Fact Checking Nelson's "Doors Of Death" light aircraft near death experience

[Gadianton]

Interesting story, Res. I've never had one like that. I had a dream as a kid that stuck with me for years, and now and again gave me this solemn feeling. it had a flying saucer and a tornado at the same time, so kind of one-ups Nelson's. I will check my journal later to see if i wrote it down.

"But I don’t think a surgeon recalling a dream a including a discussion about medical details is evidence that confuses dreams with reality. Clearly, he believes that the dead can communicate in dreams. But I think that’s different than believing that the events of every dream happened in real life."

I wouldn't put it exactly like that.

2 Corinthians 12:2, KJV: "I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven."

Visions are indistinguishable from reality, in theory, for Mormons. RTM is chuck full of dream stories and visions and revelations. Notice that the counterfactual sickness of Lee is spoken of in terms of concrete reality. He's speaking to spirit Lee about real details of a future sickness for mortal Lee. He could have left out the "in a dream" part, and readers might imagine him in the Celestial room having the conversation. If the Lord puts you on a plane crash in a vision (not just any random dream, presumably RTM doesn't think every dream is a revelation) then it's at least as real as counterfactual mortal Lee's devastating sickness. It's a counterfactual reality, even if not a counterfactual future.

I think the details of your dreaming of the location of that office, which can be wrapped up as a single static scene, is different than Lee receiving detailed notes about a medical case. Here's the thing: if RTM could sit down today and say, "yes, I could write the details down of that sickness Lee was foreordained to have" then that would tell me his dreams are as vague as anybody else's, and then he manufactures deeper content after the fact.

That doesn't mean I think he is confused about whether it happened in a way that would leave intersubjective evidence for the rest of us, but that it would help him to justify it morally. Any brilliant details he articulates or alludes to from his dreams so disclosed as dreams, are examples of manufacturing content after the fact, and that's another stepping stone toward overlaying counterfactual revelatory content on the "real" world.

[Res Ipsa]

I already checked the Color Spectrum Sunday Edition on the 14th. There was no mention of any aircraft incidents. It did cover Kerr's (I don't think the spelling's right) inauguration. The article mostly covered what was in his inaugural address. It didn't mention about who gave the invocation. I went through all 22 pages of it, but could find nothing. Ditto for The Delta Newspaper, Millard County Chronicles Progress published on the 18th, 8 pages long.

This is a huge problem for Russell M. Nelson's story along with no record of an engine blowout and what is really a crash landing in a Delta, Utah farmer's field. I get we might think 1976 was ancient history and it was a bunch of aviation cowboys just stupid around willy nilly, but that's simply not the case. The industry across the board would've, somewhere, had some record of this event.

So. This is where I'm at with regard to the story.

Russell M. Nelson probably took a flight to SGU for the inauguration. Probably.

Russell M. Nelson absolutely invented this story out of wholecloth. Virtually everything and everyone, except himself of course, were fictional tropes.

Russell M. Nelson couldn't possibly have known about the Internet because God doesn't offer up those kinds of portents.

He is, without a doubt a liar, embellisher, and deceiver. Unless someone can actually generate some proofs of this story it's a myth busted like Everybody Wang Chung said.

- Doc

Doc, I think there’s a pretty big logical fallacy at play here:
The merological fallacy. The form is something like this: if the whole has property x, it’s parts must have property x. Or, in this context, if the story as a whole is false, the parts must also be false.

I had a kitten that climbed to the very top of a tall Douglas Fir in my yard. Crows started drive bombing it. My wife and I banged on pots and pans in the driveway to try to scare them off.

This story is false. What about the parts?

I had a kitten —true
It climbed to tippy top of a tall tree in my front yard — true
It was dive bombed by crows — true
My wife and I tried to scare the crows by banging on pots and pans — true

But it was a Western Red Cedar, not a Douglas Fir

Now, I picked an extreme example to illustrate the concept, but it applies just as well to Nelsons story. It is composed of facts A + B + C + D ..... For the story as a whole to be false, only one component must be false. But saying that the whole story was made up out of whole cloth requires all the parts to be false.

