Really? Huh, how strange. It sounds to me like a parody of CSICOP or the skeptic movement in general — especially as previously mocked by Robert Anton Wilson in The New Inquisition and the Cosmic Trigger books. "Dresden Codak" has dropped references to Wilson previously, if I recall correctly.

If I had to pick out specific personages being mocked here, I'd pick Martin Gardner or James Randi long before Eliezer. The "weather balloon" reference is specifically to UFO skepticism, which doesn't seem to be a big topic around here, but which was a pretty big deal for the skeptic movement in the '80s.

The scholars in the comic are being "pseudoskeptics", as Marcello Truzzi would say ...