One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

I would humbly suggest that you give it a rest, Caz. None of what you suggest make the least bit of sense.

Your augment 'does not remain the same'--you've done a 180 flip flop.

And trying to claim that your shifting position is based on 'new information' is a deflection. Nothing has changed. We are still discussing the exact same events that you were attempting to analyze 20 years ago: Anne's strange decision to come forward in 1994/95 to claim the diary had been in her family for years, that Billy had seen it around 1950, etc. etc.

You told us that Anne would have been 'petrified and shaking like a leaf' had she been not telling the truth...

...if if if the truth had been that Mike had proof that they had faked the diary together with Caroline there to witness it.

What does RJ still not grasp about this oh so simple concept? Anyone else not getting it? I have never wavered from my scepticism that they faked it together, which would have meant that Mike could have proved it. It only matters that when Anne came out with her story, the one thing she didn't have to worry about was the thought that Mike had proof, in any form, of a 1992 Barrett hoax. She knew damned well he didn't, and why he didn't.

So why wasn't she shaking like a leaf if the diary came from Eddie? Why did she have the confidence to come forward and tell what you now acknowledge was a steady stream of b.s.?

Blimey, how many times? Because she couldn't have known this for a fact, if Mike brought the thing home one day with a less than comforting explanation for where he got it. Two years down the line, when Feldman and even Scotland Yard had dropped that line of enquiry, and Paul Dodd knew nothing, who else did she imagine would come up with proof that it originally came from Eddie? Anne would have had no more idea in July 1994 than did anyone else, what knowledge and information might have survived, for future researchers to harvest and assess, alongside her own account.

There were three different teams independently investigating the diary (Harris's, Harrison's, and Feldman's) as well as Harold Brough and Maurice Chittenden. (Yes, Chittenden. He contacted Barrett again after Mike's 1994/1995 confessions and even made a taped interview).

I assume Chittenden also came away empty from the experience, or he'd have shouted chapter and verse, along with the proof that had eluded everyone else.

Alan Gray, among others, was directly questioning Barrett---often when Mike was three-sheets-to-the-wind and likely to have made an impulsive admission. By everyone's account, Mike was a loose cannon.

Exactly - and Anne knew Mike better than anyone. His impulsive 'admission' to faking the watch engravings demonstrates just how much Anne had to fear from any similar 'admissions' about faking the diary: nothing whatsoever. If Mike wanted to make an impulsive 'admission' to getting it from the live wire Eddie, instead of the conveniently late Tony, Anne couldn't have stopped him, but it was not something anyone could easily have proved. Had the Barretts faked the diary, however, it should have been as easy for Mike to prove as falling off a log, and Anne could not possibly have banked on his spectacular failure to do so, even when he had a private investigator on board to get the goods.

If what you believe can be taken seriously, any one of the electricians could have resurfaced or had been chased down by one of the investigative teams. Eddie could have resurfaced and shouted "hold the phone! I want to come clean! I have a terrible confession to make!"

Or if not come forward, chased down.

Oh, but we have plenty of intelligence on which electricians knew what about whom, and why some were happier than others to share what they knew, as long as they could distance themselves from direct involvement. If Eddie wanted to come clean now, he could do so, but without documentary proof he would automatically be accused of seeking to sell his story, so I'm not sure what good it would do him. The interesting thing is that he once suggested he had seen the diary, and immediately clarified that he meant the diary book, written by Shirley Harrison. He knew enough of the story to suggest he had kept up with it via the books, and even tried to direct investigators away from himself and towards "the wife", presumably having read Anne's story in Shirley's 1994 paperback and been aware that the author had taken this far more seriously than Mike's hastily retracted June 1994 confession. Eddie could simply have gone down that route and pointed to Mike's confession as his own proof of innocence, but I don't actually think he is that daft!

Anne would indeed have lived in terror of exposure had all she known is that Mike had brought the diary home from the pub and had asked her to backdate his bogus research notes to 'pre-1991.' She would have clearly known something was seriously wrong and would have been an utter fool to put herself at the center of attention by telling a string of lies on radio and to those working with her. You said so yourself.

Why would the same not have applied with knobs on, if she had typed the words herself, about Mike transferring his notes since August 1991, knowing that Mike was busy trying to palm off their handiwork as a potentially genuine confession by JtR? She'd have been an even greater fool to do this, and back it all up two years later with her own version of the Devereux provenance, knowing that Mike was by then in the mood to confess all, and had already made a shaky start the previous month.

