There is a new series of tweets starting on my Twitter account today that I thought I would share with you. This has to do with the research project I’ve been working on for most of the last eighteen months, and which is likely to become a book someday: the “Year Without a Summer.”
Many people have heard of the “Year Without a Summer,” but few people know anything about it. It’s an obscure but intensely interesting event in the environmental history of our planet. In many parts of the world in the year 1816, the summer never came. A rapid temporary climate change—a volcanic winter—caused havoc over many parts of the globe.
In April 1815, a volcano called Tambora—located on Sumbawa Island, in what is now Indonesia—erupted catastrophically. The explosion resulted in a gigantic column of ash nearly 25 miles high, pumping about 60 megatons of particulate matter directly into the Earth’s stratosphere. The crater caused by this massive explosion is visible from space. Just by way of comparison, the Tambora eruption of 1815 was one hundred times more powerful than the eruption of Mt. St. Helens in May 1980. It was the single most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded human history, ten times larger than the eruption of its much more well-known cousin, Krakatoa, in 1883.
The key ingredient in the dust that Tambora spewed into the upper atmosphere was sulfur dioxide. A funny thing happens with sulfur dioxide when it’s suspended in the atmosphere: it tends to absorb heat from the sun and scatter it, resulting in less energy reaching the ground. Sulfur dioxide from volcanoes can remain suspended in the atmosphere for years and circle the entire globe. This is precisely what happened in this case. We know, because scientists have found layers of Tambora fallout in ice cores taken at opposite poles of the Earth, in Greenland and Antarctica.
The effects of the Tambora eruption on the Earth’s climate were dramatic. Red and yellow snow fell in Italy on New Year’s Eve. Cold and dry conditions persisted in New England and the rest of the Eastern Seaboard well into the late spring of 1816. In May and June, violent temperature fluctuations were recorded in Massachusetts and New York. Most startlingly, a freak snowstorm struck most of the Northeast on June 7th. Reports of how much snow fell vary by location, but there were certainly snowdrifts up to eighteen inches deep in parts of Vermont, and in Canada the ice on lakes was thick enough to walk on without breaking. Inexplicable cold snaps continued to occur throughout the summer, with sharp frosts recorded in many places in the United States even in the dog days of August. The repeated heavy frosts destroyed crops, caused animal die-offs and concerns about food security. Across the Atlantic the situation was even worse. Heavy rains fell for most of the summer in central Europe, and ruined crops resulted in famine. The weather anomalies in Europe proved to have a lasting effect on Western culture. The bad weather in the summer of 1816 kept Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and their friend Lord Byron cooped up in the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. There, to amuse themselves, they told each other ghost stories—one of which developed into Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein.
The very strange film Gothic, made in 1986 and directed by avant-garde filmmaker Ken Russell, takes place at the Villa Diodati during the summer of 1816 and describes (in a fictional way) the creation of Frankenstein. This movie, which I originally saw in the 80s, was one of the things that got me interested in this subject. Just for grins I’ll embed the trailer for the film here in this blog even though it’s not really that much on topic.
I’ve spent much of the last year and a half researching the Year Without a Summer, particularly people’s reactions to it—their attempts to explain it through scientific or pseudoscientific means, religious and spiritual responses, the event as reflected in art, and even political ramifications. This research has taken me to archives on both coasts of the United States and consumed hundreds of hours of my time. In all of that time I’ve collected a tremendous amount of interesting tidbits about things that happened that strange summer, especially weather events. It is these tidbits that I plan to begin sharing on Twitter.
Starting this coming week, at 6:16 PM (18:16), I’ll post a fact or occurrence related to the strange weather of 1816 that occurred on the exact same day 196 years ago. I’ll identify each tweet in this series with the hashtag #YearWithoutSummer. For example, it snowed in many parts of the Northeast on June 7; at 6:16 PM on that day you may see a tweet to the effect of, “7 June 1816. Snow begins in Bennington, VT at noon, continues for several hours. #YearWithoutSummer.” If there are multiple tweets on the same day, I’ll send them out within a few minutes of each other.
All of these facts come from the body of research I’ve collected for my project. I don’t know if anyone else will find this as interesting as I do, but it’ll be there for what it’s worth.
This subject is not only a particular interest of mine, but it’s also related to issues I’ve mentioned on this blog before: anthropogenic global warming, and also denial of global warming. There are significant commonalities between the Year Without a Summer and contemporary issues of man-made climate change. In 1816 the planet was becoming colder, not warmer, and it was the result of volcanic eruptions, not greenhouse gases, but both the scientific and the cultural issues involved are strikingly similar.
One of the most surprising things I encountered in my research was a great deal of evidence that people in 1816 understood what global climate change was and that humans were a likely cause of it. Today we associate the issue with fossil fuels, emissions from cars and factories, and other products of our industrialized world. But did you know that Thomas Jefferson predicted man-made climate change in 1785, before the Industrial Revolution began? He said it in Notes on the State of Virginia, where he asserts that human settlement will gradually erode the forests and wilderness and cause the climate to get warmer as a result. In 1816, in connection with the weather anomalies, a spirited debate occurred on newspaper editorial pages across the United States. The debate was whether the Earth was experiencing global warming or global cooling, and if so, how the weather events of that summer should be interpreted. No one knew what a “greenhouse gas” was in 1816, but there was clearly an awareness of the implications of climate change, and disagreement over both its causes and the appropriate responses.
In an even more eerie premonition of modern conditions, one newspaper—the Essex Register of Salem, Massachusetts—spent much of the summer of 1816 denying that the climate anomalies were even occurring. The arguments used to explain why it wasn’t happening, or, if it was, why it wasn’t as bad as everyone said, are remarkably similar in structure and spirit to arguments used by contemporary global warming deniers. Clearly in 1816 there was something deeply unsettling about climate change. Understanding the basis and nature of these responses in this historical context may help us understand similar reactions to modern conditions, and provide valuable understanding as our society continues to seek a consensus on the appropriate responses to anthropogenic climate change.
I hope you enjoy this series of tweets. If you like them, retweet them! You’d be surprised how many people find the “Year Without a Summer” fascinating once they understand what it was about.
Rab was a credit to the metal world. He was a pillar of the Toronto metal scene and chief of his own record label, Northern Storm Records. I met him in person for the first time on my first trip to Toronto in 2007, but he was already well-known to me and many people in the metal scene from the Brave Words Bloody Knuckles message board. I also had the good fortune to hang out with Rab several times at the Wacken Open Air festival. He was always in good humor even when things weren’t going well. He was forever on the prowl for the latest band demo or T-shirt. At the times I saw him at Wacken he was never without a bag full of rare European metal swag that you couldn’t get anywhere else. He shared, too: I have numerous demos, albums and samplers that he gave me. Heavy metal was his life and he loved to share it.
More important than this, Rab was a terrific person. His personality was defined by his friendliness, his generosity and his never-say-die attitude. He was a very big guy but he had a big heart. The outpouring of grief and emotion at his passing, particularly in the Toronto scene, is a testament to what people thought of him. Almost everybody who knew him has a funny story about Rab. He had a long reach too: In Flames, a band he knew personally and loved, posted a tribute to him yesterday on their Facebook page and many people in the metal world are remembering him this weekend.
One of the great things about Rab was his ability to poke fun at himself. Although metal was in his blood, he often took it with a grain of salt. No one can forget his performance as an “evil” black metaller in Detsorgsekalf’s legendary “In The Blood of a Thousand Virgins Rises Chevy Chase” video made by Eyeblister. Several of my friends made and appear in this video. I’m going to embed the video here in this blog—it’s a perfect example of the humor with which Rab approached the world and why people liked him.
The passing of anyone so young is always tragic, but it’s particularly so in Rab’s case. He had some very serious health issues but I’m told he was working very hard to live a healthier lifestyle. I know that one of the highlights of his life was the 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise, and he was looking forward to going back. It’s an incredible shame, but his passing reminds us that what enriches our lives beyond anything else is the relationships we have with other people. Every single person who knows Rab is today reflecting on how their lives are diminished now by the fact that he won’t be with us any longer.
Metalheads don’t die; they pass into Valhalla. I can guarantee you that the moment he got to Valhalla’s fiery gates, Rab already had an all-access pass. Let’s all raise our beers tonight and celebrate the life of our friend Rob Cranny. It was a loud life—so turn the music up to eleven.
This is the third article in my ongoing series profiling real-life missing persons cases. I’m publicizing these cases on Twitter, twice a day, at 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM, under the hashtag #disappeared. To catch up on what I’m doing, why I’m doing it and where the links I’m tweeting lead to, you’ll want to read the original blog from December, and the follow-up which was posted New Year’s Day.
Since I began this project I’ve been in touch with Meaghan, who runs the Charley Project website (and the related blog). We’ve chatted about a number of missing persons cases, and she is a wealth of information on this subject. I highly recommend following Meaghan’s blog, as she posts thoughts, updates and discussions on various cases profiled in her database, as well as other interesting topics.
Now, onto the cases I’m showcasing this time. These are among the most interesting and thought-provoking of the cases I’ve linked on my Twitter in the past few months.
(At left: Jovanna Crawford as she appeared in 1981. At right: Jovanna as she may appear today).
Of all of the cases I’ve profiled since October, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about the disappearance of young Jovanna Crawford than almost any other single case. This one is haunting, sad, and mysterious all at once.
First, the facts. Jovanna Crawford was a baby, not yet two years old, when she disappeared from Connecticut more than 30 years ago. She was being babysat by one Ronald Garrett, then the boyfriend of Jovanna’s mother. According to Mr. Garrett, at about 10:20 AM on June 5, 1981, a young boy, an African-American youth about 10 or 11 years old, appeared at the apartment in the Barnum Housing Projects in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The boy, who was described as having small braids in his hair, said he was supposed to pick up baby Jovanna and bring her to the home of Jovanna’s great-grandmother, who also lived in the same housing project. Mr. Garrett said he recognized the boy, so he allowed him to take her. Young Jovanna was never seen again. The great-grandmother hadn’t sent anyone to pick her up.
Mr. Garrett was arrested and sentenced to a year in prison for endangering Jovanna by giving her to the strange boy. Police, at least at the time, doubted the whole story and suspected that the young boy with the braids did not in fact exist. Whatever did happen on that morning in June so long ago, no one is sure.
Mary Corbin, Jovanna’s mother, is still looking for her daughter. She believes Jovanna is still alive, possibly unaware of who she really is. Ms. Corbin is profiled in this article which ran in February 2011. In that article an investigator again states that he believes Mr. Garrett knows more than he was telling and that the boy with braids didn’t exist.
Here’s the thing, though: when Meaghan ran a profile on her blog about the Crawford case, not long before the news article ran, two random people chose to comment. One of them stated that she thought she might be Jovanna Crawford. Another commenter said he was the boy with the braids, and that he needed “closure” on the case. Authorities investigating the case became aware of the comments; one such official, or at least someone pretending to be an official investigator, posted a little later urging the commenters to tell the police what they knew.
