Thoughts

March 11, 2003
The Pentagon is Grasping for Straws

I was reading This Modern World which highlighted a recent New York Times article that started off with this glorious gem:

Two weeks ago, a group of senior intelligence officials in the Defense Department sat for an hour listening to a briefing by a writer who claims - I am not making this up - that messages encoded in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament provide clues to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. One of the officials told me that they had agreed to meet the writer, Michael Drosnin, author of a Nostradamus-style best seller, without understanding that he was promoting Biblical prophecy. Still, rather than shoo him away, they listened politely as he consumed several man-hours of valuable intelligence-crunching time. Apparently he has given similar briefings to top officials of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.

Michael Drosnin wrote back defending his all powerful method: "Why do United States and Israeli intelligence take the code seriously? Not, as Mr. Keller writes, because "we're all a little too desperate these days," but because the Bible Code keeps coming true."

Oh, I do remember reading about the incredible Bible Code system. The basic recipe is this:

  1. Take a long text and remove the spaces. (Bonus points if the language lacks vowels so it is easier to futz with!)
  2. Pull out every (x) letter of the text.
  3. Have a computer scan for words
  4. Choose appropriate 'cluster' of words that are close to each other in the text
  5. Ignore the combinations that don't say what you want them to say
  6. Translate ancient text loosely into modern English.
  7. Shake, stir, and you're a winner!

Unfortunately like all specific 'prophecies,' they important details are always discovered after the fact. Take the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster:

Since the Columbia space shuttle tragedy we have received many inquiries about what Bible codes have to say on the disaster. In the days following the explosion, we ran the term and came up with quite a few findings, but only one extension of interest so far, a 22-letter, six-word ELS that has very interesting implications. It reads, From God Comes the Debris of Columbia. And the leader's heap of ruins is corrupt. (An earlier translation read, From God Comes the Debris of Columbia. And Impure (non-kosher) is the Monument of the Father. After tinkering with the ELS for a few days, we decided the former is more accurate.)

Okay, so what do we have here? A couple of vague statements that can be interpreted a wide variety of ways, with the translation changing radically to fit the needs of the authors. If you read the rest of the newsletter, you can see they've been hard at work finding messages about what will happen to Saddam Hussein.

What happens when the same set of tools is turned onto another large text? Michael Drosnin said: "When my critics find a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them." (Newsweek, Jun 9, 1997) So Brendan McKay took Moby Dick and ran the same analysis on it. The laws of probability worked, and the assassinations of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, President Rene Moawad, Soviet exile Leon Trotsky, Reverend Martin Luther King, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and Yitzhak Rabin showed up. Interestingly, Drosnin's future death was predicted by Moby Dick.

Posted by Patrick at March 11, 2003 11:14 PM
Comments

Does anyone know how to contact Mr. Drosnin, I have some information he might like to here? Thank you.

Posted by: Nick Rockwell on May 3, 2003 2:53 PM

I´m from argentina and i need to contact to michael drosnin because I discovered something interesting in the bible code.
I hope that Mr. Drosnin could send me a message.

Posted by: Claudio on October 12, 2003 5:21 PM

Michael other things need to be explained to yourself.

Posted by: Shagavulin on October 23, 2003 5:42 AM

I have not used the code to find things in the bible, but many of the things written by mr.drosnin have caught my attention. If anyone has any updates as to his search the the code key in jordan, i am highly intrested in the findings.

Posted by: jay on December 3, 2003 7:41 PM

The Bible Code is FACT.

Want proof?

You must understand basic statistics to understand the proof, but it's irrefutable.

Go to www.biblecodedigest.com and click on the Answering Skeptics button in orange on the right-hand side.

I challenge you to challenge me! or Math for that matter!

As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.

Posted by: Mark Simkiss on January 12, 2004 10:32 AM

I'm from Brazil and i'm trying to contact Mr. Drosnin via e-mail, but I didn't find it. Can anyone help me?

Posted by: Olavo on January 21, 2004 7:49 AM

I'd like to relay some information to Michael Drosnin regarding the engraved obelisks he talks about in "The Bible Code II". Does antone know his email address?

Posted by: Kevin Shaw on June 29, 2004 11:12 PM

I believe Micheal Drosnin has been hand picked by God to divulge information he finds in the Bible Code. He has been ever humble in quetioning why, himself? Such are the ways of God, mysterious. Michael Drosnin has been a professional writer for years, and probably feels quite burdened and persecuted by his discoveries. If God is using him, then who are we to critisize the vessel he chooses. I would like to write Michael Drosnin if anyone knows how to reach him.

Best,
Mary

Posted by: Mary Carroll on October 25, 2004 11:58 AM
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