So tell me. Why--in plain English, preferably--did Anne weave these fantastic tales, including repeating them on the radio and in her own book?

What was her motive?

Well RJ can tell me, because he claims to know more about Anne's motives than I, from as far back as March 1992. I doubt he knows more about her motives than Anne herself, and I certainly don't, so it's a question only Anne can answer. But there's the rub, because neither of us can believe she has ever told the plain, unvarnished truth. There could have been several reasons behind her decision to tell Feldman that story, but nobody could have forced her to do so and she was her own woman by then.

So perhaps RJ could finally explain what would have motivated Anne to 'weave these fantastic tales' if Mike had been in possession of the evidential dynamite to blow them to smithereens and expose them both as the diary's creators.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Clearly, you haven't thought any of this through, Caz, and you're back to Mad Hatter logic in hopes you'll confuse your readers.

I'm making no such suggestion.

I'm suggesting that the idea of 'someone pinching the Diary of Jack the Ripper from Dodd' didn't threaten Anne whatsoever because it didn't happen, and she knew it didn't happen.

Then this is not a debate, and I don't know what RJ is even doing here.

A child with a reading age of seven could grasp that a theft that never happened couldn't have threatened Anne, while a curious child of ten would then ask RJ for his proof that no theft took place, to justify his conclusion about Anne.

By contrast, Barrett confessing to the hoax would implicate her by association--particularly if she really had been involved in its creation. Her hand was forced, and she had to dream up some wild story to undermine his very public confession.

Christ on a bike! How could any story Anne could have come up with in July 1994, have 'undermined' a threat posed by Mike's 'very public confession' in the June, IF he had had the evidence to prove they had faked the diary together, whether this was in 1990, as Mike went on to claim, or in early April 1992, to reflect a story sold and told by others? This is what RJ believes, so he is forced to argue that Anne dealt with what would have been a very real, very public threat from Mike, simply by telling her tale. She may as well have waved a magic wand, hoping to turn Mike into a pillar of stone.

And it was all-too easy to convince those who already believed in the diary's antiquity that her nonsensical story was true.

Only because Mike failed to prove anything about its creation.

The Barretts hoaxing the diary supplies a motive for her behavior.

In RJ's dreams. It's a fairy tale for children.

Eddie stealing the diary and selling it to Barrett does not.

Only because RJ has already told the kiddies that there is no thief in the story.

He's selling them a fairy tale of his own creation and pretending it's real.

[caz]

Returning to my original question—the same one Paul Begg pondered years ago—why would Lynn Barrett (I’ll use her maiden name) have complained to Anne, of all people, when Feldman and his private detective were harassing and probing into the private affairs of her family?

Caz made the following suggestion:



Source please?

None of what you claim is described by Feldman—and he was the one on the telephone!

In reality, none of this would be worth talking about if it didn't give us a pretty strong indication where the diary came from. It might not be worth talking about, anyway.

Feldman tells us that when he finally got up the nerve to call Lynne for the first time, he didn’t know what to ask. And when he did call, he could barely get a word in edgewise...

"She did the talking" Feldman tells us. (p. 155)



How is any of the above ‘bending Lynn' ear’?

And where is there any indication that Lynn was even aware of Feldman’s genealogical theories involving Anne?

Returning to reality, what Lynn did do was to immediately ask Feldman to stop harassing her.

Nor does Feldman say anything about asking for Anne's phone number. That’s another invention.

What Feldman said to Lynn was this:

“IF IT IS A FAKE I WANT TO KNOW WHO FAKED IT” (direct quote)

Remember that well.

"IT MEANS I'VE BEEN CONNED."

Feldman also stated, “if it is genuine, then it is not by accident that it is in the hands of your brother.”

(Another direct quote—nothing whatsoever about the diary being connected to Anne).

Lynne then bursts out crying and hangs up the phone!

From what follows--Anne calling Feldy back after a day or two and giving him an ear full---it doesn't take a rocket-scientist to realize that very soon after hanging up Lynn called Anne, no doubt worried and angry, complaining of Feldman's investigation.

This prying Londoner wanted to know whether the diary was a fake or not and how Mike came to have it.

That’s it. That’s all we really know, and it comes from Feldman himself.

