Originally published at: What’s Really Underpinning the ‘Missing Scientists’ Conspiracy Theory - TPM – Talking Points Memo
In Rough Edges, Mike Rothschild writes about fringe groups, conspiracy theories and how the Internet broke our brains. This column is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. When the researchers began dying, it was so mysterious and intertwined that outside observers determined it had to be done with intent. First the project’s biggest funder…
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This is an industry that employs 1000s across the country, so many deaths are to be expected. 9 deaths out of 10 are fishy, 9 deaths out of a 100 are just life.
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An interesting tangential point, a conspiracy theory or 2 is often very useful for a cult.
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They did the same thing with the Bermuda Triangle in the 1970’s. Many of the disappeared ships were nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle. Many of the ‘disappearances’ were easily explainable. Other than that, ships going down in a turbulent area that also contained the world’s largest shipping lanes was not a surprise.
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It all started with the Meissner Effect back in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, some displaced scientists came to Finland to find employment. A mathematician Eugene Podkletnov showed up at the national non-ferrous mining company’s eastern lab needing work. Not really familiar with design of metallurgical refining processes, he was given some liquid nitrogen and quarter-sized tablets of YBCO and told to have at it levitating what look like fizzies tablets by spinning them in cold liquid.
Yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) is a high-temperature ceramic superconductor that loses all electrical resistance below ~93 K (-180°C). It is famous for operating above the temperature of liquid nitrogen (77 K), making it ideal for cost-effective practical applications like magnetic levitation, SQUIDs, and high-field magnets.
So far so good, but then Podkletnov started stacking his spinning fizzies on top of each other and measuring a decline of a couple percent in gravity directly above the fizzies. In other words, stack and spin enough fizzies and you could create a gravity shadow (later, “gravity shield”) all the way out to space. So that’s how flying saucers work!
While much of Podkletnov’s work has been discredited, it launched a gravity race.
Amy Eskridge mentioned Podkletnov in her anti-gravity lecture.
Given how disruptive an anti-gravity technology could be, the conspiracy theories seem inevitable. Podkletnov left Finland’s Tampere university in 1997 to do his own research, even giving Boeing a decade-long – and expensive – antigrav boner in the early 2000s. Today he is building bigger fizzies, still convinced the truth is out there as he experiments with high-voltage discharges, large ceramic superconductors, and toroid coils for impulse gravity generators.
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Haven’t heard about the Bermuda Triangle in decades. Is it missing?
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it has squared off…
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Well, we know this is an urgent issue for Pres. Trump– he didn’t say he would get to the bottom of it in “two weeks” but instead a week and a half!
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Tangential? I dunno. Yesterday, a number of commenters at TPM were insisting that the ham-fisted attempt at assassination on Saturday night was a false flag operation. At least one commenter added the PA attempt a false flag operation. There was no way of talking them down.
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What the hell is wrong with America. Ten or eleven people die or go missing in a short time and suddenly it is a conspiracy. I am not going to take this seriously until there is some evidence of a connection.
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We all seem to thrive on what we don’t really know. Conspiracy theories arise within minutes after any disaster, it’s just the human brain trying to make sense out of a random universe. That way lies madness…amplified by the shrinking world created by social media. We really do live in the worst timeline. Someone roll the ten-sided dice, stat!
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Conspiracy theories offer an odd sort of comfort. Random chance is really terrifying; terrible things happening for no reason at all is hard for many people to face. If terrible things happen to other people for no reason, then terrible things might happen to me for no reason.
Terrible things happening because of the actions of terrible yet unknown people tempers that fear, gives a sense of order and control- even if it is malevolent control, at least someone is in charge!
it’s also fun to be in the know, to have secret knowledge, to be part of the club that gets it.
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This is one of the most disappointing things that has grown in my lifetime. There have always been conspiracists and conspiracy theories, but the fuel of the internet seems to have made their proliferation exponential and instantaneous. I was very disappointed yesterday when many of the TPM commenters immediately started pounding out the false flag crap. Some of the most intelligent people I know have been sucked into this bullshit - from UFOs to BIG Pharma holding back cancer cures, it seems to spread like COVID - which became its own cottage industry of fake cures and false flag insanity. My wife’s brother died of COVID and his family thinks the coroner called the cause of death COVID because it was a scam to somehow get paid more money.
We really are not that far from the dark ages.
