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Saturday, May 20, 2017

Alois Irlmaier World War III Prophecies


Alois Irlmaier World War III Prophecies






Alois Irlmaier was a dowser and well digger who lived in Freislassing, Bavaria. He gained fame because of his psychic abilities. He was born in 1894 and died in 1959.
Irlmaier who used his clairvoyant skills to help people locate missing friends and family members. His fame, however, grew from his prophetic visions of a third world war, an attack on the Vatican that causes the Pope to flee, a revolution in Russia, a terrible event involving three days of darkness, a warming climate and the sinking of three large cities under the sea.
Irlmaier said the images of future events appeared to him like a movie. A lot of information came to him as numbers and he said he could not understand much of what he saw. He predicted his own death in July 1959. Before he died he said: “I am glad that I can go now because I won’t have to experience what I see.”
Following are some of his WWIII visions, recorded in his own words. In many cases Irlmaier admits that he does not understand what he is seeing.

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http://www.crystalinks.com/irlmaier.html

May 1, 1999 - Future Visions
On this page statements of Alois Irlmaier are listed, which refer to a big war in the future. Conrad Adlmaier got these statements when discussing with Alois Irlmaier and published them later. In addition also statements are listed, which Conrad Adlmaier did not publish in his books, but indicated to a third person orally. In these statements Alois Irlmaier shows an almost precise description of a large battle in the future.

What causes the war?

"Everything calls peace, Schalom! Then it will occur - a new Middle East war suddenly flames up, big naval forces are facing hostiley in the Mediterranean - the situation is strained. But the actual firing spark is set on fire in the Balkan: I see a "large one" falling, a bloody dagger lies beside him - then impact is on impact. ..."

"Two men kill a third highranked. They were paid by other people. ..."

"The third murder occurred. Then the war starts. ..."

"One of the murderer is a small black man, the other a little bit taller, with brightcolored hair. I think, it will be at the Balkans, but cannot say it exactly. ..."

"The year before the war will be a fruitful year with much fruit and grain. After the murder of the third it starts overnight. ... I see quite clearly three numbers, two eights and a nine. But I cannot say what it means and cannot state a time. The war begins at sunrise. He comes along rapidly. The farmers sit in the pub playing cards, when the foreign soldiers look through the windows and doors. Quite black an army comes from the east, but however everything occurs very rapidly. I see a three, but I do not know if it means three days or three weeks. It comes from the golden city. The first worm begins at the blue Water in the northwest and goes to the Swiss borders. As far as Regensburg no more bridges crossing the Donau (english=danube?) exist, they do not come from the south of the blue water."

"... Then impact is on impact. Massed units march from the East into Belgrade and moved forward to Italy. Thereafter three armored wedges immediately advance with lightning speed in the north of the Danube over West Germany towards the Rhine - without preliminary warning. This will occur so unexpectedly that the population flees full of panic to the west. Many cars will clog the roads - if they would have stayed at home or would not have used  the main streets. Everything, which will be an obstacle for the rapidly advancing tanks on highspeed-motorways and other fast-motorways, will be down-rolled. I cannot see any Danube-bridges above Regensburg anymore. Hardly anything remains of the big city Frankfurt.. The Rhine Valley will be devastated, mainly by air. ..."

"... I see three spearheads coming: the below spearhead comes along over the forest, but then pulls up itself northwestly alongside the Danube. The line is for instance Prague, Bavarian forest and northwest. The blue water is the southern boundary. The second spearhead goes from east to west over Saxonia, the third from northeast to southwest. Now I see the earth like a ball before me, on which the lines of the airplanes step out (project), which do now fly up like swarms of white pigeons from the sand. The Russian does not stop anywhere, while running in his three wedges. Day and night they run in order to reach the Ruhrdistrict, where the many furnaces and fire-places are... "

"The second spear comes westwards over Saxonia towards the Ruhrdistrict, exactly like the third, which goes from northeast westwards over Berlin. Day and night the Russians run, inexorably their target is the Ruhrdistrict... "

"...Immediately the revenge comes from across the large water. However the yellow dragon invade in Alaska and Canada at the same time. But he comes not far..."

" I see the earth like a ball before me, on whom now the white pigeons fly near, a very large number coming up from the sand. And then it rains a yellow dust in a line. When the golden city is destroyed, it begins. Like a yellow line it goes up to the city in the bay. It will be a clear night, when they begin to throw it. The tanks are still driving, but those who sit in these tanks became quite black. Where it falls down, everything will be dead, no tree, no bush, no cattle, no grass, this becomes withered and black. The houses still exist. I don't know, what it is and so I cannot tell it. It is a long line. Who goes over this line, dies. The ones, who are on the one side cannot go over to the other side. Then everything at the spearheads breaks down. They all must go to the north. What they have with them, they throw away. Nobody will come back anymore... "

"The airplanes drop a yellow powder between the Black Sea and the North Sea. Thus a death strip is created, straight from the Black Sea to the North Sea, as wide as half Bavaria. In this zone no more grass can grow, let alone humans live. The Russian supply is interrupted... "

"Swarms of pigeons ascend from the sand. Two herds achieve the combat area from the west to southwest... The squadrons turn towards the north and cut off the course of the third army. From the east there are many caterpillars. But in the caterpillars everybody is allready dead, although the vehicles keep rolling on, in order to gradually stop automatic. Here, the pilots also throw off their small black boxes. They do explode, before they touch the soil, and spread a yellow or green smoke or dust. What comes in contact with this becomes dead, whether it is a human, an animal or a plant. For one year no organism is allowed to enter this area, otherwise it will expose itself to the largest mortal danger. At the Rhine the attack is finally repelled. From the three spearheads no soldier will come home anymore... "

"These boxes are satanic. When they explode, a yellow and green dust or smoke arises, everything that comes in contact to it, is dead, it is a human, an animal or a plant. The humans become quite black and the meat fall off their bones, so sharply is the poison."

"... By a natural catastrophe or something similar the Russians suddenly evade to the north. Around Cologne the last battle has started. ..."

"... At the Rhine I see a half-moon, which wants to devour everything. The horns of the sickle want to close. What this means, I do not know. ..." 

"Then they are flying to the north. In the center there is a mark, there lives nothing anymore, no human, no animal, no grass. They fly to the quite north, where the third spearhead had come in, and do cut off everything. So they will all be murdered, nobody from these three armies will come back home anymore.
 ...But then I see someone flying, coming from the east, who drops something into the large water, so that something strange will happen. The water lifts itself as high as a tower and falls down, then everything is inundated (flooded). There is an earthquake and the half of the big island will sink. The whole action will not last long, I see three lines - three days, three weeks, three months, I don't know exactly, but it won't last long!"

"A single airplane, which comes from the east, throws something into the large water. Then the water lifts itself as high as a tower and falls down. Everything is inundated. There is an earthquake. The southern part of England slips into the water. Three large cities will be ruined: one will be destroyed by the water, the second is located so high in the Sea, that you can only see the church tower and the third falls in."
"One part of England disappears, when the thing falls into the sea, which the pilot drops. Then the water lifts itself as high as a tower and falls down. What this thing is, I do not know..."

"The countries at the sea are endangered of the water heavily, the sea is very unrest, the waves go high as a house; it foams, as if it would cook/boil in the underground. Islands disappear, and the climate changes. A part of the proud island sinks, if the thing falls into the sea, which the pilot drops. Then the water lifts itself as high as a tower and falls down. What this thing is, I do not know. When it comes, I do not know."

"The January will be so warm at some time that the mosquitos will dance. It can be that we already come into a time, when there won't be a normal winter at all, like we do know him now."

"...During the war the big darkness comes, which lasts 72 hours." "It will become dark at a day during the war. Then a hail impact, consting of lightning and thunder, breaks out and an earthquake vibrates the earth. Please do not go out of the house at that time. The lights do not burn, except candle light, the current stops. Who inhales the dust, gets a cramp and dies. Do not open the windows, cover it completely with black paper. All open-standing water become poisonous and also all open-standing meals, which are not in locked doses. Also no meals in glasses, because they would not cover it up completely. Outside the death by dust goes around, many humans die. After 72 hours everything is over. But again: Do not go out of the house, do not look out of the windows, and keep the candle light burning. And pray. Overnight there will die more humans than in the two world wars before."
"...Do not open a window during during the 72 hours. The rivers will have so few water that you can easily pass them. The cattle falls, the grass becomes yellow and dry, the dead humans will become quite yellow and black. The wind drives the clouds of death off to the east."

"...The city with the iron tower [PARIS] becomes the victim of the own people. They ignite everything. Revolution is, and everything is going wildly. The islands before the coast sink, because the water is quite wild. I see large holes in the sea, which will be filled, when the enormous waves return. The beautiful city at the blue sea sinks almost completely in the sea and in the dirt and sand, which the sea ejects. I see three cities sinking in the south, in the northwest and in the west."
"The large city with the high iron tower is on fire. But this has been done by the own people, not by those, which came from the east. And I can exactly see that the city is made equal to the ground. And in Italy it is going wildly too. They kill many people there and the Pope flees, but many clergymen will be killed, many churches collapse. "

"In Russia a revolution breaks out and a civil war. The corpses are so much that you cannot remove them off the roads anymore. The cross comes to honours anew. The Russian people believe in God anew. The large ones among the party leaders commit suicide and in the blood the great gulity is washed off. I see a red mass, mixed with yellow faces, it is a general riot and horrable killing. Then they sing the Easter song and burn candles in front of sacral pictures. By the prayer of the Christianity the monster of hell dies; also the young people believe anew in the intercession of the God's mother."

"After the victory an emperor is crowned by the fleeing Pope. How long all this lasts, I do not know. I see three nines. The third nine brings the peace. If everything is over, a part of the inhabitants have died, and the people are frightened of God anew. The laws, which bring death to the children, become invalid after the clearing. Then peace will be. A good time. I see three crowns flashing, and a gaunt old man will be our King. Also the very old crown in the south comes to honours again."

