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The Disappearance of Harold Holt, Australia's Prime Minister
26 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the drowning of Harold Holt, Australia's Prime Minister, and the various conspiracy theories that have arisen since his body was never found...
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Mixing Up Names: Harold Holt vs Harold Lloyd
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we discuss comedy legend Harold Lloyd. Uh, no. Harold Holt. Okay, this week we discuss comedy legend and silent film star Harold Holt.
00:00:10
Speaker
No, we're discussing Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister. No, that's Malcolm Turnbull. No, I think you'll find it's Tony Abbott. No, Abbott came after Turnbull. Was it Costello? No, no, sorry. Scott Morrison is the current Prime Minister of Australia, although for how much longer? You never know. OK, this week we're discussing Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. No, Harold Lloyd. Sorry, I mean Holt. The comedian? No, no, the Prime Minister. Of Australia? Yes.
00:00:37
Speaker
Who isn't Scott Morrison? Yes. And not a comedy legend? Not that I'm aware of. Okay.
Who Was Harold Holt?
00:00:45
Speaker
This week, we're discussing the life and death of Harold Holt, the Australian Prime Minister who failed to set the comedy world alight and never appeared in a silent film where he hung off the hands of a clock. In this episode, we will not be discussing the mountain of trivia I've collected about Harold Lloyd's antics, nor getting to the bottom of his mysterious connection with the deep state and... Wait, wait, wait, what? No, no. No, no Harold Lloyd conspiracy theories for you. It's all put a shrimp on the barbie, mate, and time you kangaroo down for the rest of the episode. No, if it's Australian politics you want, that's what you're going to get.
Podcast Introduction and Updates
00:01:23
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy.
00:01:36
Speaker
As per usual, I am Josh Edison. They are Dr. M. Denteth. We're both in Auckland. We're both apart, miles apart. I should probably look on Google Maps to see precisely how many miles apart we are, just for interest's sake, but it's a bunch.
00:01:51
Speaker
We're properly isolated and self-distancing and all of that business as we're still. I just want to note here, it's actually kind of interesting that for a country which has been metric for a really, really long time, the metaphor continues to be miles apart and not kilometres apart. It's amazing how things just don't die even with a change to a superior metric system. Yes, I think it's just because the
00:02:15
Speaker
The actual distance doesn't matter, so how you're measuring it is kind of irrelevant, and miles is easier to say than kilometres. And feet and inches are a useful... Josh, I would walk 1,000 miles and I would walk 1,000 more. I mean, obviously miles are important. Miles, yes.
00:02:32
Speaker
I think certainly feet and inches are quite a useful just sort of unit of measure sometimes, depends what you're measuring. But anyway, you're right. Yes, metric is the way to go. I like the fact that also for video watchers, you'll be aware that Josh's background has slightly changed. Some of the boring board games are no longer there and you've got burritos instead. Throw, throw burrito. Yes, that's by the oatmeal guy who did like exploding kittens.
00:03:06
Speaker
soft burritos that you throw at each other at various places. Well of course it does. It's a pandemic, these things happen all the time. I was throwing burritos at people just the other day and that is why I've been warned by the police twice this week. Now just to reassure you, I am wearing my flannel shirt which is my usual gear, usual thing that I put on as a bit of a totem whenever I'm sick but I'm not actually sick now
00:03:22
Speaker
I know of the explosion and kisms.
00:03:32
Speaker
as well as being the fennel shirt of decrepitude. It's also the fennel shirt of too cold to wear a t-shirt, but not quite cold enough to want to put a jacket on.
00:03:41
Speaker
Well, I'm glad that listeners are now aware that that rustling sound is, in fact, the sound of flannel. Sure is. Anyway, oh, we have a new patron, don't we? Although I have a feeling it's returning patron, actually, from a previous patronage, or it's a patron with the same name as a past patron, which is very suggestive of some kind of strange cyclical conspiracy, whatever the case.
00:04:07
Speaker
welcome patron or doppelganger patron as it may be oh the doppelganger patron there's a great name for a podcast episode we need to find the doppelganger patron
00:04:19
Speaker
and then spend most of the episode talking about the film Doppelganger with Drew Barrymore. I actually don't think I've seen it. Oh, you would remember if you had seen Doppelganger with Drew Barrymore. The last 15 minutes of that film, I will take to my grave. It really does need to be seen to be believed. Then I shall put it on to the list of films I should watch off Nixplex server. I think you should.