Nothing at all about Anne being a Maybrick or Feldman calling to get Anne’s number.

That's all RJ may know, but he forgets the middle man, Mike Barrett, who couldn't keep his mouth shut. Feldman had told Mike back in the April of 1994 that he was aiming to prove the diary had come down through Anne's family. Mike got straight on the blower to Doreen, to complain about Feldman's persistent phone calls and theories, incensed by the thought that he was trying to link Anne, and therefore Caroline, back to Jack the Ripper. Feldman would have known nothing about the communications on record about this, including those between Mike and Doreen, and between Doreen and Robert Smith.

Mike didn't have an address for Anne, so he couldn't have provided one to Feldman even if he had wanted to. But Mike could have told his family all about Feldman's theories concerning Anne, just as he had told Doreen, and that would explain his sister's attitude towards the harassment of Mike and his family, if he had already made them aware of Feldman's previously expressed interest in Anne's background, and his belief that Anne could tell him a thing or two about the diary's origins.

How else would it make sense for Mike's sister to have immediately asked Feldman to stop harassing her, if this was the first time he had called her and didn't even know what to ask?

Surely the answer is that she had been warned in advance, by Mike and possibly other family members, about Feldman's theories concerning Anne, and the harassment the Barretts had already suffered, so she was ready to give him a piece of her mind when he 'finally got up the nerve' to call her.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Assuming this is the same meeting, Keith Skinner's 'visibly distressed' has morphed into Martin Fido's 'virtual screaming fit'.

Morphed? That is a rather prejudicial and deceptive wording, isn't it?

How has Martin Fido's account ever 'morphed' from his original statement back in 2001?

Are you suggesting it 'morphed' because someone, working from memory, is now giving a different account over two decades later?

And I went back and checked. At the time of Martin's statement, Keith was posting on the same message board through an intermediary. Indeed, he responded to another poster less than 8 hour after Martin made his statement, and again a few days after that.

If Martin was substantially straying from reality, no one challenged him at the time.

His anecdote remains very curious. Did Anne have an irrational fear of Quakers? Do you think that's the explanation, or is it possible that despite what Caz now believes, she did indeed have something to hide, and it had sod-all to do with an electrician?

[rjpalmer]

This is hardly the stuff of deductive rigour therefore I do not believe that anyone should be using it as part of their case to argue for the Victorian scrapbook being a hoaxed artefact.

This is irrelevant grandstanding, Thomas, and is entirely divorced from the reality of the original context.

Martin was not pointing to Anne's strange behavior as evidence that the diary was a hoax.

A few people, including Peter Birchwood and Ivor Edwards, were hoping to organize either a private or public event where Anne Graham could be question by a neutral third party---someone outside of Feldman's protective circle of influence.

Martin, obviously convinced this was unlikely to happen, responded with the above anecdote.

?

[caz]

Thank Keith for me, Thomas, but this is not what I was remembering, but I do acknowledge having made an error in my account.

I think I made a mistake of memory, and it was not Keith who was daring to challenge Anne's veracity--it was someone far more skeptical about the diary: Martin Fido.

I distinctly remember being told that Anne would run from the room when quizzed by an unfriendly party (and I suppose Keith wouldn't fall into that category) and on one occasion locked herself into another room and Martin had to try to speak to her through a locked door. It sounds like such an utterly ridiculous thing for Anne to have done had she been telling the truth!

(And are we back to believing Anne Graham? How could she have seen the diary back around 1970 if it was under Dodd's floorboards?)

I'll see if I can find Martin's original account, but in the meantime, here is a second party (Ivor Edwards) who also recalled Martin's story back in 2002, so I am clearly not making it up, though yes--perhaps it was Martin and not Keith. My apologies.

But the fact that it was Martin makes it all the more interesting, in my opinion.



I remembered it being the bathroom; Ivor Edwards remembered Martin mentioning the kitchen.

RJ also 'remembered' the locked bathroom detail being posted by Caz. I have no memory of this, and would only post specific details like this if I had a source for them. Perhaps RJ could locate my post or admit that he was also posting from memory on this point.

Is not the point the same? Anne could clearly not stand the heat of being questioned by a non-believer. From everything I've read, she never answered questions from a hostile audience (unlike Mike Barrett) without acting either deeply upset or setting perimeters beforehand. Why is that? What honest, normal, candid person with a questioned document behaves that way?