On a hunch I did a little investigation on the person who claimed he was the boy with the braids. (Although he posted his name on that blog, I don’t feel comfortable disclosing it on mine). The person who popped up, through public records, LinkedIn and other information publicly available on the web, does seem to have lived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and he is exactly the right age to have been 10 years old in 1981. I’m certain the Bridgeport police must have investigated him, and, as I’ve said often, you can’t ever take at face value a random Internet blog comment; maybe there was nothing there or the blog comments were hoaxes. Nevertheless, it’s worth thinking about.
What happened to Jovanna Crawford? Is she still alive? Ms. Corbin thinks so, as do others. Perhaps we will never know, but there’s always a chance that a case like this can be solved.
If you know anything about Jovanna Crawford’s disappearance, call the Bridgeport Police at 203-576-7671.
The case of Peter J. Kema, Jr. is messy, complex and disturbing. It’s complicated by certain cultural differences that make it more than the run-of-the-mill case of a missing child.
“Pepe” Kema, six years old, was definitely multiracial—his ancestry is Chinese, Filipino, Spanish and Hawaiian. His father, Peter Kema, Sr., seems to have brought him to Honolulu, Hawaii in August 1997 while he was looking for work. Peter’s father claims they were homeless at the time and lived in a park with a number of other transients. He said that because he couldn’t provide for his son, he gave him to a relative, Rose Makuakane. The father showed the police a letter in which he told Ms. Makuakane that he was surrendering the child into her custody. However, the letter was dated almost a month after the last confirmed sighting of Pepe.
Charley Project’s lengthy article on the Kema case contains this information:
“Hawaii has a history of unofficial adoptions referred to as ‘hanai.’ In the hanai tradition, the biological parents turn over custody of a child to a blood relative…Many people familiar with the customs of hanai have stated the Kema situation does not classify as such an arrangement.”
The case gets more complicated when one realizes that, like the boy with braids in the Crawford case, there is a serious question as to whether Rose Makuakane ever actually existed. Police have not been able to track her down. In fact, Peter Sr., the boy’s father, may never have traveled to Honolulu at all. Prior to the disappearance of Pepe, Peter Sr. was involved in numerous situations suggesting child abuse, and Pepe’s surviving siblings describe horrific abuses occurring in the household.
The truth behind this sad case may never be known. In any event, no one has seen Pepe Kema in nearly 15 years. If you have, or if you have any information, contact the Honolulu police at 808-935-3311.
This case is noteworthy because it presents two seemingly insoluble mysteries wrapped up together.
On January 23, 2009, Benjamin Bearrick, a 55-year-old resident of Bovina, Mississippi, appeared at a hospital emergency room with a mortally wounded man. The victim of the crime, 50-year-old Shawn Sponholz, lived next door to Mr. Bearrick, and he had been stabbed multiple times in the neck. Sadly, Mr. Sponholz did not survive this attack and died at the hospital. Mr. Bearrick told the police that he came home and found his friend bleeding, and he didn’t know who had attacked him or why.
A few days later, police came to Mr. Bearrick’s home to interview him again, but he was gone. Evidently he had not been home in several days. No one has seen him since, no body has been found, and no one has any idea what happened.
Here is a video where Mr. Bearrick’s daughter and friends express their concern for him.
The obvious theory is that Bearrick’s disappearance and Sponholz’s murder are linked. Mr. Bearrick, a Vietnam veteran and respected citizen in Bovina, was evidently not a suspect. Who, then, killed Shawn Sponholz, and did that person also kill Ben Bearrick? If Mr. Bearrick could identify the murderer or provide some other crucial information, why did he not do so right away? Three years on, these questions remain unanswered
If you know anything about the Bearrick or Sponholz cases, call the Warren County Sheriff’s Office at 601-636-1761.
Fifteen-year-old Michael Palmer of Wasilla, Alaska, attended a party on the night of June 4, 1999 celebrating a friend’s graduation from high school. He had sneaked out of his house in order to attend this party. At 4:00 AM he was seen riding his bicycle down Pitman Road, toward the Palmer home, presumably so he could return to bed by sunrise. He had fallen behind some friends who were also biking away from the party. The friends waited for him at a local convenience store, but Mike never appeared. He hasn’t been seen since.
Mike’s bicycle was later found in the river. One of his friends also found his shoes, which he recognized Mike had been wearing at the party. The shoes, wet and muddy, were found near a private airstrip. Despite extensive searches, no body was found and tracking dogs couldn’t pick up his scent.
Rumors swirled in the wake of Mike Palmer’s disappearance. The family received several crank phone calls, some claiming he was dead. A local youth evidently told police that he’d seen Mike being shot and thrown into a river, but he later said he made up that story. No convincing evidence has surfaced to offer any clue as to what happened to this young man.
This case is mystifying enough, but to learn why subsequent events made it even more heartbreaking, read on.
Chucky Palmer, age 30, of Talkeetna, Alaska, was snowmobiling with a group of friends in the wilderness in April 2010. A news report summarizes the case thusly:
“Palmer…had been snowmachining during the day with friends and family to the west of Mastadon Road near Bald Mountain, last year on April 10th. The group was headed back to a cabin for the night when Palmer got lost from the group. Later it was discovered that Palmer had snowmachined off the well-defined trail and would have waded into waist deep snow had he gone off the side snowmachine trail he had chosen. Friends were the first to find the snowmachine. There was about a 12 hour delay in calling troopers. When the troopers arrived they found no trace of footprints anywhere on the trail, but did find the snowmachine stuck in the snow.”
The extensive search for Mr. Palmer was eventually called off for bad weather. It is presumed that he got lost and died of exposure. On April 12, 2011, a legal hearing declared Charles Palmer presumptively dead.
Chucky Palmer is the older brother of Michael Timothy Palmer.
There is no reason to suggest that the Palmer brothers’ disappearances are related. While foul play seems to be at least a reasonable supposition in Michael’s, an accidental exposure-related fate seems most probable in Chucky’s case. Nevertheless, seeing a family touched twice by tragedy of this nature is unbearable.
I cannot imagine the pain, anguish and uncertainty that this family has been going through. It simply beggars the imagination. A case like this really brings home the terrible human impact that surrounds these missing persons cases. These aren’t just dull case files posted on a website. Each and every one of these cases represents someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s child who may never return, and for whom there may never be closure.
If you know anything about the disappearances of the Palmer brothers, call the Alaska State Troopers at 907-745-2131 or 907-451-5100.
Fifteen-year-old Bonita Bickwit and her boyfriend, 16-year-old Mitchel Weiser, left their respective places of work in New York State on a July evening in 1973 to hitchhike to a rock concert featuring the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead. Bonita, in fact, quit her job at a summer camp that day when they wouldn’t give her the evening off to go to the concert. Bonita and Mitchel were deeply in love and despite their youth they considered themselves married, having exchanged wedding rings a few months earlier. They took off with backpacks, sleeping bags, a flannel shirt and about $25 in cash.
A truck driver who picked them up and gave them a ride for part of the way was the last person to see them. The concert, in Glen Watkins, New York, was the largest concert in history, with about 800,000 people attending. No one knows for sure if they actually made it to the concert.
Although this happened in 1973, this case of a double-disappeared illustrates how many of these cases never die. Charley Project states:
“Bickwit and Weiser’s families and friends have never forgotten about the two. Weiser’s family has since moved to Arizona, but they keep a phone listing in the Brooklyn telephone directory since 1973 in case either of the teens decide to contact them. Years following their disappearance, Weiser’s father accepted a collect call from someone identifying herself as ‘Bonnie.’ By the time the operator was able to connect them the caller had hung up. She did not call back and has never been identified.
In 2000, a witness, Allyn Smith, claimed he saw both Bickwit and Weiser drown while they were on their way back from Watkins Glen. Smith, then 24, said he was also going to the Watkins Glen rock festival and hitched a ride on a Volkswagen bus and two teenagers, whom he identified as Bickwit and Weiser, were also on the bus…They all stopped to cool off in a nearby river when Bickwit got into trouble in the water. Weiser jumped in to save her and they were both swept away, still alive. The bus driver told Smith he would call the police at the nearest gas station, but authorities have no record of such a call being made…The driver of the bus has not been found and Smith cannot remember the location of the river the teens allegedly drowned in. As a result, his story cannot be fully investigated.”
Did these bright young people drown in a river in New York State? If so, why were their bodies never found? Allyn Smith says he was there, and a good swimmer; why didn’t he try to rescue them? Did they reach Watkins Glen or not? With 800,000 people there, surely somebody saw them. But this baffling case seems to have no resolution.
Perhaps Bickwit and Weiser ran away together, as authorities originally suspected. After 40 years, though, wouldn’t the impetuousness of youth fade and at least one of them be motivated to contact their families? The truth is that we have no idea what happened to these two young people, and we will probably never know. But a listing in the Brooklyn phone directory, existing down to the present day, attests to the fact that someone out there hopes that another chapter of this disturbing story—perhaps a conclusive chapter—may yet be written.
Conclusion
As I stated at the end of my last blog on this subject, if you’re motivated to help with missing persons cases, follow Charley Project, Project Jason, and other similar resources. Since I’ve been publicizing these cases on my Twitter, several people now routinely re-tweet almost every one of my #disappeared links, as well as other cases that come across Twitter. Social networking is a wonderful innovation that can be harnessed to help solve these cases. If they had Twitter in 1973, for instance, isn’t it conceivable that some sort of alert could have gone out, spread virally around the web, that could have led to answers in the Bickwit-Weiser case? Or, in the crucial hours after the possibly nonexistent boy took Jovanna Crawford in 1981, might a social media push have alerted people in the community to be on the lookout, and the child might have been recovered?
We do not know. We can only do what we can do. In the meantime, hope and pray for the disappeared, and for their families who continue to wait, often decades, for their loved ones to come back home.
It’s been three months now since the release of Thrive, the New Age/conspiracy movie that’s been pushed heavily on the Internet. Probably many of my readers know that I run another blog, Thrive Debunked, which is dedicated to exposing the factual errors and distortions in that movie. As you’ll see there, I have my doubts whether Thrive is really achieving the sort of breakthrough success that its makers might have hoped for it. But aside from that, for me at least, as a debunker, Thrive has been an important milestone in my view of the conspiracy theory underground. Simply put: Thrive demonstrates how the conspiracy world is changing. I’m not sure that other debunkers really understand how it’s changing, or are prepared for it. That’s the subject of this blog.
The best and most concise way I can put it is this: conspiracy theorists do not want, today in 2012, what they used to want ten, five or even three years ago. The endgame for them—the “finish line,” if you will—is no longer to convince significant numbers of people in the mainstream that Conspiracy Theory X or Y is factually true. Nowadays, conspiracy theories are being used as a vehicle to advance other ideas, usually a set of ideological or even religious principles. The factual veracity of conspiracy material is no longer as important as it once was. Consequently, debunkers of conspiracy theories—who are focused on what is factual, rational and supportable in objective terms—are going to find themselves increasingly outclassed in this new environment. Before we get there, however, a history of sorts is needed.
The Good Old Days of 9/11 Truth: When Facts Mattered
In many ways, the conspiracy theories surrounding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 created the paradigm that many conspiracy theorists and debunkers alike came to understand as the rules of the game. 9/11 was the most traumatic national event of our time, comparable in psychological impact to the previous #1 generator of conspiracy theories, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. 9/11 also happened at an interesting time: the Internet was just beginning to reshape public discourse and the way people communicate. If you haven’t read this blog I wrote about the rise and fall of the 9/11 Truth movement, and why the simultaneous rise of social media was critical to it, you definitely should. That blog references a terrific article by former JREF debunker Ryan Mackey laying out that subject in exhausting detail.
