And this information about California
Press Telegram July 20, 1970
This one is related to these crazy kids. http://www.truthontatelabianca.com/thre … ders.5839/
What I find utterly hysterical about the whole thing is that people are unwilling to listen to people who’re actually knowledgeable when it comes to the Occult and Satanism. But they will take the word of convicts and buy what they say hook, line and sinker. The worst possible source of information is a convict. Especially ones who’re clearly talking out of their hat. I’ve never heard Berkowitz say anything that would demonstrate this guy was as involved in the occult as he claims. Everything that comes out of the mouth of these guys sounds like B-movie material and all one had to do is trace the roots of these claims and find their origin.
People love the idea of the occult (crazy people in robes who worship the devil) much more than the actual thing. The former you can paint in all sorts of wild colors – whereas the latter is only marginally more kinky than transcendental meditation or modern shamanism or whatever New Age branch is (or is not) your cup of tea.
Berkowitz as a pathetic, mentally unstable, attention seeking, pathological liar: Not very interesting.
Berkowitz as part of some "occult" plot which goes far beyond him: Juicy.
My two cents: Four-Pi Movement never existed except in the mind of whoever Ed Sanders talked to and like a lot of things, it planted a seed in a lot of minds that blossomed into a garden (of nonsense).
Sounds about right.
I’ve done a few posts on Ed Sanders at the blog I write for, mansonblog.com . The first post in the link will resonate with those who know who Blaine is and how he relates to the Zodiac case. Sanders got his information for the chapter on the Process that was removed from his book The Family from none other than Blaine. Blaine wrote an article for the Berkeley Tribe about a year before Sanders book was published saying basically the same thing that is written in Sanders book. This illustrates the sources that Sanders used for his book.
Like Graysmith, Sanders isn’t all bad and at the time Sanders hadn’t written a book either and really did not know how to differentiate the truth from the BS. It would not surprised me at all that someone fed Sanders a line of hooey about the 4 Pi movement and he ran with it.
http://www.mansonblog.com/search/label/Ed%20Sanders To get the article up to a readable size, hold down your CTRL key and hit the plus sign a few times.
This illustrates the sources that Sanders used for his book.
Yep. It certainly does.
The Graysmith point is a fair one, I suppose. If you write a book as an amateur, those are the kinds of problems you’re bound to struggle with. And the amount of inaccuracies and dubious claims on the part of informants doesn’t necessarily indicate anything beyond naivety on the part of the writer.
It begs a certain question, though: Why do amateurs decide to write such books in the first place? Why not slow it down a bit, consult people who are used to working with sources, used to interviewing informants, used to assessing the credibility of witnesses?
The above is common sense. If you for some reason fail to do so, you have to take responsibility for it. If I, for some reason, decided to write a book on the history of steam engines – I would consult experts. I wouldn’t just sit down and write the thing – and I wouldn’t run around interviewing people who claimed to be knowledgeable about the subject without double checking their credentials before publishing my book.
It begs a certain question, though: Why do amateurs decide to write such books in the first place? Why not slow it down a bit, consult people who are used to working with sources, used to interviewing informants, used to assessing the credibility of witnesses?
We have seen it dozens of times with the Zodiac case. People get an idea in their head and assemble what they believe to be the facts when in reality what they have gathered are a bunch of tenuous circumstantial connections. You cannot tell these people the flaws in their reasoning, they will not listen. They will hold steadfast to their beliefs. They want to be right and turn a blind eye and ear to anyone that they perceive will derail their theory. So, going about properly researching and fact checking information they receive is low on their priority list.
Most of the authors who operate this way do get their comeuppance once the book is published and I imagine it is a very bitter pill to swallow. I suppose what sets Graysmith and Sanders apart is that their books were so successful and it wasn’t until many years after their books were first published that the veracity of the content was tested.
To be fair to Graysmith, his first book was pretty good and had he not written it we probably would not be here discussing the Zodiac case today. He saved the case from falling into obscurity. Graysmith’s mistake was writing Zodiac Unmasked and not correcting the misinformation in the first book. Instead he added to the misinformation to the point that most people, who by this time were aware of the available facts, just threw their hands up and discounted everything that Graysmith had ever written about Zodiac.
