Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 In this last appendix I have no idea what is happening. This is appendix G: Kurzweil vs Hopkins. If you remember way back in chapter 12 “The Secret Government” Cooper detailed the arrangement between the US government and the secret aliens overlords…or at least that is what he said he was going to do. Instead it was just meandering tale of anecdotes with little to no factual claims. You might be thinking, “I’ve heard this story prior to this blog, and it seemed weird but coherent.” If you do think that, it’s because you’re remembering Chris Carter’s version of the conspiracy that he pushed on the X-Files when star Gillian Anderson became pregnant and they needed to create the meta-story to explain her character’s disappearance. On page 230 (231 on the PDF) we get this line, “ I have discovered that Whitley Strieber is a CIA asset, as is Budd Hopkins.” Cooper explains that he felt that Strieber was not right because he couldn’t look Cooper in the eye. Strieber had taken the positio...

 Quick correction: last week should have ended on page 420. Appendix B would make more sense if we learned about the government coverup of extra-terrestrials and UFOs in any significant manner during this book. We just haven’t and it makes this extra-long part just an add-on. Cooper is like, “hey look, alien stuff, it’s all true.” It would even make sense if it had a place in the narrative, but this stuff does not. I sincerely wonder if Cooper had an idea for a UFO book but abandoned the project and this is the stuff that’s left over. This week begins with a letter from Col. L. Gordon Cooper (USAF) to Ambassador Griffith of Grenada. Cooper is legitimate astronaut, he flew in the Mercury and Gemini missions, and just missed out on being the commander of Apollo 13. The story that Col. Cooper tells is that he saw some UFOs over West Germany in the 50s, and that even other Air Force and Astronauts are reluctant to share their stories. That’s it. It’s a lot of nothing, and because this ...

 There is an interesting balance that one must strike when discussing aliens. If you see something in the sky, you can admit that it was a UFO. You can even admit that you think you saw an alien spacecraft, but as soon as you start getting specific about what kind of alien spacecraft it was—you start to look like a crank. The balance is between just enough knowledge to imply what it is that you saw, but not enough that you know what it was. In the UFOlogy world this presented a problem, the conspiracy theorists needed to constantly toe that line because eventually the blurry photographs just lose appeal. We are still in Appendix B, and we’ve been provided with one person’s testimony that they built storage warehouses for aircraft crash recovery. I’m using the word “aircraft” in the loosest sense of the term; it was a craft that used to be in the air. I am giving the unnamed writer the benefit of the doubt that he’s not lying. Then we were treated to two really blurry and poorly cop...

 When we last left off, a proper post that is, we discussed the weird aside that Cooper takes on the JFK assassination. It appears, almost out of nowhere, in a chapter about aliens. The very gossamer connective tissue is that Cooper claims Kennedy took the presidency, found out about the aliens, then threatened to reveal everything in a year. This was not acceptable to the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) nor the JASON Project, so they had the president assassinated.  Cooper is going to jump around time more than he usually does. The first thing he brings up is Moonbase Luna. This is a stupid name for it. "Moonbase Moon" is how that translates. Cooper claims he has pictures, but he never shows them to us (I'm willing to leave room for the possibility that they do appear in the print version of the book). Luna is run by the world conspirators, who   meet "on a nuclear submarine beneath the polar icecap ."  Ok, I'll give him a point for this one. If you want...

Last week, we covered the three alternatives that JASON suggested to the ruling elites to save the Earth from environmental catastrophe due to overpopulation. The three alternatives were: underground cities (ala Dr. Strangelove), fleeing into space, or blowing a hole in the atmosphere to let the heat out (like in Spaceballs...kind of). I cut the article short because Cooper settles on a strange combination of the two. The third was rejected, not because it's implausible to him but because it's objective. We would know if this had happened. Because open nuclear weapons testing had been banned and Starfish Prime had already been detonated which did not blast a hole in the atmosphere--Cooper cannot pretend that this is an actual solution.  I actually cut the article short because his combination of the two solutions was to accept that a plague was used to get the population down to manageable numbers. Cooper writes, " It was decided BY THE ELITE that since the population must...

We are deep into the UFO stuff, and Cooper has named one. Well, the nickname that was given to it by researchers, and now we are going to get the king of the aliens, Lord Krlll/Crlll. 20 February 1954, Lord Krlll, the omnipotent Highness, landed and met with President Eisenhower who shortly afterward suffered a heart attack.  Cooper tells us that, " In the American tradition of disdain for royal titles he was secretly called Original Hostage Crlll, or Krlll. " I don't know why this is mentioned. When King Charles III comes over, or the Pope; we don't mention that there's a secret nickname for them because Americans do not like royal titles. It's not even true, we just don't as a Constitutional matter award them to our own citizens. Former presidents have had no problems addressing people by their royal titles. The secret nickname doesn't even make sense. He (?) isn't even a hostage.  Cooper presses on detailing a letter from Gerald Light, whom he d...

