyond the five senses may be in play are scrubbed and replaced with pseudo-skeptical and equally speculative “explanations.” Mainstream media articles that attack the anomalous possibilities, however, make the cut. PhD degrees from sources arguing for the consideration of non-human intelligence angles are often scratched, while pseudo-skeptical sources are allowed to retain their academic credentials.

Links to podcasts discussing NHI possibilities aren’t mentioned. Verbatim testimony from credible eyewitnesses (retired USAF pilot David Fravor: “it accelerated like nothing I’ve ever seen”) is stricken for watered-down summaries. Researchers who go against conventional wisdom are demoted to “enthusiasts,” “believers,” “hucksters,” “grifters,” “con artists” and “conspiracy theorists.” When objectively authoritative sources fall short of GSoW expectations, those sources get demoted as well.

Exhibit A: the Wiki entry “Pentagon UFO Videos,” which primarily addresses the so-called “Tic Tac,” Gimble” and “GoFast” footage released by the Defense Department in 2017. Guerilla Skeptics solve the mystery for naïve readers in the second paragraph: “Publicity surrounding the videos has prompted a number of explanations, including drones or unidentified terrestrial aircraft, anomalous or artifactual instrument readings, physical observational phenomena (e.g., parallax), human observational and interpretive error, and, as is typical in the context of such incidents, extraordinary speculations of alien spacecraft.”

But none of those “explanations” actually apply. You have to slog through 14 ‘graphs to reach the official conclusion. The images, concedes GSoW, “are characterized by the Department of Defense as unidentified.”

The Secret Cabal lady

Guerilla Skeptics was founded in 2010, not by a scientist but by a studio photographer named Ann Gerbic. According to her own Wiki bio, she responded to her Southern Baptist-scarred childhood via atheism, and initially made a name by going after psychic mediums. Her operation involved setting up fake Facebook accounts to flush out, sting and expose paranormal frauds.

Today, Gerbic actually calls her Wiki network the “Secret Cabal,” and her editing posse is 150 believers strong. In undated videos replayed on the “Good Trouble Show,” she reminds bobbleheads at a convention that “Wikipedia is the single most important tool in the skeptical toolbox.” She claims that the 1,230 pages spawned or tracked by Guerilla Skeptics have drawn 51 million page views. However, according to Heatherly, more recent analytics show GSoW’s handiwork has tallied roughly 100 million page views. With fetish-like zest, individual pages are often updated multiple times a week.  

Gerbic has been rewarded by the Center for Inquiry – a nonprofit outfit touting the certitude of secular humanism – with the ostensibly prestigious garland of “ambassador.” By 2022, her work with the Skeptical Inquirer earned her the National Capital Area Skeptics Philip J. Klass Award for “critical thinking and scientific understanding.” More on Klass, the omniscient aerospace writer renowned for decades as America’s premiere UFO debunker, in a moment.

When I first started trying to sort through this UFO stuff in the Eighties, SI was my go-to resource because it seemed to have an answer for damn near everything. The Inquirer was the glossy in-house product of the Committee for the Scientific Investigations of Claims of the Paranormal (known today simply as the Committee for Scientific Inquiry). Initially, their sanguine pronouncements felt reassuring. They were great at unmasking snake-oil peddlers, faith healers and quack remedies. But the more I followed the UFO evidence, CSICOP’s intolerance for ambiguity became increasingly obvious and disconcerting. Furthermore, in SI’s reader letters section, editors never let an opposing view go unchallenged; without fail, management always insisted on getting in the last word. Ego and insecurity shaped their editorial judgement.

The original ‘extraordinary claims’ guy

It wasn’t until I moved to Sarasota years ago that I learned about Marcello Truzzi, who once taught sociology here at New College, the state honors school now under new anti-woke Republican reprogramming. Truzzi’s statement “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof” was popularized by Carl Sagan, and in hopes of applying rigorous standards to scientific debate, Truzzi became a CSICOP cofounder in 1976. He lasted barely a year.

“They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion,” he explained of his dogmatic colleagues. “Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them. When an experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the goal posts. Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it’s a mere anomaly.”