00:04:46
Speaker
that aside, we're going back again, again we're going back to an old topic but making it new. We mentioned last week rather when we were talking about the Brothers Kaczynski that
The Disappearance of Harold Holt
00:05:01
Speaker
they were part of a series, a very irregular series we've done, of disappeared leaders of countries. We talked about the murder of Ulif Palma in Sweden some time ago, and a very long time ago we mentioned the disappearance of Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, but as with the whole
00:05:17
Speaker
Oklahoma City bombing thing we did the other week. It was something we've mentioned in the past but never really devoted a whole episode to. So we should probably do that. Indeed, Australia is a big country and it's right beside us. So let us now investigate the Australian hinterland and work out whatever happened to Harold Lloyd, comedy genius. Yes.
00:05:40
Speaker
Yes, so all the way back in April 2015, so basically five years ago, almost, almost exactly, we mentioned Harold Holt in an episode, which as I recall, we did an episode on conspiracies around mysterious disappearances, and it was mostly your sort of your Jimmy Hoffer and your Lord Lucan, but Harold Holt, we sort of mentioned him in passing just because it was odd for, that was a case of the
00:06:05
Speaker
sitting prime minister of a country, not a former prime minister, the actual guy who was in charge at that time disappearing without a trace, which certainly there have been sitting leaders who've been assassinated or who've died on the job, but I think this is the first and possibly only time one has simply vanished from the face of the earth.
00:06:24
Speaker
So we thought we'd take a bit of a closer look at the man. I mean the long and the short of it is that on the 17th of December 1976 Harold Holt went for a swim and did not come back in. No, so Holt was apparently a keen swimmer and went swimming nearly every day.
00:06:42
Speaker
I have to remember that December in Australia is the beginning of summer. So it's not a cold, wintry night that he went for a swim. It was a warm summer's day. This would have been the first weekend of the summer holidays, I think. Parliament was in recess. So Parliament had shut down. So Harold Holt went, I'm going to go for a swim. Or at least that's how the story goes. And he gets into the sea at around about 12, 15. I'm assuming that must be him.
00:07:11
Speaker
It was a pre pre-lunch swim apparently. And then goes out swimming. The water's fairly choppy and people at the time said didn't actually appear to be particularly safe. Holt was with companions when he was out there. He swam out further than them and started to actually get pulled presumably by a drag further out to sea. He didn't appear to be at all concerned about this but at one point goes beneath the water and then never comes up again.
00:07:41
Speaker
So the beach, Cheviot Beach, Cheviot Beach. I don't know how French that name gets. I think it's near Port Zee in Victoria. So those are very British places for a French named beast. French named beast. French named beach to be located nearby. Apparently it's named after a ship that got wrecked there or something. Because apparently the beach is quite a lot of rocks and reefs, fairly close offshore.
00:08:11
Speaker
which mean that the water gets very churned up and choppy and what have you. And so yeah, apparently Holt went out for a swim. One of his companions went into the water, felt quite a strong undertow and thought, no, I'm getting out of here. And yeah, he just, he got pulled out. The people who were with him apparently said, you know, he didn't appear to be in any sort of distress. He wasn't raising his arms or waving for help or anything. He just swam out and then suddenly went under and just didn't come up again.
00:08:42
Speaker
So the people who were with him immediately went off for help by about 1.30 apparently. Divers were on the scene searching for him. By the end of the day the search had become massive. Obviously this is the Prime Minister, the sitting Prime Minister we're talking about. There were helicopters, there were boats, there were
00:09:00
Speaker
Police divers, they were naval divers. He wasn't found at all on the first day. They went back the next day and the weather unfortunately hampered their search efforts a fair bit. It sort of went from being fine to being rainy and windy and so on. But on and off, they looked for a few days and the search sort of gradually scaled down and scaled down until by the 5th of January, which is what, almost three weeks later, I guess,
00:09:27
Speaker
It was finally called off entirely, although by that stage it was down to just sort of beach patrols keeping an eye out from the sounds of things. It should be pointed out that the person who was kind of in charge of the search, Lieutenant Commander Phil Hawke, said basically the chance of finding the Prime Minister was lost by the night of the day he disappeared, but they continued to look for him nonetheless because, as you pointed out, this was the sitting Prime Minister of Australia.
Cheviot Beach: A Dangerous Place?
00:09:56
Speaker
Yeah, apparently, just sort of reading up today, Shoevia Beach, the swimming was banned at the beach and that remains true to this day. You're apparently not even allowed to actually go on to the beach.
