The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (23 page)

Fact: The plastic “coffins” in Madison, Georgia, are actually burial liners, used to protect caskets when placed underground. The much snapped depot in Georgia is actually the storage facility of the manufacturer, Vantage Products. And there are more in the region of 50,000 rather than half a mill of the liners.

Fact: Most of the so-called concentration camps are nothing of the sort. One camp much featured on conspiracy sites, Beech Grove, is actually an Amtrak repair depot.

Fact: FEMA has in the past (and might well in the present) enjoyed powers prejudicial to civil liberties. When President Reagan was considering invading Nicaragua, he issued a series of executive orders that provided, in the event of mass internal dissent, for the suspension of the constitution, the imposition of martial law, the construction of mass prison camps, and the turning over of government to the president – and FEMA. Other scenarios in which FEMA has been touted as playing a leading repressive role are combating a national uprising by black Americans and incarcerating Arab Americans sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It should be pointed out that sections of the American establishment vigorously opposed the granting of Draconian powers to the Agency. At the time of the Reagan initiative the then attorney-general, William French Smith, wrote to the national security adviser, Robert McFarlane: “I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its proper function as a co-ordinating agency for emergency preparedness … this department and others have repeatedly raised serious policy and legal objections to an ‘emergency czar’ role for FEMA.”

Since 2003, FEMA has been part of the Department of Homeland Security. New notepaper did not mean new efficiency: the agency was much criticized for its slowness and incompetence following
Hurricane Katrina
. Which must be a crumb of comfort to those who fear FEMA’s intentions. If FEMA can’t set up tents after high winds and high water could it actually round anybody up in a national emergency?

Further Reading

B.A. Brooks,
Things You Never Knew About FEMA
, 2009

Linda A. Burns,
FEMA: An Organization in the Crosshairs
, 2007

“The Evidence: Debunking FEMA Camp Myths”, 10 April 2009, www.popularmechanics.com

FOO FIGHTERS

Is it a bird? A plane? No, it’s a Foo Fighter.

In late 1944 Reuters press agency reported that strange spheres, resembling the glass balls that adorn Christmas trees, “have been seen hanging in the air over German territory, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They are coloured silver and are apparently transparent.”

Numerous sightings of these weird balls were recorded by Allied aircrews throughout German airspace, and later in the war over the skies of Nippon. Dubbed “Foo Fighters” (from the French
feu
, meaning fire) the balls of light made no attempt to attack, although they could out-fly conventional aircraft. Allied boffins assumed that the Nazis’ sky balls were a secret air defence weapon, along the lines of exploding high altitude balloons, or anti-aircraft missiles. Sifting through Nazi records after the war, investigators found all manner of interesting secret devices being plotted, from the Feuerball (a missile that emitted signals to disrupt Allied aircrafts’ radio and radar) to the Wasserfall (a radio-controlled anti-aircraft missile), but none had been deployed. The consensus was that “Foo Fighters” were actually natural phenomena, such as ball lightning or St Elmo’s fire. Or, later in the war, Luftwaffe jet fighters, principally the Me262.

And there the matter lay, until conspiracist Renato Vesco decided that the Foo Fighter was actually the forerunner of the Kugelblitz, the Ball Lightning Fighter. And then “alternative historian” Jim Keith determined that the Kugelblitz was actually a … flying saucer, launched from sites in Prague and Breslau in early 1945. A “confidential Italian document” given to Keith by an unnamed, untraceable source described a dogfight between a flying saucer and Allied planes: “A strange flying machine, hemispherical, or at any rate circular, in shape, attacked them at a fantastic speed, destroying them in a few seconds without using any guns.”

Without using any guns? Surely only ray-wielding aliens didn’t need guns to destroy … and so, by a false syllogism, other conspiracy theorists came to believe that the Foo Fighters were actually helmed by aliens.

Of course,
someone
had to theorize that the aliens were helping the Nazis. According to Vladimir Tersiski the occult pan-German
Thule Society
and
Vril Society
made contact with extraterrestrials, who accordingly helped the Nazis mount a moon mission and, in 1945, enabled Hitler and the other Nazi bigwigs to escape by saucer to Antarctica.

Clever chaps those aliens. But not, seemingly, clever enough to win the war on behalf of their earthling Nazi collaborators.

Further Reading

Henry Stevens,
Hitler’s Flying Saucers
, 2003

FORD PINTO

Named after the horse, the Pinto was Ford’s rival to the Toyota Corolla, the Chevy Vega and VW Beetle in the US in the seventies. With gas prices on the up, manufacturers were desperate for a slice of the “runabout” end of the car market. Yet were Ford so desperate that they knowingly hid deadly design faults on the Pinto?

One evening in 1972, Lily Gray, pulled on to a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Alongside her in the car was a young boy, Richard Grimshaw. As Gray entered the merge lane, her car stalled. Another car bumped into her Pinto at twenty-eight miles per hour. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured, then the car went up in a ball of flames. Gray died hours later; Grimshaw suffered burns over much of his body.

