Satanic Abuse Mass Hysteria

Although we look back at the 80s with nostalgic rose-colored glasses, it's worth remembering that the entire decade wasn't unicorns and rainbows the whole way through. One of the odder chapters in our country's history happened in the 80s, with the mass hysteria regarding "recovered memories," and Satanic cults.

Until the late 1970s, most people thought that you pretty much remembered things which had happened to you. Sure you might forget, but nothing was ever put very far back in the memory closet. You could literally be walking around living your life with no idea that you were repeatedly sexually abused as a child.

According to her book, you may remember your childhood as being normal and pleasant, but that could be a lie. Under hypnosis, perfectly average people suddenly "recovered" memories of the most horrific abuse at the hands of their parents and caretakers.

This was like a depth charge set off in the psyche of a country that was just beginning to feed off the more lurid daytime TV talk shows. Ironically, the rise in awareness of incest and child sexual abuse set the stage for what was to come. By giving real survivors a framework for discussing their past and healing, we also gave non-abused people (and their therapists) a framework for planting false memories.

For in fact, people who underwent this hypnosis treatment essentially had these terrible memories implanted in them, due to botched hypnosis sessions by unqualified (although ultimately well-intentioned) therapists.

The "recovered memory" phenomenon is what kick-started the Satanic abuse panic. Many of these lurid (and false) recovered memories featured Satanic cults performing blood sacrifice, child rape, and other horrors during their rituals. Some people soon alleged that thousands of kids were being abducted and murdered by Satanic cults every year.

These numbers never quite added up, but that didn't stop the anti-cult leagues. Armed with little more than recovered memories and a prejudice against rock music and roleplaying games, these concerned parents pointed the finger at a lot of random targets. Including several perfectly unobjectionable day care centers.

It's hard to believe how bizarrely twisted the situation can get when an entire daycare center is successfully accused - based on no evidence whatsoever, beyond the poorly-obtained testimony of children and adults with "recovered memories" - of being a site of Satanic worship that drinks the blood of babies on a regular basis while lighting candles and praising Satan.

Logic flew entirely out the window for a while, there.

In this decade we have seen a lot of anti-Muslim hatred, along with some wild accusations and hysterical shrieking. Imagine if all of that was NOT being balanced by pro-Muslim people, willing to speak out on behalf of the Muslim faith, and on behalf of people who happen not to be white. That was the situation in the 80s, because who would speak out in favor of Satanic child-raping cults? There was no balancing force to rein in the crowd, and a lot of those supposed Satanic ritual abusers are still serving prison terms for their "acts."

So when you daydream about jelly bracelets and the Atari 2600, have a thought for the darker side of the 80s, too.. Photo credit: Flickr/defekto

Money Spells

I've been thinking about money a lot lately. There's the "gosh I need more money" type thought, of course. But I have also been thinking about physical money; coins and dollar bills. This week I started scrutinizing my pocket change for hidden treasures, and it led me to thinking about coins as objects, and as the subject of spells.

Naturally every witch for hire offers a money spell. I imagine money and love are just about the only two things people ask for magical help with these days. We don't often have to ask for a good harvest (although that's probably the historical version of "more money").

One element many of these spells have in common is the moon. A good example of this is collected on the Spells and Magic website. It advises you to "fill your cauldron half full of water and drop a silver coin in it," then position the cauldron so that moonlight falls into it, while you perform a small ceremony.

The connection between the moon and silver coins is an old one, part of ancient lore and myth. (And of course a key element in Neil Gaiman's book American Gods.) The moon looks like a silver coin in the sky, and its light is silvery.

(Of course these days if you want to take "silver coin" literally you will need a quarter or dime minted in 1964 or earlier. Modern coins are made of nickel-plated copper.)

One interesting philosophical difference I note between money spells is what you do with the money after you perform the spell. Out of the spells I found, about half of them have you keep the money. The other half instruct you to either spend it or give it away.

(Keeping the money signifies "money as an item to be hoarded," whereas spending it signifies "money as a commodity in flow." Although keeping the money probably makes more sense, it seems a bit miserly. I find the idea of giving money to get money more appealing to my Inner Hippie.)

