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Is that a FEMA Camp? – May 11, 2013 Edition

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, FEMA Camps, Government, Myths, New World Order, Paranoid, Urban Legends. Tagged: Air Force, Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, California, Chicago, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, Florida, Grissom Air Reserve Base, Indiana, Indiana Air National Guard, List of U.S. federal prisons, Newport Chemical Depot, prison, United States. Leave a Comment
Is that a FEMA Camp? is a blog dedicated to investigating claims of FEMA camp locations.
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Below is some of their findings. Enjoy :)
Fema-Camps-300x280

May 11, 2013 Edition

• Tule Lake, California

The claim: area of “wildlife refuge”, accessible by unpaved road, just inside Modoc County.

What it really is: It is a National Wildlife Refuge that is surrounded by farm land.

• Norton AFB, California

San-Bernardino-Airport-1_250pxThe claim: (closed base) now staffed with UN according to some sources.

What it really is: The base was closed in 1994, and is now the San Bernardino International Airport.

• Vandenburg AFB, California

The claim: Rex 84 facility, located near Lompoc & Santa Maria. Internment facility is located near the oceanside, close to Space Launch Complex #6, also called “Slick Six”. The launch site has had “a flawless failure record” and is rarely used.

What it really is: First, Space Launch Complex 6 has not had a flawless launch record. Second, while the launch complex hasn’t been used as much as others, it is still used (the last launch from there was in 2012).

As for the oceanside internment facility, this probably doesn’t exist due to the fact that Vandenburg AFB is located two to three miles away from the coast.

everglades_250px• Pensacola, Florida

The claim: Federal Prison Camp Everglades – It is believed that a facility may be carved out of the wilds here.

What it really is: First, Pensascola is no where near the Everglades. Second, there is already a prison near the Everglades, it called the Everglades Correctional Institution. It’s run by the state, not the Federal government, and it holds minimum to medium security prisoners.

• Eglin AFB, Florida

The claim: This base is over 30 miles long, from Pensacola to Hwy 331 in De Funiak Springs. High capacity facility, presently manned and populated with some prisoners.

What it really is: Eglin is a major Air Force base, it is not however over 30 miles long. It is infact only two miles long.

It once did host a prison camp, but it was minimum security, and it closed in 2006.

• Camp Krome, Florida

The claim: DoJ detention/interrogation center, Rex 84 facility

What it really is: It’s an abandoned site. The only thing that’s there are a few decaying building with graffiti on them.

• Avon Park, Florida

Click image for larger view.

The claim: Air Force gunnery range, Avon Park has an on-base “correctional facility” which was a former WWII detention camp.

What it really is: The base never hosted a POW detention camp, and portions of the base itself has been declared land surplus over the years and has been sold off.

There is a prison there, but it’s run by the Florida Department of Corrections, not the Federal government.

Click here for the latest findings at “Is that a FEMA Camp?”

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10 Places As Mysterious As The Bermuda Triangle

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Bizarre, Magic, Mysteries, Myths, Paranormal, Story Telling, supernatural, Superstition. Tagged: Angikuni Lake, Atlantic Ocean, Bermuda, Bermuda Triangle, Hubble Space Telescope, Listverse, Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, South Atlantic Anomaly, Superstition Mountains. Leave a Comment

By Michael Alba via Listverse

Everyone has heard of the Bermuda Triangle and the mysteries that surround it. Theories about this area range from reasonable to just plain ridiculous, but whether you believe it’s the site of time warps, alien abductions, or just plain paranoia, it certainly abounds with strangeness. It’s not the only place you can find creepy things happening, however—here are 10 other places on Earth with their fair share of mysteries:

10 • Superstition Mountains

superstition-mountains_3614_990x742_300pxThe Superstition Mountains are a mountain range located east of Phoenix, Arizona. Already it’s off to a great start with the name.

According to legend, sometime in the 1800s a man named Jacob Waltz discovered a huge goldmine within the mountains that has since been dubbed the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine (because Waltz was German, and eh, close enough). He kept the location a secret until his deathbed, upon which he may or may not (depending on which version of the story you’re reading) have told a single person the secret. Regardless, the mine has never been found, in spite of many expeditions. Some say the spirits of people who’ve lost their lives in search of the gold still haunt the mountains.

One reportedly Native American legend goes that the treasures of the mountains are guarded by creatures called Tuar-Tums (“Little People”) that live below the mountains in caves and tunnels. Some Apaches believe that the entrance to hell is located in the mountains. This is, of course, ridiculous, as we all know the entrance to hell is in Sunnydale.

9 • South Atlantic Anomaly

200710_saa_300pxDid you ever wonder if there was a Bermuda Triangle in Space? No? Well you’re probably wondering it now, and you’re in luck! Because there totally is, and it’s called the South Atlantic Anomaly. The SAA is the area where the band of radiation known as Earth’s inner Van Allen belt comes closest to the Earth’s surface.

It’s an area centered just a bit off the coast of Brazil, and it’s responsible for numerous problems with satellites and spacecraft, from messing up their programs to actually shutting down their function. The Hubble Telescope is actually turned off from taking observations when passing through the Anomaly, and the International Space Station avoids scheduling spacewalks when passing through it (which happens up to 5 times a day). It’s not just technical problems, either—some astronauts report seeing “shooting stars” in their visual field as they pass through.

The cause of all these problems isn’t fully understood. The main suspect is the high levels of radiation that accumulate at the anomaly, but scientists aren’t sure exactly how or why the effects occur. So let’s just pin this one on aliens.


8 • Lake Anjikuni

Colville-River-Alaska-1901-USGS_300pxNot content with just a few individuals disappearing, Lake Anjikuni decided to take things to the next level and provide the locale for the disappearance of an entire village. It all happened in November 1930, when a trapper named Joe Labelle was looking for shelter for the night. Labelle was familiar with the Inuit village, whose population ranges from 30-2000, depending on who you believe. He made his way there and found quite an eerie scene—the villagers were nowhere to be found. Everything else, including food and rifles, had been left behind.

Labelle telegraphed the RCMP and an investigation began. In the Village Burial Ground it was discovered that at least one (sources vary) grave had been opened, clearly not by animals, and emptied. Furthermore, about 300 feet from the village, the bodies of around 7 sled dogs were found, having starved to death despite open stores of food at the village. Some versions of the story even report strange lights being seen above the lake around the time of the disappearance.

So what really happened? There have been all sorts of claims about the cause for the disappearance, including aliens (of course), ghosts, and even vampires. The RCMP’s own website disregards the story as an urban legend, but with so many versions of it floating around from so many years ago, it’s hard to be certain. Except about the vampires, I think we can be certain it wasn’t vampires.

7 • The Devil’s Sea

u6XdE8YhXv_300pxThe Devil’s Sea (or Dragon’s Triangle, take your pick of which sounds more ominous) is an area of the Pacific Ocean as riddled with strange happenings as its Atlantic counterpart near Bermuda. Located off the coast of Japan, it’s been the site of countless claims of unexplained phenomena including magnetic anomalies, inexplicable lights and objects, and of course, mysterious disappearances. The area is even considered a danger by Japanese fishing authorities.

One story has it that in 1952 the Japanese government sent out a research vessel, the Kaio Maru No. 5, to investigate the mysteries of the Devil’s Sea. Naturally, of course, the Kaio Maru No. 5 and its crew of 31 people were never seen again. Another story tells of Kublai Khan’s disastrous attempts to invade Japan by crossing the Devil’s Sea, losing at least 40 000 men in the process.

The usual theories abound for what’s really going on: from aliens, to gates to parallel universes, even to Atlantis (because why not). Some suggest that high volcanic activity in the region is responsible for some of the disappearances (the Kaio Maru No. 5 may have been caught in an eruption). Our advice? Just stay out of the ocean, period.

6 • Bigelow Ranch

ftduchesne2002-1a_300pxBigelow Ranch (formerly known as Skinwalker Ranch and Sherman Ranch) is a 480-acre property in northwest Utah that is home to countless UFO sightings, animal mutilations, and other strange occurrences. Though mysterious happenings have been documented since the 50’s, some of the most bizarre stories happened to a pair of ranchers named Terry and Gwen Sherman after they bought it in 1994.

The first day they moved on to the property, they saw a large wolf out in the pasture. They even went to pet the wolf as it seemed tame (to the curious reader, yes, this is always a good idea). It was docile with the Shermans, but ended up grabbing a calf by the snout through the bars of its enclosure. When Terry shot at the wolf with a pistol, the bullets had no effect. It finally left after Terry brought out the shotgun, though even that didn’t do any actual damage. The Shermans tried tracking the wolf, but it’s tracks stopped abruptly as if it had vanished.

And that wasn’t the end of things. The Shermans were constantly plagued by such events as UFO sightings, intelligent floating orbs (reputed to have incinerated three of their dogs), inexplicable cryptids, and gruesome cattle mutilations. It got so bad that the Shermans actually sold their ranch to Robert Bigelow in 1996, the founder of the National Institute for Discovery Science, who wanted to study the mysteries surrounding the ranch. Bigelow owns the ranch to this day and NIDS keeps a tight lid on their findings.

MORE . . .

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Weird Word Salad: The Terminology of the Unexplained

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Area 51, Bigfoot, Ghosts, Haunted, Mysteries, Paranormal, Science, Skepticism, Spirits, supernatural, UFO. Tagged: Bigfoot, Etymology, Fortean, Ghost hunting, Ghosts, haunting, Loch Ness monster, Natural Disasters, paranormal, paranormal activity, Sharon Hill, Sharon Hill Pennsylvania, supernatural, UFO News, Ufology, Weird News, Words. Leave a Comment

Sharon_hill_80pxSharon Hill via The Huffington Post

Paranormal investigators say they look for evidence of paranormal activity. That phrase always confounded me. I don’t quite get it. What does it mean when someone says they have evidence of “paranormal activity”? And, how do you know it’s not normal activity that you just couldn’t ferret out?

ElmerGhost02_250pxThere is a problem with how the word paranormal is used because it is often utilized in a way that is perhaps not consistent with the original intent.

Language evolves. Let me take a shot at unpacking some of these definitions about unexplained phenomena. See if it makes sense.

“Paranormal” and other terms for strange goings-on have changed over time. The word paranormal was coined around 1920. It means “beside, above or beyond normal.” Therefore, it’s anything that isn’t “normal” — or, more precisely, it is used as a label for any phenomenon that appears to defy scientific understanding. Ok, right there is a tripping point. Whose scientific understanding? The observer who is calling it “paranormal”? If so, that is problematic as a theoretical physicist sees things a lot differently than a dentist or a police officer. So, it appears too subjective to be precise. Each person may have their own idea of what constitutes “paranormal activity”.

The term “paranormal” used to just mean extrasensory perception and psychic power but, since the 1970s in particular — thanks to TV shows and proliferation of the subject in popular culture — the term expanded in scope to include all mysterious phenomena seemingly shunned by standard scientific study. It was a convenient way to bring many similarly peculiar topics under one heading for ease of marketing. So today, it can include everything that sounds mysterious: UFOs, hauntings, monster sightings, strange disappearances, anomalous natural phenomena, coincidences, as well as psychic powers.

images.jpgUFONot everyone agrees that fields of study such as UFOlogy or cryptozoology (Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster and the like) should be considered paranormal but, if we think about the fact that after all this time, we have yet to document what these things actually are, that is beyond normal. Therefore, paranormal (arguably).

What appears as paranormal could essentially one day become normal. This has happened before with meteorites and still mysterious but likely explainable earthquakes lights and ball lightning. Or, we might not have developed the right technology or made the philosophical breakthrough yet to provide an explanation for some seemingly paranormal events. Perhaps we may find an instrument that can measure whatever it is that results in “hauntings” of a particular type. (Notice that I didn’t say an instrument that detects ghosts — an important distinction.)

Contrasted with paranormal is “supernatural.” To say something is supernatural is to conclude that the phenomenon operates outside the existing laws of nature. We would call such phenomena . . .

MORE . . . .

10 Bizarre Medical Procedures

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Bizarre, Medical. Tagged: youtube. Leave a Comment

Some strange, some twisted, some succesful, find out more in 10 bizarre medical procedures.

via 10 Bizarre Medical Procedures – YouTube.

Search Engines vs. Conspiracy Theorists?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 20, 2013
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Reblogged from The Age of Blasphemy:

Click to visit the original post

Via:- Greg Fish

If you’ve ever read anything by Evgeny Morozov, you know that his views of the web tend to be rather mixed. In his best known work, The Net Delusion, he argues against the idea that the web could liberate authoritarian regimes by giving its oppressed subjects information and a means to organize while chastising the heady notions held by techno-utopians about the future role of the web in our lives.

Read more… 660 more words

Using your iPhone to show congress you’re nuts.

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 19, 2013
Posted in: ChemClouds, ChemTrails, Comedy, Fun Stuff, Government, Paranoid. Tagged: Alex Jones, Apple, Chemtrail, Chemtrail conspiracy theory, contrail, iPhone, ITunes, youtube. Leave a Comment
Click the image for a larger, annoying view.

Click the image for a larger view.

Are you sick and tired of looking up at the sky and seeing all those ordinary clouds annoying chemclouds and ordinary contrails behind aircraft chemtrails?

Well, this is your lucky day, stinky. There is now a new app for the iPhone called SkyderALERT that allows your aluminum foiled skull, filled with paranoid delusions of grandeur, to take pictures of ordinary clouds chemclouds and ordinary contrails chemtrails and, with the click of a button, send the visual proof of your insanity to your congressional representative. The really neato thing is, the app uses the GPS inside the phone to automatically figure out the location of your loose screws. This ensures you torture the correct congressional representative for your current location.

If you’re hell-bent on wasting your money and wasting everybody’s time, you can save the world and buy this iPhone memory space-waster at the iTunes Apple Store for $1.99!

If they haven’t done it already, how long do you think it will take for congress people to add a new filter to their email programs to block this crap?

Are chemtrails and chem-clouds real?
The evidence is examined below:
Debunked: ChemTrails and ChemClouds
Debunked: ChemTrails and ChemClouds
►

Click here for a very high quality copy of this video and a link to the 1905 book “Cloud Studies”.

RELATED: Kill ChemTrails With Vinegar!!!!!

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The Internet: A Superhighway of Paranormal Hoaxes and Fakelore

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 19, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Area 51, Bigfoot, Creatures, Crop Circles, Hoax, Mysteries, Myths, Roswell, Stunt, UFO, Urban Legends. Tagged: Bigfoot, Fakelore, hoax, hoaxes, Internet Hoaxes, Loch Ness monster, occult, Occulture, Ray Wallace, Sharon Hill, Sharon Hill Pennsylvania, UFO News, Ufology, Weird News, youtube. Leave a Comment

Sharon_hill_80pxBy Sharon Hill via The Huffington Post

It’s been a hot time for hoaxing thanks to the Internet. With Photoshop, citizen journalism sites, YouTube, and postboards for the latest photo leaks, it is way too easy to send a lie half way around the world before the truth can pull its shoes on.