I'll see if I can chase down Marin's original post.

By the way, maybe Keith also has information confirming Caz Brown's claim that Lynn Barrett was fully aware of Feldman's theories about Anne's ancestry, and this is why Lynn called Anne after hanging up the phone of Paul Feldman?

Caz's account certainly appears to be very different from the way Paul Feldman reported it in his book...and Feldman was the one on the telephone.

Ah, so this has now become a 'claim' of mine, rather than a reasonable inference I took from the communications on record between other interested parties, leading up to Feldman's first call to Mike's sister. As Keith has the same documentation, he will no doubt let me know if he sees things very differently and why.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

So perhaps RJ could finally explain what would have motivated Anne to 'weave these fantastic tales' if Mike had been in possession of the evidential dynamite to blow them to smithereens and expose them both as the diary's creators.

Finally? I have already explained my reasoning; you're the one who appears to be struggling.

The way I see it, Anne lied about seeing the diary in her youth to undermine Barrett's confession and to deflect attention away from it. And it worked admirably.

By telling these tales, Anne knew that Feldman's team would lose little sleep worrying if Mike and/or Anne had forged the diary, but instead focus their time and resources researching the wildly implausible theory that the teenaged Florrie Maybrick had had an illegitimate child with a shipowner's son and Billy Graham was a direct descendant of that amorous union. It also allowed Feldman to keep arguing for the diary's authenticity, in hopes of getting a much-anticipated major motion film deal.

If Anne's motive for doing such a thing strikes you as an unfathomable mystery of human psychology than I agree that it is pointless for us to discuss it any further.

Have a joyous Christmas and a Happy New Year.

[caz]

Yes, it very much is time to put this puppy to bed. If Anne only suspected Mike had stolen property on his hands, then such a claim would have been impossible to back up. At least with her provenance story, she needed no other evidence.

What RJ finds totally impossible to do, Ikeypoo, is to imagine just for one second that Anne and Mike did NOT have anything to do with creating the diary, and put himself in Anne's position from March 1992, not knowing how her mendacious husband might have come across it, but absolutely knowing something fishy was going on when he told Doreen about the effect it had been having on their lives - his and Anne's - since his dead friend Tony had given it to him almost a year before.

In early 1993 we get Anne's question to Mike in front of Feldman et al: "Did you nick it, Mike?", which shows that something was playing on her mind. RJ no doubt interprets this as a sure sign that Anne's guilty conscience was all down to her role in the diary's creation, and not simply because she had been quietly going along with one of Mike's biggest porkies to date, because she knew damned well he didn't have the diary while Tony was alive, but was still unsure of what he knew about it and what exactly he was determined to conceal from everyone - including his wife - by backdating its acquisition.

This was the lie Anne would have been living with, which would have been more than enough to play on my mind and give me sleepless nights, if I'd had the serious misfortune to marry a Mike Barrett figure. If she had unwittingly helped him create a silly hoax out of her own fictional story, she could have had a quiet word with Doreen as soon as she realised it might be taken seriously, and it would all have gone away, without Mike even knowing what she'd done. That would have been my reaction. Not so easy if she suspected Mike had recently nicked it from somewhere. How could she have explained that to Doreen, without unleashing all sorts of trouble for Mike, possibly involving the police arriving at their door.

If RJ wants to put his puppy to bed, that's up to him. But without evidence of who held the pen, it's an imaginary puppy, like an imaginary friend from his boyhood.

Ask him why you can't see his puppy and he'll tell you with a straight face: "He goes to be wormed on Wednesdays".

Love,

Switchy
X

[caz]

It's also interesting to note that Martn refers to another time when Anne was quizzed (apparently not by Martin himself?)--not about anything Mike had said--but about her own account.

Her bizarre story of hiding the diary from her own husband behind a piece of furniture "led to a good deal of complicated revision" which I think was Martin's kind way of saying that she was lying.

But, of course, I will be accused of "reading too much into it." I always am

And what is RJ's point here, when nobody today is claiming that Anne's story about giving the diary to Mike via Tony was true?

