Tai:
An excellent interview Mike Adams did with Steven. Mike can take this mainstream because so many high level security people have already exposed the truth. I don't agree with Steven's enthusiasm. It's frightening. Cloning is showing that technology could ruin humans. I will restrain myself from saying more. First, people need to be aware of the basics.

[www.youtube.com]

Tai:
I don't agree it is the greatest secret. That shows his blinders. But it's worth watching.

[www.youtube.com]

Dr Steven Greer 2017 - UNACKNOWLEDGED AN EXPOSE OF THE GREATEST SECRET IN HUMAN HISTORY

This Thread is a PERFECT example of Controlled Opposition!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2017 03:55AM by John Rose.

(OCUPYTHEORY) London

John Rose Your good ole Dr Greer is woo woo to say the least.
Id be embarresed to quote suck a freak.
Read about the Dr Steven Greer John Rose posted link to.


Steven Greer Hoax Debunked


OccupyTheory
on 28 November, 2014 at 10:00
If you’ve ever witnessed a Dr. Steven Greer lecture, then you’ve probably noticed that his talks are a lot like reading a James Patterson novel. You get about two or three pages of data, then a new chapter begins with different data. You’re left with the idea that all of these ideas are cohesive, but in reality, what Greer has left you with is a lot of assumptions. By placing UFO cases and witness accounts into one lecture, participants are left believing that they are all interconnected.

The only problem is that the Steven Greer hoax is one that can easily be debunked. There is no analysis of evidence, no verification of any claim, and no due diligence taken. Based on that set of circumstances, anyone could say that they were from Alpha Centauri, sent to Earth to mate with 2,000 humans, and then kidnap the off-spring from that coupling to Mars to establish a new alien hybrid colony and have it be fact.

Was September 11 All a Conspiracy?

The 2001 Disclosure Project was a massive press conference that allowed Greer to make a lot of amazing claims about extra-terrestrial life, but none of those claims could be verified. According to him, this is because the press was only given 4 months to completely verify his facts. When September 11, 2001 came and its tragic events changed the world, the press was obviously preoccupied by such a story.

In other words, the terrorists were a conspiracy to stop the proof of extra-terrestrial life from being finally proven as true.

To that extent, Greer followed up his press conference a dozen years later with a UFO documentary called “Sirius.” He basically makes two claims in this movie: that free energy is possible and that there is evidence of a dead alien. This leads to a natural question: why are all aliens in UFO documentaries dead?

Should Greer Be Considered As Entertainment Only?

The problem that Steven Greer has is that in order to establish his own credibility, he has been forced to exaggerate or explicitly lie in order to make his case for UFOs. Even his alleged conversation about UFOs with the Director of the CIA was not anywhere near what everyone else at that gathering remembers and they put their memories into response letters to discredit Greer’s claims.

As for the alien that appears in Greer’s film, the fact that it is being cross-promoted as an ancient human with dwarfism and an alien at the same time means that there is something completely wrong with whatever this “corpse” happens to be. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the next promotional claims be that this figure is an alien human hybrid that was sent to Mars.

With zero verifiable facts and only a large number of stories that are repeatedly told, it is clear that Steven Greer is committing a large hoax on the general public. Once the “facts” are tested, they don’t stand up to any scrutiny. That is the classic definition of a life

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2017 06:51AM by riverhousebill.

( THE ANGRY UFOLOGIST)

John more on your Mad Dr Greer.
This Thread is a PERFECT example of Controlled Opposition!





Let's take a quick break from this article and check out the latest video from The Angry UFOlogist




Article Continues Now...

Greer is probably most famous for his Disclosure Project. His famous press conference, available on his website, in the summer of 2001 brought many witnesses before the microphone to ask for Congressional hearings on the subject. Unfortunately, he brought forth some serious loonies as well, which had the effect of casting doubt on the credible witnesses. Greer is solidly in the Exopolitics camp, which has failed to dislodge one shred of evidence of alien visitation. Sorry, Steve Bassett, you anchored your horse to a mad man.




Greer is quick with “the truth” and how the field of UFOlogy is often marginalized and subjected to ridicule while the faceless and nameless bad guys rush in to cover it all up. The reality here is one need not look any further than Greer (among others) for the real problem the UFO field is faced with: The charlatans , delusional personalities, and outright sensationalists who are taking center stage with their completely unfounded and often times exaggerated claims, citing anonymous sources, and offering of not a shred of tangible evidence as to those claims. Always convenient, always bullshit.

For a time Greer’s website sported the creature on the left claiming it had been photographed during one of Greer’s midnight UFO vectoring sessions along with various entities looking suspiciously like lens reflections. Affectionately dubbed ‘Mothra’ by Greer’s detractors, this picture and others like it were removed to howls of laughter.

Not to be outdone, Greer also claims he has developed a ‘zero point’ energy device that can be held in one hand and is capable of powering small cities. His website for THIS venture is the Advanced Energy Research Organization (AERO) which claims such technologies have been brutally suppressed by Big Oil, Nasty Government, and assorted other villains. It is supposed to be available Real Soon Now, any day, right around the corner, imminently. And in the meantime, you surely can invest in this technology which will make you insanely rich. You would have to be insanely gullible to invest in anything this man touches.

Just think about it. After fifteen years, AERO, and its predecessors have not generated one single watt of electricity. But Greer has held one of these devices in his hands, just as he has held an alien baby in his arms.

Greer is a verifiable medical doctor. He could not tell that his alien baby was human? What crap any physician would be able to tell that little fellow was full human. He threw out his medical ethics and showed his hand of being a con-artist when he claimed this was an alien. It has been proven subsequently to be a human fetus…explain your bullshit, Greer.

Yep, the cover-up was on once again with Greer not being able to name his supposed insider sources, not providing a speck of evidence, and Greer once again representing “the truth” about UFOs. You people don’t really believe he consults with world leaders…what bullshit. Prove it Greer you flatulent douchebag.

In Stephen Greer’s book, Extraterrestrial Contact, Greer claimed to have been directly briefed about UFOs by R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, at a dinner party. Shortly after Greer published his book with his apparently exaggerated account of what had taken place, Woolsey and others present at the dinner sent Greer a letter trying to set the record straight. While this is old news, it has been hidden fairly well to keep the image of this delusional lunatic intact.

(https://respectfulinsolence.com)

John you have quoted two complete frauds Greer and Adams whats up?


Now a little on this guy Mike Adams who John rose linked above.
John realy now these guys Adams and Greer?????? This Thread is a PERFECT example of Controlled Opposition! Do you think so Rose?

Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, a health scamster profiled

OracMarch 11, 2015 83 Comments


Anyone who’s read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on celebrities who have died of cancer; mockery of his pretending to be a scientist and attacking Jimmy Kimmel for “hate speech” about vaccines; alarm at his threats delivered with somewhat plausible deniability against scientists; further alarm at his “natural biopreparedness” and homeopathy for Ebola; and, of course amusement at his New World Order conspiracy mongering. In terms of blog fodder, Adams is the gift that keeps on giving. Unfortunately, in terms of his influence against science and medicine and for pseudoscience and quackery, his influence is not insubstantial, so much so that when the opportunity presents itself I feel obligated to discuss him.

The opportunity has presented itself in the form of an excellent summation of the empire of pseudoscience and quackery that is Mike Adams by Sacha Feinman entitled Meet The Internet Entrepreneur Profiting Off The Anti-Vaxxer Movement. Of course, I have one quibble about this title. Adams profits off of way more than the antivaccine movement. Quackery, fear mongering about food, Scientology-like hatred of psychiatry to the point where after the Sandy Hook school massacre, he immediately blamed psychiatric medications for the rampage of Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the massacre. But that’s just a quibble. The article itself tells the tale quite well. It also confirms something I’ve been writing for quite a while now, namely how Adams got his quacky start selling Y2K scams:


Towards the turn of the millennium, the Y2K bug was much on the mind of the media, representing perhaps the first great conspiracy of the digital age. True believers held that the seemingly simple switchover from 12/31/99 to 1/1/00 would cause computers and electronic systems the world over to crash, triggering international crises of every conceivable sort. Adams saw the opportunity in the situation, and began to sell supposed “information products” that would insulate his paying audience from the oncoming chaos, which, of course, never came.

In a since-deleted excerpt on Adams’ site published by ZDNet, Adams boasted that in 1999, “in an effort to fine-tune his web marketing techniques, Michael [Adams] launched a six-month experiment to determine what kind of revenues are possible when combining his proprietary techniques and technologies with a high-awareness topic. The result? With the help of only one employee, he created a subscriber base of over 50,000 people and sold over $400,000 worth of information products while offering an open-ended, 100% moneyback [sic] guarantee.”

This subscriber base was largely won over by Adams’ then infamous “39 Unanswered Questions about Y2K.” In a foreshadowing of the sorts of the “listicles” that would drive traffic to both Natural News and the site’s advertisers (not to mention BuzzFeed), Adams demonstrated a remarkable ability to frame a controversial issue in a manner perfectly suited for digital consumption. The widely shared email consisted of a series of fear-mongering questions such as, “Why is there not a single Fortune 1000 firm that has said, in its 10-Q SEC statement, that it is fully, unequivocally Y2K-compliant?” Critics panned the listicle as, “a national spamming campaign against the press and politicians to stir up enough anxiety to clear the shelves of Y2K supplies” and, “the best publicity stunt I’ve seen.”
“
So from the beginning, Adams was talented. He saw the possibilities in web marketing to drive traffic to his sites and use that to monetize them very early on, and to monetize them selling scams. In this, we can see him honing his early techniques. Indeed, he took it far beyond just that, mastering the dark arts of using “black hat” search engine optimization, running link farms, and using those skills to drive traffic back to his site. It turns out that the skill set that made Adams so talented at crafting mass e-mail marketing campaigns that actually persuaded the marks to give up their money is the same skill set that he later honed to become an expert at SEO.

But how successful has he been? According to Feinman:


According to the service comScore, Natural News hosted over 2 million unique visitors in the month of December 2014. The website’s Google PageRank is a respectable six, the same number enjoyed by other, more mainstream preachers of the “natural” space. The CEO of Whole Foods John Mackey’s blog also receives a six, as do the landing pages for Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra.

Adams claims that he has, “personally authored over 2,000 articles, including investigative articles, satire and op-ed,” and that “his writings have been collectively read by over 100 million people over the past decade.” Every time Adams publishes a story with a headline such as, “Medical mafia calling for gunpoint quarantines of citizens who refuse vaccinations”, it’s pushed out to the newsfeeds of the nearly 1.5 million Facebook accounts who “like” Natural News. This number far surpasses that of The Atlantic, and falls just short of the Los Angeles Times.
“
Ha! Well, I’ve personally authored over 4,000 blog posts. So there! Unfortunately, even with the boost in my traffic over the last two weeks due to the Jess Ainscough post, my traffic is nowhere near what Adams’ is regularly. Neither is that of pretty much any skeptical blog or website that I am aware of. Naturally, Adams’ numbers are probably inflated due to all his SEO manipulation and link farming, but, even so, that’s still impressive, impressive enough to be depressing. It’s particularly pressing to note that last year Adams was even featured on an episode of The Dr. Oz Show, where his not-so-mad skillz doing mass spectrometry to measure heavy metals in food were on display for real chemists to ridicule, as mentioned in the article:


Opaqueness is common throughout Adams’ world, even as he consistently lobbies for greater transparency in the variety of causes he writes about.

The Consumer Wellness Center, a tax-exempt organization based in Wyoming, operates the labs which conducted Adams’ research on purportedly toxic levels of heavy metals in organic foods. While a recent press release from the center originates from Tucson, Arizona, the organization’s website, like many in Adams’ empire, is registered to a P.O. box in Taichung City, Taiwan.

As for the lab itself and the instrumentation it utilizes, the website simply reads that, “our instrumentation is certified by our manufacturers, our external standards are traceable to NIST, and our methodologies are based on EPA-published laboratory protocols.” The letter from Adams’ lawyers states that the lab has “applied for and anticipates receipt of ISO 17025 accreditation,” a typical standard for demonstrating the technical competency of labs.

“With this sort of testing, you have to be able to replicate exactly what you are doing,” stresses Chris Vulpe, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology. “It has to be laid out in excruciating details.”
“
Yep. Just as I’ve explained.

I’m glad to see a mainstream website paying attention to the Mike Adams phenomenon. Adams has been laying down his misinformation about science and medicine for so long and his history so shrouded in the mists of time—Internet time, that is, where traces disappear a lot faster—that it’s high time that someone has looked into his background and activities. Basically, this article doesn’t really tell me what I didn’t already know about Adams from having followed him over the years. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to have the information in a convenient one-stop-shop to use whenever a clueless Facebook friend posts it on your wall. I recommend using it liberally.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2017 07:24AM by riverhousebill.

