Techno-Paranoia

"Within a single generation," writes David Ritchie, "paranoia has become as American as baseball and Mom's apple pie." That made itself more than evident in the hours and days that followed the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Even before the government and the media had announced their own conclusions?that it was the work of Osama bin Laden and fanatical members of his Al Qaeda network?the Internet was abuzz with theories, some more believable than others.

After the "official" announcement was made and America began mobilizing for war, the rumors and theories began spiraling out of control: remote-controlled planes were flown into those buildings by our own government, either to institute a police state or to facilitate an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Some claimed that the buildings were taken down by a Russian superweapon, or a massive ray gun or by something that could bend time and space. Only one thing was certain?it wasn't the work of a group of Muslim terrorists armed with box cutters.

Ritchie was paying very close attention to all this. He had reason to.

Ritchie, a bearded man of about 50 who has lived and worked in Seoul, Korea, since the mid-90s, is a specialist in geophysics and aerospace technology. Over the past two decades, he's written books about everything from volcanoes and earthquakes to artificial intelligence and the history of American space-based weapons systems. He's also written countless articles on science and technology for a variety of magazines. It's only been in the last few years, however, that he's turned his attentions toward conspiracy theories. Or, more specifically, what he has labeled "techno-paranoia"?those particular conspiracies that revolve around technological issues?UFOs, "scalar weapons," antigravity engines and the like.

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Two years ago, Ritchie began working on a booklength study of the techno-paranoid phenomenon, analyzing and tracing the histories of the various grand conspiracies he was discovering online. The book was just about finished on the morning of Sept. 11, but the attacks, he says, gave the project a new sense of urgency. The resulting work (which I was allowed to read in manuscript form) is entitled What REALLY Destroyed the World Trade Center: Techno-Paranoia and the American Mind.

On the surface, it's a sly, funny?but very insightful?overview of not only WTC conspiracies, but the Roswell Incident, S-4 (an Area 51-style secret underground base near Las Vegas), the treaty the U.S. signed with aliens back in the 40s, the Philadelphia Experiment and?my personal favorite?the Phoenix Project.

It's much too complicated to lay out here, but in a nutshell, the Phoenix Project involves another secret underground base on Long Island where American scientists are working with aliens on everything from human/alien hybrids to weather-control devices to time machines. In the process, they've also created an army of brainwashed Aryan teens known as "Montauk Children," and have released the occasional monster into the surrounding countryside. Lost Nazi gold is involved somehow, too, as well as the faked death of mathematician John Von Neumann.

In tracking these stories, Ritchie has found himself in a whole new world?one populated with superintelligent alien lizards, warring extraterrestrial factions, evil doctors, fabulous machines and James Bondian plots to rule the world.

Ritchie?much like the Amazing Randi?brings his scientific background to all of these diabolical schemes, looking at them with clear eyes and pointing out that most of them simply don't make any sense. What damns most techno conspiracies, he says, is a flawed understanding of engineering, physics and chemistry?together with the fact that there's simply no hard evidence to back most of them up. He even translates a number of "alien" words and names found in "secret documents," only to discover they are, in actuality, French, Korean or Japanese. Of course, that might just be a remarkable coincidence.

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More important than his scientific background, however, is his working knowledge of science fiction. As it turns out, nearly every aspect of most of these stories can be traced back to some particular movie or tv show?like Star Trek?or the works of Tolkien, Philip K. Dick and H.G. Wells. Certain elements can be found originally in Dungeons & Dragons, while still others (those involving secret underground bases) find their roots in Greek, Roman and Norse mythology.

Mostly Star Trek, though. But instead of simply dismissing these conspiracies with a flippant, "it sounds like something you'd see on Star Trek," Ritchie cites specific episodes.

"When young," he told me, "I enjoyed science fiction, including the original Star Trek series, as well as books and stories by science fiction writers. What I read and watched back then helped supply the background for this book, because techno-paranoid themes were prominent in the stories I grew up reading." (Also helpful was the fact that Ritchie's father, Virgil Ritchie, was a NASA engineer who helped design the Mercury space capsule.)

Although techno-paranoia in one form or another has been around for centuries, he traces its modern incarnation back to the end of World War II: 1947, to be exact. Along with the advent of the atomic bomb, the American public was also hearing more about increasingly powerful computers. The paranoia arose from the realization that these devices?so far beyond our understanding?were controlled by a very small, select, anonymous group of people. At the same time, you have the first wave of modern "flying saucer" sightings?as well as the Roswell incident.

