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Some Conspiracy Theories of Aotearoa
26 Plays2 years ago
In kind of a gentle rebuke to David Farrier, Josh and M discuss some of Aotearoa's novel conspiracy theories.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Technical Concerns
00:00:00
Speaker
So, how long do you think the connection will last this week? Well, we managed five minutes last week, so maybe ten, possibly even fifteen minutes this week. Luckily, today's topic's almost perfectly designed to get around dodgy internet connections, since it's just a selection of short snippets.
00:00:17
Speaker
Which could stand on their own about conspiracy theories local to us? Well, local to you. Technically they're not that local to me, given we're talking exclusively about conspiracy theories about Aotearoa. Well, what's the old saying? You can take the genderqueer out of Aotearoa, but you can't take the Aotearoa out of the genderqueer. Ah yes, that classic bit of folksy wisdom. Plato, wasn't it? No, Aristotle.
00:00:40
Speaker
Aristotle Onassis. I didn't realise he was a New Zealander. Oh, you're a down master, didn't I? I learn something new every day. Well, shall we crack on and let the good people listening to this podcast learn something new as well? I think we should. I think we should. We... M? Dammit. The connection's gone again. M? M? M? Oh, sorry, sorry. I was lost in a moment of revelry. You were thinking about my mum again, weren't you? I'll never tell.
00:01:19
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:27
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison. Here in Auckland, New Zealand and in Zhuhai, China, we have associate professor of philosophy and disembodied voice howling from the void within our souls. It's Dr. M. Dentith. It's true! And also, it's ID Alfred Hitchcock. Welcome to Tales of the Unexpected. Actually, that's getting awfully close to my Nixon impression. I'm not crook. I am Alfred Hitchcock.
00:01:55
Speaker
Well, they all kind of just merge into one, don't they? It'll be Poirot next. You'll manage to get a French-sounding Nixon or something, I don't know. Anyway, so we better... Ah, but, but, but, but, Stan, your little cry cells, they must lead you. Nixon, he does not commit the burglary.
00:02:12
Speaker
hmm okay now but I must I must just gonna gonna put my foot down and and call a halt to that because we need to crack on on this one on account of how last time our internet just just died it just we don't know what the problem was it just went it'd go away and it come back a little bit and then it just go away and then it just went away and didn't come back so while we can both see and hear each other on this zoom call
Conspiracy Theory Overview for Aotearoa
00:02:37
Speaker
We should probably do things as quickly as we can. I have to confess, I haven't actually listened back to last week's episode, so I have no idea what you said about me in my bit, so I need to get on to that. I need to do that tomorrow morning, but I'm assuming... Actually, no. See, what I should do now is I should pull that episode. I should delete it from the feed, because if you haven't listened to it by now, I'm going to do a simply red song. You'll never, ever listen to it ever again.
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, whatever. If you see tomorrow, I'll know the horrible truth about what you've been talking about. Then you'll never, never, never, never listen. You're looking a bit mechanical with your hair there at the moment. That is not the first time that someone has made that claim this year.
00:03:21
Speaker
Anyway, I just said we were going to crack on, and crack on we shall. I want to point out the one thing that you did not, because you haven't listened back to last week's episode. So when we started last week's episode, when we attempted to do the episode together, and we said we're going to try to make this a quick one.
00:03:37
Speaker
And then, of course, the call collapses and you send me a file. And I thought, well, you know, Josh talking about a paper on his own isn't going to be a particularly long episode. You sent me 46 minutes of you discussing that paper without my needing to interject. That's the average length of a Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episode without my being in it. You are the reason why these episodes go long. Probably, yep.
00:04:07
Speaker
Yep, fair enough. Well, in that case, you just need to tell me to shut the hell up more. No, no, I wasn't. Okay. Okay. So you mean less, less airtime for you to fill? Well, precisely. I mean, I, as was proven by last week's episode, I don't even need to be here. Well, except you do, because you need to introduce this topic since it's all, it's all you're doing. Tell us of the tale of you gently chiding young David Farrier.
00:04:33
Speaker
So yes middle of last week David Farrier released his most recent web worm at the time there have been two subsequently because he is a like you and locatious person with verbiage to spare and he basically
00:04:49
Speaker
had a piece midway through last week on the idea that there are no original conspiracy theories in Aotearoa New Zealand and that all the conspiracy theories that are being talked about in our local policy are things which have been imported from overseas.
00:05:05
Speaker
And I read this going... Now, not saying that doesn't happen. That does happen a bit. Not, but... But the fact that he intimates that New Zealanders are followers rather than innovators when it comes to conspiracy theories and that all the current crop of conspiracy theories in our home policy are QAnon-related theories have been brought in by overseas actors and we're just the sheep all following along with the conspiracy theory train. And I was going, that's...
00:05:34
Speaker
That's not true. I mean, I can come up with a whole bunch of conspiracy theories that are still being actively investigated by conspiracy theorists back home, which are unique to our country conspiracy theories. And so I wrote it to a thread, as you say, gently chastising David for making a claim which isn't true and also making a claim which is just ever so slightly dangerous.
00:06:00
Speaker
because the intimation was, well you know, because these conspiracy theories that have been talked about back home are foreign imports, it's really, it's not a native New Zealand thing to be a conspiracy theorist, actually a native New Zealand thing is the wrong, wrong phrase, it's not
00:06:17
Speaker
God, I was gonna place a native there with indigenous. It is not something unique to New Zealanders. No, that's not also... See, I'm just muddling myself up now trying to get out of the hole myself. Characteristic of? Yeah, it's not characteristic of New Zealanders to be conspiracy theorists. So we can basically blame overseas actors for the conspiracy theories in our home polity. And that's not true.
00:06:44
Speaker
We are good at coming up with novel conspiracy theories and there are an awful lot of them out there and so we're going to cover them quite briefly on today's episode just to remind people of the wonderful panoply of conspiracy theories available to a New Zealander where you don't really have to look overseas for those theories.
00:07:08
Speaker
Well, how about we play a chime and then get into them? Indeed. Let me play a chime right now. Chinese.