She is obviously someone who finds it a lot harder and more distressing to try and maintain an untrue story than her husband ever did. That would be her fault entirely, for telling it in the first place - what a tangled web and all that - but I doubt that lying came as easily to her as it did to Mike, and she seriously underestimated the efforts others would go to, and I'm very much including Keith here, to examine and explore every tiny detail of what she was claiming, either in the full expectation of finding cracks, or merely to try and make sense of her given reasons for doing what she said she did, in the context of a troubled marriage.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Speaking of shady characters, while Keith is in the mood to set the record straight, and while the Maybrick watch is gaining so much renewed interest, is Keith willing to reveal the identity of Feldman's newfound friend 'Gary,' or the names of the two secret investors who were described by Shirley Harrison as 'menacing'?

I find it remarkable that people think they are seriously investigating the origin of etchings, yet do not only not know the names of these silent investors, nor even seem to care.

RP

I assume RJ was referring to Robbie Johnson and chums here as 'shady characters' and not Keith!

May I also assume there has been no progress with sourcing any examples of Robbie's joined up handwriting?

Feldman writes that Robbie broke his back in a diving accident at the age of eight and spent three years in hospital. If true, it would have seriously disrupted his education during a critical period of his life, so what literacy skills did he take with him into adulthood? Most children in the UK in the late 20th century would have been able to join their letters before the age of eight, if they were taught a cursive letter font style. But did this apply to Robbie? Does RJ know? Does anyone know? Is the Maybrick signature in the watch even typical of letter formations used by adults schooled in the mid 20th century?

We went on a Christmas cruise in 1994, where we met a female teacher from across the pond, who appeared impressed with our daughter's reading skills. She was seven at the time, but looked about four, so I assumed this was why. We were ordering breakfast and the teacher watched my daughter as she was consulting the menu to make her choice. The teacher remarked that children in the US only needed to know their address and phone number when going to school at the age of seven. Now this may not have been true, but we were astonished. Not nearly as astonished as the teacher, however, when my daughter, with perfect pronunciation, asked: "What's decaffeinated coffee, mummy?" She nearly fell off her chair.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I'm trying to reconcile your suggestion that Anne 'felt safe' in telling her tales with Martin's account of Anne throwing a 'virtual screaming fit' and locking herself in the bathroom at the mere site of a Diary skeptic.

As you frequently point out, I have a simple mind, but this doesn't strike me as to the behavior of a woman who was 'free and clear.'

Any ideas?

Yes.

For the umpteenth time, Anne would have felt safe in the knowledge that Mike could do his worst, in the wake of his first 'confession', if she knew damned well he had not faked the diary.

It would have been a very different story if she knew, as you believe she did, that he had indeed faked it, with her help, while they were under the same roof, with Caroline as a witness. Mike would then have been able to prove it in a heartbeat, and she'd have known that too.

We know that she was safe in this respect, because Mike was woefully unequipped for the task, even with the aid of Alan Gray, the might of Melvin Harris, and the combined forces of all the Barrett hoax believers, of putting your puppy to bed with any definitive evidence.

Or none of us would still be here now.

[caz]

sight of a Diary skeptic, of course.

Anyway, as promised, here it is Caz: Paul Begg asking the same 'simple-minded' question I'm still asking. He refers to Lynn calling Anne as a 'curious detail.' What did Lynne expect Anne to do about it?



And even Feldman didn't know:



It appears that I'm in the same simple-minded club as the two Pauls, but I have a theory.

Hmmm, I wonder if RJ's theory is based on the diary's creation being a joint Barrett enterprise?

Am I getting warm?

Once again, how would either of the Pauls have been expected to know what Mike had been telling his nearest and dearest about Feldman's fantastic theories, based on Mike's own very imperfect grasp of what Feldman was thinking, during repeated phone calls to Mike made over a single weekend in April 1994, related to Anne's family background? Doreen knew at the time, but Keith and I only learned about it after Inside Story was published.

Context, as usual, is everything, and it isn't feasible to imagine that Mike would not have confided in his own family with tales of all this Feldman inspired madness surrounding him, after Anne had upped and left him to it, and was in no mood to speak to him or anyone else about the bloody diary, while learning how to cope for the first time in her life as a single parent.

Alternative explanations are all there in the fine print, making reading between the lines redundant, if only one is willing to open one's ears and eyes.

But belief is a powerful beast, like religion, and the more people who believe the Barretts and the Johnsons were hoaxers, the more powerful the beast will appear to be, while being toothless without the evidence needed to turn it into the truth. Truth demands evidence; belief requires none. It thrives and spreads well enough without it. Proof doesn't even get a toe in the door when belief owns the room. As for doubt, you can forget it - and believers do. When doubt goes from being a beautiful and essential human quality to an outdated, discarded and forgotten concept, you'd better believe that belief has taken over and is dictating its own truth to all comers who will happily lap it up without question.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Morphed? That is a rather prejudicial and deceptive wording, isn't it?