The thing about 9/11 was that facts mattered. The conspiracy theory was all about what Truthers said really happened. After 9/11, and particularly in the heyday of the 9/11 conspiracy theories in 2005-06, all the Truthers were running around out there, especially on the Internet, shrieking about free-fall speed, squibs, “Pull it!” and Able Danger. What they wanted was to convince significant numbers of people that “9/11 was an inside job.” Everything Truthers did in this period—Alex Jones standing at Ground Zero with a bullhorn, Steven Jones publishing his fraudulent paper, Richard Gage’s laughable hijinx with cardboard boxes, calls for a new investigation, etc.—were aimed at convincing people to reject what conspiracy theorist call the “official story” and instead embrace an alternative (i.e., conspiracy) explanation. Even the name of the movement indicates this: 9/11 Truth. All of the misguided “activism” by Truthers was designed to get people to believe their version of what happened. When truth is your bottom line, the rules of the game involve proving what’s true and what’s not.
Debunkers of conspiracy theories, especially those who (like me) began serious large-scale debunking by refuting the arguments of 9/11 Truthers, eagerly responded to the call to battle. James Randi, in many ways the patron saint of debunkers, set the paradigm when he debunked charlatans and fake psychics in the 1980s: collect the facts, marshal your evidence, take apart the nutbars’ claims piece by piece, and demonstrate to all the world how and why they’re wrong. For all their fury and bluster, Truthers couldn’t make their version of 9/11 stick because they were arguing their version was objective fact, and their “facts” were always wrong. It was no contest. 9/11 Truth simply wasn’t very truthful.
These days are, unfortunately for many debunkers (and Truthers), over. 9/11 Truth is dead. The fantasy that the Bush administration, Mossad or the Illuminati did 9/11 will never achieve any form of mainstream acceptance. Truthers lost this battle. There aren’t many of them left, and you’ll notice what few that do still exist are caught in a time warp, arguing as if it’s still 2005 (or 2002) and no one has yet debunked “jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough” or “there was no wreckage at the Pentagon.” This paradigm of conspiracism and debunking is in the past.
The Movies, Part I: From Loose Change to Zeitgeist.
As Ryan Mackey argues, 2005 was a pivotal year for the 9/11 Truth movement. It was not only the year Loose Change, a fact-free documentary created by three college kids, was released, but it was also the year YouTube got its start. With YouTube, suddenly you could make movies at home and spread them around the Internet. The reasons why conspiracy theorists love YouTube are numerous and complicated, but this is the one that concerns us here.
Despite being factually wrong on every major claim it made, Loose Change was supposedly a documentary. In it, conspiracy theorists Dylan Avery, Jason Bermas and Korey Rowe packed just about all the major 9/11 conspiracy theories into one film (later recycled in various recuts and quasi-sequels) and spun it loose on the Internet. But the point of Loose Change was still the same goal as all Truthers were trying to reach: convince the world that “9/11 was an inside job.” Loose Change was so packed with conspiracy nonsense that it took a while to debunk, but the end result was the same: the movie was discredited, its fan base fell away, and its claims are now just more dull conspiracy theories. Dylan Avery has disowned the film. Jason Bermas is working at a pizza restaurant. As 9/11 Truth died, so did Loose Change.
But as all successful movies do, Loose Change spawned imitators. Easily the most popular imitator of Loose Change was the infamous Zeitgeist: The Movie. Created by young New York musician Peter Joseph Merola, Zeitgeist, released on the Internet in 2007, sought to do Loose Change one better by not only alleging that 9/11 was an inside job, but also that Christ never existed, Christianity was a conspiracy by kings and religious leaders, and evil bankers rule the world through the Federal Reserve. Zeitgeist has no more truth in it than Loose Change does, but the bankers-rule-the-world and anti-Federal Reserve stuff opened, perhaps even without meaning to, a new chapter in conspiracism: it was the first attempt, at least on the Internet, to advance a political agenda through the use of conspiracy theories.
If you look at the various false claims in the third part of Zeitgeist, you’ll notice that a lot of its ideas track pretty closely right-wing, quasi- (or full-fledged) libertarian notions of property and state control, undergirded with an economic ideology borrowed heavily from the discredited “Austrian school of economics.” Do you know who else believes in Austrian economics and hates the Federal Reserve? Yup, you guessed it: Ron Paul, who first came to national prominence in 2007-08, largely as a result of his stance on the Iraq war, which was then very unpopular. It should come as no surprise to you that Ron Paul has himself flirted heavily with the conspiracist underground, most notably in his blistering racist newsletters from the 1970s through 1990s, and then later more directly when he began lining up with global warming deniers. The connections between conspiracism and political/economic ideology, particularly of a libertarian political stripe, are beginning to show.
I think Zeitgeist owed its success to this dubious flirtation with ideology. If the film had just been about conspiracy theories, it would have peaked and receded, like Loose Change did; but by very subtlely introducing its viewers to certain political and economic ideas, which hinted at (but did not openly assert to be) a “cure” for these evil conspiracies, it offered its conspiracy audience a ray of hope. Well, yes, Christianity is a lie, 9/11 was an inside job, and evil bankers rule the world, but there are people out there who espouse policies that might change that! This thought was not fully-developed in the first Zeitgeist film, and it was still too early to have a big impact. That was about to change.
The Rise of Conspiracy Ideologies
Zeitgeist began to change the conspiracist underground because it started to reach beyond questions of simple facts. When you found yourself arguing with a fan of Zeitgeist, chances are you were also going to end up arguing about Austrian economics, Ron Paul, and whether capitalism does or doesn’t work. Certainly it was not lost on people like Peter Joseph Merola that, if you hold the attention of significant numbers of conspiracy theorists, you’re looking at an audience to whom you can sell an entire pre-packaged ideology, and they’ll buy it because they trust that, by signaling that you understand “the truth,” you are automatically a sage. Merola turned this nascent observation into Zeitgeist: Addendum, released in 2008, which clumsily grafted a pre-packaged, soup-to-nuts utopian ideology, called the Venus Project, onto a conspiratorial worldview. The result was the “Zeitgeist Movement”: probably the world’s first Internet cult based on conspiracy theories.
The capability of using conspiracy theories to sell—and I mean literally sell—a belief system to a receptive audience is even more marked when you consider Desteni. I first heard about Desteni last year, but it’s no accident that this cult, run by creepy South African ex-cop Bernard Poolman, got its rise in the 2007-08 time period, about the time 9/11 Truth was ramping down and the Zeitgeist Movement was ramping up. You can read more about Desteni in my various blogs about it, but suffice it to say it’s a very crudely-crafted religious order with a great deal of self-contradictory New Agey dogma and, like Zeitgeist, a ready-made happy ending: the “Equal Money System” that’s supposed to transform the world into a bottomless horn of plenty. The real reason for Desteni’s existence, however, is the multi-level marketing scam that it sells its members at steep and totally nonrefundable prices. Desteni at least tried to diversify its conspiracist base by relying on a whole host of conspiracy theories, instead of Zeitgeist’s three, but the main thread consisted of ideas spun off from British conspiracist David Icke, who believes that reptilian shape-shifting aliens secretly control the world. Desteni also dabbles heavily in New Age concepts like channeling and past life regression. This too is important, as we’ll see.
Desteni was too transparent a deception, and its ideology too alien and bizarre, to attract more than a handful of high-commitment members. But I cite it here as an important example of demonstrating how conspiracism has begun to change. I noticed, when I argued with Destonians, that factual assertions about the fraudulence of the conspiracy theories they believed in didn’t make much of an impression. That’s not new; arguing facts to a 9/11 Truther usually doesn’t make an impression either, but that’s for a different reason. Truthers are inaccessible to facts because they don’t know what the facts really are, or they refuse to believe that a particular fact is true. Believers in conspiracy ideologies like Desteni, however, are inaccessible to facts because the facts don’t matter very much to them in the first place. To them, whether David Icke’s reptoids do or do not exist isn’t very important. What’s important to them is their “Equal Money System” or the righteousness of their slogans like “self-forgiveness” or “what’s best for all.” Similarly, if you argued with a Zeitgeister at any time after 2008, you would find they’d much rather talk about their Venus Project ideology than about the conspiracy theories that brought them into the movement in the first place. The ideologies themselves were becoming more important than the facts. This is also why you see groups that espouse this ideology becoming increasingly cult-like.
Do you see where we’re going with this? The marriage of conspiracy theory to political, economic or religious ideology makes each side of the equation self-reinforcing. Arguing against the conspiracy theories is “missing the point,” in believers’ eyes, because the ideology, not a factual narrative, is what they want to sell you; however, the reason they want to sell it to you, and most likely the reason they bought it themselves, is because it was offered as a cure for all those horrible conspiracies. It’s no longer enough for a debunker to come to the table armed, as James Randi did in the 1980s, with facts and logical reasoning, ready to prove to the world what really happened. Now, in addition to refuting factual errors and lies by conspiracy theorists, a debunker has to argue why the Equal Money System or the Venus Project won’t work, why Austrian economics is crankery, or why voting for Ron Paul is a terrible idea. The rules of the game are changing.
The Movies, Part II: From Zeitgeist to Thrive
One thing that debunkers can take solace in: conspiracy-ideology packages, like Zeitgeist and Desteni, are difficult to sustain. The Zeitgeist Movement imploded in 2011 for a number of disparate reasons, including fractious infighting over fundraising, the egotism of its leaders, dreadful press occasioned by a string of disasters that began with the Jared Lee Loughner shooting in Tucson, and loss of public interest in the movies that were its mainstay. Desteni cratered at almost the same time when it was banned from YouTube, thus cutting off its main means of recruiting new followers. In each case the ideology attached to the conspiracies was not attractive enough to gain a self-renewing base of new followers. Both the Venus Project and Desteni’s Equal Money System are extraordinarily flimsy ideologies, riddled with self-contradictions, unanswered questions, and a pyramidal structure that depends on periodic infusions of dogma from the leaders at the top. The fact that both of these organizations were utterly inept at marketing themselves to the public didn’t help either. Furthermore, their hearts just weren’t in it. Zeitgeist could never break away from the 9/11 Truth paradigm that spawned it: ultimately it was still, deep down, about the factual veracity of those conspiracy theories from the first movie, and support for the utopian Venus Project was a mile wide and an inch deep. In the case of Desteni, the ideology was transparent to begin with, merely a sham for the true purpose of the group, a multi-level marketing enterprise. Nevertheless, the failure of these groups taught the conspiracy underground some valuable lessons.
Fast-forward to the end of 2011. 9/11 Truth is dead. The Zeitgeist Movement is dead. Osama bin Laden is dead. Barack Obama’s birth certificate is no longer open to question. Now, suddenly, here comes Thrive.
