The History Channel: Conspiracy?

[Bob B.]

On Sunday October 3rd The History Channel premiers its new series Conspiracy? Here are descriptions of the first two programs:

October 3 - TWA Flight 800.
On July 17, 1996, at 8:31 pm/et, TWA Flight 800 exploded midair and fell into the Atlantic. All 230 onboard perished. Federal investigators meticulously reconstructed the aircraft, looking for any evidence of terrorism and found none. They concluded that a malfunction in the center fuel tank caused the explosion. But this official conclusion has never satisfied a coterie of independent investigators and conspiracy theorists. We weigh existing evidence against various theories to let you decide.

October 10 - Majestic Twelve: UFO Cover-Up.
What really happened in Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947? Did a flying saucer crash in the vast desert scrubland? The initial Army Air Force press release claimed they had recovered a flying disk. But a day later, the story dramatically changed--now they called it a weather balloon! In 1987, secret documents surfaced indicating the existence of the "Majestic 12"--an elite group of scientists and military and intelligence officials, allegedly brought together by President Harry Truman. Did the MJ-12 truly exist? If so, did these men forever trivialize the most talked-about UFO event in history, as well as all UFO sightings thereafter?

How do you suppose they will handle these topics? If the usual formula for this type of program is followed the woo-woo theories will be presented as if they have equal merit to the mainstream story. Let's hope THC treats these topics responsibly.

[russ_watters]

As a matter of fact, I was on the nearest U.S. Navy ship to the TWA 800 crash - about 50 miles and within surface to air missile range. But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons.

[Morrolan]

Let's hope THC treats these topics responsibly.

don't hold your breath...

[Cylinder]

I wouldn't hold your breath. It's amazing to me that they run some fairly thoughtful histories (History of Britain, First Invasion, The War of 1812, Russia: Land of the Tsars, Mexico, etc..) alongside the tabloid shows. I guess they're just playing the numbers.

I haven't completely given up on THC yet, though.

I can understand some of the controversy surrounding the crash of TWA 800. The eyewitnesses were reporting what they saw from their perspective and (from what I understand about the way it broke up) probably shouldn't be criticized too harshly for their misconceptions.

The conspiracy-mongers, on the other hand...

[Van Rijn]

Yes, I like the history channel, but they have some loony shows. Even when discussing conventional subjects, I've heard some nasty technical errors (such as when discussing nuclear weapons) on some shows. Also, some history is shown from very different political viewpoints, sometimes on the same subject but on different shows. So I wouldn't trust them to be careful like, perhaps, a Nova episode.

[Lurker]

As a matter of fact, I was on the nearest U.S. Navy ship to the TWA 800 crash - about 50 miles and within surface to air missile range. But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons.

There ya go!! See you're part of the coverup!! :wink:

[Tirdun]

Air to air missiles on a sailboat.

Di...a...blolical.

Kudos to you, mon nemesis. Your strategem has proven victorious. THIS time.

[ignorant_ape]

RUS_WATTERS wrote " As a matter of fact, I was on the nearest U.S. Navy ship to the TWA 800 crash - about 50 miles and within surface to air missile range. But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons. "

nice selective memory rus , tell us how many missiles did the AEGIS cruiser steaming 500 yards of your stern fire

disclaimer - i dont believe the navy shot down TWA800 i am just beating the HBs to the punchline

YRS - APE

[Humphrey]

RUS_WATTERS wrote " As a matter of fact, I was on the nearest U.S. Navy ship to the TWA 800 crash - about 50 miles and within surface to air missile range. But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons. "

nice selective memory rus , tell us how many missiles did the AEGIS cruiser steaming 500 yards of your stern fire

disclaimer - i dont believe the navy shot down TWA800 i am just beating the HBs to the punchline

YRS - APE

Sigh. You got it all wrong. The sailboat was a cute gimmic. It was actually attached to the conning tower of a submarine holding cruise missles. That fired at the planes!.

