Conservative Refocus

By Barry Secrest

Well, the Messianic Duffer takes a week and a half off and all hell breaks loose back on the mainland. Earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, you name it-- something either happened or was rumored to be happening somewhere across the fruited plain--when the cats away, the mice will play--one supposes. But, with all of the nonsense spewing out of DC like a malfunctioning bowel, most recently, our thoughts had turned to something a bit more intriguing indeed....and for me, it began under a tree.

I had parked my vehicle under a sheltering midday Oak, clearing my head of the myriad workday urgencies, to enjoy just a few moments away from the pressures of business. As I closed my eyes,  but for a few minutes, very soon thereafter a gentle but persistent swaying motion caught my attention. I was being gently rocked back and forth in my seat, a feeling that was not unlike my days on a Destroyer dutifully cruising about the Atlantic.

I opened my eyes, thinking that the wind must have pitched up mightily around my vehicle, only to note a dead stillness in the air. I then, after having witnessed countless videos on the ravages of an earthquake pillaged Japan, looked over towards the nearby power lines to my right to see if what I had suspected was actually happening.

The lines were not swaying, but I immediately surmised that quake vibrations would have had to be of a  considerable amplitude to cause power-poles to sway.  A few minutes later, thinking that maybe my perceptions were uncharacteristically flagging on this particular day, I clicked on the radio only to hear a flash news report of an earthquake having  just shaken the entire east coast of the US. "So, that's what they feel like," I immediately thought. You see, in almost half a century of living on the East Coast, I had never felt an earthquake tremor before.

Therefore, my next thought spoke to a certain bewilderment: "Since when does the entire East Coast of the US, situated on a comparatively stable tectonic plate, suffer an earthquake of this far-reaching a magnitude, and of almost a minute in duration, no less, in a seismically inactive Virginia?" Sure, a large number of people along the East Coast have felt isolated tremors before, but almost the entire East Coast?

The news reports written after the quake would use words such as "Scientists surprised,"  "Unusual, unlike anything scientists would expect in this area," and my personal favorite, "the last time we had a six on the East Coast was in the 19th century."

The outrageous answer to these questions, albeit extraordinarily far-fetched, was not long in coming, but it would challenge most of us that had read the report to only laugh in extreme derision and stubbornly exclaim, "No Way!"

Having One of those Unexpected X-File Moments?

The news report from NBC-17, a very credible source, had stated that there was indeed an earthquake; however, the quake was unnatural in its origins.  Huh? I ruefully thought.  Now, how could that be?

Well, according to the report, some few seismologists had indicated that the seismic signature of the quake itself was natural enough, but it was what had precipitated the quake, that had caught their eye. Apparently, there was a triggering and significantly powerful seismic event where the epicenter was located--very near Mineral,Virginia--not far, at all, from Washington DC.  This event's seismic signature bespoke of a powerful, localized, underground nuclear detonation, which had then caused the earthquake felt along most of the eastern seaboard. I know, I know, beyond unbelievable, but at some point we simply must  wonder:  Which of these dreadfully outrageous conspiracy theories will eventually become unfortunate fact?

Could this be one of those times? We may never know, but to say that the internet conspiracy theory centered sites went absolutely nuts, on this particular day, would have been the understatement of the decade. Granted, we have heard all manner of beyond-ludicrous news items of late, from a top US Liberal economist who appears to be hoping for an extra-terrestrial attack in order to boost the economy (which is probably what it will take with the current President, come to think of it), to a NASA study article, published in the UK Guardian, in which the journalists, pining at the phantom effects of man-made global warming, stated that "Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations," like they would really care about the survivability of the greater horseshoe bat, at this point.

But in NBC 17's report, a seismogram retrieved from prestigious Washington and Lee University, indicates that in a typical seismic event, a true earthquake will exhibit what are called p waves or primary waves, which will essentially hail the beginning of a seismic event in virtually every case. However, in this event's case, there were no p waves. In the above graph, the large green squiggles represent the preceding event, being the "rumored" and, at least, very sudden underground nuclear blast, while the inset black graph of squiggles, at the bottom, represents a normal earthquake for comparative purposes only, the two bearing little if any similarity. The second smaller green set of squiggles to the upper right represent the actual earthquake felt up and down the East Coast.

Below is a second graph, from the monitoring station at Virginia Tech, of the east coast blast, which very closely resembles our first graph.  Please also do not fail to note the massive initial amplitude on display of the graphs in each case. You may also note, further down, that this graph is contradicted by a later graph from the same institute.

Still unconvinced, not unlike me?  Below is a direct correlative seismogram between an underground Indian nuclear test conducted in 1998 and an earthquake recorded in 1995. In each of these cases, one cannot fail to note the obvious differences between a quake and a nuclear detonation. The detonation will typically begin with a massive spike with the seismic waves tapering off, while a natural quake will begin with a small but noticeable indication of activity--or p waves--while slowly increasing in amplitude until eventually tapering off.