Two things are unique about Thrive: the sheer volume of conspiracy nonsense that it flings pell-mell at the audience, and the firm New Age milieu from which its makers seem to have come. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Thrive mimics Zeitgeist in a three-part structure, but the division between the parts is functional more than thematic, and the parts bleed into each other pretty fluidly. The early part of Thrive carefully telegraphs to the audience various traditional New Age concepts: crop circles, UFOs, ancient astronauts, alt-med cures, and homespun inventors bucking the evil of Big Science with their free energy machines. The middle section of Thrive churns conspiracy theories, as many and as fast as possible: the “Global Domination Agenda,” UFO cover-ups, 9/11 inside job, “false flag” attacks, Rockefellers, chemtrails, cancer cure suppression, etc. The latter segments of the film are more aimed at pushing a certain philosophy: taxes are theft, money is slavery, the Federal Reserve is evil, etc. When combined with Thrive’s “action points” that it pushes especially heavy on the website, it completes the marriage of conspiracy theories to ideology, specifically (I) New Age religious or quasi-religious beliefs, and (II) libertarian economic and political agendas. I say that these three parts are largely functional because if you put the three together here, in a nutshell, is what Thrive is saying:
Part 1: “We [makers of Thrive] are New Agers and we believe in traditional New Age concepts.”
Part 2: “The reason our New Age concepts haven’t transformed the world is because the evil conspirators keep thwarting us.”
Part 3: “In order to stop all these awful conspiracies, we recommend you embrace New Age concepts and libertarian economic/political beliefs.”
As I detailed in a post on the Thrive Debunked blog in which I described my conversation with an academic who studies conspiracy theories from a religious standpoint, Part 2 may be the key section of the film. This scholar told me the following, in a conversation he gave me permission to post:
“I suspect that what’s going on is that New Age, now entering its third generation, has developed a theodicy. Now, this is a theological term, but it essentially means an explanation of the existence of evil – why bad things happen to good people. For some of those in the New Age milieu – Foster Gamble, David Icke, Whitley Strieber, Duncan Rhodes and others, all incidentally in middle age and with a long term involvement in the New Age milieu – an explanation is needed as to why, if we’ve entered the Age of Aquarius, is the world less peaceful, equal and progressive than ever? Conspiracy theories offer such a theodicy – the New Age hasn’t happened because evil people prevented it from happening.
There are a number of reasons why these two milieus found common ground. One, they share a number of common themes, from UFOs, lost ancient civilisations to a critique of global capitalism and mainstream pharmaceuticals. Also, conspiracy theories and religions are unique in seeing the progression of the world as the result of hidden, non-falsifiable agencies.”
There you have it. Thrive is essentially a religious text, but with a number of secular implications. It begs, pleads and even tries to frighten its audience into believing in New Age concepts. At the same time, it pushes a political and economic agenda that proceeds very solidly from a libertarian corner. Foster Gamble even denounces democracy as an exploitative political system. It is these ideas—New Age religious and quasi-religious beliefs, and libertarianism as an economic and political agenda—that Thrive was made to advance. Conspiracy theories are merely a means to an end.
What Does This Mean For Debunkers?
What I think this means for us—those of us who spend significant amounts of time pushing back against conspiracy theories—is that, if the trend I’ve identified here is correct, our fact-based, James Randi-style approach to debunking is going to become increasingly obsolete. To put it cynically, nobody is going to care very much about the facts anymore, because the facts no longer matter to the believers of this material. As conspiracy theories become increasingly a means to an end rather than the end itself, the bottom line for believers in them is whether the goal the conspiracy theories are advancing is a desirable one or not.
I’ve already noticed this trend on the Thrive Debunked blog. Although the majority of people who post comments on the blog are Thrive fans who are angry that anyone would criticize the movie, a surprisingly few number of them seem to be angry because they think the facts are something different than what I demonstrate they are. Indeed, most of them seem to be angry because they say that by criticizing Thrive I’m preventing the world from becoming a better place by not accepting Thrive and its messages as true. This is why so many comments take a tack similar to, “you’re missing the point” or “the movie isn’t meant to be debunked.” When the movie is attacked, its fans instinctively leap to the defense of its ideology, whereas leaping to the defense of its facts seems to be a secondary consideration.
From a purely rationalist point of view, this makes no sense. In a rational frame of mind, belief that crop circles are made by extraterrestrials or that a Global Domination Elite is trying to take over the world is only justified if the facts demonstrate that those things are worthy of belief. But Thrive utterly rejects rationality. Even if you expose its falsehoods with undeniable facts and ironclad reasoning, believers will say, “Okay, so what?” Now suddenly the debate shifts from what actually happened to what ideology is best to fix the world’s problems. That’s not a conversation in which traditional debunkers have an inherent advantage over anyone else, because you’re not arguing facts anymore.
The world was much easier when the main purveyors of conspiracy theories were interested mostly in convincing people that their version of the facts was correct. The main point of this blog is this: we don’t live in that world anymore. Thrive proves it.
The Future?
I’m not very good at prognosticating. However, I’m going to throw out a prediction that I think has at least a chance of coming true: in the future, conspiracy theories are going to appear more often as a tool than as an end to themselves. As Thrive demonstrates, conspiracist thinking is increasingly becoming inseparable from New Age religious beliefs and libertarian political/economic beliefs. To believers, the factual truth of conspiracy theories is a fairly minor issue. They take it for granted, as Thrive fans do, that ancient astronauts existed, that free energy is being suppressed and that 9/11 was an inside job. Arguing those points with them isn’t worth their time. Whether those beliefs are factually supportable is step number 12 in the process. They’re already at step number 497. This is why some particularly fervent believers in conspiracy ideologies are simply shocked that anyone would question the factual veracity of their underlying theories. To them, that was an issue settled long ago.
That said, the progression is still continuing. Thrive, like Zeitgeist, is probably going to achieve its greatest impact through failure rather than success. Thrive is experiencing serious problems in reaching much of its desired audience—many conspiracy theorists think Foster Gamble, with his big pharma family connections, is trying to sell them “disinformation,” while the most paranoid raised a hue and cry over Thrive’s promotional poster, which the nutters think is “Illuminati occult symbolism.” Furthermore, while Thrive’s New Age ideology is certainly more attractive, stable and self-regenerating than Zeitgeist’s, I don’t see it likely that Thrive’s fanbase will coalesce into a viable organization under unified leadership. Certainly a lot of people out there like the movie, but beyond being a “good movie” that poses “food for thought,” I don’t think even many of the true believers will be motivated to do much about it. Conspiracy theorists are notoriously lazy. It takes more than Foster Gamble’s soothing tones and CGI pictures to motivate them.
In the future, however, that may change. Progress in the conspiracy underground is incremental. Perhaps someday, someone else peddling an ideology will decide to make a conspiracy movie that will be able to motivate significant numbers of followers to unite behind a self-sustaining belief system. This is the future I fear. The idea of believers in conspiracy theories coalescing into an organization with real-world clout—whether through legitimate political channels or, more likely, through violent revolutionary insurgency—fills me with horror. I hope, as a society, we don’t go there.
As Thrive itself imitated Zeitgeist, others are already trying to imitate Thrive. The next conspiracy movie that seems to be trying to break into the mainstream is called Ethos, narrated by Woody Harrelson (another familiar face in New Age circles). I haven’t seen it yet, but it appears to be more of the same, supposedly diagnosing the economic and political problems of the world from a New Age and conspiracist viewpoint. I, for one, am probably not going to be re-enlisting to debunk Ethos. After three years of debunking Zeitgeist and who knows how many more still to come in refuting Thrive, I simply don’t have the time, attention or effort left to re-up for yet another campaign of endless battles with Ethos’s conspiracy believers. I’m still from the old James Randi school. Perhaps I’m rapidly becoming a dinosaur.
This blog is in response to a debate we had on Twitter shortly before Christmas. In exchange for looking at a scientific peer-reviewed paper, by Zdenek P. Bazant, Jia-Liang Le, Frank R. Greening and David B. Benson entitled What Did and Did Not Cause Collapse of WTC Twin Towers in New York, I agreed to answer ten questions put to me by you regarding the September 11 attacks. In this blog, I present my answers.
First, before I get into the answers, I’d like to explain a few things, including my rationale both for responding to you and for presenting 9/11 debunking material on Twitter in the first place. I have been debunking conspiracy theories for over 6 years now, and I’ve come to realize that, for the most part, arguing with 9/11 Truthers is a waste of time. Not only is there not a shred of evidence that 9/11 was an “inside job,” but to believe that it was a government conspiracy–whether of the MIHOP or LIHOP persuasion–requires an abrogation of logic and critical thinking so total that it becomes quite clear that “9/11 inside job” is essentially a faith-based proposition, like religion. I have no realistic hope of convincing you to abandon a basically religious belief. Therefore, I am not answering these questions in an attempt to convince you that 9/11 was not an “inside job.” I cannot do that. Only you can decide that you want to abandon conspiracism, and it’s clear you’re not there yet.
Why, then, do I occasionally post factual material debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories on Twitter under the hashtag “#911Truth”–the activity which seems to have angered you? It is because I don’t want conspiracy theorists to monopolize the subject. You may not believe what I’m about to say, but 9/11 Truth, as a movement, is dying. Far fewer people believe that “9/11 was an inside job” than they did in 2005-06, the high water mark of this conspiracy theory. People simply don’t care about it anymore. They ignore it, because Truthers are a fringe community with nothing relevant to offer. As a result, the high-commitment conspiracy theorists–the activists who still firmly believe that 9/11 was an “inside job” and want to “wake up” the world to it–have a virtual monopoly on the subject, which the rest of the world considers closed. Almost everyone who uses the hashtag “#911Truth” is a conspiracy theorist. I use it to make sure that a person who is just now beginning their investigation of these issues doesn’t see a wall of conspiracy links, unadulterated by truth and fact, which might convince them that there is no credible anti-conspiracy information out there about 9/11. But if they do a search for “#911Truth” and find 9 links to ridiculous Prison Planet articles and one link to 911myths.com, at least they’ll know that factual information about 9/11 does exist, and maybe–just maybe–they’ll be motivated to click that link. Since I cannot realistically hope to “convert” Truthers, which I readily concede, this is the best I can hope to do.
Does this approach work? Surprisingly, yes, it does. You and your fellow conspiracy theorists’ eyes may glaze over when they see links from me to 911myths, debunking911 or ScrewLooseChange. You may (and I suspect do) think I am some sort of “government agent” simply “shilling” the “official story,” either because I’m paid to or because I’m too stupid to have “done my research” and realized that 9/11 was an “inside job,” which seems self-evident to you. (Incidentally, I have been accused of being a “disinformation agent” on many occasions). But presenting the real facts does help people recover from conspiratorial thinking. Here is an example of someone I personally helped through my debunking activities. Here’s another. I doubt these will be of interest to you now, but they might be someday.
Why did I engage you in debate?
My main goal in engaging you in debate was to get you to look–at least look–at peer-reviewed science that demonstrates that 9/11 could not have been an “inside job.” Despite the fact that you were extremely resistant to even glancing at this material–hiding behind the fiction that downloading a .PDF of this paper was somehow dangerous, as if I could go into the web servers of the places that host the Bazant paper and plant viruses as a means of guerilla warfare against 9/11 Truthers. Contrary to the vast majority of Truthers, however, you did at least look at some credible peer-reviewed material challenging the conspiracy viewpoint. Accepting it is another matter–and I know you won’t accept it under any circumstances–but at least you’ve seen it, which is more than the vast majority of Truthers can say, almost all of whom are so intellectually lazy that they simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of any relevant information that’s not on YouTube or which pops up after a perfunctory Google search.
