Crackpots, kooks and loons: It all makes sense at Crank Dot Net
David Icke interviewed by USA Today
Crackpots, kooks and loons:
It all makes sense at Crank Dot Net
By A.S. Berman, USATODAY.com
Everything you know is wrong.
The Earth is hollow, and flat, and
routinely visited by beings not of this
world.
It gets worse.
The original Constitution banned lawyers
from holding office, at least one of our
presidential candidates is in fact a
shape-shifting lizard, and one individual has gone so far as to
declare himself Emperor of America.
Come again?
If any of those facts fails to jibe with your own view of the
world, you clearly haven't been spending enough time at Crank
Dot Net, a Web site that keeps visitors up-to-date on the
Internet's growing assortment of "cranks, crackpots, kooks and
loons."
From UFO abductees to armchair
scientists with unified theories of
everything, Crank Dot Net's collection of more than 600 Web
links raises the tent flap on a freak show of the Internet's fringe
element.
"I suppose it's kind of a case study in abnormal psychology,"
says Crank Dot Net creator Erik Max Francis, a 29-year-old
Unix developer in San Jose, Calif. "I just wanted to see how
these people tick."
A longtime science enthusiast, Francis in 1995 began posting
links on his personal home page for sites that reveled in
theories that were clearly "junk science." The list grew to
include Web pages dealing with conspiracies and the
paranormal, leading him to relocate the expanding number of
links to a new site, Crank Dot Net, in 1997.
Today, up to 800 unique visitors a day browse Crank Dot
Net's eclectic mix of questionable ideas.
Listings are grouped by general category
(including science, paranormal,
conspiracy) and keyword (e.g.,
prophecy, time travel). Each entry boasts
a short quotation from the site that
usually gives visitors a good idea of what
to expect, as well as a rating ranging
from "Crankish" ("above and beyond the
normal call of scientific duty") to
"Illucid" ("so beyond understanding that
it defies classification").
Francis says that one of the backbones
of the online crank world is the Web
page that does its best to prove Albert
Einstein wrong, though Crank Dot Net
spans a wide variety of subjects.
They typically take specific scientific theories and try to
extrapolate them into completely unrelated areas.
"That's when things move from the totally legitimate to the
cranky realm," Francis says.
Another genre well represented on Crank Dot Net is that of the
alien conspiracy.
 One site listed on Crank.net is that of British author David Icke's, which claims that some world figures - including Vice President Gore - are shape-shifting aliens. (Photo: David Icke) |
Icke, who says his site has racked up more than half a million hits in 11 months, is more offended by having his theories dismissed out of hand than by being labeled a crank.
"The myopic people who run this Web site (Crank Dot Net) have no idea if the astonishing information I am presenting is true or not," says Icke, 48. "They dismiss it, not because they have sought to establish its credibility by their own research, but simply because it is different to what they have been programmed and conditioned to believe.
"To them, I say on one level, 'Grow up, guys,' and on the other, 'Thank you for all the publicity.' "
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/net017.htm
Link URL for websites
http://www.davidicke.com/icke/articles2/usatoday.html
Feel free to post this page URL anywhere!
