Читать книгу Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe - Ian Shircore - Страница 28
ОглавлениеPeople whose instinct is to pooh-pooh every hint of conspiracy often pour scorn on the lack of damning physical evidence for even some of the more well-founded suspicions.
But that’s not the kind of argument you’ll hear in connection with the claim that half a million coffins can be seen stacked by the roadside in the fields near Madison, in Georgia.
The evidence is there. You can see it. You can touch it. But the question is obvious: what the hell is going on?
To be fair, they’re not actual coffins – just the casket-sized dark plastic vaults or grave liners that are used in most American cemeteries to support the earth on top of a coffin. But there are clearly many, many thousands of them, in full view of the public highway. People say they belong to the US government’s Federal Emergencies Management Agency (FEMA) or even the Centers for Disease Control (the CDC), which is based an hour up the road in Atlanta. What is beyond doubt is that massed rows of these gruesome objects have been lined up waiting in the fields for several years.
Many people in Georgia don’t like the ‘coffins’. It’s a big state, with a population of 10 million. But Madison itself has just 4,000 souls, and even the whole surrounding district of Morgan County has only 20,000. The idea that any foreseeable event or epidemic could create a need for 500,000 grave liners in the region is chilling.
There’s never been a disaster that big in American history. Only the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 and AIDS, over a period of 20 years from the early 1980s, have ever produced a national death toll on this scale. And there’s the logistics angle to think about, too. If FEMA is stockpiling coffin vaults for a nationwide disaster, it would seem crazy to park them all in one place, rather than spreading them out in depots across the country.
REASONS TO DOUBT
If there was anything remotely suspicious about these coffin vaults, it seems obvious that they would have been hidden far away from the public gaze. Instead, they are right there, near the road, stacked one inside the other in piles 17 deep, as numerous video clips on YouTube bear witness (see, for example, bit.ly/coffinliners).
The Air Seal grave liners are made by ‘deathcare professionals’ Vantage Products, a local firm based in nearby Covington. It has leased 12 acres of space in the fields since 1999 and claims there are far fewer vaults stored there than people believe. At various times, Vantage managers have said there are ‘about 50,000’ or, more recently, ‘less than 100,000’.
Vantage explains that, far from being owned by FEMA or the CDC, these coffin vaults already belong to the people who will eventually occupy them.
They have been pre-sold, the firm says, as part of people’s advance funeral plan arrangements, and are technically owned by the individuals involved. When the Morgan County authorities tried to get the company to pay inventory taxes on the liners, Vantage won a legal battle to establish that it did not own them and was therefore not liable.
REASONS TO BELIEVE
Assuming, for the moment, that Vantage’s own figures of 50,000 to 100,000 are correct, the value of the coffin vaults lined up in the fields of Madison is huge. Vantage’s accountant told the taxman in 2000 that each liner was worth less than $75, which would make the stash of vaults worth between $3 million and $7 million, but America’s National Funeral Directors Association quotes a current price for a vault of over $1,000.
Even allowing for generous trade mark-ups, that would imply that there could be tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock waiting to be used.
And Vantage’s information shouldn’t necessarily be taken as gospel. In a reply to queries about the vaults from the Morgan County Citizen newspaper in 2008, the company’s vice president of operations, Michael A Lacy, wrote, ‘In the USA, there are approximately 1.3 million deaths each year … Of those deaths, there are about 900,000 in-ground burials performed every year. Only a small percentage of those people have pre-arranged their burials.’
This is interesting, though it is actually wildly inaccurate. Official figures give the annual number of deaths in the US as 2.42 million, according to the 2007 US census, with 1.6 million of those leading to burials.
But even with nearly twice as many burials as the Vantage spokesman quoted, it is clear that there would be only a tiny minority involving pre-purchased funeral plans – and even fewer using pre-purchase plans that involved the advance-payment deal Vantage talks about. Not all cemeteries require the use of vaults, so a rough calculation would put the entire annual US demand at about 40,000 to 80,000 coffin liners for this kind of pre-pay scheme. Add to that the fact that Vantage is only one of five major coffin-vault companies and it certainly looks as if there are far too many of them stacked in the fields of Georgia to be explained away quite so easily.
And there’s one last, awkward fact that has to be accounted for. Why, those who still have doubts ask, are some of the thousands of coffin liners to be found stacked on the Madison site actually Hercules Dome products, made by Vantage’s direct commercial competitor, Polyguard Vaults Inc, of Afton, Wyoming?