00:07:23
Speaker
Right, so you've given us, you came up with the list, full credit to you for that, but you split it in half, so we can take, shall we just alternate? Shall we do one each, one from our list? Basically, yes. Okay, would you like to start?
Dunedin's Hidden Tunnels
00:07:37
Speaker
Indeed. So let's start with the octagon tunnels. Josh, what is the octagon? This sounds like I'm about to induct you into a what the conspiracy theories are. Josh, what do you know of the octagon?
00:07:51
Speaker
It's an eight-sided geometrical figure. Were you aware there's a place called the Octagon down in Dunedin on the south island of Aotearoa, New Zealand? I know literally that fact. There is a place called the Octagon in Dunedin. I don't know anything about it or what it looks like. I didn't even know about the Octagon until I went down to Dunedin at the beginning of last year where Morgan Godfrey took me out for drinks at the Octagon
00:08:18
Speaker
And I was going, what's the octagon? Because it's the famous kind of central part of central Dunedin, where the pubs and things are. And it's modelled after an octagon somewhere in the UK. And then I remembered I was in Dunedin. And Dunedin likes to have very strong links back to good old Blighty. See, there's a central square, or octagon, in Dunedin called the octagon.
00:08:41
Speaker
And one thing which came out from the thread I made on conspiracy theories back home is someone said, do you know about the octagon tunnels? And I was going, well, I only just recently found out about the octagon. So now I have no idea about there being a tunnel based conspiracy theory there. And of course, as someone whose PhD was motivated by a tunnels based conspiracy theory in Auckland,
00:09:09
Speaker
To find out there's a tunnels based conspiracy theory in the South Island of Aotearoa was very exciting. And basically the theory is that beneath Dunedin there is a citywide tunnel network which is being kept from the populace.
00:09:29
Speaker
And there's some reason to think that there's something to this particular hypothesis because Dunedin has a 150 year old sewer system built in the kind of old English style of vaulted arches and systems which you could drive a car down, you know, a proper big style old fashioned sewer system.
00:09:50
Speaker
which runs most of the length of Dunedin. And most people don't have access to it because it's 150 years old and thus is in need of constant maintenance. So allowing people to wander around those tunnels would not be a very good idea. So you've already got the beginning of a tunnel system which the public are not able to access.
00:10:15
Speaker
You add to this the fact that in the build-up and during World War II, the city council of Dunedin put in a whole bunch of tunnels and bomb shelters so that if the war did ever come to Aotearoa, the local citizens would have somewhere to hide.
00:10:33
Speaker
There were tunnels built at the end of the 19th century between the Speights Brewery and various pubs in Dunedin so that they could easily transport barrels of beer from one part of the city to another. There are tunnels connecting the hospital to the nurse's home nearby that were built in the 1960s.
00:10:55
Speaker
and then possibly even more confoundingly, there are lots of plans in the city archives of bomb shelters and tunnels that were going to be built in the 1930s and 1940s that no one knows whether they were built or not. So we've got the plans for the building of tunnels and bomb shelters.
00:11:19
Speaker
but we don't have any evidence as to whether they were built, which suggests that there also might be tunnels and bomb showers beneath Dunedin that exist that nobody knows about. And so this has led to people believing that actually there could be a citywide, extensive tunnel system beneath the city that no one talks about and is thus being kept secret from the population.
00:11:47
Speaker
Now the person who introduced me to this hypothesis did point out that this kind of folkloric idea of there being tunnels beneath Dunedin may not be something that people sincerely believe is being covered up from them. It might be one of those things which is entertaining and nice to think about, but the idea that there's an extensive tunnel system that was built deliberately so,
00:12:13
Speaker
is not something that most people believe, but it's still the kind of thing they like to talk about, the what-of situation of, what if there are more things beneath us than we're being told about? So it's a nice little, I'm not sure how to say this at all, it's a nice, moderately sized, complex tunnel system conspiracy theory about possibly our second or third, not actually, no, Christchurch is the second or third, fourth largest city in the country.
00:12:43
Speaker
possibly fifth I think Tarong is right up there these days as well probably is I think it overtook Christchurch a while back anyway yes so there'll be more tunnel material from you shortly I think but the first on my list is conspiracy theories around Helen Clark Helen Clark
00:13:03
Speaker
was the country's second woman Prime Minister. She became Prime Minister when Labour won the election at the end of 1999, I think, and served three terms. And there were conspiracy theories about her at the time around the fact that she was secretly either a lesbian or secretly a pedophile. Now, I kind of thought this one
00:13:27
Speaker
This one wasn't a great fit for this list because it seemed to be kind of an import of the sorts of conspiracy theories that you see about powerful women all over the world. We've seen it, Michelle Obama is secretly a man. Any time any woman gets a bit of profile, there'll be doubts as to her sexuality saying she's either gay or she's trans in some way, as though either of those were a bad thing. Now, there is a bit of local flavor to it in her own autobiography.
00:13:57
Speaker
She talks about the fact that she never wanted to get married, and basically only did so for her political career, because it would, you know, back with this would have been the 80s, might even have been the 70s.
00:14:13
Speaker
a single woman would have had a much harder time being taken seriously in politics than a married woman. And so she talked about how, you know, with very, very clear later on about the fact that she didn't want to get married. She in her autobiography, she even talks about the fact that she cried on her wedding day, because because she was being forced to do this thing she didn't actually want to do. And so that that gave some ammunition for it. Although I have to say, I mean, she remains to this day married to her partner.
00:14:41
Speaker
despite the fact that we had homosexual law reform in the 80s and then gay marriage being civil unions and then gay marriage being legalised more recently.
00:14:52
Speaker
Again, as in all of these cases, her sexuality is her own business, but the speculations around that seem to be motivated by good old sexism. Actually, this is a true story. Many years ago, I worked for a company where one of the people who worked there was quite senior in what was then the Christian Heritage Party. I'm not sure if they're still around, so very conservative.
00:15:18
Speaker
I remember him and one of the one of the another one of our conservative workmates I remember hearing the two of them talking talking to them among themselves while we were all in the common room and talking about this and at one point is like Actually, it was either Helen Clark or Hillary Clinton. I might be I might be making this up and tiny He said well one of those two fans on very very sort of leaned in very conspiratorians like of course, you know, she's a known lesbian and
00:15:43
Speaker
as though that were, as though that were, you know, a criminal, and I don't even think, you know, it certainly wasn't a criminal offence at the time.