"The Pope, who had not to flee across the water for a long period of time, returns. When the flowers bloom on the meadows, he will return and mourn for his murdered brothers. "

" . . .After these events a long, lucky time comes. Those, who will experience it, will be very happy and can praise themselves lucky. But the people have to begin there, where their grandfathers began."


http://www.crystalinks.com/irlmaier.html
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Friday, May 19, 2017

Jon Rappoport : Depopulation and HIV

Depopulation and HIV
 
by Jon Rappoport

www.stratiawire.com
 
19 February — 12 March 2003


 

The Depopulation Agenda (19 February 2003)
Depopulation and HIV (20 February 2003)
We Had to Discredit Peter Duesberg (21 February 2003)
More on the AIDS Scam (26 February 2003)
AIDS as an Attack on the Male Gay Community (12 March 2003)

The Depopulation Agenda (19 February 2003)

From a round-up of my best intelligence sources, and from my own 15 years of research – the subject is depopulation.
A third of Africa to go under in the first long phase, which is underway now. AIDS and other diseases will be the COVER STORY for the decimation. The real causes will be starvation, contaminated water (which has existed for a long time), toxic vaccines given to people who are already immune-suppressed, wars, and of course, stolen farmland.
Many reports of rural villages disappearing – this will be laid at the doorstep of AIDS. It already is. This is a cover story. This is a lie. HIV, as detailed in my past stories, causes nothing. It is basically a dormant retrovirus, like many others of its class. Its "amazingly intricate" activity in the body is a made-up piece of non-science.
The day after my 1988 book, AIDS INC., hit the shelves, a copy was on its way out of California to Moscow in a diplomatic pouch. It was sent by an agent of the USSR who was operating under diplomatic cover here.
This fact was relayed to me by one of my major sources for the book. He said, "Won't they be surprised when they actually read it."
What he meant was, the Russians at the time were fronting the theory, developed by East German biologist, Jakob Segal, that HIV was a lethal germ engineered in Maryland. A biowar US creation.
My book instead proved that HIV – wherever it came from – was a harmless retrovirus that was being used as a cover story to explain/conceal an emerging depopulation operation in the Third World. HIV was also a cover for other agendas outside the Third World.
As long as AIDS is the target of WHO/UN "humanitarian" efforts, the actual causes – which are easily reversible – of death in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are allowed to remain and fester and expand.
Thabo Mbeki, the president of South Africa, has been a major thorn in the side of the depopulationists. He knows that HIV does not cause human disease. He knows that the front-line drugs for AIDS, especially AZT, attack the bone marrow, where certain cells of the immune system are manufactured. Thus CREATING what is called AIDS through pharmaceutical means. In particular, giving AZT to pregnant mothers is a major goal of the depopulation effort.
Mbeki understands that the causes of death in the Third World I have mentioned above are killing Africa. However, he continues to ask for outside help to alleviate these ravages. There is no chance he will get this help. ZERO.
Mbeki is being contained, to a degree, in his attempts to form a real coalition of leaders all over the African continent. MONEY is the weapon being used against him. Payoffs, "aid", dollars, and so on.
Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier and other retrovirologists were languishing at the end of the 1970s at the National Cancer Institute and the Pasteur Institute, respectively. They had just finished their work on the doomed Viral Cancer Project, which was a failed attempt to show that cancer was caused by one or more viruses – in particular, a newly discovered class of germs called retroviruses. These scientists had cut their teeth on these somewhat exotic but unimportant germs. That was what they knew. They were fishing around for a new disease that could bring them government dollars.
They were SET UP to become the new tigers who would get major research money to explore an emerging phenomenon called AIDS.
HIV was, in their hands, destined to become the COVER STORY for death that actually was occurring for MULTIPLE REASONS.
So Montagnier and Gallo did "discover" HIV and the rest is history – false history.
I apprised the East German biologist Jakob Segal, via mail, that his theory about HIV was way off base. In the sense that it was not causing human disease. If it was indeed a biowar creation, it was a failure.
Either my letter was intercepted, or he ignored it because he had his own agenda. He had answered a previous letter of mine which had asked direct questions about his work – but when I blew the whistle, he fell silent.
Meanwhile, I had interested author and environmentalist Jeremy Rifkin in HIV. For a time – before I discovered the truth – I was exploring the possibility that HIV had been put together from bovine and sheep viruses – and Rifkin was very hot on the bovine factor – because there was a chance that HIV or some bovine germ close to it was in smallpox vaccine. If so, it potentially implicated the vaccine in millions of deaths in the Third World.
But then I dug deeper. I found out that NOTHING strange or exotic needed to be in the vaccine. All by itself it could kill people. Particularly those whose immune systems were suppressed already. And then I examined very closely the medical evidence that had been advanced by Gallo and others to prove that HIV was the cause of what was being called AIDS. I realized, in 1987, that this evidence was non-existent.
I pointed out these two discoveries to Rifkin. He was not pleased. I think he felt a little betrayed, because I had been feeding him much different information before I saw the deeper truth. And Rifkin was basically pointing himself toward a theory that irresponsible medical germ machination itself was implicated in AIDS. He felt that tinkering with germs in labs was where the real action was. I told him the Plot was more insidious than that, and HIV was really a cover story for the depopulation agenda. He soon abandoned his AIDS project.
During this period (1987-88), I met a member of the secret service of one of the African nations "most afflicted with AIDS". This man was basically loyal to his people, and he felt that a gigantic hoax was being perpetrated. At some risk to himself, he spoke to me about various doctors who had come to his family and told them that AIDS research was being done in order to prove that so-called Slim Disease – at that time the African label for AIDS – was the result of HIV. These doctors were amazed that such obviously false research was being accepted. In particular, they cited Lancet, the famous British medical journal, as the publisher of some of this research.
I then did my own examination of a key paper by Serwadda which attempted to establish Slim as a new and emerging phenomenon on the African continent. The paper was so full of unsupported statements, so rife with omissions, that I concluded Slim was basically a diversionary label for: starvation, dirty water, stolen land, and immunosuppressive vaccines.
At bottom, why all this false science? Because someone needed a cover story to conceal a persistent and intentionally unsolved situation in Africa that was causing death according to a plan to depopulate the continent.
A PLAN: DEPOPULATION.
A COVER STORY TO CONCEAL THE PLAN: HIV.
MEDICAL DUPES TO PROVIDE THE COVER STORY: GALLO, MONTAGNIER, SERWADDA, AND OTHERS.
AN INTERNATIONAL HEALTH AGENCY THAT WOULD DO EVERYTHING EXCEPT HELP SOLVE THE REAL AND CONTINUING CAUSES OF DEATH IN AFRICA: THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION.
A DIVERSIONARY AND PHONY DEBATE THAT ACTUALLY FORWARDS THE DEPOPULATION AGENDA: WHETHER TO LOWER PRICES ON TOXIC AND DESTRUCTIVE AIDS DRUGS FOR AFRICA.
[

Depopulation and HIV (20 February 2003)

In 1987, I became re-acquainted with a man who calls himself
Ellis Medavoy  [pseudonym]. He has since retired from his contract work as a propaganda consultant.
Medavoy supplied me with several contact numbers and a small pile of documents. Using these, I convinced myself that he was entirely legitimate. That he in fact was working on AIDS, and in a very curious way.
His job was to influence the press in the direction of completely accepting mainstream research on the subject of HIV. By 1987, this was not what you would call hard work. But he had been at it since 1982 – when all sorts of theories about AIDS abounded in the press and in the specialized medical literature.
Medavoy had been retained by "individuals who were part of the Council on Foreign Relations and the British Roundtable but were not acting as official representatives of those groups."
In 1983, a year before HIV (aka HTLV-III) was announced to the world as the official cause of AIDS, Medavoy knew that Robert Gallo would be the messenger for "some kind of retrovirus that would be said to be the driving force behind a global plague."
Medavoy had several tasks before him. The first one was to soften up reporters so they would be receptive to the idea that a virus was the cause of AIDS. Essentially, Medavoy had access to certain key sources that these reporters often used for medical stories.
His job was to convince these sources that "the inside word was" a retrovirus. A retrovirus was causing AIDS. Then these sources would pass that word along to reporters.
Medavoy, of course, already knew these reporters' "reliable sources." He had been cultivating them for years, in a variety of contexts. They trusted him.
And why not? He seemed to be right on the money time and time again. What he told these sources would happen did happen. And when the sources passed down Medavoy's advance wisdom to their reporter friends, the reporters were all too happy to get this prized info.
That was how Medavoy worked. He was not alone, of course. There were others like him, and others working on the AIDS issue. Medavoy's bosses considered AIDS a very big deal. It had to be positioned correctly. It had to be thought of in a certain way, so that it could be used as a smokescreen, a lie, to conceal the depopulation agenda that had been underway for a long time in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
"When I got this assignment," Medavoy told me, "I knew I was in some very important territory. The world was going to be told a lie, and they were supposed to believe that lie. Civilians, doctors, researchers, politicians – they all had to swallow the propaganda."
And what was the central piece of propaganda?
That HIV was the cause of AIDS.
Medavoy continued, "There were things that the public had to be shielded from, too. Under no circumstances could they get the notion that AIDS was really many different conditions. That was a supreme no-no. The medical journals, as well, had to refrain from picking up that tune. AIDS had to be thought of as ONE disease condition – the destruction of the immune system – which was happening solely because a germ, HIV, was attacking cells of the immune system."
Medavoy understood all of this at least a year before Robert Gallo would tell the world on television that HIV (HTLV-III) was the cause of AIDS.
So Medavoy began to plant the seed.
He began to meet with people (some of them doctors and researchers), and he told them that they could count on the fact that a virus would be found, a virus which was causing AIDS. He told them he had the word from deep inside the major research institutes around the world that were working on the problem. He told them they would be "in no trouble" if they started telling reporters who relied on them that it would be a virus – and a particular kind of virus, a retrovirus.
Medavoy told these people – who were in turn reliable sources for reporters – that Robert Gallo was surely the man who would win the race to find the cause of AIDS. Gallo was the one to keep their eyes on.
Medavoy told me, "Gallo himself was not in on this gigantic hoax. He would steal the germ from Montagnier and call it his own, but that was just theft. Gallo was just a pawn. He was a man who wanted desperately to find a retrovirus as the cause of AIDS, just as he had been a man who desperately wanted to find a retrovirus as the cause of cancer. He had learned this new field of exploration – retroviruses – and it was his only real ticket to fame. He was riding that pony for all it was worth, and the federal money, such as it was in those days, was mainly coming to him and his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute."
Gallo had been selected to be the "HIV messenger" because it was clear he would do whatever it took to finally say, "I found it!" Even if he had not found it. Even if the evidence was missing. (As I've written before – at the time, in the spring of 1984, when Gallo told the world he had found the cause of AIDS, he had not published a single paper that even purported to seriously prove that HIV was the cause of AIDS.)
Gallo wouldn't disappoint the planners of this scam. He would deliver the goods. And he did.
And then Medavoy was riding high. All his predictions had come true. What he told these "reliable sources," who in turn passed that information along to reporters, had been exact. AIDS was announced to be a condition caused by a single retrovirus.
Job of lying well done.
Lie accepted.
Universally.
Well, almost.
There were a few disgruntled scientists who fully realized that Gallo had never offered proof that HIV caused AIDS, but they were keeping their mouths shut. They could see the weather shift overnight in the spring of 1984. There was no more federal money for looking into the cause of AIDS, or for confirming or disproving Gallo. It had evaporated in hours. Suddenly, all federal funds were earmarked for discovering how HIV caused AIDS, what it actually did inside the body.
I once asked Medavoy, "Did you yourself know what AIDS really was?"
He laughed. "Of course I did. I had to know. I needed that information so I could develop the necessary propaganda to counter it."
"And what was your understanding of what AIDS is?"
"You should know," he said. "You've been writing about it."
Here is what he meant, and what I confirmed with him point by point: AIDS is a label given to a whole variety of disease conditions THAT ARE CAUSED BY DIFFERENT THINGS. Not HIV. Not HIV in any way, direct or indirect. What is called AIDS is immune suppression. This immune suppression can result from different causes in different groups and, ultimately, in different individuals. Some of the many causes – contaminated heroin, medical drugs (such as corticosteroids), starvation, contaminated water supplies, toxic pesticides, intestinal parasites grossly overtreated with massive doses of antibiotics, syphilis, massive drug taking, say, in the form of MDA – combined with months of bathhouse sex with many partners, vaccines given to people whose immune systems are already dangerously compromised. There are other causes.
Medavoy's propaganda work was aimed, in particular, at masking the continuing causes of death on the African continent – starvation, contaminated water supplies, theft of agricultural lands, and so on. Gradually, these obvious factors would be replaced in the public consciousness with a new buzz-term, HIV. As the real causes of death were allowed to flourish, depopulation would begin to overtake the population growth.
Medavoy worked on the entirely bogus green-monkey theory of AIDS.
"The green monkey," Medavoy told me, "was a myth invented to attribute the origin of HIV to Africa. It was understood that if HIV could be said to have come from Africa, then people would believe the outrageous estimates and projections for future AIDS deaths IN Africa. You know, darkest Africa, where strange and bad things lurk. We played that nonsense like a harp. The green monkey never even carried HIV – of course who cares because HIV causes nothing anyway. But the whole deal about those monkeys was really about lab monkeys in Boston who were found to have a virus 'similar' to HIV – and lab contamination was where that 'similar' virus actually came from. We knew way ahead of time – as we propounded the early green-monkey story – that it was monkeys in labs we were really talking about. We were talking about stupid and careless research in labs, and we were transferring that whole business into a ridiculous myth about Africa. The story was about as real as the moon being made of cheese."
[

