The Brothers Bogdanoff and the Jadczyks

It's funny how things come around. Last week I watched a fascinating documentary on the Bogdanoff brothers. For those not in the know, the Bogdanoffs are a fascinating case study - two brothers who became celebrities via a TV show promoting science, and then somehow bluffed their way into receiving PhDs in physics despite their theses being nonsensical in places. Many of you might recognise the brothers from their later years, where they used extreme plastic surgery to radically alter their look.

I highly recommend that you take some time to read up on these brothers, including about their recent deaths in the middle of our current pandemic - I bet you can guess what their stance on the COVID vaccine was!

At one point the documentary I was watching mentioned that someone who helped the brothers to create a fake university, which was part of their effort to use “sock puppet” accounts online to defend their reputations, was called Arcadiusz Jadczyk. Huh, I thought… I recognise that name. Now bear with me while we go on a short skeptical detour…

Many years ago, when I worked at a bank, I had a colleague who was into all sorts of conspiracy theories. As a fairly new skeptic, I had tried to engage him and his claims. For example, he told me he had built an over-unity device - a perpetual motion machine. I asked him to bring it in for me to see it working, and, sure enough, a few weeks later he brought in a converted magnetic hard drive with the cover taken off, and nails and coils of wire attached to it. When I asked if I could see it working, I was told that it only works when there's a battery attached.

Now, you might think this is a weird thing for an over-unity device to require. For one, your skeptical brain is probably screaming that the battery is going to provide power to the device, and it's not an over-unity device if it needs a power input. And two you're going to be thinking that this is the daftest thing ever. But, it may surprise you to know that many supposed physics-defying devices like this need a battery to work. For the builders of these devices, their usual claim is that a battery is needed to “smooth” the current coming from the energy generating part of the device, so that it can be fed back into the device to keep it working. The proof of over-unity is given via measurements made with multimeters and a little maths.

Those in the know understand that this is where the trickery happens. Most multimeters have some quirks that mean that they aren't great at showing average voltages/currents, especially for the kinds of fluctuating electrical flows created by generators and alternators. If a meter over-estimates an average reading, the resulting power calculations will give a higher value than the amount of power actually being generated. And, as I'm sure you already suspected, the battery in these devices is the power source that actually keeps the machine running, not the power fed back into the system. And, of course, nobody with one of these devices keeps it running for days on end, as it'll eventually run out of power and come to a stop.

Other ideas I heard from this colleague included that drinking bleach will unlock the surface of bad bacteria and kill them, using a “key” of five electrons. I also heard that earth's twin, planet Nibiru, was going to usher in the age of Aquarius, a new age of global stability, peace, prosperity and new technology, and that 9/11 was a controlled demolition. And I was told that there's a secret cabal of psychopaths who run every major company in the world. For these last two ideas, I was given books to read - and the book about psychopaths was written by none other than Ark Jadczyk. Finally, we're back to the Bogdanoffs and their partner in crime.

After reading Jadczyk's book about psychopaths, many years ago, I did some background reading on him. It turns out he's married to a fascinating woman called Laura Knight-Jadczyk. The more I read about her, the weirder things became. She has been involved in spreading so, so many weird and wonderful conspiracy ideas, around Nibiru, free energy, 9/11, the New World Order, weather modification and much, much more. It was obvious from this that my work colleague was consuming all of this drivel and swallowing it hook, line and sinker.

So how did Laura receive all of her information about these conspiracies? Did she have an insider leaking information to her? Nope - she used to run regular seances at her house, where she used a Ouija board to communicate telepathically with an alien race called the Cassiopaeians. These aliens would relay the information to her through the Ouija board. I read a great description of how this used to happen: Laura sitting at a table in front of the Ouija board, with a glass of whisky and a cigarette in one hand, and the planchette in the other. The planchette would move around the board so rapidly that she would have several of her male followers standing over her with notepads and pens, furiously trying to note down the sequence of letters as they were pointed out. And then this information was posted to an internet forum, which is where my colleague was reading it uncritically.

It was frustrating at the time that no amount of evidence I could give to the contrary would convince my colleague that the things he was reading from a woman in the US channelling aliens were nonsense. I've occasionally wondered how his life has been since I worked with him - believing in so many paranoid ideas must be tiring. I've just searched for his name, and although I can't find him on LinkedIn, when searching his name in Google the only result that looks likely to be him is an obituary from two years ago. So maybe he's no longer with us, which is sad.

Speaking of Ouija boards, a good friend made one for me recently! It's taken pride of place in my collection of skeptical oddities, which include reflexology socks, an electroacupuncture device, divining rods, placebo pills, and a can of Yeti Meat. Maybe I'll see if I can contact the Cassiopaeians and finally find out the truth about Area 51.