ARCHEOLOGY - ' The Brain Police ' and the ' Big Lie '

"THE BRAIN POLICE" AND "THE BIG LIE"

Any time you allege a conspiracy is afoot, especially in the field of science, you are treading on thin ice. We tend to be very sceptical about conspiracies--unless the Mafia or some Muslim radicals are behind the alleged plot. But the evidence is overwhelming and the irony is that much of it is in plain view.

The good news is that the players are obvious. Their game plan and even their play-by-play tactics are transparent, once you learn to spot them. However, it is not so easy to penetrate through the smokescreen of propaganda and disinformation to get to their underlying motives and goals. It would be convenient if we could point to a plumber's unit and a boldface liar like Richard Nixon, but this is a more subtle operation.

The bad news: the conspiracy is global and there are many vested interest groups. A cursory investigation yields the usual suspects: scientists with a theoretical axe to grind, careers to further and the status quo to maintain. Their modus operandi is "The Big Lie"--and the bigger and more widely publicised, the better. They rely on invoking their academic credentials to support their arguments, and the presumption is that no one has the right to question their authoritarian pronouncements that:
1. there is no mystery about who built the Great Pyramid or what the methods of construction were, and the Sphinx shows no signs of water damage;
2. there were no humans in the Americas before 20,000 BC;
3. the first civilisation dates back no further than 6000 BC;
4. there are no documented anomalous, unexplained or enigmatic data to take into account;
5. there are no lost or unaccounted-for civilisations.
Let the evidence to the contrary be damned!

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Mad Scientist i agree with you wholly man!!

You are probably so right in this issue.

I mean i have since many times believed that scientists have been LYING to us alll along..but are they the ones really behind all of this i mean ...if they were i think it would somehow leak and the govt would support us...INSTEAD the govt does nothing..and ithink being silent in this case is fishy...could they be the real ones who the info comes to and they decide what to put out and what not.

Im sure there has got to be division in the govt for this sort of thing if there are big evils such as homeland security and the CIA..

OrionSirius

yeah i've seen evidence disproving most of those, yet the scientific community ignores it completely, and of course, no major expeditions can be mounted or major research projects to prove any of this wrong, because if you try, you will lose your funding.

Why don't you guys become archaeologists -- go to school for it, or join local archaeological societies and go on digs and then offer evidence that these things are coverups.

This suffers from a lack of credibility because Nexus Magazine's editors have tended to be a bit gullible in the past. A good researcher with good credentials makes a more convincing argument than a layperson.


I'm not that impressed with the researches of laypeople. I suffered through one layperson (who had articles published in a magazine similar to Nexus) telling me (and showing me) his unicorn horn that he found, which had a hinged section on it so it could plough the ground. He wowed several editors and several creation scientists.

Since I had taken comparative anatomy, I knew his "unicorn horn" was instead a segment of spinal vertebra from a quadruped, taken at about the shoulder area where the spinous process (that he thought was a horrn) extends several inches above the vertebra.

So, if you feel there's a conspiracy, the easy thing to do is become involved with archaeological societies, learn the methods, and THEN debunk it with the weight of credibility behind you.

Byrd I disagree one does not need to become an archaeologists to see clearly that the field is abused. The Nazca lines are for instance a good example. The issue of Mayan sound technology although applied today in many ways,
are not accredited to the originators of the capacity.

The issue of is this a conspiracy does not require that one become an archaeologists. As far as I know there were humans in the western hemisphere long before 20,000 BC. The Sphinx is 10s of thousands of years old and the idea that earth was created 6000 years ago is preposterous. A Ph.D. in archaeology does not change that Byrd.

What are your thoughts?

There are too many instances of cover ups in the field of archeology, to even begin to list them here. I'm sure if you did a search on google you would find a lot of information.
I have read a few of Eric von Daniken's books. Now there are facts in there which are hard to disprove.
Even archeologists are ridiculed if they find an anomoly with history. The Sphinx is a prime example. It was built before the Egyptians, as can be seen from the water weathering.