Let me again pick the low hanging fruit. One component in the story that people are focused on is landing in a field. This detail appears in only one of the many telling we have. Nelson has never said that the landing was in a field when he tells the story. The only teller of the story who included that detail is (I bet you you’ve already guessed) Sherri Dew. Sherri Dew’s telling never quotes Nelson. She did not cite sources. And that detail never appears in the tellings we have after Dew’s book is published.

So, we have a detail that is added to the story for the first time after many tellings by Nelson himself, that appears only once, and only when the story teller is an unreliable narrator.

I think that the version of the story that Dew tells is the least reliable version. Any new detail added in her book is very likely to be an embellishment on her part. In fact, if I remember correctly, there was an incident or accident involving a plane that landed in a field on the date that Nelson attended the inauguration. It’s just not in the right place.

In telling the story that has to be pulled from her book, she took details from a completely unrelated story and added them as if they applied to the story she was telling. She again adds detail that Nelson never mentioned when he tells the story.

It reminds me of Life of Pi. Sherri pretty clearly is much more interested in telling a version of a story that she likes best as opposed to the version that is most factual.

So, if this fact — landed in a farmer’s field — is false, the story as a whole is false. And of all the facts contained in different versions, this is among the least likely to be true before we attempt to do any fact checking. Can we conclude from this that Nelson was never on a plane that experienced a dive that caused him to think he was going to die? No. That would be the fallacy.

If you want to argue from other incidents, both that have been presented here involve, at most, real incidents. Neither involve making up a story out of whole cloth.

[Gadianton]

This detail appears in only one of the many telling we have. Nelson has never said that the landing was in a field when he tells the story.

I have Tom's compilation pasted into notepad+ and ready on monitor 2 at all times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMwKxmTLaCs.

" The pilot got control and started the other engine up. We made an emergency landing out in a field." It's RTM himself narrating, and at second 54, it even shows the field outside of his (actor's) window!

Tom has this appearing in 2011

The most brutal part that Sheri appears to have invented is a second plane being dispatched (to the field?) to pick them up, and get him to the event on time.

[Res Ipsa]

RI,

I think, and I'm speaking for myself only, is that when something smells like B.S., given my life experience and age, it's B.S.. The story is so over the top and so perfectly suited for Russell M. Nelson's needs that it immediatley raised my hackles when I read it. All the additional investigation taking place on this thread serves to confirm my reaction. I was actually poking around hoping to find some sort of corroborating evidence because I just wanted to see if there was anything that could lend it some plausibility. There's literally nothing, outside of the story itself and possibly Russell M. Nelson being at the inauguration, which I'm still not sure of, that establishes any sort of reliable factual truth to this story.

- Doc

Doc, I experience exactly the same type of intuition in my law practice. It’s like a general sense that something isn’t right with an argument or a witness account. I respond to it by doing additional work to try and identify what bothers me and see if I’m overlooking something. But I would never conclude that a witness’s story was complete BS relying on my intuition alone, or even mostly.

I agree about the absence of corroborating evidence. How much have we found? Well, Nelson did give the opening prayer at Dixie College on November 12, 1976.

I think that’s it. We can confirm that he could have taken a commercial flight from SLC to St. George, but not that he actually did. Or which day he flew on.

But to confirm any piece of the story, we have to think about the range of possible evidence that could exist and how likely it is that we could find it.

It’s like the old joke. A guy is walking down the street at night and he comes upon another guy under a street lamp on his hands and knees looking for something. “What did you lose?” “A contact”

The first guy gets down on his hand and starts to help with the search. When neither of them have any luck, the first guy asks “When did you first notice that the contact was missing?” The second guy points to an alleyway. “About halfway through that alleyway.”

The first guy is pissed off. The alleyway??!! Then why the hell you looking here?”

The second guy shrugs: “the light’s better here.”

We’re looking for corroboration the way that’s easiest for us — the internet. But I don’t see much thought given to where the evidence is most likely to be.

So, several folks have posted pictures of damaged planes after landing in fields. Conclusion: Nelsons plane couldn’t have landed in a field without sustaining enough damage to require an NTSB accident report.