00:10:10
Speaker
is I saw some photos there's sort of a there's a lookout point and there's a memorial to Harold Holt but you're not even allowed to go there. I'm assuming that's because it turns out it's a dangerous speech in general as opposed to the speech killed a prime minister and for that reason and that reason alone we are now going to punish it in perpetuity. Yes no it's it seems like it was just a dangerous speech to swim at and unfortunately Harold Holt was the
00:10:34
Speaker
the ultimate illustration of that. Do we know if anyone had died at the beach beforehand? Not that I've heard of. It's entirely possible, but it hadn't come up in any of the reading I've done. Because it would be the kind of thing where, sure, people have died at that beach before, but you kill one Prime Minister. Yep, and then you're just the killer beach for the rest of your days.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yes, I mean, Holt, he was declared dead in absentia pretty quickly. You know, obviously, pretty much like you said, after a day, if he hadn't turned up after a day, there's no way he could still be alive, you would think. Which is why most of the search was trying to locate where his body was. They weren't expecting to find him alive. They were simply hoping that they might find his body and thus get a cause of death. So how did he drown? At what point did he drown? Et cetera, et cetera.
00:11:27
Speaker
Yes, so I mean that was Sunday afternoon he disappeared in the water. The following Friday there was a very well attended memorial service held for him. Obviously the search was still going at that point but there was no doubt that he, there was no question that he might still be alive. So we come to the sort of the official
00:11:47
Speaker
the official telling of the tale. And there isn't really an awful lot to tell the Victoria Police, Victoria being the state in Australia where this is for those who aren't aware of the geography. The Victoria Police launched an inquiry straight away, but never really reported on anything because there just wasn't much to say. There didn't appear to be any doubt whatsoever that he had drowned. And the report was really just about
00:12:12
Speaker
from what was released of it, it was more just about the different things that might have happened that could have caused his body to have gone missing. Possibly he was sort of, his body was pushed down to the bottom and got tangled in kelp seaweed on the floor. Perhaps he was eaten by the sea life. There were a few scenarios which could have accounted for the fact that his body was never recovered, but it didn't appear to be
00:12:37
Speaker
anything more, more to that. No, no, no real question around exactly how he might have died. And similarly, there was no state level investigation of his death. Again, there didn't seem to be anything controversial about it. And his family weren't interested in one. They didn't, they went asking for one to happen. So there was no official, there was no official investigation there. And the Victoria coroner's office didn't hold an inquest.
00:13:01
Speaker
Because at the time, in fact, the Victoria State law said that in order to conduct a coroner's inquest, you needed to have a body. And the problem with the drowning, especially running deep at sea, there might not be any body to inquest about. But things changed, didn't they? They did. So as you can kind of predict with a prime minister who disappears one day, people started to theorize as to, did he actually drown?
00:13:31
Speaker
or did something else happen, which is why back in 2003 the state coroner of Victoria Graham Johnson basically concluded that even though it's quite clear that the most likely cause of death for Prime Minister Holt was that Holt took an unnecessary risk and drowned in rough water,
00:13:52
Speaker
the lack of an inquiry at the time meant that some unsubstantiated rumors and unusual theories developed.
Conspiracy Theories: Suicide or Faked Death?
00:14:01
Speaker
And these theories are kind of where the conspiracy theories come in, because whenever you have the case of a famous person disappearing unusually, people are going to start theorizing as to what made the disappearance unusual. And the first major theory that came out was that
00:14:20
Speaker
Prime Minister Holt didn't die, Prime Minister Holt committed suicide and that's been covered up by the authorities. Yes, so this one, I don't know when it first came up, I think there were sort of suggestions in the papers the following year or something like that, but it was sort of, it was more in the way of a rumour, I suppose, that it wasn't an accidental drowning, it was a deliberate suicide.
00:14:49
Speaker
And so the theory developed that Prime Minister Holt was suffering from some form of mental health issues, that he was worried about his political prospects. He thought for whatever reason that his political career could be in jeopardy and had been driven to suicide by that.
00:15:08
Speaker
And it's a theory that's bounced around a bit. In 2007, there was an Australian documentary called Who Killed Harold Holt? that apparently leaned quite heavily on the suicide theory. But it's never really gone anywhere that people who actually knew Harold Holt said no, that this is just absolute nonsense. There's no indication that he'd ever had any sort of feelings like that. I think it was his wife or someone close to him.