RHB, what do you mean that John quoted Mike Adams and Steven Greer? I posted this link, not John. JOhn actually was snubbing this thread with his comment. If there is anyone to criticize here, it's me, not john.

the reason I posted these videos is
1) recent news....2017 videos
2) if anyone wants to talk about conspiracies like John Rose about the powers that be, then why not address the black budget, where all the missing trillions are going, why not address the many eyewitnesses that are talking about reverse engineering UFO craft at area 51, seeing grey biological beings at area 51. why not talk about where this rapidly advancing technology is taking human beings, such as cloning and RFID chips, etc.

Anyway, I appreciate the info on Steven, RHB. I haven't looked into his background. I didn't watch steven in the past. It was interesting to me that MIke Adams recommended the movie. I also haven't looked into MIke Adams but I have appreciated the handful of videos of his that I have watched.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/30/2017 09:27AM by Tai.

Mike Adams has been proved over time he is a health scamer.
Greers past I knew nothing of till I googled the Dr., His claims are bazarr.
Got my wires crossed on who postd. Sorry John Rose

where all the missing trillions are going,

The book Paying Any Price details where a lot of that money has gone.

Quote
riverhousebill

Mike Adams has been proved over time he is a health scamer.

I always thought he had some good health information on his website. What specifically do you mean by 'health scamer'? Can you give any examples? Do you mean he 'scams' people out of money or that he disseminates incorrect health information or what?

RHB, I don't have time to attack or defend a person here. The topics that Steven and Mike discuss are discussed by many. So, to me, the message, not the messenger should be analyzed as the priority. That's just me. I don't mind if you dig up dirt on any of them.

Mike is saying here that they have an accredited lab whose findings can be used in a court of law. The article you found is from 2015, which is old news.

[cwclabs.com]

Accredited Lab

Our international accreditation is beyond the scope of most U.S. university labs. Our laboratory results can be cited as evidence by any court of law, anywhere in the developed world.
ISO 17025 Accredited by PJLA w Accreditation Number: 83279 Certificate Number: L16-224. Click to view certificate (PDF)

Quote
riverhousebill

(https://respectfulinsolence.com)

John you have quoted two complete frauds Greer and Adams whats up?

Now a little on this guy Mike Adams who John rose linked above.
John realy now these guys Adams and Greer?????? This Thread is a PERFECT example of Controlled Opposition! Do you think so Rose?

Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, a health scamster profiled

OracMarch 11, 2015 83 Comments


Anyone who’s read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on celebrities who have died of cancer; mockery of his pretending to be a scientist and attacking Jimmy Kimmel for “hate speech” about vaccines; alarm at his threats delivered with somewhat plausible deniability against scientists; further alarm at his “natural biopreparedness” and homeopathy for Ebola; and, of course amusement at his New World Order conspiracy mongering. In terms of blog fodder, Adams is the gift that keeps on giving. Unfortunately, in terms of his influence against science and medicine and for pseudoscience and quackery, his influence is not insubstantial, so much so that when the opportunity presents itself I feel obligated to discuss him.

The opportunity has presented itself in the form of an excellent summation of the empire of pseudoscience and quackery that is Mike Adams by Sacha Feinman entitled Meet The Internet Entrepreneur Profiting Off The Anti-Vaxxer Movement. Of course, I have one quibble about this title. Adams profits off of way more than the antivaccine movement. Quackery, fear mongering about food, Scientology-like hatred of psychiatry to the point where after the Sandy Hook school massacre, he immediately blamed psychiatric medications for the rampage of Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the massacre. But that’s just a quibble. The article itself tells the tale quite well. It also confirms something I’ve been writing for quite a while now, namely how Adams got his quacky start selling Y2K scams:


Towards the turn of the millennium, the Y2K bug was much on the mind of the media, representing perhaps the first great conspiracy of the digital age. True believers held that the seemingly simple switchover from 12/31/99 to 1/1/00 would cause computers and electronic systems the world over to crash, triggering international crises of every conceivable sort. Adams saw the opportunity in the situation, and began to sell supposed “information products” that would insulate his paying audience from the oncoming chaos, which, of course, never came.

In a since-deleted excerpt on Adams’ site published by ZDNet, Adams boasted that in 1999, “in an effort to fine-tune his web marketing techniques, Michael [Adams] launched a six-month experiment to determine what kind of revenues are possible when combining his proprietary techniques and technologies with a high-awareness topic. The result? With the help of only one employee, he created a subscriber base of over 50,000 people and sold over $400,000 worth of information products while offering an open-ended, 100% moneyback [sic] guarantee.”

This subscriber base was largely won over by Adams’ then infamous “39 Unanswered Questions about Y2K.” In a foreshadowing of the sorts of the “listicles” that would drive traffic to both Natural News and the site’s advertisers (not to mention BuzzFeed), Adams demonstrated a remarkable ability to frame a controversial issue in a manner perfectly suited for digital consumption. The widely shared email consisted of a series of fear-mongering questions such as, “Why is there not a single Fortune 1000 firm that has said, in its 10-Q SEC statement, that it is fully, unequivocally Y2K-compliant?” Critics panned the listicle as, “a national spamming campaign against the press and politicians to stir up enough anxiety to clear the shelves of Y2K supplies” and, “the best publicity stunt I’ve seen.”
“
So from the beginning, Adams was talented. He saw the possibilities in web marketing to drive traffic to his sites and use that to monetize them very early on, and to monetize them selling scams. In this, we can see him honing his early techniques. Indeed, he took it far beyond just that, mastering the dark arts of using “black hat” search engine optimization, running link farms, and using those skills to drive traffic back to his site. It turns out that the skill set that made Adams so talented at crafting mass e-mail marketing campaigns that actually persuaded the marks to give up their money is the same skill set that he later honed to become an expert at SEO.

But how successful has he been? According to Feinman:


According to the service comScore, Natural News hosted over 2 million unique visitors in the month of December 2014. The website’s Google PageRank is a respectable six, the same number enjoyed by other, more mainstream preachers of the “natural” space. The CEO of Whole Foods John Mackey’s blog also receives a six, as do the landing pages for Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra.

Adams claims that he has, “personally authored over 2,000 articles, including investigative articles, satire and op-ed,” and that “his writings have been collectively read by over 100 million people over the past decade.” Every time Adams publishes a story with a headline such as, “Medical mafia calling for gunpoint quarantines of citizens who refuse vaccinations”, it’s pushed out to the newsfeeds of the nearly 1.5 million Facebook accounts who “like” Natural News. This number far surpasses that of The Atlantic, and falls just short of the Los Angeles Times.
“
Ha! Well, I’ve personally authored over 4,000 blog posts. So there! Unfortunately, even with the boost in my traffic over the last two weeks due to the Jess Ainscough post, my traffic is nowhere near what Adams’ is regularly. Neither is that of pretty much any skeptical blog or website that I am aware of. Naturally, Adams’ numbers are probably inflated due to all his SEO manipulation and link farming, but, even so, that’s still impressive, impressive enough to be depressing. It’s particularly pressing to note that last year Adams was even featured on an episode of The Dr. Oz Show, where his not-so-mad skillz doing mass spectrometry to measure heavy metals in food were on display for real chemists to ridicule, as mentioned in the article:


Opaqueness is common throughout Adams’ world, even as he consistently lobbies for greater transparency in the variety of causes he writes about.

The Consumer Wellness Center, a tax-exempt organization based in Wyoming, operates the labs which conducted Adams’ research on purportedly toxic levels of heavy metals in organic foods. While a recent press release from the center originates from Tucson, Arizona, the organization’s website, like many in Adams’ empire, is registered to a P.O. box in Taichung City, Taiwan.

As for the lab itself and the instrumentation it utilizes, the website simply reads that, “our instrumentation is certified by our manufacturers, our external standards are traceable to NIST, and our methodologies are based on EPA-published laboratory protocols.” The letter from Adams’ lawyers states that the lab has “applied for and anticipates receipt of ISO 17025 accreditation,” a typical standard for demonstrating the technical competency of labs.

“With this sort of testing, you have to be able to replicate exactly what you are doing,” stresses Chris Vulpe, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology. “It has to be laid out in excruciating details.”
“
Yep. Just as I’ve explained.

I’m glad to see a mainstream website paying attention to the Mike Adams phenomenon. Adams has been laying down his misinformation about science and medicine for so long and his history so shrouded in the mists of time—Internet time, that is, where traces disappear a lot faster—that it’s high time that someone has looked into his background and activities. Basically, this article doesn’t really tell me what I didn’t already know about Adams from having followed him over the years. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to have the information in a convenient one-stop-shop to use whenever a clueless Facebook friend posts it on your wall. I recommend using it liberally.

rhb, here's the live link to the above article you copied and pasted in the post above -

[respectfulinsolence.com]

To post a live link to an article you're referring to or quoting, just click the URL address, at the top of the page containing the article, in the address bar and when it's highlighted in dark blue, press Control and C on your keyboard. That copies the address of the article. Then when you want to put the link to the article or page in a post or someplace, press Control and V on your keyboard and the web address of the article should show up as a live link when you post it.

About the above article you posted, rhb, trashing Mike Adams -

The author is jealous of Mike Adams' popularity and readership because he says -

"Unfortunately, even with the boost in my traffic over the last two weeks due to the Jess Ainscough post, my traffic is nowhere near what Adams’ is regularly. Neither is that of pretty much any skeptical blog or website that I am aware of."

So your article, rhb, is mostly quoting this article in Think Progress -

Meet The Internet Entrepreneur Profiting Off The Anti-Vaxxer Movement

[thinkprogress.org]

Think Progress (and Media Matters, which was created by Hillary Clinton) is the media machine of the Center for American Progress which is a front group for Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

[leftexposed.org]

[www.discoverthenetworks.org]

[archive.frontpagemag.com]

So in other words, the left hates Mike Adams. And a big reason is because he's an "Anti-Vaxxer" and that's drives them crazy.

Only True Health Seekers and probably most Raw Foodists are Anti-Vaxxers.

Mike is saying here that they have an accredited lab whose findings can be used in a court of law. The article you found is from 2015, which is old news.


Tai, I have read about Mike Adams from the many sorces, quoted by the Literacy Project.
If you google Mike Adams you will see there is a long list who say he is a danger, Not just one old article i posted.

I still go with science ,Our candle in the dark,
We have a choice- Science or Ideolgy, from what I have read Adams is a Ideolgy
for profit misinformation Minister.


What do you think about Adams quote on killing scientist?

Im not atacking no one here, Im just reading these things about Mike Adams from many sorces as you can see from G L project.



(GENENTIC LITERACY PROJECT)

Science Not Ideology
[geneticliteracyproject.org]
NaturalNews’ Mike Adams asks anti-GMOers to kill scientists, supporters of crop biotech
Keith Kloor | July 24, 2014 | Discover



Science journalist Keith Kloor has been following the latest in a long string of deranged postings by natural/alternative medicine products huckster Mike Adams, the self-proclaimed ‘Health Ranger.” In his Tuesday post, in Mike Adams, Monsanto, Nazis and a very disturbing article, Kloor explains how Adams literally appears to have gone off the psychological deep end, calling for a mass uprising against agricultural biotechnology, including killing–yes, murder–of anyone–scientists, policy official or journalist–that wants to give the emerging technology a fair shake.

NOTE: GLP’s Jon Entine has written an article on Mike Adams in April, 2014 that apparently irked the Health Ranger.

As Kloor writes in a follow up commentary on July 24: “The article was accompanied by Nazi imagery and horrible pictures of the Holocaust. Adams equated Hitler’s propagandists with today’s media outlets and journalists who “have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of ‘feeding the world’ with toxic GMOs.”

NOTE: Here is link from wayback machine to the inflammatory Mike Adams post that he since removed.

NOTE: Here is the Genetic Literacy Project profile of Mike Adams.

“As if this wasn’t bad enough,” Kloor writes, “Adams then chillingly suggests (his emphasis)…”


that it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.

“This creepy, disturbing rant has taken a darker turn,” Kloor adds. “Today, I woke up to an update posted by Adams:


After this story was first published, someone has indeed launched a website that appears to be inspired by a suggestion from this story. The Monsanto Collaborators website lists the names of journalists and publications that the site says have contributed to the agricultural genocide of GMOs, comparing the 250,000+ suicides caused by GMOs to “genocide” and the Holocaust.

“Yeah, we can guess who that “someone” is,” Kloor writes. “This update by Adams singles out Jon Entine and the ‘Monsanto Collaborators’ website lists a number of publishers and journalists, including myself.”

Here is Kloor’s reactions to Adams first deranged post.

