Yikes, It's David Icke!

Guess who has a new book out. Okay, I suppose the title of this post was a giveaway, but world-famous conspiracy crank David Icke has unleashed yet another broadside attack on reality¹. As most of you probably know, Icke is a soccer-player-turned-paranoia-guru who attained an impressive level of international infamy in the late 1990s with the release of his book The Biggest Secret. The book was an absolute magnum opus in the field of groundless conspiracy-mongering, advancing the claim that the human race been manipulated for untold millenia by a cabal of interdimensional lizard-men. It changed the face of internet conspiracy message boards forever.

Lizard-men have 2d8+2 hit points and usually attack with clubs or large darts.
They also control the entire planet with the aid of the Bilderberg Group.

Icke's new book, Human Race Get Off Your Knees - The Lion Sleeps No More, is a 690-page tome in which he reveals, among other things, that the moon is actually a giant spacecraft filled with aliens. See, it turns out that the moon actually beams out a "fake reality" broadcast that serves to pacify us regular folks and turn us into more malleable slaves for our alien overlords. Of course, all of this is in addition to the alien/human hybrids who have already infiltrated the highest levels of society and control the entire banking industry and pretty much every government in the world. That's right, we all live in that Roddy Piper movie They Live and you can read all about it for a mere $35, plus shipping. I don't advise it.

It's hard to decide exactly what to make of David Icke. There's a part of me that almost wants to laud him for his creativity, since he continuously bangs out torturously long conspiracy tomes (16 since 1992, by my count²) that strive painfully hard to connect every conspiracy trope ever conceived into a sort of Grand Unified Theory of Crazy so complicated and implausible that it defies all attempts at concise summary. Everything from alien crossbreeding (with each other and humans), the New World Order, and the Hollow Earth to the Bilderberg Group, HAARP, and the 9/11 Truth Movement have found their way into his narrative. That's no mean feat, and I'm a little surprised that the Sci-Fi Channel isn't pounding on Icke's door to get the movie-of-the-week rights. I guess even that network that brought us Sharktopus has some standards.

On the other hand, there's a sense in which he's not much different from every other quasi-millenarian kook out there. He promises the imminent replacement of a society overrun by the forces of evil by a new, enlightened society brought about by people with access to special knowledge. Specifically, in David Icke's narrative humanity is being empowered by "truth vibrations" to throw off the yoke of a race of malevolent spacemen who control society and ruthlessly oppress the masses...but doesn't that story sound vaguely familiar?

The motif of "we, the righteous few vs. monolithic evil" has been used by nearly every apocalyptic group I can think of. Christianity's internal narrative revolves around a society dominated by supernatural evil that will eventually be redeemed through divine intervention from God and helped along by those on earth who've heard "the good news". The Gnostics (broadly speaking) were concerned with casting off an evil and corrupted world and reaching a truer, more righteous reality through the application of secret wisdom. Hell, even Al Qaeda organizes itself around the idea of holy war against a wicked society waged by virtuous adherents to a revealed "truth". The particulars may be different, but the broad outline is the same every time.

In other words, David is really just regurgitating a tried-and-true apocalyptic narrative that has been around for thousands of years. Furthermore, pretty much every conspiracy Icke evokes, from the sinister machinations of the New World Order to 9/11 being perpetrated by the U.S. government, either pre-dates him or emerged independently before he re-purposed it for his own claims. As far as I can tell, he's never met a conspiracy that he couldn't find a home for in his wacky world. In all seriousness, go to Google and type in "David Icke" plus any conspiracy you've ever heard of. Odds are you'll find a link to his website in which he endorses it as fact.

Hilariously, some of the "evidence" he cites, such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was debunked as utter hokum before he was even born.³ If that's not the very definition of "old hat", I don't know what is. Even his famed lizardmen (aka Reptilians, aka Reptoids, aka Annuaki) are derived from a subset of UFO abduction claims dating back to at least the 1950s. (And, it should be noted, are intriguingly similar to the villains in that old sci-fi show V.) His claims only sound original because of the veritable smorgasbord of absurd conspiracy theories he's stitched together in order to assemble a bizarre Frankenstein monster of paranoia.

Contrary to his own delusions, David Icke is certainly no visionary genius on a fast track to saving the universe. He's not even an especially creative weirdo. He is, I fear, just another oddball who's taken a heaping handful of pop-culture conspiracy cliches and arranged them into the generic millenarian outline like some kind of tinfoil hat Mad Lib. It would almost be funny if so many people didn't take him seriously.

_____________
1.) "Icke" is pronounced like "Ike", although "ick" is more intuitive...and fitting.

2.) He also wrote a book about professional soccer in 1983 that, so far as I can tell, includes no references to space lizards.

