Gerald Alexander Larue (June 20, 1916 – September 17, 2014) was an American scholar of religion and professor emeritus of gerontology, a former ordained minister who became an agnostic, archaeologist, debunker of biblical stories and accounts of miracles, and humanist.
Larue gradually turned his attention to topics such as the Bible's views of sex and gender and ancient practices surrounding death and dying.
During an academic career spanning five decades, Larue became a widely cited expert on topics including Satanism, visions of Mary, and death and dying.
[1] Larue was at the center of a controversy over an elaborate hoax in which his friend George Jammal claimed that he had found Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat in Turkey.
Hosted by Darren McGavin, the special featured interviews with John C. Whitcomb, Philip C. Hammond, Charles Berlitz, David Coppedge, Carl Baugh and Tim LaHaye.The centerpiece of the film were the claims of ark discovery and presenting a piece of wood from the vessel.
Sun issued a press release which complained that it was "sad and unfortunate that Dr. Larue, a distinguished USC professor, would victimize Mr. Jammal and his family to execute a third-party hoax in which he was the primary benefactor."
[2] However Larue's statements were correct: Jammal had hoaxed Sun International Pictures and the Institute for Creation Research, and they had either missed or been unwilling to accept the numerous clues which he had planted in the content of his claims, such as the names of the individuals who had helped him on his alleged quest for Noah's Ark: "Mr. Asholian," "Vladimir Sobitchsky," and, best of all, "Allis Buls Hitian".
To make the subject real, he passed around a bottle filled with the ashes of a dear colleague, psychologist Herman M. Harvey, who had given Larue permission to use his remains as a teaching tool before he died.
"[1] In 1980 he attended a meeting in Los Angeles organized by right-to-die movement pioneer Derek Humphry, a British-born journalist and author who had written "Jean's Way", a book about his terminally ill wife's planned suicide in 1975.
"He presided over Hemlock with great diplomacy when it was highly sensitive and controversial—when America was just beginning to address the subject of the hot-button topic of the right to choose to die when at life's end.