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Episode 178 - Missing Persons (Or ARE They?)
51 Plays6 years ago
This week Josh and M talk about celebrity disappearances, possibly get in trouble with Scientology, mangle both the Ghent and Kiwi accent, and sing the theme tune to "Different Strokes." It's a podcast about conspiracies and conspiracy theories with a difference!
You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Sy4HsP3TbE
Learn more about M's academic work on the Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories at:
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Transcript
Introduction from Auckland and Bucharest
00:00:03
Speaker
the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Hello once again and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand, and all the way over back once again in Bucharest, Romania is Dr. M.R. Extentith. How is it? Is it like all nice and cozy and comfortable?
00:00:26
Speaker
back in your in your home away from home it's very wet it's very very wet in fact there was a storm going on just 20 minutes ago i thought might have some interesting editing issues because there was thunder there was lightning there were cats screaming it could have made for a very interesting backdrop to a podcast but
Fake News Talk by Dr. Extentith
00:00:47
Speaker
The storm has abated, presumably to allow us to record the podcast, and will then come back in full force when I have to leave the house to go to the eco, my former workplace, to give a talk on fake news. The very talk we talked about last week. How's that for synchronicity? It's quite positively magical, I would say.
00:01:12
Speaker
And you are clearly a witch, but I guess we already knew that. That's true. Actually, I think of myself more of an evil wizard. Evil wizard? Yeah, that'll do. That'll do. Or possibly even a warlock in the vein of Julian Sand. Not in the vein of Nemesis the Warlock from 2000 AD comics. Although, actually, actually, I do want to change my categorisation. I will be Nemesis the Warlock from 2000 AD. Nemesis the Warlock was cool. He was. But that's beside the point. Or is it?
00:01:42
Speaker
It is beside the point, yes.
Weekly Conspiracy News
00:01:44
Speaker
Because we have an episode to record and we traditionally start such things with a look at the week's conspiracy news. Should we do that now? Yes, yes I think we should. Excellent, very well then. We start with an apology. Em? We do?
00:02:12
Speaker
You do, yes? Do what? Remind me of the... No, no, I'm not letting this devolve into a musical number. You know what you did. I'm really not sure what you're talking about. Last week, The Good Doctor made out that I hate the 1990s grunge music, fennel shirts and the like. This was, of course,
00:02:31
Speaker
a lie. A lie I will now make you apologize for using the very same method you used against me, scripting. It's true, yes. I made Josh say those things through the power of my words. I forced him to be insincere, and I apologized to all and sundry for my actions. Well, thank you for that. I'm not finished.
00:02:54
Speaker
I also apologize for that string of daring heists I pulled back in the early 80s. None of this is scripted. I know, I'm just getting some stuff off my chest. I was responsible for the production of the Atari 2600 ET game, I stopped Herjay from finishing the alpha art, I inspired Dan Brown, and the real Kaisa Soze
00:03:18
Speaker
Well, I can't tell you that because people die at my own hands. Okay. Guess if that helps you sleep at night.
00:03:28
Speaker
Um, getting that off your chest. Oh, it doesn't. Indeed, my last co-host, but I've said too much.
Security Bias Investigation in NZ
00:03:35
Speaker
In news close to home, our very own Director General of Security, Rebecca Kitteridge, has launched an investigation into the conduct of Secret Intelligence Service, or SIS, staff, after correspondence by them raised concerns about possible favorable bias towards private investigative firm Thompson & Clark.
00:03:56
Speaker
Now we have mentioned the story in passing in previous news segments. The Thompson and Clark investigative firm has been used by various government departments to spy on people of interest to them. Environmental activists, insurance claimants after the Christchurch earthquake and the like. This tendency to use a private contractor to spy on ordinary citizens who are engaged in no suspected wrongdoing was bad. And the current Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who just gave birth to a baby girl.
