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

[kairos]

Any chance Rusty told that story to his large family on many occasions over 50 years. So any chance we can find
stuff they wrote about Rusty dad- articles in church media,personal journals of family members including his first wife Danztel ?

[Gadianton]

I am assuming we are only talking about the plausibility of some actual event occuring in which Nelson was on a plane and came away believing he was about to die compared to his making up the story from whole cloth.

I don't know, H, is that what we're talking about? We might all be talking about slightly different things, or very different things. I know I'm not talking about "some actual event" where he "came away believing he was about to die".

What if outside the continental US years before his Dixie address, an engine sputtered and blew smoke, jumped to life and then sputtered a second time, and the pilot went into a 'gentle dive' to get the altitude down in case an emergency landing was necessary, but 30 seconds later the engine came back and all was well? Suppose Russ has severe PSTD unbeknownst to us, and he really was terrified. But he also doesn't know himself, and looking back he sees himself as having been calm, and so a "nose dive plummeting to the earth" expressed as matter-of-fact is an understandable exaggeration of a precautionary "gentle dive" that recovered within a minute?

Where do you draw the line H? Would you provide an example of a scenario that is firmly in BS territory, and one that stretches the truth, but still is in the truth territory?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Honor wrote:

I am assuming we are only talking about the plausibility of some actual event occurring in which Nelson was on a plane and came away believing he was about to die compared to his making up the story from whole cloth.

No. I don't know where you get that. In fact, it's impossible you got that from this thread, so why frame it that way? It doesn't make any sense. For me, I'm straight up claiming the story was BS and fabricated out of whole cloth. Whether or not he took a flight that experienced some air turbulence and he morphed that into this tale is 100% irrelevant to the details available to us and told to us from the pulpit and from LDS publications.

Did the flight as told to us by him and his wife happen?

No. It did not. Period. And I'm willing to metaphorically take the stand and testify under oath that what we discovered puts the credibility of this story at zero. RI can whatif and whatabout all he wants. Cool. It's made the thread more interesting and caused some of us to explore every avenue we know of to ferret out details only to find that every_single_avenue to us ends in a dead end.

- Doc

[honorentheos]

Where do you draw the line H? Would you provide an example of a scenario that is firmly in BS territory, and one that stretches the truth, but still is in the truth territory?

Maybe I'm being rash, but my early assessment of the situation was that Nelson was telling a tall tale that changed over time and wasn't trustworthy on its face. The accounts we have show the tellings change over time. Part of that could be due to variables in memory, and parts due to a sort of Commander McBragg syndrome that Nelson seems to demonstrate.

If the intent were to show the story evolved and became overly dramatic with time, the stories themselves provide the evidence for this. If, as Morley suggests, the goal is to figure out where the story diverges from reality my view is that's a white whale given the story could easily arise from his having been on a flight he viewed as potentially doomed but for divine intervention while the pilot simply engaged his training to deal with an engine problem and successfully landed the plane at it's destination. If the intent is to determine its all a lie, well, that's...

So the story is already firmly in BS territory for me. As noted, Nelson is selling a much bigger and dangerous lie as the false prophet of a massive hedge fund so I'm not inclined to think he's a particularly trustworthy fellow even if he thinks he's acting right. Mormonism corrupts. But I don't view it as feasible to determine what really happened. So this thread has been odd, like a twisted episode of Taskmaster or the like.

[honorentheos]

Honor wrote:

I am assuming we are only talking about the plausibility of some actual event occurring in which Nelson was on a plane and came away believing he was about to die compared to his making up the story from whole cloth.

No. I don't know where you get that. In fact, it's impossible you got that from this thread, so why frame it that way? It doesn't make any sense.

Because it's being framed differently by different people at different times. Clarification is good for discussion. See for example:

I don't think anyone questions whether Nelson experienced a personal scare during a flight. I'm sure he was on a plane that dove unexpectedly, giving him a momentary life-flash and subsequent reason for reflection. Hell, I've had plenty of those myself over the years. But I don't need to embellish the details of feeling scared on planes to get the essential point across. Nelson's subsequent re-tellings make miracles of the whole ordeal -- accelerating air flow putting out the engine fire, restarting of the other engine, and being able to arrive on time to his ecclesiastical commitment. All of that is unnecessary and appears worthy of a Dunnish interrogation.

