The Internet is a wild and crazy place at times. Rumors are spawned every day, and blog posts bounce from site to site to sometimes build chilling stories of doom and conspiracy. A case in point surfaced three weeks ago, and then got top billing today in a popular "bad news" web blog titled "The Coming Economic Depression." The site has been posting off beat news to build a case for the next great depression--a prospect that seems fairly likely in any case. But today's fare included a video clip from a bearded recluse in the southeast who claimed he had spotted thousands of white "UN Vans" on an air base south of Jacksonville, FL. The implications he drew were that the Gulf oil spill was laying the foundation for mass evacuations and UN controlled martial law soon to be imposed on the Gulf states.
Admittedly, the overhead satellite image from Google earth did show thousands of white vehicles lined up on an airstrip, but it was not a US military base. The vehicles were parked at the Reynolds Airpark, a privately owned field that is sometimes used by car manufacturers to store inventory. A little digging on this story yielded some surprising speculation. One article claimed the facility was owned by Pegasus, a defense related contractor who mysteriously had offices in Utah in the same building as Halliburton and the Minerals Management Service (responsible for all those off shore oil drilling permits, and dating to the Cheney years). The spin in this article was that Cerberus Capital had acquired Pegasus, facilitated by Goldman Sachs, and that Pegasus was a CIA/NSA front company that was building thousands of Spy vans equipped with a dish antenna and slapping Dish TV signs on them to mask the plan. The author suggested that Goldman knew the Deepwater Horizon well was going to blow, dumped BP stock three days before it did, then brokered the Cerberus acquisition so the nefarious Big Brother outfits and Men in Black would have all the mobile spynet equipment necessary to monitor and control the population...
A phone call to the owner of the Airpark burst that bubble when he revealed that all the vehicles were unsold Kias waiting to be sent to Kia distributors. (Jacksonville is a major port of entry for foreign cars.) But the conspiracy sites are still abuzz with this image of cars lined up in groups of five, row after row, filling the whole of two long airstrips. Some posters commenting on the articles refused to believe the Airpark owner, and began to claim that the odd gaps in the ranks of parked cars were actually some kind of coded message meant to be viewed from space and decoded... By Aliens?
This is the Internet in full bore X-Files mode. Take one part legitimate outrage over the BP Gulf disaster, add one odd image from Google earth, season with liberal and wild speculation, throw in Dick Cheney, Halliburton, and Goldman Sachs to get the hate factor flowing, shake, stir, and post to a public that is already on edge and prone to a lot of fear as to what the real consequences of the Gulf nightmare will become.
There's a place for legitimate concern and speculation over what this catastrophe might bring in the months and years ahead, but I'm afraid that cars parked on airfields to code messages for ...whomever, or to work into dark plans for "Gubmint" control and martial law are a tad far fetched. Don't expect UN vans to roll out any time soon. The story was complete nonsense.
