Nutters! Nutters everywhere.....

  Sigh....  I thought it was about time....

  ....to republish this rant that I did on the old website 3 or 4 years ago. It was triggered by a quite serious discussion I found on the internet about how NASA faked the recent Curiosity Mars landing.  Apparently, even Felix Baumgartner's recent space skydive was faked too...  sigh.....

  One of my favourite websites has always been Aaron Sakulich's 'The Iron Skeptic' in which he debunks just about everything in a very direct way with allsorts of 'colourful metaphors'. Well worth a look! Anyway, here's my attempt....

Conspiracy Theorists?  What is wrong with these people?

This isn’t a conspiracy theory about anything in particular, it’s about the mentality of conspiracy theorists.  Or perhaps it’s just another conspiracy to make all believers in conspiracy theories look like nutters.  Woooo......

  Conspiracy Theories are so frustrating and it amazes me how little it takes to start one.  This has been brought home to me by a brief dabble in the ‘sceptic blogosphere’, in particular blogs sceptical about CO2 driven climate change.  One particular blog convinced me never to bother wasting my time reading them ever again.  They mostly appear to be full of 12 year old morons masquerading as adults.

  It concerns a very polite email to one of the moderators of a blog from the Norfolk police, asking him for a bit more information about a Freedom of Information request he made.  The policeman is following up the ‘climategate’ email leaking.  You can find the post here.

  Now, to me, this is a perfectly civil and routine email.  By the time the bloggers have finished though, it’s a planet-wide CIA / communist / Norfolk Constabulary / etc conspiracy.  It’s astonishing.

"Blogging is what people do in between masterbating" *

Anon

* Apart from me, naturally. 

  I had a similar experience with one of the many 9/11 ‘truth’ bloggers a few years ago.  He was peddling some story that the World Trade Centre had been demolished by thermite charges and Exhibit A was a picture of a huge steel beam that had clearly been cut using heat – ie ragged end and drips of molten steel all over it.  To me, from its situation amongst the rubble, all that had happened was that a fireman or whoever had chopped it up using a gas axe so it could be removed more easily.  I emailed the 9/11 conspiracy theorist and told him what I thought.  I also told him you could clearly see where the cut started, which direction it went and that the bloke using it wasn’t very good at it!

  Then, bugger me, the next day it was splashed all over his website that “an expert steelworker in the UK has confirmed that the building was weakened deliberately prior to the attacks…”

  Hang on, that’s not what I said!  I emailed him immediately and told him that I’d be on the next plane over there to break his bleedin' legs if he didn’t remove the headline immediately.

  That’s the sort of thing you’re up against.  A completely one-dimensional hysterical mindset.

  Have a look at this funny site...

  I have to admit when I was a teenager I devoured every book, article and TV program about the assassination of president Kennedy and all the conspiracy theories.  Pieces of irrefutable evidence included it being ‘impossible’ for a head to explode in that way when shot from behind, the scope on Oswald’s rifle being miles out and it being ‘impossible’ to get the required number of rounds off in the allotted time etc, etc.

  I believed all this crap for a long time until it came to light that, actually, that dreadful head injury COULD have happened with a shot from behind, it WAS possible to fire those shots that quick and that the reason the scope was out was because the rifle had been dismantled a million times by clumsy cops and forensic people.  Plus there’s the fact that, by now, someone would have blabbed or slipped up if it had been a cover-up.

  So the simple (and slightly dull) scenario of Oswald doing it all by himself is probably true.  In fact in so many cases, the simplest explanation is normally the correct one.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. Friedrich Nietzsche

  Take 9/11 again.  There are hundreds of conspiracy sites all dealing in misquoted comments and ‘facts’ and hearsay.  For example, the air traffic controller inWashington said something like, “At the time I didn’t think it was an airliner – airliners don’t normally do manoeuvres like that so close to the ground.”

  So it’s gone into 9/11 conspiracy legend that it couldn’t have been an airliner therefore and must have been a missile / fighter jet that hit.  That ISN’T what the guy said!  The fact that dozens of witnesses clearly saw an airliner hit the Pentagon doesn’t matter – they must have been ‘gotten at’ by the CIA or whatever and must be lying.  That’s how it all works.  A myth repeated on the internet often enough becomes ‘fact’.

