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

[IHAQ]

I've been following this thread because isn't this Nelson fellow supposed to be the Mormon prophet? I guess I'm just naïve but for all my skepticism about Mormon claims for Joseph Smith and his Book, I've still been assuming that serious Mormons are pretty serious about virtues like honesty. I'd have expected someone like Nelson to stick rigorously close to the truth even when there was no chance of being found out.

If the top Mormon dog of our day can be caught in a bald-faced faith-promoting self-aggrandising lie, to me that seems like big news. Maybe I just haven't been paying close enough attention for long enough, but so far I haven't just been taking it for granted that someone like Nelson would do something like that.

It's a small thing but damning. A person who can completely make up a story like that just because it sounds good cannot be trusted at all to tell you anything important about anything. A person who can lie so brazenly cannot be constantly thinking about their own responsibility before an all-seeing God to uphold the terrifyingly sacred office they hold. This small damning story could tell us whether those fifteen ageing men are just some deluded but decent old guys or whether they really are just a cabal of cynical scammers carrying on the true tradition of their con-artist founder.

You're aware Nelson has already been "caught in a bald-faced faith-promoting self-aggrandising lie"?
https://www.truthandtransparency.org/ne ... -m-nelson/

[IHAQ]

I'll be amazed if it's even possible to find hard information about a scary but ultimately minor small plane event in the 1970s. There's some impressive expertise about flying here in this thread but it seems to me that the tough part is not flying but 1970's bureaucracy. What should have been recorded is one thing but what actually was recorded back then, and preserved in accessible form until now, is apparently a quite different question.

I think that's definitely the issue with this one piece of potentially corroborating information.

But that's just one missing piece of corroboration (albeit probably the most crucial in reaching a definitive answer to whether or not the incident actually happened, the smoking gun as it were). The wider problem is the other pieces of corroboration that you'd expect to find - local news stories; ensign articles; being late or missing the assignment etc aren't there. There's nothing. Nelson himself only first references it 3 years later in his preface of Heart To Heart (we don't know how it's treated within that book, if at all). And the first public mention is in 1985.

[Physics Guy]

That story about Nelson meeting Beverly Ashcraft in a MASH in Korea goes as far as recording a conversation, in quotation marks, that clearly didn't happen as presented. It's not clear that Nelson himself told that story, though. It seems to have been written by Sheri Dew. I gather she's a friend of Nelson's wife and so would have access to stories straight from Nelson but it's not clear that everything she writes must have come straight from him.

I'd expect Nelson himself to have a duty to check over a biography of him, especially one by his wife's friend, and object to things in it that didn't fit what he remembered. But nothing in that story would necessarily have been super-memorable for Nelson. Things much like that probably really did happen to him several times over the years. I could imagine him thinking, "Probably something like that happened and I told someone about it back when I remembered it better."

And so I can imagine that Dew might have been the one to make up a faith-promoting story about the Mormon president, as a kind of half-unconscious pious fraud, with the president himself being guilty only of careless acquiescence about a story that would not have been very remarkable for a Mormon GA. I mean, he could have told Dew, "No, take that out. My memory on this kind of detail is absolutely reliable and there is no way that stuff happened with Beverly Ashcraft, it must have been someone other than her—or someone other than me." But is he really going to be sure enough to say that to Sheri after she's written it into her book and all?

Maybe the kind of man that is supposed to be Mormon Prophet would have that clear memory and say that, but I do take it for granted that Nelson is not that kind of man. A decent old guy who sincerely believed all his Mormon stuff might still let this one slide, it seems to me. So that story isn't the bombshell this plane story is, in my eyes.

The aircraft story is in print under Nelson's own byline as something "I remember vividly." And being on a plane that loses an engine and nearly crashes isn't something that you can garble in memory and then plausibly figure that something like it probably did happen at some point—not unless you've had a long career as a test pilot or something, anyway. If it didn't actually happen then Nelson himself was flat-out lying in print. And to me that is different.

[Physics Guy]

The wider problem is the other pieces of corroboration that you'd expect to find - local news stories; ensign articles; being late or missing the assignment etc aren't there. There's nothing. Nelson himself only first references it 3 years later in his preface of Heart To Heart (we don't know how it's treated within that book, if at all). And the first public mention is in 1985.

