onspiracy theories, and their prevalence in society.  Of course they are only "theories" if you don't believe in them.  If you do, they are secret truths that "they" are conspiring to keep from the public knowledge.  Who "they" are varies by the situation, but one thing about modern life is that you can always find some powerful business group or government or secret society with a reason to suppress whatever truth you think you've happened upon.

Most sensible people would conclude that most conspiracy theories are bullshit.  At the same time, most sensible people know of two or three things that were at one point considered conspiracies... until they turned out to be true.

I post about this every now and then, when a news item comes up that motivates me. Also included are weird science stories, such as Loch Ness Monster hunts.  They aren't exactly conspiracies, but both require the same suspension of logical disbelief, so it's close enough.

August 3, 2003

A BBC production team just finished an extensive survey of Loch Ness, trying to find some evidence of the fabled Loch Ness Monster.  Their methodology was impressive; their results were predictable.

The team used 600 separate sonar beams and satellite navigation technology to trawl the loch, but found no trace of any monster, the BBC said in a television program broadcast Sunday.

They hoped the air in Nessie's lungs would reflect a distorted signal back to their sonar sensors.

"We went from shoreline to shoreline, top to bottom on this one, we have covered everything in this loch and we saw no signs of any large living animal in the loch," said Ian Florence, one of the specialists who carried out the survey for the BBC.

His colleague Hugh MacKay added: "We got some good clear data of the loch, steep sided, flat bottomed — nothing unusual I'm afraid. There was an anticipation that we would come up with a large sonar anomaly that could have been a monster, but it wasn't to be."

I can't think anyone will be too surprised to hear that there's not really a bunch of 70 million year extinct dinosaurs in a 10,000 year old pond in Scotland, but some people do seem to still be clinging to the hope.  I would love there to be mysterious monsters in lakes around the world myself, but I'm realistic enough to accept that there aren't.  It's like bigfoot; it's fun to pretend, but don't go wasting any real time or effort on the fantasies.  One mysterious creature somewhere is possible, but for things to persist over time there has to be an ecology that supports them, and a viable breeding population.  Just one individual obviously isn't going to last that many years, and Adam and Eve fairy tales aside, a male and a female of a given creature is not a viable population.  The inbreeding would lead to genetic disaster in just a few generations.

As for the Loch Ness Monster, all of the best sightings and pictures have been debunked, studies have shown that there's not enough fish in the loch to support any large aquatic life forms, much less a family of them, etc.  However since lots of people really want to believe in Nessie (as well as other popular myths such as Bigfoot, UFOs, dinosaurs in Africa, Yeti, the risen Baby Jesus, Bush's excuses for the Iraq Attack, and so on...) it's unlikely that any amount of "proof" will ever dissuade them.

As the article on the BBC show says:

The BBC team said the only explanation for the persistence of the monster myth — and regular "sightings" — is that people see what they want to see. To test this, the researchers hid a fence post beneath the surface of the loch and raised it in view of coach full of tourists. Interviewed afterward, most said they had observed a square object but when asked to sketch what they had seen, several drew monster-shaped heads, the BBC said.

I personally still want to go to the Loch, at least as part of my whole Scottish castle/wilderness tour, someday.  It's the homeland of my peoples, after all, at least according to my surname, and I want to walk through the gloomy moors and windswept crags and all the rest of the prototypical highland landscapes.  And I'd love to sit in a murky forest at the edge of a cold, deep loch, and think about the mysterious creatures that might be swimming deep below the placid surface.

Even though I know they really aren't.

January 18, 2003

The top 10 conspiracy theories about 9/11 and other such events in recent years.  Very interesting read, whether you believe any of it or not.

Mohamed Atta's reality-defying passport ... This incriminating item was thrown intact from a cataclysmic fireball and miraculously plucked from 1.6 million tons of debris in a matter of hours. The corporate media rarely mention the unlikelihood of this. Many in the alternative press, though, are unafraid to draw an obvious, albeit taboo, inference: that the Atta passport is planted evidence. According to Washington, DC, peace activist John Judge, other potential plants include the Arabic-language flight manuals left in one of the hijackers' cars. These manuals could serve no useful purpose at such a late stage unless the hijackers planned to finish learning how to fly during a half-hour ride to the airport.

December 6, 2002

Funny article about a man who basically started the Bigfoot craze in the Pacific Northwest by laying down fake footprints in the 1950's.  He and his family have been sitting back and smirking for 50 years, as other hoaxes have come up and various kooks arrive and try to find evidence that would seem to support the bigfoot theories.

