A plane crash and a hidden agenda

Hello! Lars here.

It's another one of those "behind the scenes" stories that some readers tell me they enjoy reading.

I can't tell if they're just being nice, or if people are really interested...

But I'll prattle on bravely in the hopes that this stuff is even remotely interesting to you. :)

So... here we go...

My family was quite religious, and there were bright, black-and-white moral lines criss-crossing all over the place in my world as a kid.

Right.

Wrong.

Not much in between.

Except that it's impossible to live in an environment like that without seeing more than a few glaring inconsistencies...

Which led me to start, as someone smart once said, "keeping two sets of books."

So I wound up being the skeptical sort.

Which means that I saw a lot of bad faith and bad intent that existed only in my head.

But I was also reasonably well equipped to detect the real thing, too.

One time, when I had just finished Undergraduate Pilot Training and was waiting around Sheppard Air Force Base until I could move on to Phoenix, Arizona to start F-16 training, something awful happened.

A trainee and an instructor were flying a training sortie in the T-38, which is a gorgeous supersonic jet used by the Air Force in the latter stages of its pilot training curriculum at the time.

The jet had a catastrophic hydraulic failure, which meant that it was almost instantly uncontrollable. And this happened at the worst possible time, when the jet was right over the town of Wichita Falls.

The two guys did all they could to point the aircraft away from the town, but it was no use. They waited way too long before ejecting, and put their own lives in jeopardy in the process of trying to get the jet pointed away from the population.

After they ejected, the jet rolled over, yawed, and crashed into the parking lot of an apartment complex. An elderly couple were killed instantly, and a number of people were injured.

The two pilots were unharmed.

An absolute tragedy, and the two guys were devastated, even though there was nothing else they could have done.

In rolled the local TV news, chasing ambulances.

The tragic story apparently wasn't "story" enough, because the ambitious young reporter decided to take an even more intriguing angle:

Did the pilots do everything possible, or was there more they could have done to save the lives of these innocent people?

There was an obvious slant to the story, and a number of facts were either misunderstood or misrepresented to match an agenda.

(This was 20+ years ago, long before Russian hackers meddling in elections, rampant fake news stories, armies of Twitter "Bots" retweeting false stories, and the populism movement in America and elsewhere. People were far less cynical in general, I think.)

That was the first time I saw firsthand what could happen if you found yourself at the mercy of someone else's agenda.

Over time, cooler heads prevailed and the two pilots were rightfully exonerated... but it was a valuable lesson for me. I learned that there's usually much more to the story than we're ever told about.

And this episode also showed me the power of the Twin Powers of Exploitation:

1. A hidden agenda

and

2. A willingness to give the truth a nudge in a certain direction... or even to tell a Big Whopping Lie.

Over the years, I saw the "twin powers" wreak a good bit of havoc. It often made me angry, and over time I became cynical.

But I noticed something along the way:

This kind of 'spin' underpins a decent number of real-life conspiracies.

And before I knew it, I had written a dozen thriller novels featuring these interesting manipulations and their often catastrophic consequences. 

These kinds of themes are extremely important, because I think we should remain healthy skeptics in the face of the propaganda that surrounds us on a daily basis.

What do you think?

Until next time,

Lars

(PS - we're running a special over at the store for a little while longer. If you're in the mood for a thriller, head on over and take a peek)