Talk:Fred Crisman

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This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 11:38, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

This article is in need of reliable and verifiable material. At present it is so hopelessly under-referenced by anything reliable that it should be an article for deletion. I tagged it in October 2008 with a CLEAN UP tag, yet no one has provided any factual verification for anything since that tag. Today, I tagged it with a notability tag, and I will propose deletion in several months unless someone begins to clean up this mess. I certainly am not interested in doing it. ThsQ (talk) 16:00, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi ThsQ. This article isn't that bad but doesn't reflect the current state of research on Fred Crisman. It shouldn't be deleted because a lot of people do view it for some basic information on Crisman. He's notable as a figure in his own right as an original member of OSI who worked overseas and was recalled to service when Bill Donovan formed CIA in 1947, as a public figure (city council member in Washington state's second-largest city), as radio personality and as an early advocate of Roma rights, not to mention Maury Island, the first modern UFO sighting/contact in which he played a pivotal role.

The thing about Crisman is that he keeps making waves years after his death. He appears in a number of works about UFOs and the JFK assassination. There is at least one recent book dedicated solely to Crisman which needs to be included in the reference section if it's not there yet. Last time I looked there was a link to a padf of an FBI background search which does document his status in US intelligence. As it stands, the entry on Crisman simply states some separate controversies in which he plays a part, so it's no worse than many stubs on wikipedia and does provide some basic information. I think the way to appraoch him here is to call him a notable public figure in his own right with a long paper tail that suggests some very strange connections, then discuss his place in the UFO and conspiracy literature and leave it at that. I think the separate cotnroversies could be merged into the main body of the article as separate paragraphs, without headers.

I can find references for his part in the Shaver mystery, the fad that gripped the US from 1945 to about 1950 and that predicted the UFO flap of 1947. Crisman wrote in to Amazing Stories edited by Ray Palmer and made some outrageous allegations about a cave in Central Asia during his service with OSI, mentioning wounds consistent with laser burns before lasers were invented. He was published under a pseudonym but Palmer later wrote that it was indeed Crisman.

I'll get this referenced in the next month or so and see about some better references elsewhere, and maybe reformat the whole article if it seems called for.

Hypatea (talk) 10:12, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

Hi Hypatea. I must agree with ThsQ: the article is poorly sourced. Your above details certainly help to make Crisman notable to some degree, and would be a valuable improvement over the existing article if you could reference those details to supporting documentation. —Merry Yellow (talk) 20:38, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Dahl

The mention of Dahl is thrown in with an apparent attempt a besmirching Dahl's own story. A lot of information is missing from this article on Crisman; and there is no article at present at all about Dahl. A lot more can be said here. Just because Crisman may have hoodwinked Dahl into believing they were "fellow" anything, other than people, should have no bearing on the story that Dahl was apparently too troubled with to continue to talk about. Misty MH (talk) 18:43, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Undue weight and fringe

Why do we quote Crisman's wild story of adventure in South Asia that some hold up as a true example of a crackpot letter in full? We do we even have mention of him writting a letter to the editor complaining about the lack of a specific skills for some barders? Wikipedia is not paper, but it also is meant to be an encyclopedia, not an indiscrminate collection of all knowledge. This article at times heads more towards the later.John Pack Lambert (talk) 18:35, 29 October 2021 (UTC)