Chorvinsky believes the Wallace family's admission creates profound doubts about leading evidence of Bigfoot's existence: the so-called Patterson film, the grainy celluloid images of an erect apelike creature striding away from the movie camera of rodeo rider Roger Patterson in 1967. Mr. Wallace said he told Patterson where to go — near Bluff Creek, Calif. — to spot a Bigfoot, Chorvinsky said.

"Ray told me that the Patterson film was a hoax, and he knew who was in the suit," Chorvinsky said.

The whole concept is really ridiculous.  There would have to be hundreds or thousands of these Bigfoot creatures in the wild, to maintain a viable breeding population.  Every animal larger than a mouse that lives in the US has been extensively documented and studied and analyzed by now, but some would have you believe that unknown mystery primates, larger than humans, live in and around densely-populated areas. People sit in the woods for weeks at a time to get a good look at birds the size of your finger that only nest 100 feet up in certain kinds of trees.  Every wolf in the area was hunted to extinction nearly 100 years ago, and bears almost went the same way.  Backpackers and miners and hunters and loggers and others travel the area constantly, and everyone is looking for a Bigfoot.

But not one of the creatures has ever been captured, or shot, or roadkilled, or photographed in believable fashion, or died and had their body found?  Please, give it up.  Stick to UFOs or at least pick a conspiracy that you can somehow work the UN or NWO or black helicopters into, since then you have some adversary to blame the mystery on.

November 2, 2002

NASA is having to pay for a book to be written to prove that they did indeed land on the moon.  Some of the most off the wall conspiracy theorists have fixed upon the moon landing as something to go on about, and the always-reliable FOX network produced and aired a laughably-scientific special about it.  Lots of science sites have fun debunking it, but I think BadAstronomy slaughters it most efficiently. 

It occurs to me that perhaps denying the moon landing like the holy grail of conspiracy theories. There are more convoluted and implausible ones, but they tend to be ones that an individual basket case cooks up; Nazis running the government (any government) and controlling the drug trade to get money to research AIDS to kill black people so that Jews can rule the world along with the Aliens who have replaced your local school board.  But for a single event, is the moon landing the biggest one?  There are a billion theories about JFK's assassination, but it's not like anyone is insisting it never actually occurred, and was all staged for some nefarious reason.  (Actually, someone probably is, but there's no organized movement behind it, unlike the moon thing.)

The whole thing is pretty similar to people who argue against evolution/for creationism, where the only way you can deny moon landing/evolution is if you are just profoundly ignorant of the science of the whole thing, which requires you to be equally fervent in your faith.  If you really know about the science you see things like this page discusses; (half way down) with the telemetry of radio signals.  The official moon hoax reasoning seems to be that the US couldn't do it, but needed to look powerful and trick the people and the Russians into believing they had done it, to win the race to the moon.  What this overlooks is that there are a lot of evidences of the moon trip over than photographs and videos.

The program seems blissfully unaware that any data other than photographs came out of the Apollo flights. But the Apollo craft would have been continuously transmitting telemetry. If Apollo had merely gone into earth orbit as claimed, how was telemetry faked?

For example, amateur radio enthusiasts were perfectly capable of listening in on Apollo transmissions - and did. If the Apollo spacecraft had merely been in earth orbit, as some conspiracy theorists claim, it would have been below the horizon and its transmissions blocked from any given location most of the time. 

It's not just frequency shifts. A radio telescope is a precise pointing device. At all times the source of the signal would have to have mimicked the position of a spacecraft en route to, orbiting, or returning from the moon, and it would have to be consistent for radio telescopes anywhere on earth. If we can pull that off, why not send astronauts along for the ride?

The only way this could have worked is for the Russians to be in on it.

So the hoax to fool the Russians involved the Russians, the US' bitter Cold War enemies.  Not to mention every single amateur radio astronomer on earth, every other major country with a scientific team on earth, etc.

As I said, it reminds me of the evolution debate, where people who disbelieve it focus on superficial things that are hard to believe, and just have no idea at all of how more complicated things like a couple I quote near the bottom of the Evolution article, ascorbic acid and vestigial feature mutation.

July 4, 2002

Yesterday this essay portion of the blog was all about Aliens, UFOs, human supernatural belief, and other such things.  I hardly remember it myself at this point, to tell you the truth.

Whatever I went on and on about, a friend of mine read it and had this to say in email about it.

I have to say you are in somewhat wrong with the less than 0.1% unexplained...read the following books as I have an see where these people, as somewhat skeptics, seem dumbfounded by the amount of data collected to say they are true, and that the debunkers are the ones that will never believe.