00:04:21
Speaker
has told government departments to stop it, however. However, they keep on using Thompson and Clark, and now it seems that certain SIS staff are altogether too friendly with the investigative firm, going so far as to tell them to name-drop SIS personnel to get jobs, attend conferences, and the like.
00:04:43
Speaker
The worry is, of course, that agencies in Aotearoa, New Zealand are using private contractors to get around issues of surveilling and spying on its own citizenry, which they aren't allowed to do. The fact they have up to now been allowed to get away with it is pretty chilling and raises some questions about the previous government's priorities.
00:04:59
Speaker
But it seems that for now, the practice is at an end. Or at least it looks like it is. Yeah.
International Murder and Art Mystery
00:05:06
Speaker
Iranian Netherlands news this time. An Iranian ambassador might hold the key to a murder in Amsterdam. And no, this is not the plot point in a scandinoire story.
00:05:16
Speaker
yet. Ali Matamed was shot dead at Point Black Range in December of 2015. Police said he had no criminal connections, yet his murder bore the hallmarks of a contract killing. But who wanted him dead? It seems Ali Matamed may have been one of Iran's most wanted fugitives, someone who planted a bomb in 1981, which killed 73 people at the Islamic Republic Party headquarters in Tehran,
00:05:42
Speaker
including second-in-command to Iran's then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, his widow told police that husband was, in fact, Muhammad Reza Kolani and that his death was a state-sponsored murder. But the Iranian ambassador to the Netherlands refuses to confirm or deny any of this. Admittedly, we are dealing with a case of they-said-they-said, and thus this might be evidence of a cover-up.
00:06:10
Speaker
or evidence that people come out with weird theories to explain away mysterious deaths. But now, Dan Brown. Or rather, Dan Brown, in real life. Rand Raun. In 1934, one of the twelve panels of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's Adoration of the Lamb was stolen from an art gallery in Ghent, never to be seen again.
00:06:30
Speaker
The thief ransomed the piece and left clues to its survival and letters sent to the authorities, but the piece itself remains missing. The panel was considered so important that during the war, when Ghent was occupied by the Nazis, Goebbels wanted his agents to find it for the Führer's birthday, and the public prosecutor's office still has two agents working on the case today.
00:06:53
Speaker
And now, Gino Marshall and Mark DeBell claim to have solved the puzzle. In the 14th letter, there were six words which were very strange, but I worked out that four of these words identified places in Gint, although odd names for them. The fifth word was the number one, fave two. If you go one, fave two meters from the four locations,
00:07:18
Speaker
There is one point where the roots will meet, and this location was very close to the cafe that the suspected thief went to all the time. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. David Suchet. Amazing how he managed to keep getting him on here. We have quite a lot of pull, more than I thought. Ever since they stopped producing Poirot, he's basically been desperate for work. He's got to do something, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, what makes the story interesting is how seriously the authorities in Ghent are taking it.
00:07:47
Speaker
Normally, stories of this type are dismissed or downplayed by the authorities, but it seems the theory of Marshall and De Bell, as presented in a recent book, are convincing enough that they are being taken seriously, so maybe this real-life Dan Brown?
00:08:01
Speaker
Yeah, story will turn out to be more than a dud film with the usually reliable Tom Hanks cashing in a paycheck.
NZ Conspiracy Website Critique
00:08:07
Speaker
And finally, news from home. Well, more news from home. The Spinoff, a website in Aotearoa, New Zealand, which does some decent and sometimes annoying, Simon Wilson, reporting, has a report on what they label to be New Zealand's most deranged conspiracy website, mediahalls.co.nz.
00:08:30
Speaker
That's MediaHorse as in MediaProstitutes.co.nz, in case the accent fooled you. We won't go into the stories MediaHorse covers, other than it's the usual mishmash of government pedophiles and lizard infestations. And we also don't recommend you go look, because we'll just give them ad revenue via clickbait. But the spin-off tracked down the person the site was registered to, Cohen James Glass,
00:08:55
Speaker
And his reaction to be linked to the site was, well, rather cute. As in horrifying. At first he denied any connection to the site in question, and then questioned the reporter's health, saying... Now the directions say Kiwi accent. Is that not what I have? I need you to go full bore rural. Like, we'd not look like Fred Dagg, full on. Yeah, yeah. Okay. You know.