In respect to all those who died. The above is a joke and means no harm.

[Waarthog]

In my current situation I have no TV, but a friend of mine who went through the same aircraft safety/accident investigation school that I did, and is currently serving as an Air Force F-117 pilot (currently in training) saw the show and told me it was remarkably factual and even handed. The "Navy shot it down" theory got the least amount of time with, terrorist missile/bomb and explosion in center fuel tank thories getting the most attention.

The missile theories don't hold much water for me as a Navy Standard missile would have likely caused a much more immediate and catastrophic breakup and a shoulder fired missle hasn't got the oomph to bring down a 747 unless is was a serious silver bullet.

Personally I think it was an explosion in/near the center fuel tank. The evidence I have seen leads me to speculate there was a short in one of the fuel pumps in the center tank and that there was a sufficent mixture to ignite. Odds are we will never know for certain.

[Robert Andersson]

a shoulder fired missle hasn't got the oomph to bring down a 747 unless is was a serious silver bullet.

Sure about that? Those usually have an IR targeting system, thus it would home in at an engine, which in the case of a 747 should blow of the wing.

[Rich]

a shoulder fired missle hasn't got the oomph to bring down a 747 unless is was a serious silver bullet.

Sure about that? Those usually have an IR targeting system, thus it would home in at an engine, which in the case of a 747 should blow of the wing.

I think most people are unaware that air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles are not programmed to strike a target as is so often portrayed in movies and on television. They actually are designed to explode in close proximity to better ensure a "hit". A missile that explodes 20m from a targetted IR or radar object is much more likely to score a kill than one that has to make contact to explode. For the missile this is actually a bonus because as a pilot avoiding direct contact with a missile is actually much easier than avoiding close proximity. That said, when a missile does explode the danger and damage tend to be proportional to how close warhead detonates. Most of that damage tends to come from shrapnel, the shock from the explosion might damage avionics or toss the plane out of control, but it's the big flying chunks of metal that will most likely result in an inability to recover controlled flight.

Most such missiles are designed to take out smaller, more nimble, fighter/bomber aircraft. It is likely that a single missile strike would damage but not destroy a larger aircraft, certainly might not blow off a wing. I've seen a lot of after-actions pictures of U.S. fighter/bomber aircraft that have taken a SAM missile fairly close in and managed to land (even with significant damage to flight control surfaces - good piloting there).

So, I think Waarthog is right... you'd have to have pretty much a direct hit on an airframe as large as a 747 to result in complete destruction. Or a very lucky hit to do something like take off a wing.

[Maksutov]

Air to air missiles on a sailboat.

Di...a...blolical.

Kudos to you, mon nemesis. Your strategem has proven victorious. THIS time.

Air-to-air missile launched from a sailboat...hmmm. Would launching it from the head of the mainsail qualify as air-to-air? :-k

[Wolverine]

I haven't completely given up on THC yet, though.

I haven't either... yet. However I have yet to recieve a reply from them (or the parent company) despite repeated inquiries as to why they've decided to pander to paranormal believers and conspiracy theorists. The addition of this sort of programming doesn't exactly bolster my optimism.

It could give one the impression that they don't care much about their reputation, as long as the ratings are decent. Sad that in the process, they provide validation for those who place credence in any of this junk.

[Cylinder]

I watched the TWA Flight 800 episode of Conspiracy? tonight and thought it fairly even-handed.

Jim Kallstrom, the head of the FBI New York field office at the time (also host of Discovery's FBI Files) said it best when he stated that the conspiracy-mongering took shape while the aircraft's wings and fuselage was still in ~150 ft. of water and ~10 miles off the coast.

One of the main conspiracists interviewed spewed the standard fare. The crux of his argument is that governments lie, so you would have to "take it on faith" that they're telling the truth in this case. Kallstrom countered with the lengths the FBI and NTSB took to recover and reassemble the debris. His quote, "We're not the Federal Bureau of Speculation!"