Hard to explain why stuff don't grow where saucers crash, and why the govt. is so quick to hush...check them out, if not for just more ammo for your debunking...

Above Top Secret by Timothy Good

Alien Agenda by Jim Marrs (the same guy who wrote Crossfire about JFK assn...and Rule By Secrecy...the dark govt book.

I have started the Alien Agenda book and it is interesting... even accounting 1897, yes 1897 news article of a saucer crash, and days of news clippings across the US as to multiple witness to the craft in flight...and the town and the govt. trying to call it a hoax...interesting read even for the skeptic like you.

Check them out.

Bill

While looking around on the CSICOP website after finding the UFO article I mentioned to Bill, I saw another good article.  By Paul Kurtz, it discusses supernatural beliefs.  Occasioned by the Heaven's Gate cult suicides, you can see it here. He discusses the Heaven's Gate beliefs, UFOs in general, the way the media (uncritically) presents UFO mythology, how such "new age" beliefs fill a need in humans, and how they compare to traditional religions.

In one sense the New Age paranormal religions are no more fanciful than the old-time religions. Considered cults in their own day, they were passed down from generation to generation, but perhaps they are no less queer than the new paranormal cults. No doubt many in our culture will not agree with my application of skepticism to traditional religion -- CSICOP itself has avoided criticizing the classical systems of religious belief, since its focus is on empirical scientific inquiry, not faith.

I am struck by the fact that the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and Chassidic Jews were considered radical fringe groups when first proclaimed; today they are part of the conventional religious landscape, and growing by leaps and bounds. Perhaps the major difference between the established religions and the new cults of unreason is that the former religions have deeper roots in human history.

The Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan, which in 1995 released poison gas into a crowded subway station, killing twelve people, was made up of highly educated young people, many with advanced degrees. Unable to apply their critical thinking outside of their specialties, they accepted the concocted promises of their guru. Thus an unbridled cult of unreason can attract otherwise rational people.

So there isn't human intellectual evolution.  People today are nearly as likely to believe in magical invisible gods or spirits as they were thousands of years ago; it's just that such belief today is inculcated from childhood by religious parents, churches, etc.  The human mind seems to be very susceptible to superstition, and there is a strong need in most people to believe in something more than the observable, physical world.  People want there to be more, they want heaven, or reincarnation, or alternate dimensions, and they aren't real picky about the scientific basis of the belief system that gives it to them.  As Paul Kurtz says in the Heaven's Gate article:

The one thing I have discovered in more than two decades of studying paranormal claims is that a system of beliefs does not have to be true in order to be believed, and that the validation of such intensely held beliefs is in the eyes of the believer. There are profound psychological and sociological motives at work here. The desire to escape the trials and tribulations of this life and the desire to transcend death are common features of the salvation myths of many religious creeds.

You can apply this psychological reality to many aspects of life, in my observation.  Not just the intensely-held beliefs, but other lesser beliefs.  People like to believe things, and when they hear about something new, they'll often start to believe it as well.  Check out this excellent article with a run down of the of the major mass delusions of the past millennium.

In the war scare setting of British South Africa in 1914, local newspapers erroneously reported that hostile monoplanes from adjacent German South West Africa were making reconnaissance flights as a prelude to an imminent attack. The episode coincided with the start of World War I. Despite the technological impossibility of such missions (the maneuvers reported by witnesses were beyond those of airplanes of the period and their capability of staying aloft for long periods), thousands of residents misperceived ambiguous, nocturnal aerial stimuli (stars and planets) as representing enemy monoplanes (Bartholomew 1989).

July 3, 2002

This was initially the "Flux Says No" item of the day.  Which means it was the one popular news item that I found dumb, and only commented on here to point out that it was dumb. You know, the daily feature I do twice a month.

Anyway, the only thing less convincing than the actual reports of cattle mutilations is the new "official" explanation for them.

Recent mutilations of cattle and horses in the Argentine countryside were the work of rodents, scientists said on Monday, not ritualistic slayings by extraterrestrials or vampires as some farmers feared.

Argentina's national food and animal health inspection service Senasa sent its own "X-Files" scientists to the remote plains to look into the deaths of farm animals found mutilated and drained of blood. Frightened farmers claimed to have seen bright lights and UFOs in the area where the deaths occurred.

But Senasa officials said the dozens of livestock whose genitals, tongues and other organs appeared to have been removed with surgical precision were victims of rodents, foxes or other animals. Senasa said the farm animals likely died from common infections and wild animals later mutilated the corpses.

