Just a quick post (I say that to myself every time) about spotting disinformation. I'll use the example most well known to me. That is Serpo (www.serpo.org). I also remember it, because serpo was the first website I looked at about government conspiracies and UFOs. That site led me to www.projectcamelot.org which led to everything.
Serpo is apparently the name of a planet in the Zeta Reticuli star system, inhabited by a race called Ebens.
Bill Ryan originally ran the site where several releases were made by an anonymous source to both him and a journalist called Victor Martinez.
Bill has given several intervews, found on the website, saying that he believes that Serpo is a mixture of disinformation and truth. Below is a very interesting interview with Jerry Pippin where as well as analysing the Serpo story, they also analyse the nature of conspiracy stories and disinformation:
http://jerrypippin.com/audio/Serpo%20Pgm%20201.mp3
I have not read the SErpo releases word for word. The sheer volume of material put me off - I like clear simple answers to simple questions. Hearing that a lot of it was disinformation did not encourage me to read it. However, this is a good exercise in how to tell what is disinformation and what is not. Serpo may have started off as a genuine disclosure, but then the government may have got in on the act. The following things made it easy.
1) The source was anonymous. Anyone could have pretended to be the anonymous source.
2) There probably was more than one person, but they all came from the same organisation, meaning that there was only one source. There was no corroboration.
3) The source communicated via email in his or her own time. This meant that the source could think up an answer that was consistent with all the previous information (and the source knew all the previous information because they had released it themselves. If there was more than one source, they could have read the other information on the website.) A good trick would have been to withold some information and ask something about that. Bill or Victor may have tried that.
4) The source was able to lay down any conditions he or she wanted. If they were not met, they would no longer disclose information.
5) The disclosures were long and rambly with spelling errors, making them hard to read and full of useless information. A person like Bill Ryan, who seems to me, to look at every word and every detail, just in case there is a slight discrepancy must have taken a phenomenal amount of time to analyse the data. MAybe they were trying to wear him down.
None of this makes Serpo disinformation. It just makes it very easy for people to disinform.
Project Camelot does face to face interviews with selected people. This makes it easier to catch out disinformation:
1) There is a wide range of people - they can seek out corroboration and/or differences between peoples' stories.
2) They know who they are talking to and so know the history of these people (in most cases)
3) The interviews are real time and face to face. this means that we can see the interviewees' reactions and the interviewer can ask a few 'oddball' questions that someone who is lying may not have thought about in advance. For example, one interviewee said that he had seen a grey alien, so they asked him how many fingers it had. His answer was that he honestly didn't look.
4) If an interviewee started getting rambly, I'd probably switch off.
So Project Camelot interviews have a lot more defenses against disinformation. Except of course, unless the interviewee has been disinformed themselves, in which case they believe they are telling the truth, but are passing on lies. This makes them a whole lot more believeable.
Like Bill Ryan in his Jerry Pippin interview, even though I have looked at a lot of information (though nowhere near enough), I am not 100% certain about much of it. Bill Ryan says that a high up intelligence person told him that all disclosure will be open to an alternative explanation because the government or whoever rules us believes that undeniable proof will put a lot of people in shock and cause chaos. So it has to be fuzzy. I believe that they don't give people much credit and that most people could handle the truth. And that is one reason why I do this blog.
All this mixed together means that finding the truth is a long and arduous process. But we must persevere if we are to find it.
