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Something strange is happening to the starlings in Wales. On the afternoon of 10 December 2019, Bodedern, Anglesey resident, Hannah Stevens, had observed a murmuration of some 250-500 of the birds while on her way to an appointment. On her return later that evening, Ms Stevens was shocked to find hundreds of the birds dead on the road:
“I counted 150 last night but I gave up as there’s just hundreds of them littered everywhere. It’s as if they just dropped down dead from the sky.”
Just days later, a similar though smaller incident occurred in Netherton, Merseyside, when around twenty of the birds fell, dead, from the sky near overhead power lines.
Post-mortems on a sample of the Bodedern birds by experts at the Animal and Plant Health Agency revealed that they had died as a result of trauma and internal bleeding, which experts attributed to the birds crashing into the ground at speed – something which, apparently, is not uncommon. Nevertheless, experts were at a loss to explain what might have caused the birds to dive into the floor suddenly and catastrophically.
For the time being that was it. Just another of those odd news stories which come and go with apparently no impact upon the lives of humans. But the conclusion was unsatisfactory. It left a hole into which florid imaginations leaped to fil the gap. In March 2020, in an attempt to debunk the various quack explanations which had emerged – and perhaps to divert attention from the alarming spread of SARS-CoV-2 among humans worldwide – North Wales Police took to the airways to declare the incident at an end. Rob Taylor, rural crime team manager, posted a video to Twitter to explain that despite, “widespread publicity and theories:
“The vet who conducted the inquiry has confirmed that the injuries and death of the birds was caused by the birds striking the tarmac or the nearby bushes, and probably consistent with the birds avoiding either severe weather or a raptor in the area… I hope that this will put a line under this. It’s quite a common thing and happens all around the world.”
Methinks perhaps he protests too much…
By the end of March 2020, the entire UK was locked down, and the conspiracy theorists had something a bit meatier to vent their imaginations on. And there the mystery of the Anglesey starlings might have ended. Except that – as the experts said – such events are not uncommon.
On the evening of 10 February 2022, Michaela Pritchard had been driving between Waterston and Hazelbeach, near Milford Haven, when she discovered a “massacre.” Starling corpses were strewn across the road. Once again, it appeared that a murmuration of starlings had become disorientated and plunged into the ground. Except that Ms Pritchard was not the only person on the road that evening…
Ian McCaffrey, who works in Waterston, was on his way home from work when he heard what he describes as a “loud electrical-type bang.” Moments later, dead starlings began falling from the sky:
“When I left work last night [Thursday], I heard a bang and then a load of birds landed on my car.
“Every now and again you will hear a bang that is coming from what I think is a crow-scarer that farmers use. However, this bang was more like an electrical bang – not quite as loud as lightning, but similar.
“It’s like there were hundreds of birds in the sky and all of a sudden they just died and fell to the ground. It was quite surreal last night, to be honest with you – not something I have ever experienced before.”
Local journalist, Tom Sinclair also witnessed the incident, after making his way to the scene following reports from worried residents:
“I was there at around 11.30pm, they were still falling from the sky. It was as if they were dead before they hit the ground…
“I don’t know what happened, really no idea, I can’t think it was a bird of prey, they weren’t flying and hitting the road, they were falling dead.
“I wondered if they were poisoned, or maybe it was birds who migrate and it was really cold, maybe they froze and died.”
The official narrative was given by a spokesperson from the RSPB:
“When this happens during night-time, it can cause them to collide with the ground as they become disorientated.”
This was inadequate for several witnesses such as Claire Eaton, who rescued one of the starlings which was still alive:
“It was really traumatic, on the road there were quite a few dead birds. Blood splattered everywhere. I saw a flash in the sky about an hour previously.
“It was like something out of a horror film. I think the cause of this is man-made, and people need to respect our wildlife.”
As on Anglesey, the Pembrokeshire incident – in an area once dubbed the “Welsh Bermuda Triangle” – was near to several military installations. Although there is no evidence thus far for military or extra-terrestrial involvement in the starling deaths.
There, for now, the story ends. The local authority has handed the case on to the Animal and Plant Health Agency. But we will have to wait and see whether the agency discounts witness testimony in favour of the “trauma and internal bleeding from crashing into the ground” explanation put forward in 2019.
