When I was a kid, a long, long time ago, everyone trusted what they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio. There was tv but most people didn't have one yet. This was the age of of very naive people. As a matter of fact up until some where in the 1960s, if you heard something from the government is was believed without question. I think that this changed about the time Nixon got into trouble. It was unpatriotic to question anything that the government told you. If you heard a story on the news then it must have been true.

Whoops here came the era of disinformation. The government admits that it puts out disinformation. It states that it does this to fool our enemies. Companies and corporations are also putting out disinformation at times for their own purposes. Some of it is a crime, such as false financial statements that are meant to fool the investors. I think that we are all familiar with ENRON. ENRON is not the first corporation to put out false numbers and I have to assume that it will not be the last. Just look at what you have been told by corporations in the last few years regarding security online for banking. Many people didn't know that when they were told by some banks that their online services were secure they weren't. Some banks had the most basic of security which allowed hackers to easily crack the site's security and get customer information. It seems that honesty is not so much a concern with certain companies, as is conducting business for the ultimate profit available.

Let's get back to the disinformation campaign. How can anyone believe anything that is said, when your are told that disinformation is being used? I personally don't get it. If I was talking to someone and they told me that some of what they say wasn't true, how could I discern what was true and what was not? If I told others what they said then I could be distributing erroneous information, couldn't I? Newspapers, tv and radio reporters flock to government addresses where they diligently write down, reprint, or report what was said. Now if we take the example I had previously given you, wouldn't you agree that maybe, just maybe, they are printing or reporting incorrect information? Let's look at a relatively harmless incident that happened when people were more naive. Roswell is the holy grail of ufo crashes. The first day the government made an announcement of the crash, they had reviewed the wreckage and decided that it was a flying disk and that fact was printed in several papers. Almost instantly we were told that the wreckage was from a balloon and we were shown balloon wreckage. This seems fine so far and many people will tell you this is absolutely true and the government was covering up the fact that they had a secret balloon project called Project Mogul. Let's look a little deeper into this. If this was true then how do we explain the fact that just the day before, the wreckage looked like a crashed disk to everyone including the army?

Sometimes people in the news media decide to take the easy way out. They think that they shouldn't have to bother with the tedious task of actually having to track down a story, so they make one up or make up certain facts that make the story more exciting. Can I be sure of what I am saying? Oh yes, in the past I have been involved to the point that I saw events unfold while a reporter was present and when the story came out, it didn't even resemble or barely resembled what really happened. To the rest of the world it was a true story, but to the ones who were there, it was practically fiction. There was a story about ten to fifteen years ago that a famous eastern U.S. newspaper published. It told of gorillas going from door to door in a native village in Africa looking for a lost baby gorilla. I remember reading it and commenting to a fellow worker that I thought this story was pure baloney. The next day the paper put up a retraction and admitted that they had inadvertently published a false story. This was an error and could have happened to anyone who takes a story off the wire or internet. It is the stories that are knowingly published that are untrue that bother me. Years ago, a famous columnist of a famous Boston newspaper decided to write fictous facts into some of his columns. He did this for quite a long time, fooling the public. Finally, to the credit of the paper, he was fired. Another reporter from a different paper made up stories about a non existent crack addict that had people in tears. She was also fired. But what about those reporters that see certain events, such as wars, as an opportunity to push their agenda?

The internet is a perfect place to put out erroneous information. It can be done anonymously. People read this stuff and one tells another and before you know it, everyone is citing this info as fact. Hate sites like to do just this. They recite their own versions of history and try to turn people against their enemies. The idea is to foster their way of thinking. You have religious groups on the net, each stating facts as they see them, aimed at conversion. You even have different country sites, each stating history the way they perceive it. To me, one of the worst offenders that is non governmental are the political sites. If one wants to see misinformation and baseless charges just tap into your favorite political site. I don't care whether it is a republican or democratic site, the result will be the same, misinformation. Each side wants you to think that the other side is composed of devils that are just out for themselves. Could both sides just be out for themselves? Well, lets not get into a political discussion here, I was only citing an example.

Were we victimized by governmental misinformation when Iraq was invaded. Didn't we all think that weapons of mass destruction were there? How did we get that idea? We got it because every news outlet we looked at told us this. As time goes by we are starting to find out more facts about the situation in Iraq before the invasion and it is beginning to seem that it was known that wmd or weapons of mass destruction didn't exist, or is this misinformation too? What is, what isn't, who can tell? It is a shame that we can't stick the bodies of certain people into a futuristic lie detector harness and drain the true facts from their brains, I bet we would really be surprised at what the truth really is. I know some of the questions I would like to ask. First, I would like to know the true story on Iraq, then ufos, the space program, oil prices, Vietnam War and many more. Oh well I know I will never get that chance, I guess I will just have to keep on dreaming.