So, therefore, my main goal in our interaction has already been accomplished. I do not expect the Bazant paper to convince you. In fact, I’m virtually certain you’ll find some basis on which to discredit it; you’ve already tried to claim, falsely, that it is not peer-reviewed. Barring that, you’ve probably spent the last 40 days in a daze of crunching physics equations in an attempt to find one that you think is incorrect so you can denounce the paper as a fraud. I expected that. But at least you’ve seen it. My job is essentially done.
A New Approach to Thinking About 9/11?
At the end of this blog I’ll answer your questions. Before I do, however, let me state that I find them all disappointing. All of your questions are points that were brought up by Truthers years ago, and which have been answered and debunked many, many times before. If you are still asking, in 2012, why NORAD supposedly “stood down,” that tells me that your investigation of the subject of 9/11 has been shockingly superficial. It is not hard to find answers to these questions. The only way you could pretend to not already know the answers to these questions is if you have seen them answered, but you just rejected them and pretended as if they hadn’t been addressed. This is what I suspect has happened.
Your questions also miss the basic point. They illustrate why your approach to the subject of 9/11 doesn’t work. Like most conspiracy theorists, you focus your attention on perceived discrepancies or “unanswered questions” that you think impeaches the “official story.” However, all you are doing is nibbling around the edges. Some of your questions–for example, “who wrote the PATRIOT Act”–have no relevance to the question of whether 9/11 was or was not an “inside job.” By that I mean, whatever the answer to that question is, it cannot affect the basic analysis of what happened on 9/11. You ask it as a means to raise speculations that you think will eventually lead people to jump to the conclusion that 9/11 was an “inside job,” but this is not a very effective means of getting to the finish line. Thus, at the risk of helping you become a “better Truther,” let me suggest that you take a different approach to thinking about 9/11.
If you think you disagree with the “official story,” first, make sure you know what the “official story” actually is. A surprising number of 9/11 Truthers do not, or they get key aspects of it wrong. For example, a common Truther claim is, “Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel!” But the “official story” is not that the steel in the World Trade Center towers melted. It never was. What happened was that the impacts of the planes knocked loose a great deal of fireproofing insulation on key support beams in the towers. The fires caused by the plane strikes–which involved a lot of things burning, not just jet fuel, but things like wood, paper, carpet, etc.–structurally weakened the steel, which is quite different than “melting.” First of all, it occurs at a much lower temperature. Secondly, the fact that the plane strikes tore loose much of the insulation in the buildings is important, because it explains why the 9/11 fires were different than, say, the 1975 World Trade Center fire, which did not involve significant structural damage. So the “official story” has nothing to do with melted steel. That means that the Truther argument, “Jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel!” is simply irrelevant.
Secondly, and more importantly, instead of trying to poke holes in the “official story” with “unanswered questions” or perceived discrepancies, instead try reconstructing the problem from the ground up. Once you understand what the “official story” is, ask yourself: if this were true, what is the minimum amount of evidence that would be required to prove it? For example, we can agree that the “official story” involves Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacking planes. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, clearly there is–we have their boarding passes, proving they were on the plane, we have recordings of their voices talking to the control tower, etc. We can agree that the “official story” involves these hijacked planes striking the towers. Okay. Is there evidence that this actually happened? Yes, there is–eyewitness reports, pieces of wreckage being found from the planes, etc., etc. Make a list of all these key links, and decide whether evidence supports them. Then determine if the questions you want to ask–about stand-downs, about Bush’s behavior at the Sarasota elementary school, etc.–can reasonably impact these key links.
This is how to go about evaluating the “official story.”
About a year and a half ago I wrote an article that attempts to put together what happened on 9/11 with the minimum amount of evidence necessary to reach logical conclusions. Here is the article. You will see it has very little to do with the PATRIOT Act, Bush at Booker Elementary, secret plans for Afghan wars, etc. You will also see within it no citations to the 9/11 Commission Report or the NIST Report. Instead, the article focuses on what really happened, and how we know what really happened, constructed from sources not derived from official investigations (and the sources that are used are each carefully scrutinized to determine how credible they are, and if there is any evidence out there that they’re faked). Again–I do not expect this article to convince you, but I present it in the hopes that its methodology might be of use to you.
You do not have to take “the government’s” word for it.
This is one of the hardest things for 9/11 conspiracy theorists to understand, and the statement I often make that engenders the most criticism from Truthers. You do not have to take the government’s word for it! We know what we know about 9/11 not because the government told us so, but because objective facts from non-official sources amply support the basic narrative of 9/11.
This is why it’s pointless for Truthers to attack the 9/11 Commission Report, as I have seen you do. The 9/11 Commission Report is a handy compendium of facts, but it is hardly the definitive source, or even in the top 10 most important sources, that explain what happened that day. It is not true that Commission members have recanted or impugned its basic conclusions–the statements you’ve seen to that effect are cherry-picked and taken out of context, and refer to disputes that do not involve the basic narrative of 9/11–but even if it was true, it wouldn’t matter. The basic facts of 9/11 speak for themselves.
Example: the confessions of Al-Qaeda terrorists Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh to planning and carrying out 9/11. Most Truthers dismiss Al-Qaeda confessions as untrue because they were supposedly extracted by torture. But did you know that both Mohammed and Binalshibh confessed to planning 9/11, on international television no less, a year before they were ever in U.S. custody? They boasted about it on a program created by Al-Jazeera in 2002, which obviously the U.S. government, or whoever you think was behind 9/11, could not control. Most Truthers do not know this, and they persist in stating that the Al-Qaeda terrorists confessed only under U.S. torture. They didn’t. Thus, you don’t need to take the government’s word for it that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh did it. They told the world they did it totally independently of anything the government did. The government is simply not the source of this information.
Answers To Your 10 Questions
And now, your questions. You will notice I don’t spend much time on them. The other things I had to say to you in this article are, in my view, much more important. But, since I pledged to answer your questions in exchange for your perusal of the Bazant article, here we go.
“1) Apparent Military stand-down”
I take it from this that you question why the U.S. air defenses did not intercept the hijacked airplanes before three of them reached their targets. The simple answer is, they had no idea what was really happening, because it had never happened before. There was no military stand-down. The judgment that the failure to intercept the planes before reaching their targets points to some sort of “inside job” is based on two faulty assumptions: (1) that you understand what NORAD’s procedures were in the event of plane hijackings, and (2) that such procedures would and should have been carried out flawlessly, to the letter, when the situation presented itself. Neither assumption is tenable.
From this I assume you mean, why was President Bush, when informed of the attacks while reading a book to children at Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, FL, not immediately moved out of the place by Secret Service agents? This is another “unanswered question” that is entirely irrelevant to the issue of conspiracy, because, if you review the facts concerning Bush’s presence at Booker School, you will see that they are all completely consistent with a surprise attack about which nobody knew anything beforehand. Assume just for the sake of argument that Bush didn’t know the attack was coming. Is it possible or likely that he and the Secret Service would have acted the way they did? Yes, clearly it is; this means that this question is not relevant to whether 9/11 was an “inside job” or not.
“3) Excessive Stock Trading + CIA connection”
I presume this question refers to the “put options” placed on the stock of various airlines prior to 9/11. This is indeed a mystery, and a question that remains unanswered. However, before you seize upon this as “evidence” of a conspiracy, consider this: again, just assuming for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an “inside job,” how unlikely is this?
Answer: not unlikely at all. The U.S. economy had already slipped into recession by the time of the 9/11 attacks. Financial traders were often betting that various stocks would go down (and that is what a put option is–a hedge that a particular stock will decline rather than rise). The only reason these sorts of trades would have seemed suspicious is in hindsight–that is, if the attacks had not happened, they would have appeared completely normal.
Take this hypothetical. Assume that I’m a day trader of stock. On Friday, just on a whim, I decide to sell a bunch of shares of Acme Corp. that I happen to own. On Sunday, a huge industrial accident occurs at an Acme Corp. plant. When the market opens Monday, Acme Corp. stock starts plummeting. Does the fact that I sold Acme on Friday indicate that I must have known the industrial accident would occur? No. If the accident hadn’t occurred, the fact that I sold Acme on Friday would be meaningless.
As for the “CIA connection,” that is spin from conspiracy theorists. Visit the link highlighted above and you’ll see discussion of that issue.
“4) Wash meeting …with ISI who gave Atta 100 Grand”
The “fact” that Mohammed Atta was given $100,000 by an official of the Pakistani ISI is by no means a fact. If you investigate that issue you’ll see that there is considerable controversy over whether the meeting took place, and if so, when it took place. Again, assume just for the sake of argument that 9/11 was not an inside job. We know from subsequent events that the Pakistani ISI supported Al-Qaeda in the past. They were protecting Bin Laden up until the very day (May 1, 2011) that U.S. forces assassinated him–in Pakistan. How strange would it have been that a pro-Al-Qaeda agency might have wanted to fund an active member of Al-Qaeda plotting a terrorist attack against the United States? Could this have happened exactly the way you claim it happened even if 9/11 was not an “inside job”? Answer: yes, quite easily.
This is another question that does not help you advance your case that 9/11 was an “inside job,” because, whatever the answer is, it doesn’t make that conclusion any more (or less) likely to be the truth.
“5) why Aphgan war plan on Bush’s desk on 9/10/2001″
There is no evidence that the United States was planning to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11. What possible strategic interest would the United States have had at stake in Afghanistan prior to September 11? If you think 9/11 was a pretext to attain some other objective, what was that objective, and why is it so hard to find? Furthermore, if it was planned, why wait until October 7 to put the plan into action–and then, why rely on the Northern Alliance to do the heavy lifting?
We have been at war in Afghanistan for 10 years now. To my knowledge, with the exception of the assassination of Bin Laden, the United States has achieved no significant strategic objective in the entire 10 years we’ve been at war there. Afghanistan is the poorest country in the world. It has no oil. It has no wealth. It has no resources. It is not a strategic location for bases. It’s a bunch of rocks and inhospitable mountains. Great place for terrorist camps, but little else. The “pipeline” stuff was debunked in 2002, but even if it wasn’t, how come, after 10 years of war there, this supposed “objective” has not yet been accomplished?
“6) when/why was PATRIOT act written “
This question is completely irrelevant to whether 9/11 was or was not an “inside job.” Technically, the answer is, it was written by Congressional staffers, who write the vast majority of bills. The question is irrelevant, though, because, like many of your questions, whatever the answer is makes it no more or less likely that 9/11 was an “inside job.” By asking the question you want to invite the conclusion that it must have been written beforehand and 9/11 was some sort of “pretext” to pass it. But you have no actual evidence that this occurred; you’re just hoping someone connects the dots and reaches the conclusion you want.
For the record I think the PATRIOT Act is a terrible law that should be repealed. It should never have been passed, and I believe many of its key parts are unconstitutional. It may surprise you that this is my opinion of the PATRIOT Act. Truthers often have a difficult time reconciling statements such as this with their religious belief that because I don’t believe 9/11 was an “inside job” that I must therefore unthinkingly accept everything the government does.