00:09:22
Speaker
Get in behind your mongrel. That sort of thing. That's precisely what I want. That's not part of the quote, unfortunately. They've been posting about shapeshifting snakes. I'd be very concerned if I was you. I imagine you're probably one of them. I know the articles you write. They probably need to have a better look at your teeth. You can always notice shapeshifters by their teeth. My God, it's John Clark reborn.
00:09:45
Speaker
Now, after admitting that, yes, he was involved in the... Not John Clark. John Clark is dead and not involved in the site at all. This is Cohen James Glass. After Cohen James Glass admitted to be involved in the site, after all, he terminated the conversation with... There is an organised Masonic child abuse in this country. You are probably raped as a child. You're a hop skip and a jump away from a thousand years in the pits of hell.
00:10:11
Speaker
Be careful, or you might end up as our next front cover story. And indeed, the next day the site did feature a cover story about the reporter replete with spelling mistakes and the like, including getting the reporter's name wrong, which of kind is what you'd expect from a homegrown conspiracy theory thing. Isn't that right, John? Too true, Ben. Too true. I saw my baby.
00:10:35
Speaker
Crying hard as babe could cry What could I do? My baby's love had gone and left my baby blue What could I do? Head straight on to the main topic of the episode That's what baby does No one puts baby's topic in the corner Righto, so here we are
Public Figures’ Disappearances
00:11:03
Speaker
ready to fly into the main topic. So we're going to be looking at cases where people have put forward conspiracy theories around the supposed disappearance of public figures. I'm thinking, of course, of the recent story around Melania Trump, who disappeared from public view for nearly a month, I think it was.
00:11:26
Speaker
And immediately, people started coming up with all sorts of conspiracy theories as to why that might have been the case. Now, Josh, just let me stop you there. For people who don't know who Melania Trump is, who was Melania Trump? Well, OK, yes, sorry. If I can just get you to sort of lift up
00:11:47
Speaker
that rock that you're living under slightly more so that my words can resonate with you more easily. We're talking about the current First Lady of the United States of America, wife of one Donald Trump, Melania Trump. See, I like to imagine that this is a historic document. Oh, I see. And so in 50 years' time when people listen back to it after we've erased all mention of Donald Trump from the internet and the history books, this will be groundbreaking material. Yeah, it's fair enough.
00:12:17
Speaker
So anyway, at the time, like, because this happened, what, more than a month ago now, we never really made a deal of it. It seemed a little bit silly to me, to be honest. But I figure we have talked about wacky right wing conspiracy theories that right wingers bring up to account for things strangely. So it's only fear that we bring up a conspiracy theory that a bunch of left wingers brought up that, to my mind, was just a little bit silly. But as to the details of it, so yes, Melania Trump
00:12:44
Speaker
suddenly just stopped appearing at public events. There were a couple of relatively significant events that the president and the first lady generally attend. And in these cases, it was merely the president, no sign of Melania. She didn't put in any other public appearances. And after a little while, people started asking, hey, where's the first lady? The White House's response was that she was recovering from kidney surgery.
