In looking for something on The Hellstrom Chronicles, I found this lengthy treatise on fake science.
It’s about the cross over fact and fiction as depicted in “documentaries”. When it’s “Ancient Aliens”, we know it’s junk, but when it’s “GMO’s are killing us”, we fail at discernment. Or the case of Hellstrom, when it’s “we’re all going to die because we suck”.
The memory invoked was this 70’s TV show
A single, cryptic phone-in to a late-night radio show by an
unidentified caller in southern Florida, for example, is enough to suggest a
supernatural cause to the strange phenomena covered in In Search of …’s
episode on the Bermuda Triangle (01.04; airdate, 27 April, 1977). Another
episode of that series devoted to the “Magic of Stonehenge” (01.24; airdate, 10
September, 1977) begins with a string of reasons why the massive stones
would be next to impossible to get to the site, let alone into position, and
proceeds to compile numerous esoteric uses for the site, including its use as a
sort of ancient communications network, or as a generator of a massive
magnetic field. “The question which still eludes us,” intones host Leonard
Nimoy in the episode’s coda, “is who erected these working monuments?
Clearly they were the work of people more advanced than we had thought
possible for that time.
I was watching it, and the show said, “the phone lines cleared, except this one”, as if that was fact, and as if the phone lines never clear. I was watching with my mother and the phone rang just then, she was upset because it seemed like such an important revealing bit of data. The show continued with disconnected bits of data, peppered with “questions” and wild speculative suggestions of answers.
Anyway, now our Presidential candidates do this all the time, so, we learned nothing.