In Search of...
zepp
Conspiracy theories are often loony, but not necessarily false
by Bryan Zepp Jamieson
08/21/04
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Sociology/conspiracy.htm
Conspiracy theories can be fun. Anyone who has seen the
incredible and convoluted notions that surround the Illuminati and the
great struggle between the Masons and the Catholics know that there
are a lot of people out there with extremely inventive minds and far
too much time on their hands.
Some of it is just plain nuts. David Icke, for example, bases
his elaborate theories on the premise that the Queen of England and
the Bushes are actually secretly extraterrestrial lizards. As John
Lennon might have sung, “Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl, but her
tail keeps coming off.” One of Icke’s main sources of information is a
woman who claims to have been a mind controlled CIA sex slave to Henry
Kissinger and Bob Hope. It just sort of follows a natural progression
from there.
Sometimes the lyrically paranoid and obsessive theories turn
out to be true. Yes, the CIA really did conduct mind-control
experiments. Yes, the government paid for experiments releasing gas
in the New York subways and in Havana (pre-Castro) in order to test
propagation of poison gases. Yes, the FBI did run infiltration and
disruption activities against the anti-war movement (CointelPro)
during Vietnam.
It’s a window into human nature that once proven true,
conspiracy theories lose their allure, save for those who inevitably
proclaim that the government is only admitting PART of the story, and
they haven’t explained why the queen has green blood. Conspiracy
theories veer wildly between the valid and real, and the farcically
absurd, often on the same subjects. The best way to get a really good
cat fight going is to lock up a dozen conspiracy theorists in the same
room and ask them to discuss what really happened in Dallas, or on
9/11.
Some conspiracy theories have enough credence that the public
at large embraces them, even if no real proof is ever forthcoming.
Most people, for example, don’t believe Lee Harvey Oswald was the only
gunman at the site of the Kennedy assassination, or that he was the
one who fired the fatal shots. Or rather, the shots that were fatal;
few dispute that he fired his weapon.
Secretive or just private organizations spawn hundreds of
conspiracy theories, which is why you hear so much about the blood
rituals of the Masons, or about how Jesus is alive and well and living
in the bowels of the Vatican with St. Germain. Anything involving
Israel will spawn a half dozen or so conspiracy theories, along with
any prominent landmark such as Ayers Rock, Stonehenge, or Mt. Shasta.
Lemurians live in the mountain, you know, and at night they sneak out
and eat the brains of people who later become conspiracy theorists.
Urban legends are often spin-offs from conspiracy theories.
The best conspiracy theories are the ones where nothing can
really be proven, one way or another, but there is enough there to
cause people to stop and consider that there might really be something
to the theory.
Most conspiracy theories tend to rely upon photographic images
that are badly out of focus. Nobody in the world of conspiracy
theories owns a good camera, it seems. Which is the reason why, when
people give me videos of various such theories to watch, I usually
feel pretty non-committal about the experience, having concluded that
the “flying saucer” could just as easily have been a frisbee, or
wondered why the guy with the camera hadn’t run over to where bigfoot
had been to look for tracks to photograph, or tufts of fur on branches
along the trail.
Then there’s 9/11. The biggest event of this young century,
it has created an entire cottage industry of conspiracy theories.
Some are ridiculous – the magic Mohammad Atta passport that survived
the crash into the north tower comes to mind. Some are beheaded by
Occam’s Razor – a vast government conspiracy to CAUSE 9/11 could not
have been kept secret; the crime is simply too monstrous. Similarly,
I find it hard to believe that anyone could secretly rig the towers
with implosion devices such as are used to bring down older buildings
in cities without people among the minimum night crew of 5,000 in each
tower noticing. “Gee, Fred, did you notice the unusual number of
electricians around here tonight?” “Yeah, Joe. Hell, I can’t get one
to show up at two in the AFTERNOON! But here’s what I’m curious
about: what does an electrician need C-4 for?” “Yeah, and why does it
say ‘Mossad’ on the backs of their jackets?”
The trouble is that there are a lot of questions about 9/11
that for good reasons or bad, remain unanswered, and pose the sorts of
problems that keep me up at night.
I watched a video tonight that I have to say is the best of
the genre of 9/11 question sessions that I’ve seen yet. No wild-eyed
suppositions. Israel and the Masons aren’t implicated, and the host
doesn’t bash Putsch – in fact, he goes out of his way to level
criticisms at Clinton to show that he isn’t driven by partisan
considerations.
The video in question is called “911: In Plane Site” and it’s
hosted, written and directed by a fellow named Dave Vonkleist. All of
his evidence comes directly from images taken directly from the major
television networks on the morning of 9/11 (and Vonkleist states that
the networks refused to give permission to use the footage and so he
went ahead and did so anyway).
The parts about the twin towers are largely unimpessive, and
involve elements that have appeared in other places. Some of it is
pretty questionable; the “pod” on the bottom of the second flight to
strike the towers may or may not be just an artefact of the camera
angle.
However, the video had elements new to me, and these raised
questions. There is a flash immediately before the plane strikes the
building, but until seeing this video, I was unaware that four cameras
at different angles caught the same flash, eliminating the possibility
that it was a glint off the sun. Vonkleist also demonstrated that in
the one video of the first flight striking the building, that plane
emitted a similar flash immediately before impact. Given that in both
cases, the flash occurred within 1/100th of a second of the planes
striking the building, I doubt it was terrorists on board firing off
missiles. Such a feat would have taken preternatural timing and
reflexes, even without the distraction of a great big bloody
skyscraper looming up in your windshield and immanent death. Maybe it
was just the ionically-charged plane going to ground against the metal
buildings as the gap narrowed. Maybe. The claim that the two planes
were in fact cargo planes has relatively little to support it, beyond
the possibility there was a pod on the undercarriage, and a breathless
claim by a Fox News reporter that there was a “blue logo” near the
front of the plane, and it had no windows. But apparently quite a few
other people there dispute that it was an American Airlines plane.
