Website investigating themes related to 2012

dagaz11

I'm part of a team of researchers who have been investigating themes having to do with 2012 and the spiritual significance it has for quite a few people. What motivated us was we noticed the messages relayed by certain groups had a tendency to attempt to disconnect, sometimes willfully, their audience from reality. This mainly concerns those claiming to “channel” extra-terrestrials and making countless predictions that have failed to materialize for over a decade. This includes for example overthrowing of governments, mass landings of UFO's and replacement of the current financial systems.

Another area of interest for us is conspiracy theories where we often find the same endgame of followers rejecting all that doesn't fit their outlook in a severely polarized way.

The difference between us and other sites investigating the supernatural and CT's is we don't aim to change or disprove anyone belief. Our goal is to give our visitors the tools to separate facts from fiction, and sometimes manipulation so they can make educated decisions.

Since our focus is on 2012 and the changes some believe it will entail, we'll also cover such topics as environmental or geophysical changes, energy technology, along with the usual themes of Ufo's and the supernatural in general. As a rule, we'll start from either facts or controversial articles/messages and strive to isolate the harmful parts.

Our website will also feature a big section on coercive persuasion and tips for spotting fakes or data misinterpretation on YT .

If you happen to know anyone interested in supporting this cause with a donation, feel free to forward them our rockethub page where they'll find all the detail about our project along with a video showing two examples of material of interest. Whether we receive any financial support or not, we're planning on a tentative opening date by mid November.

We're also always looking for suggestions on new areas of investigation. The only requirement is it has to somehow do with 2012/supernatural themes or conspiracy theories. If you have any question or comments, ask away.

One good example of what we study is the thread Joint Fleets Fend Off UFO Threat

ps: I wanted to say thanks to MrMojoRisin for allowing me to open the thread

gillad

What i have got from your post is that you have already made up your mind what you believe and what you want other people to believe.
I feel that the only difference between your site and the "debunkers" is that your site is asking for funding.
I may be wrong so i will follow your website to see is it really any different....your view of reality may not be the correct view and science is finding some very intersesting stuff in this area.

Its Behind You!

A website asking for $$ donations on first page? You have to be kidding.

MrMojoRisin

Although the request for donations doesn't exactly win the favour of some people (which I understand), at the end of the day, people are free to choose whether they want to donate to it or not. No-one is holding a gun to their head.

I like the idea behind the project though. I suppose it's an easier starting point to take strange theories, phenomena, etc. as if they're real or valid to start with, and investigate them from there to discover the actual truth. You have to start somewhere.

Whatever about the donation aspect of it, I think anything that encourages research and discussion about this sort of thing is worthwhile.

gillad

MrMojoRisin wrote: »

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I like the idea behind the project though. I suppose it's an easier starting point to take strange theories, phenomena, etc. as if they're real or valid to start with, and investigate them from there to discover the actual truth. You have to start somewhere.

Its a great idea but are they bringing anything new to the table?we will wait and see
There is a great thread here"Ghosts-what are your experiences?"...Is this new site going to explain all these experiences?...I doubt if it can.
There are lots of ufo sightings that havent been explained....how is this site going to explain ufo sightings from 50/60 years ago.
I think this site will explain what it can but it will ignore what it cant explain,so nothing new here (just the donation part)

oceanman

should this not be in the skeptics corner?

Its Behind You!

To be honest, something makes me very dubious about this. How may websites have you visited that were asking for donations to pay the server? Especially one that is not yet operating to its intended purpose.

It all seems to be "what we will do", with nothing actually to prove what is being done. In business terms, its totally naive.

Why is this web site needed? When hundreds of others exist, not to even to mention Boards.ie.

I don't like this sort of terminology quote: "That will entail this kind of pricing range:".

The goal of $2750 we set should cover about 1 year of hosting at $200-250/month. Should we exceed our objective, the leftovers will go to additional months of hosting.


The very least that this proposal/request for donations should include would be the personnel behind the project and specific achievments to date.

For achievements to date, the only reference we are given is to a thread on Boards. (Joint Fleet Fend Off UFO Threat) and a brief video that only indicates 2 areas of interest.

