Online researchers spent a lot of time this week pondering the "leadership crisis in UFOlogy," while several very public differences of opinion only served to highlight the deep lack of unity currently dominating the paranormal community.

Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) kicked off the leadership debate with a paper from member Joseph Burkes. In "The Leadership Crisis in UFOlogy," Burkes lamented the absence of a strong altruistic ethic within UFO culture, an absence that he attributed to the need to make a living in the "cottage industry environment" of paranormal research. Moreover, because UFOlogy "has been relegated to the fringe" of contemporary discourse, many researchers suffer from a need to compete not only for dollars but for self-esteem.

As for the frustrations being vented, the simmering battle between Art Bell, David John Oates and Robert A.M. Stephens continued to perk along. Bell's Web site posted an affidavit from Jon Kelly, one of Oates' former students, that charged Oates with marijuana use, unethical behavior and "tumultuous relationships with women." In particular, Kelly noted that Linda Sanders, a member of the Oates legal team, had left a threatening message on his answering machine containing an implicit threat of lawsuit if Kelly went on Bell's program to discuss Oates.

Meanwhile, the Shady Pines website, which has previously hosted missives from Sanders and other anti-Bell material, kept the pressure on Bell, presumably on behalf of Oates and Stephens, both of whom Bell is suing for $60 million for character defamation.

Mitch Battros of Earth Changes TV posted a description of Bell's activities on Shady Pines that he called "a very clever but unbelievable hateful and vindictive attack over the internet and air waves against David Oates." Battros also reprinted a number of death threats and other threatening e-mail he has received from pro-Bell forces.

Shady Pines also heaped skepticism on long-time Bell ally and Great Martian Face proponent Richard Hoagland, linking to an external website called "Richard Hoagland: Hoax or Insanity?" that asks the poignant question, "Does Hoagland intend to lie, fabricate data and perpetrate fraud intentionally, or does he actually and honestly believe this stuff?"

On Usenet, the bizarre "Orbs" continued to draw their own share of abuse after "Team Orb" popularized August's "photo opportunity" when more than a dozen of the alleged "alien subspace communications phenomena" posed "almost obediently" for those attending the annual Global Sciences Congress convention in Denver.

As "My Home," an apparent member or sympathizer of "Team Orb," put it, the behavior "was indicative of a human-compatible intelligence and a sense of humor, which even staged a scene reminiscent of a scene out of the movie 'Contact.' "

The news, cosmic though it may have been, was not popular with the newsgroup skeptics, who immediately exercised their own human-compatible intelligence and sense of humor by parodying the press release and debunking the Denver photos.

Team Orb is closely affiliated with American Computer Company, best known to UFO mythology as the company that successfully sued website Nexxus.org over ACC's claims that transistors and all earthly computer technology derive from the wreckage of a spaceship that crashed in Roswell, NM.

Outside the round of researchers "venting their frustrations," UFO-conspiracy buff and reptoid fighter David Icke reported that the unexpected illness of his tour promoter had caused him to cancel his lecture appearances in Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, and Phoenix.

Finally, on a bittersweet note, Paranormal News reprinted a 1995 piece by Vladimir Rubtsov called "Post-Soviet UFOlogy: A View from the Inside" that called for "contacts and collaboration" between researchers worldwide, but cast a wary eye toward the spread of Western-style "illnesses" like "tabloidization" into Russian paranormal research as the market economy blossomed throughout the former Soviet Union.