*******************************

I really thought Mike Adams couldn’t write anything more possibly deranged than he already has at his Natural News website. (Readers of this blog have seen a freaky side of Adams.) Jon Entine has the scoop on his editorial output and alt-med empire. Entine’s piece, which Forbes cravenly took down (after Adams threatened to sue), asked if Adams was the “most ‘dangerous’ anti-science GMO critic?”

That was meant as a rhetorical question, since Adams spouts all manner of outrageous misinformation on GMOs. But after reading the latest piece on GMOs by Adams, I have to wonder if he is literally dangerous. Here’s the title of his piece:


Biotech genocide, Monsanto collaborators and the Nazi legacy of ‘science’ as justification for murder

Here’s how it starts:


(NaturalNews) Monsanto is widely recognized as the most hated and most evil corporation on the planet. Even so, several internet-based media websites are now marching to Monsanto’s orders, promoting GMOs and pursuing defamatory character assassination tactics against anyone who opposes GMOs, hoping to silence their important voices. … All of them are Monsanto collaborators who have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of “feeding the world” with toxic GMOs.

He goes on to talk about Nazi collaborators and how this history has a modern-day parallel:


Today, a number of once-independent media sites are selling out to corporate interests and quickly becoming Monsanto collaborators. This is readily apparent by noticing which media sites attack Dr. Mercola, the Food Babe, Jeffrey Smith, the Health Ranger or anyone else fighting against the scourge of GMO genocide against humanity. These attacks all have one thing in common: they are orchestrated by paid biotech muckrakers — people I call “Monsanto collaborators.”

But towards the end is where this rant turns really disturbing:


Interestingly, just yesterday German President Joachim Gauck celebrated the lives of those brave Nazi officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. Their attempted Wolf’s Lair bombing failed, but it was an honorable attempt to rid the world of tremendous evil by killing one of the people responsible for it.

This official ceremony sends a message to the world, and that official message from the nation of Germany to the rest of the world says that it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.

Adams bolded those words for emphasis. What do you think he’s suggesting there? Maybe Dr. Oz could ask him the next time he invites Adams on to his show.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2017 03:20AM by riverhousebill.

(Wikipedia)


Media Matters for America


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Media Matters" redirects here. It is not to be confused with the 2002–2012 radio program hosted by Robert W. McChesney.

Media Matters for America


Formation

May 3, 2004; 13 years ago



Founder

David Brock



Founded at

Washington, D.C., U.S.

Type

501(c)(3) nonprofit


President

Angelo Carusone

Affiliations

American Bridge 21st Century Super PAC, Media Matters Action Network (501(c)(4))


Mission

"Monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."



Website

MediaMatters.org

quote Jennifer-Think Progress (and Media Matters, which was created by Hillary Clinton) is the media machine of the Center for American Progress which is a front group for Hillary Clinton and George Soros.

Hog wash Jennifer, Can You Show any logical proof to that claim?

David Brock not Hillary


Media Matters for America (MMfA) is a politically progressive media watchdog in the United States. The organization has a stated mission of "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media".[2][3] Set up as a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, MMfA was founded in 2004 by journalist and political activist David Brock as a counterweight to the conservative Media Research Center.[4] It is known for its aggressive criticism of conservative journalists and media outlets, including its "War on Fox News."[5][6]

This is Mike Adams comment about being accused of advocating killing Monsanto's people who are committing heinous crimes against humanity,

Here is MIke Adam's comment about it:
[www.naturalnews.com]#

That story quickly became the most maliciously and intentionally mis-quoted story of the year, with media outlets knowingly and falsely attributing quotes to me personally which I had attributed in the story to the German government. This mis-quoting tactic used by the media was so incredibly unethical and malicious that it astonished many observers who became increasingly convinced that pro-Monsanto news outlets had surrendered any semblance of credibility. (It now turns out that many internet-based news organizations changed their tune on GMOs after receiving investment money or grant money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, but that's another story.)

Every media attempt to attack this story deliberately refused to print the most important quote in my original story, which openly stated: "For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone, and I believe every condemned criminal deserves a fair trial and a punishment that fits the crime. Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes."

Not one attack piece in the media dared print that statement. They all engaged in malicious misquoting in order to paint a falsehood, which is precisely the kind of junk science tactic used by the biotech industry itself to commit scientific fraud.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2017 05:16AM by Tai.

geneticliteracyproject.org]


Mike Adams claims Monsanto set up “kill GMO supporters” website, as scientists, journalists face death threats
Jon Entine & Paul Raeburn | July 25, 2014 | Knight Science Journalism Tracker

That post 2014, If there was any kind of slander you would think Mike Adams might also be able to sue for slander, I wonder why not? with so many credible sorces quoting him? Years now. No slander lawsuite
Ive googled and read from many credible orgs who see Adams as a danger, and from what Ive read I agree.
Lets just see now why he was delisted, Im very curious as to why?
Im happy to see face book and others cleaning house, I dont think the delisting of people like Richard Spencer is censorship, You read my feelings on hate, spin, dangerous speech.
Tai there is just so much on Adams and maybe he is working for MonSatin?
To make GMO oppents look stupid.

Knight Science Journalism’s Paul Raeburn has weighed in on the increasingly sordid Mike Adams fiasco.

He writes: An anti-GMO activist has compared some science journalists and publications to the Nazis, saying they are “Monsanto collaborators who have signed on to accelerate heinous crimes being committed against humanity under the false promise of ‘feeding the world’ with toxic GMOs.”

In the post on his Natural News blog, Mike Adams also writes that ” it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.”

It is not known whether Adams is behind a separate website that appeared called Monsanto Collaborators, which listed more than a dozen science writers as collaborators, including Keith Kloor, Jon Entine, Brooke Borel, and others. It also listed Discover, National Geographic, MIT’s Technology Review, and Forbes.com, among others, as “publisher collaborators.”

NOTE: The GLP has been able to confirm that Adams is indeed the mastermind and financier behind the Monsanto Collaborator’s website. The story has now taken an even more bizarre twist, as Adams, facing multiple investigations from law enforcement officials, including the FBI, is now trying to make it appear that not only did he not oversee the project, but that it was a set up by Monsanto in a twisted plot to discredit anti-GMO critics.

This is Adams’ latest, twisted post on NaturalNews:


UPDATE 2: After careful analysis, I have come to the conclusion that the Monsanto Collaborators website is a bait-and-switch trap engineered by the biotech industry in an effort to lure in support from GMO skeptics and then discredit them with some sort of insane “call to action” of some kind. Click here to see the evidence and reasoning on this. Because of this, I am recommending that members of the GMO skeptics community refrain from linking to or endorsing the Monsanto Collaborators website.

Additionally, immediately upon publication of this article, the usual GMO corporate shills immediately began to spread utterly false and defamatory information about what this article actually stated, inventing false quotes and intentionally citing sentences out of context. We expect nothing less than lies and fabrications from the GMO crowd, of course, but they have taken it to a whole new level in their attempts to silence this powerful story that tells the truth about the agricultural holocaust that has already killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.


I have always stated in this story, as you can see below: “For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone, and I believe every condemned criminal deserves a fair trial and a punishment that fits the crime. Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes.”

Adds Raebun: Kloor has been most responsible for calling attention to Adams, reporting in May on his Discover blog Collide-a-Scape that Adams appeared as a guest on The Dr. Oz Show on May 13.Kloor also reported in that post that Adams had threatened Jon Entine, who wrote a profile of Adams headlined, in part, “Most ‘dangerous’ anti-science GMO critic?”, which appeared on the website of The Genetic Literacy Project and was cross-posted to Forbes, where Entine is a contributor. Entine says Adams threatened him and Forbes with legal action over what Adams said were inaccuracies in the profile.

NOTE: Mother Jones reported on this story as well although it provides no response to his allegations. Further, at the bottom of the page carrying the article it goes on to note, if you like this story you might also be interested in: Monsanto GM Soy Is Scarier Than You Think… 5 Ways Monsanto Wants to Profit Off Climate Change… and other reports attacking Monsanto. One has to wonder whether Mother Jones is part of the problem that encourages the Mike Adamses of the world? A more responsive and responsible reaction from the progressive community can be found in this post in Forward Progressive by Manny Shewitz.

Read the full, original article: Are these science writers and publications facing death threats for covering GMOs?

FBI turns up heat on Mike Adams as ‘Health Ranger’ fiasco widens, plus Adams’ archive
Jon Entine | July 28, 2014 | Genetic Literacy Project








via "This Week in Pseudo Science"


Last week, Mike Adams, the founder and editor of NaturalNews.com–a favorite site of Dr. Oz and anti-GMO campaigners, from Vandana Shiva to Center for Food Safetey’s Andrew Kimbrell to the Food Babe to Jeffrey Smith, but also dubbed by scientists and journalists as the number one anti-science site in cyberspace–launched an all out offensive against crop biotechnology.

Adams posted a screed on his website (this pre-censored post, since sanitized by Adams, has been preserved on the wayback machine archives) attacking supporters of genetic engineering as modern day Nazis, suggesting that anti-GMO activists should consider murdering scientists and journalists for their crimes against humanity. Adams then alerted readers to another site, Monsanto Collaborators, which was more or less a handy online list of these so-called ‘Nazi perpetrators”–aka scientists, journalists and news organizations that believe biotechnology can play a constructive role in farming–for crazies who might want to follow Adams’ marching orders and begin assassinations. I was prominently mentioned by Adams, no doubt because of the scathing Adams profile and fact sheet summary GLP posted in April.

Adams alerted readers to this new “collaborators” site, claiming he had nothing at all to do with it, but urging everyone to read it nonetheless. Not surprisingly, anti-GMO philosopher Vandana Shiva, linked to the Adams story on one of her sites (Shiva took down the incendiary Adams post on July 28, but an archived version of it has been preserved here.)

Needless to say, the last week and Adams’ anti-GMO offensive have not unfolded as Adams had anticipated. Keith Kloor, a science writer with a blog on Discover, has written a series of articles on the Adams fiasco, documenting the train wreck as it unfolded: here, here, and here.

But more interesting is the fact that it’s now clear that Adams was behind the Monsanto Collaborators site. Analyses by the GLP, geneticist Karl Haro von Mogel and most extensively by the website This Week in Pseudo Science have demonstrated that the NaturalNews.com coding signatures–akin to a DNA match–are all over the Monsanto Collaborators site, which was actually registered hours before Adams’ first attack column was published. In sum: Adams has been busted. He published both sites. He’s also launched two other slander and pseudo sites designed to promote himself and his products while trying to hammer critics.

Adams tried to cleanse his original NaturalNews.com post calling for the killing of scientists and journalists and is now blocking access to the Monsanto Collaborators site, which he claims was actually set up by Monsanto and its supporters to discredit him and other anti-GMO activists, but the truth is out and the damage has been done.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, besieged by complaints from targets and the science and journalism communities, immediately launched an investigation of Adams and the site, with Adams facing possible felony charges of inciting violence (if he lived in a Europe or a Commonwealth country like the U.K., he would probably already have been served).

As the list of cyber stories on this still developing story, posted below, illustrates, the condemnation of Adams by mainstream journalists and scientists, including Paul Raeburn at Knight Science Journalism Tracker, has been overwhelming. Consensus: Adams is (in the words of scientist and blogger David Gorski) an uber-quack.

The issue here, of course, is not Adams. He is well known for his wildly popular fringe and inflammatory views, as his anti-science web site garners millions of hits every month. The real scandal is that what Adams writes about GMOs, including hyping the long discredited myth that GMOs are causing farmer suicides in India—is standard gruel for even so-called ‘mainstream’ and “responsible” anti-GMO activists.

In other words, Mike Adams is not an outlier in the anti-GMO movement…he is as mainstream as the Institute for Responsible Technology, Center for Food Safety, and sadly, even some environmental publications, on this issue, like Mother Jones. Their positions are grounded in ideology rather than science. That’s the scandal.

Below are the links, including to archived posts that Adams tried to but failed to purge, of the growing Adams dust-up.