00:13:12
Speaker
I don't know any more detail than that, but apparently she had to go to hospital to have, from the sounds of things, relatively routine operation, and she was simply convalescing at home. That was not good enough for many people. First of all, I mean, to be slightly fair, some people did point out that this sort of kidney operation that she had supposedly had
00:13:38
Speaker
is a relatively minor one that would really only require an overnight stay in a medical clinic and usually only takes about a week to rest up from. So the fact that it was almost four weeks before anyone heard of her raised a few eyebrows. There was also the case that there was at least one that I saw and possibly more tweets put out by her from her official First Lady Twitter account
00:14:06
Speaker
that had the general sort of tone and cadence of the kind of tweeting we've come to expect from Donald Trump himself, suggesting that someone had jumped onto her account and was
00:14:21
Speaker
publishing bogus messages to try and make everything look out, it was okay. So producing proof of life, but apparently insincerely. Indeed. And then having got thoroughly carried away with it, when she did start showing up in public again, people started saying, gosh, look at her there. She's wearing, it's not winter over there now, it's winter here. It can't have been that cold over there, but wherever she was, she was sort of wearing a coat
00:14:49
Speaker
A large hat, fairly large sunglasses, prompting people to speculate that perhaps that wasn't Melania either. It was actually a body double who just kind of looked like her and was wearing copious amounts of clothing and sunglasses to disguise that fact. So you're saying that she may have been a set of dogs in a coat? It's entirely possible. Three small children on each other's shoulders could happen.
00:15:17
Speaker
I assume. Sounds like the next Home Alone film. He was in Home Alone 2, you know. Oh, he was. He was. Yeah, he definitely was. In fact, he has to. Any time, I believe, is completely irrelevant, but I understand that any time a movie has been filmed in Trump Towers or a Trump-owned property, Trump has required that they film a scene with him in it.
00:15:42
Speaker
and fairly often the scenes end up on the editing room floor. But occasionally they stay in, as in his cameo in Home Alone 2. But anyway, anyway, anyway, as to the content of these conspiracy theories, obviously people, it was more than, it's not enough to just say Melania's disappeared and now we're getting fake tweets and a body double in her place. You need to tell a bit more of a story than that.
00:16:10
Speaker
What stories did you hear about why Melania Trump was suddenly not appearing in public anymore? That different from the official version? The number one one. The number one one? I'll take it. The number one one that I heard was what I was trying to say, but they had a bit of speech disfluency. I said say one one instead. The number one story I heard was, of course, the consequences, the Stormy Daniels revelations.
00:16:37
Speaker
So the notion being that she wasn't recovering from surgery. She was in the process of separating from Donald Trump at that time. And of course, this theory seemed somewhat plausible because post the Stormy Daniels revelations, the physical relationship we saw in the media between Donald Trump and Melania Trump
00:17:01
Speaker
did appear to be quite strained. They weren't particularly close to each other in proximity. There was no holding hands. Donald Trump would barge into rooms and then Melania would turn up later on. They weren't seeing Eva talking to one another at social events. It very much looked like she was going through some kind of contractual obligation to be at places when she didn't want to be there.
00:17:29
Speaker
and so people went well look we've got some evidence there's a strain on the relationship post the stormy daniel's story and now she's disappeared so maybe when the white house is no there's nothing wrong here she's just recovering from routine surgery
00:17:46
Speaker
that looks like it might be a cover story for a relationship breakup and of course that would be big news if the first lady separated from the president during a presidency so you can kind of see why you might want to cover that up in the hope that maybe there's some work going on in the background to rescue that relationship and that seems like the most plausible and the less loopy conspiracy theory that came out because
00:18:31
Speaker
They went in
00:18:34
Speaker
had some work done out of basic vanity, I suppose. And that would explain the wearing lots of clothes afterwards if you're still in recovery mode trying to hide scars or get people slowly used to your slightly new visage. But again, no actual evidence that really supported that, much less some of the other theories. There was the idea that somehow she had
00:19:02
Speaker
she had finally quote-unquote escaped to the White House, had done a runner and was now shacked up with the Obamas with whom she was writing a tell-all book about her time in the White House with Trump. Because I'm fairly sure that Barack Obama really wants to write a book about Donald Trump. I'm surprised it wasn't she was shacked up with Hillary Clinton and George Soros, they seem to be
00:19:26
Speaker
the ones who are usually behind these things. Oh, no, surely surely Soros and Clinton will be the publishing house for Melania Trump and Barack Obama's tell or book about their joint marriage to Donald Trump. I'm sure that's the twist. It'll turn out that Donald Trump was in a polygamous marriage with both Melania and Barack Obama. Yes, it all fits now.
