End of the world Aussie Bloke hoax thread...

has anyone even done IP searches on these guys? I really think that it's the true AB on the first board, but does anyone know if the IP's matched up with posts by 'AB' on other boards? This is where the people are getting at. I really haven't seen any solid debunking info on this either... I mean, really... how many people rode the coattail of the AB story and tried to expand on it because they believed, or maybe wanted to get in on the hoax, or whatnot?

This is what I would like to see... something that lets us know (since this must obviously be a hoax) how many people started this, and how many were finally involved... excluding 'The Monitors', of course... we already know that was a hoax, and why, and the hoaxer proved himself. I really believe it's a possibility that there was one original AB, and he possibly thought his dreams or whatnot, wherever he got info, was real, and decided that noone would believe a 'prophet' so he started throwing in scientific stuff. Good possibility of that (would that be considered a hoax then? kind of a fine line there...). And, again, it is also a possibility that someone else took him too seriously and attempted to 'spread his word' and we ended up with this big mess.

Like I said... it's a possibility... may have been explored, and may have not. I do feel bad for Gartrell. I'd be pissed, too, if someone was trying to pass themselves off as me to gain credibility. I don't think he should be necessarily going straight after AB (the original), but investigating how many people were involved, and who it was that claimed to be him. I've been trying to keep up the best I can, but really... I do have a life, a band, work, a GF (and her kid), so don't bash me like you have been bashing others, SO, please.

I think you just have to trust your gut on the information given. There are very few of us who can actually do solid research and come up with this matches that and this doesn't match, so therefore...

My gut tells me:

1) There was a real AB and he is who he says he is, ie a 60 yr old Aussie astronomer.

2) I think he gave himself away too early, even though he didn't seem to want to. I think he buckled under pressure of questioning. If you look at the posts, most of this happened in a day or two. His thoughts don't seem premeditated, they read as very honestly angry and frustrated. I think in giving himself away too soon, he was taken out.

3) If you had info of this nature, had been holding it in for 20+ years and knew that we were only a couple of months away from Doomsday and wanted to leak this info to the GP, where would you go? Message boards like this one or GLP or others. But those kept getting shut down until he found one safe enough for a few days' posts, which is where we get the meat of the info. I think we have to look at the possibility that he's not lying about those sites being shut down. If he's not lying, then we have to look at why those sites were being shut down.

4) The whole, "I'm Grant Gartrell" post just doesn't feel right. It's not written in the same voice. It's like someone tracked down an old Aussie astronomer and found this guy and knew that if they put this guy's name up there, someone would eventually get in touch with the Gartrell and he'd deny knowledge of any of it. There are a few a problems with this. A) How do we know that the email this one fellow supposedly received from Gartrell was really from Gartrell? How do we know he received an email at all?

5) The whole Monitors post. Ugh. What an obvious debunk. And then the guy saying he wrote the Monitors post. A hoax debunking a hoax debunking a hoax? You can understand why some people would want to do this. A lot of damage can happen in just a few days time, let alone a few weeks as they had at that time. I for one don't believe in any of the debunking posts. We've seen this time and again and it really disappoints me how ATS has so readily accepted the hoax status of this claim. Yeah, it's been proven to be a hoax, just like it was proven that crop circles were a hoax by two guys name Doug and Dave. Riiight. And thousands of incredibly intricate and complex crop circles later... This all reeks of fear. It's understandable though. We all have much invested in the future. It's frightening to think that what we see in a movie like Day After Tomorrow might actually happen to us, to ones we love, to places we love.

6) And finally, this very interesting website. I'm not sure I understand the conclusions, but it's got my attention.

www.fortunecity.com...

[edit on 13-6-2004 by VORTEXAS]

LOOK PEOPLE, THE REAL DR GARTELL CAME FORWARD, AB WAS A HOAXTER. DR GARTRELL IS ACTUALLY EXTREMELY ANGRY AT THIS AB FOR TAKING HIS IDENDTITY, IT WAS REPRTED ON A COUPLE OF AUSTRALIAN NEWS WEBPAGES. ITS OVER, AB WAS A HOAXTER, A VERY BAD ONE AT THAT, ITS OVER FOR THE LAST TIME

No it'll be over for the last time come about July 1.

I jsut wanted to know how much seriously you people are taking this stuff. I have kind of been dying every day since I read this stuff. It's getting me nervuos, depressed, sad and angry. What do you people think?????

Again k33l, maybe these will help:
The Aussi Bloke Hoax is a Hoax After All!!!
I just received this response email from Grant Gartrell

I think your working yourself up, or have been of late, over nothing.


seekerof

k33l,

As far as I'm aware, one of the main reasons we KNOW it was a hoax is because the science didn't check out. The claims didn't make sense to those on this board who have a keen interest in astronomy and space, or to those who are able to interpret the information given.

For those of use who don't know much about astronomy we can listen to some of the very knowledgeable posters on ats, or we could go out and investigate ourselves.

Look for a few dedicated astronomy message boards. If there was any truth in the AB story these would be red hot with amateur astronomers round the world filing reports. They're not, which has to lead us to believe it's a hoax. You couldn't get millions of people around the world to agree to cover something like this up.

