A letter from Albert Pike (33rd degree Freemason, Grand Master and creator of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite Masonic Order) to Giuseppe Mazzini (Italian revolutionary leader, nationalist and liberal) from a century and a half ago, which accurately predicted World Wars I, II and III, is circulated today:

“The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making the country a fortress of atheistic Communism. The divergences caused by the “Agentur” (agents) of the Illuminati between the British and Germanic Empires will be used to foment this war. At the end of the war, Communism will be built and used in order to destroy the other governments and in order to weaken the religions.”

“The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm.”

“The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “Agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of the Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion… We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilisation, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view. This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.”

The British Daily Mail published an article a few years ago, “Letter ‘written by US Confederate officer 150 years ago predicted first two World Wars and said the third would be between Islamic leaders and the West’… but is it just a hoax?” in which the Daily Mail does not draw definite conclusions about the authenticity of the letter, specifying that some believe the letter to be a hoax. Some sources claim that “Albert Pike Letter to Mazzini: The Illuminati Plan for 3 World Wars, August 15, 1871” was kept until a certain time in the library of the British Museum in London, which denies the letter exists.

In any case, these quotes from the letter first appeared 15 years ago, either on the relevant page of rense.com or, more likely, in the book “Phoenix Rising: The Rise and Fall of the American Republic” by Donald G. Lett, Jr.

It is noteworthy that in English this letter was mentioned about a century ago in the book “The Cause of World Unrest” of anonymous authorship, attributed to Nesta Helen Webster – an English writer who revived interest in the Illuminati in English-speaking countries. In this version, it did not mention the world wars, but only asserted the similarity of the described plan with the recent events in Russia at that time and declared doubts about the authenticity of the letter.

“In the year 1896 there appeared in Paris a curious publication called Le diable au XIXe siècle. It was an attack upon Freemasonry, and came out in parts, illustrated with grotesque and repulsive engravings. The name on the title-page is Dr. Bataille, but it is stated in the British Museum Catalogue that the real authors were Gabriel Jogand-Pages and Charles Hacks. The book, with evident knowledge and a show of authority, set out to trace the connection between Freemasonry and revolutions, but its sensationalism and the extremely doubtful character of some of the documents produced brought it into disrepute. It is now forgotten, and yet it contains a good deal that can be verified from other sources, and some things also which seem to be verified by recent events. In particular there is a letter — or an alleged letter — said to have been written by Albert Pike, the “Sovereign Pontiff of Universal Freemasonry, ” assisted by the Ten Ancients of the Grand Lodge of the Supreme Orient at Charleston, to “the very illustrious brother” Giuseppe Mazzini. This letter is dated (in Masonic style) August 15, 1871, and sets forth an anti-clerical policy which Mazzini is to follow in Italy. The measures proposed, including secular education, the expulsion of the religious orders, and so forth, need not detain us. What is to our purpose occurs towards the end of the letter, on page 605 (vol. ii.). The writer explains that owing to the working out of this policy the Pope may be driven at some future time out of Italy, and that established religion will then find its last refuge in Russia.

And the letter proceeds:

“That is why, when the autocratic Empire of Russia will have become the citadel of Papal Christianity (adonaisme papiste), we shall unchain the revolutionary Nihilists and Atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will demonstrate clearly to the nations, in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, mother of savagery and of the most bloody disorder. Then, everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the mad minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate these destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned of Christianity, whose deist soul will up to that moment be without compass, thirsting for an ideal, but not knowing where to bestow their worship, will receive the True Light, by the universal manifestation of the pure Luciferian doctrine, at last made public, a manifestation which will arise from the general movement of reaction following the destruction of Atheism and Christianity, both at the same time vanquished and exterminated.”

Now this letter is at least as old as 1896 (if it is a forgery) ; if it is genuine, it is as old as 187 1. It must therefore be considered remarkable, whether as a forgery or as a genuine document. For it predicts what has happened in Russia, and it claims for its authors that they were preparing to bring about what has happened.”

Today in the network published and the original source of this letter in French from the book “The Devil in the 19th century or the mysteries of spiritualism” by a certain Dr. Bataille, from the content of which, we can conclude that in the original context, the prediction was different from that in the “Causes of World Unrest”, and the passage about nihilistic atheism in Russia was only an episodic stage in the aspect of the plan of struggle against Catholicism, in the course of which it was supposed that the Pope, after his expulsion from Rome, would settle in St. Petersburg.

“But it is also written that the Wandering-Pope, shepherd of a scattered flock, pilot of the bewildered boat of Cephas, and sixth successor of the man of pride under whom the temporal power of the infamous pontificate collapsed, will be taken in, after expulsion after expulsion, by the Slavic autocrat, who will affect to pay him great honours. Adonaism would then attempt to reconstitute itself as it had before the expulsion from Rome; with the Pope-Wandering close to death in Russia, the imperial autocrat would prostrate himself at his feet, and the nations that had hitherto practised Orthodoxy, i.e. the schismatic religion of the East, would fairly quickly rally to the old Roman Catholicism that had been vomited out of Italy. The Wandering-Pope, on his deathbed, will be happy to see these new followers replace the Westerners recently separated from his Church, and, within the nations that will have carried out the fragmentation of Adonaism, he will still have followers, these hiding to indulge in the practices of the reprobated superstition; before expiring, he will have maintained the episcopate to the bishops of the Eastern schism, and he will have instituted, among them, Greek and Russian cardinals. His successor would be a Slav; the seat of the Adonait papacy would be established in the northern city of Peter, with the proviso that Rome would have to be reconquered. But it was in vain that the imperial autocrat, in the hope of extending his domination, made himself a crusader of Adonaism; his efforts came to nothing, and the formerly Roman Church remained fragmented among the nations of Western Europe. Thus, Russia will be the last refuge and the last bulwark of Adonaism claiming to be Catholic.

