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Metz denies the claim that he tried to get a job at Chick Publications. He also claims he had documents to support his charges against Alberto. This email was received on 7/23/03. Although we cannot confirm with certainty the identity of the sender, we have no reason to doubt it is Mr. Metz. In the interest of presenting both sides, here's Mr. Metz's letter without any edits:

I was surfing the net and found references to me on your site.

Frankly, I was amazed that anyone would still be interested in this story. But I read several false statements posted about me and although I haven't begun to read all the comments on your site, I thought there might be some visitors to your site who would be interested in my response.

This is not a detailed response since I haven't begun to read all the charges and counter charges, but let me focus on a couple that I noticed were being repeated as if they were facts. If this is posted on this website, at least you will know response to these charges.

Let me preface this by saying that I had no axe to grind with Jack Chick. As a young Christian I used to distribute his tracts. That was in the day that his material was focused on simply spreading the gospel. I thought it was unfortunate that he later got caught up in various conspiracy theories. His tracts took a darker tone from that point on and seemed to me to lack the clear, simple focus of this earlier work.

But the accusation that I asked Jack Chick for a job and that was the motivation for the research into Alberto Rivera is absolutely false. I haven't read all of your posts, so I don't know where this started, but whoever started this rumor, lied. I can only assume someone made up this story in an attempt to discredit me. Unfortunately there is no way I can "prove" this, but I would like to be on record as denying it. God knows the truth.

The fact is that my friends at Cornerstone magazine asked me to investigate the Alberto story. They would from time to time ask me to write for them. If they were getting a number of letters from their readers on a topic that they knew little about and thought it deserved more attention sometimes they would ask me to investigate. Since I once did research for Dr. Walter Martin, they asked me if I would do research of this sort for them. I had published several other stories for them prior to the Alberto story, including a brief investigation into Johnny Todd, another of Jack Chick's "sources."

.The other blatant falsehood is that I never provided copies of my research documents to others. I provided documentation to Cornerstone magazine, to Christianity Today (their lawyers reviewed the documents and my story prior to their publishing the story). I remember sending out copies of these documents to perhaps hundreds of people making such inquires. Eventually due to the demand I created a small booklet with the major documents reproduced. I probably still have the documents in storage somewhere, if it would make a read difference to someone. But the documents are in circulation and can be verified. I verified them all myself over 20 years ago.

To me it's sad, that people are attracted to the nonsense that Alberto produced. It illustrates how many in the Christian community would rather chase some grand international conspiracy than stay focused and do the work God called us to do.

Gary Metz

For the sake of the record it should be mentioned that we never said he never provided copies of his research to others, we only said we never saw any such documents. The one item that seemed the best evidence of his claims (the death certificate of Alberto's supposed illegitimate son) is not on file at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, Austin TX. We will continue to follow this story for details.

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