machete squad hq

I’ve always been interested in the bizarre shit that happens in this world.  I was and remain an Unsolved Mysteries fan regardless of if Dennis Farina isn’t half the host that Robert Stack was.

"Update: Dennis Farina is a clown."

Anyway, sometimes I find myself knee deep in websites and resources with no idea how I ended up so far off from where I began.  Example: I saw Paranormal Activity and a couple of hours later I was reading up on anecdotal accounts of people’s encounters with the occult and later people who have straight up just vanished into thin air.  Not missing persons.  People who have apparently quite literally dematerialized and never been found.

The first account, and arguably one of the most well known, is from the early 1800′s in a Russian Gulag where a prisoner named Diderici was serving prison time for impersonating a dead neighbor.  He was attached to a chain gang and was walking with them outside of the prison walls when apparently he began to literally fade away until he was completely gone and his shackles fell to the ground empty while 15 guards and prisoners stood and watched. (From Among the Missing: An Anecdotal History of Missing Persons from 1800 to the Present, by Jay Robert Nash).

Other examples are even more bizarre with cases of a runner being tailed by his friends in a horsedrawn cart before he tripped and promptly disappeared off the face of the earth, a man making it halfway to his well outside his house before disappearing completely, and various other stories that mix and match elements of an unexplained disappearance, possibly detached cries for help, and the apparent presence of witnesses.  These are all outlined here.

I love these stories but they really are nothing more than that.  Stories.  Almost all of the most famous stories of unexplained disappearances – that are not strictly missing persons cases – are from over a hundred years ago with zero chance of any form of confirmation.  Coupled with the fact that people are notoriously bad at relaying events truthfully – due to emotional reactions, false impressions, ulterior motives or just plain old lying – and the completely pervasive and ready availability of blindness inducing moonshine and narcotics, these stories never really hold up.

People want to buy into this stuff.  I remember I was terrified and convinced in the legitimacy of this well known hoax which purported to be recordings from a microphone lowered 9 miles below the earth’s surface in Russia.  Read the whole story here.  We want to buy into these things not because they are soundly logical or explainable but because they explain and outline aspects of the world that we are often completely ignorant of.

Actual photograph from Hell.

We want to believe that there is more to the world around us than we can possibly understand and I agree with that perception but basing your beliefs off anecdotal accounts from a time period where journalism was basically a game of who can lie most flagrantly, is foolish and frankly pretty retarded.

“FOUL”, you say.  There are people in contemporary culture that claim to have disappeared only to reappear, such as the asshats in this support group.  Or the numerous and growing numbers of Occult followers that have played a big part in making the internet the ongoing embarrassment it appears to be.

an actual group member

There are also people that believe they have intergalactic marriages with reptilian aliens that are consumnated while they dream…  seriously, watch “Alien Abductions” from Penn and Teller: Bullshit! and regardless of your thoughts on their show, their style or their politics, admit that these people are fucking kooks. People lie everyday because its easy, because people are naive and because they can.  We create meaning out of nothing and then find a way to monetize it, it’s the American dream hard at work.

It’s very easy to be a believer, remarkably easy in fact.  If a skeptic says “well there are reasonable explanations for all of these events if you look at it from a perspective that forces you to consider its validity from a rational standpoint”, the believer simply has to say that the world is so large and the universe so complex that these things must happen….  that’s not evidence, that’s empty rhetoric.  Believe it all you want, that doesn’t make it any closer to the much more nuanced world we inhabit.

I understand why people want to believe in shit like this.  It’s exciting and bizarre and offers different perspectives on the surrounding world but isn’t the surrounding world interesting enough?  Trees can fucking communicate using pheromones, animals can survive in the most hostile environments imaginable, and the moon’s got motherfucking water on it.  Shouldn’t we be jumping for joy at how outrageous and complex our world really is, not trying to willfully ignore things we don’t believe we can explain in favor of things like the Occult, ghosts and alien abductions?  Recent evidence suggests that despite misconceptions, mankind is still evolving in remarkable ways, isn’t that a whole lot more integral to mankind than secondhand stories about hauntings or aliens buggering some old fart in Wyoming?

I’ll take the rational perspective and leave the rest of this shit to the people with self-published books, unfounded theories, and far too many cats.