  Again, the simplest explanation is the most obvious one.  A gang of disillusioned (and admittedly very misguided) muslim lads came up with a plan to hijack airliners and crash them into targets in America.  It wouldn’t have been difficult to do back then and probably didn’t even need the assistance of the mythical ‘al-qaeda’.  In some ways, flying a jet is easier than flying a high performance piston engine plane – stick, rudder, throttle, that’s it.  Anyone with a little flying experience could have done it.  Besides I’m not cynical / paranoid enough to think any civilised government would sacrifice 3000 of its own citizens to achieve some obscure end in the middle east.

  Another famous one is the Princess Diana car crash in Paris.  Now, I’ve ridden and driven that particular piece of road and understand completely what happened there.  The driver was drunk as a lord / off his head on drugs, was driving like an idiot, went into the underpass at crazy speed, the car’s suspension unloaded on the significant hump down into it (the car possibly even left the ground for a fraction of a second) and he hit the wall.  No conspiracy.

  The Apollo moon landings too – God that makes me seethe!

  One of my (many) anoraky interests is the test flight programmes and X planes in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s plus the various spaceflight programs.  As you can imagine, it winds me up when cretins dismiss Apollo as a ‘hoax’ or ‘faked’.

  The first thing I say is, “No, you’re getting confused with a crappy film in the 70’s called Capricorn One.”

  The second thing is, “Why bother faking it?”

  The third thing is, “So what about the near disastrous Apollo 13 mission?  How the bloody hell does that fit in?  Why would they fake an embarrassing accident?”

  I could write a 10,000 word rant about why I know the moon landings weren’t faked but what’s the point?  For instance - Pete Conrad (incredible test pilot & my favourite astronaut) landed Apollo 12 just a few hundred yards from the Surveyor 3 probe sent there in 1967.  He took a few bits off and brought them back to earth!  Okay, Surveyor 3 and all the pictures and video it shot could have been faked too, but then the photos from lunar orbit showing the Apollo 12 lander Intrepid, Surveyor 3 and all the astronauts footprints would have to be faked too...  It gets ridiculously complicated.

  I haven’t bothered to find out how the conspiracy theorists explain the above-mentioned recent photographs of several of the Apollo landing sites from orbiting satellites  (honestly, you really can see the spacecraft, footprints and rover tyre tracks FFS!!!), but I imagine they are faked.  Yes, if they really could take those sorts of photos, the existence of Nazi moonbases on the dark side would be revealed, so it can’t be true…

  (You think I’m joking – check here!)

  Buzz Aldrin has got the right idea.  A journalist recently asked him to swear on the bible that he’d been to the moon.  Buzz simply punched his lights out and broke a few teeth.  Not bad going for a bloke who’s nearly 80!  Nice one Buzz.

  Other great conspiracy theories include:

•   It wasn't the Titanic that sank, it was actually her sister ship as part of an insurance fraud.
•   Elvis faked his own death and is still alive and well and living on Mars or something.
•   The US government caused the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.
•   Michael Jackson faked his own death and is now living in a bunker in Area 51.
•   I used to be a half-decent cyclist and used to win races every now and then.

  What else?  Oh yes, the Rendlesham Forest UFO Incident.  This is a classic and is particularly close to my heart as it is ‘local’.  If you haven’t heard about it, it’s supposed to be the British ‘Roswell’.  In 1980, over the course of two nights, idiotic US airmen at a base in Suffolk chased hysterically all around the forest, convinced a UFO had landed.  The UFO turned out to be the nearby lighthouse at Orford Ness.  Bloody idiots.

  Now this story has been debunked out of existence but numerous books have been written about it, some completely outlandish.  One has RAF Bentwaters as the centre of an underground network of UFO tunnels etc, etc and all that horsepoo.  What’s most remarkable about this story is how it came about and how quickly it can be rubbished.  Basically, all the people involved were fooled and then lied, perhaps not at the time, but later after they’d had time to think about the embarrassing consequences.  The lies have got more elaborate over the years as those involved have made more and more money out of it, but the incident came about as a result of, to quote ace UFO debunker Ian Ridpath,  “a marvellous product of the human imagination”.