"At that point," he says, "themes that earlier had been largely confined to science fiction?such as hostile and technologically sophisticated aliens menacing Earth?suddenly became both headline news and Hollywood fare."

As time went on, the "raging sense of insecurity" that gave rise to our initial suspicion toward technocrats only grew worse.

"Within only a few months, millions of people came to believe in an imminent threat from extraterrestrials, or else hostile powers here on Earth, wielding super-technologies against us in the form of flying saucers, death rays, disintegrator beams or whatever... It took no great effort, then, to imagine that someone or something 'out there' might be prepared to conquer us, just as America had used the A-bomb to defeat Japan."

What had been popular science fiction in the past?simple escapist literature?was not so unbelievable anymore.

"A synergy developed between science fiction and techno-paranoia," Ritchie explains, "as each reinforced the other. For example, anxiety about computers led to paranoid tales of computers taking over the world; the stories aggravated that anxiety; and so on."

(Later years would give us the HAL 9000 in 2001, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Demon Seed's Proteus IV?and Microsoft.)

"In fact," he goes on, "one can trace many techno-paranoid motifs?UFO abductions, the Montauk monster?back to a small number of motion pictures from the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth and The Mysterians."

More recently born conspiracies result from more recent Hollywood fodder. He traces the "black helicopter" phenomenon of the 1990s, for instance, back to the 1983 techno-conspiracy thriller Blue Thunder.

"Also," he asks, "is it mere coincidence that techno-paranoid accounts of reptilian extraterrestrials at underground bases in the U.S. carry such strong echoes of the old tv series V, in which intelligent lizards invaded Earth; and that the underground base/reptilian mythos emerged on a large scale immediately after that series was broadcast in the early 1980s? The linkage here seems clear to me."

One of the most remarkable examples he points up is that of Alternative 3?a documentary aired by the BBC in 1977. Alternative 3?which, in part, argued that a secret space program had been established, and that humans were being abducted to be used as slave labor in extraterrestrial mining operations?was a satire, much like Craig Baldwin's Tribulation 99. In fact, it was supposed to air on April 1. Due to scheduling difficulties, however, the show was pushed back a couple weeks. As a result, many viewers believed that what they were seeing was true. So much so, in fact, that the convoluted "Alternative 3" conspiracy is still being touted by many conspiracists today?and elements of the show have wormed their way into other conspiracy theories as well. Yet it was a hoax from the beginning.

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When it comes to the events surrounding the attacks on the World Trade Center?what Ritchie calls "an ideal situation for paranoid speculation"?the conspiracies at play, while not exactly more sedate, do tend to be more earthbound than some of those others. For instance, word spread fast in those first few hours that the disruption in cellphone service was evidence that a neutron bomb had actually brought the towers down.

Only problem with that, Ritchie points out, is that a neutron bomb wouldn't have brought the towers down. That's the whole idea behind a neutron bomb. What's more, if the cellphones had indeed been knocked out by an electromagnetic pulse, they wouldn't have started working again a short while later.

The "official" explanation has it that the buildings collapsed after burning jet fuel melted the support beams. That was the starter's pistol for many of the conspiracists, who argued, for a number of reasons, that it had to be something else.

Jet fuel, one website reported, burns at a much lower temperature than the reported 800 degrees Celsius. What's more, steel melts at temperatures upward of 1500 degrees Celsius?so something other than jet fuel had to be at work.

Besides, other theorists pointed out, the jet fuel would ignite and burn up quickly after impact?not stick around for two hours in concentrated form. Still others, taking their cues from that, noted that if you look at footage of the impact, it's clear that most of the fuel exploded on the outside of the buildings.

So if the jet fuel didn't do it, what brought those buildings down? Here's where things grew sinister.

If you watch the way the buildings collapsed?pancaking straight down upon themselves?you see they bore a striking resemblance to the controlled demolitions we've seen on the tv so many times. Obviously, someone with demolitions experience had planted charges throughout both buildings beforehand. Weren't there eyewitness accounts of smaller explosions and "popping" noises on lower floors shortly before the collapse?

