Well, the demon fairy is a hoax. Just like I said I expected it would turn out to be. On August 9, 2016 I wrote:
The point of wanting the “fairy” specimen tested under transparent peer review is to make sure it isn’t an example of this (anything look familiar?) X-rays don’t establish what material something is made of. Lots of material will show up on an X-ray. Sincere researchers have been duped before. I don’t want that to happen to Lynn or anyone else. If insisting on transparency with this sort of thing draws abuse for me, so be it. Let me go on record now as saying that I believe real scientific testing will show the specimen is not an unknown life form.
Here’s Lynn Marzulli on Skywatch with the announcement:
I’m not at all surprised. Not in the least. This was no mystery from the beginning. Here are some obvious points that should have been grasped very early:
- That a specimen like this is organic (has DNA) proves nothing. It is no argument against it being a fake, nor is it an argument that the DNA is of an unknown life form. Why? Keep reading.
- That an X-ray of the specimen shows wing structures and such, including bone, proves nothing. It is no argument against fakery, either. Right after some readers blew up at me for saying something as controversial as the specimen needed independent study and to be submitted to peer review (how brazen of me), I posted a link to this site about how such fairies were manufactured by a special effects artist. I’ve corresponded with that artist and sent him a link to one of the YouTube videos about the specimen. He wasn’t impressed, saying that it looked to him like the specimen had been manufactured using two bats (plenty of bats in Mexico, you know). You can see metal objects at joints in the X-ray, something you’d suspected if limbs of a second bat was added to the first and secured in place. He also suspected there might be other known animal parts in the specimen. Here’s the point: I didn’t need a dissection by a zoologist to figure this out because I asked someone who knows how to do this. It was about an hour’s worth of work.
- The specimen was sent to Marzulli by the known, infamous, repeated fraudster, Jaime Maussan. Maussan has been linked to fakery in the past, most recently the ridiculous Roswell slides debacle. I could care less if Maussan is a celebrity in Mexico. He perpetuates frauds.
- The whole idea that Rev 9 concerns literal locust creatures or demon fairies is flawed exegesis. For one thing, the passage is about the release of the fallen Watchers (spiritual beings in biblical/Jewish texts, imprisoned in the Underworld, which doesn’t have earthly latitude and longitude). Anyone who spends any time doing real exegesis in the New Testament against the backdrop of Second Temple Judaism would know that — because they’d have studied the Second Temple Jewish parallels (like the Enochian material).
All the above should have told people that this wasn’t to be trusted. There are more problems of procedure and competence associated with the whole saga, and the video explanation, but I really don’t care to critique it. I’d rather focus on what I hope has been learned:
- Jaime Maussan should not be trusted. Ever. He is a serial fraud-perpetuator. See here and here for more. If he told Marzulli the truth that he paid $10K for the specimen, Maussan is also gullible.
- If you were fooled by this you didn’t do enough work up front. Again, this took me two emails and about an hour’s worth of work.
- If one approaches such things skeptically, that’s a good thing. It makes back-pedaling explanations unnecessary.
- If Marzulli et al were deceived (which is what I said in earlier posts and comments was my fear), he did the right thing here by the announcement. I’m willing to think he was, and did not intentionally perpetuate this fraud. His methods (or lack thereof) let him down.
- This fiasco is precisely why peer-review before going public (and before people pay for information) is essential. I hope the point is now made, but I’m not holding my breath. I’ve seen too much of this stuff over the years.
Another sad chapter in paranormal research.
Hey, Mike. I considered this “specimen” to be a forgery for no other reason than the fact ‘ it plays to the folklore/aliens ideology.
Do people not think creatures such as “Moa” or “Komodo Dragons” are strange and amazing enough, that they have to believe in clear forgeries?
Shame on us humans.
I’m struggling to understand the obsession with this stuff. Demon fairies? It all feels a bit Arthur Conan Doyle to me. It was this kind of bizarre fringe ‘research’ that I came across by the ton when I first became a Christian four years ago. It does the faith no favours I think because you start to question what on earth you are letting yourself in for. You attempt to get some further context for your new found faith and so you go looking, without much idea guidence and only a vague idea about what you are really looking for. Particularly if you have genuinely had supernatural experinces. Then you come across people telling you the Nephilim are coming to get you….
I really do believe in the information you present regarding the Divine Council and Heavenly Host. It makes complete sense to me. But surely if you go looking for physical evidence of giants, demon angels, or unicorns, it stands to reason you are going to attract con men by the bus load.
I’m not sure (and the Conan Doyle analogy feels useful). I’m guessing that it has something to do with proving the Bible, but the Bible has held up pretty well under scrutiny and criticism without such things.
what obsession? it was covered only twice in watchers series (first time had to do with witnesses at ECETI ranch) and Marzulli’s paradigm of the seed war and nephilim diaspora hypothesis doesn’t depend on it.
