May 10, 2015 — Red Pill Junkie with Richard Dolan

[Christopher O'Brien]

Gene, since a scam has not been proved yet concerning the event in Mexico City [perhaps one can and will be proved in the case of Adam Dew's activities], you and the others who make this charge are actually opening yourselves to lawsuits for libel and/or slander unless a general scam is *proved*. The careers of three productive and widely respected ufo researchers are being damaged by this internet piling on, and that constitutes significant grounds for damage claims. I don't count Mausson as one of those who could sue if all this continues because has himself has called his work in the ufo field into question many times in the past.

We've been very careful w/ our languaging and have not accused anyone of anything. In fact, we have made it clear that we suspect that Schmidt and Carey were NOT supplied w/ the quality of data that would enable them to come to proper conclusions. If Adam Dew wants to come after us, he's opening up himself to a world of bad publicity and a personalized public smack down w/ prejudice! I ain't no lawyer, but I can say w/ all confidence that we have nothing to worry about from this questionable character...

 

[Han]

Maybe Gene was mistaken? it seems a popular defense these days.........

in solidarity I believe it was a scam too!

If any one wants to sue me fine, I just hope they have a very good lawyer, because they will have a hard time explaining a few facts to the judge.

 

[The 5th Element]

The posters on this thread none need to be Legal Experts to know a great injustice has been played out against thousands, opinions and discussion must be allowed.

Batmmannn: I'm not sure what you're hoping to accomplish here. You can post 100 cartoons and 100 messages and you're never going to get everyone to agree with you. It's just an exercise in frustration on your part. That's life people don't agree and if they get force fed your opinion it will only make things worse. If you personally got "taken" for a streaming fee contact your credit card company and dispute it. Otherwise a class action or any other kind of legal action seems a real long shot. Not enough people are as up in arms as you are. I'm sure we've all blown money on things we feel were misrepresented and felt cheated. I've blown a lot more than $20 on poor decisions and risky endeavors. I've even played a few games of chance at the carnival (A fools errand if there ever was one). As David Hannum said about PT Barnum's hoaxes, "There's a sucker born every minute".

 

[Mulvaney]

Any Attorney would take this case because the payout would be huge. Just the damages alone with 10% interest on the money per year on a five year long law suit would equate to a very large sum which the Attorney could claim 30% on a contingency basis.

I wish you the best. I sometimes (jokingly) tell my wife that when I am ready to quit what I am doing now, I should take on one good class action and have a nice retirement nest egg. The money is not in the contingency fees -- if it went to trial, 30% would not be enough. It is in the attorney fees and the deep pockets of a defendant. This would not be the case I would take for all the reasons discussed above. If you can find somebody, please keep us informed. But I doubt that it will be through this forum.

This is not like the securities fraud that led to a multi-million dollar judgment against Sean David Morton -- who still appears at various conferences and cruises by the way. It is more like the claims that are regularly made at any number of venues. Where would ufology be without everyone from George Adamski or Silas Newton to "Captain" Mark Richards? This is not a question that needs answering, but at some point we start getting more into the realm of entertainment or religion, purported belief in what cannot be proven and stories spun from things that have even less basis than a slide of a mummy that was taken in a museum.

 

[Mulvaney]

If Adam Dew wants to come after us, he's opening up himself to a world of bad publicity and a personalized public smack down w/ prejudice!

I am still wondering whether eventually we will see the movie that Dew may have intended to make all along (about the nature of ufology) or if he will remain silent and hope that nobody checks his resume too carefully. Even Jamie Maussan appears to know that Dew is a real person. So that may be the last unresolved question about the whole incident.

 

[Wade]

I'm sure we've all blown money on things we feel were misrepresented and felt cheated. I've blown a lot more than $20 on poor decisions and risky endeavors. I've even played a few games of chance at the carnival (A fools errand if there ever was one). As David Hannum said about PT Barnum's hoaxes, "There's a sucker born every minute".

For me it was Sea Monkeys but in my defense I was only 12.

 

[Gene Steinberg]

The defense against defamation is the truth. If they can prove the Roswell Slides were what was promised, in other words photos of an alien creature, they'd win hands down. Obviously that ship has sailed.

I did ask a lawyer about one's rights in this case. If it could be demonstrated somehow that those involved in this venture, or at least some of them, knew that the slides depicted a mummy all along but continued to promote the event as something else, that might be evidence of fraud. At the very least, one can challenge the credit card bill for the event, be it attending directly or watching the pay-per-view stream. In the latter case, it may be enough to complain about poor quality even without regard to the content.

I suppose, though, that Mausson could maintain it was all entertainment, and thus they have no obligation other than to put on the show.

 

[red_pill_junkie]

The defense against defamation is the truth. If they can prove the Roswell Slides were what was promised, in other words photos of an alien creature, they'd win hands down. Obviously that ship has sailed.