3.) Before he settled on lizard aliens from another dimension as the shadowy secret masters of the world, Icke pointed the finger at a rather more down to earth target: Jews.

Why No One Listens to Richard Hoagland

Well, I'm back from my vacation to Pennsylvania and, as promised (threatened?) I'm going to review Richard Hoagland's Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA. That being said, I suspect that it won't be as long of a review as I had initially thought.

Weighing in at 542 pages plus endnotes, Dark Mission is a formidable and tedious read, but it can quickly be reduced to a central theme: Any time someone disagrees with Richard Hoagland's assertions about civilizations on Mars and the Moon, it's because of an utterly titanic conspiracy involving the SS, the Freemasons, and "the magicians". NASA, the Jet Propulsion Lab, private scientists, it doesn't matter - they're all either part of the conspiracy or have been sucked into its myriad twists and turns. What exactly is the conspiracy? It's honestly hard to tell. For one thing, Hoagland likes to bombard his reader with tons of weird minutiae that one is to assume is supposed to hold some meaning, such as this bit trying to illustrate weird Freemason sorcery guiding NASA launches:

As [Ranger 7, an early lunar mission] launched, the Moon itself was 33° below the horizon of the launch site, almost due West, in the realm of Osiris. At that same moment, at the impact site of Ranger 7 in three days, Orion's belt star Alnitak was exactly 19.5° above the impact site in the Mare Cognitum. Given what we know about the NASA ritual pattern and the agency's capabilities with mission planning, this hardly seems to be a coincidental series of alignments.

We chose to exclude the constellation Taurus, which is associated with the evil god Set, brother of Osiris, because it have not shown up in any of the alignment checks done to that point.

There's 541.5 more pages of that in this book. It should also be noted that any time anything is positioned even close to 19.5° from anything else, Hoagland harps on it as if it's the greatest thing since toast. This is because 19.5° is one of the special numbers he gleaned from decoding the "hyperdimensional tetrahedral physics" of one of the cities on Mars that no one else can see. The city is located near the site called Cydonia, and according to Hoagland it contains such features as pyramids and vast temple complexes. I'm not seeing it myself, despite Hoagland's numerous blow-ups of various sites adorned with notes pointing out "girders", "leaning buildings" and "collapsed structures." He has helpfully coupled these pictures with photographs of earthly building rubble for comparison. He also includes a picture overlayed with with the "geometric message" of the city, which resembles nothing so much as a jumble of lines connecting random features of the landscape.

This "city" is not coincidentally located near the infamous face on Mars, which gets the blame for catching Hoagland's attention in the first place and starting this whole mess. It's the "Martian artifact" he constantly goes back to when all else fails. The thing is, we have better pictures of the "face" than we did back when Viking 1 took the now-infamous image that Hoagland is so in love with. With modern equipment, the "face" looks like this.

The point of Dark Mission, in fact, boils down to an elaborate explanation by Hoagland as to why he still sees the face, and the cities, and a Terminator skull (complete with a photograph of C-3Po for comparison) but other people don't. To Hoagland, the answer isn't just that he's fallen victim to pareidolia and wishful thinking.* Instead, everyone else in the world is wrong, some of them going so far as to actively spread lies to conceal the myriad ways in which Hoagland imagines himself to be right. That, to all appearances, is the conspiracy. And what a vast and far-reaching conspiracy it is. On page 81 he even accuses JPL scientist Dr. Michael Malin (The Bad Guy of the book) of using his secretary as a shill to secretly "become expert in the techniques necessary to spot artifacts in the images set to be received by the Mars Observer" in order to snub Hoagland. Diabolical.

Dark Mission is among the most garbled bundles of weirdness that I've read in recent memory, and that means something since I hang out at Above Top Secret a lot. In his attempts to respond to legitimate criticisms of his "work", Hoagland has fallen down his own rabbit hole and created for himself a world of ever more complex conspiracies and relationships that I'm not convinced even he can even explain lucidly. Dark Mission is a sad testament to this. If you don't mind throwing away $25 and several irreplaceable hours of your life, then by all means check it out. Just don't expect to learn anything.


*He claims on page 4 that the face can't be pareidolia because it is "a direct, overhead view" rather than "a profile view", then goes on to marvel at its symmetry. Then, on page 334, he says that he's always expected the face to be asymmetrical, with a "feline aspect" on the eastern half "specifically intended to represent a lion". Hoagland's current claims include Mars as a prototype of Egyptian mythology, and he apparently thinks that the Egyptian god Horus was associated with lions. Thus the asymmetry of the "face" of Mars is clearly, according to Hoagland, meant to represent some kind of magic man-lion. On his website he even points to that Disney movie The Lion King as a evidence of a historical "lion/human duality". Somehow though he fails to mention this.

Seeing Is Believing...?

