Actually it was not the fact that they had planes ready in Florida it was the fact that they were transporting these people home at all, if it was not a military opperation . They went there of their own accord. If I go to Africa and die there generally the govermant does not take responsibility for getting me home the family does.
Also there is this about the planes:
Perhaps more significantly, the Americans brought in 16 huge C-131 cargo planes, but claimed they could only carry 36 caskets in each one. These aircraft can carry tanks, trucks, troops and ammunition all in one load. At the scene, bodies were stripped of identification, including the medical wrist tags visible in many early photos.Dust-off operations during Vietnam clearly demonstrated that the military is capable of moving hundreds of bodies in a short period. Instead, they took nearly a week to bring back the Jonestown dead, bringing in the majority at the end of the period. The corpses, rotting in the heat, made autopsy impossible. At one point, the remains of 183 people arrived in 82 caskets. Although the Guyanese had identified 174 bodies at the site, only 17 ( later 46) were tentatively identified at the massive military mortuary in Dover, Delaware
Um, Rocky, you know I hate to do this, but...I think WD is right...I can't believe I said that! :blink:
Jim Jones did preach socialism and Marxism, was political and taught politically, also approved of communism, went to Cuba to attract converts, was suspected of being atheist, and taught atheistic doctrines, including ones where he called himself God.
Check out what wiki says about them (wiki is not the greatest source but it encapsulates the whole lifespan of Jim Jones and the People's Temple), also, there are also some good reference points and click throughs that supply added evidence.
It is interesting to note that many gov't documents involving Jonestown are still classified even after 25 years and the Freedom of Information Act-they normally would be available-why aren't they despite many requests for them?
I'm not drawing any conclusions here, many sources indicate more than 270 children were underneath the parents, but from viewing aerial photos of the suicide grounds it seems impossible to fit that many underneath those showing.
Lots of unanswered questions.
Here's a link to an interview with Jim Jones' son a few days after the suicides where he identifies their church with socialism.
The mystery of who killed or how did the rest of the people die after the initial 409 were reported, is the main point of departure for the conspiracy theorists, for me, there is not enough evidence one way or the other.
5,000 pages of information the U.S. government has kept secret.
Another question Richard Dwyer was at the airstrip after the Ryan killing methodically washing his hands. He had in his possession the wallets and personal effects of the five people that were killed in the airstrip ambush. Wouldn't normal people be hiding in the jungle not out collecting wallets in an open airstrip? Remember they fly a plane with a loud speaker over the area to tell people it was ok to come out in the days following
Actually it was not the fact that they had planes ready in Florida it was the fact that they were transporting these people home at all, if it was not a military opperation . They went there of their own accord. If I go to Africa and die there generally the govermant does not take responsibility for getting me home the family does.
Also there is this about the planes:
Perhaps more significantly, the Americans brought in 16 huge C-131 cargo planes, but claimed they could only carry 36 caskets in each one. These aircraft can carry tanks, trucks, troops and ammunition all in one load. At the scene, bodies were stripped of identification, including the medical wrist tags visible in many early photos.Dust-off operations during Vietnam clearly demonstrated that the military is capable of moving hundreds of bodies in a short period. Instead, they took nearly a week to bring back the Jonestown dead, bringing in the majority at the end of the period. The corpses, rotting in the heat, made autopsy impossible. At one point, the remains of 183 people arrived in 82 caskets. Although the Guyanese had identified 174 bodies at the site, only 17 ( later 46) were tentatively identified at the massive military mortuary in Dover, Delaware
No they cannot. At the time of the Jonestown incident, the US military had bigger cargo aircraft than the C-131. These included the C-130 Hercules (equipped with 4 turboprop engines), the C-141 Starlifter (equipped with 4 jet engines), and a limited number of C-5 (at that time the world's largest cargo plane). The C-5 could carry what you claimed. But even the C-141 was substantially smaller than that.
C-131 pics I believe this is comparable to TWIs Ambassador ONE aircraft.
Go to Timemagazine.com under nov 78 and dec 78 for more info.