*************

Original Monsanto Collaborators site (blocked/taken down by Adams):

[web.archive.org]

Adams’ follow up post on NaturalNews saying he’s not responsible for Collaborators page before he sanitized it: [web.archive.org]

Also preserved in slightly altered form here: Tree of Liberty: [www.thetreeofliberty.com]

Adams busted: Analysis of coding of Monsanto Collaborators site showing a ‘digital DNA match’ between NaturalNews.com and the Collaborators site, meaning that Adams created the Collaborators site that he first disavowed, then blamed on Monsanto, then took down:

[www.twipscience.org]

Attack articles on Adams-created propagandists, site, in which Jon Entine listed along with Magic Johnson and others: [propagandists.org]

Attack article on Jon Entine on Adams-created collaborators website, the first linked from Monsanto Collaborators page:

—[truthwiki.org]

—[propagandists.org]

Adams sets up two other propaganda sites to promote himself and attack critics: [newsvoice.se]

Adams again attacks GMOs, and Entine: [www.naturalnews.com]

****

Adams junk science circulated by Vandana Shiva:

Vandana Shiva’s Seed Freedom: [seedfreedom.in], [seedfreedom.in] [NOTE: Shiva took down mirrored site on on July 29, but a jpg of her pages on her site and on her Facebook site are preserved below]



********

General articles and response on Adams fiasco:

Keith Kloor response (1) article [blogs.discovermagazine.com]

Keith Kloor response (2): [blogs.discovermagazine.com]

Keith Kloor response (3): [blogs.discovermagazine.com]

Genetic Literacy Project follow: [geneticliteracyproject.org]

GLP Updated Adams profile: [geneticliteracyproject.org]

GLP Updated Fact Sheet on Adams: [geneticliteracyproject.org]

Genetic Literacy Project Follow that Adams busted: [geneticliteracyproject.org]

Additional articles on unfolding Adams story:

RealClearScience: [www.realclearscience.com],

Kevin Folta Illumination blog “Do Not Stop Adams and Intimidation – Exploit It”: [kfolta.blogspot.com]

Kevin Folta on Adams and Shiva: [kfolta.blogspot.com]

Paul Raeburn, Knight Science Journalism at MIT: [ksj.mit.edu]

David Ropeik’s reflections: [bigthink.com]

Mother Jones: [www.motherjones.com]

Forward Progressive “Natural News Founder Accuses Scientists of Genocide, Hints They Should be Killed, [www.forwardprogressives.com]

Forward Progressive after Adams was busted for claiming he had no connection to ‘kill GMO suporters” site: [www.forwardprogressives.com]

Joni Kamiya, Hawaii Farmer’s Joni Kamiya, Hawaii Farmer’s Daughter: [hawaiifarmersdaughter.com]

Steven Novella/Neurologica: [theness.com]

David Gorski response (1): [scienceblogs.com]

David Gorski response (2): [www.sciencebasedmedicine.org]

Progressive Contrarian: [theprogressivecontrarian.com]

Ronald Bailey, Reason: [reason.com]

Sharon Hill, Doubtful News: [doubtfulnews.com]

Dan Mitchell, Modern Farmer: [modernfarmer.com]

Mason Bilderberg, Illuminutti: [illuminutti.com]

Nathanael Johnson, Grist: [grist.org]

Jenny Hopkinson, Politico: [www.politico.com]

Center for Consumer Freedom: [www.consumerfreedom.com]

MuckRack: [muckrack.com]

io9: [io9.com]

Briefing Room, [www.gopbriefingroom.com]

Lipstick Alley: [www.lipstickalley.com],

Democractic Under Ground [www.democraticunderground.com]

Underground Forum [www.mixedmartialarts.com]

Soap Box: [thesoapboxrantings.blogspot.com]

Swallowing the Camel: [swallowingthecamel.wordpress.com]

Violent Metaphors: [violentmetaphors.com]

Cripes, rhb, Tai posted an interview about an interesting subject which anyone can have an opinion on or belief in - UFOs/Aliens. You and other 'skeptics' don't like Mike Adams, so you're ripping him apart, but I think Tai's original intent is to open a discussion on the topic, not about Mike Adams. And just because you or anyone doesn't think Mike Adams is credible, doesn't mean his questions are not valid and that the issue and the interview isn't interesting.

Is it that you don't 'believe in' the existence of Aliens or UFO's, or that you just hate Mike Adams?

Maybe just talk about the subject of UFO's/Aliens here and criticize Mike Adams in your other thread.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/01/2017 02:18PM by Jennifer.

quote Jennifer You and other 'skeptics' don't like Mike Adams, so you're ripping him apart,


Wrong Jennifer! Im just posting the links about Mike Adams and those links which are from many crediible web sites criticize Mike Adams.
My opinion after reading many of the sites is they point out How Adams does a great job of shreading himself, no Ripping needed.

I dont know if I realy dislike Mike Adams as a person I never sat down with the man, But I would not buy a used car from Mike after what ive read.

RHB
I dont know if I realy dislike Mike Adams as a person I never sat down with the man, But I would not buy a used car from Mike after what ive read.

Tai:
He doesn't sell used cars. He sells health products, food, gardening products, and even water filters. I scanned his store just now (it's been a couple years since I last looked) I found a new item, which is Big Berkey Water filter system that I am going to look into. That doesn't mean that I would buy it from him (I would first consider buying from the manufacturer), but since he recommends it, I am going to look into knowing that he backs it and since he tests for heavy metals, his recommendation carries a lot of weight for me.

You have quoted from a lot of other people who dislike him and not quoted much from him. I don't consider that fair. If a person stands accused and the accused is still living, allow that person to defend themselves. I quoted his defense and it's being ignored.

RHB, since you started a new thread to debunk MIke Adams, please post there on Mike Adams. YOu have fully stated your case already that you believe he has no shred of credibility, despite me showing that he has an accredited lab.

SInce you were into environmentalism, I would recommend to call your environmental friends and ask about Vandana Shiva and my guess is that they are going to fully support her. I studied her work in the 90s and haven't kept up, but I just saw a video of hers about farmer suicides in india because of GmOs. which shows she is as still ethical as ever. Read your post above and see how you quoting skeptics is painting her in a bad light.

really this topic at hand that I posted, however, is for everyone, for people who love GMOS and Vaccines and for those who don't, for liberals, for conservatives, for everyone. Mike Adam's political or environmental stance does not affect the story. But I may reconsider posting anything anymore in this thread if since Mike Adam's name is involved, nothing I post will matter anyway.

quote Tai-You have quoted from a lot of other people who dislike him and not quoted much from him.
I don't consider that fair. If a person stands accused and the accused is still living, allow that person to defend themselves. I quoted his defense and it's being ignored.

Yes I quoted a lot of people who have information on Mike adams and in those post Adams is quoted, From those quotes ive read I feel he is a quack and scammer.

Not so much quoted from him? well he needs to speak up and maybe sue for slander.
Maybe people who think he is being slanderd should speak up in his defense. to whats said by the many web sites.

Do you feel the delisting of Adams on Google is a conpiracy?

The charge by google Sneaky Marketing speaks for what Ive read on Adams.

Tai I cant find a logical defense for him on the net, Ive posted links to what ive found.
Maybe you could show what links I posted about Mike Adams are false.

I dont see arguments that say charges against Adams are not valid.
Tai please feel free to post info on Adams to defend him.

Quote I would not buy a used car from the man, is an old saying for someone you dont trust, I know Tai he does not sell used cars.
Maybe Y2 kits but not cars

When you quote a person that person becomes a part of whats being discused.

[geneticliteracyproject.org]



Adams has gone so far as to ask anti-GMO activists to kill scientists and science journalists, writing: “it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of those engaged in heinous crimes against humanity.” The post, titled “Biotech genocide, Monsanto collaborators and the Nazi legacy of ‘science’ as a justification for murder,” featured this graphic:

Adams purged the article and graphic after it blew up on the Internet but it has been preserved on wayback machine here. There were reports that law enforcement authorities launched an investigation of his threats. [Read GLP article, “FBI turns up heat on Mike Adams as ‘Health Ranger’ fiasco widens, plus Adams’ archive



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/02/2017 01:23AM by riverhousebill.

RHB:
From those quotes ive read I feel he is a quack and scammer.

Tai:
But you wrote all this without reading his ORIGINAL article FIRST. That's not fair to Mike Adams and it's not fair to yourself.

RHB
Do you feel the delisting of Adams on Google is a conpiracy?

Tai:
I don't have any of the facts on that. Was it delisted for one day? One hour? One week? It's back up now on Google. If it was taken down for months, then I would look into a conspiracy. How is this even that important? Why make a mountain out of a molehill? This topic is beyond petty to me.

RHB wrote:
I cant find a logical defense for him on the net, Ive posted links to what ive found.
Maybe you could show what links I posted about Mike Adams are false.

I dont see arguments that say charges against Adams are not valid.
please feel free to post info on Adams to defend him.

Tai:
Okay, I will simply put a link to his original article here. it's too long to post. I already posted the full length article in your google thread. Please scroll down to more than half way to see this quote. The paragraph here is the entire paragraph where Mike condemns violence and states his desire for legal justice:

[web.archive.org]
Mike Adams:
"It is no exaggeration to say that the biotech mafia is the most evil, most dangerous and most criminally-orchestrated group in America day, surpassing even the tactics of urban drug gangs and Wall Street investment bankers. But just like the Nazi regime, the biotech regime will also fall and I see a day when Monsanto collaborators are tracked down, arrested and tried for their crimes against humanity in a court of law. For the record, in no way do I condone vigilante violence against anyone, and I believe every condemned criminal deserves a fair trial and a punishment that fits the crime. Do not misinterpret this article as any sort of call for violence, as I wholly disavow any such actions. I am a person who demands due process under the law for all those accused of crimes. "

Tai
Mike Adams posted his original article for everyone to view and his full article proves he wasn't advocating violence. john Rose won't agree with his facts about Hitler, but the article does NOT promote murder. The big problem I see with the article the way it stands now is that the photos are too big and there is a chance that a reporter mistook some of the photos as the end to the article and didn't keep reading to the actual end of the article. This is one scenario. Another scenario is that the reporters deliberately took that quote out of context knowing full well his disclaimer, in order to smear him. So, if I were Mike Adams, I would make sure that the layout of the article is very clear in the future and not make those photos the same width as the article.

I hope you read every single line of the complete article, RHB. It's a long article but I think this article disproves all those critics.

Tai, I think Novella makes some good points here.
Also the the 56 comments from individuals, About Adams pro and con.

Home
About The Author – Steven Novella, MD
Topic Suggestions



Jan 25 2010

Mike Adams Takes On “Skeptics”

Published by Steven Novella under Science and Medicine,Skepticism
Comments: 56


Mike Adams, editor of Natural News, is, in my opinion, a dangerous conspiracy-mongering crank. There is simply no way to be kind to his views and the nonsense he spreads on his website. His intellectual sloppiness is indistinguishable from dishonesty, as he peddles dubious cancer cures, pseudoscience such as homeopathy, and attacks vaccines and effective therapies for AIDS and other serious diseases.

His shtick is familiar – the body can heal itself of anything, “natural” (whatever that means) is the miracle cure that allows that to happen, and just about anything considered standard and scientific is an evil corporate conspiracy. Of course, anyone who criticizes his views or claims must be part of the conspiracy – a shill for the bogeyman – “big pharma”.

One common ploy of those who choose to make their living on the fringes of science and reason is to attack their critics – what I call a “preemptive strike” against those in the best position to know that what they claim is nonsense. This usually means scientists, and increasingly activist skeptics who endeavor to educate the public about science and pseudoscience. I think it is a testimony to the growing impact of the skeptical movement that we are increasingly being targeted by the likes of Mike Adams.

Adams, in fact, has recently launched a broadside against “skeptics” ( he consistently uses the scare quotes throughout his article). This seems to have been prompted by a recent trouncing he had concerning the Shorty awards. Orac and Phil Plait have complete descriptions – but briefly, the Shorty awards are for Tweeting. Adams was up in the health category, but it was discovered that there was some ballot stuffing going on, and he was disqualified. Meanwhile, skeptics were alerted to the contest and this resulted in a flood of votes for my colleague, Rachael Dunlop, who was likely to win in any case. (If you already have a Twitter account, you can vote for Dr Rachie here.)

Adams reacted by launching into a rather childish rant, blaming the whole thing (of course) on a huge conspiracy. Even worse, Adams’ fellow “natural” guru – Joseph Mercola, who is also being outvoted for the Shorty award, like a schoolyard bully has decided to attack Rachael Dunlop personally. On his Facebook page he writes:


An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.

With that as background, let’s move on to the meat of this post – Adams absurd rant against “skeptics.” While Adams likely thinks he has made a stinging attack against his detractors, he has only revealed his own intellectual shortcomings. His post is the equivalent of dropping a crudely fashioned incendiary device onto a strawman factory of his own making. One of the most useful measures of one’s intellectual honesty and rigor is the manner in which they portray the positions of their critics and ideological opponents. With that in mind – take a look at Adams characterization of the skeptical position.

Adams gives no references or links to back up his claims, which is very telling. He writes:


Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and “good for your health.”

First of all – the phrase “skeptics believe” is misleading. Skepticism is not a set of beliefs, it is a set of methods for asking questions about reality. Skeptics are also a diverse group – but we do tend to come to similar conclusions on basic questions where logic and evidence is likely to lead a reasonable person to a particular opinion.

