The "Sprinkler Rainbow Conspiracy"

YouTube link.

An old video, but apparently I've never posted this before.   Just a reminder that people like this exist.

A followup on the death and exhumation of Tycho Brahe - updated x3

In 2010 I wrote a post entitled "Was Tycho Brahe murdered?  Many people have doubted that uremia secondary to urinary retention could have killed him, and have speculated that he was poisoned with mercury.

The following week, in More thoughts re Tycho Brahe and ... Hamlet, I reviewed the connection between the Danish astronomer and the famous (fictional) Danish prince, with a comment that Tycho's supernova of 1572 melds nicely with the theory that Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

In February of 2011, the Copenhagen Post noted that Tycho Brahe was to be exhumed for a forensic study.

A group of Danish and Czech experts will therefore soon be able to carry out detailed analyses of the astronomer’s bone, hair and clothing remains to find the answer to a centuries-old mystery as to whether he was murdered.

The leader of the Danish research team comes from the  University of Aarhus’ wonderfully-named Department of Medieval and Renaissance Archaeology.

Then the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and the Prague Post announced the exhumation, and the preliminary results were made public.

It's a bit complicated.  From the Prague Post:

"We expected we would find the remains of Tycho Brahe and his wife in the grave. But after we opened it, we found remains of several other persons as well, which meant the team's archeologists had to keep working until last night to find out more about the identity of those bodies," said Petr Velemínský, head of the National Museum's anthropological depository. "We found remains of eight other individuals, five of whom were children, and that was certainly a surprise."

Conspiracy theorists claim a jealous Kepler poisoned Brahe before buying the astronomer's research from his unsuspecting widow and using it for his own ends. The story goes that Kepler used mercury to kill his former collaborator, but more skeptical voices say the tale is unlikely, calling the traces of mercury previously found in Brahe's corpse during an earlier exhumation a sign of nothing more than his penchant for alchemy, a common hobby of scientists at the time who sought to convert various elements into gold.

"When we examine the hair samples in Sweden and in Prague, and we have about 8 centimeters of his beard, we will be able to find information on what substances he administered in the last three months of his life," Vellev said. "And the bone samples will give us even further-reaching information on the last 15 years of his life."

These excerpts from the New York Times:

Brahe, who sported a distinctive gold and silver prosthetic nose — having lost the bridge of his real nose in a duel — was long thought to have died after his bladder burst. Legend has it that 11 days before his death he attended the banquet of a nobleman and was too polite to leave the table to go to the toilet.

Medical experts have exploded this theory, noting that bladder ruptures are highly unusual and that Brahe probably died from kidney failure. But even today, when Czechs excuse themselves from the table to go to the bathroom, they have been known to say, “Pardon me, I don’t want to end up like Tycho Brahe.”

Others contend that Brahe was killed by his cousin Eric Brahe on the orders of the Danish king, Christian IV, enraged over rumors that Brahe, a father of eight, was having an affair with the king’s mother. The cousin supposedly slipped some mercury into Brahe’s glass, causing him to die in delirious pain...

Legend has it that, at age 20, he damaged his nose in a duel with a fellow member of the Danish gentry, Manderup Parsbjerg, not over a woman, but over some fine point of mathematics...

A second NYT article focuses more on the Kepler-Tycho connection, with a reference to a scholarly book on the subject:

Those findings inspired “Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries,” a 2004 book by a pair of married journalists, Joshua Gilder and Anne-Lee Gilder. They argue that the evidence from the hairs [from a previous, incomplete exhumation and autopsy] points to two incidents of mercury poisoning, one at the time of the banquet and the other just before death, and that Kepler is the prime suspect because he had the means, the motive and the opportunity...

A devoutly religious scholar may not sound like a good candidate for murderer, but the Gilders argue that Kepler was an unhappy, temperamental zealot. In an astrological self-analysis, he described his “eagerness for trickery” and his plots against his “enemies,” and said he was under the influence of Mars's “rage-provoking force.”

Kepler resented Tycho’s higher status and, above all, his refusal to allow access to the full log of observations, including the records of Mars’s movements that Kepler considered essential to demonstrate the validity of his own model of the universe. Kepler tried several schemes to see Tycho’s data — to sneakily “wrest his riches away,” as Kepler put it — but Tycho resisted and forced Kepler to keep working on calculations aimed at supporting the Tychonic cosmology...

