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Dec. 28th show...." and stuff....".
- Thread starter ondafritz
- Start date
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digigeek
Pompetus of Love
While I enjoyed some of this episode and certainly realize that Bill Knell seems to be a complete and utter crook, I don't think it served any purpose on a Paranormal show.
I can't see where Knell has had much of any influence or status in the paranormal community at all. So, that makes him irrelevant to me in the field. This, in turn, makes him a bad guest for the show in my book - simply on that fact.
The show becomes a consumer protection piece (as mentioned in messages and posts) solely - relating mostly to Knell's fraudulent dog brokering and illegal DVD sales. While that's fine and, sure, not a bad listen, it sort of belongs on its own consumer fraud show, IMO.
Okay, I was looking forward to a good, interesting guest and I end up listening to a scumbag for almost an hour - I mean Knell, of course. (grin) - I was sort of bummed.
I can't see where Knell has had much of any influence or status in the paranormal community at all. So, that makes him irrelevant to me in the field. This, in turn, makes him a bad guest for the show in my book - simply on that fact.
The show becomes a consumer protection piece (as mentioned in messages and posts) solely - relating mostly to Knell's fraudulent dog brokering and illegal DVD sales. While that's fine and, sure, not a bad listen, it sort of belongs on its own consumer fraud show, IMO.
Okay, I was looking forward to a good, interesting guest and I end up listening to a scumbag for almost an hour - I mean Knell, of course. (grin) - I was sort of bummed.
No, I think this is valuable. It's valuable to have people like Our Hosts and Frank Warren out there gutting these frauds, and it's valuable to have a fair amount of publicity around the exposé.
The value is that the Paracast can enjoy a reputation for responsible journalism, where people with legitimate personal experiences (Siani, Jeremy, Jeff, David himself of course, etc.) or people who have done legitimate research with real journalistic credentials (Mac, Stan, Bruce, Allen, etc.) can talk about what's happened to them or what they've uncovered, and yet people will know -- in proportion to the publicity and word-of-mouth the show gets -- that these people deserve to be heard and taken seriously, precisely because the Paracast has quality control and will take the Knells and Holzers to task.
If the show were only exposés, yeah, that would be unfortunate (or at least, less interesting for many of us), but taking time every so many shows to give these jerks what they richly deserve, in between the Good Stuff, is a service to the discipline.
--Shawn
The value is that the Paracast can enjoy a reputation for responsible journalism, where people with legitimate personal experiences (Siani, Jeremy, Jeff, David himself of course, etc.) or people who have done legitimate research with real journalistic credentials (Mac, Stan, Bruce, Allen, etc.) can talk about what's happened to them or what they've uncovered, and yet people will know -- in proportion to the publicity and word-of-mouth the show gets -- that these people deserve to be heard and taken seriously, precisely because the Paracast has quality control and will take the Knells and Holzers to task.
If the show were only exposés, yeah, that would be unfortunate (or at least, less interesting for many of us), but taking time every so many shows to give these jerks what they richly deserve, in between the Good Stuff, is a service to the discipline.
--Shawn
ickymicky
Paranormal Novice
Wow, you spanked Knell. I looked his name up on the internet and got nothing but fraud and scam warnings. Some poor lady was scammed out of nearly 1000 dollars for a dog she never received.
I know, not related to the paranormal, except the unexplainable, incomprehensible lack of moral character of this guy has. He sounds like a sociopath.
I know, not related to the paranormal, except the unexplainable, incomprehensible lack of moral character of this guy has. He sounds like a sociopath.
urkotic
Hopeful Monster
The s-word crossed my mind as well.
I will say this. Some years back a company that I worked for very briefly employed a guy who turned out to be a full-fledged con man. His resume was completely fabricated and his various wild claims to personal greatness and epic life adventures were all made up. Bizarrely he was perfectly competent at and qualified for the job he'd been hired to do, but insisted on embellishing past the point of sanity. He also wound up being really undependable, but that's another story.
Anyway, we subsequently discovered this individual had a history online of ripping people off. I commented to a co-worker wow, this guy, I don't know, some brain dysfunction? "Pathological liar", something like that? My friend, certainly more worldly than I, suggested some people are just con men and that's what they know, how they operate and how they make their way in the world. He further felt "asshole" was a better label than any of the psychological terms I suggested.
ickymicky
Paranormal Novice
Hehe... yeah, I agree. Asshole is fitting. Sometimes you just have to call it what it is without dressing it up.
AdamI
Skilled Investigator
Man, did I ever have an experience with someone like that once. This had nothing to do with any of the paranormal topics here-- this was a guy who approached me to go into business together. Nearly *everything* about him turned out to be phony including his financial status, his background, his credentials, what he'd done in the past, etc. Spending a bit of time with this guy was really enlightening to me. If you've never dealt with a delusional narcissistic liar like this it's hard to believe that someone could actually live this way.