Seems to me that Boeing would also have a huge financial stake in a determination other than design flaw.

[Andromeda321]

Heh. Sort of reminds me of the show they did on crop circles. After reaching the conclusion that some crop circles couldn't have been made by humans they introduce this guy who makes crop circles. As part of his interview he says he can't mention all the crop circles he's made else people won't believe they're real anymore. I thought it was interesting that the producers didn't notice that slight discrepancy...

[N C More]

I noticed a whopping discrepancy in the Majestic Twelve episode.

The narrator was describing reasons why someone would fake these documents (there's a great deal of evidence that they're a hoax) and conveniently left out the possibility that they might have been cooked up by the UFO researchers themselves in order to perpetuate the Roswell myth. Maybe such an accusation was seen as "impolite"? But sheesh...they seemed to have little problem implying that members of the government were out and out liars!

Bottom line, I thought it was just "more of the same". #-o

[jt-3d]

I watched a couple of episodes a few weeks back. They did not prompt me to rush home and set up the VCR.

[Jerry]

But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons.

The navy has sailboats? Are you sure you were not in some time votex that pulled you from the wrong century and twisted the plane from the sky? You didn't happen to notice any WWII era destroyers nearby, that might have ported out of Philadelphia did you? Probably not...they had a cloaking device.

[russ_watters]

But I swear we didn't do it... our 44 foot sailboat didn't have any weapons.

The navy has sailboats?

It was a summer training cruise from the Naval Academy.

The Coast-Guard even has an old square-rigged sailing ship.

[The Curtmudgeon]

The navy has sailboats?

It was a summer training cruise from the Naval Academy.

The Coast-Guard even has an old square-rigged sailing ship.

Yep, it's named USCG Cutter Eagle, and it was my uncle Garry Houtsma's last sea-going command when he was in the Coasties. I thought about joining up back when I was a pup just so I could sail on her with him. It's a beautiful ship.

The (just lurking through, don't mind me) Curtmudgeon

[kookbreaker]

a shoulder fired missle hasn't got the oomph to bring down a 747 unless is was a serious silver bullet.

Sure about that? Those usually have an IR targeting system, thus it would home in at an engine, which in the case of a 747 should blow of the wing.

I think one major problem with the 'shoulder mounted' theory is that TWA800 was well above the altitude limit for any SMM. Conspiracists get funny and claim sooper seekrit guv'ment modification, or point out how Saddam modified SCUDs to have longer range (which is a different animal).

The problem I have with the theories is this:

If it was an enemy. There is no reason for the FBI to cover it up. None whatsoever. It doesn't make a lick of sense for them to do that.

If was done by the Navy, there's not discernable reason that it would have been done on purpose. If it was an accident, well, sorry kids, the militray stinks at keeping things like that secret. You want to tell me a AEGIS cruiser fired a missle by accident and either:

a) Kept its crew from knowing (Fat chance)

or

b) Kept its crew silent. (Fat chance).

[ktesibios]

If was done by the Navy, there's not discernable reason that it would have been done on purpose. If it was an accident, well, sorry kids, the militray stinks at keeping things like that secret. You want to tell me a AEGIS cruiser fired a missle by accident and either:

a) Kept its crew from knowing (Fat chance)

or

b) Kept its crew silent. (Fat chance).

Well, over 3000 US Navy sailors knew that the U-505 had been boarded and captured, yet not a clue about this reached the Germans until after the war (it was kept extremely secret because valuable Enigma intelligence had been captured with the sub).

OTOH, those guys were keeping a secret about an achievement they had reason to be proud of, and which they knew was very important to the war effort. I think things are different when you're trying to cover up a foul-up that you're ashamed of.

