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In Memorandum Dean Ballinger - The Great Beast vs. Waikato
25 Plays2 years ago
We present a remastered version of episode 62, our interview with Dean Ballinger, as part of our remembrance of him.
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Transcript
Tribute to Dean Ballinger
00:00:00
Speaker
Earlier this month, Dean Ballinger, a fellow conspiracy theory theorist from Aotearoa, New Zealand, died. We interviewed Dean back in the early stages of the podcast and, to our shame, never got him back. Dean and I remained in contact and deeply interested in each other's work, but unfortunately, now that Dean is dead, there is no opportunity for us to interview Dean once again.
Interview on Aleister Crowley
00:00:25
Speaker
So, in lieu of being able to present a new interview with Dean Ballinger, something that we should have done a long time ago, we have decided to reissue this interview, which was episode 62. So back in the glorious days of, well, before the Donald Trump presidency, when things seemed much better globally.
00:00:48
Speaker
So that any ado, here is Dean Ballinger and our discussion of Aleister Crowley and the weirdness of the Waikato. Aleister Crowley was born in October of 1875 and he quickly became known as the Great Beast for biting his nanny on the ankle. Though you beast, you great great beast! Born of fundamentalist religious stock,
00:01:11
Speaker
Crowley did what everyone else was thinking at the time, and decided to reject Christianity and talk to wearing fancy robes and esoteric bling. Could my amulets be bigger and even more golden? Yes, yes they could. Crowley initially joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but after claiming to have been contacted by the supernatural entity named Iwas, he started the school of Thelema, which operated on the edict. Do what thou wilt be the whole of
Crowley's Influence and Espionage
00:01:40
Speaker
the law.
00:01:40
Speaker
Crowley was, among many things, great at putting on a show. But wait, there's more! Whatever you might do, we'll come back to reward you not once, not twice, but three times! He managed to garner the attention of the creme de la creme of British society, which funded his increasingly lavish lifestyle. He even managed to franchise his operations. My good friend Jack Parsons is handling the American operation. Not sure about his naval friend L. Ron though. Seems a shady character.
00:02:09
Speaker
Crowley's exploits are somewhat legendary. He joined the pro-German movement during the First World War, but then claimed he was working for the British the entire time. It's all just part of the illusion, you see. In the Second World War, Crowley worked, also some claim, for the Allies. It's me against Himmler. Let the greatest occult powers of Europe duke it out.
00:02:30
Speaker
Crowley died at the age of 72 in 1947, and his funeral was as interesting as his life, at least to the British tabloids. Black mass, black mass, devils in the streets, it's spiritualism, run amok. Yet when conspiracy theory theorists talk about conspiracy theories, Crowley is not a name which crops up. Yet Thelema and Crowley were both the subject and object of conspiracy and conspiracy theories.
00:02:57
Speaker
Yet like stories of UFOs and alien cover-ups, serious conspiracy theorists really discuss the occult. My mystery endures.
Dean's Academic Interests
00:03:06
Speaker
Silence beast. And stop nibbling at my ankles. Shand. The podcast is Guide to the Conspiracy starring Dr. M.R. Extenteth and featuring Josh Addison as the interlocutor.
00:03:24
Speaker
This week, Josh and I are joined by Dean Bellinger, who, like me, is an antipodean conspiracy theory theorist. Dean's PhD dissertation, Conspiratoria, the internet and the logic of conspiracy theory, looks at conspiracy theories through the lens of media studies. Dean's current interest in conspiracy theories concerns two, possibly related subjects, many of us who study such theories either avoid or ignore the occult and UFOs.
00:03:51
Speaker
Are they just weird, wacky and just not worth the effort? Or is there something about these kind of conspiracy theories that typical academic analyses just can't capture?
Fluoride Debate in Hamilton
00:04:02
Speaker
So, let's invoke the great beast and find out. Hello Dean. Hi, how's it going? Oh, it goes well. So how are things down in the more central part of the North Island? Probably considerably colder than up more north where it's a bit more subtropical I would presume.
00:04:20
Speaker
Yeah well that being said the weather hasn't been delightful the last few days. Well it's obviously the chemtrails at work you know just to get us a bit more chilled out in preparation for the takeover. Ah see I think it'd be more the fluoride in the water making us more prone to feeling cold.
00:04:38
Speaker
Well, we do have that in Hamilton, plenty of fluoride. There's plenty of fluoride activists here as well. Well, actually, that's true. I mean, our four listeners who don't really know much about local body politics within Atarawa, New Zealand. Actually, the fluoride thing was a really big issue down in Hamilton recently, wasn't it? Because you actually at one stage voted to get rid of fluoride and then you voted to put it back into your water supply. What was going on there? The health and political authorities here
00:05:06
Speaker
revolted against public opinion and reinstalled it, I think was the crux of the meta. So they just went these idiotic public conspiracy theorist types or people believing this kind of nonsense and sort of overshod what might have been, I don't know about a majority opinion, but a very vocal proportion of the local public and just kind of had it reinstated really.
00:05:31
Speaker
So it's a classic case here of a fluoride conspiracy theory being countered by another fluoride conspiracy theory if you believe that fluoride is a mind-control agent. I mean, they took it away and then they put it back. It's actually ever so slightly amusing, truth be told.
00:05:48
Speaker
I also find Hamilton interesting as a little bit of a hotbed of global warming denial in New Zealand. The university here has got a couple of significant players in the denial debates.
00:06:03
Speaker
Um, one guy appears to be off on a tangent.
David Icke's Impact on Conspiracy Theories
00:06:06
Speaker
He's like a lecturer in ocean sciences, but some of the others like in the politics department are definitely much more the right wing sort of libertarian ideology, um, angle on it. So they kind of sponsor people coming through most notably, uh, Moncton a couple of years ago. Oh, when he was doing his grand tour of the country. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, I did go to that, which was an interesting experience. Um,
00:06:32
Speaker
Rather torturing fear, but anyway, this is probably a little bit off topic for you. Sorry, Matthew. Oh, no, no, it's quite right about to say, because you went to see Lord Monkton. I saw David Icke when he was out here, and that gets us quite nicely into the topic of UFO style conspiracy theories, because when it comes to alien abductions or alien encounters, David Icke really is the urtex of the modern conspiracy theory movement.
00:06:55
Speaker
And his talk, which I went to, which was at the Manukau Events Stadium, was nine hours long. And I was actually, I did think about going to that, but it was on my wife's birthday. So I thought, yeah, if she asked her on a date, I did say, did you want to go and listen to David Icke for nine hours as your birthday present? It would be an interesting relationship where yes, would be the immediate answer to that.
00:07:20
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. Yeah, she, you know, politely declined the offer in favor of a movie, perhaps, but, you know. Well, you could have watched one of David Icke's many DVDs. Well, indeed, yes. Yeah, if you can, you know, get through.