This iconic image of the Lock Ness monster was hoaxed by Hugh Gray in 1933. (source)

In this post, I wrote about a busy week in paranormal-themed news. In chatting with a correspondent — Jeb Card, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department of Miami University — over a shared interest in the state of the paranormal today or “occulture,” we got to talking about the state of hoaxing.

Make no mistake, hoaxing has always been around. Hoaxers have been trying to fool people by displaying their special skills (scams) or stupendous stories since the beginning of civilization, I think. But there is a particular history of hoaxing in occulture. Lately, it has gotten more frequent (or we sure notice it more), more absurd (to outdo the last one) and more involved (because the payout can be big while the scrutiny greater).

There are many famous hoaxes from this scene. It’s hard to say if it’s more common now than in the past. Some of the hoaxes, notes Jeb, have been very influential in the creation of popular folklore. Big ones have defined UFOlogy: Roswell and the Men in Black. Not everyone would conclude these are deliberate hoaxes — there is a grain of truth to them — but they went way out of control and now there are hoaxed videos, documents and tales based on these events that never happened the way the lore says it did. Stories like that, which have taken on a life of their own as if they were true, are called “fakelore.”

bigfoot-2The Bigfoot field is trampled over with fake footprints, stories, casts, photos and videos. It can’t be denied that the majority of Bigfoot stories are unbelievable, without supporting evidence, or obvious hoaxes. Every new bit of Bigfoot “evidence” these days makes us roll our eyes and say “SERIOUSLY!?” This reputation is damaging to those who truly believe something is out there to be found. The credibility of Bigfoot researchers scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The history of hoaxes colors this topic deeply when we realize that the seminal story of “Bigfoot,” Ray Wallace’s trackway, was revealed to be a hoax.

Actually, the same can be said for the Loch Ness Monster. The iconic Nessie photo — the long-neck arching out of the rippling water — was hoaxed.

A longtime follower of the occulture fields, Jeb says he can’t think of a time when these communities weren’t awash with . . .

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10 Strange Unexplained Events

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 19, 2013
Posted in: Bizarre, Fun Stuff, Mysteries, Myths, Story Telling, Urban Legends. Tagged: paranormal, Ufology, Unexplained Mysteries, Unidentified flying object, youtube. Leave a Comment

Disappearances, UFOs, premonitions…some mysteries will never be answered, feed your curiosity by watching 10 strange unexplained events.

via 10 Strange Unexplained Events – YouTube.

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5 things I’ve noticed about… FEMA camps

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 18, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, FEMA Camps, Government, New World Order, Quackery, Secret Societies. Tagged: alexjones, canada, conspiracy theory, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, government, Police state, The Soap Box, United States. 5 comments

Via The Soap Box

FC_fema-1_300pxI’ve done quite a bit of research into “FEMA camps” (which is a conspiracy theory that claims that the government has constructed these prison camps around the country that are to be run by FEMA to hold American citizens in that disagree with the government) and there are several things that I’ve noticed about these camps.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about FEMA camps:

5. There are apparently a lot of them.

According to many conspiracy theorist websites, there are hundreds of FEMA camps scattered across the United States and Canada.

While the numbers tend vary from website to website, some report as few as 300 “identified” FEMA camps, and perhaps as many as over 900 “identified” FEMA camps.

I find it amazing that so many of these camps have been “identified”, yet the only people they have caught the attention of are conspiracy theorists (particularly those in the Sovereign Citizens/Patriot Movement). Of course these numbers really don’t mean anything, because…

4. They can be anywhere.

Also according to many websites that promote the FEMA camp conspiracy theories, FEMA camps can be just about anywhere, be it a military base, a hospital, a prison, a warehouse, an airport, a rail depot, a seaport, any place with a fence with barbed wire at the top…

Oh, and any place that has an open field and is open to the public. Those places can also apparently be FEMA camps too.

3. Apparently they’ve been around for a while.

ALEXJONESFOIL_250pxFrom the research I’ve done into these FEMA camp claims, I have found that these claims have been around for a long time.

The first time I actually heard someone claim these places were real was back in the mid-1990′s, and I have found out these claims are even older, even going back as far back as the 1970′s.

It’s kind of strange that FEMA camps have apparently been around for so long, and yet the government has yet to use them, or enact this fascist “police state” plan that many conspiracy theorists claim is going to happen when the government starts shipping people to these camps.

MORE . . .

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Doctor who promised herbal cancer cure faces jail sentence

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 18, 2013
Posted in: Alternative Medicine, Fraud, Hoax, Homeopathy, Medical, Pseudoscientific, Scams. Tagged: Associated Press, Daniel, Herbalism, Los Angeles, Moondyne Joe, Parkinson's disease, San Fernando Valley, United States Attorney, Yahoo! News. Leave a Comment

Calif. herbal doctor who promised cancer cure to be sentenced; prosecutors seek 27-year term

By Greg Risling, Associated Press via Yahoo! News

Dr. Christine Daniel, operator of Sonrise Medical Clinic in Mission Hills was convicted by a federal jury of peddling a cancer treatments to terminally ill patients. Daniel, 57, of Northridge, was found guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles of 11 counts of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion and witness tampering. She is appealing the the verdict and denies any wrong doing. (Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer)

Dr. Christine Daniel, operator of Sonrise Medical Clinic in Mission Hills was convicted by a federal jury of peddling a cancer treatments to terminally ill patients. Daniel, 57, of Northridge, was found guilty in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles of 11 counts of mail and wire fraud, tax evasion and witness tampering. She is appealing the the verdict and denies any wrong doing. (Hans Gutknecht/Staff Photographer)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — At the age of three, Brianica Kirsch was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Her parents, desperate to find alternative measures for their daughter who had undergone surgeries and chemotherapy, turned to Dr. Christine Daniel, who offered an herbal supplement with a success rate she claimed was between 60 and 80 percent.

Brianica’s parents spent thousands of dollars on the herbal product and their daughter spent much of her time in those last few months before she died in the summer of 2002 being shuttled from her Ventura County home to Daniel’s clinic in the San Fernando Valley.

Daniel, 58, is scheduled to be sentenced Friday in a Los Angeles courtroom where federal prosecutors are asking she be sentenced to 27 years in prison for crimes they deem cruel, despicable and heinous. Daniel’s lawyer is seeking a nearly six-year prison term.

Daniel was convicted in September 2011 of 11 counts, including wire fraud, tax evasion and witness tampering. Authorities said Daniel used her position both as a doctor at the Sonrise Wellness Center and a Pentecostal minister to entice people from across the nation to take her herbal product to remedy cancer, Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis.

Federal prosecutors argue that Daniel preyed upon people in their most vulnerable state and gave them false hope.

Daniel “repeatedly demonstrated a merciless and callous indifference to the suffering of her patients and their family members,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Johns wrote in court documents. “It is unlikely that our federal criminal justice system will see the like of defendant Christine Daniel again.”

Some of her patients, relying on her product, died from complications of cancer within three to six months after taking the supplement. In one case, prosecutors contend a 22-year-old woman who had highly curable form of neck lymphoma died because she relied on Daniel’s recommendation to avoid radiation or chemotherapy treatments.

For Brianica’s parents, they implored Daniel for the stark truth given their daughter’s condition.

MORE . . ..

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The Face on Mars

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 18, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Educational, Human Perception, Illusions, Mysteries, Optical Illusion, Perception. Tagged: Carl Sagan, Cydonia, David Hume, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mac Tonnies, Mars, nasa, Viking program. Leave a Comment
A great example of pareidolia

face-on-mars2

Via Relatively Interesting

Back in 1976, the Viking Orbiter 1 acquired some images of the Cydonia region of Mars as part of the search for a potential landing site for the Viking Lander 2.  One of the images included a shot of a region that looked remarkably similar to a face. The image was released to the public by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as part of their public relations effort.

Here it is:

face-on-mars_250px

Shortly after the images were released, some people (mostly in lay literature) argued that the face was artificially created, and that this was concrete evidence for either past or present intelligence on Mars. The rock formation looked so similar to a face – how could it not have been designed by an intelligent architect?

Some believe the face was created by Martians, others say it is a tomb, or part of an ancient city. Others believe that NASA is involved in a conspiracy to cover up the true nature of the Face – all part of a secret space program (then why would they have released the picture in the first place?).

Mac Tonnies goes so far as to say that the Face is a “genuine scientific enigma”. After NASA released new images of the Face in 1998, he claims that the “experts either don’t understand the workings of their own instruments or else feel somehow threatened by the Face’s enduring mystery.” (you can check out his very centered site here)

“Scientific enigma”, the Face is not.

Introducing…. Pareidolia

Humans – all humans – have an innate ability to detect patterns out of seemingly random noise. This ability is particularly strong when it comes to faces. As David Hume once said, “There is an universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer every object, those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice or good will to everything, that hurts or pleases us.

This phenomenon – detecting something clear and distinct from an apparently obscure stimulus – is called “pareidolia“. Carl Sagan hypothesized that, as a survival technique, human beings are “hard-wired” from birth to identify the human face. This allows people to use only minimal details to recognize faces from a distance and in poor visibility but can also lead them to interpret random images or patterns of light and shade as being faces.

pareidolia-collage_600px

Pareidolia not only applies to the detection of faces, but also to the perception of religious imagery and themes. In 1978, a New Mexican woman found that the burn marks on her tortilla she had made appeared similar to the face of Jesus Christ. Thousands of people came to see the burnt tortilla. Do think that if Son of God wanted to be seen, he would appear on a tortilla? Or the Virgin Mary, on a grilled cheese sandwich? Wouldn’t they pick something a little more majestic?

Revisiting the Face on Mars

But first, let’s revisit the Face on Mars. Back in 1976, the imaging technology was inferior to today’s, and the resolution of the images was significantly lower. Even compared to 1998, the resolution of space images has increased dramatically. Let’s compare the Face from lowest to highest resolution:

MarsFaceComparison

The 1976 version sure does look like a face, and if you strain your eyes, you might still see a face in the 1998 version. But what about the 2001 version?  Not so much.

Let’s look even closer at the 2001 version, just to be sure . . .

MORE . . .

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Psychic Victim: ‘How Could I Be So Stupid?’

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 18, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Astrology, Fraud, Health, Hoax, Horoscope, Mind Reading, Paranormal, Pseudoscientific, Psychics, Quackery, Scams, Spirits, Story Telling, supernatural, Telepathy. Tagged: Adam Marks, CBS, CBS 4, CBS Denver, Colo, Colorado, Denver, paranormal, psychic. 2 comments

via CBS Denver

cccc

Adam Marks and 4 On Your Side Investigator Brian Maass (credit: CBS)

LOVELAND, Colo. (CBS4)- A 65-year-old woman who says she lost her retirement savings to a Loveland psychic is now calling the psychic “a complete ripoff” and says she wants others to hear her story and avoid the mistakes she made.

“I look back on it now and think, ‘How could I have been so stupid?’” Francine Evers told CBS4.

Evers handed over more than $73,000 to psychic Adams Marks in a six-month time frame.

Marks has been charged with theft, crimes against an at-risk adult and intimidating a witness.

He declined to talk to CBS4 about the pending criminal case promising, “I’ll have my lawyer call you.”

Evers decided to open up about her experiences with Marks in the hopes others might come forward if they have had similar experiences with Marks even though she acknowledges “It’s embarrassing.”

Adam Marks
Adam Marks
►

MORE . . . .

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Sylvia Browne: Wrong Again

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 17, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Ghosts, Haunted, James Randi, Mind Reading, Paranormal, Precognition, Prophecy, Pseudoscientific, Psychics, Spirits, supernatural, Sylvia Browne. Tagged: Cleveland, james randi, Montel Williams Show, psychic, Randi, Sylvia Browne, youtube. Leave a Comment

The Randi Show -

Randi dives into the most recent of “psychic” Sylvia Browne‘s failed predictions, hoping that this one may be spectacular enough to put her out of business for good.

via The Randi Show – Sylvia Browne: Wrong Again – YouTube.

Via Michael Shermer @michaelshermer (twitter)

Via Michael Shermer @michaelshermer (twitter)

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Deepak, and the Emptiness of Spiritual Gibberish

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 17, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Fraud, Human Perception, Pseudoscientific, Psychology, Quackery, Skepticism, Spirituality, supernatural, Superstition. Tagged: Deepak, Deepak Chopra, Existence of God, God, Michael Shermer, Rupert Sheldrake, Skepdic.com, skeptic, Skeptimedia, TED, The Skeptic's Dictionary. Leave a Comment

Via The Skeptic’s Dictionary

CHOPRADeepak Chopra is a master of the vague, cognitively empty but emotively charged expression. Science and spirituality should be friends, says Deepak. Like Dick and Jane, I suppose. The only sensible thing he says in his entire article published in Michael Shermer‘s Skeptic magazine (vol. 16 No. 2, 2011) is “With no data to support the existence of God, there is also no reason for religion and science to close the gap between them.” Of course, he asserts this truism only to deny it.

Deepak gets aligned with reality by proclaiming that “God is inside the consciousness of each person.” (In each of us, I suppose, there is a divinity trying to escape.) Does this mean anything more than that God is a thought? Yes, according to the Master:

The physical building blocks of the universe have gradually vanished; that is, atoms and quarks no longer seem solid at all but are actually clouds of energy, which in turn disappear into the void that seems to be the source of creation. Was mind also born in the same place outside space and time? Is the universe conscious? Do genes depend on quantum interactions? Science aims to understand nature down to its very essence, and now these once radical questions, long dismissed as unscientific, are unavoidable….

It is becoming legitimate to talk of invisible forces that shape creation – not labeling them as God but as the true shapers of reality beyond the space/time continuum. A whole new field known as quantum biology has sprung up, based on a true breakthrough – the idea that the total split between the micro world of the quantum and the macro world of everyday things may be a false split. If so, science will have to account for why the human brain, which lives in the macro world, derives its intelligence from the micro world. Either atoms and molecules are smart, or something makes them smart. That something, I believe, will come down to a conscious universe.

Yes, the universe might be conscious, and Deepak might be giving it a giant headache with his frequent, noisy jabbering about quantum this and that. Deepak ought to . . .

. . . MORE . . .

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VeganThink

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 17, 2013
Posted in: Educational, Health, Medical, Organic, Science. Tagged: Bill Gates, Cancer, John McDougall, McDougall, Psychology Today, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Veganism, youtube. Leave a Comment

Dr. John McDougall Tries to Explain the Death of Steve Jobs

By Dr. Kaayla T. Daniel, Ph.D., C.C.N. via Psychology Today

apple jobsSteve Jobs lived more than 30 years after developing pancreatic cancer thanks to his vegan diet.

That’s the preposterous claim made by Dr. John McDougall in a lecture that has been viewed by more than 52,500 people on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81xnvgOlHaY  and widely touted in the vegan community as a scientifically sound example of VeganThink.

McDougall speculates that Jobs first developed cancer in his twenties, which might well be the case given that most cancers develop years before diagnosis.  But by that line of thinking, anyone diagnosed with cancer who has made it to mid life could be living thirty years past the initial cancer cell divide.  Most of those people will have been on Standard American Diets, high in sugar, starch, factory-farmed animal products and all American junk food.  Somehow McDougall holds that animal products caused those cancers but Jobs’s nearly lifelong obsession with veganism could only have prolonged his life!