00:19:48
Speaker
And then the other one that I'd heard, which was kind of a counter conspiracy theory, was the idea that the old Trump is playing 4D chess routine again with the idea that maybe, right, maybe what if the Trump administration has deliberately hidden Melania, told her to lay low for a while until it looks suspicious, specifically so the left wing media
00:20:14
Speaker
will come up with a bunch of crazy conspiracy theories and make themselves look bad. Genius. Genius. See, I always find the four-dimensional stuff a little bit hard to believe because it does seem that everything Donald Trump touches politically is a disaster. He wants to engage in immigration reform.
00:20:35
Speaker
It's a disaster. He tries more immigration reform. It's a disaster. He tries to get a wall funded. It's a disaster. And then he starts separating parents from their children, which turns out to be a disaster. He claims that the only way to fix it is for Congress to pass a bill because it can't be fixed by executive action. And then he fixes it by executive action because it overshadows his great victory in North Korea.
00:21:04
Speaker
It doesn't seem that if he's playing four-dimensional chess, he's very good at it. Well, yes, and this obviously we talked about the storm theory a little while ago that the public face of of hapless buffoonery that some may see in Donald Trump is actually all just to cover while he's really secretly going after the real bad guys and blah blah blah. But anyway, yes, it is. You could you could keep going on in that vein forever if you really wanted to. And
00:21:34
Speaker
Basically, I mean, she has turned up again. And unless you start getting into the body double thing, it seems that it was largely a flash in the pan. And quite frankly,
00:21:45
Speaker
you know, she'd been to hospital, maybe she just didn't feel like going out and stuff. Why the hell not? And I found it a little bit a little bit galling, really, that the sort of the the people who like to make fun of the whole playing on the on the meme that Melania is practically a hostage in the White House and has no desire to be there and hates Donald Trump and just wants to get out, claiming sort of affecting to have sympathy for her.
00:22:09
Speaker
We're then quite happy to basically use her as a punchline and the latest jab at Donald Trump. Politics makes people bad. It just seems to be one of those things. It kind of does. And I mean, the stuff you're talking about before about the public appearances of the relationship, I mean, there does seem to be something there. There have been the famous clips of Donald Trump trying to sort of hold her hand and him batting her hand away, the one of him, of her
00:22:37
Speaker
smiling happily at him while he talks to her and then immediately dropping the smile when he looked away. That was a famous one and the numerous photos of her looking fairly grouchy at public events. But as people have pointed out, a lot of that is cherry picking to fit a narrative. I read an article on good old cracked dot com, which still exists, but isn't nearly as good as it used to be, about about these petty misleading photos that everyone shares that you probably shouldn't really. And in particular, they're talking about, you know,
00:23:06
Speaker
there was one of which whichever event it was recently where the trumps and the Obama's were both there and there was a photo of Milana sort of laughing happily while sharing a joke with Obama. And people like look here she you know she's happy to be around Obama and yet she look how miserable she is around Trump and they pointed out, if you go on Google, insert do an image search for Milania Trump smiling, you'll come up with dozens and dozens of photos of her looking quite happy in the presence of Donald Trump. So we do
00:23:32
Speaker
cherry pick things to fit a narrative that we want to put forwards and the C used to just be a case of people.
00:23:40
Speaker
coming up with the story to fit the narrative that they've already decided on. Yes, because once you've already got your conclusion, it's very easy to find evidence to support that conclusion. And so the thought that the Stormy Daniels thing must affect the relationship means that we then go back and look at images with that thought in our mind, and we interpret things in that way. And of course, you get the interesting way that by
00:24:07
Speaker
changing just a little bit of context you can change the entire meaning of a scene. I'm thinking of that famous YouTube clip where you take the opening to different strokes which has a rich white man picking up two African-American children from a baseball court and then taking him back to his tower apartment and it's got that jaunty different strokes there. The world don't move
00:24:32
Speaker
do the beat of just one drop. But if you change that music and you make it ominous, suddenly you've got what appears to be a white man taking back two boys to his apartment to presumably do really, really dodgy things to. A change in music changes an entire scene. And in the same respect, if you've already got a theory about the Trump-Melania relationship,
00:25:00
Speaker
then you're going to view scenes through the lens of that hypothesis. Theory determines evidence. Have you seen the love actually, Juan?