00:07:36
Speaker
I actually found him to be a very engaging talker, so completely leaving to one side the actual content of what he was speaking about. He is the kind of person who actually can keep an audience enthralled for nine solid hours. So you have to give him that. OK, so I was going to say if you thought that was related to his media background, because that's something that struck me as something that's possibly significant about him, this is me from a media perspective, as compared to some other conspiracy theorists.
00:08:06
Speaker
who their public image is of the mad renter who lacks charisma so they quickly turn people off if you like if they're in that kind of one-on-one mode but ike coming from tv he was already a public figure before his new age conversion and sort of you know um
00:08:24
Speaker
entry into the word of conspiracism. So he kind of knew how to play an audience. He knows how to present himself. He's maybe got those skills and experience just, you know, innately wrapped up in him as a person so he can he can pull that stuff off and that really works for him.
Defining Conspiracy Theories
00:08:40
Speaker
Yes, I would say there probably is something to the notion that he's a expert media play given his journalistic background with the BBC and other organisations. But also there's a sheer sense of passionate interest that comes out of what he's talking about, which might be faked. It's always quite possible that you can put forward views of some particular kind and make yourself sound sincere. But I think Ike really is a true believer to a certain extent in the kind of things he wants to get across.
00:09:09
Speaker
Okay, yeah, I've got that impression as well from, again, watching his online material and reading his books also to the main extent. Again, sorry, this might be a slight digression from the main thrust of your conversation, which was on UFO and occult conspiracies.
00:09:26
Speaker
Oh, quite alright. We can be as broad-ranging as we desire. Actually, so to get ourselves into this kind of table-setting exercise, could you give us what you take it a conspiracy theory is? I think I had some...
00:09:41
Speaker
you know, general definition I used. Well, the conspiracy is, you know, a group of people doing something in secret for their own interests. There's a political dimension to it. The theory is an explanatory framework set up by other people outside of whatever those power networks are to try and explain what they perceive to be the machinations and working of
00:10:08
Speaker
Power, power defined in a very broad, I don't know, multidisciplinary sense, perhaps. Across the boards are not just political power. You could talk about, if we're talking about occultism, for example, exercise of magical power or technological power, et cetera. Sorry, it's probably not the best definition off the top of my head. I possibly wasn't expecting that question.
00:10:30
Speaker
We always like to get to the very heart of the issue. All right, so you're basically using a definition of conspiracy theory here, which is going, look, it's an explanation of some kind of covert, possibly suspicious event with a political dimension.
Introduction of Josh Addison
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, that's probably more my thinking about it is coming out of politics and thinking critically about nature of power and society and so forth. I'm not saying that conspiracy theorists think in a really political way, certainly not the, you know, the occult ones we'd think of, but maybe just that, that, you know, really ingrained in depth suspicion of power in a variety of forms. Can I chime in with a question here? You certainly can. This is your podcast to Josh, you can ask whatever questions you like. I was just going to say, are you going to introduce me to Dean?
00:11:17
Speaker
Because I don't want to start firing questions at him before the man's even become aware of my existence. This is one of the minute or etiquette questions of doing an interview where no one can see each other. So Dean, this is Josh. Josh, this is Dean. You and our best friends have known each other for as long as I have. Nice to meet you, Josh. Nice to meet you indeed.
00:11:38
Speaker
So, do you have a question, Josh, now that you've
Public vs. Academic Views on UFOs
00:11:41
Speaker
re-established it? No, I did have my question. It was, can you introduce me? It's going to be the only question you ask in this, and here's a bit. I mean, yes, just for Dean's benefit, perhaps I did my email in philosophy alongside Matthew at the University of Auckland, but didn't carry on in the realm of academia like he did, so I'm
00:12:00
Speaker
more in the way of an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to the analysis of conspiracy theories. Just like you're an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to surgery. Yep, exactly. I won't follow up on that reference perhaps, so maybe I don't want to know. No, it's true, actually. But the police do. So if you do know about what Josh has been getting up to on Thursday nights, please do get in contact with the local constabulary. They really want to know.
00:12:27
Speaker
All right, so we're going to talk about UFO and occultic conspiracy theories. Now, when we were having an email correspondence about this prior to this interview, we were kind of talking about the fact that most of the time, people who study conspiracy theories, who I term conspiracy theory theorists, often don't talk about these occult or UFO conspiracy theories particularly much. Would you agree with that assertion?
00:12:55
Speaker
I think so. If I'm just giving a quick run through of my mental files on particularly academic, scholarly, and more serious writings on conspiracy theory, they don't really tend to engage with those topics, I don't think. They're much more on the fringe.
00:13:14
Speaker
out, you know, racking my brains for academics, sort of engaging with it in a particularly applied fashion. There's lots of academic history books, you know, history of conspiracies in America and so forth, as you know, that will touch on these topics, but it's kind of giving the big cultural historical overview of them rather than sort of discussing why people find them interesting, why they, you know, perpetuate throughout a culture over time and those sorts of
Rise of Conspiracy Literature
00:13:41
Speaker
arguments and analyses. If there's some key text that I've forgotten about, I have not read, please enlighten me in that regard. But that's my general impression. Certainly the impression I get just from the other talks Matthew's had with his peers is that in a lot of disciplines, conspiracy theories themselves aren't really taken seriously. There seems to be a lot of the time the focus is, well, obviously these things are nonsense. So what we're interested in is why would people believe these ridiculous things in the first place?
00:14:11
Speaker
And so I suppose like it's one thing to have conspiracy theories around in the political sphere or something where which which people at least acknowledges is you know real. So I suppose conspiracy theories about things like the occult and UFOs is sort of doubly doubly nonsense in a lot of people's eyes.
00:14:29
Speaker
Yes, I suppose there is a certain thing we can kind of imagine political conspiracies occurring, even though people think that they're quite rare. But when you start bringing in, say, demonic possession, supernatural entities, or alien abductions, you go, no, no, no, that's far too beyond the pale. No one really believes those things. We can kind of just shove those theories to one side. They're not worth having any kind of discussion about.
00:14:55
Speaker
Yeah, but I think those are actually surprisingly popular. There's the serious scholarly discussion of these topics, but for a lot of...
00:15:07
Speaker
you know, the people on the street interested in them, those sorts of subjects really resonate with them in many ways. Um, you know, okay, look, you're getting into the realms of the anecdotal here, which is probably never particularly good as evidence, but you know, over the years going to social gatherings, you go to a party or something and chat to people and you get into the subject of conspiracies and which often does come up, at least for me. Um, UFOs come up all the time. Um, Ike, incredibly popular.
00:15:34
Speaker
I have people talking to me about him all the time. He really, you know, they might not necessarily believe everything he's saying, but they certainly, they know of him. He's got a cultural profile. They probably relate to some of his ideas in some way. So, you know, not literally shipshifting lizard people, but yes, there are real problems with our elites and, you know, there's the kind of masons and some secret groups.
00:15:59
Speaker
having overt influence and covert influence, I meant to say. I wonder on a grassroots level if there's a lot of engagement from the public with conspiracy theories that maybe isn't quite adequately being reflected in some of the scholarship on it.