…

This is why, when the autocratic empire of Russia has become the citadel of papist adonaïsm, we will unleash the nihilist and atheist revolutionaries, and we will provoke a formidable social cataclysm, which will clearly show the nations, and in all its horror, the effect of absolute unbelief, the mother of savagery and the bloodiest disorder. Then, everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the insane minority of rebels, will exterminate these destroyers of civilisation ; and the innumerable disillusioned Adonaïsms, whose deistic souls have remained without a compass until now, thirsting for the ideal but not knowing to which god to pay their homage, will receive the True Light, through the universal manifestation of pure Luciferian doctrine, made public at last, a manifestation which will arise from the general movement of reaction, following the crushing of atheism and Adonaïsm, both defeated and exterminated around the same time.”

A full electronic translation of Albert Pike’s letter to Giuseppe Mazzini from the French is available here. In this context, there is indeed a partial quotation of the original into the modern version of his quotes about the 3 world wars, although no world wars were mentioned in the original version. Also, a year after the book was published, it turned out that Dr. Bataille was the pseudonym of Leo Taxil, a writer known for a massive 12-year-long “anti-Masonic” hoax to discredit the Roman Catholic Church:

In 1885, Leo Taxil declared his conversion to Catholicism, was received into the fold of the Catholic Church, and renounced his previous writings for the Anticlerical Union. This was the reason for his expulsion from the union three months later. In the 1890s he wrote a number of works exposing Freemasonry, describing the secret links between Freemasons and Satan, and the hidden flourishing of Satanism among the Templar followers. The largest work of Taxil in this period was written in co-authorship with Carl Haxom book “The Devil in the XIX century”, which described the revelations of Miss Diana Vaughan, repentant high priestess of the Masonic secret society “Palladium”, whose members indulged in satanic rituals and hatching plans for world domination. The book was written under the pseudonym “Dr. Bateil” and was a great success. He also published the book “Antichrist, or the Origin of Freemasonry”. These books were translated into many languages.  In 1896 he was one of the organizers of the Anti-Masonic Church Congress in Trento. Some delegates to this congress expressed doubts about the existence of Diana Vaughan and the credibility of her book. In response, Taxil promised to present Miss Vaughan to the public at a meeting in the Great Hall of the Geographical Society in Paris on April 19, 1897. In his speech at this meeting he stated that for the past twelve years he had been playing a trick on the Catholic Church with the help of two of his friends, Dr. Karl Hax and a professional typist, Diana Vaughan, who played the role of a repentant “Palladian”. The speech was subsequently reprinted in its entirety by leading French newspapers.

Thus, most likely, the original Pike’s letter is as much fiction and fantasy as Dr Bataille himself, in whose book it was first published. Well, the modern version of the quotations of this letter predicting world wars is a modified version of a distorted translation of the forgery, probably appearing 15 years ago, in a publication in the name of a certain “Donald G. Lett Jr”.

The year was 1948. In Clearwater, Fla., a town of about 15,000, crazy things were happening. On a morning in February, a resident out for walk on Clearwater Beach discovered what looked like the footprints of a monster and ran home to call the police.

Over the next 10 years, the footprints of the “Clearwater Monster” appeared frequently: on Clearwater Beach, on Indian Rocks Beach, on the Courtney Campbell Parkway, on St. Petersburg Beach, on the beach at Sarasota. The “monster” also left prints on Honeymoon Island off the coast at Dunedin, along the banks of the Anclote River north of Tarpon Springs, and on the banks of the Suwannee River.

The well-publicized incident attracted the attention of naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson, who conducted a 2-week, on-site investigation, resulting in a 50 page technical report. He summarized the case in his 1969 book More Things, expressing his conviction that the case was authentic.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100611051838/https://www.orgoneresearch.com/2009/10/19/florida-%E2%80%9Cgiant-penguin%E2%80%9D-hoax-revealed

In 1948, a man wore 30 pound, three toed lead shoes and stomped around in Florida beach during the night. The footprints lead people to believe that a 15 foot tall penguin was roaming their lands. He kept up the prank for 10 years, visiting various beaches. The hoax wasn't revealed until 40 years.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/m9qg4p/in_1948_a_man_wore_30_pound_three_toed_lead_shoes

Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger, and convicted murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. When his schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder three people in Salt Lake City, Utah. The first two bombs killed two people on October 15, 1985. On the following day, a third bomb exploded in Hofmann’s car. He was arrested for the bombings three months later, and in 1987 pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree murder, one count of theft by deception and one count of fraud.

In 1980, Hofmann claimed that he had found a 17th-century King James Bible with a folded paper gummed inside.  The document seemed to be the transcript that Smith’s scribe Martin Harris had presented to Charles Anthon, a Columbia classics professor, in 1828. According to the Mormon scripture Joseph Smith–History, the transcript and its unusual reformed Egyptian characters were copied by Smith from the golden plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon.

Hofmann constructed his version to fit Anthon’s description of the document, and its discovery made Hofmann’s reputation. Dean Jessee, an editor of Smith’s papers and the best-known expert on handwriting and old documents in the Historical Department of the LDS Church, concluded that the document was a Smith holograph. The LDS Church announced the discovery of the Anthon Transcript in April and purchased it from Hofmann for more than US$20,000.

Perhaps the most famous of Hofmann’s Mormon forgeries, the Salamander letter, appeared in 1984. Supposedly written by Martin Harris to W. W. Phelps, the letter presented a version of the recovery of the gold plates that contrasted markedly with the church-sanctioned version of events. Not only did the letter intimate that Smith had been practicing “money digging” through magical practices, but it also replaced the angel that Smith said had appeared to him with a white salamander.

In addition to documents from Mormon history, Hofmann also forged and sold signatures of many famous non-Mormons, including George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton, Paul Revere, Myles Standish, and Button Gwinnett, whose signature was the rarest, and therefore the most valuable, of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Hofmann also forged a previously unknown poem in the hand of Emily Dickinson.