“8) why did Military lie (see Keane’s book)”
Former 9/11 Commission member Thomas Keane does not, and never did, make the claim that anybody was covering up anything that could have altered the basic narrative of 9/11. Yes, he claimed military aides lied about certain things. But how do you get to the conclusion that what he thinks they were lying about must have been a conspiracy to “do” 9/11? There is no evidence of that. What were they lying about? Things much more petty than the underlying truth that Al-Qaeda did 9/11, I’m afraid. Bureaucracies don’t like investigations showing up their incompetence, and there was a great deal of incompetence in the government regarding 9/11. This is what military officials were lying about–not whether Osama did or did not do it.
Furthermore, as I stated above, the propriety of the 9/11 Commission investigation is not very relevant to what we know about what happened on September 11. This question is a red herring.
By the way, you skipped number 7, but you have two question 9′s.
“9) why was evac proc not followed at Pentagon”
This is another silly question, irrelevant to the key facts of 9/11. I cannot confirm that it is even true–which leads me to suspect it’s not–but even if it is, it falls in the same category as the imaginary “NORAD stand-down,” insofar as, it can only point to something suspicious if (1) you understand correctly what the Pentagon’s evacuation procedures were, and (2) you can trust, that in the confusion and chaos of the day, the only way those procedures could not have been followed is by a deliberate decision to impede them. If you want some more specific info on Pentagon responses that day, try this, about NORAD’s scrambling of fighters to protect the Pentagon or this about the activities of Pentagon officials.
“9) why Able Danger destroyed?”
Another wasted question whose answer, regardless of what it is, does not and cannot affect the key pieces of evidence upon which our conclusions of 9/11 rest. The counterintelligence “Able Danger” project most likely did not, as many conspiracists believe, identify 9/11 hijackers before the disaster. More importantly, anything involving “Able Danger” is a rabbit hole–like your other questions, it’s not very relevant. In order for it to be relevant, the same two untenable assumptions you’ve made in questions 1, 2 and your first question 9–that you understand what procedures should have been followed, and your certainty that the only reason they would not have been followed in this case was because of deliberate orders–must again support the weight of all the malfeasance you are trying to heap upon them. This is simply faulty reasoning.
I don’t really care why Able Danger files were destroyed, if they were. How can that affect what happened on 9/11?
“10) why FBI never charge bin Laden w/ 911 or update poster even after death.”
The answer to this question is so easy to find that I’m not even going to type it out. Go here for a full explanation of this issue. This is another faulty question because it’s a “sacred list” argument. It’s silly to pin your hopes that 9/11 was a conspiracy on this flimsy reasoning, when you could be investigating the actual facts and conclusions upon which the narrative of 9/11 relies.
Conclusion
As I stated earlier in this article, my point in engaging you in this open letter is not to convince you that 9/11 was not an “inside job.” I don’t believe I can do that. I’m quite certain that you’ll latch on to something in the Bazant article that you can trumpet as indicia of its unreliability, or perhaps you’ll just claim that Bazant and the other authors are just government shills. However, I did get you to at least engage with a piece of scholarly peer-reviewed evidence that challenges the conspiracy claims–and in doing so, you’ve done more than most Truthers will ever do. I also explained why I present 9/11 material on Twitter and what I hope to accomplish by doing so. Most likely you’ll disagree, or perhaps holler about this blog being some form of trickery or other evidence of my depravity, but that’s fine–I get that a lot. As I’ve said on this blog before, debating 9/11 Truthers is largely a waste of time. The marginal benefits that may come as an indirect result of these debates, however, do have value.
You may be surprised to learn that I am myself a former conspiracy theorist. Virtually all “high-commitment” debunkers–meaning, people who, like me, expend considerable effort in refuting conspiracy theories–are former conspiracy theorists who realized how silly their beliefs were. I guess underlying all these words is a hope, distant and speculative to be sure, that maybe someday as priorities in your life change you will realize that some of the positions you once held are untenable. Maybe then you’ll remember you once read a scientific article refuting controlled demolition, and you’ll do a search for it to look it up again. It only takes one piece of factual information, one logical or incisive question, to crack the facade of conspiracist thinking.
To that end I will leave you with a video that I think encapsulates this phenomenon. Made by a former conspiracy theorist, it explains cogently and emotionally how and why he left the snake pit of “9/11 Truth.” Again, you may not see much in this video now, but perhaps someday you will.
Cheers, and best wishes for 2012.
To everyone else, thanks for reading.
Update: 3 February 2012
“Visibility911″ has responded to this blog. Here is his response:
“You’re just another shill.”
Not surprisingly, he has learned absolutely nothing from this debate. I have learned, yet again, the utter futility of attempting to counter 9/11 conspiracy beliefs with reason, fact and logic. There is no attempt–indeed, not even a desire–to engage with the facts or to evaluate arguments on any sort of rational basis. There’s only the religious belief in their conclusion. Conspiracy theorists never change.
I don’t usually do short blog entries, but while I’m working on more substantive stuff I thought I’d show you a screenshot of a puzzling but amusing conversation that happened yesterday on Twitter.
A conspiracy theorist who evidently does a podcast on various conspiracy-related topics denounced my opinions on conspiracies as worthless, but yet strangely he wants me to come on his podcast and spread my supposedly worthless opinions!
For the record, I told this fellow that if he wanted me on his show, he should look at my blog and email me with a list of topics covered here that he’d like me to talk about on the show. So far I haven’t heard from him. I don’t even think he’s read the blog.
It seems rather odd for someone who regards my opinions as worthless to try to get me on his podcast, but I’ve given up trying to understand the contradictions of conspiracy theorists.
This blog, originally published January 17, 2012, was updated January 18, 2012. Scroll to the end for the update.
Some of my readers may be aware that I and this blog have become involved in a controversy involving Douglas Mallette, who has been associated with the Zeitgeist Movement. Mr. Mallette was scheduled to give a lecture on his opinions about sustainability and future development at a Green Party event in Sweden. Yesterday, the panel disinvited Mallette after observing disturbing statements he had made, promoting the use of violence against opponents of the Zeitgeist Movement, which were recorded on YouTube several months earlier and about which I wrote a blog article in February 2011. He retracted those statements and apologized for them. If you want to see the full history of this fracas, go here and be sure to scroll to the bottom for the various updates.
Last night Mr. Mallette posted on his Facebook page a long rant in response to the Swedish lecture cancellation and specifically directed at people whom he termed “cyber-bullies” and who he obviously blames for the cancellation. In that message he accused these persons, myself included, of being “paid disinformation agents.” You can see the text of that message, and a response by James Kush, one of the other bloggers so accused, here. In this post I only wish to make a few short statements in response, and to clarify the record.
First: it seems so ridiculous as to be beneath comment to have to deny that I’m a “paid disinformation agent.” It annoys me to do so because the accusation itself is so stupid. But, for what it’s worth, I’m not paid by anyone to write this blog—no person, organization, firm, government agency, business interest, association, or anything. I’m disappointed that Mr. Mallette felt the need to make this baseless accusation. I might also add that this is exactly the type of accusation often made by conspiracy theorists against persons who disagree with them publicly. As Mr. Mallette has stated he isn’t a conspiracy theorist, I’m puzzled why he chose to employ this trope.
Secondly: he seems to be under the impression that the “cyber-bullies” he complains of created this situation and sprang his own words on him as some sort of premeditated trap to try to ruin his speaking tour. This is not the case at all. I can’t speak for anyone else, but my involvement in this issue began I was contacted by a reporter from Sweden who had read my blog on Mallette’s previous statements and wanted to know if the YouTube video of him making them was still available. (Incidentally, that post contained an update in which I embedded Mallette’s apology video as soon as I found out about it). The reporter was investigating Mr. Mallette’s background because there was already a controversy developing in Sweden regarding his credentials—a controversy which was already happening when the reporter contacted me, and with which neither I nor any of the other persons Mr. Mallette accuses of being “cyber-bullies” had anything to do with instigating. I’m not out there lying in wait for Douglas Mallette to say something that makes the Zeitgeist Movement look bad. In fact, until yesterday, I was under the impression that Mallette quit the Zeitgeist Movement months ago.
Thirdly: Mr. Mallette seems to be upset mostly that the YouTube video of him making his troubling comments was made available to the reporter by the “American bloggers” cited in his story, the video of him apologizing for those comments was not. That is the exact opposite of what happened. In fact, when the reporter contacted me, I did a quick web search to see if I could find a mirror of both videos. The only one I found was Mallette’s apology video. That’s the link I sent to the reporter. I didn’t even send him the link to the original comment video that appears embedded on Mr. Kush’s blog and in the reporter’s story. Either the reporter found it on his own or someone else sent it to him. I don’t know which and don’t care.
Let me repeat this in no uncertain terms so Mr. Mallette understands. The only video link I ever sent to the Swedish reporter was a link to his apology video.
I’m going to take the liberty of embedding that selfsame video here in this blog entry so everyone can see it. Everyone has seen the original by now, so I’m going to bend over backwards to be fair to Mr. Mallette by including only the video that he would rather the reporter have seen—which, I stress again, was the video I sent him in the first place. I know for a fact that the Swedish reporter knew about it, and it’s likely the organizers of the speaking tour did too. If they were unpersuaded by it, that has nothing to do with me.
Fourthly: Mr. Mallette claims that the “cyber-bullies” who are out to get him dislike the Zeitgeist Movement because (his words):
“You have a perverse personal vendetta against a few select groups, namely the Venus Project and Zeitgeist Movement, for reasons dominantly rooted in conspiracy theory bunk, like Luciferian Cults, New World Order nonsense, UN Agenda 21, etc.”
Not only is this false, it’s in fact the exact opposite of why I oppose the Zeitgeist Movement. As should be well-known to just about everybody, I oppose the Zeitgeist Movement because it promotes conspiracy theories and advances a conspiracist worldview. I don’t believe in any of the conspiracy theories Mr. Mallette mentions—in fact, I don’t believe in any conspiracy theories at all, which is (ironically) much of the reason why Zeitgeist Movement members don’t like what I have to say.
Finally: he says “no act of contrition would satisfy you people” (meaning his critics). To the contrary, it’s quite obvious what actions he could have taken to rectify the words that he now regrets saying: quit the Zeitgeist Movement, repudiate it, and put as much distance between it and himself as possible. In fact I believed Mr. Mallette had done exactly this last summer, when he announced that he was quitting Zeitgeist at the same time many of its high-profile supporters were jumping ship. If he had broken ties with the sinking organization, and could demonstrate that to the Swedish press and the organizers of the speaking tour, it’s much less likely they would have sought to dissociate themselves from him, because then he would be just a nice man giving lectures about sustainability and global development, instead of a (witting or unwitting) ambassador from an organization with a toxic public relations reputation. I dare say he would also find himself and his actions no longer a subject of interest among the opponents of the movement.
Ironically, a supporter of Mr. Mallette’s made this exact recommendation last night on his Facebook page, advising him to distance himself from the Zeitgeist Movement, regardless of how much he might sympathize with what he perceives to be their motives. The comment was promptly deleted.