I did ask a lawyer about one's rights in this case. If it could be demonstrated somehow that those involved in this venture, or at least some of them, knew that the slides depicted a mummy all along but continued to promote the event as something else, that might be evidence of fraud. At the very least, one can challenge the credit card bill for the event, be it attending directly or watching the pay-per-view stream. In the latter case, it may be enough to complain about poor quality even without regard to the content.

I suppose, though, that Mausson could maintain it was all entertainment, and thus they have no obligation other than to put on the show.

With regards to the technical issues which arose during the stream, Maussan has stated that the people who paid for the stream can watch it for free again at the beWITNESS website; and for those who wouldn't accept that, he might be willing to offer something else in exchange --like a subscription to his Tercer Milenio webpage.

I haven't seen if a refund request has been raised by the people who attended the live event; and before you even think about it, I'm not interested in entering that particular quagmire myself. I think Maussan is already aware of who I am, and would no doubt see that as yet another attack against "the truth."

Maybe some other approaches could be entertained. Like for example starting a Change.org campaign demanding, if not a full refund, at least a public apology from the organizers. Other more 'subversive' tactics could be attending the events in which the promoters are engaged to speak in, wearing some kind of satirical T-shirt alluding to the May 5th event. I still think the #beSILENT hashtag coined by Kimball is hilarious, and has a lot of potential

 

[Burnt State]

This is what I found printed in the Ramey Memo using SmartDeBlur 2.30. It's obviously written by a timetraveller.

Re: Open Source Ufology as the way Forward

The Issue: Not only is the issue of reputation at stake but so is the very nature of what reliable research should be about. What we have in this case of the slides is two different kinds of approaches to ufology.

One claims to be about reputable research that is going to: solve the Rowell mystery and prove that the alien body recognized by a lieutenant, no a private, as the same alien he saw in 1947; that the mummy, no alien, is actually following the same evolutionary path as a gecko & is certainly not a human two year old boy, that Eisenhower let a power couple in to see the crash retrieved alien body because the Bushes said that Hilda and Ray were cool. There's the knd of "reputable" research that believes in restriction of information, non-disclosure agreements and impossible scientific claims that a 2-D image is obviously not human. They're basically the Illumanati of ufology.

The other approach to research is about open source, shared information by cabals of UFO dissidents, skeptics, investigators, cataloguers, Agnostics & Gnostics alike. If ufology wants to legitimately move forward and save the public, believerdom, and other faithful from wasting their money, at the very least, then it needs to get with the times. It must start living in the digital era where information should be free, and freely available, not hidden for teasing years to tantalize the believers, only to fall flat on it$ face. When diverse people are allowed to publicly and openly explore evidence the best results are possible.

Turn over the data to the people is what I say. Let's see how the field leaps forward then. Why should it ever be about individual ego and hiding information in order to sell tickets? Decentralize.

 

[Constance]

Yes Gene, I remember the questions that came up during the Watergate scandal -- 'what' did you know?' and 'when did you know it?'. The trial or trials being imagined here could last years, at considerable public expense, especially if there were appeals to higher courts. The process of such trials could be endlessly interesting, among other things raising questions about ufo history and the ETH, which we would like to see engaged in public and widely reported discourse in courts of law. Public consciousness of ufo history would be raised, a reason why such trials might be blocked.

The language of the law in the US is by now saturated with the phrase "knew or should have known," affirming the obligations of corporations and individuals to inform themselves about risks and potential or actual damage their activities pose for the public and the environment. I think a judge or jury in a case prosecuted against the major players in the Roswell Slides investigation would be bound to ask each of the defendants 'what did you know' and 'when did you know it'. And I think a judge assigned to this hypothetical case would be bound to recognize that the subject at the center of the inquiry -- the nature of the body in the glass case -- was a question extremely difficult to answer on the evidential basis of the two slides, indeed impossible to answer without scientific examination of the body itself. Autopsy would likely be only the beginning of such an examination, were there a body to examine. Further expert analysis would be required, by biologists, medical specialists in rare diseases, and even evolutionary scientists. And they might well disagree on their interpretations. There was never a path to certain determination of the actual nature of the body in the glass case given the evidence of only these two slides. Thus a judge or jury might accept the defense of the accused on the basis that actual 'knowledge' was plainly unobtainable in the circumstances, and that the researchers (and showman) presenting the slides in Mexico City had sought sufficient expert *opinion* from appropriately specialized scientists on the basis of the slides.


I also think it's just possible that one of the first questions to be foregrounded in the imagined trial would be whether a 400-year-old mummy could possibly be the remains of an extraterrestrial being rather than a being evolved and born on earth. Of course that question can't be answered by anyone, but the value of having the subject of widely researched anomalies (going back to our ancient past) discussed in an open court of law and propagated in the news media would in itself be worth the cost of a trial in my opinion.

 

[Paul Kimball]

This in from one of our RSRG members who is in contact with Maussan's camp:

"Schmitt is telling Maussan that he confessed due to pressure from a company that'd he'd named, but that actually had not conducted an analysis. The company's lawyer has forced him to deny everything. This is believed to be an excuse by Schmitt to get him out of trouble with Maussan."