Let me also further clarify that I do not presume to speak for all skeptics or for skepticism. I can really only speak for myself. But I do have extensive familiarity with the arguments that my skeptical colleagues have put forth over the years, and will try to represent them fairly as well.

Now – I would not say categorically that “all vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested).” My position is that those vaccines that have been approved have been tested and found to be safe and effective. For many vaccines we have decades of experience with millions of doses – and that is an impressive data set of safety and effectiveness. And of course, any new vaccine has to go through proper testing before it should be recommended. That is the essence of evidence-based and science-based medicine – using scientific evidence to see if treatments are safe and effective before they are recommended – a philosophy Adams does not practice, given the treatments he recommends.

Regarding taking vaccines “against their will” – there is actually a broad range of opinions on this matter, which is more political than scientific. You can believe vaccines work and are safe, and still believe that individuals have the right to refuse them. I actually don’t recall any popular skeptic specifically saying they are in favor of forced vaccination. Generally, adults have the right to refuse any medical intervention. It is a separate question, and one of public health, as to whether those who refuse vaccination have the right to unrestricted access to public facilities – such as public schools. But never mind all that nuance – Adams has some strawmen to eviscerate.

Adams is also a fan of absolutes as a strategy for distorting the position of skeptics. He says we profess there is no limit to the number of vaccines that can be safely given. I don’t recall anyone ever expressing that opinion, or that we can give children 900 vaccines all at once. I suspect that he is referring to Paul Offit’s statement that a child’s immune system could handle 10,000 vaccines. This statement was then taken out of context by the anti-vaccine movement. The point Offit was making was that vaccines do not represent an overload to a child’s immune system, in terms of antigenic challenge. Our immune systems face many more challenges every day than the entire vaccine schedule. However, this does not mean that other aspects of vaccines would be safe to administer in that dose, and Offit was not implying that at all – again, a nuance missed by anti-vaccine cranks.


Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level of exposure to fluoride from other sources.

Yes, Adams is anti-fluoridation. Notice the use of inflammatory language about the source of fluoride – an emotional rather than an intellectual argument. The source of fluoride is irrelevant. The evidence shows that fluoridation is safe and effective for preventing tooth decay.


Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!

Now this is an issue about which there is much disagreement among skeptics – the use of antidepressant drugs. There is actually much to be skeptical about here, and the pharmaceutical industry is open to legitimate criticism of the ways in which they have promoted such treatments. A matter of particular scientific criticism has been the application of data on adults to pediatric populations. Having said that, I think there is a legitimate role for antidepressant medication in adults with severe depression and in conjunction with cognitive-behavioral therapy (notice all the caveats).

I am also a proponent of rational pharmacotherapy – which means using drugs cautiously and with proper monitoring, understanding their mechanism of action and known and likely interactions, and limiting polypharmacy whenever possible. What I just described is, in fact, the standard of care. Saying that skeptics promote using antidepressant drugs in infants is absurd, and I would like to see Adams provide a reference for that. Saying that we or anyone promotes the use of an “unlimited number of drugs” is so ridiculous that any reasonable reader should be able to see through such patent nonsense.


Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

Again the childish use of absolutes. Medical scientists understand that the human body has a rather remarkable ability to heal itself and defend itself against infection. We call this latter ability our “immune system” – Adams should familiarize himself with that concept. Or is he claiming (yes, I am being a bit facetious) that skeptics deny the existence of an immune system. Now that’s a reference I would like to see. The well-established fact is – vaccines are an effective way of targeting our immune systems against specific viruses, so that we can mount a more robust defense against those viruses and prevent serious illness and the spreading of infectious disease.


Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)

Even Adams seems to recognize how unfair this characterization is – so that he has to qualify his statement with the clarification that skeptics oppose natural childbirth. He is blatantly exposing his deceptive strategy here – take the position of your opponent and then distort it beyond all recognition with inflammatory and extreme language. Of course, no one believes pregnancy is a disease. Pregnancy is a natural condition, as is childbirth. I would also not categorically say that childbirth is a “crisis” – but it certainly can become one quickly if things go wrong.

This is where use of the term “natural” become nonsensical. The evolution of bipedalism and large brains in humans required a number of tradeoffs – the complication of pregnancy being one of them. Also, while evolution is amazing, it often produces suboptimal compromises. As a result, childbirth can be risky. Further, I do not favor any particular philosophy of childbirth. I favor what works, based upon the best evidence available. I do not oppose “natural” childbirth, because it is not clear what that even is. Rather, I favor evidence-based childbirth. I also acknowledge that childbirth is a deeply personal and emotional life experience, and many people may choose a childbirth option that suits them, even if it is not optimal purely from a medical risk point of view – and everyone should be absolutely free to make those choices for themselves. I favor only giving people accurate and unbiased information so they can make informed choices for themselves.

I do not recommend scaring them with false claims or confusing them with deceptive philosophy.


Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.

Again, where is he getting this stuff? Hypnosis is a complex phenomenon, and there is no simple way to summarize what it is or the evidence for its efficacy for any particular indication. I think Adams threw this in because he thought the second sentence was a clever dig – and in line with his conspiracy theme.


Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.

This paragraph is such a mess of confusion it is difficult to know what to even make of it. Of course consciousness exists. I am perhaps the “skeptic” who has written most on this topic. The questions is not whether or not consciousness exists, but how to explain consciousness. The same is true of the mind – the mind exists. My position, which is, by the way, the position of mainstream neuroscientists – is that the mind and consciousness are manifestations of the function of the brain. There is no mind without brain function. This is not the same thing as being a “mindless automaton”.

The question of a soul is a metaphysical question, not a scientific question, and thus science is agnostic toward it. If one wishes to pose the hypothesis of a soul as a scientific question, then I think it is fair to say there is no compelling scientific evidence or plausible mechanism for a soul. The vitalism of the 19th century has been discarded by science as unnecessary.

The question of free will is more complex, and there is no consensus on this within the skeptical community. A subset, spearheaded I think by naturalism.org, does make the case that materialism does lead to the conclusion that we do not have free will in the sense that the function of our brains is deterministic. But even the most ardent promoters of the “no free will” position acknowledge that we make choices and decisions – they do not believe we are “mindless automatons.”


Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

I cannot even address this claim without an operational definition of “dead” vs “living” food. I think the burden of proof would be on Adams to show that there is a difference.


Skeptics believe that pesticides on the crops are safe, genetically modified foods are safe, and that any chemical food additive approved by the FDA is also safe. There is no advantage to buying organic food, they claim.

Finally Adams gets close to accurately stating the scientific position; although there are plenty of skeptics who advocate organic farming – another area of disagreement among skeptics. I will state my own position: the safety of pesticides and chemical additives, like the safety of all things, is all about dose. So yes, they are safe at appropriate levels. The FDA is charged with the task of assessing the scientific evidence to determine safety levels. I do not claim that the FDA (or any human institution) is perfect, but the evidence does suggest that using pesticides and preservatives has benefit in excess of risk. You are more likely to be harmed by spoiled food than a preservative.

Genetically modified food – just about all food is genetically modified. We have been modifying our food for thousands of years. However, the latest technology of speeding up this process by directly inserting genes into food requires an appropriate burden of scientific evidence for safety before being added to the food chain. I would not categorically say that GM food is safe or not safe – but rather that each GM crop needs to be studied for safety. I think the pseudoscience is in scaremongering about “frankenfoods” and writing off all GM crops as unsafe.

There is no advantage to buying organic? Well – the evidence shows that there is no nutritional advantage to eating organic food. I also think that the promoters of organic food, if they are going to claim it is more nutritious (and charge more for it), bear the burden of proof that it is, and they have not met this burden of proof.


Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).

So what is the difference between the water from your toilet and the water from a spring? What exactly is Adams claiming? Is this some weird homeopathy claim?

Yes – H2O from any source is the same as H2O from any other source – the only difference would be what is in the water (which is why I would not be enthusiastic about drinking from the toilet, although my dog does not seem to mind).


Skeptics believe that all the phytochemicals and nutrients found in ALL plants are inert, having absolutely no benefit whatsoever for human health.

Another string of absolutes. And again it is hard to know what Adams is actually claiming here. Like the last statement, he is saying skeptics deny a claim which he is not delineating. What does he mean by “inert?” I certainly don’t claim that chemicals and nutrients are biologically inert – by definition nutrients are biochemically active. And sure, nutrients derived from plants are great for human health. I suspect he is referring to claims made for the health benefits of phytochemicals that go way beyond any scientific evidence.

Conclusion

There is more, but this is the extent of the article you can access without registering, and I don’t want my readers to feel obligated to sign up for spam from NaturalNews. This is also more than enough to get an idea what Adams is all about. I also don’t want to beat a dead horse. It should be obvious from Adams’ post that his intellectual approach to these issues, and his critics, leaves much to be desired.

From a broader perspective, it seems the skeptical movement has really gotten under the skin of some purveyors of pseudoscience recently. They have responded by threatening to sue or actually suing for libel. They have tried to criticize science and science-based medicine. And they have tried to grossly distort the position of skeptics, and call into question our motives and our “faith.”

But the more we irritate them, the more they expose themselves, embarrass themselves, and do our work for us. Adams is just the latest crank to be goaded by skeptics into being hoist with his own petard.

Addendum:

Mike Adams has posted a follow up. In it he basically crows about how upset skeptics are by his original article. We are not upset – we are amused. Thanks for the blog-fodder. In his latest post he writes:


One such skeptic accused me of being a quack because he said that I believe “water is magical.” Was that supposed to be an insult? I do think water is magical!

I think pregnancy is magical. Human consciousness is magical. Plant life is magical. And water is at the very top of the list of magical substances with amazing, miraculous properties, many of which have yet to be discovered.

Thanks for the admission, magic man. I wonder – if the magical properties of water have yet to be discovered, how does Adams know they exist?

In any case, he still does not provide any links or references to back up his claims about what skeptics believe.


FacebookTwitterGoogle+Share

56 responses so far


56 thoughts on “Mike Adams Takes On “Skeptics””

1.
Marshall says:

January 25, 2010 at 1:44 am

I saw this off of Pharyngula. I originally posted to all of the members who were praising the author that they were the biggest group of idiots I’ve seen, and that I couldn’t believe that they could think ANY group of people could believe that crap (I don’t even think any religion preaches that pregnancy is a disease). But I didn’t even want to be associated with such a website, so I unregistered.


2.
johnc says:

January 25, 2010 at 2:06 am

He sounds like a nutcase with an anti skeptic axe to grind, and it seems the community have gotten to him in a big way which is great.

Why did you go and have to ruin it by mentioning fluoridation?

Calcium fluoride is fine, and is present in many foods we eat, the @#$%& they put in the water supply (sodium fluoride, sodium fluorosilicate, and fluorosilicic acid) is totally unnecessary and it’s safety and efficacy is questionable.

Baby and bathwater once again disposed of in a similar fashion…


3.
cfeagans says:

January 25, 2010 at 2:17 am

Finally! It was well worth the wait

You elucidated things about this guy that I wasn’t aware of from the article on his site.

He’s a bigger creep than I initially thought!


4.
OnceWasLost says:

January 25, 2010 at 2:40 am

For what it’s worth, it should be noted that this is just the nomination phase of the shorty awards. After this, the top 6 nominees in each category get voted on again, then the winner gets a free trip to New York.

Go Dr. Rachie!


5.
superdave says:

January 25, 2010 at 3:18 am

this rant makes so little sense and has such venomous hatred in it i think even a lot of pro alternative medicine people would take issue. some of those claims go past wrong and enter into crazy territory.


6.
KathyO says:

January 25, 2010 at 4:21 am

I’d be interested to know how many people who are believers in alt med. and followers of Adams would read his frothing lunacy and say, “wow, I didn’t realize skeptics were so ridiculous and evil,” and how many are going, “hey, wait a minute….that doesn’t sound right.”

As Superdave suggests, is it possible that Adams’ rant will turn his own people into skeptics?


7.
eiskrystal says:

January 25, 2010 at 5:19 am


As Superdave suggests, is it possible that Adams’ rant will turn his own people into skeptics?

Probably. The guy is one burning goat short of a herd. I would be surprised if many people take him seriously.


8.
sonic says:

January 25, 2010 at 5:35 am

Adams claims-
“so I did a little research and pulled this information from various “skeptic” websites.”

Yet I couldn’t see any links to or mentions of the websites he visited.

He trys to make a number of points and makes none. (I did get the impression that he is upset…)


9.
rulesandwisdom says:

January 25, 2010 at 5:40 am

I’m really glad to see Steve’s article on this. I was intrigued by a headline about the ‘Swine Flu Hoax’ yesterday, and was given my first experience of the worthless site that is NaturalNews. Apparently Google are now using NaturalNews.com as one of their feeds for Google News – I’ve contacted Google and ask them to remove the site because the site is “biased/contains offensive content” (their categorisation). If anyone sees ‘articles’ from NaturalNews.com appearing on Google News, I encourage them to do the same:

[www.google.com]

The fact that NaturalNews is also a massive online store for ‘natural’ and ‘alternative’ medicine, combined with the ridiculous claims and conjecture, should hopefully result in the site being removed.