Cooper is going full aliens on us. I've made this observation a few times now but I do feel that it's needed again: this isn't smart of Cooper. Conspiracism in the 90s has two large camps--one is the anti-government/anti-UN usually racist (but necessarily) militia movement. The other is the UFO groups. Currently, these groups are largely blended together. The deeper that one gets into "Q," for example, the more likely that aliens are going to show up in their worldview. This isn't a real problem...unless you are trying to convince people that the thing you believe is real.  I'm sure that most of you out there believe that extra-terrestrial life exists, you probably also believe that extra-terrestrial intelligence exists as well. Some of you may even believe that those UFO/UAP sightings are legitimate- however, a far cry from believing that there is an international conspiracy run by the Illuminati which is controlled by aliens. This is off-putting to us ...

The Knox contribution is finished and now we move on to another thing that Cooper didn't write--I'm being a little unfair because this is the transcription of a phone interview he did with Randall Terpstra. Cooper does not give any background of Randall Terpstra, so the chapter begins and we are just thrust into the conversation with this individual.  Cooper explains in the very brief preface that in his "Secret Government" video from May 1989, he was tempted to remove his claims about the Nixon resignation. Cooper's claim, along with a variety of UFO claims that he subsequently retracted, that the resignation was a coup against the US. However, he then claims that three people came forward to confirm his belief, and this Terpstra is one of them. Of course, this doesn't mean anything because there's no indication about who Terpstra is. As far as we know, he's just a guy who thinks that Cooper was right...and in the conspiracy world that's good enou...

The titles for these chapters are quite something, I've never paid attention to them before, but they are quite revealing. Here is the beginning of chapter 9: " Anatomy of An Alliance The Logic for the New World Order The Glue that Binds That Alliance of Power  and The Consequences 'All that is necessary for evil to triumph  is for good men to do nothing.'    -Edmund Burke 1729-1797 As a quick aside: in my research, I discovered something very interesting, Irish Philosopher Edmund Burke never said this quote , even though it is widely mis-attributed to him.  Back to the task at hand: what the chapter title reveals is a lack of discipline in the writer. Writing instruction repeats a mantra so often it has become a cliche, show don't tell. If you are unfamiliar, it means that the writer should rely on the reader to understand what is going on. If "Bill" is angry, it's better writing to let the character's actions reflect his anger than to state ...

Last week Cooper declared that George HW Bush was the King of America because SB 2834 gave him more liberality in directing funds toward covert actions. It only did this provided that the president did not direct already allocated funds somewhere else and if it were provided in writing what the funds were for. The reason for SB 2834 was to prevent the president from selling weapons to hostile foreign states in order to fund illegal wars in South America. It's a legitimate conspiracy that the bill was attempting to stop, it's a bit curious that Cooper does not focus on Iran-Contra more than he does. I'm not trying to cast aspersions on him, this isn't like how Alex Jones ignores all of the rules/laws that Trump broke/alleged to have broken, it's just weird that he does not concentrate on it more.  Cooper is going to continue with his grand mistake. His mistake, I should be clear, is that he is going to attempt to understand a law while lacking the legal knowledge to ...

When conspiracy theories get large enough they begin to get desperate. Your standard event conspiracy, such as the Titanic didn't sink theory, can rely on some errant data and then work the conclusion with winks and nods. It's not a good method of argumentation but it at least the evidence is grounded in reality. The more and more a theory grows it gets substantially more difficult to sustain some plausibility in the evidence itself. The vast super conspiracies concerning the Illuminati are going to inevitably begin claiming outlandish things, i.e. that Katy Perry's Dark Horse video is a black magic ritual. This is because a proper theory needs to make predictions and conspiracy theories have to grasp at straws to even attempt to do this.  In making the predictions or even trying for a cogent conclusion some conspiracy theories resort to an interesting tactic: using fictional narratives to bolster their claims. To be entirely honest, I'll make reference to a fictional ...

Let's begin with stating some answers/questions. The first is whether or not there is life in the universe aside from Earth life? We would have to honestly answer: probably. I can recall some finds on meteorites that seemed to have fossilized single cell organisms on them, but I do not remember if those finds were confirmed or validated. However, it seems unlikely given the scope of the Cosmos, with a materialistic outlook, that this planet is the only place with life in or on it. The next question should be obvious: is there intelligent life in the universe other than on this planet. Again, probably. The answer is the same for the same reasoning. Without adopting both a unique and privileged place in the universe it would be impossible to rule out the possibility that there are other intelligent life forms somewhere in the great sky of the universe. The last question: has intelligent life visited this planet? This answer is more distinct: extremely doubtful. There are a number...