Truzzi died in 2003, before I even knew who he was. But I had corresponded with Klass during the snail-mail era and managed to meet him in 1987 at a MUFON conference in Washington. As senior editor for Aviation Week & Space Technology, Klass was the quintessential inside man, obsessed with trashing UFO researchers and witnesses who dared to question press releases. It wasn’t until after Klass was gone and Internet research became indispensable that I grasped a fuller arc of the man’s sleaze.

The most exceptional target of his obsessive-compulsive fixation was Dr. James McDonald, the atmospheric physicist whose quest for data in the 1960s was uncompromising. Pushing back with a UFOs-are-plasmas theory, Klass’s unrelenting complaints persuaded the Office of Naval Research – whose funds McDonald relied on to pursue his investigations of UFOs and other projects – to let JM’s longstanding funding contract expire in 1968.

More heinous were Klass’s attacks on Bob Jacobs, the Air Force photographer who decided to go public with his eyewitness account of reviewing footage of a dummy nuclear missile warhead getting zapped by a disc-shaped UFO off Big Sur in 1964. An update of that incident is offered by UFOs and Nukes author Robert Hastings, in which former counterintelligence agent Elizondo claims to have screened the film and found its details consistent with Jacobs’ memory.

The one-man wrecking ball

Jacobs was teaching journalism at the University of Maine when Klass pounced in 1989. “When a professor of journalism, who publicly accuses the USAF and U.S. Government of ‘coverup’ resorts to intentional distortion of the facts to mislead his readers and then to coverup,” Klass wrote to Jacobs’ boss, “I am deeply distressed.” Jacobs lost his job before the term ended, and he discussed the consequences at a National Press Club event in 2022.

During a break at the ’87 MUFON conference at American University, where Communion author Whitley Strieber was the keynote speaker, Klass pulled me aside and went off the record, which I honored at the time. Klass, who died in 2005, had already publicly attributed Strieber’s stories about being abducted by space aliens to frontal lobe epilepsy. But brace yourself, he warned – the worst was yet to come.

“Whitley Strieber is a troubled man,” Klass confided. “Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to take his own life.”

What did I know? I was just some dumb reporter covering a UFO conference. Klass was the civilian dean of military aeronautics. By dropping the mental-illness turd on a journo who might be inclined to give Strieber a hard listen, this guy knew exactly what he was doing. He even smoked a cigarette — lustily, I might add — after handing me a scoop I couldn’t print.

Today, at 78, Strieber is still going strong. He continues to write books, and he hosts a podcast called Dreamland.

It’s not surprising that anyone late to this mess might accuse Guerilla Skeptics etc. of being CIA assets. But the truth is likely even more demoralizing. These people feel as threatened by this stuff as religious fundamentalists do — they wouldn’t need a paycheck or exterior motivation to try to defuse it.

Nothing to fear but facts themselves

Political scientists Raymond Duvall and Alexander Wendt went there in 2008 with an essay that appeared in the journal of Political Theory. They saw the mystery as a threat to anthropocentrism, with the potential to reshape our very identity, collective and individual. And also maybe as a siren’s call for a unified global response, of which we are incapable outside of New Year’s Eve.

“The insecurity is not conscious, but operates at the deeper level of a taboo, in which certain possibilities are unthinkable because of their inherent danger. In this respect,” they wrote in Sovereignty and the UFO, “UFO skepticism is akin to denial in psychoanalysis: the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it would reveal about itself. There is therefore nothing for the sovereign to do but turn away its gaze from—to ignore, and hence be ignorant of—the UFO, making no decision at all. Just when needed most, on the palisades, the sovereign is nowhere to be found.”

Sixteen years later:

At least one highly organized and toxic form of “sovereign” thinking is making decisions and no longer averting its gaze. As evidence for NHI accumulates, Guerilla Skeptics, etc., are producing reality-tampering counter-narratives at the speed of rain-soaked cow-pasture fungi. The intent is to retard if not fully derail this incipient national debate. A few First Amendment trials could be illuminating, and the incentives are clearly urgent:

Whoever controls the story controls the public mind. Do that, and you control the future. The future could well be 1969 all over again, when Project Blue Book slammed the door on the UFO problem – and nobody really gave a shit. Or not enough people did. Or the right people. And somebody whose name I forget said if you can hear the alarm bells, it’s already too late.