Green is another common element, for obvious reasons. (I wonder what spells are like in countries outside the U.S., where the currency isn't green?) Green threads and string and yarn are frequently part of the money ritual. Occasionally the author will specify that a green candle should be lit. More often, a green herb is included as well.

Surprisingly, the color gold, salt, and the sun make only rare appearances in money spells. All three of these things have been traditionally connected to wealth and prosperity in the past. (Think of the leprechaun's pot of gold coins, just as one example!) In fact I only found one spell which used these elements. It has you set out dollar bills, sea salt, and polished stones in the sun for at least three hours. Then you spend the money, and give away the stones.

Regardless of the spell's details, any spell worth its snuff specifies that it be performed on a Thursday. This is because Thursday was originally the namesake of Jupiter, ruler of wealth and power. (Although English has named the day after Thor, it retains its Jupiter roots in the Romance languages, being Jeudi in French, Jueves in Spanish, and so forth.)

Photo credit: Flickr/AMagill

The Wenatchee "Cougar Pack"

The Spokane newspaper the Spokesman-Review has an excellent article on an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime trail cam photograph of a staggering eight cougars all congregated in one spot. Although numerous internet pontificators have tried to debunk the shot, it has been authenticated as legitimate. Extremely rare and lucky, but legitimate.

A Wenatchee hunter named Brad had set up a string of trail cams to try and track bobcat on the range where he had permission to hunt. Instead he won the Cougar Jackpot. Although cougar are solitary, territorial animals, there are some circumstances where they may congregate - if uneasily. Study the group photo and you will see that each cougar is either pretending that the others aren't there, or is glaring at one of its neighbors.

According to the hunter, he mounted the camera along the edge of a cliff in "the first wide spot in the trail with a view of the huge valley below." Between winter conditions and some of the cats having cubs to feed, the cougars were drawn together because of the opportunity to scan for elk and deer in the valley below.

Naturally, a lot of people have freaked the eff out, and are calling for everything to be killed everywhere. No doubt fueled by the fear of an eight-cougar Super Pride, which could potentially sweep down into the suburbs and wipe us all out, one innocently bicycling child at a time. I guess. Who knows what these guys think!

Many hunters are also irate at what they see as being too much competition for deer. Let me tell you something: if you walk into the woods in Washington and you don't come out with a deer carcass, it is not because cougars ate them all. It's because you're either a lousy hunter, or you had bad luck. End of story.

Whitetail deer are a veritable plague upon our land. (And my roses.) Unfortunately, Washington state is virtually a deer Mecca, with all the right conditions for their flourishing herds to trample our garden plants. When they're not leaping in front of our cars in the middle of the night, which apparently is the #1 hobby among deer.

(Frankly, I wish cougar would kill more deer. I wish they would increase the number of deer hunting licenses handed out every year, too, for that matter.)

Truthfully though, cougar are nothing to mess with. A cougar is one of the few wild animals which will deliberately stalk, kill, and eat human beings. Sure a bear will attack you if you startle it, or if you get between it and its cubs. A shark will take a crack at you, if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But a cougar will literally stalk a hiker for miles before pouncing, killing, and dragging the body away to be eaten.

Luckily for us, the mountain lion doesn't form prides the way its African cousins do. And this cougar conference is a singular occasion, something that we'll probably never see again.

Photo courtesy "Brad"

The Carrington Event: Will We Have Another?

The world was a very different place in 1859. There were no motorized vehicles, only horse-drawn carriages, trains pulled by coal-fired steam engines, and ships powered by coal-fired turbines. Airplanes were still a pipe dream. As far as electronics went, there weren't any. Ben Franklin's work at Menlo Park didn't begin until 1876, and Nikola Tesla was only three years old in 1859. Long-distance communication happened by telegraph, when it happened at all.

Which is why the Carrington Event caused only a minor stir, and has largely been forgotten by history. But were it to happen again, the results for us would be disastrous.

The Carrington Event was a solar storm more powerful than any other storm in recorded human history. Throughout August and September, sky watchers noticed an astonishingly high rate of sunspots appearing on the face of the sun. The largest flare was observed on September 1 by a British astronomer named Richard Carrington, who recorded the flare for posterity.

