Hello and welcome to the skeptics guide to the universe. Today is Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005.

This is your host, Steven Novella, president of the New England Skeptical Society.

And with me tonight, as usual, is Perry DeAngeles. Hello. Evan Bernstein. Hi everyone. And Bob Novella. Hello everyone.

So we're going to start tonight with an in-memoriam. The Skeptical movement has lost two people since the last broadcast.

The first is Philip Class. Phil Class was the pre-eminent UFO skeptic. He almost single-handedly founded the area of UFO skepticism.

He was an editor of avionics and aviation week and space technology for over 30 years.

Received numerous awards for his work as a journalist. And the latter part of his career was essentially spent debunking Roswell and UFO sightings.

He is author of the book The Real Roswell Crash Sonser Cover Up, which came out in 1997. And UFO abduction to dangerous game.

Have any of you guys ever met Phil Class? I did not have. I met him at the World Skeptics Conference.

Right. Yeah. I met him at the same conference. He was already fairly old at that time. That was maybe 10 years ago.

Interesting thing about Phil Class. The rumor is that he was the inspiration for the smoking man on the X-Files.

This was the older agent who seemed to know what was really going on with the government in UFOs whose character was constantly smoking.

He was a Chainsmoker. Not sure if that's true or not. That was the rumor. So unfortunately he passed away a little over a week ago.

Steve, did you know that in 1976 he helped found a Psychop?

That's right. He was one of the founding members of Psychop. And he served on its executive council. That's pretty...

Psychop is a committee for the scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal. And he was a senior research fellow basically in charge of their UFO research.

He wrote me a very nice letter once. After an article of mine appeared in the New England Journal of Skepticism regarding a close vote up at Psychop.

He certainly was very concerned about the skeptical movement and the direction. Some of the people wanted to take it, particularly Dr. Kurtz.

We've all had Kurtz's of him over the years. In this particular case, he'll class agree with me. He wrote a letter stating so.

He asked me to give it this great time I did. It's not relevant anymore.

There has been some internal debate about what the relationship should be between organized skepticism, scientific skepticism, and organized secular humanism.

Along those related lines to what degree skeptical movements should take on purely religious issues.

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