I agree that sounds iffy, but on the other hand the 1980s weren't the 1840s. 1976 wasn't the unverifiable distant past in 1985. Would Nelson really have dared to tell a made-up story in public in 1985, or as early as 1979, if there was a good chance then that he could have been caught? Did Nelson have little enough to lose in 1985, and enough to gain, that he would take that chance?

If the story had first come out in the late 1990s, for instance, then I can imagine a cynical liar counting on twenty years as safe enough cover. Nine years, or as few as three years, would be bold.

Or should we figure that Nelson was figuring that an engine fire on a private flight over Utah would have left no more trace in history than a swerve on a country road in an old pickup truck?

[IHAQ]

The wider problem is the other pieces of corroboration that you'd expect to find - local news stories; ensign articles; being late or missing the assignment etc aren't there. There's nothing. Nelson himself only first references it 3 years later in his preface of Heart To Heart (we don't know how it's treated within that book, if at all). And the first public mention is in 1985.

I agree that sounds iffy, but on the other hand the 1980s weren't the 1840s. 1976 wasn't the unverifiable distant past in 1985. Would Nelson really have dared to tell a made-up story in public in 1985, or as early as 1979, if there was a good chance then that he could have been caught? Did Nelson have little enough to lose in 1985, and enough to gain, that he would take that chance?

Remember, this was the era of Paul H. Dunn. Nelson performed heart surgery on Dunn in 1974, so they were well acquainted.

On another occasion, he and Dantzel were combining five days of surgical meetings with a welcome vacation in Colorado Springs, Colorado. During the third night, however, he was troubled by an uneasy feeling that would not go away, so he awakened Dantzel and said, “Let’s pack and go home.”

Within minutes they were on their way to the airport. With no reservations, they nevertheless got seats on the next flight from Denver and arrived in Salt Lake City an hour later. From the airport he called his secretary and said, “Who’s looking for me?”

“How did you know?” was the surprised reply. “You’re needed at the hospital for Elder Paul H. Dunn.”

Elder Dunn had experienced symptoms of a heart attack during the night, and an arteriogram indicated almost complete obstruction of the coronary arteries. President Kimball arrived and gave Elder Dunn a blessing while the operating room was hurriedly prepared.

Just as Dr. Nelson began operating, the heart attack came. Emergency procedures stabilized the circulation, and the surgery was successfully performed. Elder Dunn recovered and was able to resume his heavy responsibilities.

https://www.deseret.com/1998/1/9/193569 ... -dunn-dies
You'll note that in this 1982 summary of Nelson's life in the Ensign, no mention of the 1976 Plane Incident is made.

Here's how I know the operation was in 1974

Elder Dunn was named Utah's 1972 Father of the Year by the Utah Civic Young Men's Association. He underwent open-heart surgery in 1974. In 1975, he was honored by the National Association of College Baseball Coaches as a former player who had "gone on to great heights in another field." In 1978, he threw out the ceremonial "first pitch" in the season home opener for the Atlanta Braves baseball club.

https://www.deseret.com/1998/1/9/193569 ... -dunn-dies

[Physics Guy]

If Dunn was still doing then, then maybe it was an easy era for cool stories. I wouldn't necessarily have mentioned the plane story in a survey of Nelson's life, though. It would have been dramatic but not something he did, just something that happened to him. And reporting in a biographical sketch that this Mormon Apostle was calm in the face of death is kind of like telling it as a life highlight of a plumber, that there was this one time when he replaced a pipe. It's only what everyone expects. So it would be weird to go out of your way like that to say it.

Which is a funny thing about this story now that I think about it. It doesn't really work as a story you tell about someone else. "That President Nelson, he was in a plane that almost crashed once and he wasn't fazed because he believed in the afterlife." When you put it like that, in the third person, then it's kind of interesting that the guy was on a plane that had trouble but his confident reaction just reads as a dog-bites-man story, given his office. What else, ho hum.

It's only the vivid detail of a first-person account that makes this a story worth telling. Without that it's surprisingly banal, seems to me. Which really means that Nelson himself is going to be on the hook for this. If it turns out to be a fake story then it will be hard to blame others for mixing things up, because it's not going to have had much of a life as a third-person story.

[Moksha]

Has RFM put all this into a podcast yet?