One Conservative Refocus reader, after reading one of the remarks to the initial article which we'll delve into shortly, pointed us to this seismogram below, which was taken at a seismic activity station in Fredericksburg. Notice, once again, no p waves despite the fact that Fredericksburg is located more than 39 miles away from the purported epicenter. P waves travel at a rate of about 4 miles per second, therefore, we should see p wave activity of at least 9 seconds, and yet there are none.

So what in Sam Hill does this all mean? According to an unnamed, unsubstantiated source in contact with NBC-17,  the rumored, deep underground nuclear detonation was the result of  what could be called a false flag battle between two, wait for it..... military forces both being "American in nature."  And it gets even better within the article, as follows:

...I then opened up the notepad and selected paste from the menu.   You would expect nothing to be pasted as there was nothing in the body of the submission but, just as I thought, a paragraph was pasted into the notepad.  What was revealed was 1 paragraph whereby who ever sent it stated he was a member of the United States Air Force.  He stated that the Virginia 5.8 magnitude earth “wasn’t a natural earthquake and not a HAARP earthquake”.  He told me to find a seismogram of the Washington DC area earthquake and compare it to a past earthquake.  Then he stated that I should Google DUMB or Deep Underground Military Bases.  He ended by stating “the ABC warnings are real”.  I tried to trace the IP of the submission but they don’t exist....

Unleashing the Dogs of Conspiracy...

Now, there are two things that may mystify some individuals in the above comments, the first being the allusion to a false flag battle.  To explain, false flag is a term which has been embedded in history and regards either a government or a military's manufacturing of a false enemy, or protagonist's attack, in order to gain the public's approval of responding to the manufactured attack in a retaliatory attack or even invasion--a set-up, if you will. The second question that some may have is the allusion to HAARP.  HAARP is a confirmed, advanced defense research project which supposedly tackles the measuring and study of the earth's ionosphere as it regards communications and how solar activity can influence the ionosphere.

However, many will contend that HAARP is actually a new class of ultra-high-tech technology, if not weaponry, which can be used to produce earthquakes, steer hurricanes or even produce various weather events by way of powerfully transmitting and controlling  high frequency radio waves, either up into the atmosphere or below ground, (while also propagating mass kills of both fish and birds?) which could ostensibly solve yet another well-documented mystery.

Think the HAARP  conspiracy theory to be far-fetched? Both the European Parliament and the Alaska legislature actually held hearings on environmental impact concerns of HAARP effects. Further, while some may think that controlling the atmosphere is pure hogwash, scientists in Abu Dhabi would beg to differ. In a story dated January the 3rd, 2011, the UK Daily Mail published an article detailing how Scientists had created over 50 rainstorms in the arid desert of the Al Ain region by utilizing none other than "Air Ionizers," which saturated the local atmosphere with ions until rain magically fell in the desert on a consistently repeated basis.

Now, making a carefully considered decision to write an article, while being anonymously warned via cryptic message in the process, on this fringe seeming subject, we revisited the highly ranked, Mainstream Media site where the above passage was initially obtained in order to establish a link verifying the content. Unfortunately, and yet expectantly, the article had been deleted. Sauce for the gander, as they say. But, some few identical clues had been left behind. You see, a number of other websites had also picked up the report from various venues, but this would seem to make the case for us that, indeed, something must be afoot, but what? Am I convinced that this was a nuclear detonation? Not... exactly, however a preponderance of the evidence would seem to suggest that this bit of quakery or quackery is exactly how conspiracy theories get started, along with the unthinkable part of all of this.

Seismographic Pea-Splitting

A few days after the initial p wave news article was published in the news section of this site,  we received several emails challenging the seismogram, we also received one new set of seismograms from a reader stating that he had followed our links and had came upon another site that had published the following graphs, indicating that our earlier seismograms, without the p waves, had obviously been doctored.

Increasingly bewildered, I began inspecting the new set of seismograms, and noticed that the first graph, pictured above, seemed odd in that the pre-printed and linear zero line in the middle of the top graph had somehow completely disappeared from the graph altogether. The second problem with the above seismograms would be the time element of the initial p waves to the heavier waves of the quake.  As one can see, there is an indication of the number of seconds elapsed at the bottom of the graph. The p waves, in each graph, exhibit an identifiable difference by a definite measure of the number of elapsed seconds until the heavier waves arrived. Normal, right? Well, yes, but when we take all of the data together and then try to establish an epicenter, the data does not at all appear to point to Mineral, Virginia as the established epicenter.

In fact, while the data was inconclusive, if the siesmograms, perhaps, do indicate the actual earthquake and not the hypothesized triggering event, then the bulk of our measurements placed the epicenter closer to Culpeper,Virginia, which is an easily quantifiable distance from Mineral, VA. By using a seismological slide rule, which anyone can easily use, we took the earthquake data from the above seismographs and converted the p wave duration from seconds to miles from each monitoring station. The results, while crude when compared with computer data, made it plain that the earthquakes did not seem to emanate from Mineral, VA at all.

