It’s called “Kook Magnetism”


Oh, boy, another conference: The “They Are Real” Crypto Conference to be held at the Mt Blanco Creation “Museum” in Texas. Everyone ought to go, it’s cheap at $30. I’d go, except I’m on a greatly truncated budget this year — someone tell Aron Ra he ought to attend, he’s right there somewhere in the small state of Texas, too.

I don’t know who any of these speakers are, except Joe Taylor (loony proprietor of the Mt Blanco Creation Museum) and Mothman (I’m impressed that they got it as a speaker). Not even Google knows who they are; there are so many Tom Taylors and Daniel Joneses that they just get lost in a sea of names, and seem to have done nothing to make them stand out. OK, I could find Kloetzke on the basis of her unusual name — she’s a UFO investigator. And Judkins works with Carl Baugh, somehow.

But look at the topics! UFO BIG FOOT MOTHMAN GIANTS PERU NOAH’S ARK CHUPACABRA MAN & DINOSAURS TOGETHER EYE WITNESSES! PERU is a rather large topic that isn’t necessarily nuts, but I think that’s being used as a code word for ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS and BAD ARCHAEOLOGY.

I also like that line, They used to call us nuts kooks and weirdos. Not anymore. Sorry, guy, we still do, and you still are.

You want details? They sent more in an email.

Moth Man, Big Foot, UFOs, Chupacabra, Giants, Peruvian Skulls, Noah’s Ark – “THEY ARE REAL!” These are the speakers’ topics for the October 1-2, 2018 They Are Real Conference, to be held in Crosbyton, Texas at the Pioneer Memorial Museum, 101 W. Main ST. Crosbyton, Texas 79322, 806-675-2421, www.mtblanco.com

MOTH MAN: There will be eye-witnesses. FIVE sightings of the very strange and terrifying Moth Man in Crosbyton alone. A woman hit one and dented her car. It was as tall as a man but had wings. When she approached it, it stood up and flew away. Another one chased a pick up at high speed at Sundown, Texas. News reports of them terrorizing towns in West Virginia and Iowa have surfaced.

BIG FOOT: How many bullets does it take to stop an eight-foot-tall Big Foot? The man who knows will tell you at the conference. What do they eat? Do they leave gifts? The Big Foot Lady and her neighbor will tell all about it. Are they human??

UFOs: Two cowboys saw a UFO in Blanco Canyon. What did it do? What did another cowboy see that convinced him he was not seeing a known aircraft?

CHUPACABRA: This weird vampire dog called the “goat sucker” and the “hell dog” in Mexican folk lore was just what they said it was. It was not a myth. The Mt. Blanco Museum in Crosbyton, had the best specimen of El Chupacabra. The carcass of it and a coyote were both examined in a University lab to see exactly what it is. They’re not a mangy coyote. Tom Taylor will describe the one he encountered in Lubbock, Texas.

NOAH’S ARK: You’re daring death to climb Mt. Ararat searching for Noah’s ark. Aaron Judkins did just that and got a Hollywood film crew to go with him! He will explain how hard the whole ordeal was.

ELONGATED SKULLS OF PERU: No American has spent more time with these very strange, very long skulls from Peru than Joe Taylor, curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum. With their having only one parietal bone, instead of two – (the two halves of the top of the skull) – and then having sometimes two dozen extra bones in the skull, it is easy to see why so many researchers wondered if they were alien instead of human. Taylor says, “Spending weeks with those skulls studying them in order to mold them and having made accurate reproductions of them has given me insights that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.” He was part of the LA Marzulli WATCHERS team and Brien Forester, that recently did a press release on the DNA results of these skulls. Accurate casts of them will be on display at the conference. Heard of the Star Child Skull? Researchers were convinced it was alien. The woman who owns it will be here to talk about it. An exact cast will be on display.

THEY ARE REAL is a conference to educate people, especially those who are reluctant to even discuss these strange phenomena. “The TV series Ancient Aliens talks about a lot of these subjects, but their view is pretty one-sided”, said Joe Taylor who is the organizer of the conference. Taylor continued, “I know some of the people on that show and they don’t give the whole story.” They bring in the Bible, but their take on it is skewed. Several of the skulls and artifacts I have worked on somehow show up in the show and on many websites. It irks me that they throw around fantastic dates on these objects that I know are not true. Thus, our conference.”

YES, THERE’S MORE – The mummified hand will be on display. It’s not human. It’s not a bear… It came from Big Foot country. What is it? Don Monroe is a true living Indiana Jones. He will be here to discuss the hand and so many incredible adventures that your head will spin!

Still, what makes this interesting is how they just smoosh up a wild collection of miscellaneous bad ideas, all unrelated to each other, and toss them all in a sloppy pot of conspiracy theory and bible worship and magic monsters, and each speaker probably has their own ludicrous obsession, but as I’ve seen at other events, no one will disagree with anyone else, regardless of how foolish their hypotheses are. It ought to be called a credulity conference.

Comments

  1. rq says

    I’m curious as to whether Moth Man’s talk will consist entirely of him flying around the room and terrifying people for 20 minutes.

  2. Usernames! 🦑 says

    Crosbytown is 4+ hours away from Austin, Houston and San Antonio, nestled in the rural wastelands south of Amarillo. It seems mostly a waste of time for Aron Ra to make such a trip just to laugh at a bunch of cranks.

  3. Reginald Selkirk says

    I guess the strategy of posturing “Creation Science” as real, respectable, science wasn’t working.

  4. komarov says

    Oooh, it’s peruvian skulls. Looking at the poster I wondered since when the country was considered a conspiracy theory.