We Had to Discredit Peter Duesberg (21 February 2003)

In the spring of 1987, propaganda consultant Ellis Medavoy became aware that his objectives were being threatened by a University of Berkeley virologist named Peter Duesberg.
Duesberg had just published a long paper in the journal Cancer Research. That paper made a case against HIV as the cause of AIDS.
Duesberg was far from being a nobody. He was a star in his field. He had grant monies to do research. He had a lab at Berkeley and graduate students lining up to be part of his team. Duesberg was, in addition, a recognized expert in the emerging field of retrovriruses.
He was, in his own way, the equal, in terms of prestige, of Robert Gallo. In fact, Duesberg had worked with Gallo and Montagnier and others in the doomed Viral Cancer Project, an effort to show that cancers were caused by retroviruses.
Duesberg had bailed out of that project. "I could see that we weren't getting anywhere," he told me. "These viruses were interesting, but I discovered that they weren't very important as far as cancer research was concerned. But Gallo and others stayed on. They had their reasons. I was glad to leave. Disappointed, to a degree, but satisfied. I had seen what there was to see."
Medavoy told me, "Duesberg was a wild card. We knew we could come across one, and he was it. He saw through the propaganda we were spreading in the guise of science. He attacked HIV from a researcher's point of view and he said all the right things. That is, he didn't know there was an intense propaganda campaign coordinated at high levels to 'protect' HIV as the cause of AIDS. But he knew the science. He knew the difference between real research and badly done or fake research. And HIV was, make no mistake about it, a fake from day one."
In his Cancer Research paper, Duesberg had said several things. Among the most important was, HIV was, at best, infecting only a tiny percentage of (immune-system) T-cells. This made no sense. If HIV was killing immune systems, it had to be doing much more than that.
Duesberg also began to comment on the wild contradiction implicit in HIV testing. He noticed that the blood test was looking for antibodies which had formed as part of the body's defense against HIV. The presence of such antibodies was taken as a sign that a person was going to develop full-blown AIDS and die. But, on the other hand, a vaccine against AIDS would produce the exact same antibodies, in which case people would be said to be immune from AIDS.
Medavoy told me, "Duesberg got that one right too. He saw that the HIV test was completely insane. He was telling the research community they had been roped in by a bunch of fakers – and so we had to do some heavy damage control."
Duesberg was not the only problem. At Berkeley, a few other people were waking up. Harry Rubin, one of the grand old men of virology, was willing to go public and say he thought HIV research needed a "second opinion." Richard Strohman, a cell biologist at the school, was also dissatisfied with the glib crowning of Gallo as the discoverer of the cause of AIDS. And then, there was a maverick professor of law at Berkeley, Phillip Johnson, who was more than willing to join in the fray. He not only agreed with Duesberg, he was able to organize the arguments against HIV in a more structured way than Duesberg, in speaking forums, usually bothered to. (Eventually, this burgeoning little group would expand to include more than 300 scientists and journalists who signed on to a short letter asserting that HIV science was deficient and needed a complete review by impartial people. One signer was Kary Mullis, a Nobel laureate who had discovered the PCR test for DNA. Mullis was like the grim reaper when it came to HIV. He was willing to take on anyone anywhere.)
But in 1987, it was mainly Duesberg who was carrying the banner against false science. Duesberg's principal ally at the time was Harvey Bialy, the research editor of Bio/Technology, a sister publication of Nature, the revered medical journal. Bialy was completely disgusted with the rush to judgement that had accompanied Gallo's unsubstantiated claims for HIV as the cause of AIDS.
Bialy was definitely not a man to tangle with in print. He was quite willing to do the one thing most career-minded researchers were loathe to engage in. Bialy would read a key paper on the subject of HIV all the way through and in detail, and then blast the arguments to smithereens. Point by point. Like Duesberg, he read the fine print and the methods sections, and he was brutal in his criticism. Bialy saw that, in a field (virology) that once rippled with extensive debate, AIDS was taking over as mush-science. Press-conference science. Bubble-head science. Science on behalf of gaining money grants to spout the favored line.
In 1987, Ellis Medavoy, whose job it was to protect HIV against all detractors, told me he was getting fed up with his own profession. He wanted out. He was ready to end his long career as one of the bad guys – mostly because he saw where things were headed – into a vast depopulation effort that would take decades and decades. This was a bit more than he had bargained for. Medavoy was somewhat unstable, you could say. Depending on what day you talked with him, he could be ready to throw in the towel – or he might display a completely arrogant attitude toward the rest of the human race. At any rate, before he did actually drop out and quit, he began to tell me about what he was doing – and in some cases, how he was doing it.
Ellis Medavoy and his colleagues had, besides Peter Duesberg, another problem on their hands. Through the efforts of certain "subversive reporters" – and guess who was in that crowd? – connections were being forged with the alternative health community. Some of these activists had never been much for blaming human disease on germs, and the revelations about fake HIV science were quite exciting to them. Furthermore, there were people who had been diagnosed as HIV positive or "full-blown AIDS" who were surviving quite well because they were taking care of their health. They were rejecting the whole HIV premise and they were exercising and changing their diets and not taking any more drugs and taking nutrients and so on. And staying away from AZT. These people were living testimonials to a sensational kind of healing – and if THAT got out far and wide, the whole sordid game could be blown off its hinges.
Medavoy said, "A lot of what we did at this point was stop things from getting into print. That's often more important than planting lies. As far as Duesberg was concerned, I can tell you there were many newspapers and magazines who were ready to give his views some space. You know, maverick scientist rejects HIV as cause of AIDS. So we began a coordinated effort to keep that from happening. We let the scientists at NIH [National Institutes of Health], who had the most to lose if Duesberg could establish a credible beachhead, handle the PR on rejecting Duesberg's science. They engaged in some character assassination as well, which was fine. We, on the other side, got "reliable sources" to go to those newspapers and magazines and tell them that to print anything good about Duesberg was DANGEROUS and IRRESPONSIBLE. That was our tack. We had our people say that thousands of people could die if they stopped believing that HIV was the cause of AIDS. Promiscuous sex would become more rampant than ever, people would get infected, get sick, and spread the virus even further. We hammered on all this, and we cowed most of those media outlets. It worked, for the most part."
"As far as the very embarrassing and growing list of AIDS survivors was concerned – the people who had rejected the idea of HIV and were rebuilding their health successfully without medical drugs – we tried to keep track of pending stories on these people, and we went to those media outlets and told them these people were 'vegetarian kooks' and 'anecdotal examples who had not been studied by real scientists' and 'publicity seekers' and so on. We said some of them had never really been HIV positive to begin with. It was like shooting pigeons. We did pretty well. Some stories did appear on these survivors, but the general tone was, 'so and so is a strange curiosity and scientists are studying why he has managed to live for so long without getting sick, and this may hold promise for future research.' You know, all that crap."
Here is another choice quote from Medavoy on the AIDS scam. He told me this in 1996:
"Some other operatives I was aware of played a role in getting mainstream researchers to lobby for, and win, a new standard for HIV illness, based purely on numbers of T-cells. [Note: this "innovation" came later, long after 1987.] Tests would determine if a person was 'getting sick,' or if he was 'getting better' after taking his AZT – all measured by how many T-cells [part of the immune system defense] showed up on the tests. These operatives knew, and had been briefed on this, that T-cells could actually vary all over the place, up and down, depending on factors like the time of day a person was given the test. It was another area of shoddy science, and they took advantage of it. I'll give you an example. You've got some guy who has been told he's HIV positive, and so, even though he's not sick at all, he gets tested every few months for numbers of T-cells. Sooner or later, those numbers will go down on a test. If the doctor isn't really attentive, he'll tell the patient he is now officially diagnosed with full-blown AIDS, because those numbers are too low. If the patient hasn't been taking AZT yet, he will go for it now."
By the mid-1990s, Peter Duesberg no longer got grant money from the government. His major lab at Berkeley was gone. Graduate students were told they'd be risking their futures if they associated their names with him.
Years before, Robert Gallo had told me, "The thing about Peter is, he's different. He's very bright, and he goes his own way. Sometimes that way turns out to be...unusual, strange. He can be difficult on purpose, you know. As if he's trying to adopt a position that challenges everybody else. He's a different kind of man."
Ironic, coming from the tyrannical and arbitrary Gallo, the man who had laid claim to the virus that doesn't cause anything.
[

When AIDS Lies Collide (24 February 2003)

In the wake of three major articles on AIDS I've just published on this site, I notice a story on Channel 4 (England) about a major AIDS flap in Africa.
Some researchers are now saying that, contrary to hundreds of published studies, dirty needles and not sex is the major transmission route for AIDS on that continent.
There are so many lies implicit in this assertion, one hardly knows where to begin.
But let's look at a few obvious facts.
Using and re-using needles for vaccinations and other injections is a very dangerous practice all on its own. The major threat, as any junkie knows, is to the liver. The usual name for this is Hepatitis. In fact, we are really talking about all sorts of toxins that are inserted directly into the bloodstream – bypassing the normal channels of immune defense. The toxic burden falls on the liver and other organs.
Many of those re-used needles in Africa came from "humanitarian" Western interventions to save the failing health of Africa. No one really knows the names of all the doctors and health workers who re-used those needles – how many African names, how many Western names.
But it's clear that if the UN (World Health Organization/UNICEF) really wanted to save lives all these years and decades, they would have spent, as part of their budget, some money on supplying vast numbers of needles to Africa. Not a difficult thing to do.
Of course, when you are injecting toxic medical drugs and toxic vaccines into the bloodstreams of people who are already immune-suppressed, you should STOP and really think about cleaning up contaminated water supplies and getting growing land for people back from transnational corporations – and you should forego the drugs and the vaccines because they push people over the edge into death.
This latest research finding about needles really has nothing to do with AIDS at all. It has to do with the fact that the UN and its subsidiaries have functioned as an obstacle to, and an enemy of, health.
I had not really intended to extend my series on AIDS and depopulation past those three articles, but my source for some of that material – retired propaganda expert Ellis Medavoy – had told me much about vaccines in Africa.
Medavoy was quite familiar with operatives whose job it was to convince government leaders and journalists in Africa that vaccines were a messiah of sorts.
"It wasn't as easy as you think," Medavoy said. "There were leaders who didn't want their people to become healthy – and since they [the leaders] believed that vaccines could work this trick, they were sour on it, to a degree. But the carrot as usual was money. Payoffs. 'We'll pay you to make your people healthy.' You would think this odd arrangment would be a tipoff, but money tends to make people blind."
"There is absolutely no doubt," Medavoy said recently, "that ample numbers of needles could have been supplied to Africa. The myth is that doctors over there are too stupid to want new needles, but of course that's not the case. So there has been a double-whammy. Toxic drugs and toxic vaccines, plus dirty needles. Now you are seeing the cherry on top of the cake. After decades of starvation and dirty water, and wars, and all that, you got essentially poison being delivered to people in the form of so-called medicines AND they also got whatever was on those re-used needles. The doctors and health workers there WERE blind to the fact that the drugs and vaccines were not necessary and were, in fact, toxic – they thought there was such a need, it was better to re-use needles if that was the only way to deliver the medicines."
Yes, we are still talking about depopulation. Still talking about the Trojan Horse.
And like dirty needles, the allowed export of spoiled and unrefrigerated medical drugs from the West – okayed without significant protest by the UN – to Africa, have compounded the crisis still further.
One more aspect. I have written about this before. Every day, as those decaying drugs are moving into Africa, tons and tons of pesticides banned in the US as too toxic are also being shipped to Africa and other parts of the Third World.
There is only one label for what I'm writing about in this article: chem/bio warfare.
See the mosaic. Add in all those overflights of coca fields in Andean countries, and the spraying of poisons on small coca farmers. The true purpose is not the eradication of a source of cocaine; it is the "reclaiming" of land for corporate and military use.
Add in what Medavoy calls "secret local operations [brought in from the West] which involve the use of experimental chemical-warfare compounds in the Third World..."
The picture fills out.
At the highest levels, this is intentional and its goal is depopulation and debilitation.