I should also mention that nobody is talking about falsehoods or fabrications about Mr. Mallette or what he said. The clip that caused consternation in Sweden was a clip of his own words—which he willingly chose to broadcast publicly on a podcast. This isn’t even a case of a person’s private words being used against them—what he said was said publicly, on the Internet, to an audience of anyone who cared to listen. To liken the exposure of this public information to a reporter, who initiated contact with me to ask to see the clip, to a “slander campaign” is ridiculous. Slander involves untruths. This incident involves truths, however unflattering. I’m aware that Mr. Mallette has apologized for his statements, also in public. That’s good. But what the public does with that apology, and whether or not they judge it to be sincere, is no longer in the control of the person making the apology. This seems to be the nub of what’s bothering Mr. Mallette. So far as I know the reporter had the apology before he had the original clip. Yet Mr. Mallette seems to be far less angry with the reporter, and the Swedish municipal authorities who canceled his lecture, than he is with the bloggers who responded to the reporter’s inquiry with truthful information that has been in the public eye for more than a year.
I’m not even very interested in covering Zeitgeist on this blog anymore, and careful readers might notice that it’s received little attention here in the past few months–excluding the year-end wrap-up podcast, only one post I’ve done since August even has significant content about the group. My debunking activities are tapering off for the most part, and what little I am doing, blog-wise, focuses on Thrive. Even that project is starting to wind down. Zeitgeist is pretty much dead. It’s unlikely you’ll see very much Zeitgeist material here in the future, and I even hesitated whether to junk up my blog with this post about it. But, as some facts needed correcting, I thought it might be worthwhile.
I just wanted to set the record straight here. Thanks for reading.
Update 17 January 2012
Right after this blog was published I became aware of a statement attributed to Mr. Mallette responding, it seems, mainly to the Swedish reporter. For the sake of completeness, I reproduce it here. I don’t have the link to the original source, so I’m not 100% sure this is genuine, though I suspect it most likely is.
“‘Formal Reply to Allegations Against Me’
Douglas Mallette
1/17/2012
This is to serve as the official response to a short list of attacks against me that will most like try to be used repeatedly as a way to silence me and my lectures. Sadly, we live in a world where people who don’t like someone or their ideas can use the internet as a weapon for slander and misinformation, instead of formal dialog, debate and discussion.
I will take this moment to address these criticisms against me and give full explanations, not ‘sound bites.’ It is my hope that this letter will be reviewed by any and all organizations who receive slanderous information about me. I will start with the most condemning accusation first:
_________________________________
- Accusation: I advocate violence and genocide.
This accusation stems from a statement I made on a Blogtalk radio show back in August of 2010. Here is the specific statement used against me, “The only thing that would hamper the building or the food would be some nefarious organization coming in and attacking it. And if they did that, then it’s very obvious that that organization and those people are not concerned in any way, shape or form with actually helping people eat. They only want to maintain their power and control, and that’s when you go in and simply annihilate them. That’s where I do advocate military force a little bit. We build these cool facilities that are passive and peaceful, feeding people, and some organization comes in and tries to destroy it or does destroy it, that organization needs to be completely eradicated from the face of the planet. That is pure evil. I don’t care what their ideology is, at some point people need to die. They need to be destroyed. No questions. No jury. No nothing. Your gone. Toast. You are useless waste of skin.”
That statement was uttered when I was a naive, novice activist, and when I was a much angrier man, and that statement was said in irrational anger. As I began to think about how many suffering people would be hurt further if some violent group (terrorists if you will) tried to destroy one of the food facilities put in place to help them, that line of thought got my blood boiling. The result manifested in this completely stupid statement. If I could go back in time and change it, I would, but of course that’s not possible. I do not condone violence.
If one were to do proper investigation, they would find that that is the one and only time I have ever said anything like that, and I’m sorry I did. I have become a lot more peaceful now, working on myself as much as I work on trying to better the world. I never claim to be perfect, and we all make mistakes. I’m sure everyone has moments in their life where they have said or done something they now consider to be completely against their current character.
This bears repeating – I do not condone violence. The world needs to do a lot more thinking and talking, and a lot less swinging of fists. I do advocate protecting people from irrational and violent forces, in non-violent ways if possible, and I find no shame in that. Some people have no defense and need help, at least until we get to a saner world where violence isn’t used to solve issues, and calm reason and discussion is the only tool in the tool box for that. All I can do ask for is forgiveness with regards to this ill advised statement.
_________________________________
- Accusation: I didn’t work for NASA.
I never claim I worked for NASA. In fact, I go to great lengths to make sure people understand the difference between working for the Space Shuttle Program (SSP) and working for NASA directly. The former U.S. Space Shuttle Program was populated mostly by people who did not work for NASA directly, but who worked for contracted companies like Boeing, Lockheed, United Space Alliance and hundreds of subcontracted companies. The government did this to ensure fairness throughout the country, so that the few larger companies would not dominate all the work.
I worked for a subcontractor to Boeing, first with GB Tech, then we moved over to GeoControl when the contract shifted hands to that company. I worked in the Boeing building in Houston, Texas, not far from the Johnson Space Center. I worked with Boeing people, on Boeing materials related to the Space Shuttle. My paycheck might have been from a subcontracted company, but in most respects, I was with Boeing. I make this point again and again, but sad to say, sometimes the translation misses people, and when they hear “Space Shuttle” they tend to think everyone involved were NASA employees. I hope this clears that up.
As for what I did, Boeing dealt with many aspects of the Space Shuttle, from maintenance operations in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, to logistics and operations in Texas. Boeing basically built the Space Shuttle. NASA contracted them to do it and effectively “rented” it. That’s a simple way to think about how that all worked. I worked in the Boeing SE&I (Systems Engineering and Integration) department, called Configuration Management. We were responsible for tracking and maintaining all the records of the materials that went up and down in the shuttle payload bay as they related to the Shuttle Manifest and technical drawings. This also included interfacing with other departments on a regular basis, like Propulsion, Mass Properties, etc. We attended and delivered updates to Boeing and the United Space Alliance and were responsible for delivering official documentation to NASA that readied the craft for launch. I have professional references to support my work there.
_________________________________
- Accusation: I am the poster child for the Zeitgeist Movement.
Although I do support the Movement, and several other organizations that are working towards making a more sustainable world for mankind, I do not consider myself the poster child for anything. I am simply a man who wants to help people understand how science, engineering and technology can improve the lives of all people on Earth.
My experience in the space industry, coupled with my formal education in Engineering Technology: Space Systems, coupled with my life long passion for space exploration in general (which is why I wrote a book on it), has afforded me the knowledge to speak on such things.
I have spoken at the Initiatives of Change conference in Caux, Switzerland, at Liverpool Hope University, in Liverpool, UK, and at the University of Illinois, in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois (USA), to name a few. None of those were as a ‘poster child’ for the Zeitgeist Movement. In fact, I don’t use my support of the Movement as a means to do speaking, but sometimes supporters of the Movement make it possible for me to attend speaking events. For that, I am grateful. In general, I am more interested in ideas, not the labels of organizations.
_________________________________
- Accusation: I am a Conspiracy Theorist.
As I say repeatedly when asked about conspiracy theories, I personally think they are a waste of time. One could spin their wheels forever on the subject and never really get anywhere, other than convincing themselves of what they want to be true. I do not spend my time on them. I also don’t care about ‘secret societies’ and whether “they” hold sway over the world. I’m more interested in solving problems, not complaining about symptoms. I am not a Conspiracy Theorist.
_________________________________
- Accusation: I am convinced that aliens had a role in human development.
This one kind of makes me laugh. Although I do find that hypothesis fascinating, I do not think aliens had a definitive role in shaping mankind. I have enjoyed films like Ancient Aliens, which aired in America on the subject, but for anyone to assert this as truth is ridiculous. There is no data either way to solidify that hypothesis at all, and to be honest that kind of data will likely never manifest anyway, but it is kind of fun to speculate on the ‘what if’ scenario. Sometimes it’s nice to let the mind wander. Every once in a while you find a kernel of truth there. Now, do I believe that alien life is most likely plentiful in the universe? Absolutely, and so do many, many globally recognized and well respected astrophysicists and space scientists, such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and the late great Carl Sagan.”
Happy New Year, everyone, and best wishes for 2012! In this, my first blog of the year, I will continue to profile some of the cases of missing persons that I’ve been featuring on my Twitter feed recently (and which are scheduled). This is Part II of the #disappeared series. Part I is here, and in that blog, written in early December, you’ll find an explanation of why I’m doing this, where these cases come from, and some of my thoughts about them.
Here are eight missing persons cases that I’ve linked to on Twitter. While I now profile two missing persons a day, at 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM (Pacific Time), these are cases that have stood out to me for one reason or another. It’s so difficult to choose which ones to showcase, because all of them deserve to be highlighted and publicized. Nevertheless, here are a few cases that I think are worth spending some time reading about. The links in each header are to case files on Charley Project, which I think is a terrific resource.
Torey Newlin, a 23-year-old Colorado State University student, loved the band String Cheese Incident. He, his brother and friends had seen more than 100 concerts of the jam-style band, which has a Grateful Dead-like following. In February 2002, he and some friends went to Hawaii to see the band. At the band’s concert at the Lahaina Civic Center on February 16, Newlin took a tab of LSD and wandered outside after the first set. When he tried to re-enter the venue, the security guards wouldn’t let him. Supposedly Newlin said he didn’t know where—or who—he was. Barred entry to the venue, he wandered off. He’s never been seen again.
Newlin’s disappearance triggered a major manhunt on the Hawaiian island of Maui, and a lot of media coverage. Ground and air searches yielded nothing. Torey Newlin was pretty distinctive, with his long hair and pierced tongue. He wasn’t wearing a shirt at the time of his disappearance. Despite the media attention to this case, he has never been found.
Newlin’s girlfriend was pregnant at the time he vanished. She eventually gave birth to his child. Sadly, that child has grown up fatherless for the past ten years as Torey Newlin remains missing.
If you know anything about Torey Newlin’s disappearance, call the Maui Police Department at 808-244-6400.
The hypothesis in the case of Nancy Elizabeth Branch—that she died in a plane crash—is almost self-evident. What is interesting, and frustrating, is that three other people vanished with her, and I can’t even find a record of their names.
On Sunday, December 6, 1992, Nancy Branch boarded a small airplane, a single-engine Piper Archer, at Santa Barbara Airport in California. I researched this case through NTSB records and found that the plane, registration number N81453, was owned by the West Valley Flying Club, which is still in operation. She and her friends were headed for Palo Alto after a weekend in Santa Barbara. The NTSB record of the case (link here) records these details:
“On December 6, 1992 at 1054 hours, the pilot telephoned Riverside, California FAA flight service station (FSS) and requested a weather briefing for his intended flight from his departure airfield to his destination.…The FSS briefer said the weather would continually get worse throughout the day. The pilot decided to go ahead with his planned flight. The pilot, with his 3 passengers aboard, was cleared for takeoff at 1203 hours. The pilot contacted FAA departure control and received advisories until radar service was terminated at 1214 hours. No further transmissions were recorded from the pilot.”
The pilot, whose name I could not track down, and his three passengers—including Nancy Branch—were never seen again. The Civil Air Patrol conducted an extensive search and rescue operation, utilizing over 50 planes. They expected to find the wreckage of the plane. They never did.
