Aviation Mysteries website

[Jim MacDonald]

It looks like the TIGHAR foil, the Aviation Mysteries website has closed down. I wonder if it closed down on its own or if it had a little help from TIGHAR's lawyers?

Mac

[quemerford]

More to the point, has TIGHAR been closed down yet?

[Jim MacDonald]

Nope. He's doing podcasts on their Facebook page about all of the fruitful(?) fruitless(?) expeditions to Nico. Doesn't seem to be much reaction to it.

Looks like TIGHAR is slowly withering on the vine. Then again, it seems to be the proverbial cat with nine lives.

Mac

[quemerford]

Nope. He's doing podcasts on their Facebook page about all of the fruitful(?) fruitless(?) expeditions to Nico. Doesn't seem to be much reaction to it.

Looks like TIGHAR is slowly withering on the vine. Then again, it seems to be the proverbial cat with nine lives.

Mac

Hard to believe that anyone is funding this stuff anymore.

[Jim MacDonald]

I'm surprised anyone did from the get go. Guess PT Barnum was right.

Mac

[JohnB]

Aviation Mysteries hadn't been well for awhile.
It was a one-person show, so perhaps he lost interest.
I stopped visiting when the owner/moderator asked me to quit criticizing TIGHAR.

[Jim MacDonald]

I thought that's mainly why it was there. Since Scott was told to not allow that here, they switched over to their own site to continue to ahh..refute TIGHAR's claims.

Mac

[old iron]

If the Aviation Mysteries site is down, then this is another step in the sad sad scene. What made America "Great" was innovation based in some fair measure on hard work and Science. But Science is now seen as "hard" and America in general has grown too lazy to engage in complex discussion. We are not looking for general truths based on rational examination of evidience, but rather pursue conspiracy hypotheses (if even that word is appropriate) as absolute truths based on some 35-year old single unemployable guy who lives with his mom.

Amelia has been a case in point. Based on rational evidence, there is no way that she and Fred would be on Gardner Island (or in the Japanese occupied areas, for that matter). Any examination of the distances and fuel consumptions must put them in the deep ocean not too far from Howland. Yet TIGHAR has spoken so loud and so dogmatic to nonskeptical media that that explanation seems credible, much as the "Finding Bigfoot" (or mermaids) shows on cable channetls that claim to be educational has created leagues of numnuts who take leaps to these conclusions, and no rational discussion can deter this nonsence.

What is unfortunate is that discussion has moved away from this Board. It should return.

[PinecastleAAF]

It was the most over-moderated website I ever had the pleasure to visit and then it morphed into a fantasy about rocks. It killed itself.

[JohnB]

"Over moderated".
I would get phone calls from the owner asking me to tone down my already polite posts.

Yes, I would call it over moderated.

He also (over, IMHO) catered to a guy who had his own theory.
He would post photos of coral near the island and swear they matched pints of Lockheed's structure.
I could never see what he claimed was clearly visible.
It was like, but far more obscure than, looking into the night sky and swing the fanciful designs/star signs the ancients claimed were there.

At first I thought the guy was satirizing TIGHAR, but eventually it became clear the guy was serious! Oh oh!!!!

Still, he put his time and money on it, so you have to give the guy some credit...even if you don't agree with it.

The AE centric (although it still said it was an aircraft recovery group) group jumped the shark when it announced that "crashed and sunk" was basically impossible.
Huh?
The flight was over water....with no large islands nearby.
So how can you honestly rule out crashing into the ocean?
It would be like saying a plane missing in Texas HAS to be underwater.

Last edited by JohnB on Sat Jul 24, 2021 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

[quemerford]

The AE centric (although it still said it was an aircraft recovery group) group jumped the shark when it announced that "crashed and sunk" was basically impossible.

Presumably it's easier to justify an annual holiday to Niku if you say it MUST be there (or some other island you fancy going to).