00:15:51
Speaker
I don't know if the unions are in there yet, but yeah, that sort of thing, that sort of, she was a left-wing politician, she was a woman in what, even back then, was more of a man's job. We had had a woman prime minister before that. The National Party, at the time Helen Clark became prime minister, the National Party, which had been in power up into the election, was led by Jenny Shipley, our first woman prime minister. But yeah, it just seemed to be
00:16:18
Speaker
While there was a bit of local ammunition for it, it seemed to sort of be another example of a phenomenon that we see all over the world. And again, since she, once she stepped down as Prime Minister after Labor lost the election and when was that?
00:16:34
Speaker
three terms later, so I guess 2008. She stepped down as leader and then ended up working for the UN, where she had I think what was the called the number three position in the whole of the UN. And again, if you're the sort who looks for global cabals of elitists, being high up in the UN is another one for you there. So she got a little bit of the same stuff that anyone in that sort of a position got with your whole reptilian shapeshifting
00:17:02
Speaker
uh child's blood drinking pedophiles but um so so yeah i i still i still don't think you could i i still think david farrier for instance would be justified in calling the conspiracy theories are in hell and clark uh an example of an imported from overseas style one but i guess it is true that there was a bit of local flavor i guess i suppose i disagree with that claim for the sheer fact that
00:17:28
Speaker
Lee and Wishart made a huge career, out of accusing Helen Clark of various infelicities, as did, I think, with Greg Hunt and the Spymaster, who I think was one and the same person, but pretending to be two. And they were very much focused on scandals within New Zealand politics. So they weren't necessarily borrowing from culture wars overseas.
00:17:52
Speaker
So yes, it's true. There are lots of conspiracy theories about women in politics over sayers, and they can all be explained by good old fashioned sexism. But I don't think you need to say that that sexism was imported to then generate those conspiracy theories.
00:18:10
Speaker
All you need to say is a woman has come into power in our local policy, that goes against the natural order of things, thus you're going to get conspiracy theories about it to explain why society has been thus perverted.
00:18:25
Speaker
So I would push back on the idea that the only reason why we talked about Helen Clark as a secret lesbian or a secret pedophile is because people overseas were talking that way. I think the endemic sexism in our country explains that without having to know anything about the rest of the world.
00:18:44
Speaker
Well, that does make sense, I suppose. Yes, yes, maybe we're quite capable of coming up with this sort of bullshit all on our own. We are quite capable of being sexist without having to pay any attention to the Americans or the British, which is a disturbing thing to have to admit.
00:19:01
Speaker
So, let's change the topic completely back to an old topic. Give me some more tunnel... tunnel material. Well, of course, the Hidden Tunnels hypothesis of North Head, or Monawika, is, of course, the bread and butter of my PhD.
North Head Military Mysteries
00:19:16
Speaker
And the reason why I started work on the PhD on conspiracy theories was looking into the idea that there are people who believe a conspiracy theory about my home village of Devonport.
00:19:28
Speaker
and the idea that there's a former military installation there, North Head, which contains within it a known tunnel system and the allegation of there being a hidden tunnel system that the public is being kept unaware.
00:19:46
Speaker
unaware of. And we've talked about the North Head Tunnel conspiracy theory quite a bit on this podcast. So the kind of potted history, if you don't want to go back to earlier episodes, is in the early 20th century, the corporation now known as the Boeing Corporation sold their first two prototype planes to a flying school in Mission Bay in Auckland.
00:20:12
Speaker
those planes are basically unaccounted for according to certain people in that when the flying school was shut down in the prelude to world war one the assets from the flying school were appraised by the
00:20:34
Speaker
Army. Some planes were destroyed and others were shipped over to Devonport to the base of North Head.
00:20:43
Speaker
According to certain people, the Boeing seaplanes disappear from history at this particular point. Most historians actually think that that's not true. We know what happened, for example, to the engines of the planes. And we're very aware that without the engines, the planes themselves were largely worthless. They were cloth-covered.
00:21:05
Speaker
wood boned, wood boned. I suppose technically they are wood boned. Sounds about right. Yeah, cloth covered wood boned plans. I don't care whether that's an inaccurate description. I'm sticking with it. We're likely burnt on the beach in Mission Bay.
00:21:22
Speaker
But no, according to some people, because there's no explicit statement in the record that these two particular planes were burnt, it remains an open mystery as to what happened afterwards. We know that they kind of disappear from history at that point. And so these people go, look, they were put into North Head, into a tunnel that was bricked up. And the reason why the government is denying the existence of the tunnels is to deny people access to the planes.
00:21:49
Speaker
Now many people think that is a relatively trivial and rather stupid rationale to hide a tunnel complex from the public just to keep two seaplanes from public view. So the other conspiracy theory which emerged after the missing plane hypothesis is that when the army moved out of North Head, when it was remilitarised as a naval training station,
00:22:16
Speaker
The army decommissioned the guns on North Head and the guns were basically they had ammunition which was brass casings with active ammunition inside. The casings we know were sold to scrap metal merchants for scrap fees.
00:22:33
Speaker
There's a question as to what happened to the actual powder inside those casings. According to the Army, the powder was disposed of at Fort Takapuna, an especially built pit designed to discharge old ammunition. According to certain conspiracy theorists, the ammunition was left in a tunnel on North Head and bricked up.
00:22:56
Speaker
and of course that ammunition is now festering away and when gunpowder festers it turns to something very much like jellic knight and thus it would be unsafe to dig into north head to find the missing tunnels because the tunnels could literally explode in your face and devinport is one of the most expensive suburbs in the country so in that respect you
00:23:19
Speaker
probably don't want to cause house property values to go down by blowing up a nearby hill. Now the problem with this particular theory, there are numerous problems, the one particular theory is, if that's true, why did the government allow the Department of Conservation to engage in invasive digs on North Head to locate those tunnels if they're afraid that invasive digs are going to make hills explode? So...