READ ME

some links

Scientists in my opinion only have two things on there mind.

(1) Funding.

(2) Recognition


And many of them will lie to attain these gaols.

Thalydamide was just one example.

The head of that research team lied through his teeth about his research findings.

Because of that many babies were born with birth defects.

Quote.

To be more specific, in the early 60s a wonder drug by he name of 'Thalydamide' was used by pregnant women as means of controlling 'morning sickness'. Some people believed that this drug caused birth defects, as I understand, when the use of this drug was ceased the particular birth defects also ceased to occur. This may have been a coincidence but I expect many believe there was a direct link between the use of Thalydamide and the occurence of birth defects which would lead to the following 'That the ingestion of Thalydamide is a known risk of birth defects.' The risk can be averted by not ingesting Thalydamide, alternatively the medical research community may have taken more care before advocating the use of such a drug.

Ah, Von Daniken. I read, loved, and believed him when those books were first published. As time went on and I did more research and read more about the items, I began to suspect he was making things up.

Then came the book, "Crash Go The Chariots" which debunked Von Daniken, and which did fit most of the things I'd learned.

It's like the famous "ufo shown in Egyptian tomb" that keeps cropping up here. The amateur's explaination is "wow! UFO!" The expert's opinion (and the UN-enhanced photo) say that it's actually a hand... that the scribe had written something and that someone later crossed it out.

Does it mean that a layman has no chance of making an impact in a field? No. They can. But they have to have a good background in the studies... the people who said "Wow! UFO in Egyptian tomb!" didn't know how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics and knew nothing about the form or the ways of writing.

So if you're going to present credible evidence, you can't just say "the Sphynx has water damage!" Take some geology courses, do a lot of fieldwork in geology, and then go make your claims.

If you want to debunk the things you think are wrong, learn about the field.

These are ways in which archaeologists try to escape from uncomfortable
evidence when their dominant paradigm/mind set is threatened, and when
new evidence makes it likely that they might actually have to do some
extra work, learn some new things, and unlearn some old ones.

• 1. Appeal to authority. "We already know all that we need to know about
  the subject, so anyone trying to challenge 'what the standard reference
  books say', is automatically off-limits, and should be treated with the
  highest suspicion."
  
  
• 2. Describe the information as "old news", even if short of the dogma
  defender him/herself, nobody else have really heard about some item of
  evidence. "This subject has been dealt with many times in the past
  already, and we're terribly tired of it by now".
  
  
• 3. Affect indignation. "How dare you suggest that archaeologists may not
  be doing their job with utmost competence?" "Are you attacking our whole
  profession?"
  
  
• 4. Set up straw men. Misrepresent your opponents' arguments, and then
  refute your own misrepresentations conclusively and with great flair.
  
  
• 5. Snow them with your expertise, real or imagined. Focus on the weakest
  and/or irrelevant elements of the opponent's argument, so that the whole
  thing can be nitpicked into oblivion.
  
  
• 6. Question competence of opponents. Also label your opponents, and use
  personal attacks freely. You can call them names like "kooks," and
  "fanatics". In contrast to those kooks, the defenders of the established
  dogma are so much more "competent and reasonable".
  
  
• 7. Cast suspicion on the motives of critics of the official view. "They
  only do it for money and/or to get publicity, and/or to please the TV
  crowd." Of course the proponents of the official dogma never place any
  importance in academic rewards, influence, and honors. They are
  motivated by disinterested search for the truth only.
  
  
• 8. Employ circular reasoning with abandon. For example, "Competent
  professional authorities always investigate all important evidence. So
  if they did not report about Subject X, therefore there's nothing there
  to report, and so this evidence is not important and/or it does not even
  exist!"
  
  
• 9. Require that the skeptics provide the complete solution to some
  difficult historical problem. "If you don't have a complete solution,
  that means the problem itself does not exist. So why worry about it?"
  
  
• 10. If it might have been then so it was. Overload your posts with
  wouldas and couldas. Postulate a lot of improbable events to explain
  troubling evidence that doesn't fit the existing paradigm. Also known as
  the logical fallacy of special pleading.
  