A search for answers to the questions of Jonestown
The grisly remains of Jonestown's dead had been brought to the U.S. and stacked tidily in coffin-like aluminum transfer cases in a huge gray hangar at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. The shacks and other buildings at the Jonestown commune in Guyana were shuttered and silent. Most of the 80 Jonestown survivors waited restlessly at the Victorian Park Hotel in Georgetown, pending a decision by Guyanese authorities on whether they would be allowed to leave or be held as witnesses, and in some cases defendants, in future murder trials.
The tragic saga of Jonestown was far from over. At Dover, teams of military pathologists, FBI technicians and civilian embalmers worked to identify the 911 corpses (the count now seemed official and final) and prepare them for burial or cremation. Yet the condition of the remains and the lack of fingerprint records for many victims meant the process was slow—and in many cases would prove futile. Autopsies were to be conducted on seven bodies: Cult Leader Jim Jones, Cult Physician Larry Schacht and five others selected at random. Officials decided that trying to pin down the precise cause of death for all victims would be impractical and pointless.
The Government had not yet decided what to do with the remains. Residents of Dover feared that unidentified or unclaimed bodies might be buried near their small town (pop. 28,500) in massive numbers and become a macabre shrine of sorts. Predicted Dover Mayor Charles A. Legates: "You could expect martyrdom, hordes of people making an annual pilgrimage on the anniversary of Jonestown. We just couldn't handle that."
Many of the victims' relatives hoped that the bodies that can be identified would be flown home for burial. But representatives of the relatives complained that many of them cannot afford the $275 that Government officials estimate as the cost of moving each coffin from Delaware to burial sites on the West Coast.
The task of removing the bodies from Guyana and embalming them was expensive, but the Government would not yet predict the total costs. The fact that U.S. taxpayers were bearing the cost upset at least two Congressmen, Illinois Republican Philip Crane and Rhode Island Democrat Edward Beard. They publicly protested the use of federal funds (unofficial estimates of the cost have run as high as $8 million) to transport and process the decayed remains. Said Crane: "Although the entire situation is deplorable, the responsibility to bring the loved ones back to the United States rests with the families, not the Federal Government." Crane demanded to know who in the State Department had authorized the operation (it was the decision of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance).
(Just to save some people time in looking this up) page 2
Law-enforcement agencies pressed on with their investigations. The FBI is trying to determine if there was a plan to kill Congressman Leo Ryan even before he went to Jonestown. In addition, the bureau was investigating the possibility that there are assassination squads made up of surviving cultists and a hit list left behind by Jones, as some defectors from the temple feared. The Secret Service, assuming that the President or Vice President might be on such a list, if one exists, joined the probe. Since some members of the temple in San Francisco refused to cooperate with FBI interviewers, a federal grand jury will likely be convened to question them under oath.
The apprehensions about hit squads were fueled partly by statements from master self-publicist Mark Lane, who has made a career out of pushing assassination conspiracy theories and was one of the cult's lawyers. After being hired by Jones, Lane protested in a press release: "It makes me almost weep to see such an incredible experiment, with such vast potential for the human spirit and the soul of this country, to be cruelly assaulted by the intelligence operations." After the cultists gunned down Ryan and his four American companions, and then engaged in their act of self-destruction, Lane claimed he had known all along that Jones was unstable and that the temple members had rehearsed mass suicide. But he never warned Ryan and the others about the cult's potential for violence.
Last week Lane grabbed more headlines by claiming that he knew there was an $11 million Peoples Temple fund set aside to assassinate defecting cultists, public officials and reporters who had somehow offended Jones. Lane said he even knew the numbers of the foreign bank accounts in which most of the funds were kept. He claimed that he had given this information to the FBI. That agency was checking out a variety of such reports but had not confirmed them.
Yet to be determined by investigators in the U.S. and Guyana was just how much cash, property and other assets still belonged to the cult and whether any of them could be seized as repayment for the costs the ritual of death had incurred. The temple's longtime lawyer, Charles Garry, said assets in Guyana might be used for this purpose but not those in the U.S. Said he: "I don't intend to let them get away with that. It's an ongoing church. Temple money is not subject to government interference."
