Comment by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 | Hacker News Reader

3fe9a03ccd14ca5

FBI unclassified documents on “the finders” from 1984: https://vault.fbi.gov/the-finders

Includes the stuff of nightmares. Child abuse, satanic rituals. A “school” with underground tunnels. Fire alarm switch in classrooms for alerting other rooms.

> unsure if children had been kidnapped

> children were extremely hungry and urinated and defecated on the floor during questioning

> states they were under the control of the “Game Caller” in DC [name classified]

> each classroom has on/off fire alarm switch that was used to alert other classrooms.

> 45 foot tunnel under school connecting school with nearby triplex

You can’t make this stuff up. And that’s not even all of the disturbing things. Excuse the name in the link[1] but it’s a good break down.

And the worst part about all of this? The whole thing was closed down as it was “stepping on the CIA’s toes” — that’s right. Where are the children???

https://mobile.twitter.com/davenyviii/status/118786556347911...

> You can’t make this stuff up.

As far as anyone can tell, a lot of people did make up allegations strikingly similar to these [1], and the evidence that people can make stuff up without realizing it is fairly compelling [2] [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_ritual_abuse

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy

The other thing to bear in mind with stuff like this, the FBI investigates stuff all the time and it turns out there was nothing there. One of the more interesting examples is their investigation into the song Louie Louie:

https://groovyhistory.com/louie-louie-kingsmen-fbi-investiga...

This was the height of the Satanic Panic. Without the CIA papers it's hard to tell if this was another example of the FBI investigating what was ultimately nothing, some facts planted on purpose by the CIA, or what.

> Without the CIA papers it's hard to tell if this was another example of the FBI investigating what was ultimately nothing

I can't personally come to the same conclusion. This is a documented, declassified event of a pretty dark and unsettling case that was closed directly because it was a CIA operation. That's in the signed documents by the FBI, it's not a theory.

What types of CIA operation scenarios can happen here that make this less unsettling? A benevolent daycare operation for employees? What does the CIA do?

My impression is that they found out the CIA was already involved in some way and the FBI just closed the book to get out of their way.

The CIA's involvement could have been anything. Could have been an international cult they were looking into, an experiment to try and get kids to summon The Horned God, or a brainwashing experiment, or they could have been involved because some diplomat's kid was there and they wanted to influence them. My point is that without the CIA docs there's no way to tell what was really going on or how nefarious this really was.

When I see the CIA discussed in these terms, where people make all kinds of lawless and insane behavior out to be a routine matter of course, my first thought is "we should probably abolish the CIA, just to be safe."

> some facts planted on purpose by the CIA, or what

A lot of them were Soviet disinformation campaigns; blaming the CIA was the SOP. Doesn't help that the CIA does do all sorts of weird shit, though...

The Epstein and NXIVM stories should be enough reason to investigate all "Satanic Ritual Abuse" cases seriously

Why all the down votes?

The 'Satanic' part. It's a wild disservice to actual abuse victims to lump them in with absurd show trials where children were coached into testifying to being flushed down toilets into secret rooms that didn't exist.

So just wrap your horrific acts in faux satanic ritual and get away with it. Thanks for the tip!

There may be some of this going on, but the popular idea that childhood memories of sexual abuse are commonly "invented" or "confabulated" is in many cases itself a false notion, actively spread by paid defenders of men accused of child abuse. The False Memory Syndrome Foundation actually dissolved today. Good thread on its efforts to bend the discussion of childhood sexual abuse here: https://twitter.com/mike_salter/status/1211442594821001216

"FMSF catalyzed a 180 degree turn in global media coverage of childhood sexual abuse so that, by the mid-1990s, news stories about CSA focused predominantly on the threat of false allegations ... The notion that CSA memories are particularly untrustworthy has become a widespread 'common sense' that destabilizes police investigations and prosecutions, and obstructs access to healthcare and social supports."

While this may be true, all signs in the McMartin case point to the blatantly absurd testimony made by children at the time (for example, being taken away from school grounds during the day by a hot air balloon with nobody else noticing) as being coached rather than a result of false memories.

> 45 foot tunnel under school connecting school with nearby triplex

That didn't actually exist. Two separate excavations never found signs of anything under the school except for a small crawl space someone had dumped some trash into.

The mistake you're making here is assuming that all of the accusations in that report are corroborated. They aren't. Most of it is just a collection of claims made by assorted people, not anything to do with actually investigating those claims.

Can you provide the additional information? I'm going entirely off of the declassified FBI document (linked). Are you suggesting the documents are fake?

I'd love to learn more.

The document contains a pretty detailed description of the findings of an excavation under the school which found a lot more than just a crawl space. So for the commonly accepted narrative to be true, that probably would have to have been fabricated. Unfortunately I can't find in the document who carried out the excavation and wrote the report.

See a 2002 report on the subject: https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/...