The results of the forensic studies will not be available until later this year.  In the meantime, I've requested the Heavenly Intrigue book from our library.  Stay tuned.

Photo by Jacob Christensen Ravn/Aarhus University, via European Pressphoto Agency

Addendum February 2012:

The results of a Danish-Czech-Swedish examination of fragments of the earthly remains of the 16th century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe has had to be postponed until 2012 due to a lack of funding, according to Prof. Jens Vellev who is leading the project.

Addendum December 2012:  The most recent forensic studies do not suggest murder by mercury or other detectable poison.

“There was mercury in the beard, you will also have traces of mercury if you have a beard,” said lead investigator Dr. Jens Vellev, from Aarhus University in Denmark, to BBC News. “But the amount of mercury was as you see in people [alive today].”

“It is impossible that Tycho Brahe could have been murdered,” Vellev added. He also discounted the possibility death from a combination of other toxins: “If there were other poisons in the beard, we would have been able to see it in the analyses.”

Addendum June 2018:  A detailed postmortem examination of Brahe's skeleton by a team in the Czech Republic shows definite evidence of diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, which though not a lethal disease, is associated with various comorbidities that may be relevant in Brahe's case:

Previous studies of skeletal and hair remains of Tycho Brahe have ruled out the possibility that he died from a violent death (chronic poisoning) and excluded chronic long-term kidney disease and renal osteodystrophy, nutritional osteomalacia, vitamin D and calcium deficiency from gastrointestinal malabsorption syndromes, osteopenia, or osteoporosis.

The current paleopathological study provides further evidence about his health status, by revealing that he suffered from both diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis and obesity. These results, along with those of the isotopic analysis, give a glimpse into the lifestyle of the famous astronomer, revealing the dietary excesses a 16th century high-ranking individual could have afforded (high caloric intake and presumably excessive alcohol consumption). They also reveal the possible health consequences such a prestigious way of life could have had. Although this study does not allow a definite diagnosis to be reached, it highlights plausible reasons for the sudden illness and premature death of the famous astronomer, notably conditions resulting from so-called civilization diseases, which occur with high frequency in DISH patients.

The assassination of Bobby Kennedy

I've said before on this blog that I enjoy "conspiracy theories" because they can be quite interesting.  I had forgotten all about this one.  Perhaps it's time to revive it.

“I went [to meet Sirhan Sirhan] because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said [Robert F. ] Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”

Kennedy, 64, said he doesn’t know if his involvement in the case will change anything. But he now supports the call for a reinvestigation of the assassination — which is led by Paul Schrade, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles but survived...

Though Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot Kennedy, he claimed from the start that he had no memory of doing so. And midway through Sirhan’s trial, prosecutors provided his lawyers with an autopsy report that launched five decades of controversy: Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, including a fatal shot behind his ear. But Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was standing in front of him.

Was there a second gunman? The debate rages to this day...

Sirhan’s appeals have been rejected at every level, as recently as 2016, even with the courts considering new evidence that has emerged over the years that as many as 13 shots were fired — Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets — and that Sirhan may have been subjected to coercive hypnosis, in a real-life version of “The Manchurian Candidate.”..

Karl Uecker, an Ambassador Hotel maitre d’ who was escorting Kennedy through the pantry, testified that he grabbed Sirhan’s wrist and pinned it down after two shots and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down, never getting close to Kennedy. An Ambassador waiter and a Kennedy aide also said they tackled Sirhan after two or three shots.

Several other witnesses also said he was not close enough to place the gun against Kennedy’s back, where famed Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on the senator’s jacket and on his hair, indicating shots fired at close contact...

An internal police document concluded that “Kennedy and Weisel bullets not fired from same gun” — Weisel was the wounded ABC News producer — and “Kennedy bullet not fired from Sirhan’s revolver.”..

Van Praag said recently that different guns create different resonances and that he was able to establish that two guns were fired, that they fired in different directions, and that some of the shot “impulses” were so close together they couldn’t have been fired by the same gun. He said he could not say “precisely” 13 shots but certainly more than the eight contained by Sirhan’s gun.

