Conspiracies Declassified
Page 18
The Truth
As we know from recent high-resolution photographs, the hill on Mars that some believe is a carefully carved face has no interesting features at all; it only appeared so in the earliest photo because of black dots where data was missing.
The Backstory
When NASA engineers first discovered the face, they thought it was pretty funny. All of Viking’s photos were speckled with black dots, which were places where the camera didn’t capture data. It is thanks to the fortuitous placement of about eight such dots that the hill looks reminiscent of a face. NASA published the photo, never imagining that people would think it was actually a face. Much to their dismay, they soon discovered they’d created a whole subculture of people who believed there was an advanced civilization of megasculptors on Mars.
This group was led by Richard C. Hoagland, a conspiracy theorist who spent much of his career trying to publicly associate himself with the US space program or famous planetariums or anyone who would listen to his various alternate theories. He has proposed something he calls “hyperdimensional physics” in which all fundamental understandings of the universe are wrong, and only he is right (despite having no academic credentials). He claims the Face on Mars is only one feature in what is a great citadel of pyramids and other monuments, despite a total lack of evidence and voluminous contradictory evidence proving that no such citadel exists.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
Hoagland has even tried to claim that he was the creator of the plaque attached to the Pioneer 10 space probe, when there is abundant true history to show it was created by Carl Sagan and others, and that Hoagland had no remote connection to it. The plaque shows a male and female figure and some information about where the ship came from. It is intended as a peaceful communication to any extraterrestrial life that might see it.
In 1987, Hoagland published The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. This book has become something of a Holy Bible for ancient monuments constructed on Mars, the Moon, and other places. It is full of conspiratorial gobbledygook, flagrant pseudoscience, and outright untruths about the solar system.
In 1998 and 2001, the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft took dramatically improved pictures of the Cydonia region with a resolution of only 1.5 m per pixel, and it became immediately clear that the Face on Mars did not look anything like a face. It was an unremarkable knoll without any especially distinguishing features. And then as if that wasn’t enough, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (launched in 2005) took a picture five times sharper, all the way down to about 30 cm per pixel. Still no face. We now have excellent radar and 3-D data of Cydonia, and none of the features hold up to the initial expectations so many were hoping for. No pyramids, no buildings, no giant sculpted faces.
What we can tell from the 3-D data is that when the light is hitting the hill from a certain angle, two contours fill with shadow and look generally like an eye and a mouth on one half of a face. The other half of the face is in complete shadow.
Despite all this substantial evidence, Hoagland has not slowed down. The conspiracy community now claims that the NASA images have been “degraded” to obscure the face’s true details, which is silly because the hill’s features are clearly visible in great detail. Still absolutely insistent that it is an artificial face, Hoagland has also moved on to other structures throughout the solar system that he believes were constructed by advanced civilizations, including skyscrapers on the dark side of the Moon.
The Explanation
In science, we often point to the law of large numbers when confronted with a manifestation that appears unlikely. This law refers to the mathematical probability of highly unlikely events popping up at predictable intervals. The Face on Mars is about 1 square kilometer, and the entire surface of Mars is about 150 million square kilometers. If we posit that the likelihood of any given patch of surface looking somewhat like a face is one in a million, then the probability is that there are some 150 such faces on Mars.
Believe it or not, there are certainly many, many such faces on Earth. In 2013, a company called onformative created a program that automatically scanned Google Earth looking for natural features that look like faces, and many of the results were striking. Alberta, Canada, is home to the Badlands Guardian, which when viewed from the air appears to be an astonishingly realistic depiction of a Native American seen in profile, wearing a full feathered headdress. A natural gas well and road that were put in happen to make it look exactly like he’s listening to an iPod (trust me—head to Google for a picture). France has its Apache Head of Ebihens, a face jutting out from a hillside. There is the Queen’s Head in Taiwan, the sleeping giant of Pedra da Gávea in Brazil, the Hoburgsgubben in Sweden, and the Devil’s Head in North Carolina. And, of course, there is the most famous natural face of all: the Man in the Moon.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The tendency of our brains to spot faces in ordinary objects is called pareidolia. It is an evolved trait in all animals to help us recognize our parents and others of our kind. If we didn’t have pareidolia, we would never be able to recognize cartoon characters as being people. Two dots and a line don’t actually look much like two eyes and a mouth, but our human brains make the connection instantly.
We can safely conclude that the existence of a conspiracy by NASA to cover up an advanced civilization on Mars is nonsense. There’s also no rational reason why NASA (or anyone else) would do such a thing. The law of large numbers and the phenomenon of pareidolia sufficiently account for any perceived similarity of the Cydonia formation to an actual face, and as the modern imaging proves, it doesn’t actually even look like a face!
