10-03-2023, 09:41 AM
(10-18-2019, 02:50 PM)Guest Wrote: Thanks for allowing my post to come through so quickly. I'm kind of hoping that shaking the tree may make some newer information about Mark to fall out. As far as I have been able to determine the trail goes cold in Hong Kong a decade or more ago.
One other point about the Berkeley crystal overunity experiment that has been reported so many times. It was the impression, shared by me and other people at ISSO, that Mark did not actually have the technical expertise and practical knowledge necessary to conduct an experiment of that kind, or perform proper measurement and analysis. I don't think he actually understood how to operate an oscilloscope or an arbitrary waveform generator, for example. Certainly I never observed him to do anything the least bit technical at ISSO's SF laboratory, even though we had specifically set up various workstations (electronic, electromechanical, chemical) for him to use. When his bluff was called, he just sort of faded away.
I don't think he was lying, exactly, in his accounts of the Berkeley experiment and the subsequent raid and the night spent in detention at the campus police station. Rather, I think his psychological state at the time may have caused him to... er... misinterpret events and make unwarranted associations, which he later reported as facts that he himself believed, but which had little relationship to consensus reality.
I was randomly thinking about the strangeness of my life circa 2002-2004, which had various touch points with Mark. By the time I met him, his wife had already passed away - but it must have been just recently, though it sounded like historical canon even at that point. The connection was via my bf at the time, a brilliant and highly unusual human (hi Nynex if you happen to read this). Mark was very kind to the two of us, and he was such a lovely and sincere presence that I found myself believing that he really did talk to his dead wife (though I was 19 yrs old at the time, lacking any cognitive inoculation against conspiracy theory thinking).
Mark helped Nynex and I land in place called Crestone, Colorado, which was greatly appreciated because we were a fairly desperate situation (no need to go into why, although I'll just note that magical thinking is often followed closely by desperation). We had a first row seat to his execution of the Abundance Ray scam. It's really difficult to imagine Mark intentionally scamming anyone - but OTOH scam artists are known for their charisma. Nonetheless, it's easier to see Mark as someone with a great deal of cognitive flexibility and superhuman skills of rationalization, perhaps a patsy. Regardless of his inner experience, however, it doesn't change the reality that he scammed people out of some of their retirement money, which presumably they needed. That sucks.
What a strange time. I have my gripes with the default world (don't we all?) but I'm glad to be far away from the vortex of magical thinking. Perhaps magical thinking inevitably goes to dark places, because the easiest excuse for failed predictions is "bad people didn't want this good thing to happen." Since those times, I've developed a strong aversion to it. Innocent as it may be on the surface, magical thinking can turn grotesquely corrosive (as far worse Crestone horror stories attest, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Has_Won).