Just what will happen to those who survived Jonestown, some only because they were luckily away from the commune at the fatal moments, is not at all clear. Eight of the more elderly survivors returned to the U.S. last week, after being released by police in Georgetown because they had committed no crimes and witnessed nothing that would help Guyanese authorities in their investigations. Grover Davis, 79, said he had jumped into a ditch when the suicides were ordered by Jones and pretended to be dead until everyone had left. Why? "Because I didn't want to die," he said. Hyacinth Thrash, 76, recalled that she had felt ill and had slept through the entire poison-taking ritual. When she awoke and saw no movement, she said, "I thought everybody had run off. I started crying and wailing, 'Why did they leave me? Why did they leave me?' " And then she found out why.
was stationed at Dover AFB Dover DE. when we brought back the 913 bodies from Jonestown. Day after day we were taking caskets out of C-5A Jets (we Called them pigs, because of the size, and the black painted nose on the front of the jet. Couple that with the way the front of the jet opens, and it looks like a pig opening it’s mouth) We processed the bodies in a hanger called the black hanger, which we could drop the temperature down to help slow down the decomposition process while we tried to ID the people by different means.
from jones's son (from the link you provided cheranne)
"The thing about my father is that he knew what people wanted and he could get inside your head in a minute. He told people what they wanted to hear, then hooked them." And as Stephan points out in Paradise Lost: "All it took was one thread of insanity to unravel the whole works."
Not surprisingly, Stephan is skeptical of many religious leaders - "particularly those who get rich on the backs of others.
"I have a spiritual side. I live. I let live. But what's most disturbing is what I've seen about religion hasn't been nearly so much about a connection to God."
No they cannot. At the time of the Jonestown incident, the US military had bigger cargo aircraft than the C-131. These included the C-130 Hercules (equipped with 4 turboprop engines), the C-141 Starlifter (equipped with 4 jet engines), and a limited number of C-5 (at that time the world's largest cargo plane). The C-5 could carry what you claimed. But even the C-141 was substantially smaller than that.
C-131 pics I believe this is comparable to TWIs Ambassador ONE aircraft.
The article I quoted from listed the planes as C-131s Others list them as C 141 Starlifters others as C-5 Galaxy which ever cargo planes they used and if it was the bigger C-5 all the better reason they should have been able to move bodies faster than a few at a time.
I don't recall if it was in the MSN or CNN show, but there is a scene where he is firing up the crowd in San Francisco and he proclaims "I have the power of God because it's God in me. It's Christ in me,the hope of glory! Hallelujah!" And then in one of the on-line audio clips he starts speaking in tongues within the context of a teaching. Pretty creepy.
Some things that I found relevant as I watched the the CNN program:
1. The survivors commented on how certain smells, sights and sounds can instantly flash them back to an emotional state of something that happened 30 years ago. PTSD? I don't know.
2. They all said that, although they no longer had any use for organized religion, they maintained a sense of spirituality.
3. When they returned to the site of Jonestown, there was nothing left of all the hard work and dedication that had built the place. They hadn't really changed anything at all. It was all so totally futile.
Some things that I found relevant as I watched the the CNN program:
1. The survivors commented on how certain smells, sights and sounds can instantly flash them back to an emotional state of something that happened 30 years ago. PTSD? I don't know.
2. They all said that, although they no longer had any use for organized religion, they maintained a sense of spirituality.
3. When they returned to the site of Jonestown, there was nothing left of all the hard work and dedication that had built the place. They hadn't really changed anything at all. It was all so totally futile.
I think you DO know... I think you hit the nail on the head... of course, I'm no professional on the topic.
I have no idea of there's any truth to the conspiracy theories, but I do find it really odd that the government transported the bodies to the U.S. Has anyone other than the conspiracy theorists ever offered an explanation for why that was?
I have no idea of there's any truth to the conspiracy theories, but I do find it really odd that the government transported the bodies to the U.S. Has anyone other than the conspiracy theorists ever offered an explanation for why that was?
I don't really know the answer but my thought would be that they were returned to American soil because they were American citizens.
I have no idea of there's any truth to the conspiracy theories, but I do find it really odd that the government transported the bodies to the U.S. Has anyone other than the conspiracy theorists ever offered an explanation for why that was?