The Pinto lacked a heavyweight bumper, or proper reinforcement between the rear panel and the petroleum tank. So when a Pinto was rear-ended in even a minor fashion, as with Gray, the fuel tank ruptured. The Pinto had another flaw: due to its cracker-box construction the doors jammed easily when heated.

The Pinto was a firetrap on Goodyears.

When Gray’s Pinto exploded into flames in Minneapolis, Ford already knew about the Pinto’s fuel tank defect. Indeed, the company had been alerted to the weakness during pre-production, but, because retooling the Pinto lines to fit a safer tank would cost money, did nothing about it. As many as five hundred people may have died in Pinto explosions, but all the while Ford kept schtum about the fuel tank problem. The truth only came to light because of a 1977 report by Mark Dowie in the muckraking magazine
Mother Jones
, which quoted an internal Ford memorandum entitled “Fatalities Associated with Crash-Induced Fuel Leakage and Fire”. According to a “cost-benefit” analysis in the memo, the Pinto problem would likely lead to 180 burn deaths, 180 seriously burned victims and 2,100 burned-out vehicles – all of which would cost Ford $49.53 million in out of court settlements.

Against this, modifying the tank of 11 million Pintos at $11 a go would cost $121 million.

The bottom line ruled: Ford decided it would rather pay out for death, damage and injury than save its customers lives. When Richard Grimshaw took Ford to court, the California Court of Appeal upheld punitive damages of $3.5 million against the company, partly because Ford had been aware of the design defects but had determined against altering the design (see Document, p.159).

The
Mother Jones
article and
Grimshaw
v.
Ford Motor Co
. led to the end of the road for the Pinto. There were lawsuits, recalls and a tarnished reputation that could never be made better, no matter how hard the ad men at Dearborn slaved.

A number of other cars by other manufacturers on the US market were no safer than the Pinto, and also had unprotected fuel tanks behind the axle. Ford was merely unlucky enough to be exposed.

Further Reading

Mark Dowie, “Pinto Madness”,
Mother Jones
, September/October 1977

DOCUMENT:
GRIMSHAW
V.
FORD MOTOR CO.
(1981)

Court of Appeals of California, Fourth Appellate District, Division Two [May, 29, 1981]

CARMEN GRAY,
a Minor, etc., et al., Plaintiffs and Appellants, v.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
, Defendant and Appellant.

RICHARD GRIMSHAW,
a Minor, etc., Plaintiff and Appellant, v.
FORD MOTOR COMPANY
, Defendant and Appellant.

Opinion by Tamura, Acting P. J., with McDaniel, J., concurring. Separate concurring opinion by Kaufman, J.

OPINION: TAMURA, Acting P. J.

[...]

Design of the Pinto Fuel System:

In 1968, Ford began designing a new subcompact automobile which ultimately became the Pinto. Mr. Iacocca, then a Ford vice president, conceived the project and was its moving force. Ford’s objective was to build a car at or below 2,000 pounds to sell for no more than $2,000.

Ordinarily marketing surveys and preliminary engineering studies precede the styling of a new automobile line. Pinto, however, was a rush project, so that styling preceded engineering and dictated engineering design to a greater degree than usual. Among the engineering decisions dictated by styling was the placement of the fuel tank. It was then the preferred practice in Europe and Japan to locate the gas tank over the rear axle in subcompacts because a small vehicle has less “crush space” between the rear axle and the bumper than larger cars. The Pinto’s styling, however, required the tank to be placed behind the rear axle leaving only 9 or 10 inches of “crush space” – far less than in any other American automobile or Ford overseas subcompact. In addition, the Pinto was designed so that its bumper was little more than a chrome strip, less substantial than the bumper of any other American car produced then or later. The Pinto’s rear structure also lacked reinforcing members known as “hat sections” (two longitudinal side members) and horizontal cross-members running between them such as were found in cars of larger unitized construction and in all automobiles produced by Ford’s overseas operations. The absence of the reinforcing members rendered the Pinto less crush resistant than other vehicles. Finally, the differential housing selected for the Pinto had an exposed flange and a line of exposed bolt heads. These protrusions were sufficient to puncture a gas tank driven forward against the differential upon rear impact.

Crash Tests:

During the development of the Pinto, prototypes were built and tested. Some were “mechanical prototypes” which duplicated mechanical features of the design but not its appearance while others, referred to as “engineering prototypes,” were true duplicates of the design car. These prototypes as well as two production Pintos were crash tested by Ford to determine, among other things, the integrity of the fuel system in rear-end accidents. Ford also conducted the tests to see if the Pinto as designed would meet a proposed federal regulation requiring all automobiles manufactured in 1972 to be able to withstand a 20-mile-per-hour fixed barrier impact without significant fuel spillage and all automobiles manufactured after January 1, 1973, to withstand a 30-mile-per-hour fixed barrier impact without significant fuel spillage.