More on the AIDS Scam (26 February 2003)

I have been deluged with requests for more information on the AIDS scam – in particular, how to verify independently the statements made by retired propaganda pro Ellis Medavoy.
Medavoy has recounted to me his role in shaping media response to HIV. "It was a false piece of science to begin with. HIV causes disease like a toy rocket can go to the moon. It was our job to make sure media, governments, scientists, and the public swallowed the idea that an unproven germ caused 'a new plague.'"
I can make a few suggestions on starting points, for those researchers and reporters who want to take a ride into murky waters.
I believe that amfAR (American Foundation for AIDS Research) played a significant role in stamping out dissent about HIV. And there was dissent right after Robert Gallo went on national TV in the spring of 1984 and told the world he had found the cause of AIDS. But the work of fund-raising machines like AMFAR would have been dealt a serious blow if Gallo had been denounced as a fraud or an over-eager researcher without real portfolio.
Those fund-raising organizations needed a germ they could focus on, a standard they could use to rally the troops. "Now we have the cause. Now we need to know how the germ attacks the body, and we need drugs to treat the germ. Help us. Dig deep?"
Dr. Joseph Sonnabend, a NYC researcher who also treated AIDS patients, was the editor of a journal called AIDS Research around the time Gallo made his startling announcement to the world, the announcement that effectively ended all mainstream inquiry into what AIDS was and what caused it.
Sonnabend clung to his editorial policy of permitting dissenting views in his journal. For that he was suddenly fired. Had someone at amfAR asked for his firing? It is a question that could be explored.
If amfAR was somehow involved in the effort to cast an unproven germ, HIV, as the cause of AIDS, one of course would have to go higher on the ladder of power.
Another starting point would be WHO (World Health Organization). As a possible front for larger power players who were pushing a depopulation agenda in the Third World. HIV served and serves well as a smokescreen for the continued massive death tolls from starvation, dirty water, and vaccines given to millions of people whose immune systems already sit on the brink of extinction. WHO, of course, was behind most of those vaccine programs. And WHO, while making genteel noises about the need for cleaning up contaminated water supplies and providing agricultural lands for food to the poor, has accomplished, on its massive budget, very little in this direction.
You might go to Google and punch in "NSSM 200", and read the executive summary and text of the long Henry Kissinger memo, drafted in April of 1974. It was originally classified secret by the US government. Reading between the lines, you will see that it calls for measures to reduce population in the Third World. It even suggests "improvements in technology" as a light at the end of the tunnel for this program. As I've written before, anti-fertility vaccines have been under development for some time at the UN and other places. And HIV itself – used as a smokescreen – could function perfectly as a way of "benignly neglecting" the real killers in the third World – starvation, dirty water, stolen land, vaccines and so on.
I have also received inquiries about various independent researchers who state that HIV was developed as an intentional biowar weapon. I have done a fair amount of research, over the years, into biowar germ programs. As early as 1987, I stated that germs escaping from biowar labs could certainly do damage. However, even assuming that HIV were "made" as an attacking germ, it is clear to me that it would have been a failure. HIV has never been shown to cause anything. And even more important, if you look at every so-called high-risk AIDS group of people, you can and do find non-HIV factors that explain all the immune suppression that has been occurring in these groups. The germ is the cover story. The smokescreen. The mask. The diversion.
[

AIDS as an Attack on the Male Gay Community (12 March 2003)

