Journalism, Media, Popular Culture and Ideas, Urban Legend

News from the fringe: Back to the Future Part II and Chicago Cubs win 2015 World Series, Before It’s News, Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind!, Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored, Rapture Ready News, AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory

It’s a Thursday in a deep and dark (but surprisingly warm the last couple of days) December. Winter solstice doesn’t arrive for 10 days until Dec. 21 at 5:03 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) and Christmas comes two weeks from today. Dick Cheney and the CIA are back on top of the news agenda and serious sports analysts are discussing whether the 1989 movie Back to the Future Part II will now be prophetic with the Chicago Cubs winning the 2015 World Series next year (the Cubbies last won back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908) in a five-game sweep over Miami in a nine-game series (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnmw6K1H-gQ), which, of course, didn’t have a MLB team when the movie was filmed 25 years ago. The Marlins arrived in Miami in 1993.

While the Cubs and Marlins both play in the National League, so won’t be meeting in the real seven-game World Series in any conceivable scenario, unless one of them were to switch to the American League soon, the Cubbies’ World series dream for 2015, aside from Back to the Future Part II, is the result of the team signing Jon Lester, the 31-year-old left-hander free agent starting pitcher, to a six-year contract worth $155 million at the 2014 major league baseball winter meetings.

All in all, what better time to check out some non-mainstream media (MSM) “news?” Might I suggest your tour include Before It’s News (http://beforeitsnews.com/); Alex Jones’ Infowars: There’s a war on for your mind! (http://www.infowars.com/); Trunews: The Real News, Uncensored (http://www.trunews.com/); Rapture Ready News (http://www.raptureready.com/rapnews_db.php); , AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal, Politics, and other ‘alternative topics’ (http://www.abovetopsecret.com/) and Coast to Coast AM with George Noory (http://www.coasttocoastam.com/)

Just don’t let yourself get worked up into a lather about Code ICD E 978 and legal execution by guillotine coming to the United States via Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington if you stumble onto that meme. For some of the history of where that comes from, check out(http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/08/28/74549_secret-camps-and-guillotines-groups.html?rh=1) and http://urbanlegends.about.com/b/2013/06/21/government-purchased-30000-guillotines.htm

Back in November 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote a famous 1964 essay for Harper’s magazine, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which opens with the sentence, “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” Masons, Jesuits, munitions makers, Bavarian Illuminati, the “Monarchs of Europe and the Pope of Rome,” the list of enemies has been long and variable, Hofstadter noted.

“[O]ne of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen,” argued Hofstadter. “It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him—and in any case he resists enlightenment.

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

At the same time, however, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you,” says Capt. John Yossarian, the 28-year-old fictional character and protagonist assigned to the 256th squadron of the Army Air Forces where he serves as a B-25 bombardier in Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22.

Take your pick for a worldview: Hofstadter or Heller. As for me, in the absence of conclusive proof to the contrary, I counsel that “Occam’s razor,” or the law of parsimony should apply. Namely, a problem should be stated in its basic and simplest terms and the simplest theory that fits the facts is the one that should be selected when there’s two or more competing theories and that an explanation for unknown phenomena should first be attempted in terms of what is already known.

Which means, while I approach conspiracy theories with an abundance of caution, I don’t automatically rule them out as London Times columnist David Aaronovitch, author of the 2009 book, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, does in his de rigueur attempts at debunking same. But ad hominem arguments and smarminess are no substitute for an open mind.

Some conspiracies are … well, conspiracies. Others remain unproven matters of conjecture. And still others exist on the fringes of tinfoil hat conspiracy theory speculation.

While conspiracy theories about Charles Harrelson, actor Woody Harrelson’s father, being one of the “three tramps” on the grassy knoll – a second shooter in Dallas – along with two other shadowy figures, Charles Rogers and Chauncey Holt, continue to have some currency, it appears the boxcar tramps actually were Gus Abrams, Harold Doyle and John Gedney, and that Lee Harvey Oswald, as the Warren Commission concluded, acted alone in assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

The assassination of an earlier American president, Abraham Lincoln, however, was part of a larger conspiracy, a fact that’s largely forgotten today. What is remembered is that actor John Wilkes Booth entered Lincoln’s State Box at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. on April 14, 1865 undetected and shot him in the back of the head. Lincoln, mortally wounded, was taken to the Petersen House across the street and died at 7:22 a.m. April 15. On April 26, Booth was found hiding in a barn near Port Royal, Virginia and was shot and killed by a Union solider after he refused to surrender and the barn in which he was hiding was set ablaze.

Co-conspirator Lewis Powell attempted to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward, but only managed to injure him. At the same time, another co-conspirator, George Atzerodt was supposed to have killed Vice-President Andrew Johnson, but backed out.

Eight Lincoln co-conspirators were caught over the next few days and tried by a military court. They were found guilty on June 30 and given various sentences depending upon their involvement. Powell, Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt were charged with conspiring with Booth, along with various other crimes, and all were hanged in Washington on July 7, 1865 – with Surratt becoming the first woman executed by the United States federal government.