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I read a short story in a middle school language arts textbook about one man’s discovery of a “conspiracy” to commit murder. The main character attends an inquest for a woman who died in her bathtub out of a morbid curiosity. While there, a gentleman comes up to him randomly and mentions how this is another in a string of bathtub deaths, just check the papers.
So the man does, and sure enough, he starts seeing numerous notices of deaths in bathtubs. He becomes obsessed, researching and attending each court event, trying to figure out who could be targeting people in their baths. He notices a pattern; the man who initially tipped him off attends almost all of the court proceedings. He becomes convinced that the man is a serial killer, showing off by brazenly visiting each of his “kills.” The main character buys a gun, stalks the other man and confronts him.
I don’t quite remember if they pull back from the abyss right before the end or not, but either right before shooting the man (or after) the man reveals he’s a court reporter and bathtub deaths are common among elderly people (who the majority of the “victims” are). There was no conspiracy and no serial killer. The man had become obsessed over a non-existent pattern.
I’m not sure why that story has stuck in my mind, but I think it helped clarify for me early on that it’s easy to start seeing patterns in the noise. If you lack the proper context or don’t understand the statistical probabilities, it’s easy to skew something “normal” into something aberrant.
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The Internet has made the world a much smaller place. In the past, people prone to believing conspiracy theories had to work to find like-minded individuals. They might be the only one in their small town and were tolerated by the rest of the residents because they weren’t really harming anything with their nonsense. But with the Internet, it’s a lot easier for each person from a small community to find each other and build up a feedback loop. If someone else sees the pattern too, then it must really be there, right?
One of my teachers told us that what we really need in the modern era is to learn how to process information, not learn facts by rote. It’s easy now to look up the Gettysburg Address, so there’s less reason to memorize it, but it’s more critical that you know how to recognize that what you’re reading really is the Gettysburg Address and not some nonsense that someone put up under that name. It’s more of an inverse Dark Age; that was so-called out of a profound ignorance of the populace, whereas now we are inundated with information, but many lack the training how to process it and truly understand what is relevant.
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I got a good laugh from the Eskridge lecture slides, thanks! The missing articles from Popular Mechanics gave me a shiver, however, because a short article I had written that had appeared in the CERN Courier in 2005 has now disappeared from their archives. Maybe I’m next!
How’s this for coincidences: I got my doctorate in experimental low T physics in ‘87 at UIUC, and during my last year High Tc superconductors were discovered, and we made several different compounds in our lab, including YBaCuO (the “123” compound) which does levitate nicely. John Bardeen was an emeritus professor at that time, and we would see him at the weekly low T seminars. The BCS theory (Bardeen Cooper Schrieffer, Nobel Prize 1972) supposedly explains the Meissner Effect - except it doesn’t!
So if you don’t hear from me again, consider me a victim of this conspiracy theory.
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The author’s name is ROTHSCHILD. Maybe he’s in on the conspiracy too!!! /s
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I knew Carl Grillmair, we didn’t work together much but we would bump into each other in the halls and chat a bit. The description so far is of a random nut who thought he owned the desert and got mad that Carl told him to stay off his property, so he came over and shot him. There’s no connection to anything there, just some guy who decided to shoot someone that bothered him, plus Carl didn’t work on anything that would have anything to do with all this other stuff. It’s pretty annoying to see this popping up now, but that’s true of any of these conspiracies…where it gets really bad is when the people believing this stuff start harassing those around it as part of the conspiracy, as what happened with the Sandy Hook parents being told their kids were actors or didn’t really die.
I don’t know how this goes away, but really we need to start teaching kids how to use the internet in a way that cuts through all the noise and gets to the facts. I have been using the internet since it started, and it used to be far more fact based in the beginning, but social media especially sped up the advancement of hogwash taking the place of reality, and now AI is exponentially speeding that up as well. There was such great potential to have it be a force for knowledge and good, and I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen.
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If you really want to go down the conspiracy theory rabbit-hole, consider that the WHCD suspect went to Caltech and worked for NASA. Spooky!
I work at Caltech…it, JPL, and NASA are not the place where conspiracies like this happen. It’s pretty politically neutral overall (though there’s a lot of anger at the Trump administration over funding shenanigans), though there is definitely a strong belief in people’s rights. Besides, if we were going to start a conspiracy to overthrow the government, we’d be far smarter about it than anything else anyone has ever seen, and not get caught either.