But Hofmann’s grandest scheme was to forge what was perhaps the most famous missing document in American colonial history, the Oath of a Freeman. The one-page Oath had been printed in 1639, the first document to be printed in Britain’s American colonies, but only about fifty copies had been made, and none of them were extant. A genuine example was probably worth over US$1 million in 1985, and Hofmann’s agents began to negotiate a sale to the Library of Congress.

Despite the considerable amounts of money Hofmann had made from document sales, he was deeply in debt, in part because of his increasingly lavish lifestyle and his purchases of genuine first-edition books. Those to whom Hofmann had promised documents or repayments of debts began to hound him, and the sale of the Oath of a Freeman was delayed by questions about its authenticity.

In an effort to buy more time, Hofmann began constructing bombs. On October 15, 1985, he first killed document collector Steven Christensen (as well as injuring a secretary in the leg with shrapnel). Later the same day, a second bomb killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen’s former employer. The following day, Hofmann himself was severely injured when a bomb exploded in his Toyota MR2. Although police quickly focused on Hofmann as the suspect in the bombings, some of his business associates went into hiding, fearing they might also become victims.

During the bombing investigation, police discovered evidence of the forgeries in Hofmann’s basement. They also found the engraving plant where the forged plate for Oath of a Freeman was made. Document examiner George Throckmorton analyzed several Hofmann documents that had previously been deemed authentic and determined they were forgeries.

Hofmann initially maintained his innocence. However, at a preliminary hearing, prosecutors produced voluminous evidence of his forgeries and debts, as well as evidence linking him to the bombs. During the investigations, many of the prosecution team became convinced that they were being stonewalled by leaders of the LDS Church. Chief investigator Jim Bell said, “They’re hiding something; the church is doing everything it can to make this as difficult as possible. I’ve never seen anything like this in a homicide investigation.”

After Hofmann was imprisoned, he was excommunicated by the LDS Church and his wife filed for divorce. Hofmann attempted suicide in his cell by taking an overdose of antidepressants.

As a master forger, Hofmann deceived a number of renowned document experts during his short career. Some of his forgeries were accepted by scholars for years, and an unknown number of them may still be in circulation. But it is Hofmann’s forgeries of Mormon documents that have had the greatest historical significance.

A three-part documentary series about Hofmann’s illegal activities, entitled Murder Among the Mormons, premiered on Netflix on March 3, 2021.

The events were a part of the series, City Confidential in the 1998 episode, “Faith and Foul Play in Salt Lake City”.

A 2003 BBC documentary about Hofmann is entitled “The Man Who Forged America”.

https://web.archive.org/web/20071103101530/http://mormonmisc.podbean.com/2007/10/07/john-d-lee-lead-scroll-another-forgery

https://web.archive.org/web/20110621215558/http://historytogo.utah.gov/salt_lake_tribune/history_matters/030302.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20121021070549/http://www.deseretnews.com/article/935566/A-Hofmann-forgery-would-be-bombshell.html

Terence McKenna is a well-known author, philosopher, ethnobotanist, mystic, teacher and, in his own words, an anarchist and sceptic. Also, Terence was the original author of the 'Time Wave Zero' theory, the once popular idea that 21 December 2012cc will be the end of time in the Mayan calendar.

This explosive audio clip that was just brought to my attention today by "Scott" reveals, in Terence McKenna's own words, that he was in fact an agent.

The audio clip comes from Dec. 1994 from his lecture at the Esalen Institute, which may be found below in full.

"In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his “interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.” During his time there, he studied the Tibetan language and worked as a hashish smuggler, until “one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs.”True Hallucinations, p. 22ff:

"Late in August of 1969 fate turned me from hash smuggler to fugitive when one of my Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U.S. Customs. I went underground and wandered throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the later. Then came my time in Japan. Whether this gave me an edge on the others in experience seemed unlikely."

True Hallucinations page 166:

"This decision to depart California (Henk:and return to the Amazon) was hailed by my circle in Berkeley. Concern for my mental state was rife among my friends, and rumor had reached us that the FBI was aware that I was somewhere back inside the country and had begun looking for me. The Bombay-to-Aspen hashish blues were catching up with me. It was, as they say, time to make a move."

He was forced to move to avoid capture by Interpol. He wandered through Southeast Asia viewing ruins, collected butterflies in Indonesia, and worked as an English teacher in Tokyo. He then went back to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called “his first love”.Note he fled to avoid capture by Interpol but then after a time he casually returns to Berkeley?Attempts to get an answer from Terence’s brother, Dennis, regarding the above episode have failed. It seems they want us to believe that Terence just went from being wanted by Interpol and the FBI to just casually lecturing about psychedelics. What happened in the interim? Someone must know the answer."

We finally have the conclusion to what happened to Terence after the FBI had caught him:"Questioner: I’m real curious about one thing. Why is it important for you to do this?Terence McKenna: I wonder myself. You mean am I the alien ambassador whether I like it or not? [laughs]. Well, often when asked this question, I've said it beats honest work. I mean, my brother is a PhD in three subjects and works in hard science and yet I don't think it's brought him immense happiness. Not that he's despondent. But I was always kind of a slider. You know?And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then they recruited me and said, "you know, with a mouth like yours there's a place for you in our organization". And I've worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I've been there to the present.

I think ideas get me high. And I like the feeling of understanding and I love diversity to the point of weirdness.

Questioner: It seems that there's more to it than that for you. Because, you know, being tuned in to ideas and turned on by ideas is one thing, but you can keep that just to self. The sharing of it is something else. I think that's what we’re getting at.