Media's Role in Conspiracy Narratives
00:16:20
Speaker
Another interesting line from that is I work in a secondhand bookshop.
00:16:24
Speaker
being impoverished academic, because now I can get a job. Another story, obviously. But in that, I just regularly meet people coming in looking for books on conspiracy topics, which is really quite fascinating. And again, Ike, if he comes in, he goes straight out. These people requesting him all the time.
00:16:41
Speaker
I had a guy come in the other day, he can tell me the UFO books, admittedly not that common an occurrence. When I got there, the one that he picked out was Secret of the Ages UFOs from Inside the Earth, a particularly sort of cranky tone from the 1970s, which I'll admit to having read in my youth, about Hollow Earth Theory. This guy was like really excited. I said, oh, this is pretty nuts. Yeah, yeah, great. I saw something on the History Channel about this. Sounds excellent. He walked away kind of,
00:17:10
Speaker
quite thrilled. This was a young, young British guy in his 20s. So yeah, admittedly, I guess just bits and pieces of people, but just, you know, you kind of get the sense of there's these cultural undercurrents going on. So
00:17:25
Speaker
My engagements with people plus reading stuff online just makes me think that there's a public interest in UFO and occult themed conspiracism for various reasons that is maybe more significant than some of the scholarly literature might imply.
00:17:46
Speaker
Yes, I must admit, when I think about TV shows in the US, so you look at the History Channel and the channel formerly known as H2, the sister channel to history, and they had shows like America Unearthed, which was looking at the real history of American prehistory.
00:18:04
Speaker
the ancient aliens franchise, the search for lost giants. There's a whole lot of literature being produced out there, which are making bold conspiratorial claims, often not of a political kind. They're often actually quite apolitical when it comes to alien abductions or alien history. And yet it is true that when conspiracy theorists are writing about conspiracy theories,
00:18:32
Speaker
They're mostly writing about the sensible political conspiracy theories of the 20th century. They're not talking about why people might believe that Freemasons are possessed by the devil, or why alien abductions are a major facet in Earth history.
00:18:50
Speaker
No, I agree with you there. My general thinking is just that you have obviously academic cultures and some topics are just too far beyond the pale to be dealt with in regards to the cultural politics of those institutions
Conspiracy Theories and Ideological Biases
00:19:09
Speaker
and kind of the mindsets involved from the people who work there.
00:19:14
Speaker
Not to say that there's not a lot of people who might be interested in those ideas, but you know, does it give you a bad reputation if you start dabbling with them? I personally think if you're way out from the centres of anywhere, ALA New Zealand, you could probably get away with doing scholarly work on all sorts of subjects and say university that you maybe couldn't in the States. Thinking of the experiences of say, John Mack,
00:19:39
Speaker
the famous Harvard psychologist who got way off into accepting the reality of early abductions. And there was the major academic scandal surrounding him where he had to justify himself before a sort of jury of his peers that this was valid research and so forth. But presumably he was from Harvard, the sort of
00:19:59
Speaker
American academic class system at work, so if he was that, you know. University of Waikato now is probably going to be paying much interest in what the hell are you coming up with down there. In terms of conspiracy theories, we just said around UFOs they're not political, but the only ones I'm aware of are ones around where it gets specifically conspiratorial or along the lines of the government knows and they're covering it up. Are there sort of less
00:20:24
Speaker
governmental conspiracies around UFOs, or is it all about cover-ups and what the powers that be are hiding from us? I think from, no, I'd agree with you there, Josh, that they predominantly are around the political dimension of the cover-up. And maybe there's been a change over time, so let's see, the idea of Ufology has been a post-World War II cultural phenomenon
00:20:49
Speaker
Starting in the States, so 1947, generally cited as the beginnings of UFOlogy with the American civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold citing some strange craft in the sky, so he thought, and then the term flying saucers was coined out of that and sort of took off in the popular imagination. But in the 1950s, you had some American military officials also at the height of the Cold War. So Donald Kehoe, I think, was a key figure. So he was some sort of air force
00:21:17
Speaker
official who said, well, there's all these people in the U.S. Air Force and the military and the government who know there's something more about the sources that they come from out of space and that our defense capabilities are poor in response to them. So if they are a threat, we're actually pathetically ill-equipped to handle that. And they're keeping this quiet. They know more than they're letting on to not scare the public.
00:21:41
Speaker
So there's maybe an early version of that theme in keeping with Cold War paranoia as well in the beginnings of a sort of political intelligence state that has kind of got some black government area going on that the public and even most of the members like the president doesn't even know what's
Dark Themes in UFO Conspiracies
00:22:00
Speaker
happening there. But also that shift towards it becoming much more paranoid
00:22:04
Speaker
in its application and its exegesis after Watergate, after the real hardcore cynicism maybe set in the 70s. Sorry, this is obviously incredibly reductive and broad, so my apologies for doing such a historical overview.
00:22:20
Speaker
A lot of commentators that turn to a much more cynical take on American politics and its ideals as a nation in the 70s, post-Watergate, in particular post-Vietnam. Then you get the bubbling and coming to fruition of, I think what was called the dark side
00:22:40
Speaker
UFO narratives from the 1980s in particular. So that was the whole, the US government is in cahoots with aliens, maybe several races of them, and they're predominantly evil, and they have underground bases in the American Southwest, and they abduct people and take your cell, your genetic materials, sperm and eggs in particular, and they're making hybrid
00:23:02
Speaker
alien human babies out of them and they're going to raise them and infiltrate the human race and gradually take over and maybe they've got mind control machinery and they're doing all sorts of other weird experiments. They're meant to have some agreement with the US government but they're not telling them exactly what they're doing. Cattle mutilations were linked in with all that so they need some sort of enzyme or whatever from the cattle and you know they're doing that without the government's permission and it goes on from there and gets more and more sort of baroquely paranoid and sinister as these things do.
00:23:31
Speaker
And there's those key figures. I think one that really comes to mind was Bill Cooper. I don't know if you've heard of him, you know, sort of hardcore American UFO crank, but he's actually been really influential in those circles. So he kind of started off as a Kennedy conspiracy theorist and was notorious for having the theory that the driver of Kennedy's limo killed him by tuning around extremely quickly and shooting Kennedy in the head with some sort of special gun.
00:24:00
Speaker
that pumped out some sort of shellfish toxin that kind of, you know, melted Kennedy's skull. And then the gun biodegraded. Sounds like something out of a David Cronenberg movie. It's quite a good trick, yeah. Yeah, so a bit of a fine evidence. A new flesh. Yeah, an organic gun, like Existens or something. So he started touting this and then got onto the Starkside Ufology, which other Americans had bandied about for a while and became a leading exponent of it.
00:24:28
Speaker
But I haven't seen footage of him, but just read some of his writings and what other people have said about him. It comes across as a prime sociopath, which I think is another fascinating dimension of modern conspiracy culture, and particularly this UFO stuff, because the claims are so extreme. But if anyone disagreed with him, you're part of the conspiracy.
