The Skeptical Perspective: When Debunking Goes Bad
I know that I said I was done with responding to Kal Korff, and I know that when I watch Count down with Keith Oberman, I get tired of his rants about Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but sometimes it’s just so much fun.
Take the latest rant. Korff quotes from one of my books and goes into a typical rant.
The quotes that annoy him so much are these: Marcel said about the debris, “I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what we were picking up.” He said that some of the debris was thin as newsprint, feather light but so strong they couldn’t dent it or burn it. He described foil-like material, I-beams, and “…other stuff there that looked very much like parchment that didn’t burn.” Marcel was so impressed by what he had seen that he stopped at his house on the way back to the base. He wanted his wife and son to see the debris. When Jesse Marcel, Jr. saw the strange material, he asked his father what it was.
Marcel, Sr. “It’s a flying saucer.” Marcel, Jr. said that he saw some foil material that was thicker than lead foil and that was much stronger. He mentioned the I-beams which seemed to be made out of layered foil and that was embossed with writing. Marcel Jr. described the writing as, “Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it.
Korff then says, “Well, no folks, he didn’t say it was a flying saucer. They didn’t use that word back then. They said flying disk. That’s it.” Here is the front page of the Roswell Daily Record for July 8, 1947. Clearly it says, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region.” The next day, the headline reads, “Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer.” In case you think that it was only in Roswell that they used that term, though it certainly proves my case because it shows the term in use in Roswell, here, from the Des Moines Register of July 4, 1947, “Army Probes ‘Flying Saucer’ Stories.” And from the Herald American(Syracuse, New York) “Flying Saucers Reported By Scores in 28 States.” So where did he get the idea that they didn’t use the term flying saucer in July 1947? I found lots more examples, so clearly they did.
The other part of the quote that sets him off is the term I-beam. He says that Marcel didn’t use that term and in fact, Marcel said that his son got it wrong.
Well, looking at the interview that Linda Corley did with Jesse Marcel, Sr. in 1981 (and not available until after 1993), it appears that Marcel did say that during her interview. At least it seems that way. Marcel drew a picture of the cross section of one of the smaller members and it is rectangular. If you look at the “I-beam” that Marcel, Jr. (seen on the next page with the replica of the I- beam) had made, you see that it is nearly rectangular as well. Yes, there is a “I” shape to it, but the top and bottom cross beams are small.
And something that Korff fails to report is that Corley said when she shared her tapes with Stan Friedman, she had to go back to create transcripts because the tapes, sitting on a shelf, had degraded quite a bit. They were difficult to understand and Corley had to interpret the words and phrases, so it’s possible that the senior Marcel wasn’t quite as positive as Korff and others now believe.
Korff goes on to say, “Jesse Marcel, Jr., he claims he saw an I-beam and he’s the only one who did… And his father Jesse Marcel, Sr. says, ‘No.’” According to Korff, “Jesse [Jr.] got that wrong. He was a little boy. He was only 11 years old… No other Roswell witness reported I-beams at all. None.
Zero.” Except, of course, for Robert Shirkey, who, in January 1990, in an interview described the scene as some of the debris was carried through the Operations building. In a telephone interview, Shirkey said, “Marcel was carrying a box that had the I-beams sticking up in one corner… Much later, Steve Lytle, in an interview conducted with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, used the term I-beams.
And another, though controversial witness Jack Trowbridge said, “It was aluminum in appearance. There were fragments of aircraft skin, or whatever the thing was and also some girders with pictures of hieroglyphics…” So, Korff goes off on a tangent here, claims that no one else ever mentioned the I-beams and yet, without much effort, I was able to locate two additional witnesses. Trowbridge doesn’t say “I-beam,” but does say girders, which can be construed as an I-beam-like structure and that runs the score to three.
Finally, in this latest mishmash, Korff said, “The U.S. government did launch one [Mogul balloon] to spy on the Soviets…” This isn’t quite right either. Yes, the purpose of Mogul was to spy on the Soviets, but they could never keep the balloons aloft long enough for them to drift over the Soviet Union, and the coming of the spy planes, and much later, satellites, did in the need for Mogul. It just never worked the way it was supposed to.
The real reason that I’m forced to post this here is that Korff, in his YouTube rants, disables the comments section. No one has the opportunity to suggest that maybe he’s off base on his claims. Had I been able to comment on YouTube, I would have done this there rather than use this forum.
Once again I apologize for dragging you all along with me on this, but then, sometimes it is fun to see how badly he muffs the ball.