  Basically, two guards saw a light in the woods one night, had a quick look from a distance, then thought better of traipsing around the woods at night.  Years later their story had evolved into being chased by a hovering triangle with red and blue flashing lights on it and mysterious hieroglyphics on the side.  It didn’t happen, they made it up.  No conspiracy.

  The next night, possibly with everyone a bit jittery about the previous evening’s ‘UFO landing’ story, the Orford Ness lighthouse gets spotted and in the hysteria all sorts of tricks get played on the minds of the airmen.  But it’s all bollocks and stories about ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ type meetings with aliens (it was in the cinema at about this time) were made up later by people trying to sell stories.  Amazing the number of books this has all spawned but it’s all rubbish.  It didn’t happen!

  However, in their defence, I’ve spent a night in the woods at the ‘UFO Landing Site’ in Rendlesham and it’s bloody scary, it’s an eerie place – I can sympathise with those poor airmen and their imaginations running away with them.

  I’ve also been scared fartless by a ‘UFO’ very recently, about two years ago in fact.  Seriously.  I was walking the dogs one night along a spooky path by the Norfolk coast when all of a sudden a bright light seem to turn on in the sky off to my left.  It was a fuzzy sort of light and I initially thought it was a long way away – a helicopter coming in from the North Sea gas rigs perhaps.  To my horror, I suddenly realised it was much closer than I thought, literally hovering over the field beside me.  Then it seemed to start following me and I actually recall it trying to put a spotlight on me but I obviously imagined it.  I’d just started to walk a lot faster and was genuinely terrified when something about the way it moved tipped me off that it wasn’t what I thought.  I stopped and looked at it properly…. And immediately laughed my head off.

 

  It was one of those silvery bird-scaring balloons floating above the field and it had merely reflected the moonlight or something.  Thing is, it was sooo obviously a silver balloon that I can’t believe I was fooled.  Ok, I’d had a few beers but for 5 or 6 seconds I was genuinely shitting myself.  Someone with a less sceptical, more suggestible mind would have probably been chased for miles by it, been taken aboard by its occupants and had things shoved up their jacksey before waking up with no recollection of the last 4 hours, only to recall it under hypnosis months later....

  Don’t get me wrong, it’s inevitable that other life exists in the universe it’s just that the immense distances involved and basic laws of physics make it unlikely we’ll ever meet them.  It does make me laugh to imagine that, having conquered the laws of time and physics to travel millions of light years to visit us, the aliens then make a pretty basic cock up and crash into a few trees in Suffolk.  Not terribly likely is it?  And why would you fly around with incredibly bright spotlights on your craft if you were on some stealth mission to secretly infiltrate the planet?  Etc, etc, etc….  Aaron Sakulich has some wonderfully acerbic insights into various UFO & paranormal stuff on his Iron Skeptic website.  An amusing read.

  So what’s the Conspiracy Theory mentality all about?  Dunno.  Paranoia?  Having nothing better to do?  Mental Illness?  Gullibility?  Again, I dunno.  What’s wrong with simple explanations?  What’s wrong with people?

  "Conspiracism serves the needs of diverse political and social groups in America and elsewhere. It identifies elites, blames them for economic and social catastrophes, and assumes that things will be better once popular action can remove them from positions of power. As such, conspiracy theories do not typify a particular epoch or ideology"

  That's a pretty good summing up.  What I do know is that a lot of authors make a shed load of money peddling this nonsense to readers who probably don’t know any better.  That’s most likely what it’s about.

  Rather like Dr Sagan's famous 'Baloney Detector', the criteria below come in very handy for blowing most conspiracy theories out of the water:

• Occam's razor - does the alternative story explain more of the evidence than the mainstream story, or is it just a more complicated and therefore less useful explanation of the same evidence?
• Logic - do the proofs offered follow the rules of logic, or do they employ fallacies of logic?
• Methodology - are the proofs offered for the argument well constructed, i.e., using sound methodology? Is there any clear standard to determine what evidence would prove or disprove the theory?
• Whistleblowers - how many people – and what kind – have to be loyal conspirators?
• Falsifiability - is it possible to demonstrate that specific claims of the theory are false, or are they "unfalsifiable"?

Thanks Wiki.  You do have some uses, even if government agencies frequently subvert your pages with disinformation....



   Woooooo..........