But here’s the step that’s hard to remember to do because it takes time and effort. Let’s assume, for example, that 25% of people landing in fields do so without sustaining sufficient damage to require an accident report. When you Google, you are searching a limited set of information. How likely is it that you could find a reference in that database to a plane that sustained substantial damage to one that didn’t? I don’t know, but it’s almost certain you will find all substantially damaged planes because of the reporting requirements and insurance claims. A Google search will be heavily biased in favor of finding a substantially damaged plane because of what information is likely to end up the database.

If we could take the time and effort to be satisfied that we’d found every reference to landing in a field, the percentage of landings with no damage or minor damage will certainly be understated as compared with the actual percentage. Because there is a bias in the database.

This crap is hard to do right. Our brains are full of biases and shortcuts so that we can minimize the energy we expand thinking about decisions. Trying to take a set of facts and trying to suss out what really happened has us fighting our natural inclinations every step of the way. You have to ask yourself at every step “why do I think my conclusion/assumption is right and how could I be wrong? Then do whatever you can to make sure you aren’t wrong.

There’s lots of ways we could look for corroborating evidence. It just would require more time and effort than anyone wants to spend.

[Res Ipsa]

This detail appears in only one of the many telling we have. Nelson has never said that the landing was in a field when he tells the story.

I have Tom's compilation pasted into notepad+ and ready on monitor 2 at all times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMwKxmTLaCs.

" The pilot got control and started the other engine up. We made an emergency landing out in a field." It's RTM himself narrating, and at second 54, it even shows the field outside of his (actor's) window!

Tom has this appearing in 2011

The most brutal part that Sheri appears to have invented is a second plane being dispatched (to the field?) to pick them up, and get him to the event on time.

Yikes! Thanks for catching that. I looked at the list twice and missed it. I need more coffee,

[Dr Moore]

Event like this would have been news in Delta UT.

[Tom]

Do you think his journals were available to his biographers?
I remember in the gene cook- mick jagger brouhaha, gene was getting beaten badly in terms of whether he was lying or making it all up, when his son joined in the discussion fiercely defending his father. He claimed that all the details of the encounter with mick were in his dad’s journal and told the naysayers to just look it up.
The anti gene crowd told his son that only gene could approve access since the church had control of his journals. They asked his son to simply xerox the several pages and post them. He said no! Thus most blasted his son that his dad was a Dunn like fabricator ! Still the son would not post the pages and I don’t believe ever has!
Yet Cook still has defenders but those many who heard the story from Cook’s mouth believe it was all BS used
By Cook to embellish his own reputation as a fierce defender of the Book of Mormon/ gospel.
I do believe Nelson had a scary moment in one of his travels and he had used that to embellish his reputation as
a PSR/corporate sole no less. He will probably continue to use it! Whether he tells the gun to head robbery story I doubt it will pass correlation.

I checked his biography by Condie. Condie cites “Russell M. Nelson, personal record” in numerous instances, but I couldn’t find citations to that “personal record” dated earlier than December 11-12, 1979.

for what it's worth, the acknowledgments section of the biography does state:

I express my gratitude to Elder Russell M. Nelson for his patience during our regular interviews over the course of the past two years. Most of the significant biographical events prior to his calling as an Apostle were documented in his autobiography, From Heart to Heart. I have borrowed generously from that source to describe events prior to 1979. With Elder Nelson's permission, I have made minor editorial modifications to that original source to facilitate brevity and a smooth transition to the present time.

Nelson may not have kept a journal or personal record in 1976, but I don’t think that possibility can be ruled out. As indicated earlier, Condie seems to quote from Nelson’s 1985 fireside address in telling the plane story.

[Tom]

This detail appears in only one of the many telling we have. Nelson has never said that the landing was in a field when he tells the story.

I have Tom's compilation pasted into notepad+ and ready on monitor 2 at all times.

That type of dedication is inspiring. Perhaps we could work together on a documentary history of the Plummeting Plane incident.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Sorry to ask this, but surfing right this moment is spotty. Did any newspaper articles legit state that Russell M. Nelson gave the prayer or was at the inauguration?

- Doc

[Tom]

Sorry to ask this, but surfing right this moment is spotty. Did any newspaper articles legit state that Russell M. Nelson gave the prayer or was at the inauguration?

- Doc

The Dixie Sun did (third column from left): https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/details?id=29445869