The story continues at The Washington Post.

JFK assassination records to be released ?

Twenty-five years have passed since the 1992 mandate:

[F]ederal judge John Tunheim called for complete release of the government’s JFK files later this year.

“It’s time to release them all,” said Tunheim, the former chair of an independent panel that declassified thousands of JFK records in the 1990s.

The National Archives retains a trove of more than 3,500 JFK assassination records, obtained by Tunheim’s review board, that have never been seen by the public. The records are historically significant.

The unseen CIA files include 2,000 pages of transcripts of the CIA’s harsh interrogation of KGB defector Yuri Nosenko, who handled Lee Harvey Oswald’s file for Soviet intelligence service. They also include CIA files of senior undercover officers in 1963 such as Bill Harvey, David Phillips and Howard Hunt. All three believed Kennedy’s policies were dangerously weak, perhaps even treasonous. Harvey and Phillips are known to have mounted assassination operations.

The JFK Records Act of 1992 mandates the release of all of these records by October 26, 2017.

In his Press Club comments, Tunheim, the senior federal judge in Minnesota, noted that President Trump and White House General Counsel Donald McGahn face important decisions about these records. The leadership of the CIA, including Trump-appointed director Mike Pompeo, may prefer that some of this material remain secret.

Is "The Hum" a mass delusion ?

Sue Taylor first started hearing it at night in 2009. A retired psychiatric nurse, Taylor lives in Roslin, Scotland, a small village seven miles outside of Edinburgh. “A thick, low hum,” is how she described it, something “permeating the entire house,” keeping her awake. At first she thought it was from a nearby factory, or perhaps a generator of some kind. She began spending her evenings looking for the source, listening outside her neighbors’ homes in the early hours of the morning. She couldn’t find anything definitive. She had her hearing checked and was told it was perfect, but the noise persisted. She became dizzy and nauseous, overcome, she says, by a crushing sense of despair and hopelessness at her inability to locate or escape the sound. When things got bad, it felt to Taylor like the bed—and the whole house—was vibrating. Like her head was going to explode. Her husband, who had tinnitus, didn’t hear a thing. “People looked at me like I was mad,” she said.

 Lori Steinborn lives in Tavares, Florida, outside of Orlando, and in 2006 she had started hearing a noise similar to the one Taylor was hearing. Steinborn thought it was her neighbors at first: some nearby stereo blasting, the bass coming through the walls. It would start most nights between 7 and 8 p.m. and last until the early hours of the morning. Like Taylor, she began searching for the sound; leaving town helped her get away from it, but it was waiting when she returned...

The experience described by Steinborn and Taylor, and many others, is what’s come to be known as “the Hum,” a mysterious auditory phenomenon that, by some estimates, 2 percent of the population can hear...

After it was first reported in Bristol, it emerged in Taos, New Mexico; Kokomo, Indiana; Largs, Scotland. A small city newspaper would publish a report of a local person suffering from an unidentified noise, followed by a torrent of letters to the editor with similar complaints...

Hum sufferers have been consistently written off as either delusional or simply suffering from tinnitus...

Further confusing matters is the fact that some reports of the Hum have been definitively traced to specific sources and corrected. The Hum was heard in Sausalito, California, in the mid-1980s, but was eventually found to be the result of the mating sounds of a fish called the plainfin midshipman, whose call could penetrate the steel hulls of the houseboats in the marina. The Windsor Hum was investigated by the Canadian government and ultimately traced to factories on Zug Island, across the Detroit River in Michigan. After an extensive study of the Hum in Kokomo, Indiana, researchers determined that it was caused by two nearby manufacturing plants whose production facilities were emitting specific low frequencies...

Crucially, Deming was able to distinguish the Hum from tinnitus. Tinnitus, usually a ringing in the ear, can take a number of forms, but while its intensity may wax and wane, it is more or less omnipresent, and those who suffer from it tend to hear it in any environment. The Hum, which is constant but only under certain circumstances (indoors, rural areas, etc.), defies a simple correlation with tinnitus. Additionally, Deming notes that if the Hum were related to tinnitus, one would expect a fairly normal geographic distribution rather than clusters in small towns.