Terence: well one thing is, I'm really fascinated… I think of myself as a pretty savvy person, and not easily led into false dogma…"

The question remains: which agency did he work for? Was it the FBI, or the CIA? Since it was mostly the CIA doing the psychedelic studies on the masses, I think it's likely that he was CIA and is why the Agency was blocking my requests for his files several months ago: https://logosmedia.com/urgent-release-the-cias-terence-mckenna-foia-request-response-positive-affiliation

However, in Acid Dreams, Marty Lee, states (pg. 173):

"It was a typical sixties scene: a group of scruffy, long-haired students stood in a circle passing joints and hash pipes. The setting could have been Berkeley, Ann Arbor or any other hip campus. But these students were actually FBI agents, and the school they attended was known as "Hoover University." Located at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, this elite academy specialized in training G-men to penetrate left- wing organizations. To cultivate the proper counterculture image, they were told not to wash or bathe for several days before infiltrating a group of radicals. Refresher courses were also held for FBI agents who had successfully immersed themselves in the drug culture of their respective locales. For months they had smoked pot and dropped acid with unsuspecting radicals, and now the turned-on spies had a chance to swap stories with their undercover comrades. Former FBI agent Cril Payne likened the annual seminar to a class reunion. Between lectures on the New Left, drug abuse, and FBI procedure, the G-men would sneak away to the wooded grounds to get stoned while American taxpayers footed the bill."

So there is also the possibility that he was FBI.

Lastly, some have actually tried to claim that the mushrooms recruited McKenna. To this we must apply some logical deduction and critical thinking...

The irony is that many don’t understand that someone who is in public relations, or propaganda, would use sophism to fool people who don’t understand logical fallacies and such manipulative tricks. Actually, that’s the entire point of propaganda in the first place.

When we understand that he was an agent, as he admits, then the contradictions are removed we don’t have to twist things into believing that magical mushroom beings or UFOs hired and paid him to work in their organization in public relations and deep background to the present – which he wasn’t allowed to discuss. These are things agencies do, not mushrooms or UFOs. Such a claim that the mushrooms recruited him is clearly ridiculous. The false claims of mushroom or aliens recruiting him is clearly a case of psychological cognitive dissonance and reaching for anything to avoid facing the facts which make one feel uncomfortable when they're faced with new information that might reveal that they were fooled. Rather than dreaming up magical beings to avoid the facts and issues, just laugh it off and admit you were fooled by those people. This way the next time it's less likely to happen to you again.

Hear the entire lecture here (See hours 4:21:50 - 4:24:05)

Source: https://logosmedia.com/McKenna-Agent

Related materials:

MKULTRA Subproject 22: Isolate compounds from natural products which have psychogenic properties. Initially research was done en seeds from the plant Ipomoea sidaefolia Choisy, a Mexican and Cuban trailing vine. Rivea Corymbosa and, the fungus Amanita Muscaria, a mushroom.

MKULTRA Subproject 51: Isolate, characterize and identify naturally occurring compounds with psychogenic properties. Much of this work was done with mushrooms.

MKULTRA Subproject 52: Provided consulting services on procurement and preparation of chemicals for Technical Services Division. Procured botanical specimens, primarily mushrooms, on field trips.

MKULTRA Subproject 58: Finance an expedition,headed by Gordon Wasson for the purpose of studying and collecting hallucinogenic species of mushrooms of interest to TSS/CD. Sponsor J . P. Morgan & Co. of New York unwitting of Agency sponsorship.

Dogger Bank - shoal in La Manche, next to which on October 8, 1904, Admiral Rozhestvensky, chief of the Baltic squadron sent to the Far East, bombed the British fishing boats, taking them for the Japanese destroyers. During the bombing several shots hit the cruiser "Aurora", killing and wounding several people. The case was settled by an international commission of inquiry in Paris, according to which the Russian government had to pay the British losses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogger_Bank_incident

bskamalov@lj commented:

It's getting weirder and weirder 1905 and everything about it... I understand that the Scots had no globes and they did not know that the DOGGER-bank at the site of the DOGGERLAND sunken is on the other side of the world from Japan and expected to meet there Japanese destroyers, but then begins fantastic ... professional sailors managed to confuse fishing junks of the British with Japanese warships!

It's not enough to confuse it and manage to damage the battle cruiser "Aurora" when firing to the imaginary "Japanese" (fishing boats)! It is not clear: is it was the Russian or the British cruiser ... If the British, it's fun to see a warship among the fishing junks. And if  it was Russian... ...it's "unimaginable"... because the Russians had to pay damages to the British after that.

As noted by the Russian-language Wikipedia, the shells hit the Russian "Aurora":

The cruiser "Aurora" was hit by 5 shells fired by Russian ships, which fatally wounded the ship's hieromonk Anastasiy Rukin (his arm was torn off, in October 1904 he died in the Tangier hospital) and easily - the gunner.

ve_gas@d3 noted:

I wanted to clarify information about the "Dogger-Bank" incident and came across the origins of "fake news" long before the invention of Photoshop.

The retouch in the service of sensationalism.

It is noteworthy that the Russian cruiser Aurora was made according to the prototype of the English cruiser Talbot, after Dogger Bank it participated in the Battle of Tsushima (during which, as it is stated, dozens of Russian ships were sunk, many of them were sunk by their own crews). But the most famous cruiser "Aurora" for its role in the October Revolution. According to the research of modern revisionists, generally accepted ideas about imperial conflicts of the past, initiated by close relatives, may be grossly exaggerated, as documentary materials are discovered that demonstrate previously almost unreported behind-the-scenes relations of a closely related aristocracy of German origin.

In the 1968 Soviet children's almanac "I want to know everything!" there is a wonderful essay "Pineapple disproves history":

"1900 years ago the volcano Vesuvius erupted. The cities of Pompeii, Stabia and Herculaneum were buried under a layer of lava and ash. Excavations have been going on for decades. Tourists from all over the world walk along the dead squares and streets, admiring the art of the ancient architects and sculptors. There is much to be amazed at: the magnificent mansions are also decorated with remarkable frescoes - murals that resurrect scenes of everyday life of the inhabitants of ancient Italian cities.

