Robert Todd Carroll
Internet Bunk features WWW sites that provide false, misleading or deceptive information regarding scientific matters or alleged paranormal or supernatural events. Because there are millions of such sites, we try to present only the most egregious and offensive. Readers are encouraged to send Internet Bunk material to: btcarrol@skepdic.com
Joe Firmage is the money behind these sites. He is not yet thirty, has a college education and has been a very successful businessman. He made $24 million by the age of 23 when he sold his software firm, Serius, to Oracle. He then went on to establish another very successful company, USWeb. He is now using his vast wealth to promote his vision of the unity of science, religion, alien visitation and parapsychology. He has read a few books and considers himself something of a visionary generalist on the order of Leonardo da Vinci. Firmage thinks he knows the Truth with a capital T.
According to Joe,
...our physical world is the sediment of reality. After having studied what I have studied in the world of science and having intuited my way through clues out there for us to interpret, my sense is that matter, stuff that makes up everything physically, is the crust that has developed through the collective imagination of all things in the universe. Think of it this way, if a million people think of the same thing simultaneously, the likelihood of it occurring measurably rises. And if you take that concept and multiply it through all of history and through everything that exists at any given moment in history, I think what you will have created is the physical reality that we see. Therefore, when we die, the physical component of our existence, that is participated in this sediment of reality, ceases to operate. That component which doesn't participate, or from which that sediment has emerged, perpetuates itself and goes on. I think that this physical reality is important because it has taught us something. I don't know what it has taught us, but I know we will find out at some point. I think when we die, we will move on to another experiment that further enlarges whatever faculties these types of experiences can enlarge.
Joe may not be much of a philosopher, but he considers himself to be quite a visionary. His latest venture, however, requires capital and ingenuity of a different order than running a software firm. He has provided a few hints that indicate he will not be as successful in his new endeavor.
He calls himself an optimist who believes in Progress with a capital P, but he is locked into the notion that kids in South Central L.A. have no opportunities for legal happiness.
What frontier is it that those young kids can press against? The only frontier that I know of, is that which is illegal. Everything that is legal is economically and otherwise out of their reach.
He also believes that
We make the rules for our lives. That applies to just about everything, we make the rules for our lives. Even those who from outward appearances have nothing, still at a fundamental sense make the rules for their existence. That applies at an individual level, that applies at a cultural level and as a civilization as a whole. It is within our power to make our future in every respect that we could imagine.
Does he contradict himself? Very well, he contradicts himself. Perhaps he thinks he contains multitudes. Maybe in his new unified universe there is no need for the oppressive logic of the past and it archaic law of contradiction. Maybe he has an "alternative logic" to go along with the "alternative science" he admires so much.
Joe the Explorer
He says that he admires explorers more than anything, but he seems to have little historical knowledge of exploration. He thinks the ancient explorer was a "common man" who just took off on his own to explore. He seems to lack the historical knowledge, training, ability and experience to be an astronomer or an astronaut, but with his money he can fund other "common men", (i.e., people without knowledge or proper background but with simpatico visions) to uncover the secrets of the universe. He can also fund fringe scientists like Hal Puthoff.
Firmage started showing signs of losing touch with reality while working on an online book project at USWeb. His book, which he calls The Truth describes "a new universal order based on original paradigms for space and time...."* At his website he addresses others as "People of Earth." Firmage maintains that because of "a somnolent mainstream science establishment" and an inept mass media, we have been kept ignorant of many truths we apparently could not discover on our own. In his own words, these hidden truths are:
Some readers may know that I have written about some of these "confirmed" powers (see skepdic.com/tipara.html) and am not as convinced as Mr. Firmage is of their having been demonstrated.
This is not the first time I have run across the "all is light" theory of the universe. In my wayward youth, I was very impressed with one who had such a theory: Paramahansa Yogananda, an Indian Hindu who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in the U.S.A. and authored The Autobiography of a Yogi. I was impressed with his authority because the great yogi's body allegedly did not decay after burial. The SRF story is that
On March 7, 1952, Paramahansa Yogananda entered mahasamadhi, a God-illumined master's conscious exit from the body at the time of physical death. His passing was marked by an extraordinary phenomenon. A notarized statement signed by the Director of Forest Lawn Memorial-Park testified: "No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death....This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one....Yogananda's body was apparently in a phenomenal state of immutability."
