Would you expect any military base, let alone the infamous Area 51, to be the “most boring” place you could ever work? Don’t they get to play with ET and fly spaceships? Or at least know what really happened in Roswell in 1947?
Not so much according to Thorton “T.D.” Barnes, former special-projects engineer at Area 51 in Nevada.
Actually, he says what people thought were alien-piloted UFOs in the 1960's were really spy planes being tested at over 2,000 miles per hour at altitudes of 90,000 feet, which would produce flashes of light high in the sky.
"We considered it to be a bonus. They [the UFO sightings] made it easier to conceal what we were doing," says Barnes.
While it's true that most reported UFO sightings really can be identified, I still have some questions about this random admittance of “truth:”
Why come out with it half a century later?
If the military at Area 51 was using the idea of UFOs and aliens as a cover-up for something else, how odd/questionable/bad must that something else be?
Is this just another cover-up?
(Image: Strangely hilarious, although I'm not sure if it's real. From GreyFalcon.us.)
An agreement between two or more persons to perform together an illegal, wrongful, or subversive act, as if by sinister design.
But conspiracies aren't always bad; an example of a "good" conspiracy would be the the Underground Railroad. On the other hand, because conspiracies are based on lies and deceit, they're usually so disgusting, terrible, and just plain wrong that they need to be kept secret to prevent public outrage - and to keep the lie going.
Here are 5 of the worst.
(Not to sound like a stereotypical conspiracy nut with tin foil on my head, but isn't it strange that most of these involve a government of some sort?)
Jeffrey Amherst was the Commander-in-Chief of the British Army mid-18th century, and is also believed to be responsible for purposely giving smallpox-infected blankets to American Indians, an early form of germ warfare.
Some people are skeptical about these stories, while others assert that the infected blankets were not intentionally distributed to the Indians, or that Lord Jeff himself is not to blame.
Two hard-to-read letters , however, suggest not only that it happened, but that it was intentional, and that Amherst was responsible – assuming, of course, the letters are authentic:
Amherst to Bouquet (16 July 1763) approves this plan in a postscript and suggests "to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race."
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is an anti-Semitic forgery claiming an elaborate plot of Jewish world domination. It was first privately printed in 1897 and was first made public in Russia in 1905, when Nicholas II and his secret police distributed the work and presented it as true.
It was later published in 1920 in a Michigan newspaper started by Henry Ford mainly to attack Jews and Communists. Ford even wrote a book that was heavily influenced by the text —The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.
Adolf Hitler later used the Protocols to help justify his attempt to exterminate Jews during World War II.
Beginning in 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service conducted an experiment on 399 black men who were unknowingly suffering from syphilis. The men were never treated for the disease, but their symptoms and the progression of the disease was studied.
(Experimenters wanted to see how blacks and whites reacted differently to syphilis, but whites were not part of the study.)
By the end of the experiment, 28 of the men had died directly of syphilis, 100 died of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis.
Even when penicillin was discovered in the 1940s—the first real cure for syphilis— the study participants were deliberately denied the medication
The experiments ended 40 years later when the story finally broke in the Washington Star on July 25, 1972.
MKULTRA was the code name for a covert CIA mind-control and chemical interrogation research program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence. The program began in the early 1950s, continuing at least through the late 1960s - although some argue it’s still being done - and used United States citizens as its test subjects.
These are just some of the other disturbing aims of the CIA’s mind-altering substance studies, aside from creating manchurian candidates:
Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
A material which…in very small amounts will make it impossible for a man to perform any physical activity whatsoever.
Another study of MKULTRA was Operation Midnight Climax - and yes, it was just as perverted as it sounds. Women (prostitutes on the CIA payroll) lured men to apartment hideaways in New York City and San Francisco. They then fed them LSD or marijuana while experimenters watched through two-way mirrors and recorded the sounds.
In 2004 images began to surface of the abuse, torture, sodomy, and murder of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq in a news report on CBS’s Sixty Minutes II, acts that were committed by personnel of the United States Army.