For personnel we are given:

"I'm the co-leader of a team of international volunteer researchers who have spent over a year investigating conspiracy theory groups and part of the New Age movement".

How can anyone be expected to "donate" to a cause which has no obvious proven achievements and is based on intentions not yet achieved in any way.

And indeed who is Steve Brady?

If this is a genuine project, then I suggest that you expand on the above.

dagaz11

Thanks to everyone for the feedback. I'm going to try and answer all the questions raised.

What i have got from your post is that you have already made up your mind what you believe and what you want other people to believe. I feel that the only difference between your site and the "debunkers" is that your site is asking for funding.

I may be wrong so i will follow your website to see is it really any different....your view of reality may not be the correct view and science is finding some very interesting stuff in this area.

What makes our approach stand apart is what we believe is our own business and we have no particular interest in proselytizing it. What we're looking for is for example discrepancies within the material produced by a single channel. For instance, a claim from a certain year that a particular event was about to happen, and either the validation it didn't, or a different claim that contradicts the failed announcement. If you take a channelers like the one in the video, he's been at it since the 1996 and produced over 1000 messages, most of which were removed from his website. We recovered the archive and pored over it. The summuary of the major patterns, which also includes use of coercive persuasion, is part of what we're going to made public.

Another area of research for us is sites providing either outright disinformation or twisting facts around to push their agenda.

Next difference between us and debunkers is we have no taboo, like some of them do have. If you go to a site of diehards like skepticproject.com, go start a thread on a proud product of science like Montsanto's GMO seeds and comment on an article that hints they may cause more harm than advertized, then see the love it gets you. I'm speaking from personal experience. You can also google "9/11 Toofers" andnotice some skeptics can sometimes get a lot more emotional and prejudice in their thinking process that they'd care to admit. (side-note: I personally have no urge to look into 9/11. Just mentioning it for illustrative purposes)

Last thing is we're very interested in the dynamics of the material pertaining to 2012. We follow the load of "updates" produced weekly to identify new patterns. I haven't heard of it being done elsewhere.

To give you one single concrete example, what we hope to achieve is to keep videos like "Pharoah Obama to be in Colorado Sept. 27 - Denver airport DUMB (Solar Flares/Comet Elenin)" on YT from wasting too many people's time.

To be honest, something makes me very dubious about this. How may websites have you visited that were asking for donations to pay the server? Especially one that is not yet operating to its intended purpose.

It all seems to be "what we will do", with nothing actually to prove what is being done. In business terms, its totally naive.

Why is this web site needed? When hundreds of others exist, not to even to mention Boards.ie.

I don't like this sort of terminology quote: "That will entail this kind of pricing range:".

The goal of $2750 we set should cover about 1 year of hosting at $200-250/month. Should we exceed our objective, the leftovers will go to additional months of hosting.

The very least that this proposal/request for donations should include would be the personnel behind the project and specific achievments to date.

To be honest too, I'm not expecting to raise much money. The goal I posted is what it's going to cost us, and more precisely me, as I'm the better off of our group, plus it was my idea to get a real website as opposed to anonymous blogs to disseminate our research. I replied on our idiosyncrasy above so I'll skip to the next point... Why $200 a month and why before it's up and running? Like I must have said somewhere in the presentation, we intend to open the forum by mid-November. Reason is we're going to reach a climax by mid December. That means that if we get any money from rockethub, which shouldn't be before January, I'll already have paid $400 out of my pocket. As for the reason behind choosing a mid-ranged dedicated server... The most popular sites we're investigating have at least 1million hits a year. I mean per site. It's not irrealistic to assume we're going to attract a share of their audience that will be interested in some clues they've been missing. And that sometimes has been plain hidden from them, like inconvenient archives being periodically removed. You can't stomach even a small portion of this kind of traffic on a 10$/month shared server.

For achievements to date, the only reference we are given is to a thread on Boards. (Joint Fleet Fend Off UFO Threat) and a brief video that only indicates 2 areas of interest.