While Ritchie admits there are certain problems with the jet fuel explanation, he points out that there are two major problems with the demolition story. First, though it's a reasonable explanation, there is no real evidence for any of it. The reported "popping sounds" were also reported as elevator cables snapping. Moreover, if a controlled demolition would do such a good job, why slam a couple planes into the buildings? It would be unnecessary (except, of course, as the perennial "diversion").

Others argued that the buildings were taken down by a disintegrator beam (which Ritchie traces back?only half-jokingly?to the opening scenes from The Pink Panther Strikes Again), or a megasized version of an existing device that uses electromagnetic waves to crush aluminum cans.

The "Can Crusher," Ritchie explains, requires an enormous amount of energy to crush a single can. It's difficult to imagine, then, what source could generate enough energy to take down the Twin Towers.

As for the disintegrator ray, well...

One of the more interesting theories centered on the "Woodpecker," a scalar weapon reportedly developed during the Soviet era. A scalar weapon operates on principles first proposed by physicist James Clerk Maxwell in a famous (and likely mythical) "lost" paper. Using what was, in essence, the unified field theory, it was argued one could create a device that would allow everything from teleportation and time travel to the more mundane tasks of sinking a ship that was halfway around the world?or, in this case, toppling a couple of skyscrapers.

The Soviets built such a weapon, it's said, and even used it to blow the Challenger space shuttle out of the sky. (One website Ritchie found had the Russians renting out the Woodpecker to a group of terrorists, who paid for their time in gold bullion.)

As it turns out, Ritchie admits, the Woodpecker?if it really did have all these wondrous capabilities?could explain away the problems with the official explanation. Only trouble is, there is absolutely no concrete evidence that such a device actually exists.

When you get right down to it, we've never seen buildings like these collapse before, and so the exact causes might always remain, at least in part, a mystery.

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When thinking in terms of techno-paranoia, this grand terror in the face of new technologies, the question immediately comes to mind?don't Americans embrace new technologies as often as they fear them? Home computers, the Internet, cellphones, Palm Pilots. We can't get enough of our gadgets.

He admits it seems like a contradiction.

"Perhaps that is because new technology serves as a convenient focus for both fears and hopes about the future," he says. "The original Star Trek series exemplified this dual outlook. The Enterprise crew lived in a world of technological wonders, yet constantly had to confront threats from technology run amok. That was perhaps the most significant aspect of the series. It dramatized for viewers how little may separate a techno-utopia from a techno-dystopia, and how the difference between them may depend entirely on one's point of view."

In just that way, the Internet has become central to the spread of modern conspiracies?even as the technology allows the government to gather personal information and catalog every keystroke.

"Nonetheless," Ritchie says, "the Internet has given techno-paranoid views an audience and a seeming plausibility that they previously lacked. It is amazing to see what some people will accept as fact merely because they encountered it online."

One of the great dangers of techno-paranoia, according to Ritchie, is the fact that these stories are so very alluring.

"They would explain everything neatly, if only sufficient evidence could be found to support them. Seeking that evidence could become an obsession."

He relates the story of an acquaintance of his who got hooked bad.

"She reached such a state of mind?trying to warn the world of one high-tech conspiracy after another?that she lost her job." Still, for some people, it serves a purpose. "It may increase their anxieties, but it also lets them impose order on a bewildering and frightening mass of information."

Ritchie himself admits that despite his background, his intelligence and that razor he wields?as well as the academic distance he maintains?the allure has gotten to him, too. He's not come away unscathed.

"Many particular cases of techno-paranoia," he confesses, "bear the marks of disinformation operations... Techno-paranoid stories may be based on documents of questionable authenticity, which describe sensational 'revelations' but are submitted through an anonymous contact?perhaps simply dropped through an investigator's mail slot at home. This is a classic pattern of disinformation operations."

That makes him wonder?and worry.

"Do many techno-paranoid stories therefore represent red herrings, so to speak, intended to distract investigators and the public in general from what is really happening? That is itself a paranoid thought. Regardless, it comes easily to mind.

"If that is the case, then what might such disinformation campaigns hide? Do they conceal, perhaps, a secret that would make even extraterrestrial lizards with a taste for human flesh look benign by comparison?"

Which may help explain why the prologue to his book ends with the following:

"If you happen to be highly suggestible and easily frightened, then perhaps you should exercise care in reading what follows. As the late Alfred Hitchcock once wrote: 'Dreams, you know.'"