Marzulli covers all kinds of weird things from a Christian perspective which is not a bad thing. The approach of the skeptic doesn’t impress all of us who feel that they get too much respect from Christians because we are westerners. So we stub our toes once in a while, and here the truth comes out. The risk of being like an ignorant and arrogant skeptic is not superior to being had once in a while. Its only in western culture where we are told to “doubt everything” where it appears that it is better.
So some of this may not be helpful to new Christians. I go to a church that pursues the hebrew roots and we’ve learned that its not necessarily the best thing to start off with in a conversation with just anyone in a witnessing situation. But when Marzulli came out with his “Nephilim Trilogy” fictional book series, Zondervan (If that’s the correct publisher if my memory serves me) turned it down at first. This was when the x-files where on tv and the ufo thing was still picking up more steam in the culture and Marzulli Challenged them and said “What’s the Christian Response?”
Carter saw a ufo. Reagan saw a ufo. Dennis Kucinich saw a UFO. Bill Clinton was asked why he didn’t declassify the ufo files and said “There’s a government inside the government and I don’t control it.” What’s the Christian response? Is it to follow the example of the hard nose skeptics?” But then again, we have Christians who excercise the theological imagination, and you have guys like C.S. Lewis who said that what everyone labels a an allegory, the Chronicles of Narnia, (which it is on a most basic level), he called a “supposal” wondering what if God had other worlds, what might it be like. And this is important that we have a degree of flexibility in our understanding so we aren’t blindsided when we find out that the world God created goes beyond what we’ve imagined.
But here you have an increasing testimony of weird occurrences throughout the world of ghosts, criptids, ufos, even fairies, and I don’t buy it that its all crazies and liars. We know there are crazy people and their are liars, but logic reminds us that a few exposed hoaxes cannot give us room to broadbrush all the others. We know we live in a world of hoaxers, and yet that does not detract from the serious question, are things of these natures really happening. I believe in eye witness testimony after all because I am a Christian, and eyewitness testimony has been an essential part of the basis of our faith since day one.
In light of that, what’s the Christian response? Marzulli has shown many of us how these things are not outside of the scope of the Biblical world view and that is worth a lot.
I didn’t learn anything here. The Christian response is to do your homework first before getting people to pay for things that are just unsubstantiated hype.
Lynn got duped — there’s no sin in that. I just hope he will be more careful. Instead of getting mad at me, ask Lynn to go after Jaime Maussan.
But Jenny Hanivers are real, right Mr. Marzulli?
This is disappointing, but the fact is, this proves that Marzulli IS transparent. It was his own research team that determined this was a fraud and he could’ve just silently let this slide but he rushed to bust his own story. I do expect that he’ll be more cautious in the future.
It still remains that he did extensive work with the dna examination of the paracas skulls, and it turns out that there will be more research released on those. And it remains a mystery to me why when he publishes his data on that, he is accused of not being transparent.
I respect the apparent safety of sticking to peer reviewed materials and I respect that Christian scholars who walk more cautiously have their place in the church. But I don’t know in scripture where it says we have to stick to peer review nor do I suppose that Holy Spirit is limited by that. That’s not to say that Holy Spirit has lead Marzulli all the way, nevertheless, Holy Spirit leads people on journeys that they do not follow perfectly. I do think that Marzulli should examine his association with Maussen and Forester, and yet if the research on the Paracas skulls remains consistent, it seems Foerster was key in obtaining the skull samples.
Furthermore, in my own short academic studies to today where I attend a charasmatic church which would qualify as “fundamentalist,” I’ve been made aware that though a Christian may do good scholarly work and may uphold orthodoxy, it doesn’t mean that they are lead by the spirit or that the spirit is leading me to pursue everything along lines established by respected Christian scholars.
I remember attending a philosophy conference at Wheaton years ago as college student, and a man who conversed with me mentioned that there was a lot of intellectual pride there. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but I do now. I surely believe the Lord uses all things including rigorous Christian scholarship, but its not enough and it surely cannot sustain or guide the church exclusively. And Holy Spirit has a way of doing things the wrong way according to the procedures of men.
I hope so. But it makes me wonder if, had I not said anything, the fakery wouldn’t have come out so soon. Recall that I posted a link as part of this that showed HOW these things were made. Someone sent that link to me within 24 hrs of my post. Why couldn’t Lynn find that? But once it was posted on my blog, since I take some traffic with people who were engaged in the topic, the admission came pretty quickly. I’m not saying Lynn was deceiving anyone and my post made him confess. I’m saying that I hope my post prompted him to do the sort of investigating he should have done in the first five minutes after Jaime Maussan gave him the fake. He’d never have needed to back-pedal had he and his team done better vetting and research. Instead they made a video and people paid for a story that turned out to be phony. He did the right thing in hindsight, but that should have happened beforehand. Hopefully he’ll be extra cautious down the road — and rid himself of Maussan.
actually I had seen the same thing and they said it was an alien. I think the whole thing is that they are trying to get hits to their page.
Well, that’s on the table, unfortunately.