Here is a story from a relative on the body treatment, she did say that they went after temple money for the cost of the opperation but in the end got only a part of it. I wondered if they ever got some of the cases of money that were ditched in the jungle by temple lawyers and recovered by the Government of Guyana
I have debated within myself for some time -- even before this thread -- whether to ask if anyone else was present and remembers this. It has been thirty years and it still bothers me. I am almost 100% positive that it was at the advanced class being taught at Ohio University. VP decided to hold a "family only" meeting to discuss the Jonestown situation. Eveyone's ID was checked to make certain it was only us (just to heighten the drama, I'm sure.) Then VP brings out a believer who had been in the military when Jonestown occurred (NOT John Somerville -- this man was just a private in the army.) The man told us that there was all sorts of secrecy involved in bringing back the bodies. All of his "testimony" to us was hearsay from other guys in the military. Young as I was I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, of course that is reliable because soldiers never pass around rumors to each other." VP went on about how it was all the CIA (as I recall.) I remember sitting there looking at the rapt faces of the people around me as they listened to him and wondered what was wrong with me that I was thinking how bizarre all of this was. I know it doesn't sound very dramatic as I retell it. I find it hard to convey how surreal it all was.
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cheranne
I found this in other threads it may intrest some people.
Does any one remember this tape?
I still have it, it was so wild. VP blamed the Jim Jones Kool-aid cult-suicide on the CIA predominently because they had planes "ready" in Florida.
This was probably my first red-flag...don't ask me why I stayed...maybe because I was only 20 then? and VERY impressionable still!
Wierwille, Jonestown, & totalitarian "cults", exploitative manipulation, TWI-style
The Thirteenth Tribe
1978 - The Current Psychological Hoax
1976 Corps Meetings
VPW - A Patton Wannab
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WhiteDove
Actually it was not the fact that they had planes ready in Florida it was the fact that they were transporting these people home at all, if it was not a military opperation . They went there of their own accord. If I go to Africa and die there generally the govermant does not take responsibility for getting me home the family does.
Also there is this about the planes:
Perhaps more significantly, the Americans brought in 16 huge C-131 cargo planes, but claimed they could only carry 36 caskets in each one. These aircraft can carry tanks, trucks, troops and ammunition all in one load. At the scene, bodies were stripped of identification, including the medical wrist tags visible in many early photos.Dust-off operations during Vietnam clearly demonstrated that the military is capable of moving hundreds of bodies in a short period. Instead, they took nearly a week to bring back the Jonestown dead, bringing in the majority at the end of the period. The corpses, rotting in the heat, made autopsy impossible. At one point, the remains of 183 people arrived in 82 caskets. Although the Guyanese had identified 174 bodies at the site, only 17 ( later 46) were tentatively identified at the massive military mortuary in Dover, Delaware
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WhiteDove
5,000 pages of information the U.S. government has kept secret.
Another question Richard Dwyer was at the airstrip after the Ryan killing methodically washing his hands. He had in his possession the wallets and personal effects of the five people that were killed in the airstrip ambush. Wouldn't normal people be hiding in the jungle not out collecting wallets in an open airstrip? Remember they fly a plane with a loud speaker over the area to tell people it was ok to come out in the days following
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waysider
I wonder how many pages they have on "The Cornfield Cult". :blink:
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WhiteDove
My guess is that they have a few. I know that the KBI has some here from investigations in the past.
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waysider
Has the KBI released them for public perusal?
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Rocky
No they cannot. At the time of the Jonestown incident, the US military had bigger cargo aircraft than the C-131. These included the C-130 Hercules (equipped with 4 turboprop engines), the C-141 Starlifter (equipped with 4 jet engines), and a limited number of C-5 (at that time the world's largest cargo plane). The C-5 could carry what you claimed. But even the C-141 was substantially smaller than that.
C-131 pics I believe this is comparable to TWIs Ambassador ONE aircraft.
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cheranne
They were brought back on a C5-A.
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cheranne
Go to Timemagazine.com under nov 78 and dec 78 for more info.
A search for answers to the questions of Jonestown
The grisly remains of Jonestown's dead had been brought to the U.S. and stacked tidily in coffin-like aluminum transfer cases in a huge gray hangar at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. The shacks and other buildings at the Jonestown commune in Guyana were shuttered and silent. Most of the 80 Jonestown survivors waited restlessly at the Victorian Park Hotel in Georgetown, pending a decision by Guyanese authorities on whether they would be allowed to leave or be held as witnesses, and in some cases defendants, in future murder trials.
