Sunday 13 August 2017

Sunday Express on Marcus Allen

For some reason there has been considerable mainstream media coverage of this year's Glastonbury Symposium, see: http://www.glastonburysymposium.co.uk/. I myself went along in 2010 and made one of my favourite HPANWO TV videos, Ben Goes on Tor!, see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/ben-goes-on-tor.html. In those days only the specialized press of the UFO/conspiracy/paranormal and the mind/body/spirit communities; and the various overlaps thereof, covered it. Journals such as Nexus, Caduceus, Namaste etc. This year one of the speakers was Marcus Allen, the UK publisher of Nexus magazine. He's a good friend of mine and fellow researcher, specializing in the moon landings, and has been on HPANWO Radio many times, see: http://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/programme-179-podcast-marcus-allen.html. His lecture was reviewed by Jon Austin of the Sunday Express and... ultimate spoiler alert, it is not exactly Pulitzer Prize material. Source: http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/838136/Moon-landings-hoax-Marcus-Allen-not-possible-Glastonbury-Symposium.

The content is vaguely factual, but includes some aversive elements. The very title is simplistic and misleading: "Secret Space Project- 'NASA had craft to reach moon... but hoaxed Apollo missions instead'." It is intended to make the reader scoff, and hopefully read no further. The true relationship between the secret space programme and NASA's public equivalent is complex, but explicable. Marcus and I delve into it in our interviews and also there is more information in the background links below. The article begins: "A top lunar landings denier." Any description of a person's beliefs that includes the suffix "denier" is a personal slur. It is intended to connect in the reader's mind to "Holocaust denier" and thereby demonize the person. It is a tactic used by people like George Monbiot, see: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/death-to-climate-change-deniers.html. "Shocking claim" is just a piece of shallow rhetoric. Why use the adjective "shocking"? "Shocking" is a position on a purely emotional and qualitative gauge. It says nothing about how much or little evidence exists to support or discredit the claim. It is similar to Carl Sagan's cliche "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary explanations." See here for more details: https://youtu.be/Oxfmkn7QygY?t=26m18s. "Mr Allen is the UK publisher of 'alternative news' magazine Nexus." "Alternative news" is put into scare-quotes so that the reader will intuit an implicit pejorative subtext. This is done in a similar way to how the mainstream media use the phrase "fake news". The same goes for the old lines "moon hoax conspiracy theorist" (repeated twice) and "The far-fetched conspiracy theory." If a trick keeps working, why not keep using it? "It is then claimed that specialist scientists aided by Nazi's, who worked for the US in return for immunity from war crimes trials." This refers to Operation Paperclip and it is not a "claim"; it is historical fact. After the destruction of Nazi Germany at the end of World War II, Hitler's scientists were given the choice of working for the victorious allies or going to Nuremburg. The best known of these scientists is Wernher von Braun. Many of these experts were also working in the field of electrogravitics and this would have included the back-engineering of extraterrestrial technology that used it, see background links for details. "Believers even claim that the high-tech craft are secretly flown into space." The word "believers" is another dysphemism; it echoes phrases like "believers in the cult of the Lemonade Fountain" etc. It prevents the readers understanding that people like Marcus have come to this field of study via a careful scientific analysis of the evidence. As always with the mainstream media, it is the comments under the article that are far more interesting than the article itself; and based on those, apart from the usual idiots of course, I'm pleased to say that the propaganda in this screed does not appear to have fooled as many people as the authors and editor would probably like. We're almost at the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo moon missions. NASA know this is going to be a massive informational choke point for them, possibly too massive to prevent the truth exploding out... and I'm going to be squeezing hard on their necks!

2 comments:

Andrew Johnson said...

I think they need to keep the Apollo Hoax going for a bit longer - they're managing the balance of perception I think. A fair few people don't believe it any more.

Ben Emlyn-Jones said...

We're almost at the fiftieth anniversary, Andrew. They know this is going to be a massive informational choke point for them, possibly too massive to prevent the truth exploding out... and I'm going to be squeezing hard on their necks!