This is a continuation of a series of articles I have been writing about AIDS and the intention behind it. The subject here is the Hepatitis B vaccine and its role in a health-destroying political agenda.
In 1987, while I was in the middle of writing a book called AIDS INC., the propaganda operative I have referred to as Ellis Medavoy (not his real name) told me, "You have to look at the Trojan Horse part of the scenario. It's involved in the Hepatitis vaccine."
Well, I had already done much research on the vaccine, and I was trying to put the pieces together. I had been told that the original clinical trials of the experimental Hepatitis B vaccine, which focused on New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, had enrolled young gay men in the late 1970s to test out this vaccine. Gay men who fit the profile of what would be later announced as the profile of the first AIDS cases in the early 1980s. Yes, that was suggestive. The profile was suggestive, as well as the cities. And the timing too.
Perhaps something in the vaccine was causing what was being called AIDS.
Several independent investigators believed that the ingredient in the vaccine was HIV itself. But I had already demolished all the arguments that claimed HIV was the cause of AIDS. I wasn't interested in that.
I had already established that AIDS was an umbrella label that was being applied to all sorts of individuals and groups who were suffering from suppressed immune systems – and a suppressed immune system is caused by all sorts of different factors. Chemical factors, drug factors, starvation, contaminated water, AIDS drugs, and so on.
So perhaps that old experimental Hepatitis B vaccine was another factor which had suppressed the immune systems of the gay men who had participated in the original clinical trials.
I asked Medavoy what he meant by a Trojan Horse operation. He was cagey, and he didn't give me a direct answer. "Keep looking," he said. "It's right in front of your face."
In 1987-8, I spoke several times with Dr. Cladd Stevens, a bigshot at the NY Blood Center, the group that had been in charge of the experimental Hep B vaccine clinical trial in New York. She readily admitted that some men in those trials had later tested positive for HIV, but I wasn't interested in that. HIV positive? So what? HIV didn't cause anything.
I asked her how many men from those trials had later been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS and/or had died. I wanted to know if there was a correlation between gay men who had taken that experimental vaccine and subsequent real and severe illness and death.
On this point, she was forthcoming, in the sense that she assured me an effort was being made to do such a study. It would involve using names or confidential numbers assigned to men in the vaccine trial – and comparing that list with a list of names or confidential numbers of reported AIDS cases/deaths held by the CDC in Atlanta. She said I should check back with her.
I did, several times, between 1987 and 1992, and she gave me variations on the same story: there was a lot of red tape involved in getting the names and numbers released and matched up. To my knowledge, a definitive comparison has never been done.
Why not? It was important.
Has the NY Blood Center been avoiding possible liability?
Between 1987 and 1993, Ellis Medavoy would periodically ask me, "Have you figured out the Trojan Horse yet?"
I hadn't. I knew that vaccines could suppress the immune system, and I knew that the original experimental Hep B vaccine could have had that effect on some of the gay men in the clinical trial. Perhaps that was it. In fact, I was getting what I considered reliable reports that the experimental vaccine WAS immunosuppressive. But I felt there was more to the story.
I began to think that HIV testing itself was part of the picture. If the authorities could get a group, any group, to fear AIDS, it could convince that group to get tested in large numbers – DISPROPORTIONATELY LARGE NUMBERS, COMPARED WITH OTHER GROUPS WHERE THE FEAR OF AIDS WAS NOT SO GREAT.
This was major. I imagined a group of people who lived in a small town. All sorts of people. Gay, straight, white, black, male, female. Suppose the CDC stepped in and for various specious reasons told these residents that AIDS was lurking in the town and it was imperative that they all get tested for HIV. It would bring lots of citizens to the clinics.
In fact, that was what had happened to the "gay community" in America. American gay men were being blood tested for HIV out of all proportion to the rest of America.
In 1992, I had long-since completed research on the unreliability of the HIV blood test. For various reasons, the test often gave FALSELY positive results. In other words, people were being told that they were harboring the HIV virus. The killer virus. The stealth virus that could lie around in their bodies for two years, five years, 15 years, 30 years, and then wake up and kill them.
I knew that was baloney, I knew that HIV had nothing to do with what was being called AIDS, but I also knew that the diagnosis of "HIV positive" was a lethal piece of hypnotism that could make some people jump out of windows. Michael Ellner, a New York hypnotherapist, had done important work on this issue. He was spreading the word: the DIAGNOSIS itself was immunosuppressive.
Not only that, the diagnosis – which tended to put people in a trance – was the immediate prelude to the doctor telling his patient, "Now you must go on AZT immediately, because it can extend your life."
The AZT part of my research was also, in 1992, already done. I knew this drug was a failed chemotherapy compound which had been put on the shelf at the National Cancer Institute in the early 1960s. It attacked all human cells. It had a particular affinity for the bone marrow, where certain cells of the immune system were MANUFACTURED. Although, as Dr. Peter Duesberg suggested, some patients appeared to be able to urinate out the drug without absorbing it, many patients did absorb it. AZT. A chemo drug that destroyed cells and blocked cell reproduction. AZT. A drug which in effect had been designed to CAUSE IMMUNE SUPPRESSION. And this drug was not being given to cancer patients in short spurts. It was being given to HIV positive people around the clock day in and day out. An oncologist who gave his cancer patients chemo every day for years would have his license stripped and might even face criminal charges. Murder comes to mind.
I was on the edge of the Trojan Horse.
If you get a group of people (e.g., gay men) to fear AIDS so much that they rush to get tested, and if the test itself – THE TROJAN HORSE – is so flawed it gives lots of people false positive readings – and if even the true positive readings are for a virus (HIV) which causes NOTHING – and if a positive HIV test tends to function like a trance-inducer – leading to the acceptance of AZT, a massively toxic drug – then you have a kind of closed loop of death.
With all this now in tow, in 1992-3, I went back to my notes on the hep B vaccine. Suppose, in addition to the vaccine's immunosuppressive effects, it could cause a blood test for HIV TO READ FALSELY POSITIVE.
  • Lee D, Eby W, Molinaro G. 1992. "HIV false positivity after hepatitis B vaccination", Lancet. 339:1060.
That was not the only citation.
I called Ellis Medavoy and told him what I had found.
"Yeah," he said. "It's all spread out there for you now, isn't it?"
He made one other comment which I consider very significant. "If you could figure it out, don't you think people at the CDC and NIH know about it? And don't you think propaganda and PR people have been used to make sure that nothing comes of this? Remember I once told you my most important job is nothing? What the hell do you think I meant? It's making sure that, when the hounds get close, you dazzle and blind them with nothing, with OMISSIONS in the press. They try to snap and take a bite out of you and they get air. They get NOTHING."
If you investigate the last 25 years of Hepatitis B, the disease, you will find or put together a chapter on the promotion of fear about the disease in the male gay community of America. Leading to? Large numbers of gay men getting vaccinations against Hep B. Leading, in turn, to false positive HIV tests. Leading to the administration of killer, cell-destroying drugs.
And – this is quite spooky, but in a good way – talk about synchronicity – I've just received an email of a 1998 interview done by reporter Mark Conlan with Dr. Stefan Lanka, a German virologist and marine biologist – Dr. Lanka has been one of the most outspoken European scientists on the issue of AIDS fraud. In the interview, Lanka mentions his colleague and friend, Dr. Heinrich Kremer, formerly the medical director of the Federal German Drug Abuser Clinics. Lanka states what Kremer discovered in the mid-1980s and what happened to him:
"[Kremer] knew everybody who went through [had] chronic hepatitis or had the hepatitis B vaccine would test 'HIV positive.'...He informed the mass media..."
"So he [Kremer] knew [after his rejection by the mass media] that it [the AIDS scam] was intentional from the very beginning. They [the higher-ups, politically, in Germany and, by implication, elsewhere] wanted to have a blood and sex plague...He [Kremer] was dealing at the top political level. They told him off the record, that they knew [about the fraud], they didn't care, it was about how to deal with the drug problem and with the homosexuals."
The meaning of this is clear. Drug users and certain areas in the gay community were experiencing high levels of Hepatitis B – and added to this, the Hepatitis B vaccine was also used widely in these groups. The result was a falsely positive HIV test – leading to the domino effect of death I've described above. It's called depopulation.
Lanka continues, "They even tried to kill him [Kremer], and this didn't succeed. He had a good intuition and got out of his car before the tire blew out...the German government was carrying out a secret psychological investigation, trying to prove that he was mentally ill...and in danger of committing suicide..."
Okay. Having read to this point, now read the pages I wrote on the Hepatitis B vaccine in 1987-88. Those pages will fill in some blanks. They're not as compressed as what you have just read – at that time I was swimming in various discoveries simultaneously: HIV was not the cause of AIDS; AIDS was not one condition at all, it was a smokescreen label for many different factors which were suppressing immune systems and killing people; AZT was poison; and so on. And I had not yet made the connection between the Hep B vaccine and a positive HIV test.
A decade ago [mid-1970s], 1083 gay men in good health were inoculated with an experimental vaccine against hepatitis B, an infectious viral disease. The trial was run at a prestigious research facility, the New York Blood Center.
From NY Blood Center accounts, results were very good: There was virtually full protection against hepatitis B, which reportedly was starting to run rampant through pockets of the U.S. gay community.
At that time, in 1978, AIDS was an uninvented word. And not until 1984 would HIV be isolated and labeled by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo. When so-called AIDS crept into public view in 1979, and then gained wide attention in the early 80s, people began fearing the hepatitis B vaccine.
The reason? The vaccine had originally been made from blood of human donors, some of whom later turned out to be diagnosed with AIDS. During the early 1980s, health workers, who were at risk for hepatitis B, were urged to take the new vaccine, but they stayed away from the product in droves. Dr. Robert Mendelsohn, Chicago medical heretic, points out that initially the U.S. Veteran's Administration expected to give 90,000 doses of the hepatitis B vaccine to its employees around the country. The response rate, though, by 1983, was only 30,000 doses. In the same year, 1,200 University of Illinois health workers were pressured to take hepatitis B shots. Only 237 did.
In January, 1983, a year before the "AIDS virus was discovered," Dr. John Finkbeiner, writing in Medical World News, warned that the hepatitis B vaccine "might be contaminated with a pathogen responsible for the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic."
Dr. James Chin, head of Infectious Diseases for California's Dept. of Health Services, contacted the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and asked for long-term tracking of hepatitis B vaccinees. His implication was quite clear: Maybe the vaccine was causing AIDS.
There were other factors that added to public worry. Alan Cantwell, a Los Angeles physician who authored the book, AIDS, the Mystery and the Solution, recalls that "the CDC, reporting on the first 26 cases of AIDS in the U.S., declared that 20 were from New York, and 6 were from San Francisco and Los Angeles. These were the three cities that carried out the most extensive early hepatitis B vaccine-trials. Then, all of the first 26 AIDS cases matched the profile of the volunteers in these same vaccine-trials: male, gay, under 40, well educated, and (mostly) white."
Dr. Cantwell adds: "AIDS was the first time doctors could recall working with a disease that seemed to be specific for a certain cultural group, i.e. male homosexuals." Good reason to look for a common environmental factor – for example, a contaminated vaccine.
In the meantime, throughout the early 1980s, researchers around the world were scrambling to make a connection between AIDS in Africa, which was overwhelmingly heterosexual, and AIDS in America. A sketchy scenario emerged: The AIDS microbe, jumping species from an African green monkey to an African human, eventually infected Haitians who were living in Central Africa, probably Zaire. The Haitians took AIDS home with them. It moved into their male bisexual community, where American homosexuals from New York and San Francisco picked it up. They had traveled to the "gay playground" of Haitian clubs on vacation.
There were variations on this plot. One, tentatively advanced by World Health Organization advisor, Jacques Leibowitch, had it that Cuban soldiers, hacking their way through the jungles of Angola in the 70s, brought the incubating AIDS microbe home with them. Eventually, some of these troops who were gay ended up on the Cuban-boatpeople crew that President Carter let into the U.S. AIDS spread from them into the American homosexual community.
These cover-story renditions of how AIDS moved had the effect of quelling fear that "American AIDS" was, in part, due to the hepatitis B vaccine.
Still, to some, the idea of blaming an epidemic on the Cubans sounded like CIA disinformation.
Finally, a few epidemiologists asked the burning question, "If AIDS came to Manhattan from Haiti, then why didn't it break out at the same time in New Orleans and Houston? Gay men from those cities were going to Haiti, too."
So there was good reason, among media monkey-speculations and quasi-scientific pronouncements on AIDS' origins, to wonder still about a possible tie between what was being called AIDS and the hepatitis B vaccine.
Dr. Cantwell comments, "I know of no later comprehensive checking of the vaccine batches given to the volunteers in the early NY, San Francisco, and LA hepatitis B vaccine-trials. These batches, all of them that are still available, need to be examined by people who were not involved in the original trials, vaccine-research, or manufacture."
There was, for example, the famous Cutter Labs polio-vaccine case, well-documented, in which children contracted polio from Cutter's vaccinations. Yet in making the polio vaccine, Cutter had purified their product and inactivated poliovirus according to government regulations. But children turned out to be more sensitive than the government's requirements. Cutter paid out $3 million in damages.
Dr. Mathilde Krim, one of the leading lights at the American Foundation for AIDS Research said to me: "In dealing with pharmaceutical interests...it's very hard to get into their stocks of (vaccines) and do an examination."
"You mean you'd need a Congressional edict?" I asked.
"That might not even do it," she said.
Money to protect, reputations to guard – these are, of course, basic economic and human givens. When, beyond that, there are gross errors and omissions in defending the safety of a medical product, you have to ask how much trouble there really is below the surface. Concerning the hepatitis B vaccine� Reliable reports have come in to me that indicate that this vaccine was toxic, that it suppressed immune systems in the trials run in San Francisco, LA, and New York. The authorities involved absolutely refuse to do a comprehensive check on what remains of those test batches of vaccines.
© 2003 by Jon Rappoport
Originally published at www.stratiawire.com

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Kentaro Mori : Spiritualism in Brazil: Alive and Kicking

Spiritualism in Brazil: Alive and Kicking

Counterclockwise

Kentaro Mori

June 2, 2010

In continental Europe and particularly in Brazil, a branch of Spiritualism called Spiritism is developing and evolving into a new religion.
We have all seen old Victorian illustrations of ghosts as white sheets of cloth and poorly faked photos of spirits created by double exposure, mainly resulting from the Spiritualist movement in Britain and the United States. The movement saw its peak at the end of the nineteenth century, and it’s mostly recognized as a fad today, almost a century later.
In some other countries, however, especially in continental Europe and particularly in Brazil, a branch of Spiritualism called Spiritism is still very relevant and evolving, making it a fascinating example of the development of a new religion. Followers will be quick to emphasize the distinction between the more widely known Spiritualism and Spiritism, which was founded by a Frenchman named Hypolite Rivail (1804–1869) under the pseudonym “Allan Kardec.” This fad, or fallacy, is being promoted in the name of science.


Chico Xavier

According to the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which conducts the official census, Brazil has the largest number of Spiritists in the world: over 2.3 million followers, around 1.3 percent of the total population and the third largest religious group, behind Catholics and Evangelicals[1].
All three groups are Christian; the Brazilian Spiritists give special relevance to “The Gospel According to Spiritism.” The most important leader of this movement in Brazil, Francisco “Chico” Xavier (1910–2002), is our main focus of interest here because he epitomizes Brazilian Spiritism.

Chico Xavier is said to have been a medium. His main form of mediumship, however, was “psychography,” that is automatic writing by which he claimed to contact the dead in the form of letters from the deceased and also new books by deceased famous authors.

By selling these “psychographed” books, of which Xavier is said to have authored nearly 400, the movement has been able to flourish and to promote charity works in a self-reinforcing loop where each chain reinforces the other with Xavier at the top. He was clearly not a “Sexy Sadie,” however; even in life Xavier, who lived modestly and never married, was already worshipped as a kind of ascetic saint. There is no evidence that the image of him upheld by his followers is not true. Nearly a decade after his death, and in the centenary of his birth, his life is being dramatized and promoted in major feature movies,[2] and it’s almost unthinkable to question Xavier’s public persona.

But a critical analysis of Chico Xavier’s paranormal claims quickly reveals their utmost frailty. I was myself surprised. Until I got a better look, I had always assumed Xavier’s claims had a kernel of truth. If they were not authentic paranormal phenomena, I thought they would at least prove unsolved and intriguing. On the contrary, that turned out not to be the case.


“Odorization”
A close friend of mine, Vitor Moura Visoni[3], managed to get one of Xavier’s biggest and closest associates, Waldo Vieira, to clearly state that Xavier promoted hoaxes. Vieira should know because he was there.
“Workers from the Spiritist Center went to the line [of followers] to get details from the deceased. Or they used stories told by relatives in the letters where they asked for a meeting. The messages from Chico had this information,” Vieira revealed. That would explain his “psychographed” letters with details that “only the deceased had known.” More than cold reading, this was just plain hoaxing. There were other hoaxes, according to Vieira.
“I saw that [Xavier] was conducting some séances of which I was not part of ... where they sometimes told of Scheila’s [the spirit] perfumes.... [Then] one day ... he went to post something in the mail, ... I went to his closet that had the door open and I intended to close it. When I got there, I saw a bag full of flasks.... He used the perfumes ... it was of roses.... [I confronted him and] then Chico started to cry in front [of me].”
The use of scents allegedly of a supernatural origin was a common Spiritualistic trick. That the Spiritist leader and foremost “medium” in Brazil used them, according to one of his closest associates, is very revealing.
But nothing beats the case of Otília Diogo.