[honorentheos]

I've still been assuming that serious Mormons are pretty serious about virtues like honesty. I'd have expected someone like Nelson to stick rigorously close to the truth even when there was no chance of being found out.

I think it's valuable to recognize how Mormonism assigns epistemological value to "feeling" what they consider the spirit of truth. Without pretending to read Nelson's mind in this, it's difficult to know how much value a particular member might assign to feeling "enlightened" while mulling over the significance of a life event and the lessons God may have intended they take from it. In 1978 Nelson may have seen the event as a wake up call inspire ng him to leave a record of his life for posterity while in 1985 on reflection he sees in it a parable of the fruits of faith when facing death. His spirit meter goes off and he writes it into a talk. He "vividly remembers" the event which is a red flag when it comes to memory recall in my opinion, and paints those details into an appropriately LDS public talk format with contrasting figures and meaningful stakes.

So, what does that mean? I think his track record is one that shows a disregard for careful fact handling while also dramatizing events. But why and how much of it is due to a willing misrepresentation and how much of it is due to sloppy habits and lack of professional regard for intellectual discipline when handling and representing events carefully and accurately?

It would be interesting to see the known accounts laid out in a comparative manner to see where the changes occur and to what degree. I am outside the camp of those who think he made the event up in it's entirety and view that pursuit as a waste of time. It defies reason that he would fabricate the briefly described incident in the preface to his autobiography.

[dastardly stem]

I've been following this thread because isn't this Nelson fellow supposed to be the Mormon prophet? I guess I'm just naïve but for all my skepticism about Mormon claims for Joseph Smith and his Book, I've still been assuming that serious Mormons are pretty serious about virtues like honesty. I'd have expected someone like Nelson to stick rigorously close to the truth even when there was no chance of being found out.

If the top Mormon dog of our day can be caught in a bald-faced faith-promoting self-aggrandising lie, to me that seems like big news. Maybe I just haven't been paying close enough attention for long enough, but so far I haven't just been taking it for granted that someone like Nelson would do something like that.

It's a small thing but damning. A person who can completely make up a story like that just because it sounds good cannot be trusted at all to tell you anything important about anything. A person who can lie so brazenly cannot be constantly thinking about their own responsibility before an all-seeing God to uphold the terrifyingly sacred office they hold. This small damning story could tell us whether those fifteen ageing men are just some deluded but decent old guys or whether they really are just a cabal of cynical scammers carrying on the true tradition of their con-artist founder.

You're aware Nelson has already been "caught in a bald-faced faith-promoting self-aggrandising lie"?
https://www.truthandtransparency.org/ne ... -m-nelson/

I think Physics guy pointed this out, the story in your link doesn't implicate Nelson as the story teller. If he were, then you'd have a point, I suppose.

I still think it's likely he at least embellished the events of the flight. It's also possible he embellished the events of the story you link to. But it's still a bit of a stretch to say he's been caught in a bald-faced faith-promoting self-aggrandizing lie. It's feeling damn close to that, but we should proceed with more caution, I'd say.

[Gadianton]

Maybe the kind of man that is supposed to be Mormon Prophet would have that clear memory and say that, but I do take it for granted that Nelson is not that kind of man. A decent old guy who sincerely believed all his Mormon stuff might still let this one slide, it seems to me. So that story isn't the bombshell this plane story is, in my eyes.

The 1985 story is more lucid than Dew's account, and it's from the horse's mouth. The only material myth detail for me that Dew adds is the "another plane dispatched" to fill the hole left in other accounts.

The 1985 story is detailed enough that it's hard to blame bad memory, if it didn't really happen as stated. Two examples. 1) the detailed pilot dialogue "The halfway point; the point of no return" that a real pilot would unlikely say as it's illogical, yet exactly what a pilot would say in an airplane disaster movie, and just as in the movie, the incident happens right after foreshadowed by the pilot statement, which is also right at the most dramatically disastrous point that it could happen. 2) The pilot purposefully dives the plane in order to put out the fire, which also allows allows the pilot to dramatically pull up at the last second, avoiding oblivion. In Dew's account, poor retelling, memory, fact-checking of original versions leave the plane headed for the ground ad hoc, merely at the halfway point when it happens, and without the dramatic storyboard timing. In other words, the story devolved due to bad memory, rather than evolved, and is now less mythical due to losing story elements. The exception being the introduction of the second plane.