I've been milling around over at Above Top Secret again (I'm a glutton for self-punishment) and, as usual, it's left me kind of confused. There are few people more imaginative than conspiracy kooks, but they're amazingly unable to grasp the idea that the people of ancient cultures could actually possess enough imagination to create art depicting events and creatures that weren't real. I say this based on this thread about "Alien Influences on Mankind" that basically offers up a slew of weird cave paintings, sculptures and whatnot mixed with comments from a fellow named SuperSlovak to the effect of "if someone made this painting/sculpture/unintelligible blob then they must have actually seen something like looked like it, ergo it must be real!" Longtime readers may recognize this sort of logic from other species of kooks as well, such as our dinosaur-lovin' pal Phil O'Donnelll. (For example, this page on his site that shows, among other things, a statue of a dragon as proof that live dinosaurs still exist.)

One has to wonder just how far such an attitude can possibly extend:

A picture of Red King: Clear evidence that giant rock-throwing monsters
are alive and well and living in Japan...?

In a sense though, I suppose that oddballs like SuperSlovak and his ilk are at least internally consistent. After all, they seem to have trouble distinguishing their own fantasies and wishful thinking from reality, so why should they be able to distinguish the products of other people's imaginations from reality?

An Amazing Conspiracy...?

I haven't been hanging out over at Above Top Secret lately because, well, I have better things to do. I took a mosey that way this evening in the hopes of finding something amusing and was glad to see that the conspiracy buffs didn't let me down. Check out this gem of a thread. Basically someone dredged up a photo of Barack Obama flashing the American Sign Language sign for "love", realized that he'd seen other people flashing that sign before, and decided to file it as a conspiracy under ATS's "New World Order" forum. The topic starter notes that the same hand sign is popular among heavy metal enthusiasts as a "devil sign", and from there seems to veer off into the good old realm of "global Satanic conspiracy." (Deliciously, the topic starter cites a page of crazy old Jesus Is Savior to show that the gesture is Satanic.)

Where have I seen that hand sign before...?

A few other posters noted that Obama's gesture is just regular ASL, to which the topic starter replied "unless you personally happen to know why someone used it in a particular instance - it could have meant any of it's different meanings." No Occam's Razor for this fellow - if it might be an evil conspiracy, then it must be an evil conspiracy.

I'll tell you what though, the whole "conspiracy of devil worshippers" bit is getting tired. I propose that if we must have a conspiracy to go with this picture, then it should at least be a little more original. Let's pretend that perhaps the president elect does have a secret...an alternate identity perhaps, one that no one else knows about. Perhaps someone who's occassionally on the wrong side of law, someone who tries to do thing his way. It would would have to be someone with an athletic build...someone who was born in the early 1960s...someone with a propensity for hand gestures. Wait a minute...

Holy crap...

Yeah, that's right. Barack Obama is clearly Spider-Man. You read it here first. I mean sure, there are other interpretations of that gesture, but since we don't know the context in which that photo of Obama was taken we may as well infer that it he was getting ready to shoot webs at the Green Goblin. Who's to say?

President Spider-Man! Bin Laden doesn't stand a freakin' chance.

No, wait, that's ridiculous. Nevermind.

Considering the Source: A Primer

Our friend Steve has left us another vitriolic post in which he has "cast the pearls of valuable evidence before the swine" of skeptics like Jak and myself, all the while sneering that we'd never look at the valuable links that he so magnanimously Googled up for us. Well, I've checked them out and now I think it's time for a lesson. Keeping with yesterday's theme of considering sources, let's have a look at some of the websites that our friend Steve has offered up as evidence that the HAARP facility in Alaska is actually a gigantic killing machine:

EastlundScience.com - The website run under the auspices of the deceased Columbia University physicist Bernard Eastlund, who worked on concepts similar to those utilized by HAARP. (He also helped to invent the fast-drying labels of Coors beer cans.) This site expresses concerns that HAARP-like technology could be used to defeat satellites, but since this can already be accomplished using, oh, I dunno, a Ticonderoga Class Aegis Cruiser armed with Raytheon SM-3 missiles, it's hard for me to get too worked up about it. On the subject of weather modification, however, the site has this to say:

One of the reasons weather modification is not a science is that scientists have made what they considered to be reasonable assessments of the relative size of forcing technologies (such as wind generators, microwave heaters, or explosions) and determined that the large size of weather systems make it useless to attempt to change weather patterns with human intervention.

Nonetheless, Eastlund apparently really did think that weather manipulation was ultimately possible, but the site also notes that the HAARP antenna array is far too small for such endeavors. Furthermore, nowhere even in the most far-fetched possibilities listed on this site is man-made earthquake technology even mentioned. That being said, regardless of what Eastlund may or may not have thought, the official HAARP website states the following:

The HAARP facility will not affect the weather. Transmitted energy in the frequency ranges that will be used by HAARP is not absorbed in either the troposphere or the stratosphere - the two levels of the atmosphere that produce the earth's weather. Electromagnetic interactions only occur in the near-vacuum of the rarefied region above about 70 km known as the ionosphere.

