Of Weeds and Wheat, Part 3

OF CHARLATANS AND DISEMINATORS OF INVALID ‘FACTS’

Believe it or not, there are those who base their whole - let’s call it - “work” on an mysterious event.

Of course you can’t possibly know exactly what I’m talking about - only those authors could! as only they were privy to the actual occurrences of such events. Only they could reveal to us the particulars (and significance) of some such “occurrence”.

Some of those folks have ‘conversed with God’, one had ‘communicated with an exotically named non-human civilization that originated on Mars and has been watching us Earthlings for millenniums’. Apparently, it just so happened, they felt a sudden urge to divulge to our author some very important knowledge regarding the future of mankind.

Some such folks even claimed to have communicated with the beings from the future or with the representatives of some known or unknown civilizations already extinct for - no one can really ascertain how many - millenniums.

It shouldn’t, then, surprise us how easily it is for us to pick up a copy of the ‘firsthand source’ about the civilization that went off to create new habitats on a distant planet and are now communicating with Earthlings through the channels that only human imagination could invent. Nor should we be taken aback by learning that there are ‘ambassadors’ of such civilizations here on Earth and are in hiding deep under the surface. They use crystals as transmitters to send signals to our special author’s microwave, sometimes - a vacuum cleaner.

The world is full of the “inspired” mediums. They take it upon themselves to brings us the messages from Jesus or from other dimensions or from some spiritual words.

So many hundreds of bearers of the messages important for the human race, so many hundreds of those messages, so much imagination running wild…

What do you know?!!! Sarcasm aside, many gullible people fell under enough influence of such ‘leaders’ to eventually join a cult or a sect, and ended up living pitiful and dependent lives. Because of such misplaced beliefs there were some poor souls who even paid the ultimate price. Fortunately, such extreme cases are very rare.

Even so, I am compelled to mention one example I feel illustrates this extreme gullibility pretty well.

Quite transparent in his lunacy, yet very skilled in manipulation techniques, the ‘guru’ of a certain group of crazed followers convinced them that they could meet up with their alien brothers who, just so the coincidence would have it, ‘were abiding on’ the very real and at the time approaching ‘Hale-Bop comet’. There was a catch. They (the followers) had to first be dead. Not seeing through the sick plan of a man who probably wanted to commit a suicide but was too cowardly to do it without a company, these poor brain-washed people, sadly, did just that - committed a collective suicide..

I noticed I again returned to the “dark-side” that I vouched to avoid. Apparently, it’s rather difficult for me not to. Nevertheless, I don’t mind that I at least touched up on the other side of the coin of this type of research.

OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIC-FACTUAL AND THE THEORIZING AUTHORS, A WORD OR TWO MORE

Let’s now take a walk along the sunny side of the street. Let us say a few words about the hard-working authors whose books fascinate us with the breadth and depth of the first-rate quality research that they utilize and - why not - with the theories that, regardless of whether we agree or disagree with them, never betray the truth of the facts they are rooted in. More so often than not, those facts themselves also will be presented in an outstanding, unique manner.

Since the anomalies and phenomena can be (and usually are), very divergent and spread over quite a vast field of inquiry, most of the encyclopedic-style authors eventually become experts in one area they research to a greater depth and write about the most. Do note, however, that it is not uncommon that an expert in a particular field would also have quite a breadth of knowledge that draws from many other related fields. Consequently, as evident in their works, many a time these authors will branch out and explore the inter-relatedness of various phenomena.