And so it continues...

PK

 

[Mulvaney]

Yes Gene, I remember the questions that came up during the Watergate scandal -- 'what' did you know?' and 'when did you know it?'

I do not think a lawsuit would ever get beyond summary judgment, but watergate was one of the first things that came to mind after the RSRG results were posted and the apologies started to come in. Specifically, Arlo Guthries song Presidential Rag:

You said you didn't know
That the cats with the bugs were there
And you never go along
With that kind of stuff no where

But that just isn't the point, man
That's the wrong, wrong way to go
If you didn't know about that one
Well, then what else don't you know?

Its amazing what the mind holds in storage . .. but it could be adapted. . . I suppose all that was needed here was a set of 8x10 large glossies.

 

[The 5th Element]

This in from one of our RSRG members who is in contact with Maussan's camp:

"Schmitt is telling Maussan that he confessed due to pressure from a company that'd he'd named, but that actually had not conducted an analysis. The company's lawyer has forced him to deny everything. This is believed to be an excuse by Schmitt to get him out of trouble with Maussan."

And so it continues...

PK

Such is life as a UFO investigator. How many friendships have been destroyed by these types of "joint ventures"? Or created bad feelings and even legal proceedings between associates. . I think if I were a UFO investigator/author I'd be darn careful with who I enter into a partnership with. There is frequently more soap opera than science in Ufology.

 

[SRL+]

The Roswell UFO Deception: One of the Best Hoaxes ever Perpetuated in the World's Modern History

Was it actually that good?

 

[Walter Bosley]

I've suggested on Radio Misterioso and elsewhere that researchers should investigate the subject/cases under a self-imposed media blackout for a five-year period. I would add to that doing all the due diligence with associates and other interested parties before saying a word publicly about findings. The problem I see is the rush to announce a book or some other product/show before any serious research has been done and then talking it to death in interviews before knowing the results of the investigation or writing word one. Unfortunately there are several folks out there that want to be known as The UFO Guy as opposed to legitimately BEING The UFO Guy aka a credible researcher who actually does the work and finds truths. The rush to publicity and media attention unfortunately derails the work.

 

[Burnt State]

The Roswell UFO Deception: One of the Best Hoaxes ever Perpetuated in the World's Modern History

Was it actually that good?

Definitely not. Good hoaxes manage to sustain themselves longer than a few days. This was a very well organized & marketed bad idea. Might as well been selling mermaids that they assembled. Rick Dyer needs to take notes as this is how you sell a lie. Unfortunately it was an entirely transparent one once told - nothing like a good hoax at all. I thought the coup de grace in this whole farce is that it was Dew who offered up a clear image on his site that the RSRG could confirm as an original slide to deblur which helped them nail the coffin shut. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as when listening to that Misterioso episode. The comedy of errors that went on behind the scenes prove this was far from a masterful hoax, quite shoddy work actually.

 

[Burnt State]

I've suggested on Radio Misterioso and elsewhere that researchers should investigate the subject/cases under a self-imposed media blackout for a five-year period. I would add to that doing all the due diligence with associates and other interested parties before saying a word publicly about findings.

Why work alone in the dark when you can crowd source, get it peer reviewed in real time by as many different skilled people as possible. Why not open source the whole thing instead of limiting it to a small cadre hiding from the public? Isn't that how ideas become too narcissistic.

 

[The 5th Element]

Why work alone in the dark when you can crowd source, get it peer reviewed in real time by as many different skilled people as possible. Why not open source the whole thing instead of limiting it to a small cadre hiding from the public? Isn't that how ideas become too narcissistic.

Yep, ego and money that's why most of the time. Of course when you do have many people involved it can end up in Legal hassles, hurt feelings and much of the "in-fighting" we've come to expect in ufology.

 

[SRL+]

Definitely not. Good hoaxes manage to sustain themselves longer than a few days. This was a very well organized & marketed bad idea. Might as well been selling mermaids that they assembled. Rick Dyer needs to take notes as this is how you sell a lie. Unfortunately it was an entirely transparent one once told - nothing like a good hoax at all. I thought the coup de grace in this whole farce is that it was Dew who offered up a clear image on his site that the RSRG could confirm as an original slide to deblur which helped them nail the coffin shut. I don't think I've ever laughed so hard as when listening to that Misterioso episode. The comedy of errors that went on behind the scenes prove this was far from a masterful hoax, quite shoddy work actually.

Apparently, Mr. Bob Gore is unfamiliar with Mr. R.E. Straith from the “Cultural Exchange Committee”.

 

[Mulvaney]

Apparently, Mr. Bob Gore is unfamiliar with Mr. R.E. Straith from the “Cultural Exchange Committee”.

Now that you mention it, perhaps Mr. Straith was one of the governmental experts who analyzed the slides before the Reveal.