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FREUDIAN FRAUD AND THE DEMONISATION OF UNWANTED INNOVATORS
Category: Non-fiction; Keywords: Conspiracy Theories / Science Bibliographic details: Suppressed inventions and
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Reviews |
FREUDIAN FRAUD AND THE DEMONISATION OF UNWANTED INNOVATORS by Giles Hugo
WHAT have the 'Face on Mars', cures for cancer, fluoride in water, car engines that run on water, Freud and UFOs got in common? Not much, you might think. However, for some, a careful study of these subjects points to systematic and somewhat sinister conspiracies to suppress ideas, inventions and information. All this and much more is covered in 'Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries'. I must admit that when I first browsed through 'Suppressed Inventions', my first reaction was to label most of it fruitcake fantasies for the credulous. However, while some of the subjects covered are, frankly, bizarre, and the presentation is fairly haphazard, a deeper reading began to convince me that the smoke of suppression often does point to the fire and ashes of human ingenuity and wisdom systematically discredited, destroyed and hidden by powerful commercial, professional, military, scientific and political interests. The revelations range from the quite convincing to the extreme outer reaches of paranoid possibility. Among the cases dealt with are: * T. Henry Moray's 'free energy device'. * Nikola Tesla's similar Wydencliff tower device on Long Island. * Austrian Viktor Schauberger's 'suction turbine' and levitating 'flying disc' craft. * The 'anti-gravitational' ion-profelled disc airfoils developed by Thomas Townsend Brown who 'pioneered electrogravitics', and worked for the US Navy Bureau of Ships de-gaussing ships to protect them from magentic mines and may have been involved in the 'Philadelphia Experiment' in which, allegedly, ships were made invisible, with dire consequences for the health and sanity of navy personnel involved. * Wilhelm Reich's orgone theories and devices. * The suppression of cancer 'cures' based on treatment other than radiation, pharmaceutical drugs and surgery. * The recent suppression of ozone therapy for AIDS and cancer sufferers by the US Food and Drug Administration, and the hounding of anyone involved in such therapy, in particular the three-year incarceration without trial of Basil Wainwright in Miami. * The alleged crash of a UFO in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, and the subsequent cover-up by the military. The 'Face on Mars', which is featured on the back cover, was photographed by NASA's Viking orbiter in the Cydonia Plain region of Mars in 1976, and was identified by some scientists, including Dr Brian O'Leary as being possible evidence of a gigantic humanoid visage created by a former civilisation. Proponents believe that nearby pyramid-like formations are similar evidence of intelligent life 'out there'. Whether one buys that thesis or not, O'Leary and Stanley V. McDaniel do present a convincing case that further investigation of the photographic evidence was suppressed by NASA, which restricted access to the images, and the scientific press, which rejected papers on the subject and generally ridiculed the idea. Dr Mark Carlotto, a director of a research group at the image processing laboratory at the Analytical Sciences Corporation in Reading, Massachusetts, used fractal analysis of the face image. O'Leary explains: 'This rather complex algorithm in image- processing allows one to determine the tendency of a landscape to look the same at a range of scales or resolutions. A self- similar or fractal terrain is almost always found in nature. A non-fractal terrain normally marks a feature which is formed by intelligence. Scientists uses fractals in military space and aerieal reconnaissance to discern tanks, equipment and buildings partly camouflaged by trees and terrain. Carlotto found that the face and some other features on Mars are not fractal, suggesting that they are not natural. The face itself was the least natural of many Martian landforms analysed.' Also, geographer Erol Torun examined one of the pyramids and found: '...The ratios between the five principal angles at the pyramid apex 'express the universal mathematical constants of the square roots of 2,3,5,6, e, and pi... These constants should be known by any civilization possessing Egyptian level technology... The constants themselves are universal because they exist regardless of the number base being used.' No doubt, with the right algorithms, you could prove that 'The Face' represents Elvis Aaron Presley and the proportions of the 'pyramids' on Mars also relate directly to every single one of Presley's concert dates in Las Vegas. But seriously, while it's easy for the boffins to blind mere mortals like me with science, it is the suppression of ideas that arouses my curiosity even more. Why would NASA want to limit access to such images and apparently prevent further studies of the Cydonia Plain? Why is the scientific press so unwilling to give page space to these seemingly well-credentialed proponents of the possibility of intelligent life out there some time in the past, if not the present? O'Leary's answer is most intriguing: 'So, to have a humoid on the very next planet over from earth suggests one of two things, both of them very disturbing to progressive liberal scientific mentalities. You are suggesting either that there is an intrinisic 'humanoidizing' force in the universe (which goes against the atheistic basis of the science itself), or that humanoids have fome from elsewhere and been associated with this planet, this solar system. If it's the former, then you are very close to spiritualizing the universe. If it's the latter, then you are giving aid and comfort to the whole ancient-astronaut fringe which is so distasteful to modern astronomers.' Also cited is the October 5, 1982, press statement by Dr Brian T. Clifford of the Pentagon stating that 'contact between US citizens and extraterrestrails or their vehicles is strictly illegal' - in terms of Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations, July 16, 1969, which specifies that anyone guilty of such contact 'automatically becomes a wanted criminal to be jailed for one year and fined US$5,000'. Also the NASA administration 'is empowered to determine, with or without a hearing, that a person or object has been 'extraterrestrially exposed' and impose an indeterminae quarantine'. So, if you want to make contact with possible intelligent life 'out there', be sure you don't do so in the USA. Perhaps NASA, like H.G. Wells believes that them Martians is downright mean critters. 'Sorry, ET, we can't go on meeting like this, my government suspects something.' One of the most significant examples of suppression of ideas is the case of Sigmund Freud, as related by Jonathan Eisen, referring to Jeffrey Masson's 1984 best-seller 'The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory'. One of Freud's first major papers, 'The Aetiology of Hesteria', presented to the Vienna Society of Psychiatry and Neurology in 1896, proposed that 'sexually abused children, many of whom had come from 'respectable middle class' homes, displayed significant 'hysterias' later on in life... Freud believed what his patients were telling... namely that they had been sexually assaulted, usually by their fathers, but sometimes by their mothers, and were living in shame and pain and self loathing.' However, such was the backlash from his colleagues that Freud was effectively frozen out of the Viennese medical fraternity, prompting him to write to close friend Wilhem Fleiss: 'I am as isolated as you could wish me to be: the word has been given out to abandon me, and a void is forming round me.' When he recanted, it was, as Eisen says, 'like something out of Stalin's trials of the 1930's when Freud wrote of his patients... 'I believed (their) stories, and consequently supposed that I had discovered the roots of the subsequent neuroses in these experiences of sexual seduction in childhood... If the reader feels inclined to shake his head at my credulity, I cannot altogether blame him.' However, the suppression continued well after Freud's public recantation in 1905. Masson, former director of the Freud Archives, ran into opposition from Anna Freud, who 'virtually admitted that she deleted her father's crucial letters herself dealing with the seduction theory and his interest in childhood rape.' Masson concluded: 'The psychoanalytic movement that grew out of Freud's accomodation to the views of his peers holds to the present position that Freud's earlier position was simply an aberration.' Imagine how different mental health care in the 20th century might have been if, somehow, Freud had stuck to his guns and persisted with a theory that anticipated the fairly recent professional acknowledgement that a significant proportion of girls - and boys - were, and still are, sexually abused as children. The legacy of Freud's fraud are the generations of survivors of childhood sexual abuse who are only now beginning to be believed. Apart from patches of pure nuttiness, this is an absorbing read. Review by Giles Hugo |