00:15:31
Speaker
said he was too selfish to commit suicide. That's damning with faint praise. It is, I mean, and that kind of leads into the next one, people perhaps not having the highest opinion of Mr Holt. One another theory that came up was that
00:15:49
Speaker
He didn't drown, he actually faked his death. And the reason why he faked his death was because he wanted to run off with his mistress. Now it is true that he was known to have had affairs, isn't it? Yes, and in fact, the group of people that he was with at the time included a woman with whom he either was or had in the past had an affair. And his wife apparently knew about his infidelities.
00:16:15
Speaker
And when people suggested that the woman he was with that day, he'd somehow, you know, he'd faked his death to try and run away with her. His wife made some, well, his then widow, made some comment along the lines of, you know, I hope she knows she wasn't the only one on the list. And so again, this sort of came into the field of rumors. It was sort of a story, it was a story, basically. It was a nice story people like to tell.
00:16:44
Speaker
But there wasn't anything really to it at all, certainly no evidence as far as I'm aware has ever been produced that might in any way prove this, it was just kind of a story. Yes, because normally when you get stories of this particular type, what you'll get will be the incriminating photograph or alleged photograph going, look, we took a photo of someone who looks a lot like Harold Holt 10 years later on the arms of the younger woman.
00:17:10
Speaker
Is this evidence the Prime Minister faked his own death? Is the Prime Minister now living in Hackney? And I don't believe there's any evidence of that particular kind. It's more, he was known to have affairs, one reason why you might fake your own death is to spend time with your mistress, ipso facto, he must have faked his own death.
00:17:31
Speaker
I mean, those were some theories that weren't particularly conspiratorial. I suppose faking your death is a little bit, but even then those seem to be things that Holt cooked up on his own and sort of restricted to his personal life. Things get a little more political.
00:17:46
Speaker
with the claims that possibly it wasn't an accidental drowning, it was some sort of an assassination.
Was Holt Assassinated or Abducted?
00:17:51
Speaker
Now, of course, this now ties in quite nicely with our previous discussion of Olaf Palmer. It does, yes. Of course, people end up going, that was a politically motivated assassination, because Holt is said to have either been killed by the Americans, particularly by the executioners attached to the CIA, because he was going to pull Australia out of Vietnam,
00:18:15
Speaker
or was assassinated by members of the North Vietnamese army, presumably because Australia was in Vietnam at the time. Yes, something like that, I guess. And these theories sort of assume that there were some, there were sort of divers out in the water at the beach waiting for him underwater to swim out and pull him down and murder him one way or another.
00:18:44
Speaker
There are other similar theories that say he was picked up by waiting divers in the ocean, but not murdered. He was in fact abducted, taken away one way or another. And these stories all seem to involve the Chinese, stories of a Chinese submarine waiting off the coast of Australia with divers in the water. They often say frogmen, but I think in a conspiracy theory website, we want to make very certain that we are talking about human beings in diving suits.
00:19:11
Speaker
not some sort of amphibious, relatively engineered frog. So divers waiting in the water to take him on board the submarine. Now there are sort of two flavours there. One is that he was abducted by the Chinese for some reason, not quite sure what the supposed thinking was there. But the more prominent one was that it wasn't an abduction, that it was a retrieval
00:19:36
Speaker
that Holt himself was actually a Chinese sleeper agent who the Australian intelligence services
Was Holt a Chinese Spy?
00:19:45
Speaker
were on to. His cover was about to be blown and so this was a carefully orchestrated way of faking his death and getting him back to China where he could live out his days hidden there and no one would ever know
00:20:01
Speaker
Now this was actually, there was a whole book devoted to this. The imaginatively titled The Prime Minister Was a Spy was released in 1983 by the British writer Anthony Gray who at the time talked about having an anonymous source who he'd worked with. This source was eventually revealed to be Ronald Titkem who was a former Royal Australian Navy officer and
00:20:25
Speaker
It's a book, it's out there, it's a claim that was made but really as far as I can tell no one has taken it seriously and anyone who actually knows anything about anything has pretty much rubbish the whole affair. Yeah, so it turns out that none of the claims have been corroborated and none of the documents which apparently show that Holt was a Chinese spy have ever been produced which has made people go maybe they don't exist. But of course the big question about this particular theory is
00:20:55
Speaker
presumably if Holt was about to be revealed as a Chinese asset working for the Chinese, but in power in Australia.