With nothing to lose, Rather accused CBS management of sitting on the Abu Ghraib story, the evidence for which was discovered in early 2004 by Mary Mapes, a producer for 60 Minutes II with over 20 years experience.
April 1st has come and gone and the crafty Conficker virus has yet to have the catastrophic Y2K effect experts anticipated. Will something happen today? Tomorrow? The day after tomorrow?
Still, no one knows. I’m starting to think this whole Conficker thing really is a hoax, a scam created by all those anti-virus companies to scare people into buying their products.
Or, maybe the fake security software getting picked up by search engines IS the next phase of Conficker:
Scammers game Google’s search engine by creating Web sites full of search terms. Another tactic is spamming high-traffic Web sites that lead back to their malicious site in order to drive their Web site up the search ranks.
The fake security software Web sites will ask a user to download a file that scans a machine for malware. The software usually tells the user the PC has malicious software even if it isn’t infected. The software will then badger the user to buy the questionable security program (from Information Security Resources).
(Is it just me, or does this kind of sound like all the news reports badgering people to install Norton and the like?)
My half-assed conspiracy theory aside, as long as you're fearful of other viruses and already have your computer protected, you should be safe from this one too.
You’ve probably heard about ghostwriting, especially when it comes to super-long novels, which, let’s face it, takes a lot of precious time.
But Twittering? That’s like, what? A sentence?
Even so, celebrities aren’t doing it. So if you’re following the tweets of 50 Cent, John Mayer, Kanye West, or Britney Spears, you’re really getting tweeted by “hired ghosts”.
In fact, some of these celebs don’t even like Twitter. (“Like” is a nice way of putting it.)
This is what John Mayer said to Marc Malkin of E!:
Twitter is "inherently silly and it's inherently dumb...If you really think that Twitter is the pathway to spiritual enlightenment, well...it's one step away from sending pictures of your poop."
I can’t help but laugh, but I bet his 400,000 followers are pissed.
My whole plan was to make up some completely absurd story about the origin of April Fools’ Day, but since I’m not very good at pranks, and not really a big fan of pranks being played on me, I decided not to pull your leg.
Instead, I picked some of the funniest practical jokes that actually did play out according to the Museum of Hoaxes. Geez, people sure are gullible:
Virgin Cola’s Blue Cans
1996: Virgin Cola announced that in the interest of consumer safety it had integrated a new technology into its cans. When the cola passed its sell-by date, the liquid would react with the metal in the can, turning the can itself bright blue. Virgin warned that consumers should therefore avoid purchasing all blue cans. The joke was that Pepsi had recently unveiled its newly designed bright blue cans.
The Left-Handed Whopper
1998: Burger King published a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the introduction of a "Left-Handed Whopper.” According to the advertisement, the new Whopper included the same ingredients as the original, but all the condiments were rotated 180 degrees. Thousands of customers had gone into restaurants to request the new sandwich, as well as the 'right handed' version." (Kind of reminds me of the new Diamond Shreddies.)
The Case of the Interfering Bras
1982: The Daily Mail reported that a local manufacturer had sold 10,000 "rogue bras.” According to the article, the support wire in these bras had been made out of a kind of copper that produced static electricity, which was interfering with local television and radio broadcasts. The chief engineer of British Telecom immediately ordered that all his female laboratory employees disclose what type of bra they were wearing.
You can also click here for this year's hoaxes, or here if you like cruel jokes. Don’t worry; you won't be judged.
In case you haven't heard the hundreds of news reports or from one of your techie friends (as I just did this weekend), there’s a computer virus going around that, from what I can gather, is really really bad.
So potentially harmful, in fact, that Microsoft has offered a $250,000 bounty on the heads of the jerks who created it, and who have already infected millions of computers.
The Conficker virus is set to activate on April 1st and, as if this already doesn't feel like Y2K all over again, no one knows what's going to happen.
