Thursday, August 20, 2015

Paranormal Rh Factor, Part I

Completely by accident, I happened to be listening to Nick Redfern talk about his latest book Bloodline of the Gods on Future Theater.   From time to time I’d heard people who are into the paranormal claim that being Rh negative means you’re more mystical or something, and I’ve always wondered where that belief came from.  If there was one person I’d hope to have tackle the whole question, it would be Nick Redfern.  He’s always struck me as a grounded researcher of strange topics, an excellent writer and careful about making wild generalizations.  I clicked over to Amazon and requested the deros in the fulfillment unit there to ship me his book forthwith.

Apparently the guy who whips the back of the deros’ calves to make them work faster was taking a break to lick the blood running off said calves, because I did have to wait a day and a half before receiving the book.  In the meantime, I troubled myself – but not too much – to look up Rh factor on the web.  There was the usual Wikipedia page, but then there was this unexplained-mysteries.com thread titled The Rh Neg Blood Type – Nephilim Bloodline:


The thread, started in April 2010, weighs in at 22 pages and spans more than five years.  In the name of research, I read the whole thing.  It’s a gem; reading it was like listening to one of the classic Art Bell shows from the 90s for the first time.  The original post was nutty in a determined, grammar-be-damned way.  Scattered throughout the years of responses were the occasional stray fact (e.g., blood cells have walls) or critical insight (e.g., the underlying message concerns claims of racial supremacy) plus one or two straight up, whacked-out Christian (?) rants.

And now I see that apparently my recent post in the thread has caused a site administrator to close the discussion for good.  Story of my life!  You can still enjoy reading the entire thing.

What’s the big deal about Rh factor in relation to the paranormal?  The big deal is that the whole Rh factor mythos that’s apparently been endemic to fringe ideology and science has a defined starting point in the recent past.  This means the propagation of rumors and myths can be traced back to that starting point.  By way of example, I refer you to a New York Times editorial about the first mention of the Rh factor in 1944:


On January 3, 2011, Nicholas Bakalar wrote,  'The presence or absence of the blood protein Rh (for rhesus, the monkey in which it was discovered) can lead to runaway immune reactions in Rh-positive babies born to Rh-negative mothers, or in people receiving transfusions of incompatible blood.

‘So in hindsight, The New York Times’s first mention of the Rh factor, on Sunday, March 26, 1944, should have made bigger news than it did — in a brief article at the bottom of the “Science in Review” column on Page 9 of Section 4, The News of the Week in Review. “The recently discovered Rh factor in human blood,” it said, “need not cause infant deaths and childless marriages.”’

Bakalar’s editorial goes on to say that the first mention of a preventative treatment for newborns came in 1947, but the treatment (including the blood test to determine Rh factor) was not widely available.   It was not until the late 1960s that the New York Times reported that the drug Rhogam was available to treat women giving birth.  Rh was no longer a blood disease; it was now just a factor that had to be taken into account.

I have lots of problems with the whole Rh Neg idea vis-a-via the paranormal, but one thing I do like about it is that it appears to be a very low-hanging fruit.  Like alien abductions leading to aborted pregnancies, this is an area where the science is pretty clear.  I don’t have to really wonder what’s going on when people misunderstand blood science; I’m pretty sure I already know.  This is unlike other areas of paranormal research, where despite your best attempts to stuff something into a rational framework it keeps stepping outside the box to sneer and quote Raymond Chandler (if you’re lucky) at you.

The other thing about the whole Rh Neg narrative dynamic is that besides being implicitly anti-science it’s also explicitly racist.  By that, I mean that it both denies what we’ve learned about the human animal that is us and insists on creating new, even more artificial constructs to differentiate between types of humans.  Maybe it’s the Jewish part of my DNA (METAPHOR!), but I do get a little nervous about people going after other people with knives and pitchforks because they’re different.

So here’s the plan: I’ll tweet, blog and Soundcloud as I read Nick Redfern’s Bloodline of the Gods.  I’ve already dipped in a page or two, and it doesn’t look good.  Frankly, it looks like it’s been written by . . . an alien.  And the Nick Redfern I know would NEVER have started a sentence with an “and” . . . .


Anyone interested in this kind of thing who has scientific chops in blood science, biology, evolution, obstetrics, the social history of medicine, etc., please join in.   Email me at spjohnson93@gmailcom.

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