So why did Jobs develop cancer despite what McDougall himself concedes was a “strict vegan diet” with few lapses over his lifetime?  1108 McDougall’s position — and he’s sticking to it!  —   is vegan diets prevent and cure cancer.   Therefore, it must have been bad luck — the equivalent of “being struck by lightning” or “hit by a car” –  that caused Jobs’s cancer and fueled its progression.  How else to explain the fact that Steve Wozniak (an overweight fast-food junkie), Bill Gates and other computer pioneers are alive despite similar exposure to carcinogenic lead and cadmium from soldering computer parts, long-term bombardment from radiation and EMFs, and other lifestyle risk factors that would have put all of them at increased risk for cancer?   The reason those things caused cancer in Jobs but not the others must have been luck of the draw because Jobs’s vegan diet “could only have helped him.”

None of us, of course, can say for certain what caused the pancreatic cancer that led to Steve Jobs’s death, or what, if anything could have saved him.   Dietary, lifestyle, environmental and genetic factors all must have come into play.   But McDougall’s failure to even consider the role that Jobs’s vegan diet –  and frequent fruitarianism — may have played in his death is unhelpful at best and irresponsible at worst.

MORE . . . .

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5 Things I’ve noticed about… Televangelists

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 17, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Doomsday, Fraud, Spirits, supernatural. Tagged: 700 Club, Benny Hinn, Christianity, God, Juanita Bynum, Pat Robertson, Televangelism, Television, The Soap Box. Leave a Comment

Via The Soap Box

Ever have a boring Saturday where you can’t find anything worth watching on TV, and eventually come across a preacher (commonly known as a Televangelists) preaching what they claim is the word of God? Well, I have a many of times, and there are certain things that I have noticed about Televangelists and what they tend to do.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about Televangelists:

swaggart5. They’re very entertaining.

I openly admit, I think a lot of Televangelists are very entertaining to watch.

Their charismatic actions often times make them very humorous to watch. My personal favorite (in terms of entertainment value) is Benny Hinn with his “ability” to make people fall down on the floor when ever he touches someones.

Of course that entertainment value gets taken away when you realize the next four things:

4. They’re always asking for money.

Just about every single broadcast a Televangelist makes, they’re always asking for money.

Of course they don’t actually outright ask you to give them money. They call it something else, such as pledging, or a gift, or “sowing a seed”.

They also make it seem like they need that money right away, and they always do that while wearing suits worth $2,000 to $3,000, in studios worth $2,000,000 to $3,000,000.

false-prophets33. They act like they have supernatural powers.

Televangelists often times act like their extra special with God, and that if you send them money, you will be in God’s favor (and usually the more money you send them the better favor). Sometimes they will even pray on camera for the people who sent them money, just for that extra “favor”.

Some of them also act like they can heal people from long distances away, or up close by touching you (and knocking you down in the process).

MORE . . .

greed5

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Human Guided Spiritual Defense Waves… Pseudoscience at it’s greatest (and Insanest)

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 16, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, ChemTrails, Conspiracy, Pseudoscientific, Quackery, Telepathy. Tagged: Deepak Chopra, Energy (esotericism), Game of Thrones, Graham Hancock, Lara Stein, pseudoscience, Rupert Sheldrake, TED, The Soap Box. Leave a Comment

Via The Soap Box

tin-foil-hat03_200pxWhen you explore the world of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, you often times find out that there is no deep end in the theoretical pool of craziness, and just when you think you’ve reached the bottom, you find out you’re still not at the deep end.

Recently I thought I had found that deep end with the helmet that “stops alien abductions”.
It turns out I was wrong, and that there is something crazier than even that:

Human Guided Spiritual Defense Waves

What this claims is that human beings can use “spiritual energy” to get rid of chemtrails.
In other words, use something that’s imaginary to get rid of something else that’s imaginary.
Not only does the article claim that people can repel these alleged chemicals away, it also claims you can concentrate them and focus them on small area, even house.
In fact, it even says you should do so over the homes of members of Congress (which is a tad bit disturbing). It even tells you to “make them suffer” (which I would consider a threat, if I wasn’t fairly certain this wouldn’t work at all, and that neither of these things not even existing in the first place) and suggest using social networks to help organize groups of people to “focus” their “spiritual energy” in order to do so.

MORE . . .

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Dr. Oz: A Hazard To America’s Health

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 16, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Alternative Medicine, Debunk, Educational, Fraud, Ghosts, Homeopathy, James Randi, Mind Reading, Paranormal, Pseudoscientific, Psychics, Quackery, Scams, Science, Skepticism, Spirits, supernatural, Telepathy. Tagged: Amen, Daniel Amen, Jamy Ian Swiss, Long Island Medium, Mayo Clinic, Mehmet Oz, Oz, Single-photon emission computed tomography. Leave a Comment

Is Dr. Oz a fraud or a fool? I can’t know for sure, and I don’t care.

red-palm-oil-dr-oz
by Jamy Ian Swiss via randi.org

I do know this: He sure doesn’t seem like much of a scientist to me.

And I am also pretty damned sure that he is a hazard to America’s health. And probably the greatest hazard on network television today. And that’s saying something.

When was the last time that a revolutionary, historic, scientific breakthrough was first demonstrated and announced on an afternoon television talk show?

The correct answer: NEVER.

One of the signature signs of “pathological science” is when scientists operate outside of their areas of special expertise. Another is when they skirt peer review and go directly to the media or the public. One textbook example is the pseudoscientific claims of cold fusion made in 1989 by the chemists Pons and Fleischman, and quickly discarded by the legitimate scientific community, following repeated failures to replicate their claims and results.

These attributes apply to this past Thursday’s episode of “The Dr. Oz Show” – all the more so, in fact, since Dr. Mehmet Oz is not a scientist. He’s a heart surgeon.

Oz seems to be an accomplished surgeon, which means he’s good with scalpels and sutures. But beyond that, I wouldn’t let him near me or any loved one I know. Dr. Mehmet Oz is a truly dangerous man.

LongIslandMedium_250px_200pxOn Thursday’s show (May 9, 2013), Dr. Oz presented Theresa Caputo, the so-called Long Island Medium, in a repeat appearance on his program. He also brought on the best-selling author and psychiatrist, Dr. Daniel Amen, who operates the Amen Clinics. Dr. Amen has made a name for himself in books and frequent television appearances, particularly for his promotion of SPECT brain imaging as a supposed tool in psychiatric diagnosis for conditions ranging from ADHD to depression. The scientific evidence for such claims appears to border between questionable and nonexistent. (For a skeptical look at some of Dr. Amen’s claims, see this article by Dr. Harriet Hall: and more here.

Dr. Oz, insisting that the events presented on Thursday’s show were “historic” and “ground-breaking,” then had Dr. Amen hook up Ms. Caputo to a SPECT scanner, and then give a reading to a studio audience member.

According to the Mayo Clinic website:

A single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) scan lets your doctor analyze the function of some of your internal organs. A SPECT scan is a type of nuclear imaging test, which means it uses a radioactive substance and a special camera to create 3-D pictures.

While imaging tests such as X-rays can show what the structures inside your body look like, a SPECT scan produces images that show how your organs work. For instance, a SPECT scan can show how blood flows to your heart or what areas of your brain are more active or less active.

Notice that last part – it tells you what parts of your brain are “active.” There is no evidence it can tell you if that brain is psychic. Before it could do that, you would need to determine, it seems to me, that such a thing as “psychic” exists. Parapsychology has been working on that for about 150 years. Results to date: zip, zilch, zero.

This SPECT scan of Theresa Caputo’s brain, taken during her psychic reading of a Dr. Oz audience member, clearly shows the area of her brain responsible for spouting bullcrap is very active.

Ms. Caputo, the self-styled psychic, was asked to “remain very still,” but to hold up one finger to indicate when she was receiving the voice “of spirit,” while Dr. Amen observed the brain scan activity.

I’m not a scientist, but it doesn’t take a PhD to notice that this demonstration – regardless of whether a SPECT scan can tell us anything remotely relevant about what is going on in a psychic’s brain – is not only not double-blinded, it’s not even single-blinded. The subject indicates when she claims something is happening, and the observer looks to find a match. This isn’t science. It’s non-science and nonsense.

Not to mention that nagging little question about what a SPECT scan can actually tell you about the brain.

Not to mention that if you want to test a psychic, one should probably start with testing what a psychic claims to be able to do.

Not to mention that the JREF has a million dollars for any psychic who can demonstrate their abilities under test conditions.

BullShit_200pxAs for that, Ms. Caputo – although she seems to have impressed the hell out of Dr. Oz, albeit based on his record this doesn’t seem to take much – didn’t seem to be able to do much of anything. She began her first reading (a demonstration prior to the “experiment”) by looking for something from a “father or a daughter.” She managed to find someone in the audience who had lost their father, but as soon as she asked who the daughter was – who was the “female spirit” – the subject drew a dead blank.

Ms. Caputo had to extend out to the studio audience, fishing for a “hit.” Finally she found one. Sort of.

But she had a bucket of bullshit to cover her tracks . . .

MORE . . .

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The Lunar Effect and Confirmation Bias

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 16, 2013
Posted in: Educational, Human Perception, Mysteries, Myths, Science, Story Telling, Superstition, Urban Legends. Tagged: Full moon, Lunar effect, Lunar phase, Moon, NeuroLogica Blog, New moon, Steven Novella, Tidal force, Tide. Leave a Comment

moon-bigger-on-horizonBy Steven Novella via NeuroLogica Blog

I gave a seminar recently to science teachers and the topic of whether or not there is a lunar effect came up. I was not surprised to find that 80% of them believed that emergency rooms and police stations are more busy during a full moon. I was also not surprised, but only because I have been there before, that they were highly resistant to my claim that the scientific evidence shows that there is no such effect.

Several questions emerge from the notion that the phases of the moon affect human behavior: what is the plausibility of such a claim, is there actually such an effect, and if not why do so many people believe that there is?

Plausibility

Moon_Animated_250pxOne of two justifications are commonly given for how the moon might influence human behavior. The moon basically has two physical effects on our environment – gravity and light. Astrological influences are not worth further discussion in this article, and I rarely hear that as a justification from the general public in any case.

Gravity is the far less plausible explanation of the two physical effects of the moon. The reasoning often goes something like this: the moon causes tides, which are powerful gravitational effects on water. Our bodies are mostly water, and in fact our brain are floating in water, therefore the moon’s tidal effect might affect our brain function.

This reasoning fails on many levels. First, the moon has a tidal effect regardless of phase. The only difference with lunar phase is the relationship between the lunar tide and the solar tide (yes, the sun has a tidal effect on the Earth as well). During a full moon the lunar and solar tides are lined up, and therefore the combined effect is additive (which is called a spring tide).

However, the same is true of the new moon, therefore if the full moon effect were due to tidal forces there should be an equal new moon effect.

The bigger problem with the gravity explanation is that tidal forces are dependent upon the difference in the distance of the near and far side of an object from another large object. So the ocean tides are caused by the different gravitational pull of the moon on the near side vs far side of the Earth. The tidal force of the moon between the near side and far side of your head is negligible. This is simply not a viable source of an effect on human behavior.

The more plausible mechanism for an alleged lunar effect is the light from the moon. It is reasonable to hypothesize that people are more willing to be outside and active during a full moon because there is more light. This effect, however, should therefore not be present when the sky is overcast or in large cities where artificial light trumps moonlight.

Is There a Lunar Effect?

werewolf 928_250pxThis is one question that is very amenable to standard observational studies – is there a correlation between some kind of event and the lunar cycle? There have been hundreds of such studies over the last few decades, involving emergency room visits, births, accidents, crime, crisis center calls – just about any marker of human behavior you can think of. Systematic reviews of this research consistently demonstrate that there is simply no evidence for any such effect.

Many of these studies cover years or decades of data, and thousands or tens of thousands of data points. A recent German study, for example, found no lunar effect for births between 1920 and 1989. A review of studies looking at crisis center calls found:

12 studies are reviewed that have examined the relationships among crisis calls to police stations, poison centers, and crisis intervention centers and the synodic lunar cycle. On the basis of the studies considered it is concluded that no good foundation exists for the belief that lunar phase is related to the frequency of crisis calls. In addition, there is no evidence whatsoever for the contention that calls of a more emotional or “out-of-control” nature occur more often at the full moon.

An often cited 1985 review by Rotton, Kelly and Culver found no lunar effect for a long list of events, including suicide, homicide, crime, sleep walking, alcoholism, and many others. Several later studies of psychiatric hospital admission also found no effect.

The bottom line is this – this question has been asked and answered, there is no lunar effect. A massive amount of data simply shows no connection between lunar phases and human behavior.

Belief in the Lunar Effect

Why, then, does belief in this effect remain high? Surveys show that belief in this effect remains at about 40-45%, even among those highly educated. In fact, mental health workers have a greater belief in the lunar effect. The short answer as to why this is – confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a bias in human thinking that causes us to notice, accept, and remember information that confirms beliefs we already have, while ignoring, forgetting, or explaining away contradictory data. This is a powerful effect that can lead to the very compelling illusion that an effect is real when it isn’t.

MORE . . . .
moon phases

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10 Mysterious Anomalies

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 15, 2013
Posted in: Bizarre, Creatures, Ghosts, Haunted, Mysteries, Myths, Paranormal, Spirits, Story Telling, supernatural, Superstition, Urban Legends. Tagged: DNA, Hatley Park National Historic Site, John Garfield, Listverse, Robert Dunsmuir, Royal Roads University, Vancouver Island, Victoria, William McKinley. 1 comment

By Ron Harlan via Listverse

Science continues to give us a deeper and more convincing knowledge of the universe we live in. But we still only partially understand the mysterious world we inhabit, and many mysteries remain unsolved. Here are ten of the most fascinating of these anomalies:

10 • Dragon’s Cave Anomaly

cave 857_300pxThere are the usual cryptid mysteries that we all wish to resolve, but the implications of some of these are so disturbing that we might rather not know the real answer.

In an unknown year—but likely some time in the early 1900s—land surveyors dropped rope down a cave in Boone County, Arkansas. After the rope had descended two hundred feet into the cave pipes, a horrendous hissing and roaring sound was heard, suggesting that a bizarre and enormous beast had been disturbed. Some believe that the roaring belonged to a cave-dwelling cryptid, or an apparently-extinct or so-far-undiscovered species.

The exact site of the eerie report has not been found, but the explorers of a second Arkansas cave heard a case of a landowner who had apparently gone insane with terror after entering a similar subterranean system and encountering something.

9 • Precognition of American Presidents

abe-lincoln-close-up_300pxPrecognition—including the vague sense of impending doom—is an unexplained phenomenon whereby events are seen before their time. Eerily, Abraham Lincoln reported a dream in which he had seen his own dead body. Only days later, he was fatally shot.

