Amelia Earhart Conspiracy

During a 1937 attempt to island-hop across the Pacific along the Equator, famed American pilot Amelia Earhart (and the her navigator Fred Noonan) ran out of fuel, crashed and died. It's what happens when airplanes run out of fuel, but not good enough for conspiracy buffs who have, over the years, come up with about a dozen theories as the what 'really' happened.

One of these has the Japanese capturing Earhart and imprisoning her in China where she was liberated in 1945. On return to the US she assumed a new identity as a New Jersey housewife, Irene Craigmile Bolam. (Don't ask why, bear with me...)

Of all the absurd postulations about Earhart's fate, this is the most bizarre -- but it spawned two books and innumerable articles.  In casually researching this -- initially I wasn't all that interested -- I stumbled across an excellent essay on the topic by Alex Mandel and posted to Wikisource: Amelia Earhart's Survival and Repatriation: Myth or Reality?

Highly recommended.  Read it here.

Big Cats and UFOs

Every year in the UK there are over 2,000 sightings of big cats in the wild. These usually manifest themselves as black panthers and are given names such as "The Beast of Bodmin" by the media.

There might be more sightings of big cats than there are of UFOs but they are no more credible from an evidential point of view. And, as with UFOs, no-one has yet come up with a single good, high-resolution, well-lit photograph. No-one has found a corpse that's not a dog or sheep and no-one has found a specimen of panther turd -- except in the case of a Big Cat that has been released by its former keeper.

In 1995 the British government sent a team to investigate (and, presumably, try to catch) the Beast of Bodmin. They spent months checking the photographic and video evidence in the exact locations where the cat was seen. The team's findings?

"They examined the famous video sequence, broadcast widely on television, which shows a cat leaping cleanly over a drystone wall. It looks impressive, until you see the man from the ministry standing beside the wall with his [measuring] pole, and realise that the barrier is knee-high. A monstrous cat sitting on a gatepost shrinks, when the pole arrives, from a yard at the shoulder to a foot. In one case, where the Beast was filmed crossing a field, the investigators brought a black domestic cat to the scene, set it down in the same spot and photographed it from where the video had been taken. The moggie looks slightly bigger than the monster."

That's a quote from George Monbiot's excellent new book Feral (serialised in The Guardian). I was struck by the similarities between Big Cat sightings and UFO encounters, a thought that also occurred to Monbiot. This is especially true when looking at (a) the reliability of the evidence and (b) the way in which the pursuit is like a religion in the sense that it is belief-led rather than evidence-led. The author says this:

"Perhaps the beasts many people now believe are lurking in the dark corners of the land inject into our lives a thrill that can otherwise be delivered only by artificial means. Perhaps they reawaken vestigial evolutionary memories of conflict and survival, memories that must incorporate encounters – possibly the most challenging encounters our ancestors faced – with large predatory cats. They hint at an unexpressed wish for lives wilder and fiercer than those we now lead. Our desires stare back at us, yellow-eyed and snarling, from the thickets of the mind." 

And those yellow eyes all have vertical-slit pupils like small domestic cats; big cats have round pupils.

George Monbiot: Feral. Allen Lane, 2013. (To be published on 30th May.)

Dan Brown's Inferno (2)

Can't bear to part with the money for the book?  Here is cool solution.

An author called John Crace writes "digested reads" for the Guardian.  Whenever a high-profile book is published he cleverly renders it into 600 words.  Read that and you don't need to buy or browse the real thing.  Here's a quote from the digested read:

'Langdon looked out the window. "From my observations, I deduce we must be in Florence, the most populous city in Tuscany with 370,000 residents," he said. "There's no time for you to quote Wikipedia," Sienna reprimanded him scoldingly. "The world is under threat."'

Brilliant!  Read the whole 600 words at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/19/inferno-dan-brown-digested-read.

Now you've saved at least $20 you can afford the $2.99 it will take to buy a much better thriller: Upload: A Very American Conspiracy at Amazon Kindle, Apple, Sony, Barnes and Noble and all other major eBook stores.

Dan Brown's Inferno

Good news for Florence in Northern Italy! A new Dan Brown book has hit the bookstores and it's all about local boy Dante Alighieri. No, he's not an overpaid soccer-player but an early 14th century writer.  Check him out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Alighieri.

You already know Dan Brown, of course; he's the guy who got rich writing an appallingly bad book called The Da Vinci Code.  So, has he learned anything?  Is the new book, Inferno, going to be any better?  I haven't read it myself -- I'm waiting for them to start arriving in bulk at my local charity bookshop. But the early reviews both sides of the Atlantic don't look good.  Here are a few samples.

