What Happened To Holt – Probably A Tragic But Simple Accident
June 24th, 2010
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The disappearance of Harold Holt has come up at least twice in recent weeks on comments in this blog. Thus it may be worth mentioning for those who do not know about it. The event is well known in Australia and has spawned its own conspiracy theory subculture, in some ways paralleling the Kennedy Assassination in the US.
Harold Holt was the prime minister of Australia from 26 January 1966 until 17 December 1967, when he went out for a swim in the surf of Cheviot Beach and never came out. No body was ever found, despite the largest land, sea and air search in Australian history. Of course, this was a huge event, as the death of any sitting high ranking elected office holder who acts in a leadership capacity of a major country is. The search effort and the lack of any final resolution to the fate of Holt only contributed to the story. As is often the case with such events, it called into question the effectiveness of the protection measures taken to assure the safety of important government officials.
In fact, while the disappearance of Holt was a shocking story, the incident appears to be a mundane but tragically straightforward accident. The area where Holt was swimming was well known for strong riptides and heavy surf, and the day when Holt vanished was especially rough. Holt himself was not in the best shape to take on such currents. At 59 years old, Holt had been fairly athletic for most of his life and was an experienced skindiver, but at the time, he was far from being in prime health. Holt had collapsed a year earlier and was suspected of having a heart condition. He also had recently been treated for a shoulder injury and was receiving opiate pain killers for the condition. His doctors advised him no to swim until the shoulder had a chance to heal up, but he did anyway.
All evidence is that Holt found himself in a powerful current and was unable to stay above the waves. His state of health and the drugs he was taking likely contributed and his body could easily have been carried out to see by the strong currents of the area.
Despite this, many conspiracy theories have been put forward. Many claim he was murdered, either by the Australian Government, the American Government, the Soviet Government, the UK or some other country – maybe New Zealand. Theories often claim that the involvement of Australia in the Vietnam War was the reason for the murder. Holt was critical of the war and some claim that he was about to take the country out of the war or to reveal some dirty secret about the American war effort. Other suspects include Israel, the Freemasons and the other usual suspects fingered by conspiracy theorists.
Still others believe Holt’s death was staged and he escaped on a Soviet or Chinese midget sub. Still others believe it was a Chinese Midget. Of course, there are also the claims of a UFO or some other supernatural phenomena accounting for his death.
Here’s one of the nuttier videos about it:
A little off topic, but why the hell do people post videos like this that are narrated by a vocoder, and a crappy one at that. Seriously, can your voice really be as bad as listening to this?
Still others say he may have gone out to sea, knowing full well he could not swim his way back, as a way of committing suicide. This seems very unlikely to me, as it would be a very crude and unpleasant way to commit suicide and far from bring a sure thing. There is a natural instinct to attempt to breathe and avoid drowning, making it something that’s difficult, if not impossible, to do through sheer willpower alone.
Harold-Holt.net appears to be the most prominent website for promoting conspiracy theories about Holt and his disappearance.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Conspiracy Theories, Culture, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 25th, 2010 at 12:08 am
There will always be mysteries that we simply never will know the answer to.
Harold Holt, at least they have a descent idea that probably happened because he was in a rough beach, so drowning seems like the most likely by far.
Every year, there are thousands of people who just vanish and seem to have fallen off of the earth, so to speak. The most perplexing are the ones where there’s nothing suspicious or unusual and nothing is ever found like a wallet or their car parked somewhere. Thousands of people just vanish for no apparent reason. One day they don’t show up at work. They were fine the day before. Eventually friends and family go to their home and everything is in order, like they just stepped out or like they never got back.
What happened? Most are surely dead. A few may be alive and decided to leave it all and start a new life, maybe to get away from debt or something. Some of them may have committed suicide and done it someplace remote or jumped off a bridge into the receding tide. Some no doubt met with foul play. Most probably by some freak accident like falling into water or heaving a heart attack while hiking in the deep woods and the body being scavenged by animals or maybe something as freak as trying to climb a dumpster to throw their trash bag into it and falling in, being knocked out and ending up buried in a landfill.