For a long read on the subject, see the source article at The New Republic.  The embedded image is a screencap from the World Hum Map (zoomable at the source).

New conspiracy theories

I've posted before that I love reading conspiracy theories, because they are so much more interesting than real life.  A recent Reddit thread presented some new (to me) theories:

That the government started the whole tin-foil hat idea because tin foil hats actually amplify, not block, signals.

Michael Jordan did not "retire" from basketball to play baseball for a couple of years. He was suspended by the commissioner for gambling on the sport, but they mutually agreed to not announce it because he was the game's biggest star, and it didn't do either of them any good to expose him.

Those funny "What is your Star Wars name?" type games on Facebook are used to collect your private information, especially answers to your security questions (mom's maiden name, childhood pet, etc...)

New Coke was a maneuver by Coca Cola to reinvigorate their sales by introducing a subpar product and then reintroducing "Coke Classic" to inspire nostalgia. Or it was a clever method to hide the switch from sugar to corn syrup.

That PETA is run by someone in the meat industry to paint animal rights activists as crazy people. They release massive campaigns over ridiculous topics to draw attention away from real issues and make real activists less credible.

Lost cosmonauts. The Russians lost men in space. Gagarin was just the first to return.

That laundry detergent companies put the line over where it needs to be so you'll run out faster.

Magic Johnson never had AIDS. He was paid by the government and insurance companies to say he had aids since he was the height of invincibility and admiration of youngsters at the time.

Is there an upside-down flag on this $10 bill ?

This image is a closeup of the reverse side of a $10 bill from the series of 1950C (printed between 1961 and 1963).  It looks like the flag is being flown upside-down.  This has been vehemently denied by government officials and numismatists:

Let us put this rumor to rest. It doesn’t matter whether or not the flag on the back of a series of 1950 bill appears upside down. This is not considered an error and in no way does it command a premium.

It takes a team of eight engravers hundreds of man hours to engrave a plate used for printing currency. There is no rogue engraver out there inverting American flags. Whether the flag on the back of 1950 does or doesn’t appear upside down is all in the eye of the beholder. The fact of the matter is that the flag looks the way it is supposed to look.

 So spread the message and please do not call asking about an upside flag on 1950 or any other bills. It is not a recognized error and it never will be.

Via Reddit.

Freshly released evidence regarding 9/11

As reported by the Miami Herald:

Freshly released but heavily censored FBI documents include tantalizing new information about events connected to the Sarasota Saudis who moved suddenly out of their home about two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.

The documents were released to BrowardBulldog.org Monday amid ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation...

Deputies were called after a man with a Tunisian passport was observed disposing of items in a dumpster behind a storage facility he had rented in Bradenton.

The man’s name is blanked out, but the report says authorities who searched the dumpster found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight to fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa, took flying lessons.

The three paragraphs that follow are completely blanked out. The reasons cited include information “specifically authorized under criteria established by [presidential] executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy.”

In all, the FBI released 11 pages Monday. They contain statements reiterating that the al-Hijjis had departed the United States in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.”

Those statements flatly contradict the FBI’s public statements that agents found no connection between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 plot.

Yet they dovetail with the account of a counterintelligence source who has said investigators in 2001 found evidence — phone records and photographs of license plates snapped at the entrance to the al-Hijjis’ Sarasota-area neighborhood — that showed Mohamed Atta, other hijackers and former Broward resident and current al-Qaeda fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji home.

None of that information, or even the fact that an investigation in Sarasota took place, was disclosed by the FBI to Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the attacks or to the 9/11 Commission, according to former Florida U.S. Sen. Bob Graham. Graham co-chaired the joint inquiry...

Among other things, the government asserted that classification is necessary because the censored information pertains to foreign relations or foreign activities, including confidential sources.

“This could be about information considered embarrassing to Saudi Arabia,” said Julin. Fifteen of the 19 suicide hijackers were Saudi nationals.

It's important to emphasize that this new evidence does not "prove" any conspiracy theory (MIHOP, LIHOP, or other).  It does confirm that there exists information not made public by previous investigations.  Via Reddit.

