Dr. George Michael clearly had no idea what he was stepping into last month when he submitted a favorable review of Leslie Kean’s UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record to eSkeptic, the online newsletter of the Skeptics Society. Boy, was he in for an education.

“I would’ve hoped they would’ve been more open-minded instead of going ad hominem and calling me clueless and stupid,” said Michael from Montgomery, Ala. That’s where he teaches nuclear counterproliferation and deterrence theory, at the Air War College, as an associate professor. “I know they categorically reject UFOs, I just didn’t know how deep it went.”

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For Bad UFOs blogger Robert Sheaffer, Michael’s review was “totally uncritical,” “fawning,” “either completely clueless, or else complicit in Kean’s attempts to mislead.” The title of his rebuttal — “The Day The Skeptical Society Wasn’t Skeptical” — would’ve been more accurate if “Predictable” had been the last word in the headline, because the prevailing reaction among the insular Skeptics was a sense of betrayal. As Fortean Times contributer Peter Brookesmith lamented, “How come the review was published by eSkeptic at all?”

Being limber enough to challenge the status quo of one’s own belief system is the true measure of skepticism (small “s”). One of the original organizational Skeptics, Marcello Truzzi, abandoned the group he co-founded when he realized it was becoming an entrenched ideology. (emphasis mine – frogmarch)

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Yesterday, Shermer published Michael’s rebuttal to Sheaffer’s rebuttal and Sheaffer’s subsequent rebuttal to Michael’s rebuttal. But the real question here is: Will Shermer evolve into a true skeptic and risk agitating the disciples again by making the same “mistake” twice?