00:21:06
Speaker
then presumably the Australian Secret Service would have revealed that anyway once hope disappeared because either they're about to arrest the Prime Minister, which is going to be a major embarrassment anyway, at which point they would have a story prepared for why the Prime Minister has been arrested or been taken into custody.
00:21:29
Speaker
So the Prime Minister disappearing doesn't seem like a good rationale for a cover-up, given that you've probably already prepared something to explain why the Prime Minister isn't the PM now anyway. Actually, I think the book did deal with that a little bit. I think the claim there was that it would be covered up because the Australian intelligence services therefore wouldn't have to admit
00:21:54
Speaker
that they'd let a Chinese sleeper agent end up taking the highest office in the country. I think his claim was that this guy had sort of been radicalized, that Holt had been radicalized in some way in his youth, in his twenties or something.
00:22:08
Speaker
and so had sort of risen up through the ranks as a sleeper agent the entire time. So I suppose you could run the line that once the Chinese had sort of done the Australian intelligence services work for them and got them out of the way, they could then just pretend that the whole thing had never happened and they wouldn't have to look silly about how they managed to let the sky right under their noses do his thing the entire time. But yeah, as you say, nothing's ever come of it.
00:22:33
Speaker
Why not then disclaim that the Australian Secret Service got rid of the Prime Minister rather than reveal that he was a Chinese spy? So why go he was abducted? Why not go halt disappearances entitled you to the Australian Intelligence Service doing its job and making him disappear? Well, yes, I don't know. I mean, at the end of the day, the reason why we can come up with
00:22:59
Speaker
A bunch of scenarios, none of which make 100% sense, is that the theory to begin with doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Although it does fit in with a whole bunch of theories that were coming out in the early 80s about infiltration of left-wing political activists in Commonwealth countries. So Holt was, I believe, a Labour PM. I think I'm correct in thinking that. I think
Cold War Narratives and Sleeper Agents
00:23:26
Speaker
so, yes.
00:23:26
Speaker
and in the early 80s you get a whole bunch of books coming out about the KGB for example infiltrating British universities to convert people to be sympathetic towards Soviet Russia and how those people became major assets during the 60s and 70s some of which actually did occur and so it makes sense that people then start looking at what's going on in Australia going
00:23:52
Speaker
Well, Australia is quite similar to the UK, so surely the Soviet to other communist aligned countries will be doing something similar there as well. What strange event in Australian history could we potentially explain with reference to a communist plot? Oh, look, a left-wing prime minister disappeared mysteriously. I wonder if he was abducted by the Chinese.
00:24:18
Speaker
And of course, this fits in quite nicely with the death of one of our left-wing PMs, good old Norm Kirk, who I don't think we've talked about in this podcast either. No, I wasn't aware there were theories around his death. Winston Peters has been going on about Norm Kirk conspiracy theories forever. He basically has intimated on several occasions the CIA killed Norm Kirk. Ah, see you out there.
00:24:46
Speaker
They're my strong policy of never really listening to anything Winston Peters says, because he's kept me in the dark on this one. I mean, in many respects that policy does normally pay off, but in this particular case, you have missed out on an exciting conspiracy theory that I shall force you to digest in the future. Very well. Now that's, from here on in, things get a little more fanciful.
Imaginative Theories: Aliens and Mind Control
00:25:12
Speaker
We have, now this isn't really a conspiracy theory, but
00:25:16
Speaker
the idea that Howard Holt was disappeared because he was actually a refugee alien with amazing psychic powers. We've just spoiled for you the plot of the 2017 short film The Defector. In fact, it's called The Defector Part 1. Yes, there hasn't been a Part 2 that I'm aware of.
00:25:37
Speaker
So when I first watched it back in 2017, when I think this was when the video was up on Vimeo, when you finished watching it, you could enter your email address into a field and it would alert you as to when part two was going to come out. Part two has never appeared, but it's actually, it's quite a good little short film. Very well done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So just look up the defector part one and
00:26:04
Speaker
Yeah, I think you'll find it quite interesting but certainly that doesn't claim to be anything but a work of fiction. Unlike the last entry on our list, now when back in episode 43 we talked about Harold Holt, I had just done about five seconds worth of googling Harold Holt conspiracy theory and the first thing I came across was the website of a man called Gary David Simmons and I remember saying at the time
00:26:27
Speaker
that if you picture in your head the website of a tinfoil hat wearing a stereotypical conspiracy theorist, it would look pretty much exactly like this website. It's been tidied up a little bit, came back to it again, and it's looking a bit better. Well, all right, let me clarify. It's gone from looking like a really bad Geocities site to looking like a moderately good MySpace page. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not professional.