00:23:47
Speaker
Doesn't seem like a particularly sound theory at all. We've talked about this in more depth in previous episodes. And finally, there is the question of the missing mustard gas. The missing mustard gas? Yes, the missing mustard gas, because we did have mustard gas during World War II.
00:24:08
Speaker
And it is known that the amount of mustard gas we had versus the amount of mustard gas that we disposed of at the end of World War II, there's a discrepancy. There's several thousand barrels that are unaccounted for.
00:24:26
Speaker
Now the standard theory is, when they wrote down in the ledger book the amount of barrels they disposed of, they neglected to add in an additional zero and it's just an accounting error. But if it's not an accounting error, you do have to ask, where is the mustard gas?
00:24:47
Speaker
And this is a question which does get asked because when the University of Auckland started their renovations to build what's now called the Kate Edgar Commons, which is the student centre at the University of Auckland, one of the buildings they had to modify during that building process
00:25:08
Speaker
was an American army building from World War II which had a basement in which mustard gas could have been stored. So when they did that renovation of the land, because of this discrepancy between the amount of mustard gas we had versus how much we disposed of, they had to do
00:25:30
Speaker
site testing to make sure they weren't about to build on contaminated land that may contain festering barrels of mustard gas. So this is a legitimate question. We think the mustard gas isn't really missing because it's an accounting error.
00:25:46
Speaker
But it might not be. So we do have to be cautious about these things. And some people have postulated that maybe the real reason why you might brick up some tunnels in North Head is that there might be some rather dangerous gas inside those tunnels. So still an active site of investigation to this day.
00:26:09
Speaker
Well, given that you've had two tunnel-related ones in a row, I'm going to do my second political-related local conspiracy theory, which is around the death of Norman Kirk. Now, this is going back a little bit further than Helen Clark. This is shortly before both you or I were born.
Norman Kirk: A Prime Minister's Suspicious Death
00:26:26
Speaker
Norman Kirk was the leader of the Labour Party and was Prime Minister from 1972.
00:26:32
Speaker
until his somewhat sudden death in 1974. Now there are conspiracy theories around his death that he had possibly, that this wasn't an actual death, that he had been poisoned possibly by the CIA. The CIA? The very one.
00:26:50
Speaker
These theories apparently seem to start and finish with then Labour Party President Bob Harvey. I believe Winston Peters has also been a little bit fond of these theories as well. I mean, Winston Peters says a lot of things, I don't know, but Bob Harvey certainly seems to be the most forceful one around it.
00:27:13
Speaker
And his reasoning was basically a bit of sort of good old 70s machismo around the idea that no, Norm Kirk, he couldn't have just dropped dead. He was a robust man. He had the constitution of a horse.
00:27:29
Speaker
He was a man's man, wouldn't just keel over like that. Now, this is not true at all. Norm Kirk had been told multiple times by multiple doctors that he needed to take better care of himself, or he was looking at an early grave. While he didn't smoke, as just about everybody did in the 1970s, he was overweight. He drank a hell of a lot, apparently.
00:27:54
Speaker
He had suffered from dysentery previously. He had had varicose veins removed. He had been diagnosed with an enlarged heart. So it seems like he was not actually in the best health to the point that on the 26th of August 1974, he having decided to take a couple of days off, then decided he was going to take six weeks off work to convalesce and improve his health.
00:28:20
Speaker
But by the 28th of August, he was in hospital. And on the 31st of August, he died of a pulmonary embolism. But basically, anyone who has any knowledge of his actual health and death says, no, no, there's nothing suspicious about the man's death. He was not in the best of health. He had heart problems. He died of a heart attack. But the theories have bubbled around, lasting at least until 1999.
00:28:47
Speaker
which is when Bill Clinton came to New Zealand for the APEC visit. What's the Asia Pacific economic consortium or something? Yeah. Something like that, yeah. But big economic conference, which happened to be hosted in New Zealand in 1999, and Clinton came. And apparently, Bob Harvey was still going on about it to the extent that he was suggesting that then Prime Minister Jenny Shipley
00:29:10
Speaker
who, as I said, would later that year lose the election and be replaced by Helen Clark, but at the time she was Prime Minister and Bob Harvey said she needs to go and talk to Bill Clinton. She used to ask him, did the CIA go and kill Norman Kirk? And apparently made enough noise about that Helen Clark, who while not Prime Minister, was still leading the Labour Party at the time, basically had to tell him to shut the hell up. She supposedly, you know, had to sort of publicly say, no, this isn't true. We all know it's not true.
00:29:37
Speaker
um and and and basically shut up bob bob harvey you're embarrassing us um so uh bob harvey at the time sort of said oh this is she was she was still at university or still in school when all this happened helen clark you know she she wasn't there um everybody else who was there in particular bob tizard another
00:29:59
Speaker
local politician who was of Harvey's generation said that the claim that Norm Kurt was was poisoned as quote unquote, a heap of crap. So really, yeah, there seems to be seems to be nothing to it other than what's
00:30:21
Speaker
It's not quite sexism. Male chauvinism, I guess. The idea that any man who could be Prime Minister of New Zealand is made of sterner stuff than of simply dropping dead of a heart attack. But not really any more than that.
00:30:36
Speaker
I'm sure the last time I heard it mentioned was Winston Peters mentioning, you know, their sort of open questions about what really happened to Norm Kirk. But we'll get back to Winston Peters soon enough. Let us now travel all the way back today to ancient history, that's not even a word, to ancient history.
00:31:00
Speaker
and talk about the Celtic New Zealand Hypothesis. Yes, let us do that. I don't know why I'm saying it because it's your topic. I'll just give you a chance to interject. So the Celtic New Zealand Hypothesis is something we've talked about several times on this podcast, about say on this episode, but that is not true. It's the first time it's come up unless you're listening to the unexpected version of the episode.
00:31:25
Speaker
But that's for very, very special people that don't even exist yet. So the counting New Zealand hypothesis is the claim that some people, and I'm going to use a technical term here, racists, believe that white people got to Aotearoa before the Maori did.
00:31:46
Speaker
Now, the evidence for this rather interesting claim seems to be, a, legends of white-skinned fae folk in Maori mythology. It should be pointed out that almost every single culture seems to have legends of white-skinned fae folk.