Just as I was losing faith in humanity, Steve publishes an article which expresses exactly how I was feeling! Great work.


10.
Marius Vanderlubbe says:

January 25, 2010 at 6:33 am

@johnc
“Calcium fluoride is fine, and is present in many foods we eat, the @#$%& they put in the water supply (sodium fluoride, sodium fluorosilicate, and fluorosilicic acid) is totally unnecessary and it’s safety and efficacy is questionable.”

In that case, I put the question that I put to all anti-fluoridationistas.
Where are all the adversely affected (by artificial fluoridation) people? Wouldn’t you expect to see a spike in the numbers corresponding with the introduction of art. fluoridation?

Burden of proof. Where is your evidence?


11.
whatislogic says:

January 25, 2010 at 6:39 am

Mike definitely has an axe to grind with skeptics. Skeptics are having a positive impact against his lunacy. Also sounds like the guy needs to laid in my opinion.


12.
SteveN says:

January 25, 2010 at 8:13 am

Excellent rebuttal, Steve. It’s a pity that very few of Adam’s followers will ever read it. It would give all but the most fervent of believers pause for thought, I expect.


13.
Stylus Happenstance says:

January 25, 2010 at 9:06 am

I’d heard of Natural News, of course, but not Mike Adams specifically until the Shorty awards started. The more i read about him, the more I’m convinced that he’s not a true believer.


14.
johnc says:

January 25, 2010 at 9:40 am

@Marius Vanderlubbe

Prove what? I said unnecessary and questionable.

The burden of proof lies with those who believe it’s safe and effective, as it does with any substance, especially if it’s a medicine or nutrient administered via our water supply.

If I wanted to put something in your water you’d expect the same I’m sure.


15.
Justin L. says:

January 25, 2010 at 10:20 am

I have to say Adams gave a spot on description of my beliefs, but he left out the part about eating a baby for breakfast every morning in order to control the surplus population.


16.
SquirrelElite says:

January 25, 2010 at 10:29 am

johnc,

For starters, I went to the CDC web site on fluoridation.

[www.cdc.gov]

There I found the following tidbits:

“Nearly all water on earth contains naturally occurring fluoride at levels below, equal to, or above those used in community water fluoridation. Investigation of the decay preventing effects of naturally occurring fluoride in water led to the start of community water fluoridation in 1945.”

So, most drinking water already contains fluoride, anyway. Fluoridation of public drinking water mainly serves to standardize this concentration at a level which has been determined to be safe and effective. (Sort of like pharmacognosic drugs!)

There was one note about a possible concern that is being studied:

“A study published by Bassin and colleagues suggests an association between drinking fluoridated water and osteosarcoma in adolescent males. The findings from a larger study on this topic, conducted by the same institution, are expected soon.”

We will have to wait and see on that. However, the consensus remains:

” The safety of fluoride in drinking water at levels recommended for preventing tooth decay has been affirmed by numerous scientific and professional groups.

Scientists have found a lack of evidence to show an association between water fluoridation and a negative impact on people, plants, or animals.”

If you have evidence that contradicts these statements, the onus is on you to cite that evidence and provide a link for our benefit. You might want to forward your concerns to the CDC and the EPA.

In other words, the ball is in your court.


17.
Benjamino says:

January 25, 2010 at 11:25 am

@SquirrelElite & @Marius Vanderlubbe

Watch The Senior Vice President of the EPA Headquarters Union discusses the dangers of fluoride in our drinking water
[www.youtube.com]

And checkout this series of articles on “The (Skeptic’s) Health Journal Club” which cite multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies.
Part 1 – [healthjournalclub.blogspot.com]
Part 2 – [healthjournalclub.blogspot.com]
Part 3 – [healthjournalclub.blogspot.com]


18.
banyan says:

January 25, 2010 at 11:39 am

“Thanks for the admission, magic man.” Good stuff!

I get the impression that he thinks that only absolute beliefs are possible. Why does he think that skeptics believe all GM food is safe? Why, because he believes that all GM food is unsafe, and we disagree. Either you’re with us or against us, right? Same with vaccines, and even nutrients; since we don’t think they’re literally miraculous, we must think they’re “inert.”

I’m sure dealing in absolutes saves him a lot of cognitive time and energy, but it’s not doing his readers any favors.


19.
Steven Novella says:

January 25, 2010 at 11:54 am

banyan,

You are exactly right, and that is a point I should have made myself – as some of my colleagues have made previously (I think I first heard this observation from Mark Crislip). CAM proponents seems to lack any tolerance of nuance or ambiguity. They live in a black-and-white world. If we defend the efficacy of vaccines – they we believe that ONLY vaccines work, that ALL vaccines are safe, that you can use UNLIMITED vaccines without fear, etc.

Adams’ rant is an excellent example of this.


20.
Michelle B says:

January 25, 2010 at 12:08 pm

Stuff that Adams called magical are wonderful, as is science-based medicine.

Magic is illusion. Maybe being an magician of the caliber of a Randy is too difficult for Adams so instead he plies his crass inanity.


21.
Dave Kahn says:

January 25, 2010 at 12:12 pm

Apart from confirming the importance of magic in his world view Mike Adams’ follow up reveals that he doesn’t grasp basic chemistry. “Water is made up of two gases, each of which is a combustible fuel on its own,” he asserts. Does he understand the difference between a compound and a mixture, and does he understand the properties of hydrogen and oxygen?

Water is not “made up of two gases” but is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. In elemental form these are gaseous above certain temperatures; in compound with each other they are water which is also gaseous above a certain temerature. Oxygen of course supports combustion but is not itself combustible. The various properties of water that Adams describes as magical are indeed remarkable but are well understood in scientific terms. No magic required.


22.
gdjsky01 says:

January 25, 2010 at 12:44 pm

Thanks Doctor, this is going to be my new signature quote, “Skepticism is not a set of beliefs, it is a set of methods for asking questions about reality. ”

Great post. Love your work. Run for office.


23.
canadia says:

January 25, 2010 at 1:26 pm

Unbelievable!

How people like this can exist in a world so bedecked with the wonders of science and reason is something that will never cease to amaze me.

It is a great comfort to me that people like you (steven) are taking the battle to these people. They are a serious threat to everything this species has built.


24.
CW says:

January 25, 2010 at 1:38 pm

With a lot of kids drinking filtered/bottled water, I wonder if there will be an increase in tooth/gum disease? And whether we’ll see a noticeable decrease in ailments that people think flouridation is causing? I hope scientists are studying this.


25.
canadia says:

January 25, 2010 at 1:46 pm

as posted on his article page…

Mike, after reading your post I just had to register and leave a comment. You are unbelievable! That someone as superstitious and uneducated can actually use a computer to post your thoughts is amazing! I can only hope that eventually improving science education and critical thinking will teach the new generations to ignore quacks and mystics like you. Clearly much of the current generation is hopeless, but there’s hope. Furthermore, and wonderfully so, natural selection will eventually solve what education cannot. All your disciples, with their reliance on unproven magical alternative treatments, will have a much high death rate, because it just doesn’t work. Their vaccinated children will die of measles more often, their vaccinated teenagers will struggle with herpes. Slowly but surely they will come to accept the ineffectiveness of shamanistic quackery, or they will die. Eventually whatever genetics lead to such backward thinking will be weeded out of the gene pool. Till then, enjoy that snake oil!


26.
RickK says:

January 25, 2010 at 2:01 pm

Marshall, registering and commenting on Mike Adams’s site will get you nowhere. He filters out almost all negative comments, and likes to ban people permanently if they say anything he doesn’t like.

I don’t know how someone like Mike Adams lives with such personal dishonesty. Mike Adams viciously suppresses any dissenting opinions on his site. Why?

Because he’s SELLING something. The “skeptics” he complains about – the hosts of Neurologica, Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence, etc. are not selling products from their websites (other than the occasional t-shirt with an octopus on it). So the skeptical websites are open to free expression of idea – whether in agreement or disagreement with the hosts.

Not so on Mike’s site. He FEARS truth, because it will cut into his product sales. And all those sheep in the comments section (if they are in fact real people, and not just fabricated as a marketing gimmick) have completely missed the fact that they’re being conned by a salesman.

What a sad little corner of humanity is represented on that site. I’d like to see his nonsense laughed at in mainstream media, but I fear the attention would only improve his sales.


27.
rrpostal says:

January 25, 2010 at 3:31 pm

@Benjamino

If that’s the best you can do I’m still unconvinced. The link you give (which also has the video you link to) is minor sparsely used blog by an unnamed source. The “skeptical” site also includes a video about vaccine complicity with autism, BRP scare, natural vitamin ads and other wonderful non-skeptical things. The video was from a union VP while with a misleading title. He did not represent the EPA, rather government employees. This doesn’t invalidate them. I’m one too. It’s just misleading. I had to dig a bit to find some decent claims from noted sources.The best evidence I found were the editorials by Dr Burgstahler, whose office happens to be two blocks from where I live. But they are less than recent.

Check out the root directories for more info.

[www.fluoride-journal.com]

For some reason Medline keeps rejecting this journal

[www.fluorideresearch.org]


28.
Charlie Young says:

January 25, 2010 at 3:35 pm

Being a dentist, I couldn’t let a minor grammatical error pass: fluoride is safe and effective for the prevention of tooth decay not “preventive tooth decay.”

Other than that minor quibble, I strongly back you in you quest to have reason return to the public discourse. Those absolute, inflammatory statements Mike makes are meant to strengthen his position with his minions but also, unfortunately, give him a soapbox on which to promote his dubious claims to an unsuspecting public.


29.
skepticat says:

January 25, 2010 at 3:38 pm

Mike Adams appears to be deranged. Thanks for a superb post.

I liked what you said about natural childbirth. I’m a skeptic who opted for a home delivery for my second child. I had the full support of my doctors and community midwives because I had attended all ante-natal checks and there were no contra indications. I had an evidence-based delivery.


30.
Enzo says:

January 25, 2010 at 4:13 pm

“His post is the equivalent of dropping a crudely fashioned incendiary device onto a strawman factory of his own making.”

OOOOHHHHHH

I don’t normally congest the Comments section by re-quoting lines that amuse me…But that was hilarious. I believe we call that a nerd snap.

I wish I could argue with Mr. Adams in front of some of my less skeptically minded friends. He is so over-the-top that he ends up encouraging skepticism about his own obnoxious claims.

Well done.


31.
provaxmom says:

January 25, 2010 at 7:04 pm

I like his rant. If you pick it apart, you can tell he rarely misses a day of clicking on all of your blogs and reading them. The thought of him, at home at his computer, checking all of your blogs on his bookmarks while his blood pressure goes up (and up and up since he undoubtedly wouldn’t take a medication for it)….the vision of all that makes me smile. You all obviously drive him nuts.


32.
kato says:

January 25, 2010 at 8:38 pm

Regarding the linked article on organic food nutrients, I don’t think I was ever under the impression that organic food had more nutrients, but rather less Bad Stuff. Are there any studies comparing levels of Bad Stuff for conventional vs organic?


33.
tmac57 says:

January 25, 2010 at 9:33 pm

Skeptics believe that Mike Adams is full of “blog-fodder!!!


34.
zoe237 says:

January 25, 2010 at 10:16 pm

Thanks for this Dr. Novella. I sure wish you spoke for all skeptics.

The black and white world thing is a big problem, particularly in science education.


35.
Enzo says:

January 25, 2010 at 10:57 pm

@kato

Define “bad stuff.” The difference between organic farmed food and traditionally farmed is the exclusion of soluble material (that can get into crops) and the substitution of synthetic pesticides with “natural” pesticides. Organic farmers often claim that their pesticides are also more unstable and thus do not linger on the crops as long, but this is not really accurate — not to mention that some “natural” pesticides have been shown to cause harm or prove insufficient at preventing things like fungal growth. Overall there are as many as twenty treatments crops are subjected to, organic or not. You have to prevent bugs and microbes in one way or another.

A quick Google Scholar or PubMed search for organic farming pesticides or “organic and conventional farming” will allow you to read a lot on the subject, which I believe is fairly straightforward.

It’s also interesting to note that organic farming is more expensive, requires more land and generally produces smaller crop volume. The health risk of using traditional vs. organically grown are miniscule if at all different. The argument rages on about nutrients but it seems that there are tradeoffs on both sides.


36.
SquirrelElite says:

January 26, 2010 at 12:48 am

@rrpostal,

I had similar thoughts on Benjamino’s links when I looked at them, but didn’t have time to post a response.