Carrington's solar flare propelled a coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth. It was so powerful that it took only 18 hours to arrive, even though coronal mass ejections typically take 3-4 days to travel the distance between the sun and our planet.

This coronal mass ejection caused a magnetic storm that bathed the Earth in electromagnetic radiation. At the time, the dawn of the industrial age, its most obvious effect was to cause the aurora to propagate across the entire planet. Although typically the aurora can only be seen from locations near the poles, the aurora on September 1st and 2nd were seen as far south as the Caribbean.

The secondary effect was to cause the planet's telegraph systems to go completely haywire. Telegraph wires were the only wires being strung in those days, and they conducted the electricity through to the telegraph machines - and even to the telegraph operators, some of whom received powerful shocks. Telegraph machines and poles threw sparks, and some telegraph machines spontaneously caught fire.

Telegraph machines were essentially the only electrical infrastructure on the entire planet in 1859. Imagine what would happen if we were hit by another coronal mass ejection on that scale! In fact a smaller electromagnetic storm hit the Earth in 1989, causing Quebec's power grid to crash.

The effect of another Carrington Event would be similar to that of a global electromagnetic pulse (EMP). Anything electronic would be fried. Increasingly, everything around us is electronic - even our books! This doomsday scenario would resemble what some people were predicting for the millennium - airplanes falling from the sky, every automobile coming to a sudden halt at once, and a global blackout with no hope of restoring temporary power from a generator.

Some people speculate that a Carrington Event may be what the Mayan calendar has predicted for the 2012 apocalypse. Ice core samples show that the Earth is hit with strong coronal mass ejections about every 500 years, which means that some time in the next 300 years we are likely to experience a solar storm (give or take a fudge factor of several hundred years).

Photo credit: Flickr/Guide Gunnar - Arctic Norway

Reading Books About Physics

Trying to Understand String Theory


I recently picked up The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene—not the first physics book I’ve read and probably not the last. I have a laywoman’s understanding of physics, which pretty much means that I have a vague definition of the Big Bang, dark matter, particles, and a few other physics-related concepts, but have ZERO understanding of what anything beyond four dimensions might actually resemble. I was hoping that reading The Fabric of the Cosmos would help me understand more about the ideas current physicists are floating around about the physical world.

 

Although Brian Greene is a great writer, The Fabric of the Cosmos is just a book and not a miracle-worker, so I’m not all that sure how much more I understand about science after reading the book. Brian Greene does seem much more adept than some of the other physics’ writers at using examples to show his points. After reading the first few chapters of The Fabric of the Cosmos, I felt as if I had a much firmer grasp on the general theory of relativity than I had before, and also felt as if I understood some of the finer nuances of physics because of his specific analogies.

 

That said, I still don’t understand string theory even after reading his lengthy explanation; since Brian Greene is one of the leaders in string theory---along with Michio Kaku—I have a strong feeling that the concept of string theory and its many dimensions will stay out of my grasp.

 

Lisa Randall is another physicist who understands the importance of using stories as examples to explain difficult physics concepts to laypeople; in her book, Warped Passages, she begins each chapter with a different story—often with the same characters—designed to illustrate her points about physics. When Lisa Randall explains string theory, however, she doesn’t seem to do a better job than anyone else at explaining the controversial theory. (Her story at the beginning of the chapter focuses on a scientist or future-man who has just received a special viewing device that doesn’t quite work because of the sheer number of short strings floating around.)

 

As Lisa Randall explains string theory:

 

Particles arise from the resonant oscillation modes of strings. Each and every particle corresponds to the movements of an underlying string, and the character of those vibrations determines a particle’s properties.

 

So far, so good. But to me as a laywoman, string theory gets increasingly difficult to understand when it gets into the realms of superstring theory and curled up dimensions. The fact that physicists are still unsure about how to prove or disprove string theory doesn’t help matters much either.

 

If anyone has a good resource to recommend about string theory or physics in general, I’d be happy to read it.  