> The contents of the “tunnels” further support the likelihood that Stickel had found an old trash pit. Stickel listed many objects that he found (pps. 54, 70, 75). These included sections of boards, wood fragments, a variety of metal objects, an inner tube, numerous bottles, TV antenna wire, tin cans, scissors, eye glasses, exposed film, cinder blocks, plywood, tar paper, roofing nails, four trash-filled pots (three of metal, one of crockery, the largest about fourteen inches tall, all in disrepair), a one-gallon glass food jar, 35 to 40 rusted tin can fragments, a crockery lid, an old medicine bottle, various glass fragments from a large jar, a small “pestle-like stone,” a rusted metal rod, and 60 to 70 rusted metal can fragments.

> More likely, however, is that the alarm switches were placed relatively high on the walls because staff did not want children to set off false fire alarms. The archeologist seems to have considered neither this ordinary reason that fire alarm switches had been placed relatively high on the wall, nor why the switches had been connected to a bell whose location was outside the preschool’s front office door where parents and others entering the building surely would have heard the alarm’s ring.

Different cases right? Lots of similarities. One of them was classified for 30 years.

I'm suggesting that the document is full of a lot of bullshit, because it's a compilation of raw allegations from initial investigation, and a lot of those raw allegations are total nonsense.

The papers detailing finding tunnels under the mcmartin preschool are not FBI papers but are taken from a book about the mcmartin trial by Ted Gunderson who is one of the primary proponents of the satanic ritual abuse theory. The investigation was funded by the families and none of the people involved are reputable. You can find another copy of the whole report here:

http://tedgunderson.info/index_htm_files/McMartin%20Scientif...

you will find the exact same pages as included in the finders fbi file. Even if you choose to believe the report, this demonstrates that it didn't actually have anything to do with the finders and in any case was not done for, or by, the fbi or police. it was (presumably) included in the file because it had similar claims to ones made against the finders.

I have read the entire finders fbi file. Repeatedly there are the fbi and police fielding claims that the finders were satanists, or that they were sexually abusing the children, but in every case they document they found no actual evidence of this.

the claim of an fbi cover-up was documented in the fbi file (that would be weird if you think about it) but this claim was made by a single junior member of the manhattan beach police, and is never repeated or corroborated anywhere.

the claim that the finders were tied up in the intelligence community seems to be based on uncorroborated claims as well. nothing in the document or linked resources supports it.

I hope you find this helpful, I had multiple of my friends bring up this fbi release as "proof" that SRA was real all along but after reading every page of the file I just don't think there's anything compelling in there.

IIRC, most of those were just accusations and quite possibly just "made up".

With these documents, who is "making up" the story? The FBI agents? The school administrators with tunnels, "fire alarms" and knobless, locked doors? The children being interviewed?

With regards to the last point, they include that the tunnel entrants and exits were as described by the children, suggesting they weren’t making it up.

> they include that the tunnel entrants and exits were as described by the children

Except that, you know, nobody ever actually found those. The school had an unbroken concrete slab under it with holes just big enough for sewer pipes.

> "fire alarms"

The "fire alarms" were... fire alarms.

https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/bsi/article/viewFile/...

> More likely, however, is that the alarm switches were placed relatively high on the walls because staff did not want children to set off false fire alarms. The archeologist seems to have considered neither this ordinary reason that fire alarm switches had been placed relatively high on the wall, nor why the switches had been connected to a bell whose location was outside the preschool’s front office door where parents and others entering the building surely would have heard the alarm’s ring.

What you are recalling is what was widely reported in mass media shortly after the McMartin story broke, a lot of which is contradicted by the FBI dump.

The 'FBI dump' is a collection of raw allegations from initial investigation, not anything substantiated.

This is absolutely unsettling. I thought this was one of the biggest drops of the decade. We know how corrupt the FBI and especially the CIA is, especially post-Epstein era. Who investigates the investigators? I would take anything the FBI concludes with a grain of salt.

> especially post-Epstein era

What do you mean by that?

> You can’t make this stuff up

I mean, I could.

Fascinating how this isn't the top comment.

Politics > actually answering the question

In your words what are the politics involved with "the finders" declassified documents? I don't really see this as a partisan issue, though I suspect it's perceived that way (and would be my first explanation for why there's not a greater appetite from people getting the "truth" -- whatever that ends up being).

Affluent pedophile cult conspiracy theories have been a staple of fringe right-wing elements, and the militia movement for some time. Especially recently they've been associated with the populist wing of the Republican Party (pizzagate, Alex Jones).

Given those associations, and the surreal nature of the claims, it's hard not to blame a lot of liberal-leaning people for reflexively dismissing them.

But Epstein's recent death, and the facts surrounding his case seem to indicate that many of those theories once readily dismissed as the product of fevered minds may actualy need to be reevaluated, even if they only contain a kernel of the truth individually.

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