00:32:06
Speaker
Some anthropologists have suggested this is probably due to the presence of albinoism in the human population because many cultures, until you understand that albinoism is simply a genetic defect, albinos do look remarkably different with respect to skin, hair and eyes from the general population.
00:32:29
Speaker
leading to some populations going, well, this is a bit freakish here, there must be something else going on, leading to kind of faith folk interbreeding hypotheses. So it's possible that, particularly in a Polynesian culture, where dark skin is pretty much the norm, people who have albinoism would look quite startling,
00:32:51
Speaker
And if it fits in with other anthropological theories, your faith folk legends are going to kind of centre on that unusual look. As I say, this is a theory in anthropology. I'm not saying whether it's true or false. It's just one explanation for the presence of
00:33:06
Speaker
fair-skinned, fae folk hypotheses cross-culturally. Of course, people who believe in a conspiracy theory that being a master white race and distant past will go, well actually no, what we're talking about here are the Atlanteans or the Lemurians or something similar. But yes, that's one bit of evidence they use. There are
00:33:26
Speaker
white-skinned fae folk in Maori mythology, so that must be evidence. They also use as evidence of the idea the Count got to New Zealand first. Standing stones found around the country, because apparently that kind of advanced technology of making a stone stand up in a field is a distinctly European technology that no one else is able to replicate.
00:33:55
Speaker
and also apparently carvings of spirals, which apparently is a distinctly Celtic design and couldn't possibly be a replication of the way that ferns curl and uncurl in our native bush. No, no, there's no way that people might be carving fern shapes. No, those spirals either belong to the ancient Celt or the jigsaw killer.
00:34:23
Speaker
And you know where my money's at? The Jigsaw Killer. Mmm. Well, didn't... What was the last one? I didn't see... I don't know if you've seen it. It's the Jigsaw film that was about spirals. It's the Jigsaw film that had Tom Urban Bell in it, and thus just appears to be a fan film starring Chris Rock. Very bizarre film. Last film I watched before I left the country. Do you feel good about that fact?
00:34:49
Speaker
No, no I do not. I also, because I ordered a very nice vegan chicken burger before the screening, but due to a series of mishaps, the burger was delivered to me within five minutes of the film starting, so I scoffed it down and really wished I'd spent more time with the meal and less time watching that film.
00:35:12
Speaker
Anyway, enough about Chris Rock. Yes. So, yeah, the evidence for this claim the Celts got there first isn't particularly good. There are other strands of evidence that often get put forward because there are a surprising number of books on the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis. I have three on my shelf right here.
00:35:33
Speaker
And the arguments are either math, the location of certain sites around the country, or the organisation of particular stones shows very unique mathematical alignments which would be impossible.
00:35:50
Speaker
for Polynesians to have engaged in, ipso facto, it must be the Europeans. And apart from the racism implicit on Polynesians can't do math, it's also the fact that if you select random points around the country, you can create complex mathematical relationships between them, because that's how math works. Given some random points, you can come up with a complex equation to describe those points.
00:36:17
Speaker
The other argument seemed to be, well, all these old anthropological textbooks by people like Elston Best and the like, they all seem to suggest things that Maori today don't talk about, which means that Maori are covering something up. So that's evidence of a conspiracy by Maori to deny their real history. And most modern historians will go, well, the reason why most people don't talk about those, uh,
00:36:44
Speaker
those old history books now said those old history books are bad they were written by people who didn't understand the cultures they were studying and often contained rather borderized stories so the reason why we don't refer to them anymore and the reason why mildly don't refer to them anymore is that they're just inaccurate bits of historical writing hmm
00:37:10
Speaker
Well, if I may, I would I would also like to take us back in time, but not as far back in time as you just took us back in time and yet further back in time than we've taken you back in our other stories.
WWII German U-Boats in New Zealand?
00:37:21
Speaker
I'm going back to World War Two to talk about German U-Bots visiting New Zealand.
00:37:26
Speaker
Now, it turns out that there were a small number of German and Japanese ships active in New Zealand waters during World War II. A few ships were sunk, things like that, and possibly some Axis submarines as well. Well, when I say possibly, we know that there was one German U-boat that traveled down the east coast of New Zealand during 1945, but basically went away when it didn't find anything worth attacking, which
00:37:54
Speaker
This is a little bit rude, I thought, a little bit, you know, a bit dismissive. I mean, you know, glad nothing got attacked, but still. But then there's also the mysterious U196.
00:38:08
Speaker
German U-boat, that is its final, not origin, what's the opposite of origin? Resting place. Resting place is not known. It disappeared, it presumably sank, but it's not officially recorded what happened to it in the end.
00:38:30
Speaker
However, in 2008, the New Zealand Underwater Heritage Group claimed to have found the wreck of U-196 off the coast of Northland. This supposed Nazi submarine had been discovered by divers
00:38:46
Speaker
belonging to this group. The story from there developed that this U-boat had been smuggling high-ranking Nazis and stolen Nazi treasure into New Zealand, where these Nazis took on new identities as Austrians and got away with it scot-free.
00:39:09
Speaker
When I was looking about this just now, I couldn't find anything about this after 2008. The initial stories about we think we found this German submarine and sort of expansions of the stories on it. But then I couldn't find anything
00:39:25
Speaker
else after that. So I don't know that anything ever became of it. Have you heard any more than the initial reports? No. And I assume that if there were no news stories post that celebrating the discovery of the U-boat, then it probably wasn't found. I mean, they always thought they had found it.
00:39:47
Speaker
And I suspect what happened is when they investigated the site, they went, ah, it's actually not a U-boat, it's actually a series of curious logs, or something of that particular ilk. And you don't tend to then write press releases of, we have failed to find a U-boat after all, you just slink away and say nothing whatsoever.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yes, so it sounds like people talking up at it. I mean, as we know, we did not too long ago an episode on actual Nazis living in New Zealand, people who had possibly nastier pasts than they would have let on, but who ended up living here. But there don't, as far as we're aware, appear to have got here on a missing German U-boat.