However, this story is not quite accurate. The state of the yogi's body is not unparalleled, but common. A typical embalmed body will show no notable desiccation for one to five months after burial, without the use of refrigeration or creams to mask odors. According to Jesus Preciado, who has been in the mortuary business for thirty years, "in general, the less pronounced the pathology [at the time of death], the less notable are the symptoms of necrosis." Some bodies are well-preserved for years after burial (personal correspondence, Mike Drake).
I wonder if Firmage has bothered to try to find contrary evidence for his new beliefs? It seems rather that after making millions or billions of dollars, he realized that making money is not the purpose of life. He is on a quest, like everyone else, and is seeking the meaning of life. He thinks he has found it in UFOs.
Firmage believes that "Earth is being visited by extraterrestrial beings and probably has been for millennia."
There is stunningly good evidence that UFO's are real starships, and physics now says that their existence is firmly plausible. Whatever did or did not happen at Roswell in 1947 will ultimately prove to be a "rounding error" when the implications of this phenomenon become widely known.
Roswell, retro-engineering modeled after alien technologies, government conspiracies, mass media cover-ups, MJ-12, religious myths rooted in alien visitations, etc. Joe believes it all and is sure that he can reconcile all the religions of the world with all the science of the world and all the UFOs of the world.
Given my exposure to the fields of science and religion for a lifetime (though brief it has been!), Occam's razor [!] suggests to me a common connection between many extremely well documented spiritual events and the type of psychological and physical events that surround the UFO phenomenon. Which of these phenomena is a cause and which is an effect is not yet clear.
Firmage has been inspired to act on his newfound knowledge because of a book he read by Eugene Linden, a science writer for Time magazine. Linden's vision is laid out in The Future in Plain Sight: Nine Clues to the Coming Instability. The world is a mess, is getting more unstable, and science and rationality will not solve our problems. We need a spiritual, even psychic, approach to ground our new vision in. Joe likes this message.
Unlike crackpots of the past, who did not have extreme wealth and the Internet, Firmage is in a position to support the "alternative science" he needs to uphold his vision. It doesn't matter that mainstream science labels him a nut or a crackpot. With his money, his website, e-mails, etc., he can support an industry that will appear huge even if in reality it is infinitesimally small. (One of Joe's special interests is the difference between appearance and reality. I wonder if irony is also one of his special interests.)
I'm here to help
Firmage does not seek knowledge, but enlightenment. Alternative scientists like Hal Puthoff must think they've died and gone to heaven. Funding for the most harebrained of projects is now imminent. It is bad enough that he thinks his visions are insightful. What is worse is that he cares so much about the rest of us that he is compelled to get the word out, no matter how much resistance he meets from those evil traditional scientists and scandal-happy journalists. He will, of course, surround himself with likeminded "visionaries" who will be only too happy to take his money as they chase after their windmills of light and energy and "alternative physics" where spirits work.
A sweeping new view of 21st Century science which respects a core body of spiritual truths holds promise beyond all other ontological paths that can be seen. I will shortly help launch organizations which take this into account and lay a stepwise foundation for helping this transformation along. (e-mail from Joe, May 14, 1999, sent to anyone who visits his site and registers to get the Truth)
So far, Joe Firmage has been ignored by the mainstream mass media, who see him as an eccentric with too much money and time, and too little real knowledge. He is ridiculed and laughed at for thinking he can just ignore real science in favor of some vague notion of spirituality; some loose metaphysical beliefs about light, energy and the unity of the cosmos; and an array of fringe science and pseudoscientific notions about paranormal forces and UFOs.
My prediction is that Joe Firmage will go down in the future not as another Leonardo or Galileo but as another Bozo the Clown.
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Robert Todd Carroll
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