The NTSB report seems to suggest a possible cause—that the plane hit heavy weather, about which the pilot was warned before the flight. However, this may be misleading. What few news reports about the incident that I could find mention that there was no indication of trouble from the plane. It just disappeared. Nancy Branch is the only one of the plane’s occupants whose name was released to the public.
California is a big place, and a surprisingly large amount of it is inaccessible wilderness. Quite probably in a forest or mountain somewhere in this area there lies the twisted wreckage of a small aircraft, undiscovered for nearly 20 years. That, unfortunately, is probably Nancy Branch’s grave. One wonders if someday a hiker, a hunter or a forester might someday find the wreckage and bring closure to the families of Ms. Branch and the others who were lost that day.
Specialist Joseph Bushling, a soldier, was stationed at an Army base in Dugway, Utah. On May 8, 2011, he drove into the desert in a friend’s car for reasons that are unclear. At 7:00 PM he called a friend to report that he’d run out of gas and he was going to try to walk across the desert back to the base. It was raining, he was cold and—the detail that everyone remembers from this case—he had lost his shoes, which were flip-flops. Bushling said that he’d wrapped his T-shirt around his feet. He did not make it back to the base, and no body was ever found.
Bushling’s car, however, was found, 64 miles from the base. It was locked and the keys were gone. Searchers also found his Arkansas Razorbacks hat, and eventually the infamous flip-flops. There are no other clues.
The Army initially classified Bushling as a deserter, but it doesn’t seem like he ran away on his own accord. He liked the Army and wanted to become a nurse. The question of the flip-flops entrances people. How did he lose his shoes? Was he running from something—or someone? No one knows.
The desert outside the Dugway base is a huge, remote place. A body could remain undiscovered for a very long time. Joseph’s, if indeed he is dead, has not been found, and may never be.
Joseph Bushling has a distinctive tattoo. If you’ve seen a man with this tattoo, call the Tooele County Sheriff’s Office at 435-882-5600.
If you click on the Charley Project link to Cynthia Constantine’s case you won’t find much. The all-too-often refrain, “Few details are available in her case,” appears there. What we do know is that this pretty 15-year-old girl went out to walk her dog in Oakdale, New York on a July night in 1969. The dog came back. Cynthia didn’t. She has never been seen again.
There are rumors, of course. Discussion of her case on the Websleuths forum reveals that her brother may have still been looking for her as late as May 2011. There are also cryptic stories of a homeless man who talked about a girl who was abducted and killed in the same area and never found, and someone claiming to be a private investigator from the area who knew something about an illegal abortion ring run by a notorious sexual predator. You can’t believe everything some anonymous person says on the Internet, though—in fact, you can’t believe anything with that provenance in most cases—but, more than 40 years later and the case gone very cold, speculation and rumination is about all we have to deal with. Whatever happened to Cynthia Constantine, it was undoubtedly grisly and tragic. If there is a killer out there, he (or she) has not been brought to justice.
The Sayegh case is heartbreaking, macabre, horrifying, and complicated. It also remains unsolved after nearly 35 years.
On October 25, 1978, six-year-old Cary Sayegh was last seen getting into a stranger’s car in front of the Albert Einstein Hebrew Day School in Las Vegas, Nevada. Three hours later Sayegh’s parents received a phone call where an unidentified man demanded $500,000 ransom for Carey. At the time Cary’s father, who owned a carpet business, was under indictment for attempting to bribe a public official—Harry Reid, who is now in the U.S. Senate. After this initial call, the kidnapper never contacted the family again, and Carey was never found.
Suspicion focused on a man named Jerry Burgess, who had committed a sexual assault near the same school where Cary was abducted, and whose voice Cary’s family identified as the ransom caller. In 1982 he was charged with kidnapping Cary, but the jury acquitted him for lack of evidence. Years later Burgess was arrested again. During the investigation that led to his arrest, he told an undercover agent that he could dispose of a body by welding it inside a steel drum. He’d done it before, he claimed—to Cary Sayegh in 1978.
The Sayegh case was one of the most intensive manhunts in Las Vegas history up until that time, but the case continued to spin strange tangents even decades later. Burgess alleged at his trial that Sayegh was still alive and living in Israel, though no one could prove it. Police evidently investigated at tip that Cary Sayegh was alive and well in Boston in 1999. That same year Cary’s father, heavily in debt from a gambling addiction, fled to Israel. He later came back and made a settlement with his creditors. Jerry Burgess is today in prison for crimes unrelated to the Sayegh case, but he maintains his innocence of the boy’s kidnapping.
Are Cary’s remains hidden inside a steel drum buried somewhere under Las Vegas? Or might you run into him strolling down Boyleston Street in Boston—or at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem? As of yet, no one knows.
The case of Zebb Wayne Quinn, a Wal-Mart employee who vanished from Asheville, North Carolina just after New Year’s 2000, is full of bizarre clues that all seem to point in different directions.
Quinn, 18 at the time of his disappearance, left work at 9PM on January 2, 2000 in the company of a friend, one Robert Owens, each driving separate vehicles. Both cars were seen pulling away from a gas station together. After that, Quinn dropped off the face of the earth. Owens was somehow injured in a car accident—or perhaps more than one car accident—on the night or morning of January 2-3. He told police that Quinn had accidentally rear-ended his truck, then drove away. On the morning of January 3, Owens called the Wal-Mart where Quinn worked and told them he was sick and wouldn’t be coming in. Then Owens refused to cooperate with police.
Two weeks later the police found Quinn’s car in the parking lot of a restaurant. Someone had drawn lips and exclamation points on the rear window. When the police opened the car, they found a black Labrador puppy in the car. Zebb Quinn didn’t own a pet. They also found a plastic hotel room key.
There were rumors that Quinn was having a relationship with a woman whose boyfriend may have threatened him. The police investigated this possibility but evidently couldn’t find any evidence against her or the boyfriend. Owens was not charged with anything, but evidently he has been in trouble with the law since 2000, having been arrested in 2007.
This case sticks out in peoples’ minds because of the bizarre details of the design drawn on the window and the mysterious Labrador puppy. As for Zebb Quinn himself, he has not been seen in twelve years. Until someone comes forward, whatever might have happened to him—at whoever’s hands—can be nothing more than conjecture.
Lester Jones, known to his friends as “L.J.,” was a graduate student at Mississippi State University, studying biomedical engineering. He was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity and extremely well thought-of by those who knew him. On January 11, 2010, L.J. was traveling from his family’s home in Tupelo to visit friends in Jackson. He stopped at a Sprint Mart gas station/convenience store in Flowood, Mississippi. An image of L.J. was captured on the convenience store’s security camera at 10:18 PM. That was the last anyone ever saw of him.
Later, a customer at the gas station found a cell phone in the bathroom and turned it in to the management. It was L.J.’s. There is no telling whether the abandonment of his cell phone is connected to his disappearance.
L.J.’s car is also missing. It’s common for a person who is last seen in or near their car to go missing and then the car is later found abandoned somewhere, but L.J.’s was never found at all. The potential hypotheses to explain disappearances get much more complicated when you have to account for not only a missing person, but a vehicle.
If you’ve seen Lester Jones or his car—a 2002 Ford Expedition, license no. (Mississippi) KTW-714, call the Starkville Police Department at 662-323-4131.
The case of Barbara Zakon, like Cynthia Constantine, is one where there is very little information: once again Charley Project states “Few details are available in her case.” Barbara Zakon, age unknown but about 55 or so, vanished from Brooklyn at about 2:00 PM on the afternoon of December 22, 1984. We know nothing more than that about her disappearance. What we do know is a little bit about Barbara herself: she was a Holocaust survivor and in fact had an inmate number from a Nazi concentration camp tattooed on her forearm.
Barbara’s case is a sad one because it seems like there was very little investigation done in her case. The NYPD’s case file on her has probably been closed for many years. Meghan Good, the woman who runs the Charley Project site, wrote a blog about this particular case. She writes:
“[W]hat seems saddest of all to me is that she is so forgotten. The NYPD missing persons site is pathetic and rarely updated. It no longer profiles old cases like hers and, as you can see, there was little enough to begin with. Online, Barbara exists only on a few private sites like mine. Someone cared enough about her to report her missing, but it’s likely that whoever that was is dead. It’s just as likely that her actual casefile within the police department is either entirely missing or contains little more information than what I have on the Charley Project site. (You’d be surprised to find out how many of those old missing persons reports were simply lost or thrown away without being solved.) And, as you say, all for a woman who went through so much. Last night I found myself looking through Yad Vashem’s database of Shoah Victims’ Names at people named Zakon, wondering if any of them were Barbara’s relatives.”
After reading this blog I did exactly that. (The Yad Vashem database of Holocaust victims is an amazing resource, by the way). There was a Yisrael Zakon, born in 1875 in Lithuania, murdered there in 1941; a Yitzhak Zakon from Neustadt, Czechoslovakia, date of death unknown; a Mordechai Zachon from Warsaw, Poland, the owner of a shoe factory; and numerous others. We have no way of knowing if any of them are related to Barbara, or what her own story is about surviving the Holocaust. If she was 55 in 1984, she would have been born about 1929, thus making her a young teenager at the time of World War II.
I found myself thinking a long time about this woman. The Holocaust is an astoundingly awful and staggering experience to contemplate, and the only way you can do it successfully is by looking at it through the eyes of someone who was there. How did a girl in her early teens, presumably in Poland or elsewhere in Eastern Europe, survive this horror? How many of her family members didn’t make it? How did she eventually come to America? You could write a compelling book or make a movie about such a story, but Barbara’s will never be known. We have no clue what happened to her on that street in Brooklyn in December 1984. Likely we never will. This illustrates the crushing sadness of missing persons.
In the unlikely event that you know anything about Barbara Zakon, call the New York City Police at 212-473-2042.
Conclusion
I am constantly reading missing persons cases on the web and researching details of various cases. I am not an investigator and have nothing to do with law enforcement, but as I said in my first blog I think these cases deserve attention. If you’d like to help, keep up with the Charley Project and a similar missing persons database called Project Jason. I’ll probably keep doing these profiles periodically on my blog as well. In the meantime, hope and pray for the disappeared and their families.
Thanks for reading.
[Note: some of the images in this blog came from the Charley Project--my understanding is that they originally came from law enforcement agencies and thus are public domain, but in any event, as it's difficult to publicize missing persons without photos of them, I hope it is OK that I used them.]
Here is my first (and possibly last?) official podcast, a wrap-up for the end of 2011 highlighting some of the things I’ve written about on this blog this year. In 2 parts:
Enjoy, and I hope everyone has a great New Year’s holiday! Thanks for reading.
Everything in this video is a direct quote from a comment either posted here, or in reference to this blog. Warning: some of the language gets a little saucy toward the end!
I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas. Yes, even the conspiracy theorists!
Merry Christmas from Conspiracy Theorists!
Tonight is Christmas Eve, and while waiting for Santa Claus to bring me my fat government check for being a good little disinformation agent that spreads lies about what really happened on 9/11 and criticizes the world-saving Zeitgeist Movement and Thrive movie, I thought I’d bring you a little video that shows, in animation form, some of the choice comments I’ve received on this blog over the past two years.
Everything in this video is a direct quote from a comment either posted here, or in reference to this blog. Warning: some of the language gets a little saucy toward the end!
I hope everybody has a wonderful Christmas. Yes, even the conspiracy theorists!