00:40:41
Speaker
Well, when it comes to better stories, the following one is not one of them. But it is another local conspiracy theory, and it is actually quite closely related to the Celtic New Zealand stuff. Let us briefly mention Treatygate, another hypothesis we have talked about on this podcast several times.
00:41:02
Speaker
Treatygate is the idea that even if you don't believe that white people settled Aotearoa, New Zealand first, there's a long-standing conspiracy by the Crown, so the New Zealand government,
00:41:17
Speaker
and Māori to cover up the fact that actually Māori control the entire country and they do it through some kind of treaty related principle. So for non-New Zealanders there was a treaty signed between the Crown and Māori Te Tiriti O Waitangi, the Treaty of Waitangi, and this was meant to be a co-governance.
00:41:42
Speaker
So Maori would govern themselves, the British and their subjects would govern themselves, and there would be some kind of co-governance to ensure that both sides are able to live in one country with two systems.
00:41:57
Speaker
Turns out that actually the Crown breached that treaty very early on, or so it seems, because according to the Treatygate hypothesis, actually Māori have been using the treaty to control the country and engage in large-scale social engineering ever since. A hypothesis which is quite astounding, given that if it were true,
00:42:23
Speaker
the biggest thing a subscriber to this conspiracy theory would need to explain is why if Maori are actually effectively in control of Aotearoa, New Zealand, why are they still the most disadvantaged set of people in the country? It's kind of an astounding conspiracy to control a country and then maltreat your own
00:42:48
Speaker
and privilege the people who, presumably, you're meant to be predating against. It doesn't make much in the way of sense. But yes, the Treatygate conspiracy theory is the idea that, actually, Maori do control the country, despite the fact it appears that they don't, and the evidence for that is Motoreo Maori being used in everyday conversation.
00:43:15
Speaker
Hmm, not the strongest case, I have to say. No, and they'll also tell you how, but they're also distinct Māori health authorities. And once again, you might go, I mean, that's true, but at the same time, doesn't seem to be producing the results that you'd expect
00:43:33
Speaker
if they were actually in charge of the country. Now, recently, the Treaty Gate hypothesis is kind of mutated because we had a report released, was it a year before last? Or was it last year when Heipuapua was released?
00:43:51
Speaker
Don't recall. No. Unfortunately, the pandemic means that time no longer makes sense. But this report was released because as signatories to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a declaration we signed up for under the National Party, I should point out, not the Labour Party, Helen Clark,
00:44:18
Speaker
actually thought that signing this declaration would be a dangerous thing to do, because it did point out that the New Zealand government has been engaged in racist behaviour towards Māori for a long time, and Labour, despite the fact that they often present themselves as being the more pro-Māori party.
00:44:37
Speaker
sometimes are quite happy to allow systemic racism to bubble away in the background. John Keyes' government, however, actually did sign this declaration, which then obliged us to produce a report. And this report would show what measures we as a country should or could take to achieve the goals of allowing Indigenous peoples to have rights within their own country. This report came forward pointing out that we should do more with respect
00:45:07
Speaker
to the notion of allowing proper co-governance, which you do more with respect to Maori health authorities and the like. This report is non-binding, as are most reports that come out of this particular type, but the Treaty Gate people are now going, oh, this is the report that shows that the agenda behind Treaty Gate was always true, because now we've got a written document showing that this is what the government plans to do.
00:45:36
Speaker
And the response to that is, well, labours in power, and they don't appear to be doing anything with response to that report. There's also, so it comes up from time to time, the idea that there are different
00:45:51
Speaker
translations of the treaty that possibly say different things? Well, there's this thing called the Littlewood Treaty, or what we should call it, the Littlewood Draft. And so basically there was a scribe who was in charge of writing the text of the Treaty of Waitahang'e. I forgot his first name, but his last name is Littlewood.
00:46:13
Speaker
There is a English language draft of the treaty, the final draft before it was translated in Torayo Maori for the signing. There is a very big debate in treaty scholarship about one of the key terms that occurs in Titariti Owatangi Ka Kawangatanga, which
00:46:37
Speaker
is the term which people get very hung up upon because it's the term about governance or co-governance. The Littlewood Treaty in English quite specifically indicates that the Crown expected Māori to give the authority to govern the country over to the British Crown.
00:46:59
Speaker
But unfortunately for people who think the Littlewood Treaty should be taken as the last word, international precedent on treaties is you use the language that the treaty was signed in and the treaty was
00:47:15
Speaker
The final version of the treaty was in Torayo Maori and thus we should use the language of Torayo Maori for our understanding of what the treaty means which means we need to rely upon the translation of that word into Torayo Maori and the word that was used to treat this governance relationship is not one where Maori was ceding the right of governorship
00:47:40
Speaker
It is a word which seems to indicate co-governance. But yes, people are going, well, look, we've got an English language draft of the treaty that shows that the British Crown's intention was always that Maori would give up the governance of the country to the British Crown. And the answer to that is that just doesn't matter.
00:48:02
Speaker
Doesn't matter what the English intention was, what matters is what is the wording of the contract that was signed. So yes, not a lot of water to those. I'm trying to find a decent segue into my next topic and I don't have one. I'm going to talk about poison. 1080 poison.
1080 Poison and Government Cover-ups
00:48:21
Speaker
which we have talked about more than once, I think, on this podcast before. So a quick recap of these theories, which are quite localized to New Zealand because 1080 is kind of not 100%, but quite specific to New Zealand. New Zealand uses a lot of the world's 1080 poison. 1080 is a poison used for pest control. It is poisonous to mammals, but not
00:48:50
Speaker
I don't know if it's not poisonous to any other kind of animals, it's not nearly as poisonous. And because New Zealand is, in the interesting case of having no native land mammals, we have a few native bats and we have some native dolphins, but no actual land mammals, which means that any land mammals that do exist, say, in
00:49:12
Speaker
our native bush are all introduced and most of the time they are introduced pests, things like ferrets and weasels and possums that will eat the eggs of our native birds or the native birds themselves that will eat native plants that our native animals feed on and so on. So in New Zealand specifically, 1080 is quite a bit poison to use for pest control. Or is it?