It’s strange and for the ones left behind, always difficult, but it happens. Life does that.
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June 25th, 2010 at 3:46 am
Just one minor quibble. He was the Prime Minister of Australia, not the Head of State, that role was and is taken by H.M. Queen Elizabeth II.
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June 25th, 2010 at 7:35 am
To add to what Chris wrote, there is no need for the body to be missing.
A few years ago, I listened to a radio interview of a police officer who said that the french police alone burry hundreds of people every year that they failed to identify, including many people who show no sign of marginal existence.
Moreover, if there is one true thing that the tabloids regulary show, it’s that being rich and famous offers no significant protection againts premature death, even from sheer bad luck or stupidity.
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June 25th, 2010 at 8:11 am
Andrew said:
You may be technically correct about the role, but the “head of state” is often regarded as the single highest ranking politician or leader of the majority party. In a fully parliamentary system, the prime minister usually qualifies as head of state by default. In a semi-presidential system, both the prime minister and president could be considered a head of state, although technically it’s the president who is.
Maybe I was using the term too loosely for the official definition in this case.
Basically what I mean is the primary national leader.
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June 25th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Andrew said:
Same thing in Canada. The Prime Minister is the highest office and really, for all intents and purposes is the head of state, but technically it’s the Queen. That’s a technicality because her role is basically non existent and is entirely ceremonial. So we’re splitting hairs here.
If the prime minister goes missing like that, of course it’s a very big deal and especially something like this where you never get solid answers. It’s exactly the kind of thing that conspiracy theorists are all over.
He shouldn’t have gone swimming like that and body guards or whoever might have been there should have stopped him. High ranking leaders are not just gambling with their life when they do something unsafe. They are not just private citizens and are important to their country. If they get themselves killed it can really impact the stability and security of their whole country.
It’s the same as Kennedy riding in an open convertible. He shouldn’t have done that, because it was just too risky. The Secret Service shouldn’t have allowed that kind of thing, and certainly wouldn’t after what happened. In the 60’s they were less tight with security. I’m sure heads rolled over Holt’s death.
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Andrew said:
True. The technical terms are “Head of State” and “Head of Government.” HRM Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state, while the PM is head of gov’t. Similar systems (substituting a president for a hereditary monarch) exist in France, Israel, and (technically) Russia. I believe the US is one of the few western countries to have these roles combined (most are either constitutional monarchies or have the President/PM setup).
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Matthew said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_system
Do we need to get hung up on this one thing?
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June 25th, 2010 at 1:04 pm
drbuzz0 said:
Don’t you just love random thread drift?
That said: A guy in not the best health goes swimming in the ocean on a particularly bad day, and is never seen again. Not exactly a mystery as to what happened.
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June 25th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
A little off topic, but why the hell do people post videos like this that are narrated by a vocoder, and a crappy one at that. Seriously, can your voice really be as bad as listening to this?
To keep The Man from tracking them down with voice identification, of course.
(Sure, The Man, if he was so interested, would already be watching their internet traffic, and YouTube uploads, and even if they used Tor, would presumably be watching Tor input traffic, too, but hey. Crazies, right?)
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June 25th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Matthew said:
Well, some of the conspiracy theorists like to focus on the fact that he was an experienced skin diver, and a good athletic swimmer who was not unaccustomed to swimming in heavy surf. Of course, that was generally in his younger years and it was not when he was on opiate pain killers, suffering from a shoulder injury and possibly a heart condition… So those like to be ignored. By just saying “An avid skin diver and strong swimmer” they make it sound like something he was not at the time.
Sigivald said:
It always annoys me when someone uses synthesized speech to narrate a video. Even those of us who don’t have the voice of James Earl Jones or Kasey Kasem generally sound better than that! If you trip over your words or say “um” a lot, it’s not too hard to edit that out.
