Pickpocket Mind Games in Las Vegas

By Glenn Campbell

Last night I misplaced my iPhone on the Las Vegas Strip. It appeared I was targeted by a sophisticated pickpocket at the Luxor casino. The incident was a powerful lesson in human perception and how it can be easily lead astray. This story has many layers and a surprise ending. What I learned may be more valuable than the price of any iPhone.

I was shooting video in the Luxor casino, in the Egyptian-themed entertainment areas away from the gambling floor, when I was approached by a man in tourist clothing who asked me what I was filming. I had already noticed him watching me and had already pegged him as plainclothes security, but I was annoyed by the intrusion. It was obvious that I was photographing the fake Egyptian statues at the front entrance of the casino that were deliberately placed there to be photographed.

I responding rudely. "Who are you?" Although I assumed he was security, there were no visible signs that he wasn't just a tourist. I wanted him to prove himself.

The man was slow and careful in his response. "My name is Scott."

"I'm just photographing this stupid tourist shit," I said. "You're in my space, Scott."

"I saw you at the top of the escalator and was wondering what you were photographing."

"Who are you?" I repeated.

"My name is Scott..." Then after a pause: "I am with the casino."

I accepted this claim because I had already seen him watching me, following me and acting security-like, even though there were no outward proof of it. (I had already checked for an earphone in his ear and didn't see one, but it could have meant those devices were just getting smaller.) I didn't get any less rude, however. As a photographer, I have developed a complex set of protocols when people don't want me to film. Sometimes, I back away gracefully and sometimes I'm an asshole. This situation, I felt, called for assholiness.

"Do you want me to leave?" I said.

"That isn't necessary," he said.

"Do you want me to show you my photos?"

"That would be good," he said.

I recalled the last video I shot and played it for him on the back of my camera. It just showed me moving past some smaller Egyptian statues to focus on a bigger one. No people or gambling areas were visible in the video.

This seemed to satisfy him. I asked if he wanted to see the rest of my photos, but he said that wasn't necessary. He withdrew, and I continued with my filming.

What I didn't realize at the time is that, in that moment I was showing him the video, he was within my "personal space"—that is, in close proximity to my body in a zone when one doesn't normally allow others to approach. In theory, he was within reach of my back pants pocket where my iPhone was located. I felt nothing and recall no sensation of being touched, but after two hours of intense filming on the Las Vegas Strip, my iPhone was missing.

I do not normally keep my iPhone in my back pocket, where it is more vulnerable, and not using my iPhone in the space of two hours is almost unthinkable, but this was a photography expedition, and I was totally concentrated on my camera. My iPhone was in my back pocket because all my other pockets were filled with batteries and camera gear I do not normally carry. Thus, my senses were disoriented. The pressure in my front pocket that I normally associate with my iPhone was actually a camera battery.

I noticed my iPhone was missing only after I had returned to my rental car and driven away from the casino. When I first got back to the car in casino parking, I was exhausted and dumped all my batteries and equipment from my pockets onto the passenger seat. I assumed my iPhone was there, but when I got to my destination, I couldn't find it. It was night, but I searched the crevasses and seat cushions of this unfamiliar car as best I could. No luck.

In my frantic state (ISA = iPhone Separation Anxiety, a common modern affliction), I finally put two and two together. I had no specific memories of my iPhone since putting it in my pocket as I first left my parked car, and this "Scott" was the only person who came close enough to me to take it. During my film shoot I was constantly moving and never even sat down, so I felt the chances of anyone else stealing it or it falling spontaneously out of my pocket were slim.

A few weeks before, I had read an article in the New Yorker about a "theatrical pickpocket" who lifted people's personal items as a sort of magician. He would tell people he was going to pick their pockets, so they would presumably be on their guard, but he would still have no trouble lifting watches, pens and other personal items off of them without them noticing. He even did it to other magicians like Penn Jillette.

The slight-of-hand artist in the article perfectly fit the profile of "Scott"—quiet, self-effacing, polite but annoying. I now figured the whole "with the casino" bit was a ruse to get close enough me to lift whatever was in my back pocket. He couldn't know it was an iPhone, but he might have seen that it was accessible.

This guy was smooth! First, there was the problem of getting close enough to my body to take anything, but he was also operating in a Las Vegas casino, probably one of the most intensely monitored public spaces on Earth. The article, however, made me see that it was possible. I also knew from living in Las Vegas that most casino security is focused on the gaming areas where money is changing hands. Relatively little attention is given to the public areas where no casino assets are at risk.