These guys are around, and they're more common than you think. One of the problems with this field is that the "laity" is far too trusting and I think a bit naive about this. There are people out there who are amazing liars and who do so even for reasons as simple as their own entertainment. Self-aggrandizing liars are really common, and I think there are quite a few around in this field.
Kevin Daly
Skilled Investigator
Hmmm...it really looks like he's based his business model on the Dead Parrot sketch.
David Biedny
Paranormal Adept
Here's something you'll all appreciate - I decided to get in touch with Alexandra Holzer, to let her know about this latest episode, and the fact that she might want to rethink her association with Knell (he's got her bio on his site, and is acting as one of her booking agents). Her reply? She doesn't care about his background, and is not worried about the negative connotation of associating with him. Make of this what you will.
dB
dB
Does that mean she's getting paid to do gigs as a result of his representation? That's a frightening thought.
ickymicky
Paranormal Novice
These things disturb me. You want people to 'learn the truth' from you, pay for the privilege, yet not care about the credibility of the guy pimping you out?
These two deserve each other then.
thefoundryman
chrono-synclastically infundibulated
"Birds of a Feather"....
Great show Gene and Dave, Knell and Holzer can now go into the "Noise" category as opposed by, the "Signal" category which we can now concentrate on.
Great show Gene and Dave, Knell and Holzer can now go into the "Noise" category as opposed by, the "Signal" category which we can now concentrate on.
Siani
Despiser of religious nuts
Silly woman. You were trying to do her a good turn, and she threw it back in your face. Oh well, if she's happy to suffer a tarnished reputation by association...
Schuyler
Misanthrope
I really like the way David and Gene sucked this guy in. They really were easy on him for the first 15 minutes to get him comfortable, then slowly started closing the vice. First it was just, "I can't seem to find you in the database," and then imdb, then the lawsuit, then Cronkite, then the vice was gripping him hard. Too bad the guy is such a small potatoes sycophant. Good job. Thanks for the show.
thefoundryman
chrono-synclastically infundibulated
Can any one confirm that Hoagland WAS actually a Science advisor to Chronkite at some point? I'm not sure that anything this guy said was true.
G
Gil Bavel
Guest
Well, if you were on the boards and paying attention, you knew that this kind of interview was coming--that Gene and David were giving The Paracast community a Christmas present in the form of a consumer protection piece as it relates to the biggest fraud in the UFO community.
I tried to alert people to this guy several months ago; I posted about him twice, and emailed both Gene and David separately and then, when someone wrote that they wanted to hear Knell on the show, I posted yet again about the fact that he's a liar, a thief, and if he's a researcher, then I'm the Queen of England.
There ought to be a digital kind of scarlet letter "P" for when someone has been found out to be a plagiarist in the way that Knell as been, so that he can't make another penny "writing", or on the Internet. He is a blight upon the land, except that he certainly leaves a wide trail of fertilizer behind him wherever he goes.
I had kind of hoped that after all the time that's passed since I had my run-in with him that his wife would have left him; I'm sorry that not only is she still with him, but participates in these illegal, immoral scandalous schemes.
This guy needs to be strung up by his vas deferens and left for the vultures to peck out his eyes. I agree that there should be a special place in Hell for guys like this, but I want to see justice done in this world. He needs to be made to give a public apology, on something like Coast, or better still, on George Noory's Unexplained, so people can see his little rat bastard beady red eyes, and his little short, shrimpy body, as he apologizes to each individual he has personally wronged, starting with admitting selling other people's DVDs, VHS tapes, cassette tapes, CDs, etc.
Say what you will about Linda Multoun Howe, but she is a real journalist and deserves to be paid for her work (when people actually want to buy it--I myself have wanted to buy her first book and DVD about cattle mutilations, because they're the breakthrough work in the field... she made her way in a male-dominated world and after going up against the odds, she not only made a name for herself, but won an Emmy--and now this jerkoff is selling pirated versions of her stuff at his "lectures".
He actually does do a lo of them, or used to, anyway--I saw him a half a dozen times in Kansas City back in the day--but when you realize the fact that he's stolen every single detail in his "presentation" from other people, that he didn't put a lick of work into it himself, all it really boils down to in the end is that he has a captive market for him to sell other people's work to at the end of his "lectures".
His presentations were usually in hotels, and they were usually nearly packed. He organized them himself, and made all the arrangements from the comfort of his home in Long Island. There was no promoter--he didn't want to have to pay one. He organized his own radio appearances, etc., and by telling anecdotes on the air, he A) didn't have to show his work, and B) had a 50,000 watt station that reached into the entire Midwest to insure the crowds would come. From young children to the elderly, everyone interested in the UFO mystery and associated phenomena would come, one and all, and they filled his coffers to overflowing, which is why he came back to the area every six months. Good money to be made here.
I'm almost glad that he didn't show up to the very first UFO lecture I promoted--but I very nearly didn't put any more on because of how bad that first experience was. If I'd let him ruin my lecture promotions business, I would never have met Stanton Friedman, or put on Marc Davenport's lecture, or Leah Haley's; I probably wouldn't have met Karla Turner or Katharina Wilson, and there would have been yet another life destroyed by this asshole.