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‘Edward Baker:’ Thompson, Manitoba’s microwaved telephone company night watchman 1998 urban legend owes its fame to real-life American scientist and a Denver newsman

Wendy Northcutt is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in molecular biology. But what she is best known for since 1993 is being the prime collector and propagator of the stories that make up the annual Darwin Awards, one of the most popular humour pages on the Internet, as they recognize and catalog individuals who have supposedly contributed to human evolution by self-selecting themselves out of the gene pool via death or sterilization by their own very stupic actions. The tongue-in-cheek honour originated as early as 1985 in Usenet newsgroup discussions.

While the Darwin Awards make every attempt to keep the competition for stupidity pristine by acting as gatekeeper and blocking the entry of pranksters with urban legends, some “apocryphal” stories are included on the “Darwin Awards website because they are inspirational narratives of the astounding efforts of legendary Darwin Awards contenders,” Northcutt says.

Case in point: Meet Mark Boslough, an Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist, member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories and an adjunct professor at the University of New Mexico, who is also a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and member of the group New Mexicans for Science and Reason, who has Asteroid 73520 Boslough (2003 MB1) named after him. Boslough is also the author of this now famous account, dated Dec. 25, 1998:

“Telephone relay company night watchman Edward Baker, 31, was killed early Christmas morning by excessive microwave radiation exposure. He was apparently attempting to keep warm next to a telecommunications feedhorn.

“Baker had been suspended on a safety violation once last year, according to Northern Manitoba Signal Relay spokesperson Tanya Cooke. She noted that Baker’s earlier infraction was for defeating a safety shutoff switch and entering a restricted maintenance catwalk in order to stand in front of the microwave dish. He had told coworkers that it was the only way he could stay warm during his twelve-hour shift at the station, where winter temperatures often dip to forty below zero.

“Microwaves can heat water molecules within human tissue in the same way that they heat food in microwave ovens. For his Christmas shift, Baker reportedly brought a twelve pack of beer and a plastic lawn chair, which he positioned directly in line with the strongest microwave beam. Baker had not been told about a tenfold boost in microwave power planned that night to handle the anticipated increase in holiday long-distance calling traffic.

“Baker’s body was discovered by the daytime watchman, John Burns, who was greeted by an odor he mistook for a Christmas roast he thought Baker must have prepared as a surprise. Burns also reported to NMSR company officials that Baker’s unfinished beers had exploded.”

The clues, of course, to the fabricated nature of the story are contained in the names of the participants: the victim, “Baker”; his discoverer, “Burns”; and the spokeswoman, “Cooke.”

Boslough attached his microwaved worker offering to a then-current list of Darwin Award stories for 1998, declared his entry to be that year’s winner, sent it out to a few friends and sat back and watched the inevitable unfold, as veteran Denver Post editor and columnist Dick Kreck was taken in by the hoax, publishing it as the authentic 1998 Darwin Award winner. It seems, at some level, we all want to believe.

Certainly, Kreck, who retired from the paper in June 2007, was no rookie. Born in San Francisco in 1941, Kreck grew up in Glendale, California. After earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Francisco State College, he worked as a reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. He joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs, writing a city column for 18 years and covering television and radio. His books include Colorado’s Scenic Railroads; Denver in Flames; Murder at the Brown Palace; Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer ; and Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

Boslough wrote to Kreck in 1999:

“Dear Mr. Kreck:

“Thank you so much for reprinting my Darwin Award hoax in the Denver Post.

“Like you, I am a skeptic and have always very suspicious of these stories. However, I am also a scientist so I decided to do a little experiment. I made up the most outrageous and twisted death-by-stupidity tale I could imagine. I made sure that all the characters in the story had names (Mr. Baker, Mr. Burns, Ms. Cooke) that would give my joke away to any wary reader. I set the story in a location that allowed the company “Northern Manitoba Signal Relay” to have the same acronym as New Mexicans for Science and Reason, our local version of Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Skeptics.

“I took a list of Darwin Awards that somebody sent me and attached my own creation, which I also declared to be this year’s winner. I turned it loose by e-mailing it to a few out-of-state friends on New Year’s Day. Seeing it this week in the Post is a bit like getting a response to a note in a bottle eight months after throwing it into the ocean. It is also a good lesson in why we should all be skeptical of what we see on the Internet … not to mention what we read in the newspaper!

“By the way, NMSR president Dave Thomas – a recent guest speaker at Rocky Mountain Skeptics – is the only person who discovered the hoax and correctly attributed it to me. He had searched for “NMSR” under Deja News and recognized my brand of humor when his search turned up my story.

“Best regards,

“Mark Boslough”

This invariably led to a ritual debunking on the Urban Legends Reference Pages, better known as Snopes.com , which looks at stories of unknown or questionable origin and is a well-known resource for covering urban legends and Internet rumors, receiving 300,000 visits a day. Snopes.com is run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, a California couple who met in the alt.folklore.urban newsgroup. Snopes takes it name from the Snopes trilogy – The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion – written by American novelist William Faulkner between 1940 and 1959 regarding the Snopes family in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.

You can read the “Christmas Roast 1998 Urban Legend” on the Darwin Awards website at: http://www.darwinawards.com/legends/legends1998-11.html and the Snopes “Nuke of Earl” account at: http://www.snopes.com/horrors/techno/microwave.asp

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