00:25:12
Speaker
I'm not even sure I've seen it done. I've just seen it talked about. I can't stand that film. It is a terrible film and it should be burned to the ground. It's got such bad morals and messages to it. It's terrible. Well, exactly. And that was, I've heard people, I didn't hate it, but it's not a must watch for me. But yes, certain people, I was listening to people who very much share your opinion of the film and they were pointing out that the bit
00:25:39
Speaker
The whole unrequited love section, the bit where the dude who now is the main guy on The Walking Dead. But not for long. He's leaving the show. Spoilers. Sorry. I don't care if you've watched it. He was in love with Keira Knightley, who's married to his best friend. And then there's the touching scene at the end where she realizes how he feels after she watches the footage he shot at their wedding, which is exclusively of her face.
00:26:07
Speaker
And then he shows up on her doorstep and plays some music and holds up a bunch of cards saying how he really feels about her. But you know, that's his problem. And he's going to go on with his life. As people pointed out, the only thing that stops that from being horrific is the music. If you put creepy, if you put sort of creepy music over that, it is a scene straight out of a hideous stalker film.
00:26:29
Speaker
as she goes and realizes, oh my God, he was supposed to be taking footage of our wedding. And yet every shot is just of me fixating on my face.
00:26:40
Speaker
Yeah, all it is is one soundtrack change where soundtrack change away from being quite, quite horrific. But that's irrelevant. It's just why that film must burn in hell. Anyway. Talking about burning in hell, let's talk about Scientology. Indeed. The Malania story was a bit of a non-story in the end as it turned out, which frankly didn't take up the allotted time we have allotted for a main topic for this podcast, as we knew it would not. So we
Shelley Miscavige's Unexplained Absence
00:27:06
Speaker
thought we'd
00:27:06
Speaker
Look, it may be some similar cases that have also happened. And the one that pops out, of course, is the case of Shelley Miscavige, who is the wife of David Miscavige, who is the current leader of the Church of Scientology. Now, we've managed to talk about Putin a few times and have not been assassinated by Russian agents as far as I'm aware. So hopefully we're obscure enough that we won't get sued into oblivion by talking about the Scientologists. But here goes. So Shelley Miscavige has not made any public appearances apparently since around 2007.
00:27:36
Speaker
She was notably absent from the 2006 wedding of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, the biggest celebrity Scientologists there are. And Tom Cruise is David's best friend, allegedly. Indeed.
00:27:50
Speaker
And then sort of fuels added to the fire in 2013, when the actress Leia Remini, who you may know as the lead actress from the sitcom King of Queens, and she's been on a bunch of other things, she was a Scientologist. She left the church in 2013 and has since become a vocal critic of it. And one of the things she's talked about is how back during at the time of the cruise home's wedding,
00:28:17
Speaker
she apparently asked people, hey, why isn't Shelley around and was supposedly received a lot of abuse from people within the church for daring to suggest that anything might possibly be up. And so she's been out there saying, you know, what the hell is going on? This woman hasn't, you know, the wife of the leader of the Church of Scientology hasn't been seen in public in over 10 years.
00:28:40
Speaker
to the extent that she eventually filed a missing persons report with the LAPD. And there's one other man who'd also filed a similar report. Now, in the case of the missing persons report, the LAPD have said the reports are unfounded. They claim to have made contact with Mrs. Miscavige, although apparently when pressed, so did you actually meet her in person, they would neither confirm or deny that.
