‘Orphan Conspiracies' in need of a good home

The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy, by James & Lance Morcan. US$5.62 (Kindle Edition), Amazon. Reviewed by David Riddell.

Lance and James Morcan are a New Zealand father-and-son writing team who have between them produced five novels. These include The Orphan Trilogy, a series about a group of genetically enhanced super-humans raised from birth to do the bidding of a shadowy elite who secretly control the world. Sounds far-fetched, although Goodreads members have rated the first in the series, The Ninth Orphan, at #7 on the site's list of Best Spy Novels - just behind The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and just ahead of Smiley's People. On the other hand the entire trilogy rates only 255th equal on the Conspiracy Fiction list (Dan Brown holds the top two spots), so I'm not sure how credible that ranking is.

In the course of researching background for their books, the Morcans say they explored "all sorts of alternative concepts" and sought out people who could enlighten them about these. Many readers have asked how much truth there is in the conspiracies they describe, and The Orphan Conspiracies sets out to answer those questions.

They take pains in their introduction to distance themselves from those they refer to as the Tinfoil Hat Network; probably 95 percent of conspiracy theories are pure crackpot stuff with not a shred of evidence to support them, they say. But, they maintain, there are more believable theories out there which are potentially true. Without pausing for breath and without a trace of irony they then give an example: the Establishment discredits conspiracy theories in general by disseminating the most bizarre output from the Tinfoil Hatters, so as to undermine the credibility of those "independent researchers" who may publish awkward truths.

The book is divided into 29 chapters, each outlining a particular conspiracy, or set of conspiracies. The first is on false flag operations, in which a country's political and/or military leaders stage an attack by an enemy in order to justify their own aggression. There are several documented accounts of such events, although one of the best examples, the staged assault on a German border radio station at Gleiwitz1 used by the Nazis to justify their invasion of Poland, is not mentioned by the Morcans. Rather, they frame recent tensions with North Korea in these terms, and provide considerable detail on the Gulf of Tonkin incident2 which led to the ramping up of American military involvement in Vietnam. However although declassified documents now clearly show that the Americans fired first, and that a second alleged attack by North Vietnamese naval forces never happened, to me the incident looks more like cock-up than conspiracy. Certainly the Americans didn't profit from it in the long term.

This chapter also has some interesting material on Operation Northwoods3, which involved plans drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to assassinate Cuban émigrés, sink boats of Cuban refugees, hijack planes, blow up a US ship, and orchestrate terrorism in American cities, all to be blamed on Fidel Castro as a justification for intervention in Cuba. The plans were real enough, but they were rejected by President Kennedy in 1962, and Joint Chiefs chairman General Lyman Lemnitzer was transferred to another job a few months later. "The following year, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, while Lemnitzer was appointed Supreme Allied Commander of NATO," the Morcans (correctly) state. "Go figure!" they add.

The next chapter on mind control starts fairly solidly with the Nazi Lebensborn4 programme, which is well-documented although it involved conventional indoctrination techniques on young children rather than 'brainwashing' of adults. The authors slide from this by way of Project Paperclip5 (which after World War II relocated German scientists, many of them Nazis) to America's Project MK-Ultra. This latter programme, also well-documented in spite of the CIA destroying most records of it in 1973, investigated mind control and interrogation techniques, including attempts to erase personalities of subjects and construct new ones. Sadly, the researchers became very adept at the former but never managed the latter, leaving many of their experimental subjects severely damaged6. The programme's director, Sidney Gottlieb, concluded his work had been useless7.

The Morcans, however, are not so sure. In later chapters, with minimal evidence, they suggest assassins such as Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark Chapman (Chapman's victim John Lennon, being prominent in the peace movement, was evidently a major threat to the establishment) and Sirhan Sirhan were mind-controlled "real-life Manchurian Candidates", acting under the influence of subliminal commands, possibly embedded in JD Salinger's novel Catcher in the Rye. They portray Sirhan as being in a "hypnotic state" the night he shot Robert Kennedy, and ignore statements he has made in intervening years8 that he killed the presidential candidate because of his support for Israel (Sirhan is a Palestinian).

