EvilHomer - 2014-03-06
So what's the source of this story? It seems to have EXPLODED on the crackpot blogosphere over the last few days, and it's generating an overwhelming amount of chaffe.
Near as I can tell, it originated as a small news blurb in mid-2012, apparently taken from an interview on the Crimean television station, ICTV (no idea what the show was or what the context of the interview might have been. It got a scant attention at the time, only being picked up by one notable news source - a Pakistani paper, the Pakistani Observer. I can find nothing on the "scientist" whom they claim made the discover, one Vitalii Goh, but the article mentions him exploring "alternative methods of finding water", which leads me to suspect he's not a scientist at all, but rather a dowser. This would make sense, as dowsers are notorious for shamelessly making up all sorts of bullshit.
Possible scenario: Crimean TV station aired a forgettable "Ancient Aliens" type program; some wire writer whose deadline was looming saw it and decided to make a story from one of the dowsers featured on the show. Nobody bought it except it for a single paper in Pakistan, one or two local soft news sources, and a few X-Files bloggers. People stopped caring until recently, when the conspiracy theory hivemind started focusing on Russia, the Ukraine, and the Crimea; at that point, Google-warriors rediscovered the story and here we see the result.
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