BTW, didn't the civil aviation authorities impose a requirement that the center tank wiring on that type of plane be inspected and upgraded? That would have cost operators some money, and it gives some indication of the confidence the aviation regulators had in the investigation and its findings.

edited to fix quote tags

[jt-3d]

BTW, didn't the civil aviation authorities impose a requirement that the center tank wiring on that type of plane be inspected and upgraded? That would have cost operators some money, and it gives some indication of the confidence the aviation regulators had in the investigation and its findings.

Yes as well as other types and also there are new rules on center tank usage.

[Irishman]

It's difficult to fully judge the show. I get the impression that it's being a little more lenient than some of us would like when it comes to the conspiracist claims. However, they've provided a fair amount of skeptical review on both - moreso than is typical in TV program content.

The Roswell/MJ12 conspiracy story was mostly covered, though there were a few details about the letters that weren't mentioned. Something mentioned on the SI article not on the program was the mention of one of the main document promoters having previously told a friend he was planning a hoax in order to stir up interest and "draw out" real insiders. The skeptics cited include Paul Kurtz (CSICOP founder) and Joe Nickel (well-known paranormal investigator and skeptic, or "debunker"). Nickel pointed out that the latest document has no real pedigree - it was found hidden in files in the National Archive. It was not an archived document, not a registered letter, but rather folded in between folders in a file. In other words, how it got into the files is a mystery. The conspiracists suggest it was planted by an insider who wanted to anonymously spill the beans, so he hid it there and then anonymously told them where to look for it. Right. Why not just mail it to them? If it didn't get into the Archive legitimately, on the record, then being found in the Archive does not give it any special credence. ("Hey, I found this M&M on the floor at Wal-mart, it must be okay to eat, Wal-mart wouldn't sell bad M&Ms." Was it in an unopened bag, or lying alone on the floor? Was it Wal-mart merchandise, or just some debris dropped by a customer? Just because it was at Wal-mart does not make it merchandise.)

I love the part where they admit the MJ-12 documents may be a hoax, but if so they're either a hoax perpetrated by the government to cover up their real "MJ-12 group", or to discredit the believers.

They did have one interesting and somewhat valid point. Part of the discredit to the documents goes to the unusual and incorrect date format, inconsistent with standard military date format on letters. One of the conspiracists pointed out that if you review the Archives you can find discrepancies like that all the time. Now whether that is true or not, he did not provide examples (and nobody documented checks to verify that claim). But he does have a point - inconsistencies in themselves are possible without making the documents a hoax. And if that was the only thing against them, he might have a point.

But other problems exist. For instance, the originals don't exist, only photographs of letters. Hard to investigate the provenance of the original from a duplicate. And the typewriter peculiarities. And then there's the fact that the particular date format anomaly noted matches a date format used by one of the main proponents of the letter makes the discrepancy of the date format more suspicious.

On the whole, this show is much better than the other one I saw over the weekend, Proof Positive. It presented three paranormal claims, then "investigated" them, and said that two were disproved but the third was not.

1. Rods - those mysterious critters that show up on video, zipping around at high speeds. They presented the case from the proponents that they weren't standard bugs, and had to be some new mysterious life form. Then the expert analyzed the video and determined they were regular bugs and explained how the effects are caused by changing focal length and quick panning. He even duplicated the effect.

2. Some lighthouse that had the power turned off, supposedly haunted by a ghost. Mysterious lights are seen in the lighthouse many nights, but there's no power to the building. An old guy who used to be a caretaker had died, and so it's attributed to him. Their investigator was some optical physicist, who set up a laser and some toys to try to locate the source of the light, but then eventually went up inside while it was light at night and by carefully wandering around the outside of the windows with his jacket was able to demonstrate that the light was caused by reflections from external harbor lights off the lighthouse mirror.

