9/11 Truth? Cold fusion? HAARP? Pizzagate? The purpose of this article is to propose a loose research consortium, a forum within which we might share sources, explain why we believe what we believe, and change one another's minds.

::::::::

One of the unique strengths of OpEdNews is that we host dialogs among people with a variety of different belief systems. I'm not speaking about ideologies -- democratic socialists vs social democrats or anarcho-libertarians vs communal idealists -- but rather different narratives about who did what, where and when. These are concrete, perfectly knowable facts, but what you "know" and what I "know" are not the same.

Let's see if we can resolve some of these differences. The purpose of this article is to propose a loose research consortium, a forum within which we might share sources, explain why we believe what we believe, and change one another's minds. Consider joining us, not if you can tell us what is true, but if you want to know what is true and are willing to learn from others.

Here are some examples:

• Some of us think that the Russians helped to get Trump elected; and some of us think the Red states and the Electoral College system legitimately put him in power; and some of us think there was tampering with the vote count, but it came from Republican operatives within the US, not from Russia.
• Some of us believe in the science that brought us vaccines, and think that "vaxxers" are a threat to public health; while others think that Andrew Wakefield was tarred and feathered for exposing a truth that was threatening to Big Pharma's bottom line.
• Some of us think that Pizzagate is a fantasy too whacky even for Fox News; but others think that pedophilia is rampant among the power elite, and that Pizzagate was a rare window into a great and tragic realm of corruption.
• Some of us think that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and the Bush White House cynically exploited the event to promote its agenda of war profiteering and shutting down civil liberties in America; and others among us think that 9/11 was planned within the Bush White House to advance their pre-existing agenda, and bin Laden had nothing to do with it.

This isn't metaphysics, and it isn't the edge of scientific knowledge. It is different people living in different communities, relying on different sources for their truth. All of us here believe that the mainstream media (MSM) are tainted to some extent by influence of corporate power and government -- or else we wouldn't be here on an alternative news site. But some of us go further, and proudly proclaim ourselves to be "conspiracy theorists", as the term was invented by the CIA in 1967 as a PR strategem to marginalize dissent about the Warren Commission report.

For the record, I personally have well-formed views on the four controversies listed above, but there are many other questions on the borders of my belief system, where I don't know what to believe, but I'm looking both for reliable information and for people to support a rational, open-minded approach to some very edgy topics.

• Does the Rothschild family continue to wield enormous hidden influence on the world, with trillions of dollars in hidden assets?
• Is "zero-point energy" a real, usable energy source? Was technology to harness it invented by Nicola Tesla and later suppressed by the US government?
• Has the US military shot down alien space craft and warehoused recovered technology in Las Vegas?
• Do extra-terrestrial space travelers have technologies that let them cover interstellar distances faster than light? Has that technology been reverse-engineered, available to some elite groups within the US military/intelligence service?
• What are the stories behind the London bombings, the Newtown school shooting, Parkland shootings, Las Vegas massacre, etc? Were they all false flags? Were some of them staged, and did not happen as reported?
• What happened to the people on the airplanes that disappeared on 9/11?
• Was life on earth deliberately seeded by beings who live elsewhere? Has evolution of life on earth been influenced or even engineered by visitors from elsewhere?
• What was the fate of Yamashita's treasure in the Philippines and the Nazi Black Eagle gold secreted in Switzerland during WWII?
• Are there yoga adepts who have lived for hundreds of years?
• What is the extent of underground doomsday bunkers prepared by continuity-of-government groups within the Deep State for nuclear war or civil unrest?
• What is HAARP? Is the US government modifying weather? Causing earthquakes?
• What are chemtrails?

Usually, it is much easier to know what is false than what is true. Often the official narratives are shot through with contradictions, as with the Kennedy, King and other assassinations, 9/11 attacks, the "weather balloon" at Roswell in 1947, the murder of Seth Rich. But once we put these official fairy tales aside, it is harder to put together a coherent narrative. We want to know the real perpetrators, their motives and methods, and the long train of the cover-up. We don't have the Academy or the Mainstream Press or any other mainstream institutions to help us, because these will stick unflinchingly to the official narrative, come what may. So we are left to sift through the information, misinformation, and disinformation on the web, to reject most of what we read, to accept selectively what hangs together. We can't even rely on Google, since they have taken on themselves the censorship of alternative narratives that our Constitution bars the government from pursuing.

I will be delighted to hear that some of you think these are speculations too far from reality to be taken seriously, while others of you think, "of course--this is just the kind of truth that has been censored in American media." Perhaps, together, we can figure out what's true.

Let's talk.

Authors Bio:

Josh Mitteldorf, de-platformed senior editor at OpEdNews, blogs on aging at http://JoshMitteldorf.ScienceBlog.com. Read how to stay young at http://AgingAdvice.org.

Educated to be an astrophysicist, he has branched out from there to mathematical modeling in a variety of areas, including evolutionary ecology and economics. He has taught mathematics, statistics, and physics at several universities. He is an avid amateur pianist, and father of two adopted Chinese girls, now grown. He travels to Beijing each year to work with a lab studying the biology of aging. His book on the subject is "Cracking the Aging Code", http://tinyurl.com/y7yovp87.