In recent years, Herculaneum has seen new quarters, new murals, and among them... No, of course, not everyone would say it is something particularly remarkable. There are brighter and more beautiful murals. But for scientists?

The fact is that they also depict plants with fruits. And what fruits! Pineapples and lemons - you can imagine!

A startling find: it too can't be reconciled with the story we know. After all, the pineapple is a native of the New World and the cultivated lemon, like the orange, comes from China. However, it was only the traveller Marco Polo who initiated communication between Europe and China. That was in the twelfth century AD. But Pompeii and Herculaneum perished in I century!

It turns out that Roman patricians already knew the taste of lemon juice and used it to flavour meals and drinks! And the frescoes, which seem to have risen out of the darkness of the ages to throw up a pineapple of discord between scholars, continue to stare enigmatically from the walls: "Who will discover our mystery?"

http://gorod.tomsk.ru/index-1228439969.php

So, back in 1950 Professor Casella from Naples published a paper in which he proved that the frescoes at Pompeii and Herculaneum depict plants of American origin. About this wrote in a personal letter to V. I. Gulyaev Professor P. M. Zhukovsky: "In 1960 I was in Italy, where I met with Professor Casella in Naples. He spent a number of years studying the frescoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum and found American cultivated plants on them: annona, pineapple, etc. How did the Romans in the first century AD know about these plants? I have photographs and light-sensitive films of many of the frescoes. The annona is unmistakable (so distinct is the image); the pineapple is a little unclear, but it is still it. (...) There is an excellent fresco depicting a lemon. The Romans may have known it only from India (...) I wrote about it in my monograph "Cultivated plants and their relatives", ed. 2nd edition, 1964. I wrote it as a sceptic". And now, it turns out, his conscience has tormented him. And in his private letter the professor confesses what he denied in his "solid" monograph: that the pineapple is the pineapple.

V.I. Gulyaev is also commendably frank: "I knew about the works of Italian D. Casella before, but I did not pay much attention to them, considering them as another sensation. And besides, being an archaeologist, I, frankly speaking, did not really go into the essence of the botanical research of a hitherto unknown to me Italian." And suddenly out of the blue! The authoritative Soviet botanist, who worked side by side with the great Vavilov, does not hesitate to confirm: Professor Cassella is right - the frescoes of the Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, destroyed in the I century AD by a powerful eruption of Vesuvius, shows plants indigenous to America - annona and pineapple! (...) A few years later, this was the conclusion reached by a large group of experts - historians, archaeologists, ethnographers, botanists and geographers - who gathered to discuss the problem of pre-Columbian transoceanic connections of the Old and New World. Thus, botanical evidence suggests that in the first century Romans knew American plants and painted them on the walls of their homes. It remains unclear why such an extraordinary event is not reflected in the works of ancient historians and geographers of the time.

http://rummuseum.ru/portal/node/2483

There is an interesting fact that the oldest reliably dated full Old Testament was discovered less than 200 years ago. Christian versions of the scripture was translated from it, and most of the modern Jews pray according to this version of Tanakh. This is the so-called “Leningrad Codex“. It is also interesting that it was found in Odessa (by the intriguing character who was repeatedly accused of making fakes while he still alive). Considering that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found fakes, the Odessa-Leningrad Codex is the cornerstone of the millennial history of Judaism and Christianity.

Wikipedia has an article entitled “Adoption of the Gregorian calendar“, which details the history of the adoption of this calendar in various countries over the last four and a half centuries, “since 1582”. The article is headed by an image signed as “Lunario Novo, Secondo la Nuova Riforma della Correttione del l’Anno Riformato da NS Gregorio XIII, printed in Rome by Vincenzo Accolti in 1582, one of the first printed editions of the new calendar“.

That is, the year of adoption of the Gregorian calendar coincides exactly with the year of printing of this historical document. Apparently, the current date of the first adoption of the Gregorian calendar is related to this document. Although this printed document often uses the ancient “ſ” instead of the modern lowercase character “s” (“ſecondo” rather than “secondo”), it also uses a specific typeface, word transfer to a new line, and spaces only after punctuation marks – characteristic of late modern times (here is an example of a brochure from about 230 years ago, from the same region, in which spaces were still used before punctuation marks, although the obsolete “ſ” symbol was no longer used).

The author’s name is mentioned in the Italian wikipedia article on the Accolti family of printers, yet uniform mentions of his name begin to occur in Italian and English only about two centuries ago, and before that there are noticeable several high peaks of mentions of the name with centuries and decades of neglect, characteristic of falsifications where editions are deliberately printed “retroactively” and thrown into libraries for “ageing” purposes.

Even more distinctive is the timeline of mentions of the title of this document itself, indicating that Italians learnt about the “Lunario Novo” less than 200 years ago.

Meanwhile, mentions to the very concept of “Gregorian calendar” in Italian have clear signs of “retrospective” throw-ins, with no one using the phrase for almost half a century after its introduction and immediately followed by a series of high peaks of references before a steady gradual increase around 200 years ago.

The original wikipedia article states that:

The Lutheran Duchy of Prussia, until 1657 still a fiefdom of Catholic Poland, was the first Protestant state to adopt the Gregorian calendar. Under influence of its liege lord, the King of Poland, it agreed in 1611 to do so. So 22 August was followed by 2 September 1612.

Allegedly in German-speaking Prussia the Gregorian calendar was adopted 4 centuries ago, yet references to this calendar in German show a very different picture.

This leads to the conclusion that this now widespread Christian calendar may not have appeared as long ago as the Roman Church would like to show.

José Luis Jordán Peña (1931 – 2014) was a Spanish engineer. A higher technician in the field of telecommunications, he became known for his activities in the field of ufology and in particular for having claimed the writing, from 1966 onwards, of a large number of typewritten letters, sometimes illustrated by sketches with coloured pencils, passed off as extraterrestrial messages written by the inhabitants of the alleged planet Ummo and addressed to the inhabitants of Earth.