Quantum theorists studying the fourth dimension propose that time can bend, allowing us to glimpse the future. Limiting ourselves to American Presidents alone, we find that John Garfield and William McKinley also “previewed” their own deaths. In a related—albeit slightly different—case of extrasensory perception, John Adams’ last words the moment before he died were simply “Thomas Jefferson.” It was unknown to him, but hours before, his great political rival had indeed passed away…

8 • Hatley Castle Haunting

Front-of-Hatley-Castle_300pxHatley Castle was built on Vancouver Island, off Canada’s West Coast, by the Scottish Coal Baron Robert Dunsmuir. He was a famous but controversial figure in his day, known for his swift-handed approach to decisions concerning the use of land.

The castle, which now forms part of the campus of Royal Roads University, has begun to fall prey to a series of unexplained events, which send chills down the spine of those who venture too close. Terrified observers have reported seeing a white figure drifting around the windows, and they’ve also made reference to hearing the clash of pots and pans.

It is rumored that the maid of Robert Dunsmuir—rejected by her lover—leapt from the window and died. SPIRITS, a charity dedicated to investigating the paranormal, claims that one of its staff members actually saw a female figure clothed in white slipping through the castle corridors. Unfortunately, few sources have less credibility in such cases than a charity dedicated to investigating the paranormal.

7 • Ancient European DNA

dva 857_300pxEuropean culture is extremely diverse; distinct customs and peoples live there side-by-side in relatively small but clearly-defined regions. One would imagine that the development of Europe consisted of historically understandable transitions—but according to research at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA, genetic markers in skeletons sampled for DNA suggest a sudden, drastic change around 4,500 years ago.

According to paleo-anthropologist Dr. Alan Cooper, “Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was.” The mysterious event or cataclysm may never be determined, but it’s possible that an unknown plague, or else a mysterious conflict or agreement between ancient tribes, may hold the key to Europe’s anomalous past.

6 • Australian UFO Aberrations

AU ufo_300px“Alien Abductions” have become fairly widely reported, to the point that most researchers have grown somewhat tired of the subject. However, some accounts are much more difficult to disregard than others.

In 1993, Kelly Cahill and her husband were driving at night in Victoria, Australia, when a bizarre form appeared in front of them, apparently in the process of abducting something. The occupants of a second car behind the Cahills also observed the phenomenon. When the Cahills tracked this second group down, they were able to confirm the fact that they too had witnessed the event. Spooky.

MORE . . .

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“Small Study of Reflexology Finds Nothing,” Headline Should Read

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 15, 2013
Posted in: Alternative Medicine, Debunk, Educational, Health, Homeopathy, James Randi, Medical, Pseudoscientific, Science. Tagged: Back pain, Blind experiment, Kyle Hill, medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, Placebo, Reflexology, Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. 1 comment

Written by Kyle Hill via randi.org

If alternative medicine wants to be taken more seriously, the studies must be better designed and be put in the proper context.

UK’s The Telegraph reported last month that a study published in the journal Complimentary Therapies in Clinical Practice showed that reflexology was “as effective as pain killers.” It’s a bold claim.

However, this claim is backed up by nothing in the study. In fact, all the methodological flaws encourage a reflexive rejection of the study’s conclusions.

No Control, No Power

Reflexology is based on the unsubstantiated belief that each part of each foot is a mirror site for a part of the body. (source: The Skeptic’s Dictionary)

You don’t have to be a scientist to know what questions to ask about a study. Some of the most basic are “What was the sample size?” and “Was it double-blinded?” Even these basic questions can tell you a lot about what researchers find.

The reflexology study had a sample of 15 participants, most of them women, and each received both experimental conditions (we will come back to this point later on). If 15 sounds like a small number to you, that’s because it is. In fact, because the statistical analyses they were using looked at group averages, this small number gets broken down even further. With so few participants, this study does not have the power to comment on very much. In larger studies, vexing variations between individuals “cancel out” to hit on some average value. Whether this study hit on something interesting or not, we wouldn’t be able to tell—values are lost in the large variations between so few people.

To control for possible placebo effects, the researchers used transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) as the “sugar pill” comparison to reflexology.

Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device placed on the wrist.

Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) device placed on the wrist.

But the famous “sugar pill” experimental design comes from the idea that subjects should not be able to tell the difference between one pill and another. In this study, every subject could easily tell the difference between a massage of the foot and some electrodes placed on the wrist. And this brings in other problems. Because each subject, and each researcher, knew what treatments were given, there was effectively no blinding. Blinding is the best way to avoid the pernicious biases that tend to creep into studies like this. Needless to say, an unblinded study is far less persuasive.

And what of the TENS treatment that was supposed to act as a placebo? One systematic review concluded that there is “no benefit of TENS compared with placebo.” Another review found that “evidence for the efficacy of…is limited and inconsistent,” in regards to treating chronic back pain. The New England Journal of Medicine concluded that “treatment with TENS is no more effective than treatment with a placebo, and TENS adds no apparent benefit to that of exercise alone,” also referring to treating chronic back pain.

So, according to much larger studies, there is no reason to believe that TENS does much for pain. TENS could then effectively be a placebo, but the authors of the reflexology study . . .

MORE . . .

Related articles
  • Small Study of Reflexology Finds Nothing, Headline Should Read (randi.org)
  • Reflexology ‘as effective as pain killers’ (telegraph.co.uk)
  • Use reflexology to complement drugs in pain treatment, survey findings suggest (independent.co.uk)
  • Combining Conventional Drug Therapy With Reflexology can Help in Pain Treatment (medindia.net)

Cold Reading

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 15, 2013
Posted in: Astrology, Brain Works, Educational, George Anderson, Horoscope, Human Perception, James Van Praagh, John Edward, Mind Reading, Paranormal, Perception, Pseudoscientific, Psychics, Psychology, Quackery, Scams, Spirits, Story Telling, supernatural, Superstition, Sylvia Browne, Telepathy. Tagged: Bertram Forer, cold reading, Ian Rowland, james randi, new age, psychic, Skepdic.com, subjective validation, The Skeptic's Dictionary. 1 comment

via The Skeptic’s Dictionary

“In the course of a successful reading, the psychic may provide most of the words, but it is the client that provides most of the meaning and all of the significance.” –Ian Rowland (2000: 60)

Note: to understand cold reading you must understand subjective validation.

psychic_300pxCold reading refers to a set of techniques used by professional manipulators to get a subject to behave in a certain way or to think that the cold reader has some sort of special ability that allows him to “mysteriously” know things about the subject. Cold reading goes beyond the usual tools of manipulation: suggestion and flattery. In cold reading, salespersons, hypnotists, advertising pros, faith healers, con men, and some therapists bank on their subject’s inclination to find more meaning in a situation than there actually is. The desire to make sense out of experience can lead us to many wonderful discoveries, but it can also lead us to many follies. The manipulator knows that his mark will be inclined to try to make sense out of whatever he is told, no matter how farfetched or improbable. He knows, too, that people are generally self-centered, that we tend to have unrealistic views of ourselves, and that we will generally accept claims about ourselves that reflect not how we are or even how we really think we are but how we wish we were or think we should be. He also knows that for every several claims he makes about you that you reject as being inaccurate, he will make one that meets with your approval; and he knows that you are likely to remember the hits he makes and forget the misses.

Thus, a good manipulator can provide a reading of a total stranger, which will make the stranger feel that the manipulator possesses some special power. For example, Bertram Forer has never met you, yet he offers the following cold reading of you:bertram-forer_200px

Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary and reserved. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. You pride yourself on being an independent thinker and do not accept others’ opinions without satisfactory proof. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety, and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. Disciplined and controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside.

Your sexual adjustment has presented some problems for you. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you.

Here’s another reading that you might find fairly accurate about you:

People close to you have been taking advantage of you. Your basic honesty has been getting in your way. Many opportunities that you have had offered to you in the past have had to be surrendered because you refuse to take advantage of others. You like to read books and articles to improve your mind. In fact, if you’re not already in some sort of personal service business, you should be. You have an infinite capacity for understanding people’s problems and you can sympathize with them. But you are firm when confronted with obstinacy or outright stupidity. Law enforcement would be another field you understand. Your sense of justice is quite strong.

The last one was from astrologer Sidney Omarr. He’s never even met you and yet he knows so much about you (Randi 1982: 61). The first one was taken by Forer from a newsstand astrology book.

psychicFair_210pxThe selectivity of the human mind is always at work. We pick and choose what data we will remember and what we will give significance to. In part, we do so because of what we already believe or want to believe. In part, we do so in order to make sense out of what we are experiencing. We are not manipulated simply because we are gullible or suggestible, or just because the signs and symbols of the manipulator are vague or ambiguous. Even when the signs are clear and we are skeptical, we can still be manipulated. In fact, it may even be the case that particularly bright persons are more likely to be manipulated when the language is clear and they are thinking logically. To make the connections that the manipulator wants you to make, you must be thinking logically.

Not all cold readings are done by malicious manipulators. Some readings are done by astrologers, graphologists, tarot readers, New Age healers, and people who genuinely believe they have paranormal powers.

MORE . . .

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Everything wrong with Jurassic Park in under 180 seconds

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 15, 2013
Posted in: Fun Stuff. Tagged: Dinosaur, Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park, Outdoors, Plot hole, Recreation, Samuel L. Jackson, Theme Parks. 1 comment

Just a little fun. Enjoy :)

Everything Wrong With Jurassic Park In 3 Minutes Or Less – YouTube.

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Ghosts: The Evidence

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 15, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Ghosts, Haunted, Human Perception, Paranormal, Psychics, Spirits, supernatural. Tagged: CLASSIC, ghost, STDWYTK, youtube. Leave a Comment

People have always been preoccupied with what happens to us after we die, leading some to believe in the existence of ghosts. But is there any real, conclusive evidence that these supernatural beings exist? Tune in to find out.

via Ghosts: The Evidence – CLASSIC – STDWYTK – YouTube.

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Is that a FEMA Camp? – May 5, 2013 Edition

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 14, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, New World Order, Paranoid, Government, Myths, Urban Legends, FEMA Camps. Tagged: Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, Chicago, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Grissom Air Reserve Base, Indiana, Indiana Air National Guard, Newport Chemical Depot, United States. 2 comments
Is that a FEMA Camp? is a blog dedicated to investigating claims of FEMA camp locations.

Below is some of their findings. Enjoy :)

femacamp2_250px

May 5, 2013 Edition

• Hammond, Indiana

The claim: large enclosure identified in FEMA-designated city.

What it really is: Located right next to Chicago, Hammond has multiple manufacturing centers located within the city, any one of which could probably be confused as a FEMA camp to a person who thinks that FEMA camps are real.

• Newport, Indiana

newpoetThe claim: Army Depot – VX nerve gas storage facility. Secret meetings were held here in 1998 regarding the addition of the Kankakee River watershed to the Heritage Rivers Initiative.

What it really is: The Newport Chemical Depot did store VX nerve gas there, at least until 2008 when it was all destroyed.

The depot itself was closed in June 2010, and is now in plans with the local community to be used for civilian use.

• Jefferson Proving Grounds, Indiana

The claim: Southern Indiana – This facility was an active base with test firing occuring daily. Portions of the base have been opened to create an industrial park, but other areas are still highly restricted. A camp is believed to be located “downrange”. Facility is equipped with an airfield and has a nearby rail line.

What it really is: The base was closed in 1995. The Army does maintain have a small, on-sight staff to oversee the cleaning up of the area.

Currently 50,000 acres of the firing line have been turned into the Big Oaks National Wildlife Refuge, and a 1,000 acres north of the firing line is being used by the Indiana Air National Guard.

There is what was once an old air field to the south, but the buildings there that would support it are mostly gone, and the runways either degrading, or are gone.

• Grissom AFB, Indiana

grissomThe claim: This closed airbase still handles a lot of traffic, and has a “state-owned” prison compound on the southern part of the facility.

What it really is: It’s actual name is the Grissom Air Reserve Base, and it is not closed.

The claim about the state prison there is true, and has a population of over 3,100 medium to high security prisoners there (which would mean that it’s pretty full). This does not mean however that the prison is a FEMA camp.

The base also has a joint-use agreement allowing for the runway to be used by civilians as well.

• Jasper-Pulaski Wildlife Area, Indiana

The claim: Youth Corrections farm located here. Facility is “closed”, but is still staffed and being “renovated”. Total capacity unknown.

What it really is: A bogus claim. There is no youth corrections farm located there, nor or there any buildings located in the wildlife area.

The land is also open to the public as well for hunting and recreation.

• Kingsbury, Indiana

Munitions are processed at Kingsbury Ordnance Plant during World War II. Photo courtesy of LaPorte County Historical Society Museum

The claim: This “closed” military base is adjacent to a state fish & wildlife preserve. Part of the base is converted to an industrial park, but the southern portion of this property is still used. It is bordered on the south by railroad, and is staffed with some foreign-speaking UN troops. A local police officer who was hunting and camping close to the base in the game preserve was accosted, roughed up, and warned by the English-speaking unit commander to stay away from the area. It was suggested to the officer that the welfare of his family would depend on his “silence”. Located just southeast of LaPorte.

What it really is: First, there wasn’t a military base there, just an ordinance plant there, and it closed down after the Korean War.

There really isn’t that much there, as the town has a population of less than 250 people. The only thing around there that might be mistaken for a FEMA camp is some large warehouses south east of the town.

As for the claim of the police officer encounter UN troops, this story appears to be made up. I can not find any information to confirm this actually happen, and apparently no one else has claimed to have been accosted.

Click here for the latest findings at “Is that a FEMA Camp?”

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Science VS Scientology [infographic]

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 14, 2013
Posted in: Fun Stuff, Science Fiction, Educational, Myths, Alternative Medicine. Tagged: Religion and Spirituality, Opposing Views, Miami, Scientology, l ron hubbard, Church of Scientology, Tom Cruise, Response to Critics. Leave a Comment

via relativelyinteresting.com

Ah, Scientology, the pseudo-religion/cult built on a premise straight out of science fiction. It’s mind boggling to think that Scientology has as large a following as it does, and even more upsetting that celebrities continue to endorse its ideals.

This infographic, courtesy of Visual.ly gives the low-down on Scientology – from it’s strange beginnings through to its ongoing legal battles.

science-vs-scientology-infographic

Image Source: http://visual.ly/things-you-dont-know-about-scientology

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Nocebo Mass Delusion

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 14, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Educational, Human Perception, Medical, Science, Technology. Tagged: electromagnetic field, electromagnetic hypersensitivity, Experimenter's bias, Mass hysteria, NeuroLogica Blog, Nocebo, Placebo, Steven Novella, Symptom. Leave a Comment

by Steven Novella via NeuroLogica Blog

Nocebo_150pxExpectation bias cuts both ways, for positive and negative expectations. Expectation bias, the tendency to perceive and accept data that reinforces your expectation, is one of the many contributors to placebo effects (the illusion of a positive benefit that derive from something other than an active treatment). It is also, however, part of nocebo effects  (the illusion of negative side effects from something other than active treatment).

Expectation bias can be powerful enough in some people to lead not only to the perception of a benefit or side effect but to a frank delusion. When this happens on a large scale, that can lead to a mass delusion. There are many episode that demonstrate this effect, but now there is also a controlled experiment that also confirms it.