Far more disturbing were the clear images from CNN showing a
massive explosion about a hundred yards from the twin towers moments
before the first one collapsed (and not shown again, I’m told –
certainly I had never seen it before) and the eyewitness accounts of
dozens of a massive blast just before each collapse. In the case of
the CNN footage, the images are clear and unambiguous. Something big
blew, sending white smoke 50 stories into the air immediately. It
takes a BIG blast to drive smoke 500 feet straight up, at least as big
as the one at the Murrah building. Hundreds of people heard and felt
that blast. What was it, and why was it never shown on TV again after
that one time?
Before watching In Plane Site, I was already convinced that no
commercial jet hit the Pentagon. I went to urbanlegends.com,
expecting to see some of the points answered, and came away even more
convinced that whatever hit the Pentagon, it was no commercial plane.
Urbanlegends, usually so meticulous about providing verification for
their arguments, was not doing so this time. References were made to
dozens of witnesses that saw the plane, without naming a single one.
Unlike with the towers, there is no physical evidence such as video
tape (at the worlds most closely guarded building!) showing a plane
hitting the building!
The singular lack of debris, the unscathed lawn, and the small
size of the hole in the side of the building have been covered in
various other projects with various degrees of verisimilitude. New
data in this video – taken directly from the CNN and Faux News feeds –
shows several major surprises. The top three stories of the building
remained in place around the hole, which is in fact only 12 to 16 feet
wide. Even stranger are the offices with walls torn away (as with the
OKC building) which show intact computer monitors and unburned paper
mere feet from where 8,000 gallons of aviation fuel allegedly exploded
and burned furiously.
The claim was made that the plane blasted through the first
two rings of the Pentagon and into the third. But in all the photos
available, there’s no sign this happened; the damage was limited to
the outer ring. One engine supposedly went through the second ring
and struck the third, but the engines on a 757 are outboard, along the
wings, and there is no corresponding spot on the outer wall of the
building where an engine might have struck at 250 miles an hour. In
fact, using the descriptions furnished by the military, the plane
engine would have struck exactly where a window – an unbroken window –
was in the building.
Oddly enough, one of the most interesting questions about what
really happened that day comes, not from the video, but from the
efforts at urbanlegends to debunk the no-plane conspiracy theories.
The dozens of witnesses who say they saw a plane usually mention that
it struck either a light post, a telephone post, or several of such
objects. They say that a wing sheared off or was shattered, and the
plane, in an effort to maintain control and hit its target, went to
full throttle.
There seem to be no images of sheared off telephone or light
poles, no pictures of wings several hundred feet from the building.
Further, if you apply full throttle to an engine on one side (the
other was gone, according to these witnesses), the plane would simply
spin like a top while losing the rest of its forward momentum. It
would have ended up as a giant St. Catherine’s Wheel rotating flat on
the lawn, and probably would have eventually caught fire and exploded.
No plane hit the Pentagon. I don’t know what did, and the
efforts by the normally reliable urbanlegends.com to debunk the
questions merely added to the questions.
And while I usually enjoy conspiracy theories, I don’t
subscribe to them as a rule. Really: I’m quite sure Queen Elizabeth
the second is not an extraterrestrial lizard (although I admit there
is some question about Princess Anne).
This all immediately raises the question of where that plane –
and all the people on board – wound up. That WOULD require government
conspiracies on a scale associated with Illuminati theories. I have
no answer for that one, but hope to at some point. Occam’s Razor says
the government didn’t capture and kill all those people, including one
fairly well known celebrity married to a member of the Administration.
But if they didn’t hit the Pentagon, where are they?
In the meantime, borrow or buy “9/11: In Plane Site” and judge
for yourself. And when you’re done, go and read the folks who say
it’s just a conspiracy theory.
--
"There are no longer torture chambers or rape rooms or mass graves
in Iraq"
--George Bush, May 1st, 2003
Said during "Mission Accomplished" speech on USS Lincoln
A year later, Mr. Bush observed with no irony to Al Arabiya TV:
"Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and
trying to destabilize their country, and we will help them rid
Iraq of these killers."
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com
For news feed, http://yahoogroups/subscribe/zepps_news
For essays (please contribute!)
http:yahoogroups/subscribe/zepps_essays
-
"And I deeply resent the destruction of federalism represented by Hillary Clinton’s willingness to go into a state she doesn’t even live in and pretend to represent people there. So I certainly wouldn’t imitate it.”
Alan Keyes (R-Hypocrite) on Fox News, "Special Report with Brit Hume," March 17, 2000
"Pre-emptive war was invented by Adolf Hitler. To be perfectly honest,
I wouldn't take anyone who came up with such a thing seriously".
Dwight Eisenhower (legitimately elected President), 1953
Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!
Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.
For the finest in liberal/leftist commentary,
http://www.zeppscommentaries.com
For news feed (free, 10-20 articles a day)
http://groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/zepps_news
For essays (donations accepted, 2 articles/week)
http://groups.yahoo.com/subscribe/zepps_essays