00:49:38
Speaker
Because the conspiracy theories go that actually 1080 is a lot more poisonous and a lot more dangerous than the Department of Conservation, who are the ones who put out these poisoned or obstacle pests, are letting on and are covering up this fact. So anti-1080 people, they like to do things like producing dead animals that they claim were actually dead native animals that they claim were killed by 1080 poison.
00:50:01
Speaker
A while ago, there's a photo that went around of a whole lot of dead kiwi birds, which they claimed had been killed by a 1080 drop, but it turned out, no, that was actually a photo taken by the Department of Conservation showing a bunch of kiwi that had been killed by cats and dogs, by introduced animals. There was the case of the native, were they, were they carkapal? I can't remember exactly, native parrots of one species or another.
00:50:30
Speaker
which got dumped on the Parliament steps with the claim that looked here to you. Oh, the ones that were dumped on the steps of Parliament, yeah. Yeah, yeah. With the claim, you hear these native birds that had been killed by 1080 and the birds were taken away and examined and found that they actually died due to blunt trauma.
00:50:47
Speaker
with the possible connotation that maybe some people had actually gone out and killed some native birds themselves and tried to blame it on 1080 to stop 1080 from killing native birds. It's all very, very confusing there. Although I think the more charitable hypothesis was the birds are probably struck by cars.
00:51:11
Speaker
And then there's the case of the 1080 blackmailer, which we talked a bit about when it happened. So back in 2014, the year this podcast started, somebody sent letters to Fonterra, which is the national company, sort of the national dairy company, basically, and the Federated Farmers Organization threatening to poison infant formula if New Zealand didn't stop using 1080 by the end of March that year.
00:51:40
Speaker
And so this was sort of, you know, considered to be a threat, at least worth investigating. And if it were true and somebody did have the means to poison infant formula, which often gets exported to other countries, this could be very damaging. But it turned out it didn't never came to fruition because it turned out that the blackmailer was a local businessman called Jeremy Hamish Kerr.
00:52:04
Speaker
who was the owner of a different pest control product called Ferritox, which was basically an alternative to 1080. And his business wasn't doing very well. And so he cooked up the scheme to try and pretend there was this sort of environmentalist plot to blackmail the country into stopping using 1080 in the hopes that maybe they would, and then his company would do a little bit better. So it was found that his crime, he actually
00:52:33
Speaker
had nothing in common with your actual 1080 protesters and conspiracy theorists who tend to do so on environmental grounds. His motive was cold, hard cash, but it didn't work out for him. So again, if you want to know more about 1080 conspiracy theories in this country, you can go find our old episodes on them. But they are very definitely local and based on some of the unique qualities of New Zealand and our local wildlife.
Bruce Cathy's UFO Energy Grid
00:53:02
Speaker
Now I'm going to end with Bruce Cathy and Harmonic 33. Now this is another topic we've mentioned a few times in passing. We've never actually had an entire episode devoted to Bruce Cathy and the world energy grid. And maybe we actually should do a deep dive into Cathy and his position. Although part of the problem for doing this is that you kind of need access to his books.
00:53:27
Speaker
and I'm currently a long way away from my copies of his books. There's actually very little information about Bruce Cathy available online in part because we're talking about a ufologist with a conspiracy theory who was publishing back in the late 1960s right through to
00:53:46
Speaker
Well, I mean, technically he was polishing up until his death in 2013, but the heyday of Bruce Cathy's work is really late 60s, 70s and 80s. Now Cathy was a former Air New Zealand airline pilot who spotted a UFO in Auckland, I think back in the mid 50s.
00:54:14
Speaker
And he developed a mathematical formula for the prediction of UFO sightings and nuclear tests. And his mathematical formula indicated to him that there was this thing called the world energy grid. And the reason why UFOs would be seen at particular points around the Earth's crust
00:54:40
Speaker
is that at some point in distant history, our world energy grid was destroyed, presumably due to some conflict of an interstellar nature, and UFOs were basically engaging in repairing the world energy grid.
00:54:58
Speaker
in order to then usher us back into the Galactic Confederation. So UFO sightings were evidence that the world energy grid was being repaired. So his first book, Harmonic 33, kind of set out the world energy grid hypothesis and the mathematical formula he used to generate the grid around the earth.
00:55:24
Speaker
In subsequent books, he kept on refining the formula to take into account more and more sightings of UFOs. Going back to our previous discussion about the Celtic New Zealand hypothesis, it turns out that if you take data points,
00:55:41
Speaker
and you generate a formula to predict where other data points are going to be and then someone gives you evidence of a data point which doesn't fit that particular formula you can rescue the formula by adding in some additional hypotheses or auxiliary assumptions and thus produce a new formula which will now predict that particular point and further points
00:56:06
Speaker
And as many people like to point out, the problem with Bruce Cathy's hypothesis was that by the end, his formula would predict a UFO sighting anywhere on Earth, because it had got to the point where he'd kept on modifying the formula to take into account no one's sightings of UFOs, that no part of the Earth would never have a UFO sighting according to his formula if given enough time. And what's particularly fascinating about Cathy's work
00:56:35
Speaker
is that not only was he a home-grown ufologist with a rather interesting mathematical formula for the prediction of UFO sightings, he's been mentioned several times on shows like Ancient Aliens and the like. So we have successfully exported Bruce Cathy and his ufological claims to the American ufology community.
00:57:03
Speaker
Well, on a similar vein, my last one is about Bruce De Palma, who is sort of imported and then exported and then imported again a little
Bruce De Palma's Free Energy Machine
00:57:14
Speaker
bit. He was American originally, but moved to New Zealand and in fact became a New Zealand citizen in 1994. And he invented a, well, he invented the in-machine homopolar generator.
00:57:33
Speaker
Now we've gone from ufology to the free energy crowd. There's a bit of a society all around the world of people who have these machines that they claim can get free energy by condensing it out of the zero-point energy ether stuff.
00:58:01
Speaker
And they come up with these machines that they claim basically give out more energy than you put into them, basically. Mr De Palma was at pains to say that this thing he'd made was not a perpetual motion machine, because the point about a perpetual motion machine is that it just
00:58:20
Speaker
keeps going under its own steam, but it neither takes in nor gives out energy. It just keeps going and going and going, and you can't actually extract energy from it. No, no, his one could apparently put out five times more power than was put into it. It's based on supposedly an invention by Michael Faraday called Faraday's Disc, and it's sort of an electromagnetized flywheel.