A recent study looked at sham exposure to wifi signals in 147 subjects. They were first exposed to either a documentary about the dangers of wifi, or to a documentary about internet security. A total of 54% of the subjects experienced

“…agitation and anxiety, loss of concentration or tingling in their fingers, arms, legs, and feet. Two participants left the study prematurely because their symptoms were so severe that they no longer wanted to be exposed to the assumed radiation.”

wifi ouch_300pxFurther, the group exposed to the wifi documentary experience significantly more symptoms.  This is a small study but it matches prior research showing that those who believe they have electromagnetic sensitivity will experience symptoms when exposed to sham EMF. The difference with the current study is that it used healthy volunteers and controlled for media exposure.

Systematic reviews of the research on EM hypersensitivity show that those who self-identify as having EM hypersensitivity (which has now been renamed in the technical literature as “Idiopathic environmental intolerance attributed to electromagnetic fields”) cannot tell the difference between real and sham EMF. This review concluded:

“ No robust evidence could be found to support this theory. However, the studies included in the review did support the role of the nocebo effect in triggering acute symptoms in IEI-EMF sufferers. Despite the conviction of IEI-EMF sufferers that their symptoms are triggered by exposure to electromagnetic fields, repeated experiments have been unable to replicate this phenomenon under controlled conditions.”

The new study suggest that this nocebo effect can happen on a large scale due to media reports, and cautions the media about sensationalizing such reports.

MORE . . . .

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illumiCorp – Training Module I

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 13, 2013
Posted in: 9/11, Alex Jones, Aliens, Area 51, Cattle Mutilations, ChemTrails, Conspiracy, Crop Circles, David Icke, Debunk, Disinformation, Educational, False Flag, Federal Reserve, FEMA Camps, Global Warming, GMO, Government, HAARP, Health, Hoax, Illuminati, Moon Landing, Mysteries, Myths, New World Order, Paranoid, Pseudohistory, Pseudoscientific, Pyramids, Quackery, Roswell, Secret Societies, Skepticism, UFO, Urban Legends. Tagged: Alex Jones, big brother, biowarfare, central bank, ChemTrails, Christianity, Conspiracy, David Icke, Federal Reserve, Federal Reserve Act, Federal Reserve System, Freemasonry, Freemasons, global surveillance, globalism, Gospel, Hollywood, human databasing, Illumicorp, Illuminati, International Monetary Fund, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Knight, masons, military, military-industrial complex, New, New World, New World Order, One, Order, religion, RFID, Templar, truth, United States, World, world government, World Order, World Trade Organization. 2 comments
This is How the New World Order Works

logo 02_200pxHello initiates and welcome to module one of the Illumicorp video training course. I would like to officially welcome you as a member of the team.

You’ve joined our organization at perhaps the most exciting point in our long history. Our founders shared a passionate dream. To transform this country, and eventually the whole world to one cohesive organization.

This presentation is designed to enlighten you about our organization’s goals and achievements. As your guide, I will help to answer some basic questions you might have about Illumicorp, and familiarize you with the valuable role you will play in helping us reach our prime objective. So please, take a tour with me as we march together towards an exciting new world.

Start this video to continue your training:

Illumicorp Module 01 Training
Illumicorp Module 01 Training
►

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

books

Click the image to download the official course booklet (PDF) containing very important additional information.

What are chemtrails, and should you be scared of them?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 12, 2013
Posted in: ChemTrails, Conspiracy, Debunk, Educational, Government, HAARP, Health, Physics, Science, Skepticism. Tagged: Atmosphere, Chemtrail conspiracy theory, contrail, geoengineering, Global Warming, HowStuffWorks, Ice crystals, Jet engine, Water vapor. 1 comment

via HowStuffWorks

Is there something sinister in airplane contrails?

Is there something sinister in airplane contrails?

The trail of clouds that billow from an airplane streaking across the sky can be mesmerizing for children and adults alike. Jet engine traffic has become so common that it’s not unusual to see several lingering streaks in the afternoon. And though many consider the streaks beautiful against a bright blue sky, others are alarmed about them. Concerns range from the idea that these streaks could exacerbate global warming to more elaborate theories that the government has secretly been dumping harmful substances on the land.

Before we get into the various theories about the possible harmful effects, let’s discuss the scientific explanation for these streaks. Jet engines spew out very hot air. And, because water vapor is one of the byproducts of the exhaust, the air is also very humid. However, high in the atmosphere where these jets fly, the air is typically very cold — often lower than -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Additionally, the atmosphere up there is often of low vapor pressure, or the force exerted by a gas on the surrounding environment.

When a jet engine is spewing out hot, humid air into an atmosphere that is cold and has low vapor pressure, the result is condensation. The water vapor coming out of the engine quickly condenses into water droplets and then crystallizes into ice. The ice crystals are the clouds that form behind the engine. This is why the streaks are called contrails, short for “condensation trails.” To help explain it, scientists liken it to seeing your breath on cold days. You may have noticed that puffs of breath dissipate quickly on dryer days. The same is true of contrails: When the atmosphere is more humid, the contrails linger, but when the atmosphere is dry, the contrails disappear more quickly.

This explanation makes sense. But, as author and airline pilot Patrick Smith tells readers, the contrails consist of not just ice crystals and water vapor but also other byproducts of engine exhaust. These include carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfate particles and soot (source: Smith). Some point out that these, in addition to the extra cloud cover, can have negative environmental effects. And conspiracy theorists have nicknamed contrails “chemtrails” under the suspicion that the government is taking advantage of this scientific phenomenon to secretly release other substances into the atmosphere.

MORE . . .

Debunked: ChemTrails and ChemClouds
Debunked: ChemTrails and ChemClouds
►

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Is the Winchester House haunted?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 12, 2013
Posted in: Bizarre, Ghosts, Haunted, Mysteries, Paranormal, Psychics, Spirits, Story Telling, supernatural, Superstition, Urban Legends. Tagged: Calif, California, HowStuffWorks, San Jose, San Jose California, Sarah, Sarah Winchester, Winchester, Winchester Repeating Arms Company. 1 comment

Why does the Winchester Mystery House have stairs leading nowhere?

via HowStuffWorks

Is this sprawling mansion haunted or just oddly designed? Photo courtesy ­Winchester My­stery House, San Jose, CA

Is this sprawling mansion haunted or just oddly designed?
Photo courtesy ­Winchester My­stery House, San Jose, CA

Most of us want to get home construction over as soon as possible. We worry about the expense and complain about the inconvenience. But for Sarah Winchester, construction was a way of life. For 38 years, she had construction going 24 hours a day at her home in San Jose, Calif. This was no ordinary construction job, though; the house is an oddball labyrinth of rooms that at one point reached seven stories. It’s filled with weird things like stairs and doors that go nowhere. And I haven’t even mentioned the ghosts.­

Sarah Winchester didn’t always want to build a haunted mansion. Born in 1839, Sarah Pardee was one of the social stars of New Haven, Conn. Although she only stood 4 feet 10 inches, she was known for her beauty and her sparkling personality. In 1862, Sarah married William Winchester, who was the heir of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The company had developed the repeating rifle, a gun that was easy to reload and fired rapidly, at a rate of one shot every three seconds. The gun was used by Northern troops in the Civil War and was also known as “the gun that won the West” Silva.

winchester-mystery-house-2_300px

You won’t get far if you follow the stairs to nowhere.
Photo courtesy Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, CA

The young couple started a family in 1866, but their daughter, Annie, died in infancy, a blow that Mrs. Winchester never recovered from. Mr. Winchester died of tuberculosis 15 years later. Distraught over these losses, she visited a medium for spiritual guidance.

The medium told her that the Winchester family had been struck by a terrible curse and was haunted by the ghosts of all those killed by the Winchester rifle. Their spirits were seeking vengeance, and the only way to appease them was to build a house for them. The ghosts had another request: that the house never be completed. Never stop building, the medium told Mrs. Winchester, or you will die. We can’t know exactly how she interpreted this advice; she might have thought the spirits would get her if she stopped, or she might have seen continuous construction as a path to eternal life.

Mrs. Winchester headed west to build a home for herself and her ghosts. She bought a six-room farmhouse on 162 acres in California and set to work building, a task that would occupy her until her death 38 years later. But how did she end up with such a weird house? Why did she construct stairs that went nowhere and doors that opened into walls?

Find out on the next page . . .

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Michael Shermer – What happens after we die?

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 11, 2013
Posted in: Afterlife, Brain Works, Science, Spirits, supernatural. Tagged: Michael Shermer, Scientific skepticism, Skeptic (U.S. magazine), Skeptic Society, youtube. 1 comment

Michael Shermer discusses the belief in life after death. (May 6th, 2013)

Michael Shermer – life after death
Michael Shermer – life after death
►

Via Michael Shermer » What happens after we die?.

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Tin foil alert: Alex Jones promises 'biggest Bilderberg news ever'; Bonus: Our video preview

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 11, 2013
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Reblogged from Twitchy:

Conspiracy kook Alex Jones says he's ready to break the "biggest Bilderberg news ever." Or is that just what they want you to believe? Hmmmm?

We expect the big news will look a little something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYJPJ6hlYHA

* * *

More Alex Jones gems on the vilemonkey YouTube channel.

They

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 11, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, New World Order, Paranoid, Secret Societies, Skepticism. Tagged: American Gods, Discworld, Facebook, Good Omens, Neil Gaiman, Nice, Terry Pratchett, United States. Leave a Comment

Reblogged from I am Chickadoodle; Hear Me... rawr:

“Who are they?/Where are they?/How do they/Know all this?/And I’m sorry, so sorry/I’m sorry it’s like this” –“They” by Jem

I’ve seen a lot of recent posts on Facebook recently that claim that “they don’t want you to know…” followed by something that often sort of makes sense, or at least seems partly based in fact, then takes a turn for the paranoid and tells you to rise above and see the truth and don’t let “them” keep you down.

Read more… 836 more words

The 16 Personalities of Sybil

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 11, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Debunk, Educational, Hypnosis, Medical, Myths, Psychology, Science, Urban Legends. Tagged: Dissociative identity disorder, Herbert Spiegel, Mason, Sally Field, Spiegel, Sybil, Three Faces of Eve, Wilbur. Leave a Comment

The book and movie “Sybil” told the story of a woman purported to have Multiple Personality Syndrome.

By Brian Dunning via Skeptoid

Read podcast transcript below or Listen

Sybil DVD_Pic 2The 1976 TV movie Sybil starred Sally Field as a woman with Multiple Personality Syndrome. The movie, and the book upon which it was based, were fictionalized but were based upon a real person. The most significant impacts of Sybil were to bring the idea of Multiple Personality Syndrome to the general public’s attention, and the controversy which followed in psychiatric circles. In her later years, debate raged over whether the woman upon whom Sybil was based indeed had multiple personalities, or was faking the whole thing, or whether she had some other disorder that compelled her to fake them. At the center was a real person who was suffering from a real illness. Today we’re going to look at what that condition might have been, and what the true state is of our knowledge of this most shocking of mental illnesses.

Shirley Mason was that woman. She was born in 1923 and died in 1998. She worked as a commercial artist, although from about the age of 30, she spent nearly half of her time in psychotherapy, prompted by emotional breakdowns and outbursts. Most of her sessions were with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur. But one day, Mason came into Dr. Wilbur’s office and said that her name was not Shirley Mason, but Peggy, and that she was a small girl.

Shirley "Sybil" Mason, c. 1950 Public domain image

Shirley “Sybil” Mason, c. 1950
Public domain image

Other personalities soon appeared, finally totaling sixteen. Their ages varied, some were boys and some were girls, and there was even an infant. The longer they worked together, the more Dr. Wilbur became convinced that Mason’s case was an extraordinary one. She began giving academic presentations on the case, and within a few years it was the foundation of her entire professional career. Dr. Wilbur even teamed up with an author, Flora Schreiber, to document the case. Many interviews with Mason’s various personalities were taped. Wilbur determined that Mason’s mother, Hattie Dorsett, a psychotic who had been hospitalized with schizophrenia, had subjected the young Mason to years of astonishing sexual and sadistic abuses.

In the mid 1960s, Dr. Wilbur sought out help from colleagues to refine the diagnosis. She believed that Mason was a schizophrenic like her mother, and asked Dr. Herbert Spiegel to give his input. Dr. Spiegel saw Mason over the course of several years. His specialty was hypnosis, and he often hypnotized Mason. It was during these sessions that he began to realize that the various personalities might not be exactly what he’d been told they were. In a 1997 interview with the New York Review of Books, Dr. Spiegel said:

But one day during our regression studies, Sybil said, “Well, do you want me to be Helen?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she said, “Well, when I’m with Dr. Wilbur she wants me to be Helen.” I said, “Who’s Helen?” “Well, that’s a name Dr. Wilbur gave me for this feeling.” So I said, “Well, if you want to it’s all right, but it’s not necessary.” With me, Sybil preferred not to “be Helen.” With Wilbur, it seemed she felt an obligation to become another personality. That’s when I realized that [Dr. Wilbur] was helping her identify aspects of her life, or perspectives, that she then called by name. By naming them this way, she was reifying a memory of some kind and converting it into a “personality.”

Dr. Spiegel went on to explain how these personalities came to be:

Sybil told me that she had read The Three Faces of Eve, Thigpen and Cleckley’s book on a case of multiple personality. She was very impressed with that book… I have the impression that Sybil learned from reading this book that she could express her agonies and her stresses in life through the histrionic display of multiple personalities, especially if it were encouraged by the therapist.

For her 2011 book Sybil Exposed, author Debbie Nathan reviewed Dr. Spiegel’s extensive notes and concluded:

Sybil’s sixteen personalities had not popped up spontaneously but were provoked over many years of rogue treatment that violated practically every ethical standard of practice for mental health practitioners.

Dr. Wilbur and Schreiber asked Dr. Spiegel to co-author the book with them. They were going to make it into a book because Dr. Wilbur had been unable to get it published in professional journals.

I saw her “personalities” rather as game-playing… So I told Wilbur and Schreiber that it would not be accurate to call Sybil a multiple personality, and that it was not at all consistent with what I knew about her. Schreiber then got in a huff. She was sitting right in that chair there, and she said, “But if we don’t call it a multiple personality, we don’t have a book! The publishers want it to be that, otherwise it won’t sell!” That was the logic behind their calling Sybil a multiple personality.

And come out the book did, though it omitted any reference to the substantial role that Dr. Spiegel played in Mason’s therapy, and changed or omitted many other parts of the tale that did not conform to the compelling narrative envisioned by Schreiber. The book reassigned credit for Dr. Spiegel’s hypnosis sessions to Dr. Wilbur, even though she had in fact never actually done any hypnosis at that point in her career; instead, she’d suggested most of Mason’s false memories of abuse using sodium pentothal. The book was, in point of fact, a pop horror story; a sensationalized and fictionalized account that exploited and exaggerated a real patient’s condition, painting her as a freakish and frightening psycho. In doing so, author Schreiber even found and included a letter that Mason had written to her analyst in 1959:

I am not going to tell you there isn’t anything wrong. We both know there is. But it is not what I have led you to believe. I do not have any multiple personalities. I don’t even have a “double” to help me out. I am all of them. I have been essentially lying in my pretense of them. The dissociations are not the problem because they do not actually exist, but there is something wrong or I would not resort to pretending like that.

