A Brief History of My Anonymous Posting
Between 2006 and 2009 I posted on Wikipedia and my blogs Morgellons Watch and Contrail Science using pseudonyms. I did this because I was a little embarrassed to be writing so much about fringe topics.
But I actually started out on Wikipedia using my own name.
But I noticed a lot of the editors were just using pseudonyms, and I thought I’d join them, so in April of 2006 I stopped posting as MickWest and started posting as “Herd of Swine” - a biblical reference. I can’t remember why I picked it, but at the time I had been discussing the Bible a lot, and I liked the style of one editor called “The Hokkaido Crow.”
A year later, in May of 2007, I wanted to edit a page I’d originally edited as MickWest, so I signed into my old MickWest account and made a handful of edits. Unfortunately, this somehow enabled the flagging of my account as a sock puppet, and the MickWest account was suspended. The Herd of Swine account remains, although I don’t use it.
None of this is secret. In fact, I wrote about posting anonymously in my book (see excerpt, below.) The edit history is all publically available on Wikipedia.
It’s also not sockpuppetry. A sock puppet on Wikipedia is the use of “multiple accounts to deceive or mislead other editors, disrupt discussions, distort consensus, avoid sanctions, evade blocks, or otherwise violate community standards and policies.“ My new account was simply a new account. I stopped using MickWest and started using Herd of Swine because I wanted to be anonymous. My mistake was (a year later) going back to update some old edits and thus causing the accounts to overlap.
After that happened, I continued posting on the internet anonymously, somewhat halfheartedly on Wikipedia, and then on my blogs: Morgellons Watch, and Contrail Science. Then in 2009 excessive media attention made me decide to post again as myself. Since then I’ve only ever posted as me, Mick West.
This all, of course, was a very long time ago; the sock-puppet misunderstanding was back in 2007, 16 years ago. So why am I writing about it now?
Nowadays I post a lot about UFOs. Mostly that involves investigating individual UFO cases, but I also do some broader commentary on UFO culture. This makes some people unhappy because they feel like I’m attacking them.
Somebody from the UFO world stumbled across my old Wikipedia page, with the notice about it being a sock puppet account. It’s not, as explained above, but also because it’s actually me. But this obviously seemed like a gotcha, so they shared it on Twitter with “look, Mick West uses sock puppets” commentary.
I know that type of thing will come up again and again, so rather than playing whack-a-mole on Twitter, I thought I’d explain in interesting detail what the situation actually is (or rather, was, 16 years ago)
Finally, User:MickWest is me. I’ve always been sad that I lost the username, as I’m “MickWest” just about everywhere. Since 16 years have passed, maybe there’s a Wikipedia administrator out there, reading this, who will lift the block so I can again contribute to Wikipedia as myself.
[UPDATE 7/21/23: It turns out I just needed to request the block be lifted on Wikipedia, with an explanation. Now I’m unblocked and User:MickWest is back up and running!]
The following is an excerpt from my book, Escaping The Rabbit Hole, where I describe that period of my life.
I moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1993, where I worked for a year at Malibu Interactive, writing a robot war game. Once more I found myself in the right place at the right time, during a period of rapid expansion of the industry, especially in Los Angeles. I left Malibu with Joel Jewett and Chris Ward to start our own company, which (somewhat on a dare) we called Neversoft. It was touch-and-go for a few years, but we eventually hit our groove with the wildly successful Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series.
I was mostly busy with work for the next decade. Consequently, much of my debunking was at work—as emails would get passed around (after we actually got email, around 1996), I was always quick to point out the errors and direct the writer to something like Snopes (which was founded in 1995). I remember one particular story around the time of the Mad Cow scare (around 1995), where a brain disease infecting cows was occasionally being transmitted to humans as Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). It was claimed that 50 percent of Britons (including myself) would die of CJD disease within ten years. That was over twenty years ago, and 99.9999 percent of Britons are entirely unaffected, but the effects of that media scare live on, in that I still can’t donate blood in the United States. This always stayed with me as a prime example of the negative effects of junk science—the predictions of a CJD epidemic in the UK were vastly overblown, and in the twenty years since the fears were raised there has never been a proven case for CJD from blood transfusion.
I took up my hobby of debunking more seriously again after I cashed in my stock options and left Neversoft in 2003. The Tony Hawk money meant I could pretty much retire, giving me a lot of freedom to do whatever I liked with my time. I started part-time work as a writer for Game Developer magazine, where I just wrote about whatever interested me in game development technology. Around 2005 I joined Wikipedia as an editor (that does not mean I worked there; anyone can join). Initially, I did lots of minor little editing on dubious topics like homeopathy and audiophiles. I found a big source of bunk in the form of Biblical Scientific Foreknowledge (now called “Scientific foreknowledge in sacred texts”), which is rather a fringe subject that suggests that there is scientific truth in the Bible that was not available to humanity at the time it was written, the claim being that this was proof that the Bible was written by God. I delved into such arcane subjects as Ancient Egyptian Medicine, biblical exegesis, phytopharmacology, and vegetarian lions.