Sister Josefa

the 'materialization' of the spirit of sister Josefa in ectoplasm

Just look at this photograph. Is that part of a comedy show? It may be funny, but not intentionally so. The photo was captured in 1964, and the man smiling in sunglasses is Chico Xavier himself. The person covered in white sheets is the medium Otília Diogo, or as Spitirists believe, the “materialization” of the spirit of sister Josefa in ectoplasm. Thanks to the mediumship of Otília Diogo, of course.
Other photos clearly show the medium behind the veil, and in fact, the veil had a rectangular semi-transparent part to allow Diogo to see. The alleged ectoplasmic materialization could be touched and also hold a heavy Bible. That’s very material indeed. And even believers noticed how the medium, Diogo, had a remarkable similarity to the face of the spirit.

the medium Otília Diogo the alleged materialization of sister Josefa

And yet, they believed it. They still believe it. Xavier was there and he emphatically claimed the materializations were real and authentic. But the case would soon turn into turmoil.
The photos here were taken by Cruzeiro magazine, which had the utmost priority of selling more magazines. First promoting then exposing the hoax served them well. After first publishing an article where they left whether the “Uberaba materializations” were real open to interpretation, they then proceeded to expose the hoax they helped to promote.

 the veils and instruments found inside Diogo’s briefcase

Caught!
And expose they did. With clear photos it’s obvious that the “materialization” is simply the medium Diogo in sheets. Believers even claimed the spirit went through solid steel bars, but the photos show that it was simply some sheets thrown to the other side, while the very solid (and alive) medium was behind them.
Cruzeiro couldn’t have had better news when in 1970, Otília Diogo was finally caught red-handed. She wanted to have her wrinkles removed with plastic surgery, and as a payment for the surgery, she offered to conduct materialization séances in the house of the doctor, a believer. But the doctor was not that gullible and was suspicious of the small briefcase she always had with her. When he and his family managed to open it while Diogo was sleeping, they found all the “ectoplasm,” that is, all the very material garments and veils she used to portray different spirits.
Her tools even included some perfume used “to reinforce the presence of the spirit.” Just like Xavier, according to Vieira.
Finally exposed in her fraud, what would Diogo say? “I lost my mediumship in 1965, but I thought I should keep performing materializations. I didn’t want anyone to notice.”
And people believe it. Most Spiritists in Brazil, when informed about Chico Xavier’s involvement with the case of Otília Diogo, firmly believe that although she was definitely a hoaxer, she only started to hoax shortly after the phenomena was witnessed and authenticated by Xavier. That’s an amazing example of cognitive dissonance.
Even though the photos taken during those 1964 séances clearly show a person using veils and are obvious evidence of the hoax, many still believe that ectoplasm works in mysterious ways—including looking exactly like a common veil. We skeptics are still arguing with believers who staunchly defend the case with elaborate arguments—all of which have been refuted—but the first and obvious impression that one gets from the photos is quite right. Those are quite simply ridiculous hoaxes.

Smart People Believe Weird Things

Now, Waldo Vieira was also a witness during those séances, and he revealed that from the beginning they had their suspicions about Diogo. But he also claims that Diogo was also an authentic psychic, just as Xavier. Although a hoaxer at times, she also had extraordinary paranormal powers. The cognitive dissonance is complete.
Even if one accepts that these alleged mediums were hoaxers, the believer will convince himself that some of the phenomena must have been authentic. Paraphrasing the old quirky philosophical question, if a hoaxer is not caught hoaxing in the middle of the forest, did he hoax? To the believer, the answer is clear. The most elaborate and unthinkable arguments are presented to argue that those ridiculous hoaxes could, or even must, have been authentic.

Time and again one can find such examples, and the story of Otília Diogo, so famous in Brazilian Spiritism, is almost identical to the story of Florence Cook’s materializations of Katie King, which occurred almost a century earlier at the height if Victorian Spiritualism. She only started to hoax after the examination by William Crookes, the believers will argue.
The Swiss contactee Billy Meier may have hoaxed some photos, but he must have started it after he had some authentic contacts with aliens from the Pleiades.

There’s much more in the story of Chico Xavier, certainly, since we didn’t even approach in any detail his main paranormal claim of 400 “psychographed” books. That’s for another opportunity.

But, as famous as he was for his moral guidance and spiritual messages published in hundreds of books, let’s end with a particularly interesting snippet: “The truth that hurts is worse than the lie that comforts.... Those who can will understand this.”

[1] The total number of atheists and nonreligious citizens in Brazil is probably comparable to and perhaps even greater than the number of Spiritists, however the IBGE refuses to tally the number of atheists in the Census.
[2] Many members of the Brazilian upper classes, including the entertainment elite, are Spiritists. It's considered more refined than traditional Catholicism.
[3] The work by Visoni is freely available in Portuguese at http://obraspsicografadas.haaan.com/.

 http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/spiritualism_in_brazil_alive_and_kicking
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Joe Nickell : Spirit Painting


Spirit Painting

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Skeptical Briefs Volume 10.1, March 2000

Part I: The Campbell Brothers

During the heyday of spiritualism, among the “physical phenomena” commonly manifested were so-called spirit paintings. These were portraits and other artworks, done in various media and produced under a variety of conditions but always ascribed to spirit entities. During 1998 and 1999 I was able to examine several of these at Lily Dale, the western New York spiritualist colony, and to thereby shed light on some century-old mysteries.

Figure 1. “Spirit” writing and painting produced on a slate during the heyday of “physical mediumship” (now exhibited at the Lily Dale Museum). Figure 1. “Spirit” writing and painting produced on a slate during the heyday of “physical mediumship” (now exhibited at the Lily Dale Museum).
Full-fledged spirit paintings, often portraits of the dearly departed, were typically rather elaborate renderings in oils or pastels. Although looking for all the world like artworks done by professionals, they were produced under remarkable conditions: e.g., during a short time, in complete or near darkness, etc. The most famous spirit-painting mediums were the Bangs sisters (the subject of Part II) and the Campbell brothers.
Although there are myriad discussions of spirit painting (e.g., Coates 1911; Carrington 1920; Mulholland 1938), I have come across no real history of the alleged phenomenon and nothing to establish its origin or chronicle its development. The following few paragraphs are my attempt to fill this void.
Soon after modern spiritualism began in 1848 with the spirit rappings of the Fox sisters (who confessed their trickery four decades later), spirit pictures began to appear in a very simple form. The earliest ones of which I am aware were drawings produced as an extension of “automatic” writing, whereby messages were supposedly dictated by otherworldly entities or the medium’s hand was allegedly guided by them. For example, in 1851 John Murray Spear (b. 1804) produced séance writings and “also geometrical drawings and strange unintelligible figures, of which no interpretation was vouchsafed” (Podmore 1902, 1:216).
Figure 2. A typical “spirit” pastel portrait by the Campbell Brothers (exhibited at the Maplewood Hotel, Lily Dale). Figure 2. A typical “spirit” pastel portrait by the Campbell Brothers (exhibited at the Maplewood Hotel, Lily Dale).

In the mid 1860s, a Glasgow cabinetmaker and spiritualist named David Duguid (1832-1907) began painting small landscapes while being observed, according to psychical investigator Frank Podmore (1902, II:130), “apparently in deep trance, and with his eyes apparently closed”-emphasis on the word apparently. Podmore (1902, II:131) was “disposed to regard Duguid’s trance utterances as probably not involving conscious deception,” but his later mediumistic demonstrations are another matter. Magician John Mulholland in his Beware Familiar Spirits (1938, 158), says Duguid was among the mediums who employed “simple substitution of painted for unpainted cards.”
After the debut of slate-writing-a phenomenon claimed to have been “discovered” by “Dr.” Henry Slade (d. 1905)-spirit pictures also began to appear, sometimes accompanying writing (see figure 1), sometimes separately. These pictures could be done (like the messages) with a simple slate pencil, but more ornate ones were rendered with colored chalks or paints. The slate effects were done under conditions that supposedly precluded trickery, thereby seeming to prove they were authentic spirit productions. In fact, however, they were easily produced by a variety of conjuring techniques, and mediums were repeatedly caught faking the phenomena (Houdini 1924).
Although spirit painting is distinct from spirit photography, there was actually some overlap. Interestingly, early photographic techniques-daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, etc.-did not yield spirit portraits; those awaited the advent of glass-plate negatives which facilitated double exposures. After spirit photography became established in 1862 (by Bostonian William H. Mumler1), painted portraits or other artworks obviously served on occasion as the basis for photographed spirit “extras.” Some mediumistic photographers produced photo images with artistically added “veils,” “shrouds,” and other funereal trappings (see examples in Permut 1988). And David Duguid expanded his repertoire from spirit paintings to spirit photographs and even “psychographs” (supposedly non-camera spirit or psychic photos) (Coates 1911, 65). One way the latter were produced involved using seemingly unprepared paper that actually contained a chemically bleached-out image. At the appropriate time the paper would be secretly pressed against a blotter dampened with a developing solution (Carrington 1920, 220-221).

Figure 3. “Spirit” oil painting, Azur, produced in stages during an 1898 séance (exhibited at the Maplewood Hotel, Lily Dale). Figure 3. “Spirit” oil painting, Azur, produced in stages during an 1898 séance (exhibited at the Maplewood Hotel, Lily Dale).

At Lily Dale, I was able to examine several pictures by the Campbell brothers-or I should say, “brothers,” since they were unrelated. (According to my sources at Lily Dale, they were a gay couple in a time when differences in sexual orientation were less tolerated.) They were Allan B. Campbell (1833-1919) and Charles “Campbell” (born Charles Shourds, who died August 23, 1926). They lived at Lily Dale but traveled widely, reportedly making twenty-two trips to Europe. Their mediumship involved slate writing and spirit typewriting (produced in a portable cabinet), but they are best known for their spirit portraits and paintings (“Campbell Brothers” n.d.).