Denver International Airport: Conspiracy Central

DIA came up in an episode of Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory that I recently watched. Frankly, DIA probably deserves an episode all on its own. Ventura just shuffled around the airport and stared disbelievingly at a mural on the wall, but surely there's more investigating (and shouting) that could be done there?

In 1995 a new airport opened in Denver, replacing the former Stapleton International Airport. At 53 square miles, it is the largest international airport in the United States - and the third largest in the world.

But aside from being a United Airlines hub with a state of the art baggage system, DIA has also quickly become the focus of conspiracy theorists everywhere.

As a general overview, conspiracy theorists claim that DIA is just the cap on an underground network of tunnels - nay, an entire underground city - where the elite will retreat when the world comes to an end. Some believe that "the elite" include the world's rich and famous; others that it consists strictly of government and military personnel. And still others believe that the DIA will be the hiding place for the Illuminati, the secret conspiracy to run the world via the Trilateral Commission.

In the airport's early days in the mid to late 1990s, several people came forward to say that they had worked on building the tunnels, or had toured the underground system. Pictures of cavernous rooms, mine shafts, and vast tunnels big enough to drive a semi truck through were released. It was claimed that these rooms would be used for prisoner control, or would house the New World Order.

In hindsight, most of these pictures and locations have proved to be part of DIA's high tech, world class automated baggage system, storage tanks, and other normal airport accoutrements. OR SO THEY WOULD HAVE US BELIEVE.

The airport's artwork has come under fire as being a signal to the airport's true purpose. Now it is inarguably true that the murals in the airport are both lurid and horrifying, and perhaps inappropriate for people who are about to embark upon airline travel, which is a fraught and tension-filled act at the best of times. DIA's murals do not soothe the traveler's jangled nerves. Quite the contrary. They depict fireballs, stormtroopers in full riot gear, dying doves, and huddled, terrified children.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the paintings portray the overthrow of the current paradigm, the coming paramilitary apocalypse which will usher in the New World Order, crushing all dissidents (and bunny rabbits) before it. The artist himself claims that no, no, oh my, you've misunderstood: it simply depicts the coming environmental catastrophe. This isn't as ringing a defense as one might want to hear.

It still leaves aside the issue of why, if you're going to build a big secret underground lair, you would decorate it with a painting of the End Times. Kind of tips your hand, don't you think?

Finally, the two things that really send people over the edge: the Masonic capstone and the phrase "New World Airport Commission." The Masons were apparently involved in the construction of the airport, although why that earned them pride of place is unexplained. The "New World Airport Commission" is not a real thing, so that's anyone's guess. More fuel for the flames, clearly!

Photo credit: Flickr/Mash Down Babylon

Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory: Sleeper Assassins

"A government plot to turn ordinary citizens into programmed killers."

In this episode, Ventura claims to have uncovered a CIA conspiracy to create real-life Manchurian Candidates, brainwashed assassins who kill under orders but without any conscious intent.

This is an interesting case, because we know for a fact that the CIA at least attempted to do this in the 1970s as part of project MK-ULTRA. It's also true that many people with psychiatric issues can perform complex actions (like committing murder) while in a fugue or dissociative state. And furthermore, the act of committing murder could certainly create traumatic amnesia, such that the killer truly does not remember having killed someone.

And finally we have the entirely plausible theory that these killer are lying in order to get a reduced sentence.

Faced with all these possibilities, and with the understanding of humanity as a vast and complex population, "CIA mind programming" honestly seems like the least likely explanation. It's like Dr. House says - if you're in Central Park and you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.

Another argument against sleeper assassins is that the phenomena of post-hypnotic suggestion is actually a fairly flimsy one. It's true that you can (as they demonstrated on the show) make someone limp after hearing a trigger word.

But limping is an emotionally-uncharged act, and a simple one. As a "proof of concept" demonstration, it's pretty weak. It's a big jump from this parlor trick to assassination - a complex act with lots of steps, forethought, planning, scheduling, purchasing, hiding, and so forth. And it ends with shooting someone, an act so counter to most people's psychology that it would take a lot to overcome that.