Not even close, in actuality, when taking into account the scale of miles which we were using. In addition, when we pulled data from other monitoring stations, the arc of targets were suffused all over the map. One thing to remember, however, is the fact that the hypothetical nuclear blast was merely a triggering event for the actual quake, and the fault line which was disrupted would most likely only be near a detonation, not dead on top of it. Another fact to consider is that since a rumored nuclear detonation would not have the normally associated p waves, it would be a bit more difficult to record a seismic fix than a typical earthquake.

Ergo, exactly which seismograms were being doctored, if any?  Was it our initial seismograms or the follow-up seismograms, which conveniently contradicted our originals, or are seismic recordings always this haphazard? And why, for Heaven's sake, were certain individuals, all of a sudden, interested in our now quickly becoming elusive, but soon to be forgotten, oddity earthquake article? Scratching a sore spot on my head at this point, I backtracked to search the web for another article that might substantiate our first couple of seismographs, which were absent the p waves, and the search didn't take very long at all.

The substantiating article for our original article, without the p waves, was written by Daniel De Vise at the Washington Post, who was not at all interested in the missing p waves, par for the course, and yet did innocently provide the confirming graph photo as taken by an Olympus camera. This short story by De Vise appeared on 8/24/11, in which a group of William and Lee students and faculty members had gathered around the seismograph joyously photographing the rare seismographic activity image, in Virginia, for seismic posterity's sake:

"Washington and Lee seismograph enjoys 30 seconds of fame"

This seismograph at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., recorded Tuesday’s 5.8 earthquake. Within a few minutes, a crowd had gathered with cellphones to take pictures, according to university spokesman Jeff Hanna.

For more on how local universities coped with the quake, read this.

So, our original seismogram, apparently, wasn't a doctored photo at all, and there have been no indications of any sort of technical malfunction--and yet now we have seismograms appearing days later in which the p waves have magically reappeared? It would seem that the plot has now thickened even more, because now things appear to be disappearing and mysteriously reappearing at a prodigious rate, begging the question "why," once again.

Being Dumb about DUMB

Naturally curious at this point, I decided to take the mysterious messenger's advice and Google the word DUMB.  Unfortunately, in this case, I wasn't disappointed. There appears to be over 49 million internet references to the DUMB Base phenomena on the web, and they apparently do not limit themselves to only Obama's hair-brained economic schemes.

DUMB stands for Deep Underground Military Base, and according to numerous sources, there are a great many of these underground bases all over the US. In the NBC-17 report, the article makes reference to the source of the earthquake as a DUMB Base in Virginia, where the detonation supposedly occurred. Now, granted, the state of Virginia could be euphemistically termed as one grand military base, such are the plethora of discreet bases dotting the landscape in virtually any direction you might throw a stick, but when we looked at the long-list of DUMB bases as conveyed by former military members and otherwise, we noted one DUMB Base in particular that appeared at about the same location as our earthquake.

This  hypothetical DUMB base is located near Culpeper, Virginia, of all places.

In another raw twist to this entire story, there is one more significant point that some few have overlooked. You see, the rare earthquake that happened in Virginia had companion quakes which occurred, only a couple of hours before, all the way across the US in Colorado, another extraordinarily rare venue for earthquakes.  And once again, only hours apart in fact. My, how odd it is that two places, totally unconnected and separated by numerous undisturbed seismological faults, could both see unprecedented seismic activity in the same 48 hour period.

The kicker in Colorado? You guessed it, no appreciable connective p waves here either.  P waves are, indeed, becoming so de rigueur anyway these days, it would seem. The other point here would be that Colorado is, like Virginia, dotted with all sorts of both known and unknown military bases...think NORAD, for instance. But the other disturbing thing which gives us p wave pause, was a slew of articles on the web, which indicated that the Russian intelligence Service, GRU, was circulating a document within the Kremlin which stated that there were two nuclear blasts, one in Colorado and one in Virginia. Credible or not? Good grief.

So, what does this all mean? Oh, for heaven's sake, nothing, to be sure.  I, quite frankly, have no earthly idea beyond one simple point--being that the word "peculiar" seems to be the new norm these days in America, if not the world.

We did, in fact, find it rather odd that a bizarre combination of earthquakes would occur in two geographical regions which are considered extraordinarily strategic in value to America's defenses, a thing that should not be lost on anyone, when you stop to think about it.  But the other thing to remember is that strange and peculiar, being terms that have been more associated with both US and world finance in the last several years, and then spreading into our government more recently, has  even now found its way into our seismic activity and perhaps even beyond that.

In fact strange is becoming so commonplace that a large number of people in America now have no idea what normal actually is. It's almost as if normal has become weird and weird has become normal.

Now, where have we heard that one before, and where did I put my foil hat?