00:26:57
Speaker
a professional operation but it doesn't claim to be it's it's the work of a single man that man being Gary David Simmons and he claims to know what happened to Harold Holt because he claims to be the person who did the dirty or at least was part of the dirty trick so he claims that he was well now
00:27:15
Speaker
He was a naval diver, I think there's plenty of plenty of information on record that there's no question that he was indeed a diver in the Australian Navy. But Josh, he was not just a naval diver, he was a naval diver who was subject to mind control drugs and had a chip implanted in his throat. Yes indeed, if you go to the website harold-halt.net
00:27:41
Speaker
You can see he's put up reproductions of scans he's had done that supposedly show this computer chip that's in his neck. And he talks about how this bunch of naval divers were subjected to various mind control experiments that were fashionable at the time. He was drugged and experimented on in other ways. He claims that he forgot all of this for many decades. Indeed, it's at some points claims that he actually forgot how to speak and read and write and only regained those senses
00:28:08
Speaker
those capacities in more recent times. But through this fog of drugs and mind control, he now remembers that on the day he was indeed a diver waiting out in the surf for Harold Holt. He remembers towing Harold Holt's body to a fishing vessel that was waiting further offshore.
00:28:32
Speaker
and claims that he was the diver who was tasked with diving down to the bottom of the ocean with Harold Holt tethering him there and leaving him there. He thinks that at the time he dragged Holt away, Holt had been drugged but wasn't actually dead yet and that he would have drowned having been tied down at the bottom of the ocean. He says that the plan was that the rope he was anchored with was supposed to decay over a couple of days
00:29:00
Speaker
so that a couple of days later his body would float to the surface and be found, but that part of the plan didn't work out. He thought possibly he'd just been sunk too deep and wasn't going to come up again. He claims that the motive for this
00:29:14
Speaker
was that Holt was killed by American interests, presumably. Well, he claims he was killed because he was opposed to Americans setting up satellite surveillance bases in Australia. So either he was killed by the American military or possibly elements within the Australian military who wanted
00:29:32
Speaker
keep the Americans on side something like that. He says a bunch of other things though does Mr Simmons. Yes Mr Simmons is what we'd call in today's parlance a sovereign citizen. He claims that Australia's constitution is illegal and invalid and he keeps on talking about this thing called the second law of the universe. Yeah
00:29:55
Speaker
He takes this very seriously, the second law of the universe. He claims to have invoked the second law of the universe in the real times. He keeps talking about the fact that he invoked the second law of the universe and setting up his website.
00:30:07
Speaker
and indeed when apparently his original host it was taken down and he had to get it set up somewhere else he he has uh reproduces his correspondence with his web hosts where he takes them to task over the fact that he did invoke the second law of the universe when he set up that website and they've done something else very bad by by rescinding his invocation or something and he had to invoke it again i've i've had a look through the site i have no idea what the second law of the universe is nor indeed what the first or any other
00:30:37
Speaker
laws of the universe are, but he's very keen in talking about it. It actually reminds me a lot of the so-called Geomancer's Mile, which is a measurement you find amongst people who believe in a pre-deluge super civilization of human beings, so basically a civilization which disappeared with the flood or a natural disaster. And they talk about how all these monuments around the earth
00:31:04
Speaker
are unified by the fact that there's a common measurement between them all, the geomancer's mile. Now no one ever tells you how big a geomancer's mile is, they simply tell you that all the monuments share this common measurement.
00:31:21
Speaker
And they do it in such a way you end up going, I don't think they know what a geomancer's mile is. They simply know that other people like that term and so they're using it all the time. And maybe Mr. Gary David Simmons is very keen on the second law of the universe without necessarily being clear exactly what that law is.
00:31:47
Speaker
So yeah he he's being fairly fairly vocal in his way apparently apparently it was it was back in when was it again 2005 when the Victorian state coroner
00:31:59
Speaker
released his conclusions on the death of Harold Holt. That sort of spurred Mr Simmons apparently to become a bit more vote. I don't know if that was the point when he recovered these memories that he claims to have, but that seems to be when he started talking to people. And he's apparently written many times to the authorities claiming to know what happened to Holt. He's filed various affidavits. He's made statutory declarations about the things that happened to him, the things that were done to him by the government and
00:32:30
Speaker
the things that he claims he was made to do by them. And yeah, it certainly doesn't come across as particularly persuasive.