Here's a few places you could start (I just googled "astronomy discussion forum" to get these)

www.astronomyforum.net...
astronomyphysics.com...
www.astronomy.com...

Knowledge is power. Deny Ignorance!!

The last BIG ONE was 65 Million Years Ago!!!!

So we can all rest at ease...
I found this on The Discovery Channel...

dsc.discovery.com...

As Shakespeare once said, "thou doest protest too loudly."

This link might make some people feel better. It's hard to come in late on something like this and accept the hoax premise. We've all been conditioned to accept hoax stories as cover-ups. But I hope this is a hoax, as most people seem to think it is. If it is then I'm gettin' a new car!

www.astronomy.com...

A noise like thunder but much louder woke residents of 2 town's on the East Coast of New Zealand last week, report's say that people awakened by the noise in the towns of Napier and Hastings saw a glowing yellow ball that lit up the sky.A day or 2 later a 4.5 billion year old meteorite crashed through the roof of a house in Auckland. nzherald.co.nz

I wonder how many of you PhD wannabe's who "new all along it was a hoax cause I'm a genius" are religious or thought Iraq had WMD. The whole world is based on 'hoaxes' and yet you saw through this one? (I'm not dismissing religion as a hoax but it has a system that is at least partly based on belief without evidence) I think those who dismissed this as a hoax straight away are the one's with the serious problems. Doomsday theories only need to be right once. I suppose Yellowstone is a hoax, and nuclear weapons, and Kobe Bryant, and the Greenhouse effect. The point is.... MAYBE!

your argument makes no sense

[edit on 20-10-2004 by antipigopolist]

Well, the point of my post was in fact very poorly expressed, and my excuses go out to everyone for this. I personally don't judge myself as a particularly "gullible" person, I have interests in social engineering and neuro-linguistic programming, and thus I generally do not tend to be very conclusive very soon about most things. Now, what I was trying to express in the post, was my personal feeling of what the AB hoax made me think about. I really never took it for real or anything, but I started to seriously think about myself and about how I would consider my life if I were to die now. I know that it's not going to happen, but it's become so damn important to me to fulfill my objectives [in life] in order to make me a "complete" person. I have been seriously asking myself more existential questions in two days than most people do in a lifetime. And that seriously got me thinking, because I now know perfectly what I want from life and I presumptuosly think I also know what humankind's current goal in existence is: think, ask, answer. I also happened to read all of it during a period of relative inner crisis of mine, thing that also 'helped out' the way it 'made me think'. I would also like to thank all of you for your replies, and thank AB, because I guess that without him I would've never come across ATS and never found such a great community of thinkers (a nearly extinct race I must guess). That said, I was actually curious if some of you has felt the "same things" as me, in this or in other similar cases. I'll also link you to a post I made in the 'Predictions' forum:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Thanks again to everyone. Seriously.

Originally posted by ljhowie
I wonder how many of you PhD wannabe's who "new all along it was a hoax cause I'm a genius" are religious or thought Iraq had WMD. The whole world is based on 'hoaxes' and yet you saw through this one? (I'm not dismissing religion as a hoax but it has a system that is at least partly based on belief without evidence) I think those who dismissed this as a hoax straight away are the one's with the serious problems. Doomsday theories only need to be right once. I suppose Yellowstone is a hoax, and nuclear weapons, and Kobe Bryant, and the Greenhouse effect. The point is.... MAYBE!

I think what matters is taking each case on it's own merits. You're right, the world is full of hoaxes, but I think that means we need to learn to spot the differences between the real and the fake. Somewhere between the definite and the impossible is a huge great swathe of "maybe" that we're all investigating. At the end of the day everything here is just someone's opinion and has to be taken on it's merits or researched independently . With regards to WMD and Iraq, I think you're right, a lot of people were misled, most notably the politicians who went along with the whole war idea. A lot of those that looked into it further though, like those who looked into the Aussie Bloke affair in detail, spotted lies from the start(EDIT: or at least picked up on them pretty quickly). I think those who believed the Aussie Bloke threat are more likely to be those who believed in the WMD/Iraq arguments too...

[edit on 15-6-2004 by muppet]

I think we should all just sit and wait, only time will really tell won't it
millions of people face armageddon every single day , its called dieing it's gonna happen one day that is inevitable, so there is an asteroid on it's way right now, it will strike when YOUR time is up so why worry about the future, live for today .

So I have what, three more days to go on a crazy credit card shopping spree? I mean in 3 days my credit won't matter much right?

I never believed in the weapons of Mass destruction in Iraq and for the most part never bought into the AB asteroids either. The dates were wrong, there will be three NEOs at their closest points on 26 June 2004, one with the potential of doing incredible damage, being asteroid Itokawa. However I don't believe that this will happen. However I must say that after reading the AB postings I find myself checking various end of times and astronomy sites frequently. I check unusual weather. I guess sometimes we just want to make sure we're still ok.

Originally posted by LL1
The last BIG ONE was 65 Million Years Ago!!!!

So we can all rest at ease...

I never knew the universe worked on a schedule! If only the trains did.