00:29:06
Speaker
And there have been various reports from other people along the lines of, no, no, no, she's still around. I've seen her. I've spoken to her. You know, we've received correspondence from her. But no, nevertheless, she never has has never actually
00:29:22
Speaker
Now, of course, there are a whole bunch of theories about this, one of which is she's dead, and the Scientologists are covering up either a murder or a suicide or an accidental death that they didn't want investigated by the authorities.
00:29:37
Speaker
The other hypothesis is of course based upon stories we have from ex-senior Scientologists who talk about how if you get on the wrong side of David, you basically go to a building in a compound where you're forced to sleep on a stretcher, work 14 hours a day, and eat very bad food. And so one hypothesis is that Shelley did something to earn the eye of her husband,
00:30:07
Speaker
and she's having to earn herself out of some kind of Scientology purgatory, which of course is why she hasn't been seen. She's basically being imprisoned, although Scientologists will not call it that, because she's in breach of her thousand-year contract.
00:30:25
Speaker
And I mean, at this point, we just don't know. All we do know is that she hasn't appeared. Obviously, the Church of Scientology line regarding the accusations by the likes, specifically regarding Leah Remini, is that she's just bitter. She got kicked out of the church. She left it. She's angry and bitter and lashing out. And it's all just rumors and defamation and slander just designed to make them look bad because she's an angry, bitter person. And yeah, I mean, we just don't know.
00:30:54
Speaker
As in the case of the Trump, of the Melania Trump story, what we have heard about the Church of Scientology and the narrative that we're aware of does kind of make us more likely to believe such claims. As you say, there have been these stories around about the sorts of things that the Church of Scientology gets up to, the dodgy sorts of things they get up to. And so it's quite easy to connect the dots and assume something bad has gone on.
00:31:25
Speaker
Has it? We don't know. We certainly aren't in any position to make any definitive claims, and also we don't want to get sued back into our mother's wounds.
00:31:33
Speaker
Yes, I mean, it's a classic case of in a vacuum, a lack of evidence means people will theorize. And in such a vacuum where the past behavior of an organization having conspiratorial overtones, if not acting outright conspiratorily, and the Church of Scientology has its sheer
00:31:57
Speaker
Let's say she has a sheer number of actual conspiracies they've engaged in right down to tax avoidance surveilling of people who investigate them and the like. Then you're going to go well with theorizing and conspiracy seems like a viable option. So we've got some conspiracy theories as to why Shelley hasn't been seen in quite some time.
00:32:23
Speaker
Yes, I mean, there are theories they have some merit to them, but at this stage, they are neither proven nor disproven. Now, when I was thinking about this episode, I thought there must be there must be more examples of this that we could point to some more substantive historical ones. And I couldn't bloody find any. But it's just it seems like the sort of thing that must have happened in the past, some enemy of Stalin or someone who got on the wrong side of the pope in historical times or something would have
00:32:50
Speaker
would have disappeared from view and the official line was, no, no, no, they're just on holiday, they're travelling the country, especially in earlier times when before television and photographs and social media and the internet and so on, when it would be quite easy or wouldn't be unexpected for a person to disappear for large periods of time if they were travelling somewhere else or something.
00:33:11
Speaker
But dang it, I couldn't find any. Can you think of any? No, I mean, I'm sure there are going to be examples from the history of certain royal families where family members disappear. And people go, oh, we haven't seen Prince Wimhelm for quite some time. Oh, no, he's off skiing in the Alps. He's off skiing. It's fine. He's just in the Alps. There was the Kennedy who they lobotomized and stuck in an asylum, wasn't there? I don't know what the official story about where she was, though, was.
