Holland's "Hi-Jack Hero Dieter" story doesn't pass scrutiny.

[Guest]

In light of recent admissions that Elder Holland cannot be trusted to tell a straight story....I think we need his personal verification, and that of Uchtdorf, that the following story is, indeed, accurate...

The following was originally written by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland and posted on LDS.org.

On December 17, 1973, the president of Lufthansa German Airlines in Frankfurt, Germany, received alarming news. Five terrorists had hijacked a Lufthansa 737 jet in Rome, Italy, and were making their way to Athens, Greece, with hostages on board. As they did so, 32 people lay dead in Rome, and one of the hostages now in flight was soon to be mortally shot and summarily dumped onto the airport runway in Athens. With guns to the heads of the pilot and copilot and with hostages trembling in terror, the unstable hijackers directed a bizarre path from Rome to Beirut to Athens to Damascus to Kuwait.

In an instant, the president of Lufthansa ordered into the air his chief pilot for the 737 fleet. Thirty-three-year-old Dieter F. Uchtdorf was to take a small group of emergency personnel and follow the hijacked plane wherever the guerrillas took it. In every setting possible he was to negotiate for the release of the plane, the pilots, and the hostages. Then, when all of this had been accomplished, he was to fly the hijacked 737 back to headquarters in Frankfurt.

With fortunately no more bloodshed, this mission, like so many others he had been on personally and professionally, was successfully accomplished. Unknown to him at the time, it was a portent of more important missions yet to come.

Link

Is this strictly true Jeff? Dieter?

[_Dr Exiled]

My money is on a loose definition of truth and some exaggeration if the story is checked. I think Holland wants to be exaggerator in chief for the Mormon church and I would definitely nominate him for the job.

[_I have a question]

My money is on a loose definition of truth and some exaggeration if the story is checked. I think Holland wants to be exaggerator in chief for the Mormon church and I would definitely nominate him for the job.

Let's start with something easier, like, who did Holland hear the story from?

[_Themis]

Doubtful he was his chief Pilot at 33. He could have been the pilot responsible for flying the people who would be doing the actual negotiating. Dieter would never have been tasked for anything but flying the plane where his passengers told him to go.

[_Gadianton]

I would start with little things like this:

In an instant, the president of Lufthansa ordered into the air his chief pilot for the 737 fleet

Is there a such thing as a "chief pilot" for the "737 fleet"? references I'm seeing imply a single chief pilot role for the entire fleet, and the Church's bio has Uchdorf "ultimately" becoming "chief pilot".

I know nothing about the airline business, but that sentence stuck out as one of those "one of the houses the Hell's Angels own" type statements.

[_Maksutov]

Hmm. We need an objective metric for classifying these faithful fibs. "White lie" vs "Whopper" seems a bit imprecise. Can't we come with something like a rating system? The unit of measure could be a "Dunn".

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

We actually have a couple decent threads devoted to this and Monson's bull crap story. Someone who can actually use this forum's craptastic search function might be able to link them.

- Doc

[_Dr Exiled]

Hmm. We need an objective metric for classifying these faithful fibs. "White lie" vs "Whopper" seems a bit imprecise. Can't we come with something like a rating system? The unit of measure could be a "Dunn".

I like it. Is it a one to five or one to ten scale, or something else? Also, how many Dunns would you give Holland for his latest faithful fib? On a one to ten scale and ten being the worst, I would give this a 6 Dunn. These exaggerated conversion stories are probably pretty common. However, I would give the wrong roads story a 10 Dunn because this lie goes to the heart of religion and communion with the imaginary man they claim is upstairs. In this tale as discussed at length, Holland tries to make random occurrences into positive and misleading results that could have dangerous implications. For example, I could rationalize being duped, raped, or any bad experience as god testing me or trying to show me how bad something was by allowing me to think that the result was from him instead of just being random.

For pushing that sh___, dodo should do some time, if we lived in a perfect world that actually punished the religious magicians instead of giving them tax breaks.

[_SteelHead]

"How many Dunns".......

A brilliant scale!

[_Xenophon]

We actually have a couple decent threads devoted to this and Monson's bull crap story. Someone who can actually use this forum's craptastic search function might be able to link them.

- Doc

All that I could find, though I admit it is not easy to search:

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=35056&start=0

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=27872

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=39987