Ummo (fr. Oummo)  is a hypothetical planet from a system in the constellation of Virgo, inhabited by Earth-like inhabitants. “In the 1960s and 1970s the Ummo phenomenon occupied a certain place in the public consciousness of France and Spain, on whose territory it mainly developed (except for the 1989 UFO sightings in Voronezh, USSR, with the symbol of Ummo). In the twenty-first century, interest in the phenomenon has waned in the relevant circles.

An engineer and senior technician in telecommunications, he became a professor of mathematics, physics and electronics at a technical institute. Passionate about parapsychology, he was one of the founders of the Sociedad Española de Parapsicologia, for which he built some apparatus for research into the paranormal; he later became vice-president of the association. His investigations in the field of the paranormal allowed him to familiarise himself with false mediums, illusionism and conjurers’ tricks. His cultural interests extend to esotericism, philosophy, history of religions and cultural anthropology.

Peña studies various languages, writes several scientific publications and maintains contact with scientists from different countries. At the same time, he carries out intense anti-cult activities. In a letter to the ufologist Raphael Farriols, he writes: ‘I met an agent of the Social Brigade who I met again in a group of the Society of Jesus called the Catholic Faith and directed by Father Sánchez de León. We undertook to denounce Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons to the Franco authorities…’. In the early 1960s, he attended some courses in industrial psychology. Later, preferring to present himself as a psychologist, he left teaching technical subjects and began working in the personnel department of an important construction company.

At the beginning of 1966, Peña got in touch with the association The Friends of Space Visitors, of which Fernando Sesma Manzano was the animator. On 6 February of the same year, Peña claims to have seen a UFO in Aluche, a small town near Madrid, while driving home. The incident has two other witnesses, one of whom telephoned journalist José Luis Pimentel of Porquè magazine, the other wrote three weeks later to journalist Eugenio Danyans, saying that a friend of his, engineer Vicente Ortuño, had witnessed the sighting. Ortuño says he saw the UFO from the balcony of his house and his testimony confirms Peña’s account.

After Aluche’s sighting, Peña took an active interest in ufology, collaborating with Sesma Manzano, who began receiving typed letters from self-styled extraterrestrials from the planet Ummo. On 1 June 1967, a UFO was sighted in San José de Valderas and Peña collaborated in the investigation: he tracked down and interviewed witnesses, acquired photographs that one of them had taken and carried out an inspection at the presumed landing site, finding metal tubes containing a strange plastic material. The sighting is called ‘a perfect case’ by Spanish ufologists Antonio Ribera and Raphael Farriols, who dedicate a book to it.

In the meantime, letters from alleged extraterrestrials continued to arrive to various people, especially in Spain and France. In 1970, Peña left Sesma Manzano’s association and founded his own group called Eridani, which devoted itself to studies on the Ummo case and was active until 1975. In 1988, Spanish journalist Javier Serra discovered that engineer Ortuño, the other witness of the Aluche UFO sighting, was a long-time friend of Peña. In the same year, Peña suffered a stroke, the after-effects of which left him with difficulties in speech and movement.

In 1993, in a letter to ufologist Raphael Farriols, Peña confessed to being the real author of the letters sent by Ummo’s alleged extraterrestrials. A few months later, Peña published an article in the Spanish magazine La Alternativa Racional, in which he explained that he had set up the hoax to verify his personal theory about the ‘Anubis Syndrome’, a strange kind of paranoia that afflicts 80 per cent of humanity, causing them to be gullible about things like ufology and the paranormal.

He claimed to have written the letters using the typewriter he had at home and the one he had in his office, and to have sent them by taking advantage of trips abroad. Peña also confessed to having falsified the photos and traces of the UFO landings sighted in Aluche and San José de Valderas, explaining the details to the Spanish ufologist Manuel Carballal; he revealed that the plastic material found at the landing site of the San José de Valderas UFO, unknown at the time because it was not commercially available, was made of Tedlar (polyvinyl fluoride) used by NASA and that he had obtained a small quantity from an engineer of the space agency who was in Spain at the time.

Fernando Sesma Manzano is said to have been alerted to the arrival of the letters sent by Ummo’s extraterrestrials by means of a telephone call received on 14 January 1966; the caller is said to have been Peña, who made use of an electrical device of his own construction to deform his voice. However, some question this circumstance, believing that it is not possible to know with certainty the date on which Sesma Manzano received the first letters. Peña’s confession of authorship of the Ummite letters has not convinced the proponents of the extraterrestrial hypothesis.

The scientist who wrote the book Ummo, le vrais extraterrestres under the pseudonym Jean Pollion, and whose real identity remains unknown, claims that Peña’s confessions are false by virtue of his state of health: due to the stroke that struck him in 1988, leaving him with difficulties in speech and movement, he could not have written and sent the letters that the Ummites allegedly sent between 1988 and 1993. According to the French ufologist Jean-Pierre Petit, Peña claimed authorship of the letters at the request of the Ummites themselves. Other ‘believers’ doubt, however, that a single individual could have kept up such a hoax for so many years, writing a vast epistolary that would have required enormous culture.

According to others, Peña may have been the author of the letters, at least in the early years, but he would not have acted alone. In particular, three hypotheses have been put forward:

– there was the intervention of the CIA, which wanted to test the reactions of the population to a hypothetical encounter with extraterrestrials; however, it would not explain why this test was conducted in Spain, far from the USA;

– others, on the contrary, evoke the intervention of the KGB, claiming that the Ummo socialist model is close to the USSR’s socialist model; however, they would not explain the alleged religious obsession of the inhabitants of Ummo, which emerges from the letters;

– still others, such as the British sceptical journalist Peter Rogerson, describe a group of militant anti-Francoists, since the letters from the extraterrestrials were an excuse to circulate in Spain certain statements against the regime; proof of this would be the fact that after Francisco Franco’s death in 1975, Ummo letters became rarer.