Rather more interesting is the Morcans' take on John Hinckley Jr, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan. They point out, apparently correctly9, that Hinckley's father was a personal friend of George HW Bush - who would have become president had the assassination attempt succeeded. His brother was due to have lunch with George W Bush the day after the shooting. Fascinating stuff, though surely if the Bush family had prior knowledge they would have taken steps to distance themselves from Hinckley's family in the period around the event? Or perhaps the Bushes are cleverer than they appear, and that's just what they want us to think…

That's about as good as The Orphan Conspiracies gets. While continuing to mock the Tinfoil Hatters, the authors' evidence for their claim that a shadowy "Splinter Civilization" secretly controls global affairs for their own benefit repeatedly strains credibility.

Take the chapter on suppressed science. This has plenty of material that is very familiar to skeptics, such as the supposedly suppressed discoveries of Nikola Tesla, free-energy machines repeatedly quashed by the scientific and industrial elites, HAARP, and of course cold fusion. All these claims have been thoroughly debunked. Another chapter describes the work of "leading Japanese scientist" Takaaki Musha (who wrote the book's Foreword); he claims "superluminal tunnelling photons" in microtubules in the brain explain human intelligence, and could lead to the development of self-aware computers. Furthermore, if "an individual's brain can connect with the superluminal field which is part of all other living organisms, then it may be possible for that individual to come from an awareness of what has been termed the universal brain." Enough said.

Then there is Ormus, a substance fed to the orphans in the Morcans' novels to enhance their mental and physical functioning. It's not clear why this is a conspiracy, but there are hundreds of websites promoting various formulations of this white powder which purportedly consists of "monoatomic" forms of gold, rhodium, iridium, copper, platinum and other metals. These can supposedly become superconducting under certain conditions. Ingesting small quantities is said to have effects including "[s]lowing aging, assisting mental wellbeing, replacing gray hair, improving eyesight, re-growing missing teeth, increasing body immunity and correcting damaged DNA". It's even reported to have caused a cat to regrow its amputated tail.

RationalWiki10 on the other hand describes it as "a fictitious group of substances … They definitely do not contain any gold or other precious metals, which is in fact a good thing, because water-soluble forms of precious metals are very toxic."

The greatest value of The Orphan Conspiracies may be as a reference for those wanting insight into the minds of conspiracy theorists, though it's far from a comprehensive treatment of all the theories out there. Nothing on the Moon Landing Hoax, 9/11 as an Inside Job, Chemtrails, or Barack Obama's birth certificate, for example. It could also do with better references for some of the claims made, though in the age of the search engine this is less important than it was.

More serious is the selective quoting of some sources. For example when discussing alleged secret prisons set up to detain anyone deemed a threat to national security the Morcans cite RationalWiki as saying:

"There are several videos purporting to show footage of the camps, as well as shots of ominous-looking fences and webpages listing locations of over 800 camps, allegedly all fully guarded and staffed full-time despite being completely empty."

They omit the next sentence which reads:

"In addition to the implausibility of such a massive conspiracy being kept totally silent, the evidence is damaged by the fact that the videos and pictures actually depict everything from National Guard training centers to Amtrak repair stations to North Korean labor camps."11

Disclaimers at the end of almost every chapter stating they could be totally wrong about all they've just written, or that they're merely reporting the ideas of others, don't really cut it either.

Just occasionally there's a snippet that may give the reader pause, and yes, there are undoubtedly powerful individuals and groups who use their positions to further increase their wealth and power at the expense of the rest of us. But if the conspiracy theorists (among whose numbers the Morcans definitely sit despite their protestations) really want to convince us our destiny is ruled by sinister secret overlords, they'll have to do a lot better than this.

References

  1. ww2today.com/the-gleiwitz-incident-and-the-first-man-to-die-in-world-war-ii
  2. militaryhistory.about.com/od/vietnamwar/p/gulfoftonkin.htm
  3. abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92662
  4. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Lebensborn.html
  5. news.bbc.co.uk2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4443934.stm
  6. Collins, Anne 1988: In The Sleep Room: The Story of the CIA Brainwashing Experiments in Canada. Lester and Orpen Dennys Ltd, Toronto.
  7. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-sidney-gottlieb-1080920.html
  8. www.nytimes.com/1989/02/20/us/sirhan-felt-betrayed-by-kennedy.html
  9. www.rense.com/general45/hink.htm
  10. rationalwiki.org/wiki/ORMUS
  11. rationalwiki.org/wiki/FEMA_concentration_camps