9/11 conspiracy theory explained and dismissed in 5 minutes

YouTube link.

JFK assassination conspiracy theory re Secret Service standdown

YouTube link.

Lots of JFK-related material will be posted this month in anticipation of the 50th anniversary of his assassination.  Here's an old video excerpt from some television program.

I presume the implications in the video have since been debunked by reliable researchers, but I was unable to locate such this morning.  I did find this comment in the relevant Wikipedia page:

Questions regarding the forthrightness of the Secret Service increased in the 1990s when the Assassination Records Review Board—which was created when Congress passed the JFK Records Act—requested access to Secret Service records. The Review Board was told by the Secret Service that in January 1995, in violation of the JFK Records Act, the Secret Service destroyed protective survey reports that covered JFK's trips from September 24 through November 8, 1963.

Conspiracy theory is often fascinating.

Rumors Osama bin Laden was not buried at sea

I first saw the rumor in RT this morning-

The body of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was not buried at sea, according to leaked emails of intelligence firm Stratfor, as revealed by WikiLeaks.

Stratfor’s vice-president for intelligence, Fred Burton, believes the body was “bound for Dover, [Delaware] on [a] CIA plane” and then “onward to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda [Maryland],” an email says...

"If body dumped at sea, which I doubt, the touch is very Adolph Eichman like. The Tribe did the same thing with the Nazi's ashes," Burton commented in another email...

Stratfor is a US-based intelligence firm called the “shadow CIA” by some media. Among its clients are several US agencies and many big companies. The company relies on paid tips from informants placed in high circles of business, government and security all around the world.

I also found a commentary on the rumor in the Atlantic Wire, where it is roundly dismissed:

It would be an intriguing story—if only there was a shred of evidence substantiating it...

First off: It's telling what each story doesn't tell you about the emails. In RT, the Russian-subsidized news service that was picked up by Drudge, there's no mention of the first email Burton sent where he says "Reportedly, we took the body with us. Thank goodness. Sent via Blackberry by AT&T" That first word suggests he's just reading news reports and passing along information. That last sentence suggests he's spouting off text messages. It certainly doesn't suggest he's running his own reconnaissance operation...

Second, and most importantly: reports like Business Insider's fail to mention that Burton himself actually reverses himself later on...

This joins other Osama bin Laden death conspiracy theories, which are nicely summarized at Wikipedia.

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin reaches the outer limits (of his patience)

YouTube link.

Discussed in this Reddit thread.

Iapetus, a fascinating moon of Saturn - updated

NASA's Cassini spacecraft is returning awesome photos of Saturn, its rings, and its moons, many of them assembled at Boston.com's Big Picture.

I was especially interested to see a closeup of Iapetus, the eighth moon, which has a circumferential ridge around its equator. The photo embedded above is from NASA in 2007. The photo below comes from what I'm sure everyone would consider a "wacko" website that suggests that Iapetus is an artificial (i.e. manufactured) moon.

Certainly the comparison with a Deathstar is striking - and that website is quite interesting (especially if you enjoy pondering conspiracy-theory-type improbabilities).

Whether or not the Iapetus stuff interests you, the rest of the photos from Cassini are truly impressive.

Update December 2010: When I originally posted this is May of 2009, that equatorial ridge around Iapetus was unexplained.  A new hypothesis suggests that this ridge comes not from deformational stresses within the moon, as previously postulated, but rather that it is the remnant of a collapsed ring of debris:

...we propose intact capture or accretion from a debris disk of a "sub-satellite" (possibly more than one) around Iapetus... Such a sub-satellite would be tidally drawn towards Iapetus, once Iapetus is sufficiently despun by tidal interaction with Saturn... Once deep inside the Roche limit, tides would then tear the sub-satellite apart. The resulting debris would collisionally evolve to the equatorial plane, dissipating orbital energy and ultimately raining down on the equator (deorbiting) at subsonic speeds... Assuming the density of ice and a high porosity, rubble-pile structure, all the mass in the ridge can be supplied by a sub-satellite ~100 km in radius, a size relative to Iapetus far smaller than the relative sizes of the Moon to the Earth or Charon to Pluto...

That's from the abstract at the American Geophysical Union meeting.  A BBC summary is here.