PART 7
Urban Legend Conspiracy Theories
Who doesn’t love a good urban legend? They tend to be lighthearted mysteries that many of us have heard of, but are often more mainstream and relatable than hardcore political conspiracy theories. Sometimes they involve a story heard from a friend of a friend of someone who was involved, but they nearly always reference something that you vaguely remember hearing in the news and that has the air of plausibility—something that could happen to you. Sometimes they’re funny, sometimes they’re weird, sometimes they’re scary.
It’s the familiarity that is key to urban legends’ tendency to spread. We’re all much more likely to pass on a story we’ve heard if the person it happened to was a friend of a friend, or if it happened nearby, or if it involved a service we all use or something we’re all familiar with. Urban legends spread virally nowadays, because nothing travels faster on the Internet than a cool story.
Is that arcade game you’ve always played really a way for the government to spy on you? Is it possible that Finland isn’t a real place? Was TWA Flight 800 shot down by the United States? Urban legends—believe them or not—will always at least get your attention.
Hearst and Hemp
* * *
Date: 1930
Location: United States
The Conspirators: William Randolph Hearst, DuPont, Federal Bureau of Narcotics
The Victims: The hemp industry and marijuana users
* * *
The Theory
Cotton and timber are planted in much higher amounts than hemp. Yet many marijuana enthusiasts claim that hemp is a superior industrial product to both cotton fiber and wood fiber, so why is its planting so marginalized?
The answer, they say, is that newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst lobbied against hemp to protect his vast wood-fiber paper holdings. That’s why many states went so far as to make marijuana illegal.
The Truth
Hearst was a buyer of paper, not a seller. He would have benefited from increased competition in the paper market from hemp. The reason hemp wasn’t planted in greater amounts is that hemp is a terrible fiber for newspaper, and most other products that need finer, softer threads. Hearst had nothing at all to do with laws to ban marijuana, which
were in place long before he came along. States had been banning marijuana largely as an action against immigrant classes, who were its main users. The war on marijuana was driven by racism, not a newspaper magnate.
The Backstory
The story of Hearst lobbying to get hemp and marijuana banned to protect his holdings did not exist until 1985, when pro-marijuana activist Jack Herer published a small book called The Emperor Wears No Clothes. Herer’s book is still popular today. In it, Herer expanded upon two popular beliefs and invented a third. He greatly exaggerated the industrial value of hemp, and he greatly exaggerated the medicinal value of cannabis. The myth that he invented was that Hearst and his “vast timber holdings,” along with the DuPont family that produced nylon, were allegedly afraid of hemp competition.
In fact, Hearst did briefly own one processing mill, the Dexter Sulphite Pulp and Paper Company in New York, in the hopes that it would provide him with cheap paper; but the paper it produced turned out not to work well for newspapers, so he sold it to Kimberly-Clark.
The only significant land holdings Hearst owned were a 270,000-acre ranch in San Simeon, California, a lease on the 50,000-acre Wheeler Ranch in Northern California, and the 900,000-acre Babícora Ranch in Mexico. Neither San Simeon nor Babícora were ever used for logging. After Hearst’s death, his trustees did do limited logging on Wheeler Ranch. In his lifetime, however, Hearst never sold a splinter of wood for paper manufacturing. He simply wasn’t in that business.
Nearly all of his newsprint was imported from Canada. By 1939, its rising prices seriously impacted Hearst. Had there been a viable alternative in the market, the competition would have helped drive down paper prices for him. Hemp was never that alternative. Its fibers are coarse and suitable for products like cardboard, but it simply doesn’t work for finer paper products.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
There is another popular urban legend that says when George H.W. Bush was shot down in World War II, his parachute and its lines were both made from hemp; his shoes were stitched from hemp; his plane’s engine was lubricated with hemp seed oil; and the ship that picked him up had rigging, lines, and fire hoses all made from hemp. So far as researchers have determined, none of this is true. The United States was using cotton for most of these products and had little hemp fiber on hand. Plus, Bush was rescued by the submarine USS Finback, not by a ship with rigging.
World War II did see a surge in the demand for hemp fiber; in fact, a 1942 war propaganda film titled Hemp for Victory intended to encourage its planting. The vast majority of industrial hemp in the United States had been imported from overseas, and when war with Japan hampered those imports, cotton had to do double duty. The calls for increased domestic hemp production were too little, too late, and when the war ended, the industry had not materialized in any meaningful way.
The Explanation
While Herer’s efforts to promote marijuana by touting hemp may have fallen flat, he was not entirely wrong that powerful forces played a role in the banning of recreational marijuana. It’s just wasn’t Hearst or the DuPont family.
