I've always deemed it wacko whenever this local celebrity, a former actor to be exact, would show up on national television and relate his stories about making contact with ETs and sighting UFOS and the like. I've always believed there are other intelligent life forms out there but I'm a bit conservative on the disclosure part. Personally, I think that if one wants to maintain a semblance of sanity in spite of what he knows he should either (1) keep what he knows to himself or (2)present damning,irrefutable evidence from credible witnesses.

I've followed UFO stories from time to time and assessed the 'believability' of these stories based on eyewitness accounts and first hand evidence. Every so often, a face-off between skeptics and believers happens on TV like in Larry King Live during the spate of UFO sightings in Stephenville, Texas and always without fail, you see the panel of skeptics lambasting the testimonies from ordinary people with a surfeit of scientific/technical arrogance. It ain't so easy, however if they're dealing with a pilot or a particle physicist who knows his science quite well.

I do know for fact that a lot of purported 'evidence' for the existence of ufos and ETs are contrived, money-making hoaxes that simply gives the subject a bad name and the skeptics a field day. That's why I never stopped looking for what I can consider as solid evidence, credible witnesses and 'damning' testimonies. Can't say I found it already but I guess the Disclosure Project would be the closet one. The project headed by Dr. Steven Greer boasts an array of Air Force personnel, Intelligence and Corporate personalities who have had first hand experience of the subject one way or the other. The central tenet of their belief is that the US government knows about UFOS and have been discreetly acquiring their technologies all these years in typical Conspiracy Theory fashion. For a detailed look at their case check out the movie 'THE GREATEST STORY EVER DENIED" by Jose Escamilla by clicking on this link http://freedocumentaries.net/media/50/The_Greatest_Story_Ever_Denied/

Predicacion impartida por el pastor Eduardo Escamilla donde se habla sobre el poder de las imágenes en la acualidad.

En esta conferencia se exponen los mensajes subliminales en las peliculas de Disney y los juego extremadamente vionlentos que la juventud consume hoy en dia.

Predicación impartida en la Iglesia Cristiana de Venezuela el domingo 24 de febrero del 2008 por el pastor Eduardo Escamilla.

He also got a very poor 12-page review put into his file evaluating his teaching that year. According to the website he has set up to chronicle his interpretation of events, it was the first negative review he had ever gotten in all his years of teaching. He appealed these decisions multiple times, and seems to have raised such a furor that the school board felt the need to defend their decisions, so they released supporting evidence from his personnel record in October. In November, he sued. Yesterday, the case was finally settled.

The local newspaper report is rather vague on the details, though:

A tentative agreement was reached Monday between the Wake County school system and a former Enloe High School teacher who sued after he was punished for inviting an anti-Islamic speaker to talk with his students.

Social studies teacher Robert Escamilla and his attorney, Billy Strickland, said they couldn't disclose the terms of the deal until July 1. They said the agreement was contingent upon the school district performing some actions that they couldn't disclose yet.

"It could be a productive development if they do what they say," he said. It would not, however, return him to Enloe, he said.

[...]

Escamilla was suspended in February 2007 after he invited an Egyptian-born Christian to speak at Enloe. Some parents, the ACLU and the Council on American-Islamic Relations complained that the speaker had denounced Islam and warned female students not to marry Muslim men.

Escamilla was later reprimanded and transferred to Phillips High, an alternative school. The school board also released negative parts of his personnel file to justify its decision not to grant Escamilla's request to be reassigned back to Enloe.

School officials accused Escamilla of being a lax teacher. But Escamilla pointed out that before last year, he had received only positive evaluations during his 18 years at Enloe.

Escamilla sued in November alleging that his due process rights had been violated.

Personally, I'm with the school officials on this one. As I said of my experiences in his class in my previous post:

I was never particularly impressed with his classes, in any case, because all we ever did was read the textbook and then teach the chapters to each other in assigned turn. He very rarely actually seemed to teach us anything. I think I saw him being more teacherly in driver’s ed than in my history class.

I find it very bizarre if it's true that every teaching evaluation he ever got before was completely positive. If so, they must not have been based on input from students. Of course, maybe it's because his students tended to do well on multiple choice state mandated exams. We didn't learn much else.

If you're interested in more news stories about this saga, the local TV station has this story, with a fantastically weird picture of him and several more links in the sidebar. I cannot imagine who the students rallying to bring him back would have been, unless they were ones particularly taken with his apparently increasing strangeness in the classroom. We Enloe students do delight in weirdness, though Mr. Escamilla's kind was never to my taste.

-posted by Dana