00:58:50
Speaker
with a bunch of extra stuff around it. I don't know. And he worked on this machine for all of his life up until his death in 1997. He had a workshop here in Auckland. He'd done stuff overseas as well. And he was, from the sounds of things, fairly well regarded in the global free energy community.
00:59:13
Speaker
Now, obviously, when it comes to free energy, conspiracy theories are basically that, you know, this stuff is real, but they, quote unquote, don't want you to know it, because the petrochemicals and all them would lose all their money if you could suddenly get free energy from a different source.
00:59:29
Speaker
Now, there's an interesting, there's an article about him on the website God in a Nutshell, which gets very, well, conspiratorial, I guess is the only word for it. It starts with a Bible quote from Ephesians 6.12, which says, for our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world's darkness and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
00:59:54
Speaker
And this particular article sort of makes some quite dark insinuations about the forces that may be at work in preventing free energy from coming to light. This one says, it is a common misconception that working on such devices, free energy devices, is a simple process with no interference from dark forces.
01:00:15
Speaker
Many people have been tricked to believing that the only reason why a free energy device is not readily available to the public is because the concept is impossible and it does not exist. Haha, the very thought. Normally it is through strange, darker manipulations that devices and their inventors are thwarted. In many cases, as soon as an inventor has stumbled upon a working concept, strange things start to happen to them in their lives. These events can range from financial ruin to false illness and other forms of seemingly external sabotage. Perhaps this is evidence of the powers of the world's darkness. It is after all pretty hard to complete.
01:00:44
Speaker
and promote your inventions with so many life obstacles trying to throw you off your track. Although at the end when it does talk about Mr De Palma's death in 1997 it says it was most likely due to alcohol related illness, so no actual
01:00:57
Speaker
insinuations that these dark forces did him in. And then there's just also a little bit of the, as they put it, basically, the scientific community kind of didn't want to have anything to do with him because the idea of free energy basically violates all of science as we know it. So they will, in their conspiracy theory, they'll sort of lean heavily on the fact that, you know, they've been poo-pooed by the scientific establishment.
01:01:27
Speaker
who are afraid of what their findings could show. But again, nothing's ever actually become of this. His head is machine, it does its thing, but has not, as far as anyone is aware, revolutionised the production of electricity. Or is that just what they want you to think?
01:01:48
Speaker
Is that what they want you to think? Is that what you think? No, no. No, no. But I think I try to think very little these days. Yeah, no, it's probably the best, best policy. So there you go. Yes, we have a local guy here in Auckland was working on his free energy device and was supposedly ridiculed. I probably was ridiculed by the scientific unity for it. It was supposedly beset by dark forces who didn't want him to complete his life's work, which I guess he kind of didn't.
01:02:17
Speaker
And that is all we have to say for today on conspiracy theories in New Zealand.
New Zealand's Unique Conspiracy Exports
01:02:23
Speaker
So David Ferrier, stick that in your pipe and smoke it. Now, I do want to point out we've only talked here about clearly unwarranted conspiracy theories back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
01:02:35
Speaker
In part because David's article was, look, all the stupid conspiracy theories people believe back home are overseas imports. And my argument is, no, we've got a lot of stupid conspiracy theories back home, which you don't need to refer to overseas to get any.
01:02:52
Speaker
any belief in. So there are warranted conspiracy theories we could talk about, and there are also a whole bunch of not necessarily warranted conspiracy theories in that there are good evidence behind them, but certainly conspiratorial hypotheses that we should take seriously and at least investigate. So there's also a treasure trove
01:03:14
Speaker
of warranted and maybe warranted conspiracy theories we could have covered as well. But we wanted to look specifically at the unwarranted ones, to go... I don't have to look overseas to find that actually we're good enough when it comes to generating conspiracy theories in this country. Sure, there are foreign imports which are cluttering up our conspiratorial spaces here.
01:03:39
Speaker
But, you know, we do well enough. We come up with our own conspiracy theories. And when it comes to stupid conspiracy theories, we're up there with the rest of the world. We are, in some cases, possibly even punching above our weight. Well done us. Well done us. Makes me proud to be a Kiwi. I'd break into the national anthem if it weren't a tuneless dirge like all national anthems in the world. Although it does have that line about the country's van. Yes.
01:04:09
Speaker
yes well gotta gotta have the van because that's
01:04:12
Speaker
I mean, obviously it's a van in the sense of front, but I prefer the idea that we have a national van. Like maybe it's the mystery machine from Scooby Doo, something like that. Maybe you or I could drive it around the country looking for conspiracy theories. Or from the Lovecraft investigations. That was the mystery machine. So today the van is there than our country. I mean, our country is good to be close to Ryloo, where Cthulhu lies slumbering. Lies dreaming. Food for thought. Food for thought. Food for thought.
01:04:42
Speaker
Some more food for thought is what will be in our bonus episode this week. Which is actually our bonus episode from two weeks ago, which we never really recorded.
01:04:51
Speaker
Yes, so two weeks ago we were going to talk about a thing but then M was unwell so we put it off and then last week we'd had enough trouble recording the main episode so we flagged the idea of a bonus episode. So this week we're going to tell you what we thought about the Trojan Horse Affair podcast. We're also going to talk about another documentary that had things worked out differently might have been the content of this episode but it turns out actually wasn't.
01:05:15
Speaker
So if you'd like to know more about either of those topics, then become a patron. And if you are a patron, well, then you're all set. The bonus episode will be winging its way to you shortly by some method. If you'd like to become a patron, just go to patreon.com and search for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. But don't feel any pressure. You're our audience, and that's good enough for us.
01:05:38
Speaker
So, I don't think I have anything else to say. Do you have anything else to say? No, I'm just going to press a random button on my sound machine to basically close things out. So... I think something's up perfectly. That too. Right, I'm watching Stop Recording now.
01:06:04
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R.X.Dentist. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com, and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, it's just a step to the left.