At some point on Wikipedia I found an article on a proposed medical condition called “Morgellons.” It looked a bit dubious to me. People were claiming that fibers were coming out of their skin, and I thought that looked like they might just be mistaking random bits of clothing fibers. I made some edits to the page in March and April 2006. After a few weeks, I found the subject so interesting that I started my first single-subject skeptical blog (using the blogger.com platform at the time, later switching to WordPress, both of which were free).
MorgellonsWatch.com was my part-time hobby for nearly three years. I wrote over a hundred articles, and got over twelve thousand comments. During the first year or so, there were several media stories regarding Morgellons, and I received a few requests for interviews. I declined them because I wanted to remain anonymous. I was actually a little embarrassed by the amount of work I put into my odd hobby, and preferred to not discuss it with anyone.
I learned many lessons while running Morgellons Watch. The most important one was to be polite and respectful to people that you disagree with. Nothing good comes of insulting someone, even unintentionally.
Interest in Morgellons died down around 2008 and more or less went away after the CDC did a study on the topic in 2012 and found nothing unusual. So I stopped posting and moved on to other topics.
After I left Neversoft one of the first things I did was take flying lessons at Santa Monica airport. It turned out flying was a bit more stressful than I’d imagined. Santa Monica airport is right next to the very busy Class-B airspace of Los Angeles International Airport, and to go anywhere requires careful planning and often complex navigation. I got my solo certification, I did a few long distance solo flights, then decided flying was really not for me.
But along the way I had to learn a lot about planes, air traffic, and the atmosphere. I also found a new topic that intersected with my new knowledge and my interest in debunking. The topic was Chemtrails—the unfounded belief that the long white trails left by high flying airplanes were not just condensation clouds, but were artificial trails deliberately sprayed for some illegal or nefarious purpose.
I came across the topic of Chemtrails somewhat randomly on Wikipedia, and I immediately found it fascinating—particularly the false idea people had that “normal” contrails could not persist. At that point (in 2007) I’d grown a little disillusioned with Wikipedia. Rather than spend much time editing the Wiki article (which would often be re-edited by a believer in Chemtrails shortly thereafter), I simply started a new blog: Contrailscience.com.
Chemtrails seemed like safer ground than Morgellons, as it seemed to mostly be a misunderstanding of the physics of the atmosphere with none of the implications of mental illness that Morgellons had. But there was still this constant problem that people got so upset by rigorous criticism of their ideas that productive conversation became impossible. So to try to address this I instituted a politeness policy on the site which grew more and more strict as time went by.
I was still settling into semi-retirement. After Neversoft I’d done some consulting work. I wrote the artificial intelligence for the computer players in a poker game. I wrote articles on topics like simulating fluid mechanics or analyzing video game lag. I was contracted by a large corporation to build a robot to test the effects of various factors on the response times of video game controllers. I wrote an iPhone app (one of the first available at the launch of the app store) to help Scrabble players. I traveled the world with my wife. I spent a lot of time on the internet—anonymously posting explanations of “Chemtrails” on Contrail Science. But I was getting a little bored of the whole thing, and I considered closing it down and spending more time programming.
Then in December 2009 I had a story hit the big time with the case of the “Mystery Missile”—where a plane flying from Hawaii to the mainland left a contrail on the horizon that looked a bit like a missile trail. A Los Angeles news chopper spotted it, put it on the evening news, and the story went viral. I wrote a few articles debunking this (explaining how it was just a contrail from an odd angle) and ended up being contacted by the media with interview requests. At the time I was still anonymous, but I decided then that my debunking would be taken more seriously if I was honest about who I was. This was a pivotal moment. I could either maintain my anonymity and just slip away, or take advantage of this publicity to get my message, one of truth and science, out there. I “broke cover,” and went on CNN and CBS Evening News to explain what the trail actually was.
I got a lot of traffic from that, nearly a million visitors to Contrail Science over the course of a week. This felt like a good time to branch out a bit. There was a lot of discussion in the comments section on Contrail Science, but the blog format was cumbersome, and the topics quite often strayed from the topic of contrails and onto broader conspiracies or other strange phenomena. I decided to set up a forum to foster more of that wider conversation.
Metabunk.org was born in December 2010….
This was an excerpt from Escaping the Rabbit Hole, a new edition of which was published in June of 2023, adding section on QAnon, Election Fraud, Coronavirus, and, of course, UFOs.
Your honesty and integrity are refreshing. We need more people like you leading the charge.