X-File: Papio
The Truth Is Not There
The above image was shot using a Canon AE-1 35mm film camera, back around the turn of the century. The view is looking NNW from Giles Road (the northern boundary of Papillion) across a cornfield. The road barely visible in the middle distance is 108th Street. A railroad track runs along the top of the ridge in the background of the photo.
Gary Speck's website, Ghost Towns of Sarpy County, referred to this exact spot:
Portal, Nebraska... This small railroad town was predated by a one-room school and cemetery. The site of the town is long gone. It was located along the Union Pacific Railroad, northwest of Papillion, on Giles Road, between 108th and 114th Streets.
Speck's website refers to Portal, Nebraska's "one-room school." That schoolhouse was moved to the center of Papillion, where it sits all scrunched up next to "the old Sautter house" on a half-acre lot that the city council apparently thinks is befitting our history. Why was it moved? One theory (which I just made up) is that it was relocated to divert attention and visitors away from the Portal area.
This starts some seemingly innocuous questioning. The description calls the railroad track a Union Pacific track. And UP (now UPRR) has been headquartered in this area since 1863, when Union Pacific was established in Omaha as one of two companies directed by President Abraham Lincoln to construct the first transcontinental railroad. UPRR is now the largest freight railroad network in North America. [1]
Yet, Mapquest has labeled the track "Burlington Northern". Why the discrepancy? I'll put that question in context later.
Upon further investigation, it turns out the Ghost Towns of Sarpy County website has recently "gone 404." Did somebody "get to" his ISP? Is my source material being systematically removed by the Internet police, the FCC, or some other secret government guys?
And what exactly is in the mysterious white dome?
I passed this location daily on my way to work, and was unconcerned with these questions, until I saw the movie The X Files: Fight the Future. I was shocked when, in scene 17, I saw a sight that looked remarkably familiar.
From a transcript of the movie:
Inside the car, Scully and Mulder watch the train go by. Its cargo includes white unmarked tanker trucks. The car discreetly paces the train as it hurtles towards its destination. Eventually, the car stops and Mulder and Scully get out, looking past the camera at something behind us. They begin to walk toward it, past us. The camera pans to follow, over the crest of a hill Mulder and Scully have begun to walk down and we see they're headed toward some white domes appearing to glow in the middle of a desert, surrounded by a cornfield.
Is the train a Union Pacific train, or a Burlington Northern? And remember the cornfield in the foreground of my photo?
KURTZWEIL: You saw this experiment?
MULDER: Yeah, but we were chased off.
KURTZWEIL: What did it look like?
MULDER: There were bees... corn crops... What are they?
KURTZWEIL: What do you think?
MULDER: A transportation system. Transgeneric crops that are polygenically altered to carry a virus.
KURTZWEIL: That would be my guess.
So, the movie hints that the corn is genetically engineered for some insidious purpose. Hmm... genetically engineered corn? I found an article in the Cornell News from May, 1999 that tells of "an increasingly popular commercial corn, genetically engineered to produce a bacterial toxin to protect against corn pests... this hybrid crop, known as Bt-corn, has genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis spliced into the plant genes." The article assures the reader that "The engineered corn is safe for human consumption."
So why the secrecy, the cover-up? What insidious, dastardly things are happening as a result of dome-schooled, genetically-altered corn crops?
The truth is shocking, yet horrifying. The corn kills Monarch butterflies.
John E. Losey, Cornell assistant professor of entomology, reported: "We need to look at the big picture here. Pollen from Bt-corn could represent a serious risk to populations of monarchs and other butterflies." Linda S. Rayor, Cornell instructor in entomology, said, "Monarchs are considered to be a flagship species for conservation. This is a warning bell."
And yet, the Cornell report reveals that in 1998 "more than 7 million acres of the hybrid crop were planted by U.S. farmers." Three years later, a Benbrook report showed planting had increased tenfold— amounting to almost 80 percent of all corn acres!
