I am not going to waste a lot of time on this. Oh hell, I already have wasted a lot of time on it. I wanted to know if the music truly died on The Day the Music Died. It’s a tough call, but my answer, if had to give an answer, would be no. Nobody died, or maybe four strangers died, or four corpses were brought in to serve as cadavers, or the whole thing, beginning to end was faked.

Start with the plane crash itself: Nobody saw it. That does not mean it did not happen as we are told, but we are missing a critical element, eyewitnesses.

This is the crash site. Three bodies are visible. Closest to us is said to be Richie Valens, and then Holly to the left, and in the field beyond, the Big Bopper. The pilot, at the time of the photo, I assume is still in the wreckage. He too died, we are told.

The plane is said to have cartwheeled 540 feet before coming to rest against the fence. We don’t have photo evidence of that – only verbal reports. Photographs are confined to the place where it finally stopped. Even so, if that is true, the plane would have been moving slowly by the time it got to this point, so that centrifugal force was no longer tearing at the victims, and they were gently deposited here. After all, the fence is not damaged. The plane merely came to rest there.

Given that, it is hard to imagine how the plane, at this time lacking force of movement, was able to deposit the Big Bopper forty feet away and across the fence – forward motion.

This is a better shot of the crash. That is said to be the body of Richie Valens. In those days they did not “Photoshop,” per se, but rather cut and pasted in photographic studios. If Valens’ corpse was added to this shot in a studio, they did a very good job. The grass around his right shoulder and left forearm looks real. The shininess of the hair and jacket is odd, meaning it was probably taken with a flash photo, I suppose, but I see no other evidence of flash reflection in the photo. I would think that a flash would illuminate the area under the wing of the plane in the foreground just beyond the body, but it only casts a shadow caused by sunlight, and this on an overcast day. As can be seen in the first photo above, the body is very close to the wreckage, so a flash should illuminate that area. This indicates that a flash was used to take a photo of the body but was not done at the crash site. This indicates pasting.

(There are as many as ten men in various photos, always just standing, observing. If “Valens” is pasted in, why not them too?)

Then there is this:

The head was badly crushed and deformed, the calverium region wide open and the brain tissue almost completely eviscerated.

That is from the death certificate. The “calverium” region is the top of the skull, and “eviscerated” means “disemboweled.” This person’s head is intact, and, to boot, there is no blood. The calverium is present and uneviscerated.

Buddy Holly’s death was said to be equally gruesome, with his head split open, half his brain tissue missing, and his chest soft due to the internal organs being crushed. The face was badly cut up. We have no photos to support this. It could be just good taste.

Again, going back to the top photograph, there is no evidence of any of this, so we have to guess that the photographer simply withheld the most gruesome shots. Or, that these bodies were actors, or that they were pasted in in a photo studio. All is possible, including real death of the real people. I don’t rule that out.

Here’s an analysis by a blogger named Hoi.palloi, who seems to have a keen eye for this stuff.*

Then you have the convenient halo of “snow” hovering around the tops of the bodies, making convenient cut-outlines framing their rotated bodies-and-chunks-of-ground-and-grass which seem undinted [sic] by their apparently collapsing into it. The snow on the bodies doesn’t look consistent between pictures, and neither do their heads, but the plants are always happily tucking them in for the Big Sleep.

Finally, for me anyway, there is this shot:

I do not know who the grieving man is, but that appears to be the face of a young child on the middle body. The third body from the left appears to be mere clothing arranged to look like a body. This is a fake photo [or a real photo of a staged scene], and it could be a well-known fake, for all I know. But it does come up under the heading “The Day the Music Died,” so someone is presenting it as real.

This post was inspired by the recent death of Prince Rogers Nelson, whose death is also suspicious.

The list of dead musicians is long – next I want to look at John Denver, as we have now a video that has recently appeared and is said to have been filmed in 1996, a year before his death. Something fishy about it, and it is not that he is fly fishing in New Zealand.
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*After I began to look into this, I discovered that others have had the same suspicions over the years. There is nothing new going on here. It is just not widely disseminated. Googling “fake death Buddy Holly” leads you right to debunking sites, but not to any real evidence.