And that’s not even a good synthetic voice. It sounds like an analog vocoder from the 1950’s. I’ve heard better speech from the Microsoft Office readback engine!
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June 25th, 2010 at 3:00 pm
drbuzz0 said:
The alternative is talking about nuts.
Personally, I’ll eat just about anything with almonds in.
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June 25th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
[Other] Matthew said:
Almonds are nice, especially with good chocolate and maybe some icewine or good cider. I’ve got a really good charoset recipe (almont/apple – based traditional Jewish holiday dessert) which I just tried out a few months ago. Yummy.
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June 25th, 2010 at 7:43 pm
Franck said:
True. It’s surprisingly common for authorities to find dead bodies and not be able to identify them. Sometimes it’s because they’ve decayed or something, but it may also be that there does not seem to be anyone fitting the description reported missing and nobody in the area seems to have any idea who they might be.
In the US, it is custom to call a dead man of unknown identity “John Doe” and a woman “Jane Doe.” Medical examiners are tasked with the identification of Doe cases, and in general, most are identified, but a significant number never are.
Some of the strangest are the ones that seem the most straight forward. I remember reading that police found a young man dead in a park. They estimated his age to be 16 to 19. He had apparently died in a freak accident, trying to climb a small rock formation, lost his footing and hit his head as he fell down. He hit it in just the right way to be killed. They figured he was a local because the park was not noteworthy for any reason and frequented by mostly locals. He looked very middle class and normal. Clean cut and wearing cloths available in local stores.
Turns out there were no missing person reports of someone of that description in the area. Nobody seemed to know of him. No high schools or universities reported any conspicuous sudden absences of someone fitting the description. Just… nothing.
http://www.doenetwork.org/
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June 25th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
There is a website dedicated to strange disappearances. Ironically named Strange Disappearances. These are reports of folks vanishing into thin air in front of witnesses.
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June 25th, 2010 at 8:33 pm
DV82XL said:
Joe Nickel investigated some of these stories of someone “disipearing” for no reason. I don’t mea that they one day they were gone, but that they went outside and someone looked and suddenly they were gone, with their footprints ending abruptly etc etc.
Anyway, despite claims of investigations and such, he went looking for the real investigation records. Things like police reports or, if they were very old and predated police reports, than at least the name of the person on census and property records etc.
The ones he investigated it turned out he failed to find any actual primary documentation that any of this happened or that these persons ever existed.
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June 25th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Experienced does not always mean safe. Many experienced motorcycle riders crash and die every year, experienced pilots crash, experienced lumberjacks cut off limbs, experienced sailors get shipwrecked… you know the rest.
Even experienced swimmers can get cramps, swim out to far, and even get swept away in rip currents.
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June 25th, 2010 at 9:48 pm
I think this is a case of someone overestimating their abilities and suffering the consequences. If the intention was suicide then having a background as a skindiver would give him the knowlege to carry it out painlessly and easily rather than being crude and unpleasant. If hyperventilation is carried out before swimming to depth under the water all cabon dioxide is washed out of the bloodstream and lungs and whilst rising from depth towards the surface the changes in partial pressures alow the level of oxygen to fall to levels which will not sustain conciousness before the levels of carbon dioxide rise to a level where the body feels the need to breathe. Therefore the mind black out with no unpleasant sensations and drowning takes place.
That said an accident is the most likely scenario.
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June 25th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
That still does not seem like a good way to do it, even if you could make it work, because it might not be effective. He was not entirely alone. He had at least two others nearby. If he had done that and bobbed to the surface and been pulled ashore, then he potentially could have been saved by CPR.
It’s possible to come close to drowning and be without vital signs for a couple of minutes and then be saved by CPR, but end up having severe brain damage from the time without oxygen. You could end up conscious and able to live, but very severely impaired. All and all, seems a risk I would not want to take.