Conficker is the latest example of a type of malware called a botnet, which gives a cybercriminal control over an infected computer. The criminal can steal information stored on the computer or make it do things like send spam emails...
What sets Conficker apart is that it’s more sophisticated than any previous piece of malware. It uses a new form of cryptography, can be controlled by criminals in multiple ways, and updates itself.
...the bad guys haven’t done anything with the computers they control yet, which means they could do, well, anything.
Anything?
"Perhaps in the best case, Conficker may be used as a sustained and profitable platform for massive Internet fraud and theft.
In the worst case, Conficker could be turned into a powerful offensive weapon for performing concerted information warfare attacks that could disrupt not just countries, but the Internet itself.(Globe and Mail)
But now some experts are saying there’s nothing to worry about...as long as you don't click on pop-ups and regularly do anti-virus and Windows updates. But even so, we won't really know until April 1st.
To make me even more paranoid until then, while looking all this up I also came across I site warning that searching “Conficker” could put your computer at a greater risk of getting it. Super...
But whether all this an April Fools’ prank or the real deal, I have to wonder why people create these viruses in the first place. Are they greedy? Lonely? Ingenious? Or some hideous combination of the three?
P.S. Virus-makers I may have insulted just now, please don't ruin my computer!
Of all the 11 people who took my poll, no one believes in Bigfoot!
Let’s explore some possible reasons why...
The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization cites thousands of reports of possible sightings or “vocalizations” of Sasquatch, Bigfoot, or in simpler terms, a “large, hairy, humanlike creature.”
Hmm, that sounds like it could be my friend’s dad, some guy I once saw at the bus stop, or a Star Wars character.
Maybe it’s not so much that people don’t believe in Bigfoot, but that it’s not that crazy of an idea. Big deal? There’s so many species of animal out there that the elusive Bigfoot could just be another one, or something in the early stages of human evolution – which would be pretty cool.
Plus, anyone can just put on a Chewbacca costume and walk around in the woods.
Apparently a bishop – you know, someone who, by definition and requirement, believes in God – denies the Holocaust and ignores the murder of 11,000,000 people because there’s “no proof” that it occurred.
Um, is that what you call hypocrisy, or just plain nuts?
A letter written to the Belfast Telegraph caught my attention because it asked those questions (but not in those words, exactly), and it got me searching for more.
I found another article, this one from BBC News, which reported that Bishop Richard Williamson claims the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is authentic. This anti-Semitic piece of garbage supposedly reveals a secret plot for Jewish world domination, and has been proven a hoax numerous times since the early 20th century – hence the garbage comment.
To attempt to be fair, I should refer to this video in which Williamson explains that people were never killed in gas chambers. He doesn’t specifically deny that Jews were killed in Nazi concentration camps, but he says it was more likely 200,000 to 300,000.
Even more ridiculous is Williamson’s attempt to exonerate himself from his clearly anti-Semitic beliefs: "My definition of anti-Semitism is to be against every single Jew purely because he's a Jew. That's not at all my case. I once had a Jewish rabbi come and speak to seminarians. Does that sound to you like anti-Semitism?"
Well, no, but the part about the Holocaust never happening, and supporting the authenticity of a piece of hate literature that’s been used to justify the oppression and genocide of Jews, is.
Plus, it kind of reminds me of that part in movies when a white person is accused of being racist and all they can come up with is, “My grandma’s black. How can I be racist?”
But doing one semi-tolerant thing doesn’t make up for saying, "Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism,” or, “A woman can do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be thinking properly as a woman.”
So if denying the Holocaust isn’t anti-Semitic, does that mean calling Protestants devil-worshipers isn’t hateful? Or that claiming women are inherently stupid isn’t sexist?
Is this guy Rush Limbaugh’s best friend or something?
For the sake of being rhetorical, even IF (IF) the Holocaust didn't happen the way we're told it happened, according to Williamson at least 200,000 people were imprisoned and killed in Nazi concentration camps. Whether gas chambers were used or not, it doesn't make what happened any less awful.
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