However, there was another incident while there for the true believers to claim victory. They were preparing to enter the lighthouse and found the door inexplicably locked. One of the crew climbed a ladder and into the window to open the door from the inside. He got spooked by "brushing into someone and seeing a figure in the dark", and ran out the door. Then just after that, the door had an odd occurrence where the lock mechanism failed and got broken, as if kicked in. This happened while the people had gone inside the lighthouse. While the true believers would have that as a sign of the ghost, I think someone might have kicked in the door (damaging the lock) and been inside the lighthouse when they approached. The distraction by the first guy running out let him sneak out the back, and the door subsequently jammed from that damage. Hard to say.

3. Some guy claims he has evidence of a past life. He's a police detective, and claims he was a skeptic until someone convinced him to get a past-life regression. He went as a lark to discredit it, but had a hypnotism session that produced some remembrances. He taped the event and wrote down a bunch of the details that he determined were verifiable facts. He then proceeded to investigate the facts. The principle one was a portrait of a hunchbacked lady. After much investigation, he finally ran across it by accident in New Orleans, and identified the artist. Then looking into the artist's journals he validated all the other facts he had on hand. So he convinced himself that he's the reincarnation of that artist.

Now we didn't get to hear the tape of the original hypnosession, only little snippets. So we can't judge the technique and whether the lady conducting the session gave leading questions. He claims he'd never heard of the artist and that the guy is pretty obscure, and it took him a year to locate the picture of the hunchback lady. That's inconclusive.

But what really bugged me was thier method of investigating the truth. They hooked him up to a polygraph to determine if he was lying. Right. Curiously, they had on the first try a result that suggested that he might be lying when he stated that he had never heard of the author before the session. They reviewed the polygraph session and the administrator of the test decided he might have posed an ambiguous question, and they took a second polygraph a week later with more carefully constructed questions. So they naturally got results that he wasn't lying. Great.

2 things. First, the polygraph is not infallible. In fact, there are methods to trick it. But even if it works properly and the subject isn't actively trying to fake it, at most all it shows is that he believes his story. It doesn't validate one iota the connections he's made or whether he had heard and forgotten about this artist or if he was led by the hypnotherapist to come up with these details.

But the program's summary: the test is inconclusive, but until better data comes along it is proof positive for reincarnation. WHAT?

[crateris]

The "haunted lighthouse" mentioned a few posts back is here:

http://www.alpenacvb.com/fright.htm

It's been on a few TV shows, including recently TDC, I believe. It's about a 1/2 hour drive from my house, so SOMEDAY I'll check it out. I have been there a few times in years past, but it's been only in the last 10 years or so have they "admitted" that is is haunted. It's been only in the last few years that the light has been shining "by itself". Of course, for some reason, it's quite dim compared to what it should be. I'll just have to see for myself. IF I can screw up the courage! (I'm a skeptic, but I'm also a chicken!)

c.

[Lurker]

We want you to spend the night inside with just a flashlight, water, a few munchies, and a camcorder!!

[crateris]

We want you to spend the night inside with just a flashlight, water, a few munchies, and a camcorder!!

If you would just come from the Holy Land of Apple (computers), I'd be glad to share my munchies with you while you man the camcorder!



C.

[Mojo_the_Mi-Go]

OH I saw the last one...with FDR knowing about Pearl Harbor before the attack. Thing is, "seen" is kinda a relative word, I think I was on this board and not paying attention. 8-[

It seemed the VAST bulk of what I heard was pro-conspiracy.

I also saw that show with the three paranormal topics. Can anybody offhand bedunk that thing with the lock breaking and such in the light house...that gave me the creeps. <---Isn't that the coolest smiley, I love it.

Oh, and it has ben a LONG time since my last post. Feels good to be back.

[Jpax2003]

Tonight they ran an episode about the Anthrax terrorism of 2001. I thought the were even handed, but I do not know the details of the investigations. One of their possible conclusions is that the FBI did not research deeply enough because they were covering up for a USAMRIID test which went wrong and used real spores or something to that effect. But they also ran arguments against it. The show pretty much seemed to indicate that Hatfill is probably the terrorist, but they can't prove it.