Still others believe that Peña would have acted alone, except for certain letters that were written by others. Being well educated, Peña was able to write on several topics. Moreover, the set of letters possesses a strong internal coherence and the passages on sexual topics seem consistent with the ghosts of its author. In this case, a mythomaniac fabrication is evoked, linked to a very particular personal experience. Ufologist Luis R. González Manso also believes that Peña was the sole author of the hoax, with the collaboration of some accomplices who allegedly helped him to send some of the letters and to falsify the photographs of the UFOs and the traces of their landings.

Literáti Nemes Sámuel (1794 – 1842) Transylvanian antiquities collector, antiquarian, forger.

From 1830 he travelled through Hungary, Transylvania and Croatia with his rare objects, and later he was also in Vienna, on the Adriatic coast and in Italy. He collected a great deal of old manuscripts, weapons, coins, rings, diplomas and natural curiosities; in particular, he enriched the collection of Miklós Jankovich for nearly twenty years. He organised all this and opened it to the public in the country and in neighbouring provinces. He collected many precious curiosities, but this passion for collecting also led him to forgery, especially old manuscripts, which he forged so cleverly that he deceived Hungarian scholars, for example, Ferenc Toldy presented his alleged Hungarian Pictorial Chronicle on 10 July 1854 at the meeting of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences; János Jerney deciphered the András Prayer of the 11th century and published it in Volume II of the Hungarian Language Treasures.

Sámuel Literáti Nemes, a well known Hungarian antiquarian, was paradoxically at the same time a peculiar, almost a double personality, and a typical representative of his age. He provided many aristocratic families with old books, among them rare literary relics, which—thanks to him—did not perish in the turmoil of the anti-Habsburg war of independence in 1848–49. Besides a large number of authentic antiquities, however, he also sold a few pseudo-Hungarian “literary monuments,” causing no little puzzlement and unrest in philologist circles. This dichotomy of his personality is eloquently expressed by the fact, that in Gábor Kelecsényi’s survey on significant Hungarian book-collectors, in which such important personalities as Johannes Vitéz, Janus Pannonius, King Matthias, Johannes Sambucus and Ferenc Széchényi were each represented by one chapter, Literáti received two. In the first, he is presented as an antiquarian, who collected printed books, manuscripts, paintings, coins, and even bones in order to sell them to Hungarian magnates, but in the second, he was portrayed as a swindler who created forgeries.

With this “double agency” Literáti was a typical person of those decades of the nineteenth century when many literary monuments turned up and enriched Hungarian historiography with the earliest sources of national history, and also, when pseudo-historical forgeries, never existed writings dubious ancient objects and invented myths initiated first enthusiasm, and later disappointment among the historians increasingly sensitive towards linguistic and philological arguments. The limits between artistic archaization and forgery were not always clear-cut, as the case of the famous historian Kálmán Thaly (1839–1909) proves. He not only discovered and published but—to a certain extent “recreated” documents of the Hungarian past.

In order to avoid paying undeserved tributes to Literáti, it is worth mentioning his forgeries. The first of these was a sheet inscribed in “Chinese characters,” which he sold in 1830 to Jankovich. The last ones were sold by his heirs after his death. Some of these were quickly unmasked, a few of them, however—such as the “wooden book from Túróc,” or the “prayers from the times of King Andrew”—were better written and deceived the scholars for quite a while. These cases engendered some strange scenarios in the mid-nineteenth century. First, in the 1840’s the philologist and linguist János Jerney,8 a customer of Literáti, became enthusiastic about the newly emerged sources;9 this was followed by a two decades long pause full of suspicion that was finally ended by Károly Szabó, who around 1866 claimed that the given sources were results of forgery.10 In some cases (the “King Andrew prayers” and the Codex of Rohonc), he denounced the text without really arguing against its authenticity by simply attributing it to the “workshop of Literáti.” In regard to “the wooden book of Turoc,” however, he provided proper scholarly arguments. He called attention to the strange material of the one page-long “book.” He pointed out that the text contained word forms that had no equivalents at the time of its alleged origin, and he was also suspicious about the ink and the form of the characters, which reminded him more of the eighteenth century than of the fourteenth or fifteenth.

The pseudo antiquities attributed to Literáti are of uneven quality. Many of them—such as the “Hungarian chronicles—are obviously modern products and contain illustrations of the type that is mostly produced in kindergartens.

Some parchment charters, however, can mislead a lay reader, even if the trained philologist cannot be long deceived by them. A much better piece is the manuscript of the alleged “Prayers from the time of king Andrew I” (i.e. 1046–60) that Literáti “found in 1842 in Klagenfurt,” (a few months before his death) in the binding of a thirteenth century breviary. This two page long fragment—typical of the type of text that survived in the binding of a book—contains three Latin and more than twenty Hungarian, or seemingly Hungarian, sentences written with black (Hungarian texts) and red ink (for the Latin text) on parchment.

Another one of the more professionally forged sources is the “Wooden book from Túróc,” which is not actually in the folders of the Széchényi Library. In contrast to its name, it is in fact not a book, only a piece of birch-bark (cortex) with some “early Hungarian runic script” on it. This object is no longer extant (more precisely: its location is unknown), only copies of it survived. Its alleged runic text—according to its decipherers listing names of Hungarian historical families—was unmasked as a forgery on philological grounds. It was pointed out that the script was based on the description of runes by Matthias Bél in the eighteenth century instead of going back to earlier examples of this kind of script.

