The January 1995 Skeptics UFO Newsletter (SUN), edited by Philip Klass, includes a report on last October's UFO conference in Pensacola, Florida where Budd Hopkins, a "UFO-abduction guru," reported human-alien hybrids have been produced using earthling sperm and ova. These hybrids "can do all of the things the aliens can do. They can pass through walls. They are telepathic. They are able to control people's behavior, etc. We don't know whether there are in fact hybrids amongst us. I have every reason to believe that is the case - meaning hybrids amongst us who are operating in the real world," Hopkins said.
SUN predicts, "If Hopkins is correct you will soon see Hybrids on professional football teams." Hybrid running backs able to penetrate the wall of the opposing defensive line would face Hybrid defensive players using telepathic skills to keep their team informed about their opponents strategies.
Pat Reeder of the North Texas Skeptics alerted us to a great book called Lady Cottingley's Book of Pressed Fairies. Written by Terry Jones of Monty Python fame, it parodies the Cottingley Fairy fake photographs which fooled Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, in 1918. Quoting Reeder, the story goes that "fairies were appearing to a little girl in Victorian times as she read in her garden. They would land on her book, so she would slam it shut 'SPLAT!' pressing them for posterity! The book is filled with lovely portraits of mashed fairies." At this writing this beautiful book is sold out at most Oregon bookstores, but second printings should arrive sometime in April.
Check out the "Letters to the Editor" section of the April (Fools?) 1995 Scientific American. Billed as "this is no joke: real mail from real readers," it contains such gems as:
Skeptic reports orgonomist, James DeMeo, demonstrated his rain-making ability using his orgone energy 'cloudbuster' for the Colorado River Board of California. The demonstration occurred on November 21, 1994; it is unclear if DeMeo is taking credit for the January and March California floods.
DeMeo's cloud busting technique is derived from the work of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1956). Reich, a psychiatrist who worked with Freud in the 1920s, believed he had discovered 'orgone energy' which could be extracted from the atmosphere with an lorgone energy accumulator.' Reich discovered orgone energy was useful for everything from spontaneous generation of life (in the form of bions) to curing illness (by directing orgone energy to the afflicted body part) to alleviating drought. For a more thorough description of Reich's work see the Skeptical Inquirer (Fall 1988) and Skeptic (Vol. 2 No. 3).
In 1968 Reich's followers founded the American College of Orgonomy (ACO) now located in Princeton, New Jersey. DeMeo is the Director of Research at the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory, Inc., an offshoot of ACO, which bills itself as "a nonprofit science research and educational foundation, since 1978." The corporation, which until recently was located in El Cerrito, California, has apparently decided to relocate in Oregon and is setting up a new "research" facility in the Ashland area.
Evolution was not the only target of the Southern fundamentalists in the 1920s. Nelkin, in the book The Creation Controversy (1982), writes: "The revolt against science also included attempts to prescribe by law that pi should be changed from 3.1416 to 3.0000, partly because it was simple to use, partly because the Bible described Solomon's vase as three times as far around as across."
Stephen Jay Gould, science writer and Harvard paleontologist, has written several essays on his experiences as a scientific witness against the Arkansas and Louisiana laws mandating the teaching of "creation science." About evolution he writes:
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