00:24:49
Speaker
you know, very much that type of logic. Um, and that guy, he's also interesting Cooper for, you know, meeting a sorry end, a very paranoid end where his anti-government beliefs led him to have a shootout with police in which he was killed over pain as Texas.
Libertarian Themes in Conspiracies
00:25:07
Speaker
I think it was something like that.
00:25:08
Speaker
Actually, that gives us a nice segue into libertarianism, because in your PhD, you kind of take a certain class of conspiracy theorists to task, don't you, for their subscription to a kind of libertarian political ideal.
00:25:24
Speaker
I possibly do. I haven't really looked at it for a while, so I may well have forgotten. I certainly did deal with that topic. Yeah. And that's one I do find interesting in its, you know, sinister implications. I'll freely admit here that my politics are of the left, so I do find Libertarians fairly wretched creatures for the most part. They can be odd beasts.
00:25:50
Speaker
Yeah, just that strain. Anyway, something noticeable in American culture, American conspiracy culture, I thought that bubbles through. But yeah, I see what you mean with Cooper, the really strong anti-government, anti-authoritarian. Actually, that was another thing I was trying to think of some ideas to talk about for this.
00:26:09
Speaker
But the idea of conspiracy theories is a way of demonizing either people and or institutions that you really dislike in relation to your ideological beliefs, for example. The UFO framework is maybe one way that that's expressed in
00:26:32
Speaker
American conspiracy culture by conspiracy theorists with really strong libertarian ideals. The idea that for someone like Cooper say, you know, you hate the American government so much what the state represents, you know, you're such an adherent of this
The X-Files Influence
00:26:47
Speaker
kind of frontiersman
00:26:49
Speaker
do everything by yourself, libertarian individualism, that as Ike might demonise the real family, who obviously really dislikes by saying they are shapeshifting lizard baby eaters, Cooper and his ilk are doing the same by saying the US government is so bad it's in cahoots with these evil aliens that are
00:27:12
Speaker
abducting people against their world or even more extremely eating people. You know, there's the same tropes. There's, you know, there's people being devoured, people having horrible experiments done to them. But all with the collusion, active collusion of the authorities, in this case, the American government. And I guess then then then the X-Files came along. I guess that had to be kind of significant in terms of chucking all the all the idea of UFOs and governmental conspiracies right into the popular consciousness.
00:27:42
Speaker
And then what was the follow-up? Millennium? And also the lone gunman, which really went with the hyper paranoid approach to dealing with political information. So yeah, I kind of forget about it now, but there was a time when not very long ago at all when that sort of stuff was really flavour of the minute, wasn't it?
00:28:04
Speaker
Oh yes, yeah, I mean, and the eight exiles was a kind of surprise hit. No one really thought it was going to be a particularly big show. And you get kind of tapped into some cultural zeitgeist of that moment became the behemoth it is still today.
00:28:22
Speaker
with the remake about to be released. X-Files seem to be interesting in regards to, yeah, the writers appear to have researched all of that, what at that time was really quite fringe UFO conspiracism heavily and they were drawing on that for inspiration for
00:28:41
Speaker
a lot of their plot lines and scenarios, at least with the arc story, the ongoing one about the alien colonization and so forth. Mainstreaming it, yeah. This is probably something else from a media study perspective I find interesting as well, but there's the idea of there's some core texts that really popularize particular strand or
00:29:06
Speaker
or type of conspiracy theory and make it sort of go mega if you like and it really gets ingrained in the popular consciousness. Whereas before it used to circulate amongst people at weird fringe conferences in the middle of nowhere or on obscure forums on the internet and so forth.
Roswell and Mainstream Culture
00:29:25
Speaker
So for example, Roswell, just to tie it back with UFOs is maybe a good example, where that story bubbled around for years
00:29:32
Speaker
from renewable ufological history so it was certainly there but it was kind of you know if you're a hardcore ufo buff you'd heard about it until i think it was 1980 when charles burlitz who american author from the burlitz family who do the language schools but he also was famous for writing these these pot boiler paranormal books in the 70s and early 80s um so with another guy william moore wrote i think it was the
00:29:56
Speaker
The Roswell incident, but a best seller because he'd already had a reputation as a best selling author. I think his big one was the Bermuda Triangle in 1973. He was the key author who popularized that bit of folklore as a genuine paranormal phenomenon.
00:30:12
Speaker
So it was well, then it was kaboom. This is a big thing. Then you get all these other members of the public interested. Then you get all these other amateur researchers really keen and they go out and do their own work. And then you get all these other people that come out of the woodwork. Ah, 50 years ago I was out in the Texan desert, New Mexican desert. And yeah, I was, you know.
00:30:32
Speaker
smoking something with my mates and we saw this thing drop out of the sky and the military teamed up and all the various deathbed confessions and the like for Roswell. Maybe the X-Files was similar in that regard and more potent because it was a TV show.
Cultural Psyops in Media
00:30:49
Speaker
Possibly reaching many more people than, say, a book might have on an international level as well.
00:30:56
Speaker
Of course, there are the conspiracy theories that go that the X-Files was a perfect disinformation campaign, a way to get information out there, or it's also at the same time going, no, no, no, you watch that on TV. Yes, it's all just pretend. Yeah. There is no real Scali in Mulder. That is pretty good. And that also sounds similar logic to the disclosure movement.
00:31:18
Speaker
Yeah, that's a term I've heard used a bit. Sorry, are you familiar with that from, I presume? Yeah, I don't know about you, Matthew. I've only heard it in just fairly sort of general terms, as in disclosure is what these UFOlogists want to bring about, want to force out of the government. But I don't know in any great detail. Does this idea of the
00:31:39
Speaker
Yeah, a political movement of let's petition the president and the American political authorities to really reveal the truth about UFOs, i.e. that they know that alien life exists and that there are some, you know, aliens are on Earth and the American government has direct evidence of this.
00:31:59
Speaker
And also part of that is often cited is the idea that pop culture, such as the X-Files, as you mentioned, and other sort of major films and so forth, Transformers series are ways of conditioning the public to accept the reality of alien life when disclosure is going to happen. So it's kind of a psyops going on through popular culture.
00:32:21
Speaker
So a ufological variation on the whole Illuminati media meme-scape that's so popular online at the moment, pop videos are all full of Illuminati imagery and the like.
00:32:36
Speaker
I've laid the dagger with her hand over the eye and stuff that's come up a few times here. Did you see that news story that came out about two or three weeks ago about the person who was doing infographics for regional news in the US quite deliberately putting in Illuminati symbols into the graphics behind TV shows and sports broadcasts? Oh really? In the hope that people would spot them and no one did.
00:33:03
Speaker
So he had lots of pyramids, eyes and pyramids, pentagrams and such like in sports broadcasts, thinking that someone would talk about them online and no one spotted them. And so as he was going, look, everyone spots all of this imagery in a lady Gaga video, but on regional news, no one cares at all.