  
• 11. And if everything else fails, openly misrepresent the evidence, and
  hope that nobody notice.

Yes, there are a lot of cover ups in the field of archeology...

There are only a few good archaeologists that I trust, one of 'em is Graham Hancock. (www.grahamhancock.com...), he, and a friend of him, Robert Bovaul(spell...), are the ones that came up with the theory that the Sphinx is 10s of thousands of years old...

Graham a message board on his website that is quit simmilair than our ATS board. I believe Graham is often a bit sceptical, but the last thing he wants is a cover-up

Go check out his website, I'm sure you'll like it.

www.grahamhancock.com...

Precisely Byrd, learn about the field. Obviously, you haven't bothered searching for or reading any of the links. So next time do your homework before you post.
But hey if you want to keep your head in the sand by all means do so.

In 1966 respected archeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre and her associates on a U.S. Geological Survey team working under a grant from the National Science Foundation were called upon to date a pair of remarkable archeological sites in Mexico. Sophisticated stone tools rivaling the best work of Cro-magnon man in Europe had been discovered at Hueyatlaco, while somewhat cruder implements had been turned up at nearby El Horno. The sites, it was conjectured, were very ancient, perhaps as old as 20,000 years, which, according to prevailing theories, would place them very close to the dawn of human habitation in the Americas.

Steen-McIntyre, knowing that if such antiquity could indeed be authenticated, her career would be made, set about an exhaustive series of tests. Using four different, but well accepted, dating methods, including uranium series and fission track, she determined to get it right. Nevertheless, when the results came in, the original estimates proved to be way off. Way under as it turned out. The actual age was conclusively demonstrated to be more like a quarter of a million years.

As we might expect, some controversy ensued.

Steen-McIntyre's date challenged not only accepted chronologies for human presence in the region, but contradicted established notions of how long modern humans could have been anywhere on Earth. Nevertheless, the massive reexamination of orthodox theory and the wholesale rewriting of textbooks which one might logically have expected did not ensue. What did follow was the public ridicule of Steen-McIntyre's work and the vilification of her character. She has not been able to find work in her field since.
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I looked up archeologist Virginia Steen-McIntyre on a Google search and I'm seeing conflicting stories. There's an excellent article (supportive of her) about that show on Talk Origins (www.talkorigins.org... )

I did question your article based on information I found on Google. For instance, your source says she's an archaeologist -- and she is, indeed, nowadays. Most sites list her as a geologist. She may have been niether -- a more credible source says she was a grad student in geology and that the methods she was using for dating the samples had been untested -- the methods were controversial and nobody knew how reliable they were.

And as far as her "never working again" goes...
"In early 1973, Virginia Steen-McIntyre had achieved international recognition from several organizations, including the National Academy of Science, from whom she also received funding for foreign meetings and speaking engagements. She worked part-time in her area of expertise for a government laboratory, and even became an adjunct professor of Archaeology at Colorado State University"
www.terravista.pt...

I don't know if you'd care to read that Terravista article, but it gives a more balanced insight into what was a real scholarly brawl (more like an outright war) between two groups at the site who disagreed with each others' conclusions. The writers of this webpage do agree there was abuse and that there needs to be a review, but point out that science is ALWAYS suspicious of results that don't match up with facts (ala the famous "cold fusion" fraud of the past 20 years.)

At any rate, it seems her case is being heard. Discovery Channel included her in a recent show(tlc.discovery.com...

(a more polite and less informative version of "what really happened" ): www.science-frontiers.com...



But my suggestion still stands: if you want to do research or to debunk some of the old guard, you really do first need to know quite a bit about the field -- and this would include taking coursework and doing fieldwork. My personal opinion is that the jury's still out but that I'm disinclined to believe 200,000 years. I would, however, believe 20,000 years since the Clovis points and some other artifacts suggest that there were humans in the area some 12,000 years ago.

[Edited on 4-12-2002 by Byrd]