The tragic saga of Jonestown was far from over. At Dover, teams of military pathologists, FBI technicians and civilian embalmers worked to identify the 911 corpses (the count now seemed official and final) and prepare them for burial or cremation. Yet the condition of the remains and the lack of fingerprint records for many victims meant the process was slow—and in many cases would prove futile. Autopsies were to be conducted on seven bodies: Cult Leader Jim Jones, Cult Physician Larry Schacht and five others selected at random. Officials decided that trying to pin down the precise cause of death for all victims would be impractical and pointless.
The Government had not yet decided what to do with the remains. Residents of Dover feared that unidentified or unclaimed bodies might be buried near their small town (pop. 28,500) in massive numbers and become a macabre shrine of sorts. Predicted Dover Mayor Charles A. Legates: "You could expect martyrdom, hordes of people making an annual pilgrimage on the anniversary of Jonestown. We just couldn't handle that."
Many of the victims' relatives hoped that the bodies that can be identified would be flown home for burial. But representatives of the relatives complained that many of them cannot afford the $275 that Government officials estimate as the cost of moving each coffin from Delaware to burial sites on the West Coast.
The task of removing the bodies from Guyana and embalming them was expensive, but the Government would not yet predict the total costs. The fact that U.S. taxpayers were bearing the cost upset at least two Congressmen, Illinois Republican Philip Crane and Rhode Island Democrat Edward Beard. They publicly protested the use of federal funds (unofficial estimates of the cost have run as high as $8 million) to transport and process the decayed remains. Said Crane: "Although the entire situation is deplorable, the responsibility to bring the loved ones back to the United States rests with the families, not the Federal Government." Crane demanded to know who in the State Department had authorized the operation (it was the decision of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance).
1 | 2 Next
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cheranne
(Just to save some people time in looking this up) page 2
Law-enforcement agencies pressed on with their investigations. The FBI is trying to determine if there was a plan to kill Congressman Leo Ryan even before he went to Jonestown. In addition, the bureau was investigating the possibility that there are assassination squads made up of surviving cultists and a hit list left behind by Jones, as some defectors from the temple feared. The Secret Service, assuming that the President or Vice President might be on such a list, if one exists, joined the probe. Since some members of the temple in San Francisco refused to cooperate with FBI interviewers, a federal grand jury will likely be convened to question them under oath.
The apprehensions about hit squads were fueled partly by statements from master self-publicist Mark Lane, who has made a career out of pushing assassination conspiracy theories and was one of the cult's lawyers. After being hired by Jones, Lane protested in a press release: "It makes me almost weep to see such an incredible experiment, with such vast potential for the human spirit and the soul of this country, to be cruelly assaulted by the intelligence operations." After the cultists gunned down Ryan and his four American companions, and then engaged in their act of self-destruction, Lane claimed he had known all along that Jones was unstable and that the temple members had rehearsed mass suicide. But he never warned Ryan and the others about the cult's potential for violence.
Last week Lane grabbed more headlines by claiming that he knew there was an $11 million Peoples Temple fund set aside to assassinate defecting cultists, public officials and reporters who had somehow offended Jones. Lane said he even knew the numbers of the foreign bank accounts in which most of the funds were kept. He claimed that he had given this information to the FBI. That agency was checking out a variety of such reports but had not confirmed them.
Yet to be determined by investigators in the U.S. and Guyana was just how much cash, property and other assets still belonged to the cult and whether any of them could be seized as repayment for the costs the ritual of death had incurred. The temple's longtime lawyer, Charles Garry, said assets in Guyana might be used for this purpose but not those in the U.S. Said he: "I don't intend to let them get away with that. It's an ongoing church. Temple money is not subject to government interference."
