The latest hero of the right-wing tinfoil hat set is a gentleman named David Gaubatz. Briefly, he claims that he knows what happened to Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Go read his entire story here; it’s quite short. Briefly,

He found the sites where he is certain [WMD] were stored. The reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

What distinguishes Mr. Gaubatz from your uncle Sid who was kidnapped thirty years ago by aliens, or other lunatics? Well,

Having served for 12 years as an agent in the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, Mr Gaubatz, a trained Arabic speaker, was hand-picked for postings in 2003, first in Saudi Arabia and then in Nasariyah in Iraq. His mission was to locate suspect WMD sites, discover threats against US forces in the area and find Saddam loyalists, and then send such intelligence to the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.

In reading the saga of Mr. Gaubatz yet again (this guy has been a favourite of the right wing blogging kooks for awhile now), I was struck by the resemblance between his claims and those of various pseudoscientific cranks of the sort gleefully debunked by folks like Martin Gardner and James Randi.

Some of the similarities:

a) The hero is alway a lone truthseeker with a staggering discovery, seeking recognition from a sceptical world.

Be it a perpetual motion machine, definitive proof of UFO abductions, or the Secret of Saddam’s Missing WMDs, our protagonist is always in possession of Secret Knowledge with potentially devastating implications that he/she is struggling to bring to the people.

b) The Secret Knowledge is deeply counter-intuitive.

It usually involves the notion that Einstein was wrong, or that a new and hitherto unrevealed major hominid exist. In the case of Mr. Gaubatz, we are asked to accept that the hundreds of Iraqis involved in a cover up decided to confide in Mr. Gaubatz, but not, for some reason, to anonymously claim the large rewards being offered by the US for definitive proof of WMD caches.

c) The actual physical evidence is minimal or nonexistent.

A single blurry photo of the UFO. A plaster cast of Yeti’s footprint. In the case of Gaubatz - he says he was shown bunkers which, he decided, were of unusual size. That’s pretty much it.

d) The experiment/discovery is, unfortunately, now impossible to verify.

Unfortunately the lab notes have been lost, or the findings can’t be duplicated, or, in the Gaubatz story, “the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria.” This happened in a Coalition-occupied Iraq, mind you, during a period when one would assume that discovery of the WMD (and thus justification of the invasion) was a fairly high priority.

e) Our hero was the sole possessor of this knowledge.

Curiously, no-one is ever able to replicate that cold-fusion finding or that “remembering water” study. Curiously, none of the articles about Gaubatz seem to cite other sources. Count the number of times in the referenced article that a key revelation is carefully prefaced with the attribution “he said”. None of the “numerous Iraqi sources” are identified. His key interactions withe Iraqi Study Group were all “verbal”. Key records have been “lost”.

f) Our hero is struggling to bring the Secret Knowledge to the world, but sinister forces are suppressing The Revelation.

The damned publishers of “Nature” refused my antigravity formula again because the oil companies realize that it would put them out of business. The New England Journal of Medicine won’t print my cancer cure because the “cancer-lobby” of powerful doctors don’t want to give up their fat research grants. And the CIA, Republicans and Democrats are all conspiring to hush up Mr. Gaubatz’s discoveries because of their potential to embarass the US.

g) The Revelation must therefore be made through media not afraid to carry The Truth.

Pseudoscientists never publish their findings in serious peer reviewed journals, and Gaubatz’s “discoveries” have so far been ignored by both the evil “MSM” and the various credible historical, political and military journals. This, of course, is a consequence of (f), above…the suppression of truth by the powerful elites. Thank God for the blogosphere, where we can finally get accurate information about what’s REALLY going on. Oh, yeah, and Fox. You know, the network that brought us the Roswell Alien Autopsy “documentary”?

There are a few reasons that this kind of narrative endures. It appeals to us because it’s a good story, with many of the narrative elements that we enjoy in our myths. Who doesn’t root for David when he takes on Goliath? Who doesn’t occasionally attribute adversity in our life to powerful, sinister forces operating behind the scenes? Who doesn’t harbour some distrust of the government, or big science, or industry, or the Kremlin, or some big and powerful bogieman out there? Who doesn’t enjoy a bit of mystery? And for the Bush-supporters - who doesn’t want to believe that they were right?

Gaubatz continues in his heroic quest, but has now moved on to new themes. He has discovered the secret Islamist conspiracy behind the Trolley Square shootings. His website now features a charming article, not in the LEAST bit opportunistic or exploitative, that links the murders at Virginia Tech to Islam, and then solicits your support for his non-profit organization to protect America against Muslims “through a commitment to America’s Judeo-Christian moral foundation and to an enduring faith and trust in G-d and in His Providence.”

All this is not to say that Mr. Gaubatz is wrong. And maybe Uncle Sid really was anally probed by the Greys.

More likely, though, Mr. Gaubatz needs a shave, and Occam has the razor.

h/t to Tom Cerber, the Politic