Monsanto™, the patent-owner of engineered Bt-corn, affirms that the engineered corn is safe for human consumption. However, it's recently been discovered that this is not entirely true. Thousands of livestock deaths have been reported, as a result of grazing on genetically engineered crops and feed. [2] In a report for the Institute for Responsible Technology, Jeffrey M. Smith describes a study revealing health problems associated with genetically modified corn and the cover-up attempts by Monsanto™ and European regulators to distort the findings.
Since 2004, at least twenty-six countries have total or partial bans on GMOs, including Switzerland, Australia, China, India, Ireland, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Mexico and Russia. Significant restrictions on GMOs exist in about sixty other countries. [4] Meanwhile, as Smith writes, "consumers in the US will unwittingly serve as the guinea pigs."
Who is holding back the truth, and why?
Throughout the past century, the U.S. government supported its farmers through subsidies to ensure that the United States' domestic food production continued to grow. Growers of corn, in particular, have been rewarded for producing more and more corn, regardless of whether the excess could be put to use. And Bt-corn was expected to increase yields per acre up to 15%. (It doesn't, but that's irrelevant to the government.)
And how would the United States use this alleged excess corn yield?
High Fructose Corn Syrup.
According to howstuffworks, "in 1970, approximately 16 percent of sweetener consumed in the United States was HFCS. By 1997, that number had risen to 57 percent. HFCS is in nearly everything: jelly, juice, sodas, whole-grain breads, cereals, ketchup, crackers, yogurt, sweet pickles, applesauce, salad dressing, ice cream, cough syrup and lots more. Additionally, the sugars in the syrups act as a preservative, which is why HFCS is now added to some meats."
With this increasing demand for HFCS, it's no wonder the Government is subsidizing the use of high-output monarch-killing Bt-corn.
Meanwhile, remember this part from above?
Scully stands behind Mulder as they both watch a train go by. Its cargo includes white unmarked tanker trucks.
It's a movie— which is why it's not quite accurate. These are the real killer tankers:
Let's put this all together in a Mulder-like diatribe: Cargill™ is obviously a government cover corporation running "black ops" train tankers on misidentified railroad tracks in order to haul dangerous Monsanto-altered High-Fructose Corn Syrup to be put into the food supply of a blissfully ignorant America!
It's also apparent that the Government is prepared to sacrifice the Monarch butterfly as a species to further its own political agenda of increasing production of HFCS and genetically-modified Ethanol. (Don't get me started on genetically-engineered Ethanol and how it's bad for the environment— and classic Mustangs.)
I, for one, will not stand for it, and I will be defying both the insidious government's efforts to create genetically-modified Cornhuskers, and its consumerist populace faithfully sucking down the corn-fed virus of obesity, by becoming a radical monarch butterfly conservationist.
I tried to warn people. (Well... I made this webpage.) But all these reports and studies (and the X Files movie) have apparently called too much attention to these issues. Remember the photo I took?
Now— the cornfield is gone. The dome has been replaced by an industrial park. The railroad track has been taken out of service, and parts of it removed as 108th Street was widened and rebuilt. In 2006, the X-Files movie was no longer available at my local Blockbuster® video store. A quick seven years later, and the entire Blockbuster® store disappeared— and so did every Blockbuster® store in the area! Someone has even broken into my home and stolen the original film negatives I have of this location. Or at least, I can't find them. This one photo is the only remaining evidence of how close to home the evil plot came.
Was that Monsanto's genetically-altered corn in the foreground? Did the dome contain genetically-altered bees to pollinate it, or was it a HFCS or Ethanol processing plant? Did the railroad tracks carry Cargill™ tankers filled with the sweet nectar of nefariousness? How much of the Monarch butterfly species is our government willing to sacrifice? All of it? How many people?
Watch out for bitter old long-haired freaky dudes wandering through roadside weeds muttering about government conspiracies. They might be me.
