Brian O’Leary’s Preposterous Life – Part 4

Attempts to defrock Brian and other outrages

Mo Udall was not the first presidential candidate that Brian advised.  His first was George McGovern in 1968.  He also advised Walter Mondale in 1984, Jesse Jackson in 1988, and he worked with presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich on free-energy legislation to support an R&D effort.  Brian was right in the middle of American political life. 

Even though he got Buzz Aldrin a job, Brian had been a NASA gadfly for many years.  As he explored the fringes, he was subjected to defrocking efforts.  Brian published papers while working at Cal Tech, and when a Cal Tech student asked that Brian speak at Cal Tech’s commencement ceremony, there was an attempt to erase Brian at Cal Tech, claiming that he never worked there.  His Cal Tech employment was a matter of public record, as his scientific papers stated his Cal Tech employment, so it was an incompetent attempt at erasing him. 

When Brian was at NASA, he was officially an astronaut.  In 1987, a San Diego Union journalist interviewed Brian and published an article that correctly called him an ex-astronaut.  Wally Schirra, who lived in San Diego, objected to calling Brian an astronaut.  The journalist who published that article was soon looking for a new job, and Schirra proposed a 50-mile-high club.  Under Schirra’s new definition, nobody could call themselves an astronaut unless they had been 50 miles above Earth’s surface.  It was not the only effort to defrock Brian.  Brian had his astronaut credentials challenged by an attorney at MUFON, who stated that NASA informed him that Brian was never an astronaut.  Brian submitted pay stubs and the like, showing that his job title at NASA was an astronaut.  Brian discussed it some in his Camelot interview. 

Even though his NASA biography correctly calls him an astronaut, at Wikipedia, Brian has been posthumously demoted to “astronaut candidate,” which is a designation that did not exist when Brian was at NASA.  There was even a recent attempt to delete his Wikipedia bio altogether.  In a future post, I will write about my adventures in getting his NASA bio published, to then be challenged by a leading space debunker who attacked Brian’s Martian credentials, and he did it incompetently, which is standard for debunkers.  Perhaps the greatest irony of organized skepticism, which claims to speak for honest rationality, is that its efforts are usually incompetent, irrational, dishonest, or all three. 

Brian became a prominent advocate of the scientific investigation of paranormal phenomena, which naturally riled up the “skeptics,” who assume that such phenomena cannot exist, with their materialist religion.  When Brian spoke globally in his last years, he often had a “skeptical” stalker who followed him around the world and tried to undermine his appearances, and it would not surprise me if the “skeptic” was on somebody’s payroll.  I had my own “skeptical” stalker for years.  That space “skeptic” who tried to debunk Brian’s Martian credentials tried to intimidate his debunking targets by bragging about his national security (AKA “spook”) connections, as Phil Klass also did.  Such are the virtues of organized skepticism. 

Brian had his email address on his site, and he regularly received email attacks, which would take the wind out of his sails for a few days.  His email account was hacked and the hacker sent out fake emails from his address, so he had to change his email account. 

Brian’s defrocking had multiple dimensions, as he was cast from the citadel.  While Brian was a NASA gadfly but an Ivy League professor, his op-eds ran in the New York Times.  His books were published by major publishing houses.  When he left the Establishment’s fold, he lost all of that access.  Politicians such as Al Gore did not reply to his letters, and he had to work with fringe publishing houses.  For one of his later books, he had to self-publish and his book distributor went bankrupt with Brian’s entire book inventory in that publisher’s warehouse, which sent Brian into bankruptcy. 

When Brian was on that Fox TV show, expressing his Moon-landing skepticism, it was a bit of a misrepresentation.  The camera crew ambushed Brian, stating that the interview was about Cydonia and Mars, not the Moon landings.  But two hours into the interview, they sprang their Moon-landing question, which was what they were really after.  Those ten seconds on that Fox TV show wrecked Brian’s remaining relationships with his fellow astronauts, as Brian became a pariah.  Brian thought that his free-energy work was his life’s most important effort, but he was an exiled voice in the wilderness by then.  The closer he got to the truth, the more ostracized he became.  I ended up being his final book’s proofreader. 

These are the realities when people challenge our corrupt system, and Brian had a belly full of it, not to mention having his life shortened.