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

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

RI,

Give me a task and I'll execute it. We wrapped up our hike and I'll just be sitting in a hotel room and then train. Also, I asked my FAA FOIA liaison if it'd be worth scrubbing the NARA for obscure flight information from 1976. As a reminder to people following this thread - "A thorough search within the Flight Standards Service revealed no records related to your request. Any records we may have had were destroyed in accordance with the Records Retention Schedule, as referenced in Federal Aviation Administration Order 1350.14B." Right now I'm mainly interested in knowing if the flight described even took place, and any speculation about incidents or accident reports are moot until we know if the flight even happened.

- Doc

[honorentheos]

I expected more from a thread that has run over 40 pages. I'm not sure what is gained here, either. Whether or not the story has become embellished would seem to be an obvious yes and be expected given how memory works. It's a rather benign story, too. He claims to have felt calm in the face of death. Ok. But knives have been drawn over it and there is a certain irrationality to the thread in reading it over the hunger to see the story proven to be a lie.

That's unfortunate. Res appears to have this about right. People are grasping and exerting surprising effort over what, exactly?

[DrW]

I expected more from a thread that has run over 40 pages. I'm not sure what is gained here, either. Whether or not the story has become embellished would seem to be an obvious yes and be expected given how memory works. It's a rather benign story, too. He claims to have felt calm in the face of death. Ok. But knives have been drawn over it and there is a certain irrationality to the thread in reading it over the hunger to see the story proven to be a lie.

That's unfortunate. Res appears to have this about right. People are grasping and exerting surprising effort over what, exactly?

Why should this oft repeated lie be considered a benign and harmless story? Should Paul Dunn's tall tales have been overlooked because he was in a high leadership position in the LDS Church? Paul Dunn's lies were not mere embellishments. They never happened. Paul Dunn never pitched for a major league baseball team. Russell M. Nelson was never in a flaming aircraft spiraling to the certain death for all aboard on a flight from SLC to St. George, Utah in 1976, or ever. It never happened. What's the difference?

As IHAQ has written, this particular Nelson lie has been repeated many times, in speeches and in print, over a period of nearly 40 years. Unlike at least one other whopper, this one has not yet been deleted from the record by the Church PR folks. It's probably too late to do so. In the end, the purpose of the lie is to help bring in donations from faithful members. Why is "Lying for the Lord" in LDS leadership culture still tolerated in the age of the internet?

The big self aggrandizing lie to help bring in donations from those in the thralls of unfounded belief is the same dynamic currently being used by Trump. No big surprise there.

The way in which the LDS Church selects its top leadership pretty much assures that the oldest, weakest and most out of touch individuals automatically ascend to the throne. This leadership by the aged may have worked well in primitive clan cultures. It is a disaster for the LDS Church, unless one judges success by the bank account of Ensign Peak Advisors.

[tapirrider]

The bottom line: If whatever happened on Nelson's aircraft occurred before 1978 and was categorized as an "incident," we know that the chance of finding that event in the online databases is exactly zero before we ever run a query. That's not because an incident didn't happen. It's because the databases do not include reports of "incidents" for that timeframe.

Confirming my understanding of the database requires doing some research and reading, as well as running several different queries to test what type of documents are included for which years. Falsifying my understanding should be easy peasy. Post a list of the aircraft incidents in Utah before 1978 from the database, and the search parameters you used to find it. DrW's single record from 1979 does not falsify my description, which applies to incidents before 1978.

Your entire case is based on online databases and assuming it was an incident and not classified as an accident. Many day ago I gave you this:



https://www.archives.gov/research/trans ... -accidents
Aircraft accident reports can be found in the Minutes of Meetings of the Civil Aeronautics Authority 1938-40 and the Civil Aeronautics Board, 1940-78 (MLR A1 E-34A, boxes 1-511) in the Office of the Secretary. The CAA minutes are arranged chronologically by year and the CAB minutes are arranged by year and month. There are accident reports, ranging from a paragraph to a several page report, located in each month of the minutes. The reports are submitted to the board anytime up to a year and a half after the date of the accident. Therefore, a search must be made of each month's minutes subsequent to the accident. The search involves checking the monthly index to determine the page number for the minutes. In some cases, particularly in the 1960's, the index will refer to a page listing board actions, which then refers you to an exhibit containing the accident reports.

The accident reports include, at a minimum:

information concerning the date
type of aircraft
owner
number of passengers
some mention of the circumstances of the accident

Folks, if Nelson's fantasy had actually occurred, there would in fact be a record of it in aviation documents.

[honorentheos]

I expected more from a thread that has run over 40 pages. I'm not sure what is gained here, either. Whether or not the story has become embellished would seem to be an obvious yes and be expected given how memory works. It's a rather benign story, too. He claims to have felt calm in the face of death. Ok. But knives have been drawn over it and there is a certain irrationality to the thread in reading it over the hunger to see the story proven to be a lie.