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I relate this story because it holds lessons which we might apply to the more contentious issues which fill establishment media outlets and the social media conspiratorium alike… particularly those which have become so politically charged that reason has taken a back seat to emotion and tribalism. Thus far at least, neither Boris Johnson nor Donald trump has had anything to say about dead starlings falling from the skies above sleepy Welsh villages. And so there is no “right v left” side of the argument as to what might or might not have caused the bird deaths (although we might anticipate that, “trusting the ornithology,” the self-identifying left will be drawn to the official Animal and Plant Health Agency narrative – although some will go with climate or environmental explanations – while various conservatives and libertarians will side with those blaming such things as 5G, military experiments and UFOs).
To begin with though, let us examine our psychological response to the story. Humans are drawn to patterns. So much so that – as myriad optical illusions demonstrate – we easily find patterns where none actually exist. Like, for example, making connections between quite separate bird death incidents in Anglesey, Merseyside and Pembrokeshire. It is very easy to see a pattern – similar incidents with mysterious causes. But they may just as easily be unconnected – the fact that witnesses in Merseyside and Pembroke saw birds falling dead from the sky doesn’t disprove the explanation given for the Anglesey incident.
The same goes for the claims of some “electrical” event in the Merseyside and Pembroke cases. The fact that witnesses saw a lightning-like flash followed by a loud bang prior to birds falling dead from the sky isn’t proof of causality. The two things have to be treated as coincidental unless and until evidence connecting them is uncovered.
Unsatisfactory, isn’t it? You really want there to be an explanation to the mystery. And the fact that official agencies are either not commenting or are offering explanations which appear to be contradicted by witnesses makes you want to dash in and fill the gap… Is there a cover-up of some sort going on?
This, of course, is where those who are critical of official narratives become victims of their own impulsiveness. So far, we have a partial official narrative:
“It is not uncommon for flocks of birds to become disorientated and fly at speed into the ground, killing sizeable numbers.”
This still leaves us wondering who or what might have disorientated the birds, injecting an element of mystery into an otherwise bland story. According to the RSPB, the most likely explanation was that the birds were panicked by a passing bird of prey – which is certainly more plausible than the idea that space aliens traversed light-millennia just to scare birds in remote regions of North and West Wales.
But then we have what appears to be a repeat event. And this time it comes with both eyewitness contradiction of the official narrative – the birds were dead before they dropped from the sky – and an unnatural cause – the flash of light and accompanying bang just prior to the incident. Could the military have been experimenting with some secret weapon?
All we do know is that several witnesses to the Pembrokeshire incident have stated that the birds were dead before they hit the ground. In the event that the Animal and Plant Health Agency were to claim that the birds died only after they had crashed into the ground, we might reasonably suspect a cover-up. But as yet they haven’t reported, and may, as far as we know, be as mystified as the witnesses themselves.
In the course of the extreme measures taken in response to the pandemic, and as a result of the politicisation of just about everything to do with it, the self-identified left has become increasingly shrill on two points – that we should “trust the science” and that, if “the experts” agree, then we non-experts are wrong to challenge them. This though, is the basis of both bad science and bad journalism. Falsifiability is the very essence of the scientific method – which is why scientific papers are subject to peer review. If you claim to have discovered something but your peers cannot replicate your method and results, then your claim is false.
Of course, we lay people lack the resources and knowledge to falsify a scientific finding. And so, we seek out scientists who can. And very often in the case of developing science – such as that around the pandemic – we find that there are as many scientists challenging the official narrative as there are those who support it. This would be like discovering groups of ornithologists concerned that climate change rather than passing raptors is causing more bird death incidents similar to the ones in Wales.
Bad journalism – of which there is a great volume these days – simply takes at face value the official line. Most often, what passes for news is merely the regurgitating of official press releases, with few establishment news outlets employing and funding proper investigative journalism anymore. But what a good investigative journalist is looking for is precisely the kind of hole in the official story seen in the Welsh starling deaths – the official line is that the birds died from hitting the ground, but witnesses say the birds were already dead when they fell from the sky.