37.
eiskrystal says:

January 26, 2010 at 4:35 am


It’s also interesting to note that organic farming is more expensive, requires more land and generally produces smaller crop volume.

Scale probably matters. Pesticides are necessary for large industrial type farms, but probably aren’t cost effective for smaller ones. There is also run-off into the environment, cost of the pesticides/fertilizer etc… to consider.

It would be perfectly possible to view organic food as “normal”, stable farm production and see the artifically increased yields as using a large excess energy and chemicals in order to have small gains in production.


38.
kato says:

January 26, 2010 at 8:48 am

@Enzo: “Bad Stuff” refers to anything added to the process that you wouldn’t eat directly such as pesticides and fertilizers. As well, I suppose anything like a fungus or microbes that should have been cleansed.


39.
Al at OutboundMusic says:

January 26, 2010 at 12:37 pm

Organic vs. “Bad Things”: I assume here that we’re also talking about meat, dairy and poultry products. If that’s the case then the “Bad Things” would include the Omega-6s we get from the corporate products as opposed to the more healthy Omega-3s from Organic farms. Here’s a link to an interest lecture on the subject at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston; [www3.mdanderson.org]


40.
catgirl says:

January 26, 2010 at 1:06 pm


Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis.

I absolutely hate guys like this who make this claim. Pregnancy isn’t a disease, but it sure as hell has a lot more symptoms than most common diseases. If there were a disease as common as pregnancy that caused daily vomiting that lasts for months and medications for symptom relief were heavily restricted, it would be an epidemic. And childbirth may not be a “crisis”, but it is certainly life-threatening (although less so now, specifically because of modern medicine). Babies are great, but the method of getting one is worse than any disease I’ve ever had.


41.
Matt Novack says:

January 26, 2010 at 1:26 pm

@kato & @eiskrystal

I recommend listening to Skeptoid podcast #166 “Organic vs Conventional Agriculture” (transcript here: [skeptoid.com]).

It’s a good overview of the differences between the two, and Dunning even goes into detail about fertilizers:

“The biggest misconception is that organic farming does not use fertilizer, herbicides, or pesticides. Of course it does. Fertilizer is essentially chemical nutrient, and the organic version delivers exactly the same chemical load as the synthetic. It has to, otherwise it wouldn’t function.”


42.
Benjamino says:

January 26, 2010 at 1:57 pm

@rrpostal

The blog source is named as ‘Paul D Maher, MD MPH’ formally of the FDA.
(You can find that and more info under the heading ‘About Me’ in the right hand column of any page in the blog)

Re: The video. The union VP does represents employees of the EPA. He clearly states this in the first 30 seconds on the video.

Thank you for the link [www.fluoride-journal.com] (As an aside both it and the first blog post I linked to in my first post reference the same Chinese study.)

While I may not have convinced you maybe the last sentence of that PDF should a least give you pause for thought.

“In short, despite growing evidence of serious neurotoxicity
for both fluoride and lead,1-6,11 U.S. safety standards for fluoride in water have been moving in the opposite direction to those for lead in blood. From a scientific standpoint, this reversal is very difficult to understand or to justify.”

p.s. when you mentioned the “BRP scare” were you meaning BPA? If so this article might be of interest
[www.jsonline.com]

An extract:
“The newspaper had the containers of 10 items tested in a lab – products that were heated in a microwave or conventional oven. Bisphenol A, or BPA, was found to be leaching from all of them.

The amounts detected were at levels that scientists have found cause neurological and developmental damage in laboratory animals. The problems include genital defects, behavioral changes and abnormal development of mammary glands. The changes to the mammary glands were identical to those observed in women at higher risk for breast cancer.”


43.
skeptologic says:

January 26, 2010 at 2:09 pm

I’ll tell you what this skeptic believes. I believe that watching Dr. Novella take down idiots like Mike Adams is a thing of beauty. What a crank, he must be related to Neil Adams.


44.
SkullVodka says:

January 26, 2010 at 8:36 pm

Who would be dumb enough to spout such obvious lies in a forum where it is saved and archived for all to see and scrutinize for the rest of eternity. This is nothing that could ever be lived down, or be forgotten. What happens on the internet stays on the internet. What an unbelievable @#$%& bag. And I do mean unbelievable in every sense of the word. Wow, just wow.


45.
tl;dr says:

January 27, 2010 at 12:12 pm

I just read this article now.

Dr. Dunlop is actually in 2nd place, ~1000 votes behind Mercola for the Shorty #health award. IIRC, when Mercola was not in the lead he said, “Now I could care LESS about this stupid Twitter award”

Yet now he “urgently needs your voice and vote.” It’s a matter of health freedoms!!11! Lulz.


46.
wichitarick says:

January 27, 2010 at 4:19 pm

While I cannot address ALL of these views from either side I can show very real cases of friends dieing after dropping what their medical doctors were telling them and using “alternative” methods.(R.I.P.)
My way of referring to a lot of the material that “Mr Adams” is using I call the “DUH” factor. It is really that simple to do a little reading/research and draw your conclusion instead of believing what is screamed from the pulpit RC.


47.
Tom Coward says:

January 29, 2010 at 7:51 pm

Interesting post. Concerning ‘organic’ foods: I tend to prefer them not because they are more nutritious (I know that they generally are not) or that they taste better (sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t) than non-organic, but rather because the way they are produced is generally less burdensome on the ecosystem. Also, meat, milk and eggs produced by ‘organic’ methods tend to involve less pain and suffering to the animals involved.


48.
Chicago Skeptic says:

January 30, 2010 at 8:37 pm

How does Mr. Adams – having such an non-scientific mindset – expect the “miraculous properties” of water to be discovered? I am sure his answer would be quite informing.


49.
E says:

January 31, 2010 at 10:14 am

One surprising thing I recently learned about this Mike Adams is that he lives in Ecuador. Guess that’s so he can be freer to carry out his health freedom nonsense and be freer to sell tourist getaways to his new neighborhood – the “Valley of Longevity.”

Too bad that escape, oops I mean move, to Ecuador didn’t work out so well for “herbal formulator,” Greg Caton. And if anyone’s interested in hearing a good one, listen to podcast “Health ranger report #84.” It’s short, sweet and amusingly chock full of everything from how the mean old FDA has apparently gone global…to Mike Adams using phrases like “chemical holocaust.”

Oh yeah, and in another “Health Ranger report” podcast, Mike Adams inadvertently reveals how slick these guys really are when he explains that he doesn’t sell herbs, supplements or remedies; but only sells books with information about herbs, supplements or remedies (Greg Caton got apprehended because he apparently continued to sell the actual items).

The only award I hope Joseph Mercola wins is a good long sentence and a fancy orange jumpsuit.


50.
daniel.oliveira says:

February 1, 2010 at 10:00 am

Steve,

Thanks for another excellent post!
Your rebuttal is an good example of why one should stay tuned on Neurologica on a frequent basis.
Skepticism scores again!

Steve rocks, Adams “cranks”!


51.
Woof says:

February 6, 2010 at 4:35 am

You can get the full content of any article on the Health Ranger Moronathon site by clicking on the “Printable Version” button, no registration required.

Direct URL in this case is [www.naturalnews.com]

52.
Pingback: How to win friends and influence people «

53.
Pingback: Hi Ho Silver! Health Ranger, Please Go Away! « Skeptologic


54.
gijacklin says:

April 20, 2010 at 1:28 am

You’re kidding me right? All you did was rant and rave about someone else ranting and raving only you obviously have been living under a rock. Western medicine is good for car accidents and that’s about it. Autism rates went up when the vaccinations went up. Chemo kills you before the cancer in most cases. Has about a 3% success rate. Do you even know anyone that went through western treatments for cancer where it didn’t come back? I don’t but know many, many people that used holistic therapies and are still here 10 years later and up. I don’t need statistics I just talk to people that have successfully cured themselves of cancer and ask them how they did it. It’s called treating the cause not the symptoms.

You are far too intelligent to believe what you write. And I can only surmise you spent so much time on cutting up one article of Mike Adams (which really was boring of you) because you can’t truly deny that naturopathic medicine is the wave of the future. That everything Mike Adams is about is good and wholesome and right. Which means you are either being paid by big pharma or just writing from the opposite point of view cause it’s your job. No one can deny that big pharma is Satan and has no place in our world anymore.

You should write about something that matters. If your child or wife got cancer I can’t imagine you would let them do conventional methods on them with out at least investigating alternative. For the love of God I hope you would. Western medicine is a business and they don’t care about we the people at all.


55.
ThomasT says:

April 16, 2013 at 8:16 am

A Mike Adams reader here! I’m also also a commenter, as unfortunately many of his ‘writers’ merely repeat meaningless studies from mainstream medicine that ignore that we do have the heart disease prevention and cure, that for cancer etc. Mike rarely writes anything about health himself these days, but does write absurd political rants, which I don’t bother with.

I got onto this site when linked to the Billy Meier et contact story, which to all mainstream scientists, neurologists etc baldly state must be a hoax. My point is that if even one single part of Meier’s story is correct, that single one taken from his 1800 pages of et contact notes, from 1000 pre-Photshop 35mm film, from cine film, from sound recordings, from the metal fragment analysis by IBM scientist M. Vogel. etc. then the phenomena exists. As a retired airline training Capt. I have had excellent UFO sightings, even carrying ‘official’ UFO report forms in our nav. bags in 1972.

As example let’s take the Jet Propulsion Labs photo-analysis of his 35mm film,that of the Swiss Air Force Mirage Fighter in the same frame as a UFO. In the analysed photo from JPL, there is an ‘energy field’ encompassing both craft. At that time, according to Meier, the et pilot told him, via telepathy, (which can’t exist in mainstream neuroscience), that she was ‘melting down’ the gun-control of the fighter jet which had ‘locked-onto’ her craft. (My son is in neuro-science in Vienna)!

Another example is the accurate planetary information published by Meier before nasa’s ‘discoveries’ .

[www.bibliotecapleyades.net]


56.
ThomasT says:

April 16, 2013 at 9:24 pm

Just a little follow on, hopefully being on topic for this disciussion, so not getting censored.

Mainstream medicine is NOT squeeky clean, Doc. Steve.

[www.rawstory.com]

and , is this why you try to discredit Mike Adams and Natural News?

[www.naturalnews.com]

Again, as I have asked before, please provide a link to the ORIGINAL Mike Adams article that is being trashed, otherwise HOW DO WE KNOW IF THIS IS ALL MADE UP? You posted many articles about a fake call for violence by Mike Adams. A bunch of writers deliberately said he advocated violence when he did not. They got away with it by NOT posting his original article. Here this man is talking about something without posting the original article. Please post a link to this author's article and WOULD YOU PLEASE READ MIKE ADAMS ARTICLE FOR YOURSELF BEFORE YOU REPOST SOMEONE"S TRASHING? Unless you unconditionally support this author without reading the article for yourself, please read it.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2017 02:30AM by Tai.

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE that RHB just quoted from

What 'skeptics' really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe

Sunday, January 24, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

[www.naturalnews.com]

I thought it would be interesting to find out exactly what "skeptics" actually believe, so I did a little research and pulled this information from various "skeptic" websites. What I found will make you crack up laughing so hard that your abs will be sore for a week. Take a look...

[theness.com] -the link to my last post.



Novella and the 56 other peoples comments speaks very well about the
problems with Mike Adams.


On what skeptics think, I like what gdjsky01 said about skeptics
quoted in my above post on Novella posted under comments

gdjsky01 says:

January 25, 2010 at 12:44 pm

Thanks Doctor, this is going to be my new signature quote, “Skepticism is not a set of beliefs, it is a set of methods for asking questions about reality. ”


”
Jennifer Im confused on link to ORIGINAL Mike Adams article that is being trashed,
Where did I post first? I will try to find link when I know,
Ive gone to many sites about Adams and have posted from them,
So Im not eactly sure what one and where.


quote Tai-YOu have fully stated your case already that you believe he has no shred of credibility, despite me showing that he has an accredited lab.

Tai lets just say Im very skeptical about Mike Adams and his accredited lab when Ive read things like what David Kahn says, Can you understand why someone might just be skeptical after reading?
Can you show me that what Khhn says is not corect?




Dave Kahn says:

January 25, 2010 at 12:12 pm

Apart from confirming the importance of magic in his world view Mike Adams’ follow up reveals that he doesn’t grasp basic chemistry. “Water is made up of two gases, each of which is a combustible fuel on its own,” he asserts. Does he understand the difference between a compound and a mixture, and does he understand the properties of hydrogen and oxygen?