The Campbells’ “spirit” artists produced pastel and oil portraits. I inspected examples of both with an ordinary magnifying glass and a 103 illuminated loupe and found them indistinguishable from works produced by the human hand. Some writers claim the pictures “have no brush marks” (Jackson 1975). That is true of the pastels which were of course done without brushes or paints and which in fact have the characteristics of pastel drawings (see figure 2). The oil paintings do indeed have brush marks which may easily be found by the use of oblique light-a technique used to enhance surface irregularities (Nickell 1999).
One of the oils is a striking 40 x 60-inch painting of Allan Campbell’s alleged spirit guide, Azur (figure 3). It was produced on June 15, 1898, in a single sitting lasting only an hour and a half. In a signed statement, six witnesses (all of them apparently spiritualists, some of them prominent) described the conditions under which the picture was produced:
On the evening mentioned we met at the cottage of the Campbell Brothers on the hill and proceeded to their Egyptian séance room. Across the bay window at the end of the room was hung a large silk curtain, where stood a small table and a canvas 40"360". Each one in turn went up to the canvas and magnetized it by passing his hands over the surface. We then placed whatever marks we pleased on the back, some placing names, some numbers, some marks to suit their fancy. Mr. A. Campbell then invited one of the circle to sit with him in the impromptu cabinet and the silken curtain enclosing them; each member of the circle in turn sat within the cabinet with Mr. Campbell. Every time the curtain was withdrawn we saw the partly finished picture of Azur. During the entire séance there was light enough for us to see everything perfectly and note the gradual growth of the painting on the canvas. Mr. A. Campbell was entranced and Azur, using his organism, gave us some very beautiful words of welcome and lessons of a high order. He spoke of the stars and their significance, which we fully realized afterwards.
After some music, additional lights were brought, the curtain withdrawn, and lo! The picture was complete. It represented Azur with arms uplifted as in the act of speaking and fully life size. While we were admiring it, there came at the back of the head a six-pointed star, which is now distinctly seen. (Prendergast et al. 1989)
One notes that the picture was only observed in stages, but how was it done under the conditions described (assuming them to be true) and in so short a time for a large oil painting? To begin an answer we turn to Hereward Carrington (1920, 222) who describes the two major techniques used for spirit paintings rendered in oils:
One method is for the medium to take an ordinary oil-painting, as fresh as possible (so long as the oil is quite dry), and over this lightly gum, around the edges, another piece of blank canvas, seeing to it that it looks neat at the edges. Now, as soon as the medium is alone in the cabinet, he carefully peels off this outside piece of canvas, secreting it about his person, and exposing the under canvas (the one upon which is the painting) to view. In order to produce the impression of the painting still being wet, he quickly rubs over the painting with poppy-oil, and there is your spirit painting!
The second method Carrington describes as a “chemical means,” but that is something of a misnomer. As he explains:
The oil-painting in this case is first varnished, and, after this is thoroughly dry, it is covered with a solution of water and “zinc white.” The canvas will now have the appearance of being blank, and may be inspected. All the medium has to do, in order to restore the painting, is to wash over the canvas with a wet sponge, when the painting will appear as before.
In the second technique, the zinc white might be sponged off incrementally so that the picture seems to develop in stages. And it would be appropriately damp when brought forth (Gibson 1967). With either method employed, the sitters’ placing their names and other identifying marks on the back of the canvas to prevent substitution-a common ploy of spirit-painting mediums (Gibson 1967)-was a disarming but irrelevant act since the main canvas on which the marks were placed was not switched.

Figure 4. Surface damage is apparent in each of the four corners of Azur-a possible indication of trickery. (All photos by Joe Nickell) Figure 4. Surface damage is apparent in each of the four corners of Azur-a possible indication of trickery. (All photos by Joe Nickell)
In examining Azur, I detected no traces of zinc white residue that might be expected to remain. However, I did discover-in each of the four corners-evidence of surface damage, seemingly consistent with the first scenario Carrington described. Although unmistakable, the damage is much less apparent to the unaided eye than is seen in an oblique-light photograph intended to reveal it (figure 4). In fact, the damage would no doubt generally go unnoticed, and, indeed, I had seen the painting on previous occasions without observing it. My eventual discovery reminds me of an exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Gregory, in "Silver Blaze” (Doyle 1894), concerning a clue, a “wax vesta [match], half burned”:
“I cannot think how I came to overlook it,” said the inspector with an expression of annoyance.
“It was invisible, buried in the mud [Holmes replied]. I only saw it because I was looking for it.”
“What! You expected to find it?”
“I thought it not unlikely.”
If my observation of surface damage in the four corners of Azur means what I think it does (no innocent, alternate explanation comes to mind), then Allan Campbell seems to have had a blank canvas covering the finished Azur, lightly glued at the corners. There may actually have been two or more overlays so that intermediate stages of the painting could have been prepared in advance. Or there could have been a partial rendering on the back of the blank canvas for the same purpose (although that would have required reattachment after reversal). Allan Campbell might even have had a brush and paints available so that he could have produced on the overlay the first several stages of the painting until ready to reveal the finished product. (These could have been kept in a drawer of the “small table” referred to.)

How do we explain the star-shaped halo that afterward appeared on the painting, as the sitters attested, “while we were admiring it?” I suggest that the star, which is not particularly bold, was not at first noticed. When the sitters’ attention was called to it, and they then focused on it, they were deceived by the power of suggestion into thinking it had spontaneously materialized.

What about the members of the circle having taken turns sitting with the medium in the makeshift spirit cabinet (the curtained-off bay-window area)? Would not the presence of even a single observer have precluded trickery? Hardly. The painting may have had a covering placed over it, which was used to conceal the removal of the (hypothesized) canvas overlays. And Charles “Campbell” might have played an important role. It is curious that his involvement was not described; he might, for example, have been the first to sit with Allan Campbell, making removal (or reversal) of one overlay a cinch. He could have sat more than once, or one of the other sitters might have been a confederate. Again, we do not know that a sitter was always present or that the picture advanced to a new stage during each sitting. No doubt, whatever the actual conditions, they were insufficiently stringent to prevent deception.

Even if I am wrong about the implications of the surface damage in the corners, the hypothetical scenario I have sketched remains a valid explanation, since it would be possible to attach an overlay without such damage. (One version of the trick calls for tacks to be used to attach the blank sheet [Gibson 1967].)
Given the evidence, the painting of “Azur”-indeed the entire body of spirit paintings, like other physical spiritualistic phenomena-can scarcely be taken as proof of a transcendent realm.


Notes

  1. Spirit photography was reportedly “discovered” by Boston photographer William H. Mumler who noticed “extras” on recycled glass plates from which previous images had not been entirely removed. In 1862 Mumler began producing spirit photographs for credulous sitters but was later exposed when some of the entities were recognized as living city residents (Nickell 1995, 31).

References

  • “Campbell Brothers.” N.d. Album, Lily Dale Museum.
  • Carrington, Hereward. 1920. The Physical Phenomena of Spiritualism. New York: American Universities Publishing Co., 220-223.
  • Coates, James. 1911. Photographing the Invisible. N.P. [USA]: The Advanced Thought Publishing Co.
  • Doyle, Arthur Conan. [1894] N.d. [1930]. “Silver Blaze” in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, reprinted in The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Books,.
  • Gibson, Walter. 1967. Secrets of Magic: Ancient and Modern. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 138-139.
  • Houdini, Harry. [1924] 1972. A Magician Among the Spirits. Reprinted New York: Arno Press.
  • Jackson, Dorothy. 1975. “Lily Dale-Spiritualism Center in Chautauqua County,” unidentified clipping, dated October 1, in “Campbell Brothers” n.d.
  • Mullholland, John. [1938] 1979. Beware Familiar Spirits. Reprinted New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
  • Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
  • Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1999. Crime Science. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 177, 178.
  • Permutt, Cyril. 1988. Photographing the Spirit World. Wellingborough, England: Aquarian Press, 13-15, 22-23, 26, 29-30.
  • Podmore, Frank. 1902. Modern Spiritualism. London: Methuen & Co.
  • Prendergast, Emma, et al. 1898. Text given in a brochure, Spirit Painting: Azur. Lily Dale, N.Y.: Lily Dale Historical Society, n.d. (Other signers were Abby Louise Pettengill, M. Sage, Sidney Kelsey, F. Corden White, and Helen White.)
  • Swann, Irene. 1969. The Bangs Sisters and Their Precipitated Spirit Portraits. Chesterfield, Indiana: Camp Chesterfield.
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Skeptical Briefs Volume 10.2, June 2000

Part II: The Bangs Sisters

In addition to the Campbell “brothers” (the subject of Part 1 in the March Skeptical Briefs), the other major spiritualists whose mediumship produced “spirit” paintings were the Bangs sisters of Chicago.

Misses Elizabeth S. and May E. Bangs were reportedly mediums since childhood, but their “gift” of spirit painting did not appear until the fall of 1894 (Chesterfield 1986). They offered clairvoyance, séance trumpet effects and spirit "materializations,” “direct” (or so-called automatic) writing, spirit typewriting, and slate effects. But they were most famous for their allegedly ghost-rendered paintings.
Their business card advertised, “Life Sized Spirit Portraits a Specialty” ("Bangs Sisters” n.d.; Swann 1969). Indeed, they appear to have made something of a racket of it, as indicated by an Associated Press story of 1908. A woman who alleged to be the wife of a Chicago millionaire accused May Bangs of enticing him into a bigamous relationship, the man having been, it was claimed, “inveigled into the marriage through the instrumentality of a ‘spirit portrait’ of his dead mother"-produced by the Bangs sisters ("Spirit” 1908).

The Bangses were exposed as tricksters many times. For example a minister, Rev. Stanley L. Krebs (1901) sat for one demonstration that involved producing a “spirit” reply to a multi-paged letter that he had been instructed to bring, sealed in an envelope. At the beginning of the séance it was placed between two bound slates. Careful observation, and the use of a small mirror that permitted viewing under the table, allowed Krebs to see how the bound slates were secretly wedged apart and the envelope dropped into Miss Bangs’s lap from whence it was transferred to a tray on the floor and drawn under a closed door. In time, after her accomplice/sister had done her work of steaming open the envelope and penning a reply, the seemingly impossible effect was completed.

The sisters used a variety of techniques for their spirit portraits. Typically, for reasons skeptics may well imagine, “their method was to have the sitter bring a photograph of the dead person to be painted, and the following day the spirits would paint the portrait . . .” (Mulholland 1938, 158). For one-day service, the photograph was reportedly “concealed” from the sisters’ view (Swann 1969, 4), but they may have gotten access to it much as they did the previously described letter.

According to a booklet published at the Indiana spiritualist colony Camp Chesterfield (where the Bangses had a cottage for a number of years), the sisters’ earliest work involved “a locked cabinet or curtained off space” and “several ‘sittings’ were necessary.” Later, the “canvas” (actually a paper-mounted panel) was placed before a window with light streaming through, and the sitter watched the picture progress over a period of up to forty minutes or so. Still later, the sisters were able to produce artworks in “as little as five minutes” (Swann 1969, 3).
Reportedly, the Bangs sisters’ portraits were examined by unnamed “art experts” who concluded they were not done in any known artistic medium. Rather, the colored substance “could be compared to the dust on a butterflys [sic] wings” (Swann 1969, 3). That is, the particulate matter resembled pollen, and would thus seem consistent with a pastel “painting” (i.e., a drawing done in pastel crayons, which consist of pigment mixed with gum).

In fact, at Lily Dale, a spiritualist community in Western New York, where the sisters resided for many seasons, I was able to examine two of their “spirit” portraits that were framed and mounted under glass (as would be expected for certain media, like watercolors or pastels, but not others, e.g., oils). I used an illuminated 10X loupe for the inspection. Having myself done portraits in oils, pastels, watercolors, and numerous other media, I saw very familiar characteristics that I could not distinguish from ordinary pastel renderings (Woolwich 1996), including layering and blending of colors and even unmistakable crayon strokes (as in the hair; see figure 1). Indeed, although claiming that, for some pictures, the spirits under the Bangses’ mediumship furnished “their own colouring matter,” one contemporary source stated that “for the usual portraiture, coloured French pastels are placed in front of the canvas and these are used by the spirit artists-by a process called ‘precipitation'” (Coates 1911, 294).

But how were the pictures actually produced? The evolution of their techniques would seem consistent with deception. The early cabinet method suggests the pictures were simply painted by the sisters out of patrons’ view, and the latest productions (done in "five minutes”) no doubt involved the substitution of a previously prepared picture. The ‘window’ technique is interesting, and to my knowledge the secret has never been revealed publicly.