Even the experts interviewed on the show agree that it would take several years to turn a normal person into a sleeper assassin. Which begs the question: why? Surely it would be more efficient - in time, in resources, in efficacy of results - to just use a regular assassin for something. If you want to kill John Lennon, then send an assassin to kill John Lennon, and instruct him to lie about his memories afterward.

The typical explanation for sleeper assassins is that they can "blend in with the normal people." But this is the case with regular old non-sleeping assassins, too. Witness the recent case of a Russian spy who was exposed from her normal life in suburban Virginia. And no doubt we are surrounded by other spies, both our own and those from other countries.

The fundamental problem is that both "lying" and "a psychiatric disorder" are both far more likely explanations. Between those two perfectly understandable causes, how much territory is left for "secret CIA programming"?

Probably the most damning case against sleeper assassins is that if it really worked, people would be using it. Imagine being able to kidnap a trusted advisor, program him to become a sleeper assassin, then return him to his native country to kill his leader. If this were possible, we would long since have gotten rid of Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Bin Laden. The fact that there are un-assassinated CIA assassination targets left in the world is proof enough that it's not a real thing.

Jesse Ventura's Conspiracy Theory: 2012

"The conspiracy plot to save the elite. But not you."

Okay, so, first of all, the 2012 thing? Not happening. The Mayans were just a bunch of people who lived a long time ago, and made a really big calendar, and every calendar comes to an end. Just like our calendars! Imagine someone were to unearth a Western calendar, then declare that "the world will end on December 31." No doubt the Mayans would say the same thing we would - "Don't be so literal!"

I trust it will come as no surprise to anyone that America is dotted with hardened underground bunkers for the military and governmental elite in case of war or whatever. I have difficulty seeing this as a grand plot against Americans. But then again, I do appreciate Jesse Ventura's populist appeal, getting his nose out of joint based on the fact that they won't save us all.

(But where would we all stay? We can barely fit together on the surface of the country. You would have to build an entire underground country to house us. Now I'm reminded of the 1990s science fiction movie "Slipstream" starring Mark Hamill, which is one of my guilty pleasures.)

The actual cause of the 2012 disaster is a bunch of stuff thrown into a bucket. Solar flares are one thing Ventura clings to as a possible source of catastrophe. It's true that if there was a massive batch of solar flares, we could all be in a lot of trouble. It's happened before: the Carrington Event. Frankly, there's not much we can do about it, given the amount of electronic infrastructure we rely on.

But please keep in mind that forecasts for solar activity two years from now cannot possibly be all that accurate. They are, after all, simply forecasts. No more or less reliable than weather forecasts. Saying that 2013 could be a big year for solar flares is like saying that it's likely to be an El Nino year. It may or may not end up being true, and even so, there's so much individual variation year by year to make the forecast almost meaningless.

In Narrative Derail #1, we visit a guy who is building a sort of exclusive post-apocalyptic underground resort in a former underground missile silo. I love reading about silo homes, so I got a real kick out of this.

So, this isn't exactly striking me as a conspiracy. Although they keep asserting that there's a conspiracy to suppress the truth about the coming apocalypse, so that "they" can escape unharmed. I don't buy it.

In Narrative Derail #2 we go to Denver International Airport, of course! DIA deserves a post all on its own. But suffice it to say, there is a lot of weird stuff there. Although I'm skeptical as to whether or not it "means anything." I mean, what's the point of being an elite future-knowing cult like the Illuminati if you go around painting murals about it?

What's Going On At Plum Island?

You may be familiar with Plum Island from "Silence of the Lambs," where Clarice Starling disingenuously holds out the prospect of "walks on the beach" to entice Dr. Lector to help her out.

"Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center. Sounds charming," he drily replies.

Plum Island is a small, J-shaped patch of land off the Eastern end of Long Island. It was named for the beach plums which grow along its shoreline. Doesn't that sound lovely?

The United States Government bought the island in 1899, and initially used it as a military post. In the 1950s the island was handed over to the USDA, which established the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, ostensibly to help our beleaguered domestic farmers cope with animal disease outbreaks.

Rumors about Plum Island have been rampant since the 1960s. One early charge is that the center was involved in biological warfare tests - in "weaponizing" diseases like anthrax and smallpox. Although the military has repeatedly denied it, this was almost certainly the case in the center's early years and throughout the Cold War.