I felt that my iPhone was lost forever. If "Scott" was a professional, he would have left the Luxor immediately and moved on to another casino where I had no chance of finding him. I checked my photos and videos, but he wasn't on them. (He must have been smart about that as well.) I ran through all the damage control I would have to do to protect my data, and I added up the cost of the forced upgrade to a new phone.

Do not weep for me about any lost equipment. As a perpetual traveler, theft and loss happens to me frequently. I have had numerous computers and cameras stolen. I narrowly avoided a pocket-picking on the Paris Metro (and got photos of my assailant). I even had my passport stolen in a foreign country (if you call Canada "foreign"). I had an earlier iPhone stolen on Miami Beach when I went for a predawn swim. Each incident taught me something and trained me to arrange my life so thefts are no big deal. Every physical object in my life is replaceable, apart from a few key internal organs.

I refer to electronic thefts as the Forced Upgrade Program. Whenever I lose a camera, computer, or phone, it is just an excuse to upgrade to the latest technology. Alternatively, it can sometimes be a good excuse to let go of technology for a while and get back to the basics. In any case, the loss of a cellphone is hardly news in my world, but this incident was different. This was a mind game! Virtually all of my previous thefts were crude crimes of opportunity by criminals I assumed were drug addicts. This was different. If this was real, it was a smooth crime by a sophisticated criminal.

My iPhone was gone. By process of elimination, "Scott" was the only person who could have stolen it. There was no chance of getting it back, I figured, but at least I could do my civic duty by reporting the crime. I drove back to the Luxor to at least tell their security about it. I knew they would take it seriously, and they do have plenty of video cameras in the place. I didn't think I would recover my own cellphone, but at least they would be on the lookout for this guy in the future.

I knew Luxor would be especially concerned because this guy was claiming to be "with the casino". At least I would get a clear answer to what happened to my baby. If the casino did not have an employee named Scott working plainclothes security at the time I was there, then it was obvious that the fake "Scott" was a professional pickpocket and took my iPhone.

Luxor security was very responsive. I want to the security desk and filled out a form (shown above). A security officer came out to talk to me. He asked intelligent questions and took notes. Then he said he wanted to talk to his supervisor, and he asked me to wait.

When he came back, he had some surprising news: The casino DID have a plainclothes officer named Scott matching my description working in my area at the time of the alleged incident. They were concerning about my filming and had been watching my activity on video.

The officer said he didn't know how much of my encounter with Scott was on video, but they could probably call it up if they needed to. Would I like them to do that?

I laughed. "No, that won't be necessary," I said. "This has been quite an education."

The officer said he could still take my written incident report if I wanted to give it.

I said that wouldn't be necessary. I would take it as a souvenir.

I returned to my car, realizing that the only con artist was me. This New Yorker article had sensitized me to pickpockets and had made me believe anything was possible, even in a well-monitored casino.

Sure enough, with daylight the next morning, I found my iPhone lodged in a narrow crevice of my rental car.

100 Tweets on Marriage

By Glenn Campbell

Below is a collection of 100 of my past tweets on marriage (tweeting as @BadDalaiLama). This list was assembled for the English language edition of my forthcoming book, The Case Against Marriage. If you would like to locate and retweet one of these tweets, you can find it by searching one of my two archives: the official downloaded Twitter archive or my own homemade tweet archive.