I think several people have exactly questioned that, concluding he imagined the whole thing.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Well, Honor, then use exact language. We're not only talking about that. I'd say most posters are talking about the literal story Russell M. Nelson and his wife like to tell from the pulpit and in LDS publications.

- Doc

[Gadianton]

What we're discussing is not whether this all occurred. We can guess that the story, in all its parts, most likely isn't true. But we're trying to determine what portions might be true.

We can speculate that Nelson is probably not telling the truth, or at the very least not correcting falsehoods told on his behalf--we just don't know whether or not Nelson is intentionally lying.

Do I have that right?

Well, what if Nelson has turned so many personal stories into scripture over the years that at a relatively young age, all standards had gone out the window, and this is just how he normally sees things? what if he's really delusional, then is it intentional? What if everything happened just as he stated it, but it happened 10 years prior in a third-world country where a drastic plane episode is more likely to happen, but for some reason he intentionally lied and said it was Dixie?

It's hard to know where to draw that line, exactly. Did you read his account of the couple who he baptized after he'd said dramatically, "you didn't read the Book of Mormon, get the F* out of my sight and we can continue this conversation once you do! F'ers!" And then, they come groveling back in tears, "yes, we suck, just as you said, and we've read it now. Obviously, it's True, anybody who actually reads it would know that!" And then Rusty coldly forgives, "very well, we may continue the lessons and we'll see if you qualify for baptism, eventually -- should I find myself in the mood".

That is the perfect example of a story that for me can be said to be pure BS. The invented narrative elements far outweigh the utility of what is probably true, that he did convert that couple. Using that as a template, how would I judge this story? The essential difference seems to be that a couple getting baptized is an ordinary enough claim, whereas a plane on fire and nosediving is pretty exceptional. And so even if Rusty's narrative was lifted from a book, we're primed to accept the truth of the story on account of something core to the exceptional claim being true. An extreme example: suppose some guy claims to have been abducted by aliens, shown the universe and made a celebrity on the alien home world, and the stories never end. Suppose it were discovered one day that he really had been abducted by aliens, probed for 30 seconds and then thrown out of the saucer as a reject. Because alien abduction is such an extreme claim, if it were true as a bare minimum, then there is literally nothing he could exaggerate or invent from there that would outweigh the utility of the base claim, and so most of us would say, "It turns out Joe was telling the truth all along! All that other stuff he said, well, imagine how screwed up you'd be if it happened t you!"

[honorentheos]

Well, Honor, then use exact language. We're not only talking about that. I'd say most posters are talking about the literal story Russell M. Nelson and his wife like to tell from the pulpit and in LDS publications.

- Doc

It was exact language in a reply to Gadianton.

As a reminder and context:

I am outside the camp of those who think he made the event up in it's entirety....

Then you're in good company, because based on what I've read, it seems no one on this thread is in that camp.

[Lem]

Well, Honor, then use exact language. We're not only talking about that. I'd say most posters are talking about the literal story Russell M. Nelson and his wife like to tell from the pulpit and in LDS publications.

- Doc

I would agree. For some reason, he's using my opinion which I stated as such, and in which I was apparently wrong about no one thinking the story was completely fabricated, because it does seem there are several.

As a reminder and context:

Then you're in good company, because based on what I've read, it seems no one on this thread is in that camp.

Reading the thread for oneself seems to be the lesson here.

[honorentheos]

Well, Honor, then use exact language. We're not only talking about that. I'd say most posters are talking about the literal story Russell M. Nelson and his wife like to tell from the pulpit and in LDS publications.

- Doc

I would agree. For some reason, he's using my opinion which I stated as such, and in which I was apparently wrong about no one thinking the story was completely fabricated, because it does seem there are several.

As a reminder and context:

Reading the thread for oneself seems to be the lesson here.

The real lesson right now is about ego and it's influence on objective discussion. But that's a meta discussion.