The ionosphere is created and continuously replenished as the sun's radiation interacts with the highest levels of the Earth's atmosphere. The downward coupling from the ionosphere to the stratosphere/troposphere is extremely weak, and no association between natural ionospheric variability and surface weather and climate has been found, even at the extraordinarily high levels of ionospheric turbulence that the sun can produce during a geomagnetic storm. If the ionospheric storms caused by the sun itself don't affect the surface weather, there is no chance that HAARP can do so either.

Keep in mind that even if the ionosphere did have an effect on surface weather, HAARP causes fluctuations in the ionosphere that are vastly weaker than the naturally occurring fluctuations it experiences every day because of the sun.

Of further note, I'd like to point out that simply having patented something doesn't actually mean that it works - the U.S. Patent Office is not in the business of determining if inventions are functional, but rather it is in the business of determining if they are ripped off. See for example this list of perpetual motion machine patents.

BroJon.org - This site is a clearinghouse of news links mixed in with in-house conspiracy essays that warn of "Media Mind Control", claim that climate change is untrue, and attempt to prove that catastrophism is the primary method of speciation on the planet. Among the other services this site offers is an "earthquake calculator"(Based on Stonehenge, they claim. According to our BroJon friends natural disasters almost always occur during full moons. Perhaps it's also a werewolf detector.) and a "remote viewing aptitude test".

FromTheWilderness.com - Run by Michael Ruppert, this site has the ostensibly noble goal of serving as a watchdog against governmental encroachments on civil liberties in the post 9/11 world. The HAARP article was written by Michel Chossudovsky an economics professor from the University of Ottawa, citing sources such as EarthPulse.com and Dr. Rosalie Bertell, a biometrics specialist who also opposes mammograms, the irradiation of food to kill bacteria, and all nuclear power. Chossudovsky is concerned that technology such as what he thinks HAARP is could be used to enforce U.S. hegemony and economic globalization, to which he is opposed.

It's worth noting that much of the to-do about HAARP seems to be generated by Bertell, Chossudovsky and a fellow named Nick Begich. (Begich calls himself a doctor because of his degree from the the Open International University for Complementary Medicines.*) These three extensively cite each other (Chossudovsky's paper cites both of them, for example.) and it is a handful of their essays that most commonly pop up when you look for scary HAARP stuff online. (In fact, one of the links we looked at yesterday took us to a paper by Bertell.) Much of what they claim is either based on their own naked assertions or citations that reference one another's naked assertions.

Crystalinks.com - Run by Ellie Crystal, "psychic and reiki master" and her mystical companion "a spirit named Zoroaster", this site is, frankly, a big concentrated pile of woo-woo. She claims to hold a "Ph.D. in metaphysical studies" but lists no university in her biography. Actually, there are two biographies on her site and only one mentions the Ph.D. - the other only says that she has a Masters of Psychology from NYU. This is extra confusing because both of these biographies are on the same page. She has an enormous number of articles, most of which are apparently culled from Wikipedia - Her HAARP article is essentially just a cut and paste job from the Wikipedia entry, right down to the section headings. Also of note is her "Predictions for 2001" page, which claims to have an extremely detailed prediction of the September 11th attacks...too bad the Web Archive shows that this page didn't exist before 2005.

What does all of this mean? Well, for one thing it means that our friend Steven suggests that we should trust the word of conspiracy theorists and pseudo-psychic hucksters rather than, say, the independent scientists that actually run HAARP. However, I imagine that the information given on the HAARP website won't be considered valid by our friend because, as he has noted repeatedly, the government might be lying. Now, I have no doubt that the government has lied, does lie, and will lie again, but that doesn't mean that we should embrace as canon any conspiracy theory that we can conceive of as possible. It also doesn't mean that we should trust a psychic to tell us how a sophisticated ionospheric research program works, nor does it mean we should place all of our faith in half a dozen papers with inbred citations from a handful of scholars who are working far outside of their fields.

Sorry Steve, I remain skeptical.

*The University's website it is here, though it apparently hasn't been updated since 2005. This "university" may no longer be in operation and is decried even by freakin' chiropractors for being shady.

Harping on HAARP...