I never made very much money promoting UFO lectures, but I served my community that was hungry for any information they could get about UFOs. There was a great deal of UFO activity on the highway between where I live and Kansas City, and more, I found out, on the way to Topeka, which is the opposite direction. There was also an abductee support group, and when Knell didn't show up and I had to do a free lecture with a friend, I discovered during the question and answer session that people had a lot of questions, like who to turn to if you find yourself being abducted. We had a lot of abductees in that first group. And they had serious questions--questions that Bill Knell would never have been able to answer.
I found out just how much interest there was in my area on the UFO subject when Bill Caulfield, a local UFO investigator and long-time pilot spoke, and the lecture got covered in the university newspaper, with photos and a really nice writeup. I offered a special price--five bucks--for students, and I sold out the entire ballroom for him. This was back in the early Nineties. Bill Caulfileld did kind of a "Who's who" in UFOlogy, rather than the evidence or focusing on certain cases--but even his lecture was based on his own research and relationships over the years, rather than the bovine scatolgoy that Bill Knell scoops out and flings at the crowd.
And the difference is that when Caulfield said "I've known such-and-such for 35 years, he's a good guy", or whatever, it had the virtue of being true! And while there was a lot of that sort of thing in his lecture, and maybe not a lot of red meat, it was true, and that's what's important. I'd rather hear boring turthful stories about who wrote what book when than some wild crap about hunting a bigfoot creature through an active (yet abandoned) military base in Long Island, where Knell climbed over fences (not with that gut) and saw "time ripples" when the creature disappeared.
He has done irreperable harm to the UFO community, which does indeed harm the movement of real investigators trying to discover the truth of whatever is goingon with this phenomenon.
If I see him again, I will be happy to spit in his eye and charge him for an eyewash.
My point is, it is one of the callings, and perhaps among the highest, of The Paracast, to call out these charlatans, to invite them on, and bring the heat. To "out" the plagiarists, the criminals, the cowardly and those that would make a living on hoaxing the gullible public. This is the difference between all those other shows, and the one that we love. Gene and David know that they have a responsibilty to their listeners and all of the members to get at the truth, and to untangle as much of the lies out as they can.
And with people like Knell in the mix, it can be a job combing out all those faulty cords and cables, and still have a show that guests will want to come on, be a part of, and carry on that fine tradition. What our inimitable hosts do is not easy, although they make it look so, and it needs doing.
Who else out there is doing it? Who else does it with the flair and panache that Gene and David do? Throughout all the noise of 2012 and disclosure and exopolitics, and all the other airy-fairy crap of the New Age upon us, it's hard to separate the signal out, and be able to successfully get at the truth.
Which is why we're all here.
We want the truth.
So, yes, Digigeek, despite your opinion that this was the sort of episode of the show that maybe doesn't belong, I submit that this is the heart and soul of The Paracast. This is what The Paracast IS. Expect more of the same, too, because my distinct feeling is that it feels good to our illustrious hosts to do this service for the community. Just as I felt good answering those questions for free afer I gave over 100 people their money back when Knell didn't show up, and spoke for over an hour to those with deep, disturbing questions about what resources they had at their disposal and to whom they should turn, so do Gene and David when they grab a rotten weed like Knell at the roots and pull him up.
They relish it; they are the "Adopt-a-highway" crew of this section of the Extraterrestrial Highway.
There should be more like them. Too many people turn a blind eye to these scum, these lower-than-low--and in their business, they have to be careful to make a distinction between the misinformed, like Paola Harris, the uniformed, the deliberate liars, like Mr. Horn, and the absolute criminals, like Bill Knell.
Exposing trash like Knell is all in a day's work for Gene and David, and it makes me proud to support The Paracast.
If you agree, hit the donation button for five bucks while you're thinking about it--they did a great service for everyone that listened to the show, and I know that the holiday season has been pretty darn lean for them. I speak from personal experience when I say that ad revenues are bottomed out--this is the time of year when companies basically roll up the carpets, close the windows and put a "Be back in February" sign on the door.n Sales are really hard this time of year.
Show your support, and buy 'em a coffee at Starbucks or something for the holidays. There are some great things coming down the pike in 2009, so I hear, and every little bit helps. For all that they've done over the last year, make your New Year's resolution to make a donation if you haven't made one before, and if you have, to give a little extra. They deserve it.
AD ASTRA PER ASPERA!
G
Gil Bavel
Guest
Yes, he was a young science consultant for NASA to CBS, where he sat next to Cronkite during the Apollo missions.
Richard C. Hoagland: Missing Apollo 11 Tapes Pt.1 - Video, Movie
I have a question. Do you know if Knell has any connections to Dick Criswell, another UFO "expert", (alpha con) who by chance lives in the same town of Lebanon, IN. Sounds to me the town full of bullshit artist.