00:33:41
Speaker
I'm glad I'm not a Kennedy. It was one of the big American families. Anyway, the only other thing I could think of actually that resembled this was a case we talked about last year, the whole missing Richard Simmons thing. It was around this time last year that a podcast came out called Missing Richard Simmons, where the guy pointed out that Richard Simmons had disappeared from public life back in 2014, which was notable for the fact that he had had a really, really active public life and was
00:34:10
Speaker
very sociable and very outgoing and liked to involve himself in the lives of his fans and so on. And then just disappeared from public view. And the podcast itself, I think it was six episodes long, I think. And essentially came to the fairly unsatisfying conclusion that no, Richard's just decided he didn't want to be a public figure anymore. So he's not, which is his right. And that was all they could say about it. But it had its share of conspiracy theories, mostly around one of his
00:34:38
Speaker
I'm about to say house servants, that sounds wrong. One of the people who worked for him that he had a very close relationship with, the theory being that she had taken over his life and was controlling him. Something which friends and family of Richard Simmons said, no, that's not the case. Richard just doesn't feel like being out and about anymore. Who famously said, I just want to be left alone. I just want to be alone. Wasn't an old actress.
00:35:08
Speaker
I don't know. I mean, the quote rings a bell. It's a famous Gina Davis. No, no, it's much older than that. Hang on. I'm going to Google it right now. And I'll should do some vamping to cover the fact that this is just dead air. Otherwise, as Josh goes to his tablet, a tablet, I have to say that causes us quite a lot of issue because often Josh's tablet will decide to shut down just before recording or not recognize that a Google document has been updated. So he has to
00:35:37
Speaker
menu. Garbo, Grisha-garbo. There you go. Actually, I think this is a newer tablet than the one that kept restarting itself all the time. Although this one does restart itself and conveniently sometimes. Anyway, Grisha-garbo. Grisha-garbo. If you own a tablet, it's just a bad idea. You need to do what I keep telling you to do. Get yourself an iPad. You'll be fine. Never. Never in a million years. Unless someone wants to give me one. You might want to contribute to our
00:36:05
Speaker
patronage accounts and buy me an iPad. That's probably more than a cup of coffee. So yeah. Yeah. But the fact that I'm reduced to looking up obscure celebrity quotes, uh, on the, you've come to the end of an episode. Yes. Yes.
00:36:22
Speaker
Have you got a bit of colour in your hair there? I do. I've got, I've got some, it's not actually hair dye, it's hair clay. It's purple hair clay that actually makes my hair look purple. It's not so obvious in this light. So I've got a little bit of... You've got a bit of a Admiral Holdo, Laura Dern and The Last Star Wars movie quality to you at the moment. Well... Do you also go
00:36:50
Speaker
We need to fire a gun. Can you see those gifts? Yes, it is. Quite charming. She couldn't help herself from doing it. I must admit, if I was in a Star Wars film, they cast me as a Jedi or a Sith, I would spend the entire time I had with my legs going, warm, warm, warm. Yeah. Anyway, from Admiral Holdo and myself,
00:37:17
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this podcast. There'll be one next week, I assume. You're not going anywhere else, are you? I'm going to Prague, but that's on Friday, so I should be able to record something on Thursday. Okay. Well, that's all right then. In that case, we shall speak to you all next week. And... And if pain persists, see a doctor. Or a Scientologist.
00:37:38
Speaker
And the world don't move to the beat of just one drum. What might be good for you may not be good for some. A man is born. He's a thing I've fixed, that's all I know. They've got nothing but the genes it takes. Different strokes it takes. Different strokes it takes. Different strokes to rule the world.
00:38:08
Speaker
Shame about Dana Plato. Yeah, actually, quite a shame. You've been listening to the podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. It is written, researched and performed by Josh Addison, aka monkeyfluids, and MRXtenteth, aka Conspiracism on Twitter. This podcast is available where all good podcasts can be found, as well as iTunes, Podbean and Stitcher.
00:38:37
Speaker
It can also be watched on YouTube. Just search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, or, if you happen to be technophobic, consult the auguries. You can support the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy via our Patreon page, as listed in the podcast description, or just by searching for us on Patreon.
00:39:00
Speaker
You can also support us via the Podbean Patronage system, if that is more your style. You do you. If you want to get in contact with us, why not email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com, or find us on Facebook. And remember, Soylent Green is meeples.