Marijuana’s doom came from two fronts in the early twentieth century: the institutionalized racism inherent in the criminal justice system, and the evangelical Christianity that triggered Prohibition. Throughout World War I, anti-immigrant sentiment ran high in the United States. Making the lives of immigrants harder was one way that law enforcement tried to discourage them from coming here. Marijuana use was high among Chinese immigrants in California (for whom cannabis was a common traditional remedy) and in many poorer black and Latino communities nationwide. After Prohibition was passed, marijuana use skyrocketed, notably among Mexican farm workers who could no longer have a drink to relax after work. Volumes of historical research published in such journals as the Virginia Law Review, Contemporary Drug Problems, and Public Health Reports reveal that enforcement of laws against marijuana was almost entirely against minority ethnic groups.
Harry Anslinger, commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was one of the most powerful crusaders against marijuana. It was Anslinger who began calling it marijuana, a Spanish word, so that it would be perceived to be associated with low-class or criminal immigrants. Before 1930, it was called Indian hemp, or Cannabis indica.
Anslinger’s assault was multipronged. Educational films such as Reefer Madness in the 1930s cemented public sentiment against marijuana. Anslinger fed newspapers a constant feast of hysterical press releases blaming murders and many other crimes on people using the drug.
Anslinger’s swan song was the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (yes, spelled with an H). This provided a legal way for farmers to sell hemp (so long as they paid the tax) but simultaneously made the sale of recreational marijuana (which was, of course, done without taxes) a federal crime. It was opposed, unsuccessfully, by the American Medical Association, as medicinal uses of marijuana were indeed on the rise—until the act passed.
All of this was going on completely independently of William Randolph Hearst. The closest connection he had to the decline of either hemp or marijuana was that his newspapers, like all newspapers in the country, eagerly trumpeted Anslinger’s press releases. But the forces that were already in motion to ban recreational marijuana were virtually unstoppable. Industrial hemp was doomed to find its own place as a fair material for some uses, mainly boutique clothing and food products, but not a very good one for many.
There Is No Finland
* * *
Date: 1945
Location: Eastern Sweden
The Conspirators: Japanese and Russian governments
The Victims: Residents of Eastern Sweden
* * *
The Theory
It sounds almost too bizarre to believe, but some people think that the country of Finland (which separates Russia from the Baltic Sea) is actually not there—instead of the landmass shown on maps, it is actually just more Baltic Sea. Thus, people who believe themselves Finns living in Finland are actually located in eastern Sweden, north of where they think they are. The story states that all governments are complicit in agreeing to alter maps and GPS data in order to fool everyone into thinking that this section of the Baltic Sea is the fictional country of Finland.
The Truth
Finland exists.
The Backstory
Much of this claim depends on the alleged backstory of Japanese overfishing in their local waters in the late 1940s, and the consequent need to find new fishing grounds. A glance through the pages of a history book tells us this is not very likely because prior to the 1960s, the idea of overfishing in the ocean didn’t really exist. There hadn’t been any decline in any fishing stocks—not counting certain species of whales—and no nations had ever had to do anything about it. So it’s very doubtful that the Japanese faced critical shortages as early as 1950.
Prior to World War II, Japan had a thriving fishing industry, one of the strongest in the world. But the war effort devastated it, and they actually experienced severe famine in the closing year of the war. After the war, rebuilding their fishing industry was a major priority for the occupying forces. The Allies invested in it heavily—so successfully that by 1952, the revitalized Japanese fishing industry exceeded its pre-war size. Thus, this “need to find new fishing grounds” around 1950 can’t be accurate. So much for the fundamental motivation of the alleged conspirators.
Another facet of the overfishing narrative is that after World War II, Russia had starvation problems, and because Japanese waters were overfished, the two nations hatched a plan to solve both of their issues. Japan would fish in the Baltic Sea, and would share its catch with Russia. Russia would construct the Trans-Siberian Railway for Japan to transport the fish. Win-win!
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
To support the conspiracy, the theory claims that the Trans-Siberian Railway was built after World War II, but the fact is that its first transcontinental route had been completed during World War I, some thirty years earlier.
/> The grandest part of the plan was the strategy to protect the Japanese fishing boats from international regulators: the two nations would pretend that there is no Baltic Sea in that area—that instead it is some new country called Finland; thus, no regulators would think to check there for fishing boats. All the other nations of the world agreed to alter their maps and GPS data as a gesture of goodwill toward these two nations, which had both suffered so terribly during World War II.
The Explanation
Finland has a long history, stretching back some 9,000 years to when it was first settled as the glaciers receded from the Ice Age. Plenty of evidence proves that Finland existed as a nation, by name, for many centuries. Just about every ancient text in Scandinavia mentions Finland by name. There is an immense amount of ancient documentation of the early Finnish wars from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There is also an eleventh-century runestone named U 582 on which Finland is carved, and also a thirteenth-century runestone named G 319 that bears the name as well.