1. Trying to capture love with marriage is like displaying a wild animal on your wall. As soon as you've nailed it down, you've killed it.
2. Beauty cannot be purchased or possessed. If you try, all you'll get is bragging rights to the beauty that was once there.
3. As a rule, Paradise turns into Hell as soon as you move there.
4. If you're not willing to fight, stand up for your interests and defend your borders, then love is not the place for you.
5. Love alone cannot bear the weight of all we ask it to do.
6. Given the credit card of life, most spend it to the max as soon as they can, laboring the rest of their lives to pay the interest.
7. A relationship cannot truly grow unless there is the realistic option to withdraw and renegotiate.
8. A romantic relationship should not be confused with a parental one.
9. A successful relationship isn't merging. It is sharing of independent viewpoints.
10. Don't be a victim of your own cleverness—finding ingenious ways to sustain a relationship that really should end.
11. Even after years of research and testing, there is still no clean-burning form of love.
12. Every relationship is a balance between sharing and the need to preserve ones own identity.
13. You can't prove love by killing freedom.
14. If a little of something makes you happy, that doesn't necessarily mean a lot of the same thing will make you more happy.
15. A bad marriage is the ultimate police state, with Big Brother watching your every move for signs of disloyalty.
16. Love is not a steady state but an ongoing negotiation to get what we want.
17. Adult personality cannot be changed from the outside, especially within the scope of romance. Change may happen, but only after you're gone.
18. Love is a means of travel, not a destination.
19. People in love are not sane. They are the worst people to be making fateful choices about lifetime commitments.
20. It is remarkable how humans can willingly accept imprisonment in exchange for the approval of their family and society.
21. Failed romances are one of life's great classrooms. You learn how people really work and how fantasy differs from fact.
22. Gay couples who cannot marry must take their relationship in small discretionary steps in a process resembling reason.
23. Falling in love with someone is the best guarantee that you won't be able to change them.
24. Love is a condiment of life, not a main course. It can't give you a meaningful mission any more than ketchup is a food group.
25. Given the choice between being lonely and losing yourself in a relationship, lonely gives you far more options.
26. Love is a dance of "Closer, please, but not too close!"
27. It is remarkable how love can turn lead into gold—and back to lead again shortly after marriage.
28. Romantic love is a partnership, not a charity. You're not there to repair the other person or protect them from themselves.
29. Happiness is not a permanent condition. It must be constantly renegotiated and cannot be nailed down in the future by any form of contract.
30. Hubris is thinking your romance will last forever.
31. It is plain enough to us when a friend gets drawn into an unproductive relationship. If only we had that same insight for ourselves
32. Marriage is like giving guns to teenagers. Who among us, in the heat of passion, can comprehend the implications of "Til Death Do You Part"?
33. Romance does not just combine the strengths of two people, also their weaknesses.
34. If a relationship is faltering, don't fool yourself into thinking you need "more commitment" and fewer options for escape.
35. The main effect of marriage is to tie people together by shared financial obligations. This is different than being tied together by love.
36. The neutralizing of future discretion should not be mistaken for a declaration of love.
37. In Medieval times, marriage was a necessity. You couldn't have sex, live together or have children without it. Today it is a vanity.
38. The unmarried look longingly over the fence at those who are married. The married look longingly back.
39. Marriage can give you a front-row seat to insanity no one else can see.
40. In the beginning, love is defined for us by others. We have to fail many times before we learn to define it for ourselves.
41. Romance is a futile attempt to reproduce the apparent security and unconditional love of childhood.
42. It's a bad sign for your relationship if you're watching your words and editing your thoughts to not trigger an explosion.
43. Ice is water that got married. Those free-flowing days are over!
44. Instead of making one grand decision based on faith, you should make many small decisions based on knowledge.
45. In every relationship, you have to fight for what you want, especially from those you love.
46. The greatest wealth is the freedom to change.
47. Just because you love someone doesn't mean you can live with them.
48. It doesn't say much for your relationship if you think you need marriage to lock you in and make it harder to escape.
49. If one fat person marries another, they'll both get REALLY fat. Same with any other mutual defect.
50. Looking back on our own romantic obsessions, we are bound to exclaim, "I can't believe I fell for that!"
51. Loss of libido is a crisis only if you are already committed to a relationship that depends on it.
52. Gays battling for the right to marry is like men fighting for the right to wear corsets.
53. Love is harmless. The obligations that follow on its heels are not.
54. Loyalty isn't all that admirable if it makes you hold on to a dysfunctional relationship.
55. Making babies is the standard turnkey solution for couples who can't think of anything else to use their relationship for.
56. Many a marriage is kept marginally afloat by the herculean efforts of one party who mistakenly takes the wedding vows literally.
57. Romance is powered by the need to believe, which can sweep all sorts of disturbing evidence under the carpet.
58. In any relationship, how you argue is more important than what you argue about.
59. You can't reason with the gambler, the addict or someone in love. They may agree with your logic, but it won't change their behavior.
60. In romance, you build the theatre, write the script, choose your own role and cast a lead actor. Don't rant at all actors if the play sucks.
61. Marriage is the most effective Redpill you can take. In a few weeks you'll start seeing your partner for who they really are.
62. In any relationship, there are times you draw close and times you pull away. You damage the former if you try to prevent the latter.
63. Marriage, under the law, has nothing to do with love. It is an economic incorporation that most relationships are much healthier without.
64. Much of what we call romance is the attempt to outsource responsibility for our own life. 
65. If you grew up in a paper mill town, the smell of wet paper would remind you of home and you'd probably marry someone who smelled like that.
66. Love without flowers, chocolate, jewelry, children, alcohol, codependency or interior decorating. Can you imagine such a thing?
67. Marriage and home improvement recursively justify each other.
68. In romance, you are not a therapist, protector or parent. You are a consumer, willing to pay a reasonable price for a quality product.
69. Even a "successful" marriage runs the risk of freezing your life in place and bringing an end to creative growth.
70. Only in romance are people expecting someone else to save them from themselves.
71. Passion alone cannot fuel a long-term relationship.
72. People in love build a mythology about their early days that involves some selective memory loss. When love ends, full memory comes back.
73. Marriage is most destructive when you have to mute your own growth to match that of your jealous and less competent partner.
74. The recurring error of investors everywhere is to take the "trend" of today and extrapolate it in a straight line into the future.
75. People tend to confuse having a lot of obligations with having a meaningful life, so they pile on the obligations.
76. Relationships are damaging when they disrupt the individual's direct negotiation with outside reality.
77. Romantic love is a value-added service. If you are not receiving value in excess of the price paid, you shouldn't be using the service.
78. Most forms of mutual protection become unequal over time, with one party giving far more than he is getting.
79. Romantic relationships are successful only when power is relatively equal and each person remains responsible for their own problems.
80. single — adj. the state of being able to do whatever you want with your life without having to negotiate with anyone.
81. Someone in love is the perfect propagandist, trumpeting the positive aspects of their choice while obscuring the negative.
82. Survival in marriage means carefully watching your words and not rocking the boat.
83. Romance involves the acceptance of creeping change, often leading to conditions you never would have agreed to in the beginning.
84. The dueling agendas of gay rights are "Government must stay out of our bedroom," and "Government must sanction our relationship."
85. The greatest danger of marriage is the loss of negotiating power.
86. The main fallacy of romance is thinking someone else can give your life meaning when you can't find it yourself.
87. When your love is completely selfless, prepare to be abused.
88. The only thing sadder than divorce is a failed marriage that does not end.
89. The premise of many a Hitchcockian thriller—and countless real-life ones—is how your partner changes after you are married.
90. You don't fall in love with a person but with an image of them which is partly a fiction in your own mind.
91. The scary thing about intimate relationships is how one party accepts and adopts the dysfunctions of the other.
92. There are no unconditional relationships. You have to fight for what you want, even from those you love.
93. To be against marriage doesn't mean you are against love. It only means you don't want money to come between you.
94. Walking down the aisle, taking the marriage vows, the bride is thinking: "What does everyone think of me? Am I doing this right?"
95. We design our own romantic disasters. The opposite gender just fulfills them for us.
96. When you find something thrilling, the worst thing you can do is commit yourself to repeating it. The thrill goes, but the commitment stays.
97. You never know what a person is really like until after the honeymoon.
98. Young people in love think they have things all worked out, but time will teach them otherwise.
99. Your best asset in romance is to not really need it.
100. Free will dies the moment you say "forever".