00:33:25
Speaker
that's actually that's great i have to look that up yeah so he's kind of been like um culture jammer or some sort of some sort of avant-garde subversive type and yet completely failing to have any impact whatsoever as far as he could tell yeah
00:33:40
Speaker
So he's doing it in full view and it's quite blatant, and no one picks up on it, whereas there's endless, endless examination of, yeah, some Lady Gaga or two-pack video. Well, I have to say, I think in the Lady Gaga case, I actually think the people who are making those videos are quite deliberately putting those symbols in.
00:34:02
Speaker
not because they're members of the Illuminati who want to reveal their plans of society, but for the sheer fact they know that people look for these things and thus it makes people pay more attention to the videos they produce. So I think it's a self-feeding circle now, essentially.
00:34:19
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that whole, that principle of music and pop culture is really based around notions of transgression as a way of selling, as a way of selling your cultural product in the consumer marketplace. So you've got to have something that's NG for the youth.
00:34:36
Speaker
Um, things like, you know, sexuality is possibly no longer as edgy and transgressive as it was given social changes. So yeah, I'll be thinking similar as well. Maybe these, these videos, they're deliberately playing on the kind of occult magical overtones of that sort of symbolism and putting it in there. Cause they know that kids will be like, this is a bit freaky. Well, it's got some, you know, sort of weird.
00:35:03
Speaker
occultic ambience, possibly more potent in the States, given it's, you know, much more ingrained Christian culture, you know, sort of strong fundamentalist kind of ethos that's still apparent there, possibly more than we've got in New Zealand, say. Yes, where we are sort of largely secular.
Evolution of UFO Narratives
00:35:22
Speaker
Yeah, so yeah, no, I'm wondering that also about, you know, the deliberate usage of Illuminati symbolism and motifs in that kind of way. Yeah.
00:35:33
Speaker
Without going too fast or saying that they're all 10th level masons doing weird rights off screen or whatever. Although of course they could be. You have to remember, Freemasons aren't quite the enemy that some people online want to make them out to be. Mostly they sit around in town halls drinking sherry complaining that no one wants to play with them anymore. Yeah, that sounds about right from the few I could probably think of as well, yeah.
00:36:01
Speaker
Now, it's quite interesting talking about the UFO side of things, because, as you point out, the kind of UFOlogy that emerges in the 80s, the kind of dark side UFOlogy, as opposed to the kind of more golden days of the 40s, 50s and 60s, where aliens were kind of bringing a hopeful message and we were being warned of forthcoming doom. And in the 80s, they kind of went goth and kind of joined in with the darkness.
00:36:30
Speaker
If we move to the occult and we start talking about occultic conspiracy theories, particularly the long history of discussion of the occult, particularly within Europe and the UK, are they similar or dissimilar?
00:36:47
Speaker
I mean, so it compared, say, to the talk of UFOs, are occultic conspiracy theories along the same axis or are they a kind of different version of a conspiracy theory under your view? Oh, this is probably just to do with stuff I've been reading recently. I kind of liken them together because I think there's a lot of crossover between them. Well, look, I'll
00:37:14
Speaker
Maybe you rewind a little bit back to UFO ufology, because there seems to be, you know, certain dominant strands of UFO culture that have developed over the last 50 years and are kind of fairly well entrenched today.
00:37:29
Speaker
So the first and maybe oldest one is the ETH, the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis, which is literally that the ETs are coming to Earth from other planets and spaceships and they're doing missions of exploration or whatever that are fairly benign and so forth. Sometimes they crash L.R. Roswell and the American government might have recovered some of that software, you know, that hardware and is back in Geneva or whatever for sinister purposes possibly.
00:37:52
Speaker
That's kind of the old school one. Yes, there are literal aliens visiting Earth, outside of all of the scientific problems that suggests. The psychosocial hypothesis, which certainly where I'd put myself in these debates, but that's... Sorry, the ETH one is more American. They seem to have that more literal belief in untetenological utopianism than maybe appeals in that regard. Psychosocial from Europe and the UK, so more
00:38:20
Speaker
more sceptical it's like well we don't think this stuff is really happening but there's you know people are having genuine experiences that they think are real on some psychological and emotional level so it's a mixture of all sorts of psychological factors with wider aspects of society such as the zeitgeist and so forth that you know are sort of creating again there's there's some mystery and strangers involved people are having these mental experiences possibly your imaginative experiences that
Influential Works on UFOs
00:38:48
Speaker
are quite profound for them, but, you know, they don't sort of make any scientific kind of sense. But there's still something on a cultural level that's really quite significant going on there. I think David Clark has just written a book How UFOs Conquered the World. I found it in my town library, which was good, good school from them. It's really good. That's probably a really good ex postulation of that whole psychosocial strand in ufology and how it's developed to the present. Because he's a British based sociologist, isn't he?
00:39:16
Speaker
Yeah, I think he specialises in folklore. He does the columnists of the 14 times, which we both readers of, obviously. We are, indeed. Yeah. And the third strand is this kind of...
00:39:30
Speaker
I'll call it occult ufology. It's much more intrinsically entwined with ideas from occultism and mysticism. I get the feeling of stuff I'm reading online that's actually going through some popularity or resurgence or something. It maybe has ways. Again, there's maybe key theorists and authors.
00:39:56
Speaker
Some associated with it, possibly Jacques Velie, who is maybe one of the most interesting authors on UFOs anyway. I'd probably recommend him to people who might not be interested in the subject because he's a very clear writer. He's a French scientist. He's actually coming from a proper scientific background and he's like a computer technician.
00:40:16
Speaker
and he worked with Alan Heineck and all these other figures back when the American government was investigating UFO's scientifically in the 1960s. So he has a wealth of sort of direct knowledge of the field and the main players in it and the cultural and institutional politics involved. His conclusions, whether you like those or not, that there's still something genuinely weird and there is a phenomenon and the phenomenon is he thinks it's some kind of
00:40:42
Speaker
non-human intelligence interacting with humanity in a variety of strange ways. It works on this level of what folklorists might call the trickster. It doesn't obey what we think is normal aspects of logic and things making sense. He doesn't give any conclusive
00:41:03
Speaker
arguments, which I think is actually a good thing about his reasoning. He's not saying this is literally what the phenomenon is, but just kind of. These are my conclusions on a general level. And there's also John Keel, who was an American journalist who wrote fairly lurid but entertaining books. The Mothman Prophecy has been the big one based on his fieldwork in West Virginia when they had this big UFO flap in the mid 60s.
00:41:31
Speaker
And people have seen not only UFOs but weird monsters, you know, Mothman flying around.
00:41:36
Speaker
So, but he also was, you know, there's this other intelligence that's kind of really strange, that's manipulating humans. He was a much more paranoid take on it. And they seem to have sort of been a couple of key figures that have set these templates of UFOs and occultism as in there's this other occultism, another realm of reality that is interacting with humanity, but not a long ways we kind of think of in terms of your standard, you know, sort of,
00:42:05
Speaker
logical positivistic, materialistic paradigms that science is based on. This is when you get into the realms of psychic phenomena and paranormal and the supernatural. Those are the levels, those intangible levels where the interaction is taking place. UFOs are one major manifestation of those forces or intelligences on our plane of reality, if you like.