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PS: I should come clean here. I was coy about offering up that they might really have died. I do not think that at all. I think that the wreckage might have been real, perhaps hauled in on the back of a truck and deposited there. Snow then covered the tracks. Everything after that is fake – there were no cars or men standing around, no corpses – that was all pasted in in a photo studio. Most likely no plane took off that night, none of the suposed victims were even at the airport. It was all a manufactured event.

[Note: This post was written in Portland,  and we have seen homelessness here all about, people sleeping in streets and doorways. In one instance we were walking down the sidewalk within a few feet of a bearded and poorly dressed man, and I was approached by a woman hawking some snake oil having to do with travel. I kindly refused her invitation to listen to her presentation. The man a few feet away said “Well, she didn’t want to talk to me.” He knew what what up, his perceptions are keen enough.]

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There are nagging problems in this world that seem never to be solved … addiction and homelessness, for instance. I think the underlying presumption in the minds of those we call “right-wingers” and “progressives” is that the person suffering the problem is helpless.

I have already alienated the pwoggies by suggesting that mental illness is wildly overstated, so I might as well go one step further and suggest that helplessness and victimhood are as well.

I don’t truck with right wingers in these matters … I don’t care about bootstraps or economic betterment because that usually involves some form of wage slavery, or what was referred to in the sixties as “selling out.” In right-wing authoritarian type of mind, these problems are solved by getting a job, working 40,60,80 underpaid hours a week in submission to some over-important cracker. That is just another manner of destruction of the human spirit … and not “empowerment.” (But keep at it, son, and some day you too can be a cracker!)

But the pwoggies are no closer to answers with their shelters and shrinks and drugs. These people are down, seemingly defeated, and possibly on the way out. If there is to be redemption, it has to come from inside. If it does not come from there, it will not happen.

It will not be found in drugs, twelve-stepping, religious faith or getting a job. For each person the answer, if one exists, is buried under a life of defeat that results in resignation of the spirit. For each person redemption comes from that same source. To step in that person’s life and “do for” him or her is to further rob the spirit. Just as giving a person money robs that person of ambition, so too does stepping in to solve  spiritual problems result in robbing the spirit.

But a bed is nice, and so is food. If we can provide that and dispense with all the other bullshit, maybe these people can find some dignity in knowing that there is a tomorrow. Each one has unique qualities, though perhaps drugs and booze have done so much physical destruction that only a skeleton remains. Even so, the recovery journey has to come from self-leadership and self-discovery. Otherwise, it will not happen.

Keep the shrinks away, however. They ain’t got a clue. Keep the preachers away. They are false leaders. Keep the right wingers and pwoggies away … each has a roadmap to a dead-end.

So I tend to agree that food and shelter are necessary to help the homeless people among us. But that is about all I can offer as a solution, and imagine that I am no closer to the answer than anyone else. These are, after all, complex humans, each one a riddle.

Just out of curiosity I “Googled” “Paul and Mike McCartney twins” to see if anyone else had tripped on this information. I went ten pages in, and found not a hint. Even as it was hidden in plain sight, meaning many thousands of people out there must know about them, the Google just doesn’t seem to know.

The Google is just another illusion, designed to make it appear that you have free access to ideas. It is perhaps one level deeper in thought control, as you think you are accessing the world, but … not. Google, a campus in Silicon Valley, is not into freedom of speech or exploration of new ideas. Quite the opposite. They merely exist to give us that impression.

They are Intel. I quit using them several years ago when they announced that they keep track of any searches I do for “advertising” purposes. I use Bing. But I am no fool. I have never thought for a second that Bing and Google are separate operations. They are merely Democrat-Republican, Microsoft-Apple,  Coke-Pepsi. Bing is tracking me too, and if ever I refuse to pay my taxes or decide to run for office, they can mine my data and find out all about me.

