h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is a good article. Well done.

Yup, nice to see a bit of healthy debunking.

I'd like to add that the article is correct in talking about survivalist 'cults', but it should also be mentioned that most survivalists are not conspiracy theory devotees, just people who like to take wide-ranging precautions against disasters (natural, political, economic... whatever).

But like all sections of society, there's a particularly 'colorful' branch!

Hmm... I've got a few reservations about this entry. Almost all of the conspiracies mentioned on this page are 'disproved' by yourself; although I personally agree with your opinions, a lot of people don't; wouldn't it be better to leave them more open-ended, for readers to draw their own opinions?

And secondly, re. the Diana conspiracy, you say that the paparazzi were nowhere near at the time. But in fact a major part of the scandal is that the paparazzi *were* all over the place; one reporter was following them at high speed, very close, on a motorbike; this is suspected to be one reason for the dangerous driving involved.

I have to disagree with Peregrin. These items have not been disproved by the author. He has merely stated that there is no evidence whatsoever that anything supernormal happened. He hasn't proved that there was no evidence, nor is it possible to prove this. That's why there are conspiracies about it. Surely any reasonable person will take a complete lack of evidence for something as indicating that nothing strange has happened. It is up to the people who think that something strange has happened to produce the evidence.

It is impossible to disprove something. You can only prove that something else happened which would make it impossible for the first something to occur.

Like when the Housing Benefits agency ask you to provide proof that you have no bank accounts, you mean...?

Exactly. You can't prove a negative.

Thanks

Okay lets all get really pedantic and see how critical we can be about how people have worded their entry and how much confusion we can draw from the limits of our language to actually explain anything we want to say!

I'd have to agree with someone who said you perhaps have a one sided view of each theory, however I can only talk with regards to the Roswell and Tunguska incidents; to sumarise I believe you all need to take a closer look at some of the facts surrounding these issues and question the reliability of your sources.... I think if you did this you would not be so quick to formulate and impress an opinion about either of these mysteries. There is a lot more to these incidents than has been popularised for obvious reasons and I certainly dont think you can cover the subjects brought up in either in merely a couple of short paragraphs.

Sorry, but I'll go on searching for the truth I'm afraid?

"There is a lot more to these incidents than has been popularised for obvious reasons"

Please spell out the obvious reasons to me as I'm a bit slow...

If people actually new for sure, and that would mean a complete change in government attitude to these issues so that we had acces to the knowledge that they have about these incidents, that a spaceship had crash landed somewhere in a desert or somewhere in a remote jungle then we would have to all admit that we are not arogantly alone in this vast expanding universe which incidentally is several times as old as our solar system. This would in tern mean that we are all aware of the ability to travel not just to the moon and back and send afew flawed probes to orbit the odd planet in our tiny little solar system but that also in addition we should be able to master interstellar travel! Hooray says everyone, lets master space travel and then we dont have to worry about the world population increase and the lack of food to supply it and the rapidly diminishing natural resources for power on this planet.... we can surely go find the solutions elsewhere. Oh dear says the government we'll have to spend a lot more money on space travel now wont we and how much is all that going to cost and damn, now that everyones united in the universal goal of space travel for the better good of humanity we cant go about having any more lucrative wars and invading this country so we can impress our ideals upon them because were meant to be their ally.
(heres one I came up with after reading your reply and there are more I can think of that would require more rambling on my behalf but I would rather leave it up to other people and see what they come up with, theres probably countless economic, social and political reasons why the people with the truth behind these particular mysteries dont want to incite worldwide hysteria, however I bet the government can come up with more reasons than we ever can)?

On the subject of "checking your sources", here are a few facts about the Roswell incident that documentary makers often gloss over...

1) The "incident" took place only eight days after the US press had coined the term "flying saucer" in response to a report by pilot Kenneth Arnold of seeing several objects travelling like "a saucer skipping on water". He never mentioned them being saucer-shaped; in later interviews he denied that they were, but the press assumed that "detail". When a local Roswell newspaper heard that debris had been found nearby, they ran the headline "USAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER" to cash in on the national craze for "saucer sightings". At the time, the famous Marcell "debris photograph" was the beginning and end of the publicity.

2) In 1978, the National Enquirer (mentioned in the main article) published the "USAAF CAPTURES FLYING SAUCER" headline, with a footnote that if anyone had memories of the incident they would pay cash to publish them - the "better" the story, the more money was available... It was after this point that the first stories of a second crash site, bodies and cover-ups appeared. None of these aspects is evident in any document predating the "National Enquirer" article in 1978.

3) Lots of documents relating to the region are still listed as "Classified", so people assume this has something to do with the "Incident". The classification in fact stems from the fact that the local USAAF base was home to the 509th bomber group, home at the time of the world's only immediately deployable atomic weapons. The classification code used for documents pertaining to this was as high as it was possible to get, so many are still exempt from US freedom-of-information legislation.

I have this info along with a collated "Timeline" of the incident on my main website at - enjoy!

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