00:42:29
Speaker
of that kind of otherworldly intelligence or phenomenon coming through. Someone like Verlee gets into the ties between ufology and psychic phenomena with a variety of, well, depending on your tastes, but quite interesting case studies and reports and speculations and so forth.
00:42:53
Speaker
Yeah, but I've noticed just, you know, reading websites, there's the anomalist and places like that online that, you know, sort of clearing houses of paranormal discussion online. Guy called Chris Knowles, who's an American, I think he's a comics writer. He writes quite an interesting blog called The Secret Son. Don't agree with what he says on there, but he's actually, I think, a good writer who expresses his ideas quite well, but he is a very clear exponent of this type of thing, I think.
00:43:21
Speaker
I find him quite interesting and he's good because he often links to all these other writers on the subject as well. It seems to be taking a slightly more sinister turn some of this discussion as in the UFOs are kind of magical and or a demonological slant coming through. I mean, thinking it's sort of like the new demonology paradigm and ufology.
00:43:45
Speaker
there are these kind of weird otherworldly intelligences, but like out of HP Lovecraft or something that have maybe sinister or, you know, we don't know designs on humanity and I'm manipulating us and so forth, the control motif again, which is central to conspiracism. And, you know, you can analyze the history of ufology along these lines. And so another interesting time with the cultism because of
Crowley's Occult Influence on Ufology
00:44:09
Speaker
I don't quite know why, but just got interested in Aleister Crowley recently. Over the years, I've just accrued books on various subjects I thought might be interesting from working in a bookshop, so I had a few Crowley bios. I actually thought I'd about time actually read some of these. I'd actually plowed through about three or so because I was just interested. What is the mythology around this guy? He's such a big cultural figure.
00:44:31
Speaker
But I've found that there's this distinct strand perpetuated by people like Knowles, for example, on that blog of Crowley being tied in with Ufology. So this whole mythology that is being developing, I think it's kind of quite interesting just to see it sort of developing before you culturalize, so to speak.
00:44:51
Speaker
with a whole lot of set storylines of Crowley is almost in some respects the key instigator of modern ufology. Obviously I might not have this exactly right so I'm just trying to do it from memory off the top of my head. Crowley had a very active figure.
00:45:03
Speaker
every act of Korea traveled all over the world to places. And I think in the, no, sorry, you know of his influence on Aron Hubbard and Jack Parsons? Yes, actually, I'm a big fan of the Jack Parsons story just for the sheer fact that, so full listeners who don't know who Jack Parsons was, Jack Parsons was a very famous rocketeer operating out of California, arguably the father of modern US rocketry.
00:45:34
Speaker
and also a major figure in the occult at the time, which is kind of what got him put offside with the American government, and hooked up with the young L. Ron Hubbard. Yeah, and was doing, well, he was a Crowley follower, a Thelamite, Crowley sort of self-styled religion of magic and the will and so forth. Anyway, one guy, Kenneth Grant, who was a major
00:45:59
Speaker
Acolyte of Crowley's or Epigone after his demise and sort of perpetuated the Crowley mythology through a whole lot of I haven't read any of them directly. They sound like rather lurid books. But he appears to be the key seed of this Crowley UFO.
00:46:14
Speaker
link. So Parsons and Hubbard doing Crowley's theories. They wanted to do some Babylon working ritual, I don't know, to bring in a moonchild or some other weird occult entity or something. They went and did some weird rituals out in the Mojave Desert in California. Grant sort of speculates they actually opened up a portal in space time and let all these weird entities from another dimension come in. The weird entities being UFOs and their alien occupants.
00:46:44
Speaker
those are these otherworldly occult entities, and that's how they manifest in our reality. And that appears to have just hit the imagination of a whole lot of people, particularly in the States, and sort of bubbled through to sort of be this big strand of contemporary ufology, I think. And the idea of Crowley, when he, for example, toured around America in the 1910s, so this is what this Christopher Knowles guy is sort of arguing,
00:47:13
Speaker
He went on a magical retreat in New Hampshire. I presume that just means he went around sort of rooting his head off out in the woods or something with his various concubines. But this guy knows he did some rituals there and then opened up another gate in space time, which was meant to activate in 40 years, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill, their abduction in New Hampshire, which is kind of seen as the template for the modern alien abduction phenomenon. So again, Crowley did this.
00:47:40
Speaker
Crowley hung out at Montauk at the top of Long Island in New York. He probably did some ritual there. Lo and behold, Montauk is now the center of all these absolutely mad conspiracy theories about secret American bases, and they've got time travel technology, and they're taking kids there and doing weird experiments on them. You name it, it's all in the multi-dimensional time travel type stuff.
00:48:02
Speaker
Yeah, we've looked at the Montauk project before. That's some good stuff right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Crowley's sort of been tied in with all of these by all these writers. The other big one is that...
00:48:15
Speaker
the book of the law so the basis of Crowley's occult religion that he thought would be the you know the religion of the new age of man after Christianity or whatever in the west and was apparently dictated to him by a discarnate intelligence through his wife so you've got this weird channeling going on he was in Cairo in 1904 his wife goes into these trances
00:48:38
Speaker
tells him, you know, you have to write this book, he receives some sort of weird messages or something from some disembodied voice, writes all this stuff down, puts out all this book, that's the crux of his legend, because it's got his famous aphorisms, do what thou will, should be the whole of the law, and every man and woman shall be a star, the stuff that Jimmy Page would sort of scratch onto his lead zeppelin.
00:48:59
Speaker
you know, records in the run out groove, that type of thing. So, you know, yeah, man, I'll do what the world that the hippies picked up on. But that book Crowley, apparently, I mean, the evidence for this is very tenuous. So that's what makes me kind of more intrigued by it. So it's people taking some tiny bits and pieces and sort of really extrapolating from them into the sort of fully fledged
00:49:21
Speaker
occult conspiracy mythology. Yeah, so Crowley drew a picture of what he thought this entity that dictated this book to him looked like. This kind of weird face with a big head. He wasn't a very good drawer, possibly. But lo and behold, people later, oh, it looks like a grey alien.
00:49:39
Speaker
it looks a little bit like a grey alien, looks a bit like just some general monster doodle as well if you like but you know it's got that that interpretation is already there that people are wanting to put on it so that's another key part of this whole new mythos as well that's come out and then this book which admittedly i did find disturbing and and sort of read it but well yeah it did kind of freak me out i think just
00:50:03
Speaker
Oh, I did probably find it a bit scary, even though I'm not religious or anything, but I don't quite know why. Final events by this American UFOlogist, Nick Redfern. So he picks up on all the stuff and goes through and sort of argues that he has evidence that the American intelligence agencies actually had a special unit set up that was doing occult experiments surrounding contacting extraterrestrial intelligences, but they found out they're actually occult intelligences.