This is fishy on numerous levels.  I regard all UFO sightings, especially ones of the "strange lights" variety, as little better than bigfoot sightings; 80% hoaxes, 19.9% confused people, .1% unexplained.  And when you throw in mysteriously mangled corpses, it just complicates things.  True, you've got some actual physical evidence, but evidence that's so easily falsified.  The explanation sucks also though.  Farmers have seen dead, scavenger-gnawed animals their whole lives; why wouldn't they be able to recognize it in this instance?

The whole concept of aliens mutilating cattle is so dumb anyway, I wonder where it came from.  So imagine you're an astronaut, and you travel to another world, where the people are technologically advanced, but don't have interstellar flight yet.  You're landing and exploring, etc, but trying to keep from being seen. What possible reason would you have to land, mutilate livestock, and then leave the evidence around?  I mean what could the possible scientific benefits be?  If you wanted to experiment on an animal, you'd take it with you, and have a lab on your ship, not out in some field somewhere.  And if you were trying to land in secret, wouldn't you turn off the ship lights?

If this is really happening, I.E. it's not just animals and superstitious farmers, I'd say they're doing it themselves for some sort of insurance scam, or whip up interest in something for a financial reason, or there are local pranksters. Maybe someone with a vendetta against a farmer, and wanting to hurt him by killing his animals, and clever enough to disguise it somewhat by making it look supernatural, to throw off suspicion?

June 21, 2002

In somewhat related news, there's a good article on Bigfoot this month on CSICOP.  Various evidence is evaluated, claims are analyzed, and it's boiled down to this.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with the argument for the existence of Bigfoot is that no bones or bodies have been discovered. This is really the 800-pound Bigfoot on the researchers' backs, and no matter how they explain away the lack of other types of evidence, the simple fact remains that, unlike nearly every other serious "scientific" pursuit, they can't point to a live or dead sample of what they're studying. If the Bigfoot creatures across the United States are really out there, then each passing day should be one day closer to their discovery. The story we're being asked to believe is that thousands of giant, hairy, mysterious creatures are constantly eluding capture and discovery and have for a century or more. At some point, a Bigfoot's luck must run out: one out of the thousands must wander onto a freeway and get killed by a car, or get shot by a hunter, or die of natural causes and be discovered by a hiker. Each passing week and month and year and decade that go by without definite proof of the existence of Bigfoot make its existence less and less likely.

April 24, 2002

Interesting article about the prevalence of conspiracy theories is found here, and is worth a read. The article briefly describes a bunch of well-known conspiracy theories:

A near-majority of the Arab world believes that Jews were warned away from the World Trade Center on 11 September; an actual majority believes that Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered because of her involvement with a Muslim man; more than half of all black Americans believe that the CIA makes drugs easily available in their communities to keep them quiescent, and one-fifth believe that it deliberately introduced the Aids epidemic; 80 per cent of all Americans believe that the US government is conspiring to withhold information about Gulf war syndrome; and a bestseller in France claims that Osama Bin Laden was a US agent who was used by President Bush to destroy secret CIA offices in the twin towers.

Between November 27 1963, and March 16 1964, the FBI had three of its top marksmen carry out an exercise to establish if those shots could have been fired in that time frame. The three experts, using the same rifle Oswald was supposed to have used, fired 3 shots each at a stationary target only 15 yards away, trying to match Oswald’s speed and accuracy. Every shot was high and to the right. None of these top marksmen could get off three shots in the time of 5.6 seconds and hit a target at a distance less than one quarter of the distance than the President’s limo had been. The shots were fired at a flat trajectory and not from a height of at least sixty feet that would have been the minimum elevation from which the sniper was firing.

In a final series of tests, one of the FBI marksmen fired a series of shots at a target set one hundred yards away. Again, he could not get the three shots off in the time frame; his best time being 5.9 seconds, but all of his shots were at least five inches above and to the right of the target. Robert Frazier, the agent, claimed that was the best he could achieve due to an uncorrectable mechanical deficiency in the telescopic sight.

British researchers, who uncovered thousands of previously secret government and military reports and investigated dozens of sightings, have concluded that flying saucers were a product of Cold War paranoia - not visitors from outer space.

The study by David Clarke and Andy Roberts concluded that none of the evidence pointed to any form of alien contact. Instead the widespread belief in UFOs that began in the 1950s and lasted until the present day should be seen as a social phenomenon...

Many of the early UFO sightings were seemingly confirmed by Britain's fledgling radar system, often scrambling fighter planes into the sky to investigate sightings. But, as the new technology improved, the number of incidents appearing on radar quickly dwindled to zero. 'That cannot be a coincidence. Those early confirmations were just a product of a primitive radar system,' Clarke said.

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