A fellow named Steve recently posted a comment on here lambasting me for being, shock of shocks, an ignorant, close-minded skeptic who resorts to ad hominem attacks. He was referring to this post, in which I made fun of a Youtube conspiracy crank because she forgot that rainbows exist and thus posted a video in which she blamed the mysterious appearance of a rainbow in her sprinkler on a far-reaching government conspiracy. In all honesty I'm not going to claim that I didn't for example, call her...let's see...an "internet weirdo", a "conspiracy nut", and ...actually, I think those were the only pejorative terms I used. On further consideration, I'll add "loon", "wingnut" and "smacktard" to the list. (Alas, being spotlighted by PZ Myers has led this particular oddball to make many of her videos private, which makes it difficult to explain her claims without sounding like I'm exaggerating. Go to her profile if my video links don't work.)

There are issues of contention between skeptics and True Believers™ that are deserving of measured and carefully laid out arguments. Attributing rainbows to the evil machinations of the New World Order is not one of them. Nor is the belief that sun glare reflecting off of the hoods of cars is actually a "HAARP laser". Nor is the assertion that the moon is a giant mirror. Stupidity on that order of magnitude is not deserving of well measured refutation so much as simple derision. Granted, there's a sense in which I feel bad for the True Believers™ like this lady who have "fallen down the rabbit hole" of their own delusions so far that they can no longer see the light of day, but my sympathies don't extend nearly far enough to make me pretend that such lunacy represents anything close to an actual position worthy of consideration.

Steve then goes on to defend our rainbow-fearing friend as a "conscientious, truth-seeking individual" rather than a "self-proclaimed skeptic" like your ol' pal Skippy. He then accuses me of buying into the "pablum being fed [to me] by our nation's (dis)information sources". That is, I'm afraid, a rather typical argument. I'll note with no small sense of smarmy self-satisfaction that I predicted in the very post that Steve takes issue with that I would be accused of "buying into the government's line instead of going down the rabbit hole."

He then claims that "there exists far more evidence to support HAARP's military/black-ops uses than you have even begun to touch" and urges me to "get to work" because I have "the entire internet' with which to uncover the truth. Pardon me for questioning the internet as the final arbiter of reality, but for the time being let's overlook the whole "no fact-checking or editing" thing and just roll with it. I plugged "HAARP weapon applications" into Google. The first link that came up is from 9/11 "Troofer" James Rense. It also offers a link to explain "how the Zionists hijacked Christianity", but at this point Rense is more concerned with whining about Barack Obama. The second link is from good ol' Jesus-Is-Savior.com, a mirror site for Jesus-Is-Lord.com which many of you will remember from my Poe's Law post. The third link is a video from Ben Fulford, a pal of Rense, which decries HAARP as one of the evils of "Zionist occupied America".

Thus far we're three for three on articles coming from foaming conspiracy theorists who are preoccupied with the idea of a global plot by the Jews. That right there is some objective freakin' research. It's also worth noting that the article on Jesus-Is-Savior article is copied from EarthPulse.com, which is also happy to tell you about "laser acupuncture" and "USSR Hypnosis at a Distance". Perhaps, just perhaps, some of the "research" that conspiracy theorists have done on HAARP is actually something more along the lines of agenda-driven fear mongering or just plain and simple silliness.

On the other hand, when it comes to HAARP being able to cause massive scary weather effects and earthquakes, one thing I do know is this: The HAARP antenna is capable of sending a signal into the ionosphere that is not even 1/200 as powerful as the random fluctuations that the ionosphere experiences daily. You see, the ionosphere is affected primarily by the ultraviolet energy produced by the sun. It seems to me, reading articles by the conspiracy buffs, that they think that the government has somehow managed, for a mere $250 million, to build an antennae array capable of overpowering the energy output of the freakin' sun, which is, frankly, hilarious.

Likewise, the idea that earthquakes can be caused by ionospheric disturbances is kind of out of left field. While it is apparently the case that earthquakes of sufficient size can cause certain atmospheric effects (including effects that can be detected before the quake itself "begins"), I can't find anything that indicates that the reverse is true. Well, that is to say, I can't find anything that indicates the reverse is true when I'm looking at real science websites or journals. What I can find are plenty of naked assertions that ionospheric effects can cause earthquakes on sites like, say, AwakeFromYourSlumber.com and PropagandaMatrix.com. (The former is also concerned about the "Zionists" - a recurring theme, it seems.)

Our friend Steve, who doesn't, I should note, actually claim himself that HAARP causes earthquakes, may do well to remember the old cliche about considering the source. Now, I'll go out on a limb and say that maybe HAARP-based technologies could potentially be used to screw with various forms of communications, but that's not what the majority of conspiracy crowd is going on about. They tend to talk about HAARP as an earthquake-generating doomsday weapon or some kind of laser device (for some reason), which is just plain isn't. There's a difference between keeping a healthy eye on the government and becoming a member of the Tinfoil Hat Brigade, and from what I've seen most, if not all, of the HAARP conspiracy buffs fall into the latter category.