00:50:31
Speaker
and they thought they were actually demonic, literally so. So Redfern to his credit is not actually saying that himself. So his concern was that you've got a bunch of extreme fundamentalists in the US military and really high positions of power who believe this stuff. So he thinks that's quite a dangerous
00:50:53
Speaker
Development, if you've got people like that in the intelligence agencies who are meant to be sane for one thing, logical, objective, secular, et cetera, all of those values, but they're not there. I think that's a particular variant of this that's come out because he reckons he's found government files that reinforce the existence of this group.
00:51:15
Speaker
A lot of talking with weird people in sort of cafes and anecdotal again. But all of this sort of stuff adds to the mystique, adds to the mystery, adds to the mythology. So other people pick up on it. So I'm just trying to think of these other bits and pieces to this whole.
00:51:32
Speaker
Crowley occult UFO conspiracism. But yeah, that's certainly something I've just found pretty interesting because it's almost like I said before, it's like something that's sort of developing now. So if I just jump on the internet every so often, it sort of seems to be another little bit of an instalment that someone has written, some conspiracy theorist has written that sort of adds a little bit more to that narrative and sort of fleshes out a bit more. And then you get the snowball effect. So, you know,
00:52:00
Speaker
if it will be picked up on by more people and become more entrenched and established.
Reptilian and Occult Conspiracies
00:52:05
Speaker
And also tapping into, I mean, a particular variant with Crowley, but tapping into the similar, you know, hardcore occult demonological frame that Ike is working on where, you know, again, you've got the reptilian shapeshifters who are, to all intents and purposes, demonic monsters. He doesn't call them that, but that's, that's the impression of them, that they are, you know, they're non-human entities in positions of power. They manipulate people. They eat people. Everything that's, you know, the very heart of darkness of mankind, they do. And
00:52:35
Speaker
that they are also linked with sophisticated technology and sort of other dimensions and you know maybe they were evolved from dinosaurs and they went into outer space and then came back again to try and retake over earth and not very happy at us upstart apes all that kind of
Favorite Conspiracy Theory
00:52:50
Speaker
those kind of ideas floating around in a very well not very but you know a different frame of reference so he certainly wouldn't bring Crowley in because he really does not like him. So this end on a fun question. Okay after that yep. What is your favorite conspiracy theory? At the moment it might be the whole uh what's the right way of trying to sum it up that whole kind of
00:53:17
Speaker
all gone chemtrail, sulf mythology that sprung up just because it's so utterly mad. So I can't take too much of it because I just feel my my synapse is starting to collapse but it really is just a whole other paradigm of human thought you know on a good day. You know the thing of the people take photographs of clouds and there's websites of photographs of clouds and they're saying here's the good cloud spirits eating the evil chemtrails
00:53:46
Speaker
And there's actually, you know, I'm surprised at the amount of this material that's online. And I presume it's not people taking the piss because there just is quite a lot of it and they all seem to be, you know, fairly serious about what they're doing and all kind of descended from some very
00:54:05
Speaker
you know, weird melange. I think it's also very interesting from a cultural history perspective, melange of ideas cribbed from Rudolf Steiner and Wilhelm Reich, um, theosophy in general, ideas from the occult in general. So that formed this whole paradigm of, you know, this kind of
00:54:27
Speaker
All going energy, Steiner, other realms type stuff with the chemtrails and the sort of evil government technology and with these kind of good spiritual entities that are trying to help mankind against the evil conspirators.
Anthropocentric Nature of Conspiracies
00:54:40
Speaker
And I think this website, Educate Yourself, if it's still active, I looked at it for a little while, was a good sort of clearinghouse for that information. I hadn't heard of that one, but that sounds quite awesome.
00:54:53
Speaker
You do realise the reason why you find it hard to cope with these chemtrail conspiracy theories is because the chemtrails are doing a job on your brain at this very moment in time. If the chemtrail didn't exist, you'd be able to cope with the magnificence of the chemtrail hypothesis.
00:55:11
Speaker
No, maybe the chemtrails are having some effect. I did notice some good examples just the last few days in the very clear sort of frosty winter air over Hamilton of some good, well, sorry, I'd say contrails, but I'm sure there's plenty around who would point up and go chemtrails. So maybe I should scan some of the usual suspect websites for some nice photographs of them. I'm sure they've been
00:55:33
Speaker
uploaded there very promptly. Clear swimming each a heart out. There does seem to be something quite interesting about the chemtrail hypothesis, which is that they put all these photos of clouds online. It's almost as if they've never looked at clouds before and go, oh my god, clouds look like that.
00:55:49
Speaker
Yeah, they haven't studied their cloud chart, yeah. Well, I just had my cloud spotters guide out before looking at the Metcruel clouds, Curocumulus, something outside. My wife and I were going, oh, look at those, those are nice. I thought, I wonder what they are. And we're like, yeah, there's some wisps of cirrus up high, but there must be a chemtrail and so on and so forth. So you just...
00:56:11
Speaker
a lack of natural history knowledge or possibly desire to engage on the natural world around you before immediately jumping in and attributing these things to some human-made cause. Sorry, you probably want to finish off. I just also find this might be a topic for another type of discussion. The anthropocentrism of
00:56:34
Speaker
so much conspiracy theory fascinating particularly in terms of downplaying nature altogether so something like earthquakes don't really exist anymore it's the earthquake gun you know it's the harp yeah yeah so natural events they no longer actually there's no such thing as a natural disaster anymore it's an unnatural disaster it's man-made but you know that that kind of world view of
00:56:58
Speaker
diminishing nature and saying that all of these natural events are now the construction of humans with this highly advanced technology, I just found really interesting, just in terms of the wider sort of cultural and ideological connotations and resonances of that.
Conclusion with Dean Ballinger
00:57:15
Speaker
But again, it's kind of probably your wrap up time and that's possibly something for another line of discussion.
00:57:22
Speaker
Indeed. Well, we'll have you back and we can explore the anthropocentric nature of so many of these natural cause conspiracy theories out there. So thank you Dean. That has been absolute pleasure. Okay. All right. Well, I hope my rentings about
00:57:39
Speaker
Crowley and UFOs were of some interest. No, no, all very informative. Thank you. So that was Dean Bellinger, another of the many conspiracy theory theorists of the Antipodates. We live in a weird hemisphere here in the South. Must be something in the water. Well, well, well, three holes in the ground. Exactly. No, I liked it. I thought that was really interesting, actually. I hadn't I hadn't I wasn't aware of how closely tied the UFO stuff and the occult stuff can be.
00:58:09
Speaker
And that's it, you're just gonna leave me hanging. You're not even gonna agree with me. You're just gonna sit there, grinning like some kind of a monkey. Yes you are. You're listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, everyone. That was our interview, making up, obviously, the bulk of the episode, so we might as well just shoot straight into the conspiracy catch-up. Not gonna say a fucking word. Play the damn chime. Breaking, breaking, conspiracy theories in the news.
00:58:44
Speaker
Right, so a short one this week, which is good, because the interview... Whilst long. Whilst long. Was informative. Was certainly worth it, yes. Actually, I meant to say, was informative, was long. That's entirely the wrong emphasis, I'm so sorry. Yes, nevertheless... It was informative. So lucky for us, I don't actually have a lot...