How has Martin Fido's account ever 'morphed' from his original statement back in 2001?

Are you suggesting it 'morphed' because someone, working from memory, is now giving a different account over two decades later?

And I went back and checked. At the time of Martin's statement, Keith was posting on the same message board through an intermediary. Indeed, he responded to another poster less than 8 hour after Martin made his statement, and again a few days after that.

If Martin was substantially straying from reality, no one challenged him at the time.

His anecdote remains very curious. Did Anne have an irrational fear of Quakers? Do you think that's the explanation, or is it possible that despite what Caz now believes, she did indeed have something to hide, and it had sod-all to do with an electrician?

Something to hide, RJ?

Like the auction ticket you mean, which you believe Mike had, right from March 1992 to April 1999 and beyond, but did an infinitely better job of hiding it than Anne did her own feelings, when getting the third degree about the diary from Martin Fido?

If Mike volunteered so much as a partially true story of the diary's origins in January 1995, what was it about that blasted ticket that made him refer to its existence often enough, but hide it from every other living soul, not even leaving it with his solicitor to be revealed after his death?

I too have a theory, and it's that Mike's ticket never existed, and what Anne had to hide was the fact that from March 1992 she had not only gone along with one of his previous lies, about Tony Devereux giving him the diary in 1991, but had very unwisely compounded it with her own version of the Devereux story in July 1994.

The art of telling lies must be easier for some than for others. The motivation for doing so may be impossible for the onlooker to ever know, and is often far from clear to the person telling the lie. "It seemed like a good idea at the time" might be the best explanation we could hope to get from a confessed liar, but then how would we know if they were not lying about this too?

[caz]

Finally? I have already explained my reasoning; you're the one who appears to be struggling.

The way I see it, Anne lied about seeing the diary in her youth to undermine Barrett's confession and to deflect attention away from it. And it worked admirably.

Yes, but it would not have worked if Mike had produced proof that the scrapbook housing the diary was obtained from an auction sale, whether that was as early as 1990 or as late as 1992.

This is not a difficult concept for anyone not permanently glued to the Barrett hoax theory.

By telling these tales, Anne knew that Feldman's team would lose little sleep worrying if Mike and/or Anne had forged the diary, but instead focus their time and resources researching the wildly implausible theory that the teenaged Florrie Maybrick had had an illegitimate child with a shipowner's son and Billy Graham was a direct descendant of that amorous union. It also allowed Feldman to keep arguing for the diary's authenticity, in hopes of getting a much-anticipated major motion film deal.

If Anne's motive for doing such a thing strikes you as an unfathomable mystery of human psychology than I agree that it is pointless for us to discuss it any further.

Anne had had very little contact with these people when she told Feldman her story. How could she have been comforted, let alone motivated, by the thought that it would take preference over Mike's claims, in the event that he went on to prove them with indisputable evidence, as he surely could have done if they had really created the diary in 1992?

Is RJ seriously reduced to implying that if Mike had produced irrefutable proof of a Barrett hoax, this would have made no difference to anyone in Feldman's team, or Shirley's, and they would have carried on carrying on as before, accepting that Anne may have seen this same scrapbook, complete with 63 pages of Maybrick's musings, back in the swinging sixties? RJ really shouldn't judge all these people by his own standards, which evidently include sticking to a belief regardless of what might come along to shatter it. The people he includes in his sweeping statement are better than that, and don't deserve to be brought down to his level.

[Scott Nelson]

But belief is a powerful beast, like religion, and the more people who believe the Barretts and the Johnsons were hoaxers, the more powerful the beast will appear to be, while being toothless without the evidence needed to turn it into the truth. Truth demands evidence; belief requires none. It thrives and spreads well enough without it. Proof doesn't even get a toe in the door when belief owns the room. As for doubt, you can forget it - and believers do. When doubt goes from being a beautiful and essential human quality to an outdated, discarded and forgotten concept, you'd better believe that belief has taken over and is dictating its own truth to all comers who will happily lap it up without question.

This has got to be the most profound prose I've ever read on these boards, Caroline.