Tellingly, in 2003 the island's facility was handed from the USDA to the US Department of Homeland Security. The war on terror clearly requires research on anthrax and smallpox, does it not? The use of biological weapons in warfare violates the Geneva Convention, but that doesn't mean that the government won't study it.

The contagious and deadly diseases (for both human and animal) being kept at the facility read like a list of horrors. Foot and mouth disease. Anthrax. Smallpox. Polio. But what else could be kept and studied there?

Many people charge that Lyme Disease originated at Plum Island. Although Lyme Disease was described in America in small pockets in the 1700s, the charge is that the modern version was accidentally released from the island's facilities. Although mammals found on Plum Island are shot on sight, the theory is that an infected tick hitched a ride to the mainland on one of the island's plentiful migratory birds.

Others have noted that the spread of West Nile Virus in America would seem to indicate Plum Island as a potential epicenter. An escaped mosquito could easily have been carried by the sea winds from the island to the mainland.

Farther on the fringe is the theory that AIDS did not evolve naturally in the wild, but was created at Plum Island and released in America in order to destroy the homosexual community.

When the "Montauk Monster" washed ashore in the summer of 2008, many people believed it to have been an experimental animal that somehow escaped Plum Island. Aside from the unlikelihood that an animal of that size would be able to slip unnoticed from the facility, it has been fairly conclusively established that the Montauk Monster was in fact a rotten raccoon which had suffered from mange.

More puzzling are accounts from 2010 of a body which washed ashore on Plum Island itself. To the best of my research, the body has not been identified. It was described as being a six foot-tall black man with "very long fingers" and no apparent cause of death.

Photo credit: Flickr/jimmywayne

The Hollow Earth

The idea that the Earth is hollow is a persistent one which pops up occasionally in cultures throughout history. The belief itself is simple: that our planet is not a solid sphere filled with molten rock, but is in fact more like a tennis ball: a hollow sphere with lots of space inside.

In most telling, the center of the Earth contains another sun which floats in the middle, bringing light and warmth to the inner Earth. (This sun is a key element, obviously, because otherwise how would all the plants grow? DUH.)

Needless to say, a basic understanding of physics and gravity is enough to dispel any lingering thoughts that our planet might be hollow. But many people don't let the facts get in the way of their beliefs.

Hitler may have believed in a hollow Earth. (Let's face it - it's less crazy than some of the other stuff he believed.) Nazi Admiral Donitz once gave a speech which seemed to indicate that Hitler was sending submarines out to the seas beneath the polar ice caps to look for the entrance.

The hollow Earth naturally must be accessible somehow, or else where's the fun? Most people seem to believe that there are openings at the poles of various sizes. In the days before satellite imagery, a lot of people believed that the holes were very large - thousands of feet across. One noted hollow Earth scholar proposed that many Ice Age species didn't go extinct - they just wandered into the holes and never came out.

These days most people believe that they are small, or hidden somehow, whether beneath the ice or in another dimension. Others, that entrance can be gained by climbing down through a dormant volcano, or by becoming an ascended master able to travel through the various trans-dminensional planes.

There is a long-standing theory among certain UFO camps that UFOs do not in fact come from outer space, but are instead being built and deployed from within the hollow Earth. They cannot be said to be piloted by aliens, then, but they are almost certainly not being piloted by other humans. (But surely a parallel civilization which evolved inside our planet could be considered "alien"?)

These beliefs often cite Agartha, the dominant society within the hollow Earth. Its capital city is Shambhalla, and its residents may be a superior race which arose on Earth millions of years ago but took refuge inside our planet for various reasons. Some say they were driven underground by ancient wars (such as the war between Atlantis and Lemuria). Others believe that they are hiding from a hostile force, or simply that they found our sun's rays damaging.

One notable branch of hollow Earth theory states that Mount Shasta in California is itself hollow, and is in fact a giant mountain-shaped civilization all on its own. Inside Mount Shasta you can allegedly find the Agarthean city of Telos, which believers have described and fleshed out in a surprisingly intricate fashion over the years.

Illustration credit: Flickr/kodunion

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