00:59:02
Speaker
to follow up on. First of all, we've mentioned a few times that we kept getting this mysterious 50 hits a day on the one episode we did about Tesla all originating from China, and we never quite understood why. But it seems like they've dried up. I'm a little bit sad to see them go, to be honest. I know. That little trickle of 50 hits a day to China, that kind of just kept me going on a day by day basis. And now we just have to rely on people actually listening to the podcast, as opposed to what I'm assuming was some kind of bot.
00:59:30
Speaker
but just picking us on a regular basis. That was really, really into stories about Tesla or really hated Thomas Edison. So yes, I mean, we came up with various explanations for what was going on at the time. Maybe now we can just come up with explanations for why it stopped, what dark conspiracy was behind the silencing of the 50 hits a day from China. We'll probably never know. Actually, we probably will never know.
Suspicious Death of Alberto Nisman
00:59:52
Speaker
No.
00:59:52
Speaker
So let's move on to something a little more concrete. So this, I can't remember how long ago it was. We did an episode on sort of conspiracy theories surrounding American presidents and other governmental figures in other countries. And we kind of mentioned this issue, didn't we? Yeah, we talked about the prosecutor in Argentina, Mr. Alberto Nisman, who was, what was he? He was about to indict the president. Yeah. Or at least the claim was he was about to indict the president and then just being a whole lot of
01:00:24
Speaker
reshuffling and stuff scandals going on with the intelligence. I think the claim was he was found dead at his desk and in his hand was an unsigned warrant for the arrest of the president. So it was ostensibly a suicide but it was incredibly suspicious that he died just before he was about to do something damaging to the government. I think the term is convenient. Convenient, yes.
01:00:46
Speaker
And so now, just last week, it's been revealed that he had had spying malware on his cellphone for at least six weeks before he died, suggesting that he had been under some sort of surveillance. So, apart from that, all I see on our little list of things to catch up about is that you've been reading books?
01:01:05
Speaker
I know, it's a dirty thing, but someone's got to do it. It's not a practice I recommend. A recent note, I've been sent to local conspiracy theory box. Richard Harmon's, this is a really long title, so please bear with me. America Betrayed, why 9-11 occurred, plus a wake-up call for the future.
01:01:25
Speaker
which is an 80 page book which claims that 9-11 was caused by the Nazi Zionist which is his portmanteau term of Nazi and Zionist which basically claims that the founding fathers would hate what America has become and Prescott Bush is actually responsible for importing Zionism to Germany
01:01:49
Speaker
forming nazism and then modern day nazis run the american state but those modern day nazis are the zionists quite bizarre little book actually it's a great example of what richard Hofstadter would call pseudo scholarship and that it has all the hallmarks of being a book that is based on research except that when you start to pry the research apart to work out is this factual or are these claims true kind of all just a
Review of Conspiracy Theory Books
01:02:17
Speaker
evaporates. But that book, and despite the fact it uses the term nazi zahinus, is a darn sight better than the other book I read recently, which is To the End of the Earth and Back Again by Maxwell C. Hill, which is a book which claims that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians came to Aetoro and New Zealand first, and that the Maori are in fact the product of Chinese, Melanesian inbreeding
01:02:45
Speaker
and also were brought here by the Spanish. Right, but was this before or after the Greeks and the Egyptians were here? And they only arrived about 500 years ago and the entire book appears to be one concerted campaign to denigrate Mฤori as much as possible and then go oh and it's quite possible that maybe there were people here before they came
01:03:09
Speaker
and something something something conspiracy. It's quite bizarre book it's about 300 pages in length and it doesn't really tell a consistent story as opposed to tell a lot of different stories which all kind of suggest that Maxwell C Hill doesn't really understand history.
01:03:27
Speaker
All historical processes. So he says that the Maori were brought here not of their own volition and also other people would be here before them anyway. Yes, the ancient Greeks and Egyptians. Right, okay. Who were then wiped out. Oh, but the best bit is, and this is the bit which I don't think that Max Hills actually worked out, he makes this claim. He claims that the Maori came here on Spanish ships, at least Tainui did, one of the iwi, one of the tribes in Marudam,
01:03:56
Speaker
and that some of the Maori are the product of Chinese Melanesian breeding when the Chinese brought their junks down here and left their Melanes Chinese children behind but also the Maori came from a place called Hawaii
01:04:11
Speaker
and Hawaii is located in the upper reaches of the North Island so claims look the Maori claim they came from Hawaii which is probably the Cook Islands but that's not true they actually came from the north of the North Island because his place is called Hawaii there and doesn't seem to realize it if he's making the claim
01:04:31
Speaker
that the Maori came here from here, then they must have been here in the first place. It's a really weird book. Actually the hardest book I've ever read. I've said it before and I'll say it again, reading gives you cancer. In this case it has. I don't recommend it under any circumstances. I'm going to have to have lesions cut off my back because of this. Yeah, well, you've only got yourself to blame, quite frankly. And my anonymous benefactors who keep sending me these books to read. Well, obviously. Anonymous benefactors.
01:05:00
Speaker
What more needs to be said? They're behind everything. Almost as though there's some kind of conspiracy effort. I like the way you manage to segue in to that particular point. Yeah, it's pretty good. So, I guess we're at the end. I guess we're done. And the end has been prepared for. It has. Doctor Who reference. It took me so long before I got what you were going on when you used to say that, but now I do. And see, in those days I sounded much more intelligent now. It just sounds like a pop culture reference. Yeah. So, um, goodbye. Do we want to do contact details?
01:05:29
Speaker
You can get in contact individually with Josh or myself on Twitter. I'm Conspiracism. And I am Monkey Fluids. We have a Patreon page. We do. You can look out the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. You can give us money. Or you can just go to Conspiracism.podbean.com and give us money through their Patreon system. There are lots of ways to give us as much cash as you desire.
01:05:51
Speaker
Hmm, and please do, quite frankly. We need to roll in the moolah so we can fund our extravagant Morgan style lifestyles. Oh yes, actually that needs to be the stretch gold DeLorean full of dry ice. Yes, I shall put that stretch gold up. If you donate $15,000 a month, we too can have our own DeLorean and ours will actually travel in time.
Podcast Conclusion
01:06:17
Speaker
That's a promise.
01:06:18
Speaker
Okay, I think we're done. So we have a song and it's almost kind of relevant because it's called UFOs. And it's by the spectacular Fantastic! So let's take it away.
01:06:58
Speaker
The birds are turning into flying saucers The strange things happening over and over And when I wake up Everything will be okay And when I come to sleep Everything will be okay
01:07:34
Speaker
Hey, what do you know? Strings things happen in Ohio Birds are turning into flying saucers Strings things happen in over and over And when I wake up
01:08:02
Speaker
And when I go to sleep Everything will be okay Everything will be okay
01:08:41
Speaker
I wake up, everything will be okay. How will I go to sleep? Everything will be okay.
01:09:03
Speaker
Everything will be okay. Everything will be okay.