"The new novel is probably the closest Brown will ever get to his version of The Hangover: Langdon wakes up in a Florence hospital with a bad case of retrograde amnesia after a gunshot head wound and a strange object connected to Dante's Inferno." Brian Truitt, USA Today

 "Narration appears lifted from a Fodor's guide, as when Langdon pauses in the middle of a life-or-death escape to remember the history of a bridge: 'Today the vendors are mostly goldsmiths and jewelers, but that has not always been the case. Originally the bridge had been home to Florence's vast, open-air market, but the butchers were banished in 1593.' It's like trying to solve a mystery while one of those self-guided tour headsets is dangling from your ears." Monica Hesse, Washington Post

"As a stylist Brown gets better and better: where once he was abysmal he is now just very poor. His prose, for all its detailing of brand names and the exact heights of buildings, is characterised by imprecision. It works to prevent the reader from engaging with the story ... But in the end this is his worst book, and for a sad, even noble, reason – his ambition here wildly exceeds his ability." Jake Kerridge, The Daily Telegraph

Jack Kerridge has it dead right. In the preface to The Da Vinci Code Brown gave credit for the research to his wife. That, in my opinion, could be grounds for divorce. But the problem is not with the stuff he makes up, it's with the stuff he doesn't need to make up. It's the job of fiction writers to invent reality. But every time he makes a simple mistake of inconsequential fact he torpedoes the reader's carefully suspended disbelief.  In one four-page passage of DVC (the chase across Paris) he makes seven basic mistakes.  For example, Europol does not operate marked police cars with flashing lights and sirens in the French capital.  Nor any other European capital for that matter.  [Easy to check: https://www.europol.europa.eu/.]

Dan Brown is an achingly bad writer. His editors at Doubleday should be ashamed of themselves. These are all problems good editing can fix. Maybe Doubleday doesn't have any good editors with some professional pride? Maybe they are just happy to bank the proceeds from selling this crap?

Batman/Colorado (2)

More on the "10 key points of evidence that point to a conspiracy in the Batman/Colorado shooting" from http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread864644/pg1.

Key point 6 (OK, I'm doing them out of order) says this:

Holmes booby trapped apartment - How are we to believe that a 24 yr old, former jewish camp counselor, gaming nerd, science rock star, Neuroscience PHD had the skill set to set up a system of explosive devices and booby traps that would have the FBI bewildered for almost two days?? How are we to believe that ?? There is no way this maze of death was the work of one neuroscience student. It's BS.

No, it's not bullshit. If the poster of this thought for a few seconds he'd have realised the crass stupidity of what he was saying. In the first sentence he establishes that James Holmes was a "science rock star" and a "neuroscience PhD" student but claims that he didn't have enough brains to improvise an explosive device. As any ill-educated Taliban fighter could tell you, making IEDs is not that complicated.

As a 24-year-old "gaming nerd" it's pretty safe to assume he knows how to Google something like "How do I make a bomb?" to get some instructions. Copies of the Anarchist's Cookbook are up there somewhere. Even the murderous clowns who bombed the Boston Marathon managed to make devices that actually exploded.

The FBI (if it was the FBI rather than the ATF) was dead right to take two days getting into the apartment. What was the rush, for fuck's sake? You take your time. You drill holes and insert fiber-optic cameras. You use the resulting photos and architect's plans to figure out how the booby-trap is rigged and how it needs to be made safe. That's not being "bewildered", that's being smart. And staying alive.

The 1st Law of UFOlogy

Don Craig's 1st Law of Ufology goes like this:

"The sharper the photograph or video, the more likely it is to be a fake."

The rider to this is as follows: "If you can see windows and/or landing gear it is definitely a fake!"

But stay optimistic! The last ten years has seen the widespread introduction of high-resolution digital cameras -- including those in cell-phones. Now there's really no excuse for getting convincing sharp images of the same object from many angles.  Is there?

Burning Cars 9/11

The National Press Club, Washington DC, a few years ago.

I'm the only Brit sitting with a bunch of American journalists having a few drinks late one Saturday afternoon.  I'm on my second JD and listening to the others, wondering what hot topics they were going to cover.  It wasn't long before they moved off the latest sex scandals of Capitol Hill and onto the Great 9/11 Conspiracy; not the brilliantly executed al-Qaeda terror plot, of course, but the one perpetrated by the US Government.

I said nothing, happy to look and learn, but I couldn't hide behind my shot glass forever.  "Hey, Don!  What do you think?"  They were buying the drinks which obliged me to perform.  "I think al-Qaeda did it."

Jaws dropped, they gasped and stared at me as though I'd suggested the founding fathers used to eat their children.  Eventually one of them said, "If it was just the AQ operatives in the planes, how did they manage to set fire simultaneously to so many cars throughout New York City?"

Jesus, was that the best they could do?  Remember, all these guys were journalists, some even claiming to be investigative journalists.  I wasn't in a position to spout statistics at them, but I have learned more talking to cops than I have to hacks.

Was is the most common reason in large western cities for the spontaneous combustion of the automobile?  In some places it is the attempt by criminals to destroy trace evidence in vehicles.  The cars might be stolen or there might be a body in the trunk.  In other places, the No 1 cause is the guy who wants to replace his old clunker with the shiny new model, courtesy of his insurance company.

But how does that explain a high incidence of car torching in Manhattan on 9/11?  Well, think about it.  Armageddon strikes the southern end of your city; what better opportunity to get rid of the rust bucket parked outside your front door?  "I looked outa the window and saw this jet engine land on my Buick!" you tell the insurance investigator.  "So where's the jet engine now?" he wants to know.  "Men in black came and took it away on a helicopter."