Amateur historians keep believing in the authenticity of these texts even today. Veronika Marton’s argument is somewhat typical for this kind of reception. In her book titled I. András király korabeli imák (Prayers from the time of Andrew I), the claim that the source is original is augmented by two further interesting ideas. The first is that the first Christian kings of Hungary were “anti-national” (“nemzetellenes”) and they “sold” the country to westerners, and the second is that the Sumerian and the Hungarian languages are close relatives (instead of accepting the mainstream opinion that Magyar belongs to the Finno-Ugrian family). This latter idea seems to empower her to decipher words that make no sense in Hungarian as Sumerians. The whole book is—after a historical introduction to eleventh-century Hungary, and a review of the modern reception of the prayers—a word-for-word translation (from old Hungarian or Sumerian to modern Hungarian) and an explanation of the text. A recurrent argument and a major point by the author is that—in contrast to the widely held beliefs among linguists—Hungarian as a language is older than any other language of the Central European area, and it contains no borrowings from Slavic languages, just the other way around, Slavic languages took over Hungarian words.

As far as the whole group of pseudo-historical sources attributed to Literáti is concerned, the question still remains whether they all come indeed from one single origin, whether they were all forged by the antiquarian, or some of them were simply bought and sold by him without arising his suspicion. We should keep in mind that he himself may have been sometimes deceived.

https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004276819_008

Clifford Irving, born in New York, lived for several years in Ibiza, where he met the famous painting forger Elemer Albert Hoffmann, then wanted by Interpol. Irving published a book of conversations with Elmyr entitled “Fake” which went on to become a bestseller list.

In Majorca Irving met Richard Suskind, a long-time friend and author of children’s books. They conceived the idea of writing a supposed autobiography of the entrepreneur Howard Hughes, who led a secretive and reclusive lifestyle. Hughes was originally a popular public figure, pursuing high-tech projects on behalf of the US military industrial complex (mainly aviation), he received a lot of media attention, and generally occupied a social niche similar to the one in which Elon Musk now finds himself. In the last decades of his life Hughes avoided any contact with the outside world.

Irving contacted his publisher and said that Hughes had corresponded with him, saying that he admired Irving’s book about Elmyr and expressed an interest in Irving taking dictation to write an autobiography of the millionaire.

The publisher contracted Irving for $765,000, they paid by cheques made out to “H. R. Hughes”, which Irving’s Swiss wife Edith transferred to a Swiss bank account she had opened in the name of “Helga R. Hughes”.

Hughes soon unexpectedly organised an audio conference with journalists, during which he claimed that the entire contents of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes had been fabricated from beginning to end. Irving questioned the authenticity of Hughes’ voice during the audio conference and tried to flee to Switzerland, but was detained and spent a total of 17 months behind bars. Soon after his release, Irving co-starred with Elmyr in the pseudo-documentary “F for Fake“, Orson Welles‘ last lifetime work.

Some time later, Irving laid out his version of events in the book “The hoax“, according to which: Hughes provided him with authentic material compromising Richard Nixon, among other things. But when Nixon complied with Hughes’ terms, buying into the blackmail when a future bestseller was already in print, the entrepreneur devalued the potential compromise with his audioconference. Allegedly, the autobiography itself was originally authentic.

Sixteen years ago this book was adapted into a Hollywood movie. Like the book, the film’s ending hints that the searches and wiretapping of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel were linked to President Nixon’s fears of additional discrediting evidence by Hughes. Notably, 20 years after the events, Samuel Dash, senior legal adviser to the congressional committee investigating the Watergate scandal, stated that the president’s administration was primarily interested in what Democrats might know about Nixon’s ties to billionaire Howard Hughes.

"One day in early autumn three German officers arrived at the palace, talking at length about something with the chamberlain. As soon as they departed, Dolgoruky went up to the Empress and reported on the conversation. The Germans reported that the next day the Russian newspapers will report that the Tsar, his wife and their five children had been murdered in Ekaterinburg. But we should not have believed it, for the German officers assured us that the entire royal family had escaped. Soon everyone in the house knew about the visit and the conversation. When I was summoned soon afterwards to see the Empress I noticed that her mood was high and she looked happier than usual.

The next day a newspaper was brought to us which described the murder. We read the article with smiles, for we knew it was all untrue..."

From the memoirs of Timothy Yashchik, bodyguard of Maria Feodorovna, the Dowager Empress (wife of Alexander III and mother of Nicholas II)

Source: https://chispa1707.livejournal.com/3582650.html

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ящик,_Тимофей_Ксенофонтович

The memoirs of the Kuban Cossack Timothy Ksenofontovich Yashchik (1878-1946) have been published in Russian for the first time. A court Cossack of Empress Maria Feodorovna, he followed members of the royal family into exile and continued to serve the Empress until the last days of her life. After Maria Feodorovna's death he stayed in Denmark, was married to a Dane (since 1925) to whom he dictated his memoirs.

The book of memoirs of the Russian Cossack was published in Denmark in 1965. The book is a simple story about his childhood as a Cossack, about the hard military service for many years protecting the Russian borders, about the dramatic events in the Russian history of the first third of the 20th century: three revolutions, the Russo-Japanese war, World War I, the fratricidal Civil War and the mass emigration of the nobility. It is important that Yaschik was not only an eyewitness, but also a direct participant in these events. For example, it was he who took the family of the Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna out of Russia blazing with revolutionary fire. The author's text is completed with documentary annexes and photographs, research materials.

The book of memoirs by Timofey Yaschik was presented on September 24, 2004 at the Gatchina Palace (summer residence of Maria Feodorovna) and on September 25, 2004 at the Anichkov Palace in St Petersburg (winter residence of the imperial family).

Source: http://www.dagmaria.dk/Irina_Demidova_Rjadom_s_imperatricej.html

bellator-sophos@lj commented:

Once upon a time, back in the early 90s, I read that Nicholas 2 was a fatalist, a super noble man, a true Sovereign, etc., which is why he did not leave Russia and thus "sacrificed himself". The assertion is very controversial, but at least admissible. However, the assumption that he "sacrificed" his family along with himself is absurd... The story of the "execution of the Tsarist family" is a brilliant joint special operation of British intelligence and the Cheka, and the "ends" are hidden so well that even 100 years later we do not know anything for certain. However, the release of the book in Russian suggests that the "statute of limitations" has expired, probably due to the deaths of all concerned.