Fortunately, I do not matter. As with all of those thousands of others who easily figured out the McCartney twins, we remain anonymous.

The young son of a friend, age 10 or so, is currently enthralled by space aliens and UFO’s. His mother mentioned this in an “it’s just so cute” frame of mind. I hope she does not ‘set him straight’, but rather allows him to continue to explore. What he is doing is really important, and anyway, maybe he’s on to something important. Perhaps she can guide him by helping him ask good questions, like “Is that photo real?”, or “Do they really know that for a fact?” Also, she can suggest as he sits staring at the wall, puzzled, “Maybe you can dig a little deeper. There’s an answer if you keep looking.”

But the worst thing she can do is worry that he does not have correct information about our world. Let him believe as he will as he explores as he can. I fear that some teacher, some thought control guru, will set him straight, make sure that he believes what he should believe, using proper authority figures as a guide. That will destroy his creative impulse, and discourage critical thinking. He is, after all, learning by doing. That is the only way, as I see it, to learn to think critically – trial and error. Studying text books on logical fallacies or syllogisms (not done anyway) is not nearly as valuable as totally screwing up and getting something totally wrong, and realizing it.

Telling kids what to think is a grievous sin. Another friend spent many tedious days during his teaching career “proctoring” ACT tests for his high school. That’s what we do – fill our kids’ heads with facts and demand that they read them back correctly to get into a “good” school. It’s how education came to be what it is today – they slowly replaced curiosity with memorization.

Is the children learning? Nope.

Allow them to explore, gently guiding them as they go their own direction, giving them the basic tools to work things out on their own … that has a name – I’ve forgotten it … what was it … we used to do this sort of thing in past centuries … hmmm .. oh yeah! I remember! It is called “education.”

 

Envision a small room full of children and toys. The toys are of the boring kind, plastic bats and wiffle balls, those spongy basketballs that don’t bounce very well, and plastic tables and chairs with tea sets where most of the pieces have long been lost. It’s a boring time for the kids, but they are young and so don’t know what they are missing. They can use their imaginations and somehow make fun of it all.

In a few years their imaginations will be gone. The room will wear them down, make them forget how to pretend and have fun. Then they’ll be ready to be regular people.

The kids have a room monitor to watch them all day long. They are never left alone unless they are asleep, and even then the room monitor listens in through a microphone and can peep in through a spy hole.

Outside the small room is a town full of people, a forest full of danger and excitement. But the kids never get to see that, at least on their own. They are kids. They get in the way. We hired people to keep them in that room so we can go on about our business. They can be a nuisance, after all, so many questions, so much energy.

And the forest – don’t even think about it! Maybe the monitor will take them there on a field trip, but they will be watched closely. Grown-ups are scared in the forest too, and usually don’t go there without a gun. But the kids are curious. There is genuine excitement and danger out there. Creative impulses are set free. The games they could play in the forest are so much more intense than swinging a plastic bat or sipping fake tea from a tiny cup. They invigorate the kids, make them hard to manage.

I know, if you’ve read this far, that you think I have constructed an allegory about our school system. It does work that way. School, as we do it, destroys youth and kills imagination. As designed.

But that is not my thrust. The allegory is about our political system.

Voters are kept in a small room and only allowed to play with bad toys, these awful candidates who are insincere and won’t have any power after the election anyway. Voters are kept far away from the real action.

Voters are discouraged from exploring on their own. Even if they want to leave the system, they are always brought back to the room and told “Vote. It’s your duty. But only for one of these two. That’s your choice.” Voters are not allowed real games and candidates, or to have a real say in how their country is run.

That is all that elections are, folks – a way of keeping us out of everyone’s hair. The more we believe, the harder we debate and fight about our candidates, the better for the real leaders.

After all, we are the children. We have to stay busy doing something, and elections are the best way yet devised to soak up our energy, kill our imaginations, and keep us out of their hair.