They might be better off if they actually studied up on the issues that concern them, looked at the best available information, and did their best to base their positions on observable reality. Then they could look at new claims through a filter of reasonableness and plausibility, using this process as well as further study to help them determine if the claim should be accepted or rejected. Furthermore, they would do well to remain open-minded...but not quite so open-minded that their brains drip out. You know, kind of like a skeptic.

Odds, Ends, and HAARP Conspiracy Cranks...

I wanted to post a few quick updates this afternoon, so here we go. Firstly, I'm toying with the idea of setting up a Facebook profile, mostly because I've gotten a couple of "friend requests" from people I know who use the service. When and if I ever get that set up in any presentable way I'll add a link to it in the sidebar, but honestly social networking sits just aren't my cup of tea.

Secondly, I've not heard a word from Phillip O'Donnell since early last week, so I guess that means we won't be debating. Rumor has it that he's had some experiences in the past wherein he tried to do some online debates and simply got dog-piled by a hostile crowd and thus he's not very interested in doing any more public debates. Nonetheless it's absolutely amazing to me that he would come onto my blog and challenge me to a debate, then refuse to actually do it. Readers can feel free to mosey over to Living Dinos and prod him a little.

Thirdly, Your old pal Skippy's girlfriend is in Baltimore and the moment and will be there for the better part of the week because of Otakon. (Some kind of anime convention, apparently.) That's all well and good: she's apparently having a great time and I get to be the master of my castle for a few days. The only problem is that she's got the laptop with her so she can update her blog, which means that typing updates over on my end is temporarily dependent on my desire to sit around in the bedroom and work at the desktop PC while her multitudinous cats chew on my feet. Thus far I've not been able to muster up a whole lot of desire to do so, which is lame because this has been an interesting week for internet weirdos.

Among other things, there was an amusing post over on Pharyngula that highlighted a bizarre a video by this lady. She's some kind of conspiracy nut that thinks some kind of evil government plot is responsible for, among other things, rainbows. (Not kidding. Watch the video.) Her main area of interest in HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which she seems to think is some kind of weather-controlling, laser shooting, earthquake causing doomsday device like a James Bond villain might use. The poor woman is clearly daft, as should be evinced by this video, in which she has recorded sun glare coming off of passing cars under the mistaken impression that they are actually laser weapons, and this video, in which she notices the phenomenon of earthshine and comes to the conclusion that the moon is actually a giant mirror. She's also a proponent of the tired old "ChemTrail" conspiracy, which holds that airplane contrails are actually some sort of high altitude chemical dispersion device towards some unknown end. (Step 1: Blanket the atmosphere with airborne chemicals. Step 2: ? Step 3: PROFIT!)

For the record, HAARP is a project run by the University of Alaska and contingent of other universities and is being built using technology from APTI and BAE Systems*. The program is also affiliated with the U.S. Navy and Air Force. It's meant to study various natural processes of the ionosphere and to utilize these processes to develop new communications technologies. It's pretty cool stuff and it's completely non-classified - there are even open houses in which the public can tour the facility a couple of times a year. HAARP is not in anyway associated with the development of weapons, though there was talk in 1990s about using similar technology as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative. (Interestingly, some anti-HAARP conspiracy books have been released by the Adventures Unlimited Press, the publishing house of living dinosaur and ancient astronaut proponent David Hatcher Childress.)

HAARP conspiracy theories are usually so far removed from anything that HAARP actually does that it's almost difficult to know where to begin in debunking them. In a way that's almost a rhetorical advantage to the conspiracy nuts - if you point out, for example, that HAARP has abso-freakin'-lutely nothing to do with causing manmade earthquakes, they'll accuse you of buying into the government's line instead of actually "going down the rabbit hole". Perhaps it would be better to let readers peruse our friend's other videos so they can see the raving craziness for themselves.

I also want to point out that that some conspiracy buffs are loudly crowing about the $250 million price tag that has been attached to HAARP, apparently to show that the government is throwing so much money into the project that it must be some kind of crazy ray gun. The line of thought seems to be that the government wouldn't be putting that much money into something that isn't a weapon. Frankly, that's silly. No one with any sense of scale when it comes to military development costs would honestly think that a global doomsday device could be manufactured for $250 million. For example, F-22 interceptor aircraft cost over $135 million apiece, and that's just fabrication costs for something that has already been designed.** To claim earnestly that a superweapon on par with the Death Star has been developed for a mere quarter of a billion dollars is as revealing a display of ignorance by the conspiracy buffs as one could hope for.


*BAE also makes such fine products as the M2 Bradley.
** The total cost of the F-22 program has thus far been around $69.7 billion.

Ed Mitchell and UFOS: From Any Other Source...