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June 25th, 2010 at 10:38 pm
You poor stupid brainwashed fools. It seems obvious that he drown despite no body and no witness who actually can be sure? How come you don’t at least consider that there could have been something else. Precious love for big brother?
Johnson Killed Kennedy to become US president. Why would he not kill another world leader. Johnson wanted more and more money made off of blowing up NAM and Australia was a fool to be part of support for it and Holt knew it 100% and was ready to pull the plug and start turning the tide when everyone saw the reality. You think Johnson was happy about this?
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June 25th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
TheBrainz said:
But of course
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June 26th, 2010 at 2:40 am
Hey, Skippy’s back!
I see you have yet to study any history.
It’s time for Skippy the Brainz show!
Get ready for more Insane Troll logic!
More grandiose claims of Conspiracy, but with 100% less evidence!
Watch as he dismisses facts!
Laugh along to his ever popular catch phrase “Don’t you people see…”
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June 26th, 2010 at 9:50 am
Ha ha ha
It’s so funny I forgot to laugh.
Maybe you should actually watch the video in this page and listen to what it has to say. Maybe instead of focusing on the fact that it is narrated by a computer voice, you should actually consider the message. All you seem to care about is how the voice sounds bad. Actually look at the info. You will learn something.
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June 26th, 2010 at 11:33 am
TheBrainz said:
You are assuming people haven’t looked at the video and decided that the claims in it are just dumb. Really really dumb. And that the simpler more logical thought that he was out of shape, injured, had a heart condition, and went swimming in a dangerous section of water on a day the danger level was higher makes more sense.
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June 26th, 2010 at 11:44 am
You are absolutely right about the vocoder. Listening to that Youtube posting started to give me a headache right away. I could only listen to about a minute of it before I had to turn it off. And I thought autotunes sucked the big one.
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June 26th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
One other thing – did he actually go swimming alone?? That’s probably the most dumb@ss thing he could possibly have done, especially in rough weather. I lifeguarded and taught swimming for years, and I wouldn’t swim alone/unsupervised. Too much can happen, and large amounts of dihydrogen monoxide are deadly if you lose any kind of function while immersed in it.
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June 26th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
matthew said:
He was with at least two body guards. Apparently they didn’t want him to go in, but insisted and said he wanted to go for a quick dip and he went under and after they didn’t see him come out for a minute or so, tried to find him, but I guess it was too late. If you’ve ever seen really high surf, it can be hard to spot a person, even i they’re okay, their bobbing head in the peaks and valleys of the waves is not an easy thing.
I strongly suspect that there were some jobs lost after this.
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June 26th, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Maybe I shouldn’t even open up this subject, but considering that his swim was, according to everything I’ve read, a pretty spur of the moment kind of thing that he decided to do on a whim, how the hell were their snipers and divers ready for the assassination? Did they just have them on every beach on the off chance he’d go for a dip? At least with JKF there was a known route.
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June 27th, 2010 at 10:45 pm
What would it take to get you to consider the possibility that just maybe your government does not love you and does not always do the best and most honest thing for the good of the world? What would it take for you to even stop and think maybe the truth was ugly?
I bet nothing could convince you to even look at reality in a way that would not make eveyrhting seem so great.
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June 28th, 2010 at 12:43 am
TheBrainz said:
::snicker:: possibility? I’ll raise you one and state flat out that the government doesn’t have any individual’s best interest in mind. That said it isn’t worth the time and effort for the government to spend the majority of it’s time running around actively oppressing everyone and lieing about everything. Keep in mind that 99% of the time something stupid happens isn’t due to malice but incompetence and bureaucratic one upsmanship between agencies.
Frankly it isn’t worth the time and effort to believe that every action of the government is designed to screw someone.
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June 28th, 2010 at 5:06 am
Thanks for the useful post. Keep the good posts coming.. I’ll check back soon.
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