However, Schreiber flipped this around rather than taking it for the true confession it purported to be, and wrote that this was another of Sybil’s hysterical personalities talking, and added (on her own) that Sybil had no memory of the two days during which she’d written the letter.

The book was a hit, selling six million copies in its first four years. Diagnoses of Multiple Personality Syndrome went from 200 worldwide to thousands of new cases each year. It was the disease of the day, trendy and new and flashy.

MORE . . . .

Related articles
  • Skeptoid #361: The 16 Personalities of Sybil (skeptoid.com)
  • New Model For Personality Disorders Could Help Doctors More Effectively Diagnose Patients (medicaldaily.com)
  • Famous Movie Characters Who Suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder (Split Personality) (famous101.com)
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Atacama Specimen

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 11, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Debunk, Mysteries, Skepticism, UFO. Tagged: Atacama, Atacama Desert, Chile, DNA, humanoid, NeuroLogica Blog, Stanford University, Starchild Skull, Steven M. Greer, Steven Novella. Leave a Comment

by Steven Novella via NeuroLogica Blog

One persistent theme that skeptical investigators encounter is the fact that true-believers of various stripes often whine about the fact that they are not taken seriously by scientists and that their claims are dismissed out of hand. Ironically they often direct their whining at skeptics, even though we are the ones addressing their claims and investigating them. Mainstream scientists won’t taint themselves by even acknowledging their existence.

What the true believers repeatedly fail to appreciate, however, is that it is not necessarily their claims that relegate them to the fringe, but their atrocious methods. Dunning-Kruger EffectThey giddily squander their credibility by accepting poor-quality evidence, making bad arguments, and dismissing perfectly reasonable alternative explanations.

In short, they are not taken seriously because they are not serious scientists. A version of the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to make them incapable of perceiving their own gross scientific incompetence, and so they have no choice but to whine about those “closed-minded scientists” and the conspiracy of silence against them.

Yet another example of this is the Atacama specimen – a six inch tall humanoid skeletal remains discovered in the Atacama desert, Chile, in 2003.

The Disclosure Project, founded by Steven Greer, has promoted the specimen as evidence of aliens. They make the classic mistake of looking for evidence and arguments to support their hypothesis, rather than properly considering other hypotheses or looking for evidence to disprove their hypothesis.

What they are doing is essentially mystery mongering, as is evidenced by the title of their article on the specimen: Stanford University Research: Atacama Humanoid Still A Mystery.

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Atacama Specimen

Their approach is similar to that of the Starchild Skull proponents – take a human specimen and look for anomalies, and then declare those anomalies evidence that the specimen is alien. The problem with this approach is that there are numerous causes of anatomical anomalies, including genetic, developmental, pathological, traumatic, or artifacts of what happened to the specimen after death.

Alien proponents would have to convincingly rule out all such possibilities before Occam would be satisfied that a new explanation was needed. Even then, all we would have in an anomaly – not something alien. That conclusion is a classic example of the argument from ignorance logical fallacy.

One way to address the question of whether or not the specimen is human is to . . .

MORE . . . .

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Yes, Alex Jones Is Still Nuts. Want Proof? Here’s Him Going Bonkers On Google & Facebook: ‘Use ‘Em Like A Toilet!’

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 10, 2013
Posted in: Alex Jones, Comedy, Conspiracy, Fun Stuff, Government, Moron, Paranoid, Quackery, Secret Societies. Tagged: Alex Jones, central intelligence agency, Drudge Report, Facebook, Google, Jones, Mediaite, New World Order, youtube. 2 comments

Ladies and gentlemen … grab some popcorn … because once again, i present to you … my favorite moron …

Download: drum-roll.wav

… Alex Jones!

Grab the popcorn and be sure to watch the video i put together at the bottom. Enjoy!! :)

MIB

H/T Thomas J. Proffit

by Andrew Kirell via Mediaite

alexjones_animated_3Just your occasional reminder that conspiracy theorist radio host and expert false-flag-identifier Alex Jones still has a few screws loose while giving melodramatic on-air rants.

This latest winner comes courtesy of MofoPolitics, who flagged down a video of Jones angrily firing off at Google, Facebook, and YouTube for being “front operations” for the Central Intelligence Agency.

While addressing user concerns with Facebook and other social media outlets, Jones did one of his signature “take the volume up to 11″ moves and fired off this hilarious tirade:

“Use it like a toilet! Use Facebook to jack their system! And jack ‘em hard! But hate ‘em, and spit on ‘em while you do it. Same thing with YouTube. And all of it. Jack the enemy conduits. Jack it hard and hate ‘em! And spit on ‘em while you do it.”

So… if understood correctly, Mr. Jones would like for us to use social networking sites to jack the system hard, but make sure we hate them and spit on them while we jack them. Roger that!

Oh, what’s that? Now you want to turn this into a generic invective against all your favorite bugaboos?

“This is a war! They’re killing kids everywhere with GMO and vaccines knowingly. This morning they had jets out spraying chemtrails everywhere. It’s a public G.O. engineering program — partially declassified and the public doesn’t even know about it! You think you’re in Kansas? You’re not in Kansas anymore!”

ALEXJONESFOIL_250pxJones then cited an InfoWars (his own site) article suggesting that Google is purposely trying to kill traffic to Jones’ site and the Drudge Report by telling Google Chrome users it has been infected with malware. Of course, what’s not clear is how many people actually received these warnings, or whether the warning images were just clever photoshops made by an InfoWars fan in his mom’s basement. How do we know that InfoWars didn’t create these images to make us think Google was the CIA front as a distraction from InfoWars’ own rogue CIA operations?!?!

Nevertheless, here comes that fiery rant against Google you’ve all been waiting for:

“Google is the one jacking and breaking through your pass codes. And spying. And [Google CEO Eric] Schmidt says, ‘You shouldn’t visit anything you don’t want me to see.’ On a power trip. What a joke! By the way he only sold 10,000 of his book. What a joke you are, scumbag. Just because you can run a CIA criminal front, doesn’t mean you actually ever did anything, little man! Hope you’re cozy under the black wings of the New World Order!”

After he calmed down a tad, Jones then cut to an article entitled “Mark Zuckerberg Awarded CIA Surveillance Medal.” That’s frightening, right? Fits the InfoWars narrative pretty well. Too well, one might say.

Well, that’s because it’s a fake article. Writes the author in the last paragraph: “Hope you enjoyed the spoof folks. I thought it was great.”

But whatever, man. Enjoy this video, y’all:

Alex Jones Is Nuts
Alex Jones Is Nuts
►

Download: looney-tunes.mp3

Related articles
  • Yes, Alex Jones Is Still Nuts. Want Proof? Here’s Him Going Bonkers On Google & Facebook: ‘Use ‘Em Like A Toilet!’ (mediaite.com)
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  • Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a fan of Alex Jones’s InfoWars (illuminutti.com)
  • ‘You Son Of A B*tch’: Furious Boston Man Confronts ‘A**hole’ Alex Jones Reporter Over ‘False Flag’ Allegations (mediaite.com)

HAARP – The Military’s Mystery Machine

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 10, 2013
Posted in: Conspiracy, Debunk, Educational, Geeky Stuff, Government, HAARP, Mysteries, Myths, Physics, Science, Technology, Urban Legends. Tagged: Alaska, Gakona Alaska, HAARP, High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, Ionosphere, Popular Science, Radio, United States Naval Research Laboratory, Van Allen radiation belt. Leave a Comment

The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, has been called a missile-defense tool and a mind-control device. The truth is a bit less ominous

By Abe Streep via Popular Science
Posted June 18, 2008

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Northern Exposure: With HAARP, an antenna array located 200 miles north of Anchorage, Alaska, scientists study the outer atmosphere by zapping it with radio waves generated by 3,600 kilowatts of electricity. Appropriately, it has a great view of the aurora borealis. U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

If the paranoid blogosphere is to be believed, every morning a group of plasma-physics grad students wakes up at a research facility in Gakona, Alaska, 200 miles north of Anchorage, and prepares for another day of playing God. It’s cold, dark as a mineshaft in winter, and the day’s work does little to cheer the mood. Depending on the unpredictable agendas of military scientists, this group of technicians must shoot radio waves into the upper reaches of our atmosphere to create missile shields, eviscerate enemy satellites, set off the occasional earthquake, or control the minds of millions of people.

Skywave Propogation: Radio waves travel in straight lines, but the Earth isn’t flat, so sending radio signals to the other side of the world is tricky. HAARP’s findings could lead to ways to extend the range of radio signals by creating irregularities in the ionosphere that would bounce signals across long distances.  Paul Wootton

Skywave Propogation: Radio waves travel in straight lines, but the Earth isn’t flat, so sending radio signals to the other side of the world is tricky. HAARP’s findings could lead to ways to extend the range of radio signals by creating irregularities in the ionosphere that would bounce signals across long distances. Paul Wootton

The truth is, though, that the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP—the 180-antenna array that became fully operational (in 2007) when the defense-systems contractor BAE finished installing transmitters—is nothing more sinister than a research station. And now, 15 years after construction on the station began, HAARP’s managers are seeing what the fully powered system can do; most recently, they’ve begun zapping the moon with the hope of determining the composition of its soil. “It’s up, it runs, it performs beautifully,” says Ed Kennedy, the former HAARP program manager for the Naval Research Lab. “HAARP is a great example of a project that from start to finish stayed on schedule and on budget.”

HAARP’s purpose is to study the ionosphere (the section of the atmosphere beginning about 50 miles up in which ultraviolet radiation temporarily strips atoms of their electrons), the magnetosphere (the region in space above the ionosphere where the Earth’s magnetic field affects the behavior of charged particles) and the Van Allen radiation belts (bands of highly charged particles contained in the magnetosphere beginning some 400 miles up). Scientists are interested in the ionosphere because of its ability to affect radio signals; the Van Allen belt, because the radiation there damages satellites, and a better understanding of it could lead to ways to make satellites last longer. “It’s an open plasma-physics laboratory,” says Dennis Papadopoulos, a physics professor at the University of Maryland who helped conceive the idea for HAARP with the Naval Research Lab more than 30 years ago. “You test ideas and scientific theories. Then, if something’s important to the Department of Defense, you apply it.”

Ionospheric Manipulation Made Easy: HAARP’s ionospheric research instrument comprises 180 aluminum antenna towers [1] on a 40-acre plot. Together the towers beam radio waves into the ionosphere, which begins about 50 miles up. There, sunlight temporarily strips gas molecules [2] of their electrons, creating charged particles [3]. Scientists tweak HAARP’s signal [4] to stimulate reactions in the lower ionosphere, causing phenomena such as radiating auroral currents, a.k.a. “virtual antennas,” which send extremely low-frequency waves back to Earth. The waves can reach deep into the ocean and could improve submarine communication. At night, the absence of sunlight causes the lowest layer of the ionosphere to temporarily disappear [5]. This allows HAARP to conduct experiments that could lead to better ways to use a process called skywave propagation.  Paul Wootton

Ionospheric Manipulation Made Easy: HAARP’s ionospheric research instrument comprises 180 aluminum antenna towers [1] on a 40-acre plot. Together the towers beam radio waves into the ionosphere, which begins about 50 miles up. There, sunlight temporarily strips gas molecules [2] of their electrons, creating charged particles [3]. Scientists tweak HAARP’s signal [4] to stimulate reactions in the lower ionosphere, causing phenomena such as radiating auroral currents, a.k.a. “virtual antennas,” which send extremely low-frequency waves back to Earth. The waves can reach deep into the ocean and could improve submarine communication. At night, the absence of sunlight causes the lowest layer of the ionosphere to temporarily disappear [5]. This allows HAARP to conduct experiments that could lead to better ways to use a process called skywave propagation. Paul Wootton

One application government scientists are particularly interested in is turning the lower ionosphere into a tool for broadcasting radio signals or bouncing them around the curvature of the Earth. By beaming a signal ranging from 2.8 to 10 megahertz into the ionosphere and then pulsing the signal, HAARP stimulates what’s called a “virtual antenna”—a radio interaction that causes the ionosphere to send a very low-frequency signal back down to Earth. The phenomenon could theoretically improve submarine communication. Because salty, conductive seawater absorbs high-frequency radio waves, submarines currently operate with wires that reach up into shallow depths to receive usable radio signals. Low-frequency signals like the ones HAARP generates in the ionosphere could allow subs to operate at much deeper depths. “It’s a real signal that comes from space as though there were an antenna up there,” says Paul Kossey, HAARP program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate. “But there’s no wire doing it.”

Of course, a vocal minority of HAARP-watchers have their own ideas about the purpose of the $230-million, taxpayer-funded antenna array . . .

MORE . . . .

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  • Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura HAARP (tatoott1009.com)

Controlling the Weather

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 9, 2013
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Reblogged from Pie Cubed:

Click to visit the original post
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Come closer and put your tinfoil hat on. I'm going to tell you something crazy. The government is controlling the weather. That's right, they are. They spray carbon dioxide in clouds to increase the formation of rain. To like, increase the water supply in a region or something equally sinister! And we're not entirely sure if it works, actually. Well, ehm, but let me tell you, it's a conspiracy!

Read more… 866 more words

Lincoln Kennedy Myths

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 9, 2013
Posted in: Assassination, Conspiracy, Debunk, JFK, Myths, Prophecy, Skepticism, Superstition. Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, John Wilkes Booth, kennedy, lee harvey oswald, Lincoln, Lincoln-Kennedy, Snopes.com. Leave a Comment

An old story claims a long list of astonishing similarities between the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy.

By Brian Dunning via Skeptoid
Read transcript below or listen here

LincolnKennedy_300pxAnyone with email has probably received a chain letter revealing a startling series of similarities between the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But even before the days of email, the story had been around, being printed and reprinted, quoted and requoted, and it all seems to go back to a book published the year after Kennedy died. Author Jim Bishop’s book A Day in the Life of President Kennedy, published in 1964 but written mostly while Kennedy was still in office, included an appendix listing a number of strange parallels between the two distinguished Presidents.

We’re going to examine these parallels to see if they hold up, but in doing so we should keep in mind the larger question. Are these similarities in any way meaningful? Do numbers and the spelling of names hold any consequential significance? Let’s find out. Today’s version of what’s become quite the urban legend will read something like this:

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.

Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.

Both were shot in the head.

Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln.

Both were assassinated by Southerners.

Both were succeeded by Southerners.

Both successors were named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their three names.

Both names are made of fifteen letters.

Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.
Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

The Lincoln-Kennedy myths are really intriguing when you hear them, but perhaps equally captivating when you hear the counter arguments. If I drop six pairs of dice, chances are that one pair will match. Taken by itself, that match is pretty cool. Four U.S. Presidents have been assassinated in office, which results in six possible pairings; between those six, it shouldn’t be surprising that we’d find one pairing with interesting coincidences. But that’s just where the counter arguments start to get interesting.