Edgar Mitchell was a decorated pilot and astronaut back in the 1960s and, among other things, he holds the record for the longest moonwalk ever.* He holds a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has several honorary doctorates from other institutions. Sounds pretty impressive, eh? Well, frankly, all of that is pretty impressive. Unfortunately, he's fast becoming the poster boy for UFO conspiracy theorists.

Ed Mitchell walking on the moon.

Mitchell made headlines about a week ago when he went to the British press with a story about UFOs being covered up by the U.S. government. It really wasn't anything that he hasn't said before, but a lot of the conspiracy sites out there have been treating this like some kind of sea change in world attitudes about UFO visitation. Basically all of the excitement hinges on a pair of statements that he made last week on a British radio program, which we'll examine in turn. Here's the first:

There’s not much question at all that there is life throughout the universe. I’m totally sure we are not alone.

Well, that's pretty fair, and in fact I think he's probably right. I'd stand by him on this statement - somewhere in the universe there is almost certainly other life in some form or another. There's honestly not a lot of controversy about this statement, so I'm unclear as to why it's causing so much excitement. I guess hearing it come from a former astronaut makes a difference to some people, but if some of the True Believers™ out there would read some books by actual astronomers (Which I have a sneaking suspicion they won't - I rarely read much scholarly work when I was a True Believer™ myself.) they'd realize that the idea of alien life somewhere in the universe isn't particularly controversial. This particular statement is something that most of us evil skeptics probably wouldn't have a problem with. That being said, I think the real excitement is about the second statement he made:

...We have been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomenon is real - though it’s been covered up by governments for the last 60 years or so.

Now here we get into conspiracy gobbledy-gook. Again, alien life is not only possible elsewhere in the universe but, I'd argue, fairly likely. On the other hand, claims of alien visitations to the earth are totally unsubstantiated. Note that Mitchell himself offers no elaboration or evidence here, he just knows. He later goes on to specifically mention that the Roswell incident really involved a crashed UFO and the corpses of aliens were recovered from the scene. Unfortunately, Mitchell himself has never actually seen the bodies, but he heard about them from a source he won't name except to say that he's dead now.

Are we honestly meant to believe a fantastical story about a government cover-up of the most important scientific discovery of all time based on a yarn someone heard from an anonymous source who's now claimed to be deceased? If I posted an entry claiming that some super-secret anonymous source told me that they were keeping a live dragon in a special enclosure underneath the Pentagon, but that I'd never seen the monster and the source was dead now and thus not available for questioning, would you believe me? Probably not, unless your name is Philip O'Donnell. Nope, if I made a claim like that, I would be deluged with e-mail calling me a loon! What makes an equally weak story more believable when it's coming from Mitchell? Keep in mind that he's not even saying that he himself has any specific experience with the alien corpses himself, he's just repeating what someone else told him. As long as the primary source remains anonymous and no actual evidence is forthcoming, Mitchell's UFO claims are no weightier than the old cliché about how "a friend of a friend" heard that there are alligators in the sewers.

Looking at these assertions, I have to note that Mitchell isn't really making any claims or giving any more actual evidence that countless conspiracy-minded forum posters all over the internet. The only reason he gets any press at all for these statements is that he's a former astronaut. The members of the media (as well as some conspiracy buffs) are also downplaying the fact that Mitchell is a proponent of ESP, distance healing, and, specifically, is a supporter of the Canadian huckster who goes by the emo-sounding pseudonym "Adam Dreamhealer". Mitchell claims that this miracle man cured him of cancer simply by thinking good thoughts about him, but is somewhat slower to mention that it was never confirmed by doctors that he even had cancer. (As a little background information, Adam Dreamhealer claims that his supernatural healing abilities came to him when a giant bird "downloaded all the information in the universe into [his] mind". ) I'm not so sure the media would be quite as interesting in Mitchell's UFO claims if they were aware of the breadth and scope of some of his other odd claims.

Mitchell supports "distance healer" Adam Dreamhealer.
Dreamhealer claims a big bird gave him the secrets of the universe.

Ed Mitchell's not some kind of lunatic or idiot, and there's no reason to try to denigrate all the real scientific work he did as an astronaut, but his current UFO (and other) claims just don't come close to reaching the levels of credibility that they would need to warrant the amount of attention they're getting. Keep in mind also that I'm not calling Mitchell a liar, either. For the most part, Mitchell is not claiming that he's had firsthand experience with aliens - he's just retelling stories that other people have told him. That makes him gullible rather than malevolent. The same his true for his claims about Adam Dreamhealer - Mitchell is no more a liar in this matter than is any other "satisfied" victim of a faith healer.

All of this leads me to suspect that while Mitchell is a smart man with an open mind, he may have kept his mind so open that his brains are starting to slosh out.

*Technically he is the co-holder of this record, alongside Alan Shepard.