    BIG FOOT: How many bullets does it take to stop an eight-foot-tall Big Foot? The man who knows will tell you at the conference. What do they eat? Do they leave gifts? The Big Foot Lady and her neighbor will tell all about it. Are they human??

    Those priorities are … interesting. If you spot a bigfoot believer in the wild you should probably approach with caution, if at all.

    NOAH’S ARK: You’re daring death to climb Mt. Ararat searching for Noah’s ark. Aaron Judkins did just that and got a Hollywood film crew to go with him! He will explain how hard the whole ordeal was.

    Huh, I never really thought about how steep Mount Ararat might have been. But if the climb is as difficult and dangerous as this implies, just how did the animals get down? I’m guessing they didn’t get off the boat to tread water close to the shore until the receding waters revealed more passable terrain.

    “I know some of the people on that show and they don’t give the whole story.”

    No, “they” never do. Noone ever does. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to be the only person on the planet to have worked out the truth and be willing to share it – a thankless task if there ever was one.

  5. ridana says

    I wanna know what is it with Route 651! Is that a Bigfoot or UFO sighting hotspot? Chupacabra crossing? Mothman flyway? The way into Crosbyton?

  6. monad says

    @2: I guess you need some way to skirt the cell phone problem, but given that their story of a Moth Man sighting is one fleeing the moment it actually saw a lone human, I wouldn’t be too terrified of it.

  7. rcs619 says

    I like the bit at the end about the “Institute of Omniology.” That is the most fake-sounding, made-up, wannabe scientific name they could have picked, lol. That sounds like the name of some group from a bad sci-fi novel.

    But yeah, kooks are gonna kook. Someone really needs to get in there and give a play by play. Bad biology is always good for a laugh, if nothing else.

  8. willj says

    That bigfoot stuff is crap. But no one can convince me that mothman isn’t real. I’ve seen the comics.

  9. daved says

    rq@2, I would actually show up for that. I think most of us would. I mean, if it was real.

  10. mareap says

    I’ll try to get my sister to go. Crosbyton isn’t really close to anything but she’s fairly close. She also has an BS in Geology and and MS in Oceanography.

  11. Reginald Selkirk says

    mareap #14: She also has an BS in Geology…

    There will certainly be plenty of BS on offer.

  12. robro says

    The mysteries never cease: Is Joe Taylor channeling god? Is Tom Taylor the son of god? Why does Mothman get a picture but Big Foot doesn’t? What happened to Mothman in the second poster? Was he replaced by Dan Monroe? Is Dan Monroe his human alter-ego?

  13. Pierce R. Butler says

    How many bullets does it take to stop an eight-foot-tall Big Foot? … Do they leave gifts?

    Prob’ly not if shot at.

    And a “UFO investigator” named Chase?!?

  14. coragyps says

    Ooh! Ooh! I’m just an hour and a half away! If I force myself to go, I’ll hate you forever, PZ!!

  15. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    Reginald Selkirk,

    There will certainly be plenty of BS on offer.

    PhD.

  16. Matrim says

    What I want to know is why Mothman’s picture is a statue of Pazuzu? Do they actually have some weird story connecting the two, or (more likely) did they just grab a picture of a creepy winged statue?

  17. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    one detail often passed over as insignificant when it is actually very significant, is the “there are eye witnesses” presented as the ultimate proof of existence. Eye witness testimony is proven to be quite unreliable as our normal psychological processes are quite good at “filling in” missing pieces seamlessly. this “feature” is the source of the phenomenon known as Pareidolia, the appearance of faces in random stochastic splotches of random dots.
    thank you letting me note the “eyewitness testimony” is another WEIRD aspect of this hodgepodge

  18. John Morales says

    slithey tove, as with ‘testimonials’, the flaw is that perception is not veridical.

  19. John Morales says

    [technical addendum; not necessarily veridical– an existence claim does not suffice for an universal claim]

    (I knew what I meant, but I was sloppy. Less so now)

  20. richardemmanuel says

    Behemoth man is bigger, and irreducibly complex. Most mothmen don’t make it past their first birthday…

  21. says

    Well, as much as I’d like to believe, I’m still waiting for credible evidence of cryptids and/or alien life. And at that point, I’ll take it on a critter by critter basis — evidence for Sasquatch isn’t evidence for, say, the Mothman, or the Chupacabra, or the Mongolian Death Worm.

  22. postwaste says

    I’m only 30 minutes away, but I won’t go. I’ve been there and had my fill of this place. Sorry.

  23. unclefrogy says

    something is not quit right about climbing Mt. Ararat which is death defying and taking a Hollywood film crew?
    the true heroics were getting the film crew up and down while filming.
    uncle frogy

  24. Matrim says

    @33, unclefroggy

    Ararat is only a particularly dangerous climb in winter, if they went during the summer and took the sourthern route the only serious danger is altitude sickness, which is fairly easy to alleviate if you limit your daily progress, at least until you hit the glacier. Once you’re above the snow line it’s more harrowing, particularly if you’re an inexperienced climber, but it’s nothing to write home about.

    Not that any of this matters anyway, given that Mt. Ararat is not the same “Mountains of Ararat” mentioned in the Bible, which probably refered to a region that’s now part of Armenia. So even if there was a Noah’s ark (there isn’t), you wouldn’t find it on Mt. Ararat.

  25. Colin J says

    Mothman has been left out of the list of speakers on the second poster? He’s been deplatformed! We need to protest. You may not agree with his views (on topics such as his existence) but he has a right to be heard.

    Or maybe there was just a horrible accident with an open flame…