00:32:41
Speaker
Although I suppose you could say it does sound exactly like the sort of things that a person who had been drugged into insensibility and made to do all sorts of things under mind control would say. Yes, this is one of the things that cuts both ways because on one level, if you receive a letter from a member of the public saying hello,
00:33:01
Speaker
I've recovered my memories recently and it turns out that I was one of the people responsible for assassinating a sitting prime minister of this country. Your first reaction is likely to be, I think you might be a bit of a nutter and file the letter away.
00:33:18
Speaker
at the same time, if it turns out there really was a conspiracy to drug and enact mind control upon citizens in order to get them to be complicit in state sanctioned murders, then they're probably only going to remember that when they recover their memories due to some particular event,
00:33:38
Speaker
at which point being concerned citizens who are aghast at what happened to them, are then going to write letters starting off with, hello, I just recovered my memories and I helped assassinate the sitting Prime Minister of this country. But yes, I think his case certainly is not bolstered by all the sovereign citizen. Australia's constitution is illegal and invalid. I invoke the second law of the universe stuff.
00:34:02
Speaker
I think that that would probably further colour in the opinion we might have often. And also given that they did do a very large amount of diving at the site that Holt disappeared at, the body being trapped beneath the waves seems implausible unless of course
00:34:21
Speaker
you think that the police divers and the naval divers were actually in on the conspiracy at which point of course they're not going to find the body because they know exactly where it is and just won't look there. Now on his website he publishes a few sort of news articles where he's been mentioned. I found him mentioned a few times in places but it was usually this sort of tone was and here's what this crazy person thinks that he
00:34:46
Speaker
put up a few news articles where his claims had been taken appeared to have been taken somewhat seriously. One of them they sort of was a amalgamation of his theory and the theories of another man called Colin Law, another Australian who claims that Holt was killed not because he was opposed to American satellite bases but because he wanted to set up an Australian atomic energy industry and the
00:35:14
Speaker
the American nuclear power industry didn't want the competition sort of mentioned the Rockefellers didn't want any anyone cutting into their profits and they sort of in this particular article sort of mentions that as the motive but then brings in Mr Simmons as sort of the proof about that Holt met with a sticky end. This was published though in not one of Australia's main newspapers it was published in The Nation
00:35:39
Speaker
which I couldn't find mention of until I went back and looked at the guy's site and saw that it's pointed out to be the official newspaper of Australia's One Nation political party. I think I know those. That is the super right wing, highly xenophobic
00:35:55
Speaker
party in Australia, so perhaps not the most erudite of publications. Which we should point out does have a sitting MP in Canberra, so they might be a fringe party, but they're not so fringe that they're actually not represented in Australian politics. Yes, I mean that's the long and the short of it with Mr Sillins, and I think we mentioned the case of Willef Palmer at the start, and
Impact of Holt's Disappearance on Conspiracy Theories
00:36:21
Speaker
I think a lot of these theories have a similar problem to the ones in the Ulof Palmer theory, where people claimed that he had been, if you recall or if you didn't hear that episode, the sitting Prime Minister of Sweden was shot on the street one night while he was out for a walk, and people immediately suggested it was some sort of a political assassination. But one of the problems with that is that at the time, Prime Minister Palmer
00:36:42
Speaker
The reason why he was out on the street was because he and his family had decided pretty much on the spur of the moment. They were just going to go see a movie and they were on their way to the cinema. That hadn't been announced and advanced. And similarly, Prime Minister Holt, his decision to go for a swim at Chevy at beach was pretty much a spur of the moment thing. Apparently there was some
00:37:04
Speaker
Some sailor was apparently stopping by in Australia on his way Circumnavigating the globe that was sort of a thing in the news at the time and that driven out to watch his yacht coming in But apparently they couldn't get a very good view of him So they were on their way back home for lunch and just on the way Holt's decided actually I feel like a swim Let's stop at the beach here
00:37:24
Speaker
So if this was some meticulously planned operation, that doesn't seem to jibe with the fact that there doesn't appear to have been any way of knowing that he was actually going to be swimming at that beach in the first place. Yes, it does seem that to explain the conspiracy here, you need to have people who are very much aware of the Prime Minister's movements
00:37:44
Speaker