For personnel we are given:

"I'm the co-leader of a team of international volunteer researchers who have spent over a year investigating conspiracy theory groups and part of the New Age movement".

How can anyone be expected to "donate" to a cause which has no obvious proven achievements and is based on intentions not yet achieved in any way.

I can't disagree there would be something of a leap of faith for anyone willing to donate, but if noone is willing to, things will still somehow follow their course. Another important contribution for us would be requests for investigation, if any. Given the flood of data to peel off, we tend to stick to catching up with the sources we're familiar with. If you stumble on an iffy sounding video on YT that you would like to see investigated for possible disinformation, let us know about it. Then, if at some point, you too would want to bring your contribution to outing manipulation attempts or bad reporting no matter where side it comes, we'll always have room for one more provided you have the right profile.

One last thing for now... I want to make it clear there's no war against anyone's belief. That's why we will not cover anything related to traditional religions, including pagan branches, or even New Age movements, as long as they do not display demonstrable emotional/mental manipulation. I'll finish replying tomorrow. I'll also post a video that should better illustrate our approach.

gillad

You need to pay attention to your posts as you have quoted me as saying things that another poster said.
You have created your own disinformation by doing this so fix it and get your own house in order first.

Ziycon

I can't see how it would be in the range below you suggested, a site I run has numerous complex features with loads of content and costs nowhere near that a year to host and there is plenty of space/bandwidth to expand, you need to shop around as there are much cheaper alternatives out there for a site that's starting up.

The goal of $2750 we set should cover about 1 year of hosting at $200-250/month. Should we exceed our objective, the leftovers will go to additional months of hosting.

There is no need for a dedicated server when your site hasn't even been launched, let alone built. You have no idea if the idea will be successful or not, you need to start out small and grow as demand/interest grows, this way you only pay what is needed at the time.

With all that said I wish you the best of luck with the project, sounds like it could be interesting if done right.

dagaz11

You need to pay attention to your posts as you have quoted me as saying things that another poster said.
You have created your own disinformation by doing this so fix it and get your own house in order first.

Constructive comment is always welcome. Thanks for pointing it out.

Ziycon wrote: »

I can't see how it would be in the range below you suggested, a site I run has numerous complex features with loads of content and costs nowhere near that a year to host and there is plenty of space/bandwidth to expand, you need to shop around as there are much cheaper alternatives out there for a site that's starting up.

The goal of $2750 we set should cover about 1 year of hosting at $200-250/month. Should we exceed our objective, the leftovers will go to additional months of hosting.

There is no need for a dedicated server when your site hasn't even been launched, let alone built. You have no idea if the idea will be successful or not, you need to start out small and grow as demand/interest grows, this way you only pay what is needed at the time.

With all that said I wish you the best of luck with the project, sounds like it could be interesting if done right.

What draws me to Dedicated servers is I have a site on a shared server with bluehost and I'm not impressed with the performance when loading pages of a barely populated forum. Thank you for the suggestion and the best wishes at any rate.

should this not be in the skeptics corner?

No. We're all very open to the supernatural. I'm personally quite curious about some "pseudo-sciences".

Here's a link to a video we put together a few months ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bUlgep-DDY It was intended to make up for the char cap on YT that made it difficult to post quotes when commenting to some channelers' videos. It will give an idea of what we've been looking into.

Anyway, I'll post a link when we're open.

Ziycon

*I know this is slightly off topic so I'll leave it at this.

There's your problem, you're using Bluehost who are a known overseller, they are the same group as hostmonster.

You need to find yourself a host that doesn't offer unlimited resources of any kind, this way you will get what you pay for and wont notice slowness issues like you've reported.

Many people will be put off your site straight away as you're asking for donations, this makes alarm bells ring straight away as there are many people that have tried to make money of this 'area' in the past and no doubt there will be more to come, just be aware of this.

dagaz11

I did note it can turn into a distraction but it was also interesting for me to read everyone's reaction. I emailed rockethub to ask if it was possible to yank the project. I'd rather shoulder the whole cost and spend my spare time on work than create unnecessary controversy.

Thank you for your reply. You've got an incoming PM.