The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (71 page)

Put your mind into another train of thought. Fancy Australia discovered and colonised under the French flag, what would it mean merely several millions of English unborn that at present exist we learn from the past and to form our future. We learn from having lost to cling to what we possess. We know the size of the world we know the total extent. Africa is still lying ready for us it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.

To forward such a scheme what a splendid help a secret society would be a society not openly acknowledged but who would work in secret for such an object.

I contend that there are at the present moment numbers of the ablest men in the world who would devote their whole lives to it. I often think what a loss to the English nation in some respects the abolition of the Rotten Borough System has been. What thought strikes a man entering the house of commons, the assembly that rule the whole world? I think it is the mediocrity of the men but what is the cause. It is simply – an assembly of wealth of men whose lives have been spent in the accumulation of money and whose time has been too much engaged to be able to spare any for the study of past history. And yet in hands of such men rest our destinies. Do men like the great Pitt, and Burke and Sheridan not now to exist. I contend they do. There are men now living with I know no other term the [Greek term] of Aristotle but there are not ways for enabling them to serve their Country. They live and die unused unemployed. What has the main cause of the success of the Romish Church? The fact that every enthusiast, call it if you like every madman finds employment in it. Let us form the same kind of society a Church for the extension of the British Empire. A society which should have members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea we should have its members placed at our universities and our schools and should watch the English youth passing through their hands just one perhaps in every thousand would have the mind and feelings for such an object, he should be tried in every way, he should be tested whether he is endurant, possessed of eloquence, disregardful of the petty details of life, and if found to be such, then elected and bound by oath to serve for the rest of his life in his County. He should then be supported if without means by the Society and sent to that part of the Empire where it was felt he was needed.

Take another case, let us fancy a man who finds himself his own master with ample means of attaining his majority whether he puts the question directly to himself or not, still like the old story of virtue and vice in the Memorabilia a fight goes on in him as to what he should do. Take if he plunges into dissipation there is nothing too reckless he does not attempt but after a time his life palls on him, he mentally says this is not good enough, he changes his life, he reforms, he travels, he thinks now I have found the chief good in life, the novelty wears off, and he tires, to change again, he goes into the far interior after the wild game he thinks at last I’ve found that in life of which I cannot tire, again he is disappointed. He returns he thinks is there nothing I can do in life? Here I am with means, with a good house, with everything that is to be envied and yet I am not happy I am tired of life he possesses within him a portion of the [Greek term] of Aristotle but he knows it not, to such a man the Society should go, should test, and should finally show him the greatness of the scheme and list him as a member.

Take one more case of the younger son with high thoughts, high aspirations, endowed by nature with all the faculties to make a great man, and with the sole wish in life to serve his Country but he lacks two things the means and the opportunity, ever troubled by a sort of inward deity urging him on to high and noble deeds, he is compelled to pass his time in some occupation which furnishes him with mere existence, he lives unhappily and dies miserably. Such men as these the Society should search out and use for the furtherance of their object.

(In every Colonial legislature the Society should attempt to have its members prepared at all times to vote or speak and advocate the closer union of England and the colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire. The Society should inspire and even own portions of the press for the press rules the mind of the people. The Society should always be searching for members who might by their position in the world by their energies or character forward the object but the ballot and test for admittance should be severe.)

Once make it common and it fails. Take a man of great wealth who is bereft of his children perhaps having his mind soured by some bitter disappointment who shuts himself up separate from his neighbours and makes up his mind to a miserable existence. To such men as these the society should go gradually disclose the greatness of their scheme and entreat him to throw in his life and property with them for this object. I think that there are thousands now existing who would eagerly grasp at the opportunity. Such are the heads of my scheme.

For fear that death might cut me off before the time for attempting its development I leave all my worldly goods in trust to S. G. Shippard and the Secretary for the Colonies at the time of my death to try to form such a Society with such an object.

SPACE MONOLITH

If
Star Trek
taught us anything it was that the
Enterprise
would take much more, Captain, and that pretty much anything was possible on the final frontier.

But space monoliths?

When Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin entered space in 1961 he is said to have observed an alien communication beacon, dubbed the Monolith, which continued in orbit until 1972 when it was retrieved by a US military shuttle and taken for study at a clandestine base, probably
Area 51
. In between these dates, the Monolith almost caused the demise of the 1969 Apollo 10 mission, which took a top secret detour from its schedule as the “dress rehearsal” for the moon landings to photograph the celestial map carved on the Monolith’s surface. As Apollo 10 approached the Monolith, the crew of Stafford, Young and Cernan suffered communications and technical malfunctions resulting in a re-entry to Earth at a dangerously high speed which the crew were lucky to survive.

Remember Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film
2001: A Space Odyssey
, itself based on Arthur C. Clarke’s short story
The Sentinel
? The one with the alien monoliths that mark (if not kick-start) the various stages of human evolution? The monolith conspiracists surely do
.

The evidence for the monolith theory is scant. Neither Gagarin nor the Apollo 10 crew ever mentioned seeing a monolith. Apollo 10 splashed down within thirty-five seconds of its scheduled landing time, meaning that the technical problems suffered were indeed very minor – and that there cannot have been time for a detour to investigate an alien artefact. One of the fuller expositions of the monolith conspiracy, by Richard Boylan in the pages of abovetopsecret.com, is based on information “disclosed to me by a reliable confidential informant, who previously worked on contract for the National Security Agency, and maintains connections within the Intelligence community. This informant, whom I shall call ‘Jesse’, has over 40 years of notes from a very close relative, who served as CIA liaison officer to the National Council on UFO/ET matters.” In other words, the “information” is third-hand from unnamed, unidentified sources.

For years the Monolith theory went into abeyance, and just when it seemed dead in space a camera from the University of Arizona’s HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) project took a photograph of a “monolith” on Mars in 2011. Veteran astronaut Buzz Aldrin then stoked the space conspiracy theory by announcing that a similar monolith had been detected on Mars’s moon Phobos. The University of Arizona, however, roundly rejected any notion that the monolith was an alien-made structure. Alfred McEwen, professor of planetary science at the university and HiRise’s principal investigator, said: “Layering from rock deposition combined with tectonic fractures creates right-angle planes of weakness such that rectangular blocks tend to weather out and separate from the bedrock … It is not that unusual. There are lots of rectangular structures on Mars. It is striking when you see one that is isolated, but they are common.”

Buzz Aldrin suggested that the only way to prove the matter of the Mars monolith one way or another was to pump money into space exploration and go there.

SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA

At around 2.00 p.m. GMT on 1 February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated while re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere after sixteen days in space. Tragically all seven crew members taking part in mission STS-107 were killed. Barely had Columbia’s debris finished showering down on the East Texas town of Palestine (pop. 18, 458) than the conspiracy theories lifted off.

As to whodunnit, there is an embarrassment of choices:

The official investigating body, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (which comprised independent experts from academia, the space industry, the military) mundanely concluded:

The physical cause of the loss of Columbia and its crew was a breach in the Thermal Protection System on the leading edge of the left wing, caused by a piece of insulating foam which separated from the left bipod ramp section of the External Tank at 81.7 seconds after launch, and struck the wing in the vicinity of the lower half of Reinforced Carbon-Carbon panel number 8. During re-entry this breach in the Thermal Protection System allowed superheated air to penetrate through the leading edge insulation and progressively melt the aluminium structure of the left wing, resulting in a weakening of the structure until increasing aerodynamic forces caused loss of control, failure of the wing, and break-up of the Orbiter. This breakup occurred in a flight regime in which, given the current design of the Orbiter, there was no possibility for the crew to survive.