Explaining the technique is made difficult by the conflicting descriptions given by credulous observers who lacked knowledge of conjuring methods and who may have misperceived or misremembered exact details. Some accounts insist the effect was produced “in broad daylight” with the blank picture panel simply standing on a table before a window, but as May Bangs herself admitted (1910), "The room is shaded sufficiently to cause all the light from the window to pass through the canvas.” A more detailed explanation states:
Two identical, paper-mounted canvases in wooden frames were held up, face to face, against the window, the lower edges resting on a table and the sides gripped by each medium with one hand. A short curtain was hung on either side and an opaque blind was drawn over the canvases. With the light streaming from behind[,] the canvases were translucent. After a quarter of an hour the outlines of shadows began to appear and disappear as if the invisible artist made a preliminary sketch, then the picture began to grow at a feverish rate and when the frames were separated the portrait was found on the paper surface of the canvas next to the sitter. Though the paint was greasy and stuck to the finger on being touched, it left no stain on the paper surface of the other canvas which closely covered it [Fodor 1933].
The effect was reproduced by stage magicians who were probably inspired by the Bangs sisters’ phenomenon. As described in Thayer’s Quality Magic Catalog (1928), two canvasses were placed face to face in a frame before “a powerful light from the rear.” Then:
With the house lights off and while all eyes are intent upon the white illuminated canvas, slowly and faintly at first, a dim shadow appears. Gradually this shadow grows larger and becomes more distinct. The outlines begin to take shape, colors appear, and in a few short moments, a perfect finished picture in all its brilliancy of color is before them.
Thayer’s catalog did not, of course, explain how the trick worked, but-significantly-prepared “spirit” portraits were sold with the apparatus. Whatever the secret, it may have been virtually identical to the method used by the Bangses. One notes that, like theirs, the Thayer method employed two canvases, and I think therein lies the crux of the matter.

After considerable experimentation, I have found a way to produce what seems a very similar effect. Someone witnessing it might well write, as one of the Bangses’ clients did (Payne 1905): "At first it was a faint shadow, then a wave appeared to sweep across the canvas, and the likeness became plainer. It was a good deal like a sunrise-got brighter until it was perfectly plain and every feature visible.” The effect is of a picture seeming to slowly materialize and gradually coming into focus. Indeed, that is just what occurs in the method I came up with.

Briefly, here is my hypothetical reconstruction of a Bangses’ spirit-picture séance. Prior to the client entering the room, the previously prepared picture (rolled up perhaps) is secreted in its hiding place (for example in a drawer on the back of the table). The sitter is invited inside, allowed to casually inspect the premises, and invited to take a seat. The two blank panels are placed face to face, stood up on the table, and held by a sister seated on either side. The aforementioned short curtains are drawn to each side and the opaque blind pulled down. The spirits are invoked, while under cover of the drawn blind, one sister uses her free hand to extract the picture from its hiding place and attach it to the face of the rearmost panel which is laid on the table behind the other panel. All is now ready for the blind to be raised.

figure 2 Figure 2: Two paper panels are placed together before a window (or in this case a light box), with a hand showing nothing else is interjected.
  figure 3

figure 4

figure 5

Figures 3-5: In the transmitted light a "cloudiness” forms (not shown), then colors and shapes gradually come into view; A face begins to be recognizable and eventually becomes even sharper; Finished portrait on one panel (shown in reflected light) is presented to sitter. Lincoln pastel portrait and photos by author.
Light is seen streaming through the blank panel, which will function as a sort of screen on which the seemingly materializing image will be projected from the rear. At a suitable time, one of the sisters, using her free hand behind the curtain, stands the picture panel upright a few inches from the other, an action which creates a shadowy, clouded effect upon the “screen.” Slowly, the picture panel is moved forward, and, as it approaches the screen, colors appear, followed by a blurry face which eventually comes into focus and is recognized. Finally, the completed picture is revealed in full light at the end of the séance (figures 2-5).1

That the Bangses employed some technique such as I have hypothesized2 is consistent with the overall scenario described in various accounts (Coates 1911; Fodor 1933; “Bangs Sisters” n.d.). It would certainly explain the otherwise puzzling use of two panels: the extra one serving both as a shield to hide the portrait panel from view and as a screen on which to permit rear projection of the image. The following account is also instructive:
A few minutes after they [the face and form] began to appear, the psychics (apparently under impression) lowered the canvas toward me until it touched my breast. May Bangs then got a message by Morse alphabet [supposed spirit-rappings] on the table: ‘Your wife is more accustomed to see me in the other aspect.’ Up went the canvas again and I saw the profile and bust, but turned round in the opposite direction; instead of the face looking to the right, it was looking to the left. The portrait then proceeded apace, until all the details were filled in . . . [Moore 1910]
This is consistent with the methodology I have described, it having been merely necessary to “flop” (reverse) the picture panel as it was returned to its place on the table.
In some accounts the picture behind the screen seemed to be manipulated in and out of focus. For example, one witness described how the developing image “disappeared, but came back very soon clearer than before” ("Bangs Sisters” n.d.) One case featured an illusion involving “three pairs of eyes” that “showed on the canvas at once in different poses and places” (an effect that could easily have been accomplished with a separate sheet of paper on which the sets of eyes were rendered).

Many times the spirit-picture production ended with a very interesting effect: the portrait’s eyes-which up to that point had been closed-suddenly (or sometimes gradually) opened, “like a person awakening” (Payne 1905; Coates 294-331). Now, the same effect was actually a popular parlor diversion of the Bangses’ time (the late nineteenth to early twentieth century) with advertising cards being specially printed for the purpose. One for Stafford’s Ink, for instance, depicted a little girl with closed eyes, behind which-printed on the reverse with good registration-were a pair of heavily outlined, open eyes. In ordinary viewing (reflected light) the child slept, but when the card was held up to a window or lamp (i.e., viewed in transmitted light) the open eyes became dominant and she suddenly awoke.

This effect may have been copied by the Bangs sisters, although it would have been accomplished differently, since the portrait-side of the finished picture would have required open eyes. Having closed eyes behind (as on an overlay) would not seem to work, since the open eyes (with their dark irises and pupils) would still dominate from the beginning. There may be several ways to solve the problem: the effect might simply have been produced by tipping the picture forward so that the eyes were brought into focus, coupled with the power of suggestion; or the finished, open eyes might actually have been drawn in, in a final stage, under some pretext of pulling down the opaque blind; or by some other method. (For example it is possible to have a removable, opaque material applied on the back to the area behind the eyes so that, in transmitted light, there appear deep, shaded sockets, but when the material is peeled off the eyes open.) In any event one sitter did report that, before opening, the eyes of the spirit portrait wereindistinct and apparently closed” (emphasis added; Holland 1909).
Although, as indicated earlier, the Bangs sisters may not always have received a photograph of the deceased subject in advance of the séance, they could nevertheless proceed once they gained access (by some subterfuge) to the photo. One sister could then go off to produce the portrait while the other kept the patron distracted. For example, one wrote:
Entering the seance-room, and finding only three canvases, I selected two of them, took them out in the sunlight, in company with one of the Miss Bangs, exposed them for fifteen minutes to the strong rays of the noonday sun, examined the surface thoroughly to fully assure myself that they were not chemically prepared, at the same time to secretly mark them for identification.
Subsequently the identification marks would show that the "canvas” had not been switched (Thurston 1910). (If the panel was not marked-most accounts omit that detail-the procedure is simplified, since the portrait can be prepared on a panel that is switched for one of the selected ones, eliminating the need to surreptitiously affix the picture to a panel during the séance.)

One incident is particularly revealing: A couple who had sought a picture of their deceased son concluded that the resulting image resembled him only “in a general way” and “was not even a fairly good portrait.” In rationalizing the failure, one writer pointed out (perhaps more wisely than he knew) that the couple “had no photograph of their departed son with them” (Coates 1911, 325). Thus the Bangs sisters were apparently left with few options. They could fish for a description (in the manner of a police artist eliciting an eyewitness’s recollection) or opt to produce a generalized child’s portrait which the credulous couple might accept. In contrast, when a photograph had been brought to the sitting, the “spirit” painting might be pronounced “a perfect enlargement of the original . . .” ("Bangs Sisters” n.d.). Whatever techniques the sisters actually employed - and May Bangs (1910) acknowledged that “No two sittings” were “exactly alike” - they were obviously effective, given the many testimonials they elicited. Significantly, as physical mediumship has largely given way to mental phenomena (witness the rise of mediums like James Van Praagh who limit themselves to readings [Nickell 1998]), "spirit” paintings have all but disappeared. A few historic examples remain as reminders of an earlier, though not necessarily more credulous, time.

Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Joyce LaJudice of the Lily Dale Museum, Lily Dale, New York, for her generous assistance in providing information on the Campbell “brothers” (Part I) and the Bangs sisters (Part II).
Thanks are also due several Center for Inquiry staff members for help in various ways, particularly watching numerous experimental attempts to reproduce the Bangs sisters’ effects: Ben Radford, Tom Flynn, and others-including Tim Binga and Ranjit Sandhu, who also provided research assistance.

Notes

  1. If it is true, as earlier stated, that the picture seemingly appeared on the “canvas” nearest the sitter, all that would have been needed was for the pair of panels to have been casually reversed as they were taken down from the frame and carried to the sitter.
  2. I have wondered whether the Bangses might have produced a picture in “real time,” working on the rearmost panel (reversed for the purpose) while the sitter viewed the progress. Such a scenario (too lengthy to detail here) would present many difficulties, and one would think even a credulous sitter would catch on. But it might still be possible.

References

  • Bangs, May. 1910. Letter dated 17 September, quoted in Coates 1911, 294.
  • “Bangs Sisters.” N.d. Album of clippings, photos, business card, etc., in Lily Dale Museum.
  • Chesterfield Lives. 1986. Chesterfield, Indiana: Camp Chesterfield.
  • Coates, James. 1911. Photographing the Invisible. N.p. [USA]: The Advanced Thought Publishing Co., 292-336.
  • Fodor, Nandor. 1933. Encyclopedia of Psychic Science. London: Arthurs Press, s.v. “Bangs Sisters,” 27-28.
  • Holland, George C. 1909. Quoted in Coates 1911, 325.
  • Krebs, Stanley L. 1901. A description of some trick methods used by Miss Bangs, of Chicago. Journal of Society for Psychical Research 10.175 (January): 5-16.
  • Moore, W. Usborne. 1910. Quoted in Coates 1911, 298-299.
  • Mulholland, John. 1938. Beware Familiar Spirits. Reprinted New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.
  • Nickell, Joe. 1998. Investigating spirit communications, Skeptical Briefs, September, 5-6.
  • Payne, John W. 1905. Quoted in Coates 1911, 295-296.
  • “Spirit Portrait” of his dead mother. 1908. The Buffalo Evening Times (Buffalo, N.Y.), January 8.
  • Swann, Irene. 1969. The Bangs Sisters and Their Precipitated Spirit Portraits. Chesterfield, Indiana: Camp Chesterfield.
  • Thayer Magic Mfg. Co. 1928. Quality Magic Catalog No. 7. Los Angeles. Two pages describing the spirit-painting effect are reproduced in William Doerflinger, The Magic Catalog (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 196-197.
  • Thurston, Dr. and Mrs. H.E. 1910. Quoted in Coates 1911, 322-324.
  • Woolwich, Madlyn-Ann C. 1996. The Art of Pastel Portraiture. New York: Watson-Guptill.

 

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.


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