Jeff Peckman's Crazy is Hanging Out...

Well, the whole Stan Romanek alien video seems to have kind of fizzled out throughout most of the media, but that didn't stop Romanek's ally Jeff Peckman from making an appearance on David Letterman's show earlier in the week. Peckman, a transcendental meditation enthusiast, appeared with Romanek on Larry King Live a couple of weeks ago but didn't really have an enormous amount to say. Letterman, on the other hand, plays his interview with Peckman perfectly straight and lets him espouse his views on aliens with few interruptions. Check out the embedded video below to see Peckman explain how the U.S. government is conspiring to hide visitation of Earth by 57 different species of aliens in order to...wait for it...protect the evil interests of Big Oil.

Enjoy.

Back among the faithful...

Ugh...I was lucky enough to have gone through my UFO True Believer™ phase during a period of my youth in which I didn't have access to an internet enabled computer. I only had my beloved but very woo-woo neighbors and The X-Files to reinforce the silly UFO "research" I was filling my head with at the time, but modern True Believers™ have dozens of internet forums to supply them with all the insular reinforcements they need to get inextricably bound up in their fantasies. As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a large bit of my free time trolling the internet UFO pages for reactions to the Romanek "case" that recently began attracting so much attention, and I have to tell you that the world of the True Believer™ can get pretty bizarre.

The one-stop shop for conspiracy theories of all stripes is without a doubt AboveTopSecret.com, a collection of forums that plumb the depths of silliness and seriously discuss such things as the reality of vampires, text messages from the future, and (endlessly) the New World Order.* Many of these folks see signs of global intrigue everywhere. For example, I'm reading a post right now about how one of the songs on the soundtrack of the new "Grand Theft Auto" game is a "New World Order" song meant to brainwash the unwary. (The song is actually "One Vision" by Queen. It was released years ago on the CD "It's a Kind of Magic" and later on a greatest hits album.) Oh, and if you decide to poke around on there, it would pay to get used to the word "sheeple", as it pops up constantly as a pejorative term for anyone who subscribes to commonly held views on...well...anything.

Forums like Above Top Secret provide powerful reinforcement for people inclined to believe in these sorts of things. Unlike the old days, when you actually had to find people in your area that shared your beliefs on certain topics, nowadays you can hook up with hundreds of people on the internet that have ideas similar to your own. Combined with the fact that these forums tend to be insular and have a high turnaround time for skeptics (As another example of the insular quality of certain websites, I might note how quickly skeptics get bored with and leave Ray's blog.), this can create impression that a vast majority of people, or at least a majority of knowledgeable people, support the views being espoused there. Since most of the people on conspiracy forums already believe in at least some of the conspiracies being discussed, it can seem to believers like almost anyone who's ever heard about or discussed conspiracy X or conspiracy Y has come to accept it as real. After all, almost everyone who comes to the forum to discuss it already "knows" it's true!

There are powerful "out-group" forces at work as well. Conspiracy theorists, are, after all, "in the know". They feel that they possess insight that the public at large does not. Thus, any skeptic that appears to challenge them are part of a sinister out-group that is ill-informed at best or a malevolent agent of the conspiracy at worst. Meanwhile these malign attacks on the in-group serve to strengthen the bonds between "the good guys" as they circle the wagons against their foes.

As far as alien abductions and their ilk go, an entire modern mythology has grown up around them in the last few decades that works quite a bit like a feedback loop. There is a culturally accepted "script" for an abduction: paralysis, gray aliens with big black eyes, operating tables and fertility experiments, etc. Encounter stories that sync up with this scenario are reinforced within the UFO community because they "fit the mold", to the point that most modern alien abduction tales are indistinguishable from one another. There's another factor at play too. Most people who come to believe that aliens have been probing them in their sleep don't just wake up one morning secure in that knowledge. Instead, they have some sort of strange experience and, while looking for answers, encounter a psychologist or UFO researcher or some other authority figure who already knows the abduction script and is inclined to believe it. This authority figure will help the victim "recall" memories that fit the abduction script by asking leading questions and, essentially, molding a new set of experiences and memories for the victim that fits with the authority's preconceived idea of what happened.

For an interesting look at this phenomenon, I recommend this book by Susan Clancy. Carl Sagan also discusses this subject in Demon Haunted World, in which he interestingly compares the abduction myth with its sister modern myth, Satanic Ritual Abuse. Sagan wryly notes that alien abduction "specialists" rarely uncover instances of SRA, whereas SRA "specialists" almost never "discover" that their patients were abducted by aliens.

In any event, for an interesting immersion course on in-group reinforcement I dare you to spend a week or two hanging around at Above Top Secret or a similar forum. Life among the faithful is a strange thing indeed.


*The sinister Illuminati conspiracy, not the pro wrestling faction.