Water is not “made up of two gases” but is a compound of oxygen and hydrogen. In elemental form these are gaseous above certain temperatures; in compound with each other they are water which is also gaseous above a certain temerature. Oxygen of course supports combustion but is not itself combustible. The various properties of water that Adams describes as magical are indeed remarkable but are well understood in scientific terms. No magic required.



Skepticism is not a set of beliefs, it is a set of methods for asking questions about reality. quote- gdjskyo01

quote Tai-You have quoted from a lot of other people who dislike him and not quoted much from him.

I will post quotes from Mike Adams, To be fair.

Tai of course I might cherry pick his quotes,
You can also quote Mike Adams if you think Im to selective

"In a world where a Fukushima-style disaster could happen any day, potassium iodide is an FDA-approved supplement that's scientifically proven to help protect your body from radiation... Click here to get potassium iodide discounted at the Natural News Store." -- Mike Adams


Mike Adams respects F.D.A. science whenever it helps him to sell a product. Potassium iodide does not actually protect the body. It only suppresses the entry of radioactive iodine into the ovaries and thyroid, which may provide some protection for those organs but only those two organs. Concentrated chlorophyll extract is more effective for overall radiation protection, as shown by U.S. Army research. Chlorophyll, the dark green pigment found in some vegetables, is significantly safer and better suited for resisting whole body radiation damage, but it is not sold in the Natural News store.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/03/2017 05:34AM by riverhousebill.

Most of what I have read about Mike Adams makes me very skeptical
about claims he makes.
So many sources shread him, and about the only defense for him comes from two of his own sites, So mnay other groups have nothing good to say about his work.



The only thing I have found a little odd that may prove some websites are spreading lies about Adams is this claim quoted on several websites ive quoted from.
The Claim the FBI was watching him.
Ive googled to find more on this and there is nothing
anywhere that says FBI involved looking at Adams.
maybe I missed info, I can not find anything that supports the claim.

RHB Posted:

55.
ThomasT says:

April 16, 2013 at 8:16 am

A Mike Adams reader here! I’m also also a commenter, as unfortunately many of his ‘writers’ merely repeat meaningless studies from mainstream medicine that ignore that we do have the heart disease prevention and cure, that for cancer etc. Mike rarely writes anything about health himself these days, but does write absurd political rants, which I don’t bother with.

I got onto this site when linked to the Billy Meier et contact story, which to all mainstream scientists, neurologists etc baldly state must be a hoax. My point is that if even one single part of Meier’s story is correct, that single one taken from his 1800 pages of et contact notes, from 1000 pre-Photshop 35mm film, from cine film, from sound recordings, from the metal fragment analysis by IBM scientist M. Vogel. etc. then the phenomena exists. As a retired airline training Capt. I have had excellent UFO sightings, even carrying ‘official’ UFO report forms in our nav. bags in 1972.

As example let’s take the Jet Propulsion Labs photo-analysis of his 35mm film,that of the Swiss Air Force Mirage Fighter in the same frame as a UFO. In the analysed photo from JPL, there is an ‘energy field’ encompassing both craft. At that time, according to Meier, the et pilot told him, via telepathy, (which can’t exist in mainstream neuroscience), that she was ‘melting down’ the gun-control of the fighter jet which had ‘locked-onto’ her craft. (My son is in neuro-science in Vienna)!

Another example is the accurate planetary information published by Meier before nasa’s ‘discoveries’ .

[www.bibliotecapleyades.net]

Tai:
This is actually interesting. I wasn't going to bring Billy Meier up but I know someone who traveled to stay with Billy Meier and examined his evidence. The person I know believes that Billy Meier did have contact with ETs for about a year and then lost contact.
I saw a video where Billy Meier was trying automatic handwriting. In spiritual orthodoxy, that is very wrong and bad. That was probably his vain attempt to reconnect. then I read some of the writings and the morality was not good, in my opinion. His writings were a total turn off to me, not to mention his personal history. Yet, the person I know was not interested in any of that, just whether or not there was real contact and he believed it to be true.

DEC. 16, 2017

[www.nytimes.com]

Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’:
The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program

By HELENE COOPER, RALPH BLUMENTHAL and LESLIE KEAN


WASHINGTON — In the $600 billion annual Defense Department budgets, the $22 million spent on the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was almost impossible to find.

Which was how the Pentagon wanted it.

For years, the program investigated reports of unidentified flying objects, according to Defense Department officials, interviews with program participants and records obtained by The New York Times. It was run by a military intelligence official, Luis Elizondo, on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C Ring, deep within the building’s maze.

The Defense Department has never before acknowledged the existence of the program, which it says it shut down in 2012. But its backers say that, while the Pentagon ended funding for the effort at that time, the program remains in existence. For the past five years, they say, officials with the program have continued to investigate episodes brought to them by service members, while also carrying out their other Defense Department duties.

The shadowy program — parts of it remain classified — began in 2007, and initially it was largely funded at the request of Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was the Senate majority leader at the time and who has long had an interest in space phenomena. Most of the money went to an aerospace research company run by a billionaire entrepreneur and longtime friend of Mr. Reid’s, Robert Bigelow, who is currently working with NASA to produce expandable craft for humans to use in space.

On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in May, Mr. Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that U.F.O.s have visited Earth.

Working with Mr. Bigelow’s Las Vegas-based company, the program produced documents that describe sightings of aircraft that seemed to move at very high velocities with no visible signs of propulsion, or that hovered with no apparent means of lift.

Officials with the program have also studied videos of encounters between unknown objects and American military aircraft — including one released in August of a whitish oval object, about the size of a commercial plane, chased by two Navy F/A-18F fighter jets from the aircraft carrier Nimitz off the coast of San Diego in 2004.

Mr. Reid, who retired from Congress this year, said he was proud of the program. “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going,” Mr. Reid said in a recent interview in Nevada. “I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Two other former senators and top members of a defense spending subcommittee — Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, and Daniel K. Inouye, a Hawaii Democrat — also supported the program. Mr. Stevens died in 2010, and Mr. Inouye in 2012.

While not addressing the merits of the program, Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at M.I.T., cautioned that not knowing the origin of an object does not mean that it is from another planet or galaxy. “When people claim to observe truly unusual phenomena, sometimes it’s worth investigating seriously,” she said. But, she added, “what people sometimes don’t get about science is that we often have phenomena that remain unexplained.”

James E. Oberg, a former NASA space shuttle engineer and the author of 10 books on spaceflight who often debunks U.F.O. sightings, was also doubtful. “There are plenty of prosaic events and human perceptual traits that can account for these stories,” Mr. Oberg said. “Lots of people are active in the air and don’t want others to know about it. They are happy to lurk unrecognized in the noise, or even to stir it up as camouflage.”

Still, Mr. Oberg said he welcomed research. “There could well be a pearl there,” he said.

In response to questions from The Times, Pentagon officials this month acknowledged the existence of the program, which began as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Officials insisted that the effort had ended after five years, in 2012.

“It was determined that there were other, higher priority issues that merited funding, and it was in the best interest of the DoD to make a change,” a Pentagon spokesman, Thomas Crosson, said in an email, referring to the Department of Defense.

But Mr. Elizondo said the only thing that had ended was the effort’s government funding, which dried up in 2012. From then on, Mr. Elizondo said in an interview, he worked with officials from the Navy and the C.I.A. He continued to work out of his Pentagon office until this past October, when he resigned to protest what he characterized as excessive secrecy and internal opposition.

“Why aren’t we spending more time and effort on this issue?” Mr. Elizondo wrote in a resignation letter to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Mr. Elizondo said that the effort continued and that he had a successor, whom he declined to name.

U.F.O.s have been repeatedly investigated over the decades in the United States, including by the American military. In 1947, the Air Force began a series of studies that investigated more than 12,000 claimed U.F.O. sightings before it was officially ended in 1969. The project, which included a study code-named Project Blue Book, started in 1952, concluded that most sightings involved stars, clouds, conventional aircraft or spy planes, although 701 remained unexplained.

Robert C. Seamans Jr., the secretary of the Air Force at the time, said in a memorandum announcing the end of Project Blue Book that it “no longer can be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”

Mr. Reid said his interest in U.F.O.s came from Mr. Bigelow. In 2007, Mr. Reid said in the interview, Mr. Bigelow told him that an official with the Defense Intelligence Agency had approached him wanting to visit Mr. Bigelow’s ranch in Utah, where he conducted research.

Mr. Reid said he met with agency officials shortly after his meeting with Mr. Bigelow and learned that they wanted to start a research program on U.F.O.s. Mr. Reid then summoned Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye to a secure room in the Capitol.

“I had talked to John Glenn a number of years before,” Mr. Reid said, referring to the astronaut and former senator from Ohio, who died in 2016. Mr. Glenn, Mr. Reid said, had told him he thought that the federal government should be looking seriously into U.F.O.s, and should be talking to military service members, particularly pilots, who had reported seeing aircraft they could not identify or explain.

The sightings were not often reported up the military’s chain of command, Mr. Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

The meeting with Mr. Stevens and Mr. Inouye, Mr. Reid said, “was one of the easiest meetings I ever had.”

He added, “Ted Stevens said, ‘I’ve been waiting to do this since I was in the Air Force.’” (The Alaska senator had been a pilot in the Army’s air force, flying transport missions over China during World War II.)

During the meeting, Mr. Reid said, Mr. Stevens recounted being tailed by a strange aircraft with no known origin, which he said had followed his plane for miles.

None of the three senators wanted a public debate on the Senate floor about the funding for the program, Mr. Reid said. “This was so-called black money,” he said. “Stevens knows about it, Inouye knows about it. But that was it, and that’s how we wanted it.” Mr. Reid was referring to the Pentagon budget for classified programs.

Contracts obtained by The Times show a congressional appropriation of just under $22 million beginning in late 2008 through 2011. The money was used for management of the program, research and assessments of the threat posed by the objects.

The funding went to Mr. Bigelow’s company, Bigelow Aerospace, which hired subcontractors and solicited research for the program.

Under Mr. Bigelow’s direction, the company modified buildings in Las Vegas for the storage of metal alloys and other materials that Mr. Elizondo and program contractors said had been recovered from unidentified aerial phenomena. Researchers also studied people who said they had experienced physical effects from encounters with the objects and examined them for any physiological changes. In addition, researchers spoke to military service members who had reported sightings of strange aircraft.

“We’re sort of in the position of what would happen if you gave Leonardo da Vinci a garage-door opener,” said Harold E. Puthoff, an engineer who has conducted research on extrasensory perception for the C.I.A. and later worked as a contractor for the program. “First of all, he’d try to figure out what is this plastic stuff. He wouldn’t know anything about the electromagnetic signals involved or its function.”

The program collected video and audio recordings of reported U.F.O. incidents, including footage from a Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet showing an aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed and rotating as it moves. The Navy pilots can be heard trying to understand what they are seeing. “There’s a whole fleet of them,” one exclaims. Defense officials declined to release the location and date of the incident.

“Internationally, we are the most backward country in the world on this issue,” Mr. Bigelow said in an interview. “Our scientists are scared of being ostracized, and our media is scared of the stigma. China and Russia are much more open and work on this with huge organizations within their countries. Smaller countries like Belgium, France, England and South American countries like Chile are more open, too. They are proactive and willing to discuss this topic, rather than being held back by a juvenile taboo.”

By 2009, Mr. Reid decided that the program had made such extraordinary discoveries that he argued for heightened security to protect it. “Much progress has been made with the identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings,” Mr. Reid said in a letter to William Lynn III, a deputy defense secretary at the time, requesting that it be designated a “restricted special access program” limited to a few listed officials.

A 2009 Pentagon briefing summary of the program prepared by its director at the time asserted that “what was considered science fiction is now science fact,” and that the United States was incapable of defending itself against some of the technologies discovered. Mr. Reid’s request for the special designation was denied.

Mr. Elizondo, in his resignation letter of Oct. 4, said there was a need for more serious attention to “the many accounts from the Navy and other services of unusual aerial systems interfering with military weapon platforms and displaying beyond-next-generation capabilities.” He expressed his frustration with the limitations placed on the program, telling Mr. Mattis that “there remains a vital need to ascertain capability and intent of these phenomena for the benefit of the armed forces and the nation.”

Mr. Elizondo has now joined Mr. Puthoff and another former Defense Department official, Christopher K. Mellon, who was a deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence, in a new commercial venture called To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science. They are speaking publicly about their efforts as their venture aims to raise money for research into U.F.O.s.

In the interview, Mr. Elizondo said he and his government colleagues had determined that the phenomena they had studied did not seem to originate from any country. “That fact is not something any government or institution should classify in order to keep secret from the people,” he said.

For his part, Mr. Reid said he did not know where the objects had come from. “If anyone says they have the answers now, they’re fooling themselves,” he said. “We do not know.”

But, he said, “we have to start someplace.”



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 12/20/2017 12:29AM by Tai.