Reposted in 2011 to accompany even better photos of Iapetus in an adjacent post.

9/11 conspiracy theory in a nutshell

YouTube link. 

Summarized in less than five minutes, and presented in a humorous fashion.

Debunking a Pearl Harbor myth

I bookmarked this several years ago and should have posted it yesterday.  The idea that the U.S. had foreknowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack is something I had heard for years.  The UPI cited a New York Times report indicating that such speculation was false:

Historians say they have concluded the United States had no advance notice Japan intended to attack Pearl Harbor Dec. 7, 1941, settling a long-debated issue.
The New York Times reported on its Web site Saturday that historians for the National Security Agency concluded in a history released last week that decoded messages buried in Japanese-language weather reports, meant to alert Japanese diplomats to destroy codes, did not reach U.S. officials prior to the attack...

"In reality," the authors concluded, "the Japanese broadcast the coded phrase(s) long after hostilities began -- useless, in fact, to all who might have heard it."

Here are excerpts from the full-blown conspiracy theory:

The only newspaper in the whole world to use any portion of the story was the Honolulu Advertiser. A front-page banner headline in the paper the morning of Sunday, November 30, "JAPANESE MAY ATTACK OVER WEEKEND!" A subhead noted, "Hawaii Troops Alerted".

Suspiciously, the story didn't mention that the target of the Japanese attack would be Pearl Harbor itself. The horrible cost paid for that simple omission is well-known.

For an extensive and well-reasoned discussion of this topic, see "The Truth About Pearl Harbor" at Neatorama (abstracted from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader).

Assassins in the news

Many reports today discussing the determination by Norwegian authorities that mass killer Anders Behring Breivik was insane at the time of his crime, and instead of going to prison will be undergo psychiatric care.  I won't elaborate on this - you'll find plenty of discussion/analysis elsewhere.

Yesterday while driving I heard part of a discussion on NPR re John Hinckley, Jr., who in 1981 tried to assassinate president Ronald Reagan.  He has now been declared sane and not a danger to anyone.  At the time of his trial he was deemed by the jury to be "not guilty by reason of insanity," so if he is no longer insane, the rationale for detaining him becomes weaker.  And of note, his attempt on Reagan's life was never considered to be a political act; he delusionally wanted to impress actress Jodie Foster.

A report in the Christian Science Monitor discusses information being presented by lawyers for Sirhan Sirhan that suggests that he was a diversion for the real killer of Robert F. Kennedy.

The lawyers, William F. Pepper and Laurie Dusek, also said sophisticated audio tests recently conducted on recordings from the assassination night show 13 shots from multiple guns were fired — five more than Sirhancould have fired from his small pistol. Authorities have claimed eight bullets were fired, with three hitting Kennedy and the rest flying wildly around the kitchen and striking five other victims who survived.

Pepper and Dusek argue that before Sirhan's trial, someone switched a bullet before it was placed in evidence because the bullet taken from Kennedy's neck did not match Sirhan's gun. The lawyers suggest a second gun was involved in the assassination, but they do not know who fired it.

I might revisit this in the future, when I have more time, because in the years after the assassination there was a lot of conspiracy theory about the deed, in particular because Sirhan was photographed standing in front of RFK, but the fatal bullet entered his neck from behind.

The "Bisley Boy" - an old conspiracy theory

Elizabeth I never married, went bald early and forbade a post-mortem on her body, so conspiracy theories about her life abound. One of the best is the “Bisley Boy”.

The young Princess Elizabeth was staying at the royal hunting lodge of Over Court in Bisley, Gloucestershire, with her father, Henry VIII. While he was out one day, she got a sudden fever and died. No one wanted to upset her father (he had just had Catherine Howard beheaded for adultery) so Elizabeth was buried in Over Court and a hunt began in Bisley for a replacement. The best they could manage was a boy of the same age who had red hair.

In 1870, the vicar of Bisley, Thomas Keble, claimed he had found a coffin containing a girl in Tudor dress while renovating Over Court. He then secretly reburied the coffin in an unmarked location so the house didn’t become a shrine. 

Found in the "facts about princesses" entry in the QI ("Quite Interesting") blog at The Telegraph.