That's unfortunate. Res appears to have this about right. People are grasping and exerting surprising effort over what, exactly?

Why should this oft repeated lie be considered a benign and harmless story? Should Paul Dunn's tall tales have been overlooked because he was in a high leadership position in the LDS Church? Paul Dunn's lies were not mere embellishments. They never happened. Paul Dunn never pitched for a major league baseball team. Russell M. Nelson was never in a flaming aircraft spiraling to the certain death for all aboard on a flight from SLC to St. George, Utah in 1976, or ever. It never happened. What's the difference?

As IHAQ has written, this particular Nelson lie has been repeated many times, in speeches and in print, over a period of nearly 40 years. Unlike at least one other whopper, this one has not yet been deleted from the record by the Church PR folks. It's probably too late to do so. In the end, the purpose of the lie is to help bring in donations from faithful members. Why is "Lying for the Lord" in LDS leadership culture still tolerated in the age of the internet?

The big self aggrandizing lie to help bring in donations from those in the thralls of unfounded belief is the same dynamic currently being used by Trump. No big surprise there.

The way in which the LDS Church selects its top leadership pretty much assures that the oldest, weakest and most out of touch individuals automatically ascend to the throne. This leadership by the aged may have worked well in primitive clan cultures. It is a disaster for the LDS Church, unless one judges success by the bank account of Ensign Peak Advisors.

You assume it's a lie. It may be, but frankly it doesn't look like it is to me and it's really irrelevant either way. That's the entirety of the problem I see here. Res seems to be following a rigorous, defensible process and the result is the falsifiability of the story may not be possible. What I see from others, you included, is a form of Dunning-Kruger where experience and knowledge of modern flight procedures and airplane mechanics yielded an early assumption and now all of your intellectual effort is going into defending that assumption rather than actual careful unbiased investigation.

Res is doing it right. You could learn from him here.

[Gadianton]

I expected more from a thread that has run over 40 pages. I'm not sure what is gained here, either. Whether or not the story has become embellished would seem to be an obvious yes and be expected given how memory works. It's a rather benign story, too. He claims to have felt calm in the face of death. Ok. But knives have been drawn over it and there is a certain irrationality to the thread in reading it over the hunger to see the story proven to be a lie.

That's unfortunate. Res appears to have this about right. People are grasping and exerting surprising effort over what, exactly?

I think you're understating this "how memory works". Maybe how it works when there was never an attempt to substantiate the story in a minimal way, and there is an incentive to lie, there is an incentive to embellish, and the context is a religious leader who has free reign to take advantage of a system set up where he can say whatever he wants and the followers know not to question nor does the thought to question even come to mind. And the religion has a history of taking advantage of it's members in such ways and in fact even was founded on the principal.

Nelson doesn't have to be as diabolical as mark hofmann. He just has to have confidence in his own success and a flair for enjoying popularity, and the red carpet for abusing the Saints is rolled out for him to tread upon.

Hey, we have plenty of context and supporting storytelling for Uchdorf's heroic flying back of a hijacked plane, I wonder why that is?

[honorentheos]

I expected more from a thread that has run over 40 pages. I'm not sure what is gained here, either. Whether or not the story has become embellished would seem to be an obvious yes and be expected given how memory works. It's a rather benign story, too. He claims to have felt calm in the face of death. Ok. But knives have been drawn over it and there is a certain irrationality to the thread in reading it over the hunger to see the story proven to be a lie.

That's unfortunate. Res appears to have this about right. People are grasping and exerting surprising effort over what, exactly?

I think you're understating this "how memory works". Maybe how it works when there was never an attempt to substantiate the story in a minimal way, and there is an incentive to lie, there is an incentive to embellish, and the context is a religious leader who has free reign to take advantage of a system set up where he can say whatever he wants and the followers know not to question nor does the thought to question even come to mind. And the religion has a history of taking advantage of it's members in such ways and in fact even was founded on the principal.

Nelson doesn't have to be as diabolical as mark hofmann. He just has to have confidence in his own success and a flair for enjoying popularity, and the red carpet for abusing the Saints is rolled out for him to tread upon.

Hey, we have plenty of context and supporting storytelling for Uchdorf's heroic flying back of a hijacked plane, I wonder why that is?

All well and good, and whatever the reality is, the story certainly diverged from it whether intentionally or otherwise.

But there's a new issue raised by this thread and that is how others respond to the pursuit of knowledge compared to affirming an easily arrived at conclusion.

Of the processes followed in the thread to validate a belief of what actually happened, Res seems to be the one exhibiting scepticism of all assumptions and using the rigor of a process to maintain intellectual discipline.

[IHAQ]

You assume it's a lie. It may be, but frankly it doesn't look like it is to me and it's really irrelevant either way.