Just what will happen to those who survived Jonestown, some only because they were luckily away from the commune at the fatal moments, is not at all clear. Eight of the more elderly survivors returned to the U.S. last week, after being released by police in Georgetown because they had committed no crimes and witnessed nothing that would help Guyanese authorities in their investigations. Grover Davis, 79, said he had jumped into a ditch when the suicides were ordered by Jones and pretended to be dead until everyone had left. Why? "Because I didn't want to die," he said. Hyacinth Thrash, 76, recalled that she had felt ill and had slept through the entire poison-taking ritual. When she awoke and saw no movement, she said, "I thought everybody had run off. I started crying and wailing, 'Why did they leave me? Why did they leave me?' " And then she found out why.
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cheranne
was stationed at Dover AFB Dover DE. when we brought back the 913 bodies from Jonestown. Day after day we were taking caskets out of C-5A Jets (we Called them pigs, because of the size, and the black painted nose on the front of the jet. Couple that with the way the front of the jet opens, and it looks like a pig opening it’s mouth) We processed the bodies in a hanger called the black hanger, which we could drop the temperature down to help slow down the decomposition process while we tried to ID the people by different means.
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excathedra
ohmygod cheranne you poor thing. i don't know how you handled that
hugs,
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excathedra
from jones's son (from the link you provided cheranne)
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excathedra
hiccup
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cheranne
My father was there and told me this. He wrote the book on C5A fire extinction safety.
We were in Dover for 3 yrs then went to Tinker AFB where I became involved with The Way.
He was sent back there when I was sitting at Emporia Kansas listening to vpw speak on the
"psychological hoax",but I'll never forget him talking to me about it and trying to warn me about
TWI.
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WhiteDove
The article I quoted from listed the planes as C-131s Others list them as C 141 Starlifters others as C-5 Galaxy which ever cargo planes they used and if it was the bigger C-5 all the better reason they should have been able to move bodies faster than a few at a time.
Don't know
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waysider
I don't recall if it was in the MSN or CNN show, but there is a scene where he is firing up the crowd in San Francisco and he proclaims "I have the power of God because it's God in me. It's Christ in me,the hope of glory! Hallelujah!" And then in one of the on-line audio clips he starts speaking in tongues within the context of a teaching. Pretty creepy.
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waysider
Some things that I found relevant as I watched the the CNN program:
1. The survivors commented on how certain smells, sights and sounds can instantly flash them back to an emotional state of something that happened 30 years ago. PTSD? I don't know.
2. They all said that, although they no longer had any use for organized religion, they maintained a sense of spirituality.
3. When they returned to the site of Jonestown, there was nothing left of all the hard work and dedication that had built the place. They hadn't really changed anything at all. It was all so totally futile.
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Rocky
I think you DO know... I think you hit the nail on the head... of course, I'm no professional on the topic.
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excathedra
i watched most of it. i fell asleep toward the end. it made me really very sad
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Linda Z
I have no idea of there's any truth to the conspiracy theories, but I do find it really odd that the government transported the bodies to the U.S. Has anyone other than the conspiracy theorists ever offered an explanation for why that was?
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waysider
I don't really know the answer but my thought would be that they were returned to American soil because they were American citizens.
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WhiteDove
Here is a story from a relative on the body treatment, she did say that they went after temple money for the cost of the opperation but in the end got only a part of it. I wondered if they ever got some of the cases of money that were ditched in the jungle by temple lawyers and recovered by the Government of Guyana
Story
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vermontlaw
I have debated within myself for some time -- even before this thread -- whether to ask if anyone else was present and remembers this. It has been thirty years and it still bothers me. I am almost 100% positive that it was at the advanced class being taught at Ohio University. VP decided to hold a "family only" meeting to discuss the Jonestown situation. Eveyone's ID was checked to make certain it was only us (just to heighten the drama, I'm sure.) Then VP brings out a believer who had been in the military when Jonestown occurred (NOT John Somerville -- this man was just a private in the army.) The man told us that there was all sorts of secrecy involved in bringing back the bodies. All of his "testimony" to us was hearsay from other guys in the military. Young as I was I remember thinking, "Oh yeah, of course that is reliable because soldiers never pass around rumors to each other." VP went on about how it was all the CIA (as I recall.) I remember sitting there looking at the rapt faces of the people around me as they listened to him and wondered what was wrong with me that I was thinking how bizarre all of this was. I know it doesn't sound very dramatic as I retell it. I find it hard to convey how surreal it all was.
Anyone else recall this?
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