Good journalism asks questions, but it doesn’t rush to fill the gap. What might have caused the Anglesey starlings to nosedive the ground? Did some kind of electrical disturbance cause the Merseyside deaths? What, exactly, was that white flash and loud bang in Pembrokeshire? And could it be the cause of the bird deaths? What else – climate change, microwaves, agricultural pesticides, etc.. – do we need to rule out? Importantly though, good journalism does not rush in to fill the holes in the official narrative. To do so would be to drop down into the conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
Filling the gap is a hallmark of conspiracy theories… most often filling the gap with some pre-conceived evil like 5G, military experiments, UFOs or chemtrails. “It was the chemicals they spray out of the back of aeroplanes that killed the birds!” Unfortunately, it is at this point that a reasonable critique of the official narrative gets lost amid the ravings of the kind of people who are not safe to be allowed out unaccompanied by a responsible adult.
The hole in the narrative has always been the most potent weapon the public has against the wrongdoing of officialdom… “If Iraq was bristling with weapons of mass destruction, how come nobody has ever found one?” “If, as we now know, the vaccines do not prevent transmission, why are you still pushing vaccine mandates – which might even lull someone into a false sense of security?” It is the question – and the attempted cover-up – which catches them. What lets them off the hook is what – for want of a better term – we might call the convenient nutter. Not just a conspiracy analyst – someone inclined to get a little excited about a topic which needs further investigation – but someone who is almost religiously devoted to their one, often seriously cranky and universally-applied, explanation of events. “The grey aliens are behind it all!”
If you haven’t spotted this yet, once you get it, you will see it everywhere – the establishment media love this kind of conspiracy theorist because they can be used to discredit otherwise credible questioning of the official narrative. Consider the rise and fall of Stella Immanuel, a Nigerian doctor who claimed to have successfully treated Covid patients with a certain anti-malaria drug. As I explained in some depth at the time, much of the furore around the otherwise uncontroversial medicine was largely a result of Donald trump latching onto it in the early days of the pandemic. If Trump was in favour of it, then the establishment media simply had to be against it, going so far as to promote fraudulent data in an attempt to discredit it.
But data seldom breaks through to the front of public consciousness. And the bigger threat to the establishment were heavyweights like the clinicians at the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance, or researchers like Professor Didier Raoult who, prior to the pandemic had been regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on infectious diseases. Stella Immanuel provided the convenient antidote. As the BBC was able to report at the time:
“Stella Immanuel, a doctor at the centre of a controversy over unproven and potentially dangerous claims that an anti-malaria drug can treat Covid-19, is no stranger to conspiracy theories…
“She is also a pastor and the founder of Fire Power Ministries in Houston, a platform she has used to promote other conspiracies about the medical profession…
“Five years ago, she alleged that alien DNA was being used in medical treatments, and that scientists were cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious.
“Some of her other claims include blaming medical conditions on witches and demons – a common enough belief among some evangelical Christians – though she says they have sex with people in a dream world.”
This set up a classic guilt by association trap. From that moment on, anyone calling for research studies into potentially viable generic treatments could be dismissed as a crank… “just like that weird Nigerian woman.” And many were, as anyone who pointed out the huge vested interest that Big Pharma had in blocking any such research – even as failed drugs like Remdesivir were given a free pass – could attest.
I make no claims as to whether any generic drug with antiviral properties would have been effective as an early intervention against Covid. But, given that at the time the alternative was to sit, gasping for breath until you either recovered or died, it is not unreasonable to ask why no such research was ever undertaken. Not least because in another life-threatening area of medicine, funding and licensing is available to allow at-risk patients to opt into research using experimental drugs.
Nor do I offer an explanation for why many official narratives turn out to be full of holes, precisely because the uncomfortable vacuum obliges us to ask questions. I don’t rule out the various conspiracy theories – which encompass everything from space aliens to technocratic indifference and incompetence – but I try to stick to Carl Sagan’s maxim that, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” And for the most part, Occam’s Razor is the best starting point… Most of the things that go wrong in this world are the result of some combination of hubris, wilful blindness and crackpot realism – and the outlandish conspiracy theories only seem plausible because we cannot believe our ruling elites could possibly be so stupid.
I do, however, caution against either of the political extremes which have crowded out rational debate in recent years – on the one side, to rush to fill the narrative gap with one of more preconceived “explanation,” and on the other, the knee-jerk call for the cancelling and censoring of anyone who points to that emotionally-stressful hole in “the science.” Both prevent far more profound truths from seeing the light of day.
As you made it to the end…
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