What does a lie look like?
DrW has explained why the veracity of the story or otherwise is important. Nelson is the leader of an institution that promotes honesty. It also promotes the idea that God wants 10% of your income. If Nelson is lying about his airplane story (like he was found to be with his "woman in stake conference" story which had to be removed from subsequent print runs of his biography) then the membership needs to know that he is not trustworthy when it comes to telling the truth. That is not irrelevant to members, nor their families and friends. Were Bernie Madoff's tales of investment returns irrelevant? Of course not, and it was right that he was pursued. Madoff's fraud was for an estimated $64.8 billion. Nelson is currently sat on more than $100 billion of donated funds, which can be doubled or more when considering the property portfolio etc. I'd suggest finding out if Nelson is lying is a bigger deal than it was for Madoff - there's far greater sums involved and there are many many more victims.

That's the entirety of the problem I see here. Res seems to be following a rigorous, defensible process and the result is the falsifiability of the story may not be possible. What I see from others, you included, is a form of Dunning-Kruger where experience and knowledge of modern flight procedures and airplane mechanics yielded an early assumption and now all of your intellectual effort is going into defending that assumption rather than actual careful unbiased investigation.

Res is doing it right. You could learn from him here.

RI is looking into 1 aspect of the stories corroboration. One would expect to find an aviation body report of an incident of the nature Nelson describes in his Doors Of Death story. If one cannot be found there might be a number of reasons why it can't be found - it was never recorded; the record is in a database that hasn't been searched; the record has been destroyed; the incident never happened.

The case for it being a lie becomes more compelling to me when you consider the other corroborating information that should also be reasonably expected to exist - newspaper reports of the incident; Nelson not making his intended appointment; other passengers noting their fortuitous survival alongside an LDS official; other church personnel involved with Nelson at the time talking about it etc. No corroboration has been found. Anywhere. Nothing. And a fair few people have spent a fair bit of their time looking.

As it currently stands we cannot say categorically that it didn't happen. But given the total lack of corroboration thus far, and that Nelson has been caught "red handed" materially embellishing a story that he has repeated over the years (and allowed to be included in his biography) I'd suggest it looks much more likely that the incident didn't happen. However, I'm open to reviewing that opinion should a shred of corroboration be forthcoming.

Feel free to explain on what basis you think it looks more likely to be a factual recounting of an actual event.

[IHAQ]

For reference and so people don't have to go looking back, here's the recounting in Sheri Dew's Nelson biography he signed off on.

On November 12, 1976, Russell Nelson had boarded a commuter plane in Salt Lake City to fly the quick route to St. George, Utah, where he was to give the invocation at the inauguration of W. Rolfe Kerr as the president of Dixie College.

It was a short hop of less than an hour in a small, two-engine propeller plane. Only four passengers were on board. The pilot had just announced that they were halfway to St. George when the engine on the right wing exploded, spewing oil all over the right side of the aircraft and then bursting into flames. In an attempt to douse the flames, the pilot turned the fuel off, causing the small plane to go suddenly into a free fall death spiral.

The woman across the aisle from Russell began to scream hysterically. But Russell felt calm. “It was the most amazing thing,” he said. “I thought, ‘My wife and I are sealed. Our children are sealed to us. I’ve honored my covenants. I’ll meet my ancestors and go on to a glorious resurrection..'”

He was, however, impressed with how quickly and comprehensively the mind can work. “It’s true, your life does flash before you. I had a bright recollection and perfect remembrance of my whole life. One major thought was that all of the framed awards and honors on my wall, the various clothes I’d worn — tuxedos and uniforms and doctoral robes — didn’t mean anything. What mattered was that I had my garments on and had been faithful to the covenants I’d made in the temple. I knew I was going to die, but I knew I would be fine.”

Miraculously, the free fall extinguished the fire, and, in the nick of time, the pilot was able to start the left engine, regain control of the plane, and guide it to an emergency landing in a farmer’s field not far from Delta, Utah. Everyone walked away from the incident unharmed. Another plane was dispatched, and Russell made it to St. George in time to give the invocation.

One wonders how and when the Church office building were informed about the incident (it was 1976 and he wasn't carrying a mobile phone) and when and where the additional plane landed and took off, all in time for Nelson to make his appointment as if nothing had happened. Presumably there'd be a record somewhere of that additional hastily arranged flight? Sending a second plane for a chap who's just going to give an opening prayer...really?

If the second engine was working and the fire was out, and he was 20-30 minutes away from the destination airport, why make an emergency landing in a field with the potential for making a bad situation much worse? I also note Delta, Utah has an airport that opened in 1943. I wonder what their records show for 12th November 1976?

[honorentheos]

You assume it's a lie. It may be, but frankly it doesn't look like it is to me and it's really irrelevant either way.

What does a lie look like?

One example is the kind of lie one tells themselves about how intellectually rigorous they are being while really just seeking means to justify an early conclusion.

Feel free to explain on what basis you think it looks more likely to be a factual recounting of an actual event.

Another example of what a lie may look like is creating a fabricated position and claiming it's what someone else is arguing.