A lot of the similarities are about dates that are exactly 100 years apart. This is no great shock; as U.S. Presidential elections happen every four years, so there are only 25 elections in a century, and every President has at least one other President elected exactly a century before and/or after. kennedyBut this century-centric nature of the Lincoln-Kennedy legend starts to fall apart very quickly when you look at what should be the most important dates: Lincoln and Kennedy died 98 years apart, not a century; and they were elected to the terms in which they died 96 years apart, not a century. Conveniently omitted from the chain email. But let’s look deeper.

My favorite disassembly of the Lincoln-Kennedy legend is the one on Snopes.com. Barbara Mikkelson, who does most of the research and reporting on Snopes, has always been most astonishingly thorough with the way she tracks down every last scrap of an urban legend, but she also applies a very keen skeptical eye to popular claims. The Lincoln-Kennedy legend is primarily a list of coincidences; and when taken away from the context of all the many non-coincidences that also characterized the two men, it seems amazing. She writes:

We’re supposed to be amazed at minor happenstances such as the two men’s being elected exactly one hundred years apart, but we’re supposed to think nothing of the numerous non-coincidences: Lincoln was born in 1809; Kennedy was born in 1917. Lincoln died in 1865; Kennedy died in 1963. Lincoln was 56 years old at the time of his death; Kennedy was 46 years old at the time of his death. No striking coincidences or convenient hundred-year differences in any of those facts. Even when we consider that, absent all other factors, the two men had a one in twelve chance of dying in the same month, we find no coincidence there: Lincoln was killed in April; Kennedy was killed in November.

Even advice columnist Ann Landers took on this question in 1995, and aptly pointed out that there are far more differences between the men than similarities …

MORE . . . .

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  • Comparison of their Deaths (draftone1.wordpress.com)
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Conspiracy theories only create more conspiracy theories

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 9, 2013
Posted in: 9/11, Conspiracy, False Flag, Government. Tagged: 9/11 conspiracy theories, alexjones, Boston Marathon, Conspiracy, conspiracy theory, False flag, The Soap Box, United States, world trade center. 7 comments

via The Soap Box

Conspiracies 901_300pxConspiracy theories are all over the internet it seems these days, and there are a lot of things I have noticed about many of these conspiracy theories, but there is one thing that seems to be an absolute constant about conspiracy theories:

Conspiracy theories create more conspiracy theories.

Take the 9/11 conspiracy theories for example. What was probably the original conspiracy theory concerning that act of terror was the accusation that the Bush administration allowed it to happen, then it eventually progressed into the belief that the government made it happen, then into the belief that the towers were brought down by explosives, then into the belief that the towers were hit by drones, until finally you get to the really bizarre ones that claim that no planes hit the the World Trade Center towers at all.

Originally it would take years for a conspiracy theory to get to it’s most bizarre levels (as the 9/11 conspiracy theories did) but now it takes no time at all.

The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories for example took very little time to go from your basic false flag attack conspiracy theory, to the truly bizarre theory that it didn’t happen and that all the grieving parents of the children that were killed were just actors, and that all the children that were killed either were not killed, or never even existed.

That progression took less than a week.

And the conspiracy theories concerning the recent bombing of the Boston Marathon went from being an alleged false flag attack, to being an outright staged hoax in less than a day…

MORE . . . .

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Sylvia Browne’s Biggest Blunder

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Astrology, Fraud, Metaphysics, Precognition, Prophecy, Psychics, Quackery, Scams, Skepticism, Spirits, supernatural, Sylvia Browne, Telepathy. Tagged: Anderson Cooper, Browne, CNN, csi, Hornbeck, james randi, Missouri, Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, Sylvia Browne. 3 comments

By Ben Radford via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry – CSI

From June 2007

The tragic consequences of listening to psychic advice were brought into sharp focus in January 2007, when yet another psychic vision from Sylvia Browne was revealed to be wrong.

Why don't you remember this headline?

Why don’t you remember this headline?

Several years ago during one of her many appearances on the Montel Williams show, Browne told the parents of missing child Shawn Hornbeck that their son was dead. His body, she said, would be found in a wooded area near two large boulders. Furthermore, according to Browne, Hornbeck was kidnapped by a very tall, “dark-skinned man, he wasn’t Black, more like Hispanic,” who wore dreadlocks.

According to a spokesman for the Hornbeck family, following the Montel broadcast Browne tried to get money from the family: “She called Pam and Craig about one month after the show and pretty much offered her services to continue their discussion for a fee. Pam was that desperate that if she had had $700 in her bank account she would have put it on the table. We are talking about a mother who would have sold her soul to have her boy back.”

In fact, Hornbeck and another boy were found very much alive January 16, 2007, in the home of Michael Devlin, a Missouri man accused of kidnapping them. Hornbeck had been missing for four years, but his parents had not given up hope of finding him despite Browne’s misinformation. Devlin, a Caucasian, is not Black, dark-skinned, nor Hispanic and almost certainly did not have dreadlocks at the time he allegedly abducted Hornbeck.

Within days of Hornbeck’s recovery, critics such as James “The Amazing” Randi spoke out against Browne. CNN’s Anderson Cooper featured Randi and gave refreshingly skeptical (and harsh) coverage of the case, calling attention to Browne’s highest-profile failure to date. Browne, in a statement posted on her Web site, responded to the criticism, stating that “I have never nor ever will charge anyone who seeks my help regarding a missing person or homicide. In these cases I choose to work strictly with law enforcement agencies involved to aid and not impede their work and only when asked. To be accused of otherwise by James Randi and others like him is a boldface [sic] lie. . . . If the brilliant scientists throughout history had a James Randi negating every aspect of their work, I doubt we would have progressed very far in medicine or in any technology. . . . I cannot possibly be 100 percent correct in each and every one of my predictions.”

Yet her documented track record is one of nearly 100 percent failure rate instead of 100 percent success. Browne’s confidence in her body of work is baffling, and her claim that her flawed visions were “one human error” is an amazing understatement.

Anderson Cooper Exposes Sylvia Browne
Anderson Cooper Exposes Sylvia Browne
►

Also see:

  • Psychic told parents that son was dead (Anderson Cooper Blog)
  • AC360: Sylvia Browne’s Best Evidence? (stopsylvia.com)
  • Dead Wrong, . . . Again (iLLumiNuTTi.com)
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  • Psychic on The Montel Williams Show said Amanda Berry was dead. She wasn’t. (macleans.ca)
  • I See Dead People. Oh, Also Profits. (moralcompassblog.com)
  • ‘Missouri miracle’ Shawn Hornbeck: ‘You can’t give up hope’ (fox4kc.com)
  • Cleveland abductions: fans lash out at ‘psychic’ Sylvia Browne over false prediction (guardian.co.uk)
  • Amanda Berry psychic was wrong — and they usually are (mnn.com)
  • Case stirs memories of Hornbeck finding (stltoday.com)

Foiled Again: Lake Monster, Bigfoot Body and Alien Humanoid All in One Week

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Bigfoot, Creatures, Debunk, Hoax, Mysteries, Pseudoscientific, Roswell, Scams, Story Telling, Urban Legends. Tagged: Atacama Desert, Bigfoot, DNA profiling, Lough Foyle, Sharon Hill, Sharon Hill Pennsylvania, The Huffington Post, Tom Biscardi, Unidentified flying object. 2 comments

Sharon_hill_80pxBy Sharon Hill via The Huffington Post

It’s been a busy week in the world of the weird. Not a good one for those who hope to see the dawn of new worldviews or a shift in the paradigm. In one week, three stories topped the abnormal news headlines — all three hyped stories fell apart.

While the stories are still unfolding, it’s clear that they turned out to be nothing as promised.

Click image to view the fake monster video.

Click image to view the faked monster hump video.

First, there was this video of a lake creature swimming among boaters supposedly in Lough Foyle in Ireland. The video, taken by students one of which has the suggestive name Conall Melarkey, shows a hump moving rapidly through the water. The story gained widespread attention. The problem is that no animal can swim this way, no animal looks like this and, in consideration of the circumstances, the best explanation is that someone is towing a hump through the water. In all respects, this video is unbelievable. That is, it appears to be faked.

This second story is a bit more “inside baseball.” Many people will remember the Georgia Bigfoot Hoax of 2008 when two men, including Rick Dyer, teamed up with Bigfoot tracker Tom Biscardi to announce to the world they had a Bigfoot body in a freezer. There was even a press conference where Tom was adamant this was not a hoax, it was “the real deal.” Well, it was a hoax. Hard to fathom how a rubber suit with animal entrails would fool anyone for very long.

Rick has been telling anyone who will listen yet again that he has another Bigfoot body. This beast he supposedly shot during filming of a documentary called Shooting Bigfoot. The majority of Bigfoot enthusiasts did not buy it — once bitten, twice shy — and berated Dyer for his claims and his pay-per-view antics. The movie has come out and… there’s no body. But ever the profiteer, Dyer is still looking for money even though he says he is quitting the ‘footer world.’ Bye. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

alien603 836This week was the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure, an unofficial governmental hearing that provided a forum for testimony from believers in the reality of UFOs and alien visitation. It was nothing we haven’t heard before (and been unimpressed by). But, one very interesting aspect of this tale was about a six-inch, strange-looking mummified body, human-like but not quite right. The ribs, the head, the bone growth was strange. DNA testing showed it was human and of local Chilean origin where it was said to have been found in the Atacama desert. The Atacama humanoid was featured in the new movie “Sirius,” also about extraterrestrial visitation to Earth.

Study of the specimen’s bones by one expert delivered a shocking conclusion: the being was six to eight-years-old. Either the bone conclusions are wrong or we have a very bizarre find here.

MORE . . .

Related articles
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  • I Doubt It and Maybe You Should, Too (illuminutti.com)
  • Brewer offers $1M Bigfoot reward (illuminutti.com)
  • Australian Sceptics: Bigfoots, Yetis & Yowies oh my (blogs.abc.net.au)
  • Bigfoot: Truth or Myth (VIDEO) (indianasnewscenter.com)
  • Bigfoot findings near Lykens (fox43.com)
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Dead Wrong, . . . Again

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Fraud, Ghosts, Haunted, Horoscope, James Van Praagh, John Edward, Paranormal, Precognition, Pseudoscientific, Psychics, Scams, supernatural, Sylvia Browne, Telepathy. Tagged: Browne, Louwana Miller, Miller, Montel Williams, psychic, Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, Skepticblog, Sylvia Browne, United States. 2 comments

by Mark Edward via Skepticblog

H/T Thomas J. Proffit

Amanda Berry

Amanda Berry

Grief Vampire Sylvia Browne has once again proven herself to be the worst possible psychic medium in known history. Skeptics should be happy she is back in the news this time for her ”incorrectly predicting”(?) the outcome of the Amanda Berry disappearance. Chalk up another totally reprehensible miss to her worthless career.

Words cannot be used here at Skepticblog that could express my utter contempt for this bottom-feeding woman and her supporters. This time out she not only caused untold grief to family and community members, but also may have contributed to Amanda’s mother Louwana’s untimely death:

From:  http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/05/amanda_berrys_mother_louwana_m.html

“The case was featured on “American’s Most Wanted.” Louwana Miller appeared on Montel Williams’ nationally-syndicated talk show in November 2004. On the show, a psychic (read as Sylvia Browne)  told Miller that Amanda was probably dead.

“I still don’t want to believe it,” Louwana Miller said in an interview after the show. “I want to have hope but . . . what else is there?”

Louwana Miller: Amanda’s Mother: Dead of a Broken Heart?

Louwana Miller: Amanda’s Mother: Dead of a Broken Heart?

Activist Art McKoy befriended Louwana Miller during her ordeal. He said he could tell that the stress and heartache were wearing her down. The visit with the psychic was the breaking point, he said.“From that point, Ms. Miller was never the same,” McKoy said. “I think she had given up.”

For those who say psychics like Browne, Edward et. al. somehow help or comfort those in need and repeat the phrase “What’s the harm?” there should be a real answer in what has taken place here. How much more can we stand without getting The Law involved in these sorts of horrible mind games? This is not comforting or entertainment – this is blatant criminality of the worst kind. Sylvia and her ilk make a very good living doing this day in and day out. How many other people have had their lives, hopes and dreams shattered by these predatory harpies?

Browne to Miller: “ She’s not alive, honey.”

The Hornbeck Family

The Hornbeck Family

In a related development: French television news program “Enquete exclusive – Voyants, mediums, mentalistes revelations sur leurs mysterieux pouvoirs’” which featured myself and CFI/IIG’s Jim Underdown, showcased through amazing interview footage the entire Shawn Hornbeck drama. If you are not already familiar with Browne’s mis-deeds in this matter – it’s too much to go into here. Let’s just say once again, Sylvia told Shawn’s parents on nationwide television he was dead when he was later found quite well and alive.

French program here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34Iji3aMAa0

Not only do the Hornbeck parents come forward and speak out about the emotional damage that ravenous bad-tempered shrew Browne inflicted on their lives, they also give a very negative shout out to that other slimeball James VanPraagh for doing the same sort of “comforting.”

Maureen Hancock

Maureen Hancock

In the “Enquete” program, “The Medium Next Door,” everybody’s darling Maureen Hancock also gets her fair share of explicit exposing when Jim and I reveal the latest trend in mediumship: using “hot reads” taken from credit card information to later reveal dramatic “hits” in a live audience performance. This isn’t a magic or mentalism show folks, this is a con pure and simple.

Later in another segment of the program, Hancock is also shown in her opulent home psychically picking out suspects and leading police (and another mother of a missing woman) on wild goose chases that lead everybody off the track. It is obvious Maureen is bluffing her way through the whole segment. Hancock has absolutely no track record anywhere for her claims as a successful “psychic detective” – other than her known background an “associate member” of the Licensed Private Detective Association of Massachusetts. What might that tell us about her ability to suss out information on people? So why isn’t this mis-use of private information a crime? Isn’t this tantamount to filing a false police report? Having the French television crew capturing her deceptions on camera in the presence of their own law enforcement officers should be extra embarrassing for the police involved. How do you feel about being seen internationally as dupes for this woman?

MORE . . .

Also see: Sylvia Browne’s Biggest Blunder (iLLumiNuTTi.com)

Related articles
  • When Psychics Fail: The Sylvia Browne and Amanda Berry Fiasco (skepticalteacher.wordpress.com)
  • Amanda Berry is alive and well … and proves Sylvia Browne’s to be a total fraud (skeptical-science.com)
  • Dead Wrong, …Again (skepticblog.org)
  • Shame on you, Sylvia Browne, for telling Amanda Berry’s mother her daughter was dead. (badscience.net)
  • Psychic Sylvia Browne told Amanda Berry’s mother she was dead (deathandtaxesmag.com)
  • Psychic on The Montel Williams Show said Amanda Berry was dead. She wasn’t. (macleans.ca)
  • Psychic Sylvia Browne slammed for declaring Amanda Berry dead (twitchy.com)
  • Fans lash out at ‘psychic’ Sylvia Browne for false Ohio abduction prediction (rawstory.com)

Red Flags Of Quackery

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Acupuncture, Alternative Medicine, Educational, Homeopathy, Medical, Metaphysics, Pseudoscientific, Quackery, Reiki, Scams, Superstition, Urban Legends. Tagged: Fallacy, Informal Logic, Maki, Philosophy, Philosophy of Logic, Quackery. Leave a Comment

Created by Maki at Sci-ence, the Red Flags Of Quackery inforgraphic below lays out many of the gambits and logical fallacies you may encounter by charlatans and true believers.


