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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.