and able to predict small things of this particular type. Now of course that isn't out of the question, especially if your conspiracy then includes members of the Prime Minister's group, because you can imagine a situation where a member of the group casually suggests a whole, oh that looks like a nice beach, you should go for a swim there, but you are now adding in significant levels of
00:38:10
Speaker
unpredictability to the story be much easier to make the Prime Minister say disappear in the middle of the night and then you could still do the he left his wife for a mistress he packed his bags left in the middle of the night was never seen again you could do the he was extracted by Chinese agents they arrived in the middle of the night they took him to an airfield and he flew away
00:38:33
Speaker
can still have all the same conspiracy theories resulting from a disappearance without the unpredictability of why this beach at this particular time. And I mean I don't know a lot about diving but I assume it's not, it's no small thing to get a bunch of divers in the water at a particular spot so unless they had
00:38:54
Speaker
teams of divers waiting in every sort of beach and inlet on the coast of Australia where he happened to be diving, or they were somehow able to get people to exactly the right spot in a very short amount of time. Yeah, the whole thing just doesn't really seem to hold together. And like I say, I mean, at the time, and in all official inquiries afterwards, the notion that he drowned has never really been questioned at all. People saw it happen.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yes, this is very much a fringe conspiracy theory. It's not a major part of Australian politics to believe that Harold Holt was disappeared. It's simply a very fascinating story, which is the age old story we find in this podcast.
Holt's Legacy as a Cultural Meme
00:39:38
Speaker
Famous person disappears unusually, conspiracy theories fill the void. So he's become a bit of a bit of a meme in Australian culture. There was some time ago
00:39:50
Speaker
There was a sports commentator talking about people people still rooting for this supposedly hopeless team Or rooting for this team was like still leaving the porch light on for Harold Holt or something And then that team was was mocked with Harold Holt references from now. I think just this very afternoon I saw I work for a company with officers in New Zealand and Australia and on the company and
00:40:13
Speaker
the company Slack channel, somebody put up one of those things, a little Twitter meme where someone had said, you know, all these stories at the moment of like the dolphins coming back to the canals of Venus and here in Australia, and they had a photo of Harold Holt swimming in on the surf.
00:40:30
Speaker
which a week ago I would not have got that reference but thanks to the reading for this episode I did and that's why gentlemen we say broaden your mind it's a film reference it is it sure is
00:40:43
Speaker
So I think we've come to the end of this episode. So shortly we will stop recording this and start recording our patron bonus episode, which you will be unsurprised to learn still has a bunch of Covid stuff in it. And as an update on Alex Jones and that whole Q revelation, you'll be surprised by what has happened in the last week. And yes, we'll be talking about Covid-19, we'll be talking about how climate change deniers are using the Covid-19 crisis to further their cause.
00:41:12
Speaker
We'll be talking about how Pew Research Center has some interesting data on what Americans believe about COVID-19. And then we have an update on that Kennedy curse. You'll never guess who's died recently. Some people, quite a few. It's been in the news, I think. It has. But as you were talking about someone specific. Yes, so that's coming up for our patrons. If you would like to join one of our growing number of patrons,
00:41:42
Speaker
You could do so by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy or by going to conspiracism.podbean.com, the site where this podcast is hosted and using Podbean's native patronage scheme.
00:41:56
Speaker
But if you don't feel like becoming one of our patrons, that's fine too, just thank you for listening basically.
Podcast Software Challenges
00:42:03
Speaker
And we also apologise to our patrons who meant to be live broadcasting this episode this week so patrons could listen in. Unfortunately the software that I was using to reroute the audio from Zoom to Discord
00:42:18
Speaker
didn't quite do what it was meant to do. We're hoping to have that issue fixed by next week by using completely different software. That would be the ideal season. Next week patrons tune in for a Discord broadcast but for now you'll just have to cope with the the usual fear
00:42:38
Speaker
So I believe that's all we have to say to our regular listeners. We'll see you next week, presumably still in isolation. I think by this time next week, it may have been announced that isolation measures might reduce. It does seem that even if we go from alert level four to alert level three, it won't be changing most of our lives. Not a lot, no. I think anyone who can remain, who can work from home will be encouraged to still keep working from home.
00:43:08
Speaker
But at least it might be possible to go through the drive-through at a fast food place. Oh the luxury. Oh the decadence. Yeah precisely. So until next week it's goodbye from me. And it's goodbye from Josh. Classic.
00:43:34
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:44:35
Speaker
And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.