(click image for larger view)

2012-01-09-redflags2

(click image for larger view)

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Energy Medicine – Noise-Based Pseudoscience

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Acupuncture, Alternative Medicine, Homeopathy, Hypnosis, Magic, Medical, Metaphysics, Pseudoscientific, Quackery, Reiki, Superstition. Tagged: Cargo Cult, Cargo cult science, Harriet Hall, pseudoscience, Richard Feynman, Science-Based Medicine, Signal-to-noise ratio, Steven Novella. 1 comment

by Steven Novella via Science-Based Medicine

energyhealingSo-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is largely philosophy-based medicine rather than science based. There are a few core concepts that are endlessly recycled in various forms, but it is mythology and culture, not grounded in the rigorous methods of science that allow us to tell the difference between our satisfying fantasies and hard reality. Sometimes proponents of such philosophies try to cloak their beliefs in the appearance of science, resulting in what we simply call pseudoscience.

Harriet Hall coined an excellent term to refer to such pseudoscience -” Tooth Fairy science.” In her metaphor, pseudoscientists sometimes act like scientists by describing the details and statistics of their claimed phenomenon (such as examining all the details of the Tooth Fairy phenomenon) without ever testing the reality of the phenomenon itself. The fundamental concept at the core of their belief is never challenged, or only superficially so, and they proceed prematurely from their faulty premise.

Another term that I find extremely apt is “Cargo Cult science,” a term coined by Richard Feynman. This is a reference to the cargo cults of New Guinea – the pre-industrial tribes were observed building straw mock-ups of control towers, planes, and runways in hopes that the planes they observed flying over head would deliver their cargo to them. In other words – the cargo cults mimicked the superficial appearance of an aviation infrastructure but had none of the real essence or function (because of lack of understanding). This is a perfect analogy to much of what passes for science within the world of CAM.

reiki-hand_200pxNot that we need another analogy, but I have often described such pseudoscience as being lost in the noise. In any endeavor to detect something there is the issue of the signal to noise ratio.  Often the core challenge of scientific research is pulling the signal out from the background noise, or (more to the point) deciding if there is a signal in the noise, or if the information represents pure noise. In this analogy “noise” refers to any randomness in the data or interference from effects other than the alleged signal of interest. What I find is that pseudoscientific investigations of tooth fairy phenomena are completely lost in the noise of data, seeing whatever phantom “signals” support their philosophy. Elaborate but entirely illusory constructs are often crafted (or retrofitted to) these phantom signals.

Energy medicine is a perfect example of cargo-cult, Tooth Fairy, noise-based pseudoscience.

Energy medicine began its life as a philosophy-based notion, and is still philosophy-based, but many of its modern practitioners are desperate for the respectability that science has to offer. Some have therefore erected a pseudoscientific facade for this pre-scientific superstition.

One example I was recently asked to investigate is the Heartmath institute., which promotes an energy-medicine based claim that the heart sends out “energy” waves that regulate the body, including the brain.

MORE . . . .

The Secret Life of J. Allen Hynek

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 8, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Area 51, Debunk, Educational, Roswell, UFO. Tagged: csi, J. Allen Hynek, Jacque Vallee, Project Blue Book, Stanley Kubrick, UFO, ufo phenomenon, Ufology, Unidentified flying object. 1 comment

via The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry

According to legend, the astronomer J. Allen Hynek was a skeptic before becoming an outspoken UFOlogist, but is the legend true? This article takes a look at Hynek’s unusual life and career.

Allen_Hynek_Jacques_Vallee_1_300px

Allen Hynek (left) and Jacques Vallee (right)

It was a “road to Damascus” experience for the Mad Men era. In 1966, the respected astronomer J. Allen Hynek had gone—seemingly overnight—from a determined debunker to an ardent apostle of the UFO gospel. A longtime consultant to Project Blue Book noted for his skeptical stance toward UFOs, Hynek suddenly began telling anyone who would listen that the UFO phenomenon merited serious scientific scrutiny. The great director Stanley Kubrick was among the many who listened. In a 1968 Playboy interview promoting his science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick spoke approvingly of what he termed Hynek’s “belated but exemplary conversion” (Phillips 2001, 58).

In fact, the professor’s apparent trans­formation from skeptic to UFO proponent was not quite the conversion event that it appeared on the surface. Since his teens Hynek had been an enthusiastic though closeted student of the occult. The French-born Jacques Vallee, a computer scientist and UFO author, was one of the few persons who knew Hynek’s secret. Hynek once told Vallee that he had become an astron­omer in order to discover “the very limitations of science, the places where it broke down, the phenomena it didn’t explain” (Vallee 1996, 232). Nonethe­less, the scientist’s public U-turn gave a big boost to the UFO movement, lending it a measure of credibility, and made Hynek into a celebrity as the nation’s “foremost expert on flying saucers” (O’Toole 1966). For two decades people could point to Hynek and say, “He’s a trained scientist, an astronomer no less: if even he believes in this UFO stuff then there must be something to it.”

MORE . . . .

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History of the Roswell UFO Incident

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 7, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Conspiracy, Roswell, UFO, Urban Legends. Tagged: Center for UFO Studies, HowStuffWorks, Kevin D. Randle, New Mexico, Roswell, Roswell UFO incident, Stanton T. Friedman, UFO Crash at Roswell, Unidentified flying object. Leave a Comment

Via How Stuff Works

ufo-crash1-200x225On the evening of July 2, 1947, several witnesses in and near Roswell, New Mexico, observed a disc-shaped object moving swiftly in a northwesterly direction through the sky. The following morning Mac Brazel, foreman of a ranch located near tiny Corona, New Mexico, rode out on horseback to move sheep from one field to another. Accompanying him was a young neighbor boy, Timothy D. Proctor. As they rode, they came upon strange debris — various-size chunks of metallic material — running from one hilltop, down an arroyo, up another hill, and running down the other side. To all appearances some kind of aircraft had exploded.

In fact Brazel had heard something that sounded like an explosion the night before, but because it happened during a rainstorm (though it was different from thunder), he had not looked into the cause. Brazel picked up some of the pieces. He had never seen anything like them. They were extremely light and very tough.

By the time events had run their course, the world would be led to believe that Brazel had found the remains of a weather balloon. For three decades, only those directly involved in the incident would know this was a lie. And in the early 1950s, when an enterprising reporter sought to re-investigate the story, those who knew the truth were warned to tell him nothing.

Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris found 75 miles north west of Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The debris was identified as that of a radar target.

The cover-up did not begin to unravel until the mid-1970s, when two individuals who had been in New Mexico in 1947 separately talked with investigator Stanton T. Friedman about what they had observed. One, an Albuquerque radio station employee, had witnessed the muzzling of a reporter and the shutting down of an in-progress teletyped news story about the incident. The other, an Army Air Force intelligence officer, had led the initial recovery operation. The officer, retired Maj. Jesse A. Marcel, stated flatly that the material was of unearthly origin.

The uncovering of the truth about the Roswell incident — so called because it was from Roswell Field, the nearest Air Force base, that the recovery operation was directed — would be an excruciatingly difficult process. It continues to this day, even after publication of three books and massive documentation gleaned from interviews with several hundred persons as well as other evidence. Besides being the most important case in UFO history — the one with the potential not to settle the issue of UFOs but to identify them as extraterrestrial spacecraft — the Roswell incident is also the most fully investigated. The principal investigators have been Friedman, William L. Moore (coauthor of the first of the books, The Roswell Incident [1980]), Kevin D. Randle, and Donald R. Schmitt. Randle and Schmitt, associated with the Chicago-based Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), authored the most comprehensive account so far, UFO Crash at Roswell (1991). From this research, the outlines of a complex, bizarre episode have emerged.

More . . .

This photo is from the Air Force’s ‘Roswell Report,’ released June 24, 1997. It is said to show insulation bags used to protect temperature sensitive equipment. (Photo: AP)

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Inside Source Claims “Shooting Bigfoot” Documentary Climax is Just a Big Hoax

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 7, 2013
Posted in: Bigfoot, Creatures, Fraud, Hoax, Myths, Pseudoscientific, Story Telling, Urban Legends. Tagged: Bigfoot, Cryptozoology, Dobbs, Jeff, Morgan Matthew, sasquatch, Squatch, Toronto, Who Forted? Magazine. 2 comments

By Greg Newkirk via Who Forted? Magazine

Jeff, a squatter who appears prominently in the film as a “weird homeless guy”, but as it turns out.. was actually part of the crew, says "I can tell you right now, all the shooting and stuff like that is staged.”

“I can tell you right now, all the shooting and stuff like that is staged.”

Since the Sasquatch hunting documentary Shooting Bigfoot premiered at Toronto’s “Hot Docs” festival this week, the cryptozoological community has been buzzing with widespread allegations that the film wasn’t so much a documentary as it was science fiction, but all they had to base their opinions on were a few broken promises, previous hoaxes, and inconclusive footage.. until now.

Thanks to the investigative prowess of J.R. Bob Dobbs Jr, a man involved in the filming of the movie has come forward claiming that infamous Bigfoot hunter (and hoaxer) Rick Dyer and director Morgan Matthews coordinated an elaborate hoax for the film’s climactic scene, a tense moment during which Dyer has long claimed to have actually shot and killed a Sasquatch.

Dobbs met up with Jeff, a squatter who appears prominently in the film as a “weird homeless guy”, but as it turns out.. was actually part of the crew tasked with being a “lookout” during the pivotal “Bigfoot killing” scene.

“They had me right on that hill back there watching for people… they radioed in letting me know before they did anything, so I knew what was going on,”  he tells Dobbs, adding that he had to walk in and out of the camp all night, and there wasn’t a Squatch in sight.

dyershooting_250pxDobbs’ offscreen partner tells Jeff that internet commentators were picking apart the film’s final scene, saying, “at the end you see some sort of scuffle and Rick with his gun, and then Morgan Matthews, the director, gets knocked over by something.. can’t really tell what’s going on, and then at the end he’s in a hospital. Doesn’t really explain what happened to him.”

“Did you see him beat up or anything like that?” she asked.

“He actually walked out of here just fine, got in the truck, put everything away – he was carrying at least 80 pounds of gear, at least… I can tell you right now, all the shooting and stuff like that is staged.”

Jeff went on to mention that the money shot was actually filmed multiple times and that Dyer’s gun wasn’t even firing live ammunition, a fact that would certainly make it hard to kill a Bigfoot, unless they’re just sensitive to loud noises.

MORE (Including Video) . . .

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5 Things I’ve noticed about… the show “Ancient Aliens”

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 7, 2013
Posted in: Aliens, Crop Circles, Mysteries, Pseudohistory, Pseudoscientific, Pyramids, Stonehenge, UFO. Tagged: Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Baghdad Battery, crystal skulls, Great Pyramid of Giza, history, Pumapunku, Social Sciences, The Soap Box. Leave a Comment

Via The Soap Box

Ever watch the show “Ancient Aliens“, the History Channel show that claims that humans were visited by aliens in the past? Well I have, and there are some things that I have noticed about that show.

So here are five things I’ve noticed about the show “Ancient Aliens”.

5. Their answer for everything is “Aliens”.

Ancient aliens 823_300pxAccording to the “experts” on that show, almost everything we have built in the ancient world was built by aliens.

It doesn’t matter if it is a giant structure like the Great Pyramid of Giza, or some mundane but interesting object like the Baghdad Battery, or even something that was proven to be made in modern times, such as the Crystal Skulls, according to the experts on the show, they were all either built by aliens, or their construction was guided by aliens.

Heck, even our own existence is, according to them, the result of aliens messing with our genes a long time ago.

4. The “experts” have a “pics, or it didn’t happen” type mentality.

All of the “experts” on that show apparently want exact details about how a megalithic structure was built, and if they don’t have those exact details, they assume that aliens built it, not humans (where as with most scientists or archaeologists, it’s the other way around).

This is somewhat similar to the phrase “pics, or it didn’t happen” where when someone makes a claim on the internet that they did something pretty awesome, if someone is skeptical of the claim they will sometimes say “pics, or it didn’t happen”. Although some might argue that this is more of a reverse of that…

3. They get their facts way wrong.

Many of the “facts” that are presented on that show are just down right wrong. A great example of this would be many of the claims they make about Pumapunku that simply aren’t true.

According to the show Pumapunku is 14,000 years old, when in fact it’s closer to 1,500 years old. Also, according to show, the stone blocks at the site are basalt and granite. In fact the site was constructed using andesite and red sandstone.

MORE . . .

Also see …

Ancient Aliens Debunked

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31 Inanimate Objects With Secret Inner Lives – Pareidolia

Posted by Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB) on May 6, 2013
Posted in: Brain Works, Ghosts, Human Perception, Illusions, Optical Illusion, Perception. Tagged: cloud, ghost, Ghost hunting, Pareidolia, perception, skeptic, solar system, The Skeptic's Dictionary. 1 comment

How many times have you heard a paranormal investigator claim to see faces and images of the deceased in everything from a cinnabon swirl to a waft of smoke rising from a candle? Are they seeing the deceased? No. What they’re experiencing is a nearly uncontrollable urge by our brains to seek out and identify patterns. Especially human faces. This phenomenon has a name . . .

Pareidolia

«A psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.» – Wikipedia


«. . . a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct.

«Under ordinary circumstances, pareidolia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based upon sense perception.» – The Skeptic’s Dictionary

Try to NOT see the face in the shadow.

How powerless are we to our own brains? Look at the image to the right and try to NOT see a face in the shadow cast on the garage door. Bet you can’t!!!

See? Our brains are hardwired to seek out and find faces.

Just HOW hardwired are we to see faces where none exist? Look at the following montage of photos and try to NOT see faces. Prepare to lose control of your mind to the power of pareidolia!!!! Bwahaha!!!!!!

Mason I. Bilderberg (MIB)

Via BuzzFeed

This hinge is fascinated by your long and meandering anecdote. No, really, do go on.
This hinge is fascinated by your long and meandering anecdote. No, really, do go on.
This bit of tupperware is terrified by what lies ahead.
This bit of tupperware is terrified by what lies ahead.
These boxes are quietly plotting something diabolical.
These boxes are quietly plotting something diabolical.
This tap is thinking back to a time long ago, before the weight of the world crushed its spirit.
This tap is thinking back to a time long ago, before the weight of the world crushed its spirit.

This ladder sometimes goes to scream, but nothing comes out. It's the strangest thing.
This ladder sometimes goes to scream, but nothing comes out. It’s the strangest thing.
This judgmental handbag disapproves of your lifestyle.
This judgmental handbag disapproves of your lifestyle.
This pepper doesn't want to die. Not now. Not like this.
This pepper doesn’t want to die. Not now. Not like this.
These slippers are just livid.
These slippers are just livid.


Click here for 23 more mind-controlling examples of Pareidolia.

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