Regarding Wally Gentleman and the Meier fraud:
I never had the pleasure of meeting the late Mr. Gentleman, but I know a lot of effects guys-- Ray Harryhausen, Jim Danforth, etc.-- and have done considerable writing on the subject. The quote from Gentleman in LIGHT YEARS (wasn't that what the Kinder book was called) always leaped out at my for its equivocal nature.
Effects technician Wally Gentleman never said the Meier photos were legitimate. That's NEVER, as in "NOT EVER."
Kinder used enough of Gentleman's quote that one could ASSUME Gentleman was endorsing the photos, but he never said 1) they were real 2) he thought they were any good 3) that he could never duplicate them.
Kinder used a neat bit of literary slight of hand with the quote, letting the reader's imagination fill in blanks that Kinder intentionally leaves. Gentleman did say "I don't know how they were done," and that's simply a statement of fact: he wasn't there, so he didn't know how they were shot.
Gentleman did say something to the effect that, "If we were doing these in a studio situation, we'd have a crew of thirty or forty men and high-tech cameras." He was, again, simply stating a fact. When you're shooting intricate model effects in a studio setting for a major film (like 2001, which Gentleman worked on), yes, in a situation like that, you use a large crew.
But he did NOT say, "We'd NEED a crew like that to duplicate these pictures."
By leaving these quotes hanging in his book, Kinder in effect misquoted Gentleman and made simple statements of fact into endorsements of model shots that are patently obvious to the most untrained observer.
The same tactic was done on the Fox ALIEN AUTOPSY show, in which contemporary physical-effect/make-up guys were asked what they thought of the "alien" footage. And like Gentleman, they responded, "Well... we don't know how they did it." Well, no, they don't, because they weren't there. COuld they guess and be right on the money? Sure-- but that wasn't what they were asked (or rather, thoe answers were left in the outtake files.)
Wendell Stevens did the same selective quotations in that insane text about the Meier case regarding the "hair" from the space babe. I spoke to the scientist directly and he chuckled at his supposed "endorsement" of the hair being anything but a human hair that showed eivdence of being bleached.