Here's the "conspiracy theory" view of Wikileaks

The 250,000 pages end up at the desk of Julian Assange, the 39-year-old Australian founder of a supposedly anti-establishment website with the cute name Wikileaks. Assange decides to selectively choose several of the world’s most ultra-establishment news media to exclusively handle the leaking job for him... Indeed a strange choice of media for a person who claims to be anti-establishment. But then Assange also says he believes the US Government version of 9/11 and calls the Bilderberg Group a normal meeting of people, a very establishment view...

Most important, the 250,000 cables are not "top secret" as we might have thought. Between two and three million US Government employees are cleared to see this level of "secret" document, and some 500,000 people around the world have access to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRnet) where the cables were stored. Siprnet is not recommended for distribution of top-secret information. Only 6% or 15,000 pages of the documents have been classified as even secret, a level below top-secret. Another 40% were the lowest level, "confidential", while the rest were unclassified. In brief, it was not all that secret...

But for anyone who has studied the craft of intelligence and of disinformation, a clear pattern emerges in the Wikileaks drama. The focus is put on select US geopolitical targets, appearing as Hillary Clinton put it “to justify US sanctions against Iran.”

...What is emerging from all the sound and Wikileaks fury in Washington is that the entire scandal is serving to advance a long-standing Obama and Bush agenda of policing the until-now free Internet. Already the US Government has shut the Wikileaks server in the United States though no identifiable US law has been broken...

...the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 (S.773). It would give the President unlimited power to disconnect private-sector computers from the internet. The bill "would allow the president to 'declare a cyber-security emergency' relating to 'non-governmental' computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat." We can expect that now this controversial piece of legislation will get top priority when a new Republican House and the Senate convene in January.

U.S. nukes reportedly compromised by aliens

Aliens from outer space, to be more precise.  I first saw the story at Reuters last week, in a piece dated September 15:

Witness testimony from more than 120 former or retired military personnel points to an ongoing and alarming intervention by unidentified aerial objects at nuclear weapons sites, as recently as 2003. In some cases, several nuclear missiles simultaneously and inexplicably malfunctioned while a disc-shaped object silently hovered nearby.  Six former U.S. Air Force officers and one former enlisted man will break their silence about these events at the National Press Club and urge the government to publicly confirm their reality.

One of them, ICBM launch officer Captain Robert Salas, was on duty during one missile disruption incident at  Malmstrom Air Force Base and was ordered to never discuss it. Another participant, retired Col. Charles Halt, observed a disc-shaped object directing beams of light down into the RAF Bentwaters airbase in England and heard on the radio that they landed in the nuclear weapons storage area. Both men will provide stunning details about these events, and reveal how the U.S. military responded. 

More at the link.  I didn't know what to think of it.  Today the story was picked up by the Telegraph - re British nuclear weapons sites:

Col Charles Halt said he saw a UFO at the former military base RAF Bentwaters, near Ipswich, 30 years ago, during which he saw beams of light fired into the base then heard on the military radio that aliens had landed inside the nuclear storage area.

He said: "I believe that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted - both then and now - to subvert the significance of what occurred at RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practised methods of disinformation." 

The testimony was supposed to take place today.  I'll defer any commentary, except to say I'd be delighted if it's true.

About that number on the back of the Social Security card...

In a post last week I quoted a Republican conservative about a meeting he had with some irrational Tea Party enthusiasts:

I sat down, and they said on the back of your Social Security card, there's a number. That number indicates the bank that bought you when you were born based on a projection of your life's earnings, and you are collateral. We are all collateral for the banks...

More at the link. I didn't understand what they were talking about re the number on the back of the card. Today I found the explanation at Mother Jones.  After citing some nonsensical and paranoid comments from online discussion threads, this explanation is provided by Donald Walton, a U.S. bankruptcy trustee, on eight "key signs that can identify a subject social security card as either legitimate or fraudulent." Here's #7:

7. Sequential Control Number. On the rear of a legitimate card there is a sequential control number. The control number is a combination of alpha and numeric that bears no relation to the actual social security number on the card. However, the computer records of the Social Security Administration should show a correlation between the control number and the social security number and name on the card.