You can find many more related tweets be searching the archives (above) for "love", "marriage", "relationship" and similar terms.

The Art of the Frame

By Glenn Campbell

An essential problem of art is where your work should begin and end. If you are taking a photo, what should you include in the frame and what should you leave out? If you are editing a movie scene, how long should it be? If you are writing a piece of music, how long should each passage be and how many times should it be repeated? If you are writing a book or essay, at what point have made your point and are now beating it to death?

Many works fail not because the raw material is inadequate but because it is framed wrong. We all have all set through movies that have some good parts but just goes on and on and on. The good parts are eventually drowned out by the rest of the movie and we walk away exhausted. The artist might be including too much or too little in the frame or perhaps he is ignorant of framing altogether. You could say that framing is half the job of art. It is not just what you produce but how you edit and present what you produce.

I could probably write a whole book on the subject of framing, but the core idea is pretty simple: Every work needs a human focus, a single point of reference within it that he automatically identifies with. Once you know what that human focus is, framing will be dictated by it.

To illustrate this concept, I will use photography, but similar analogies apply to almost any art.

Grand Canyon Landscape

Imagine the Grand Canyon. You have seen countless photos of it. If you go there, you are probably going to take your own photo, but it will be probably be no different than the thousand you can pull up on the internet right now. A photo that shows only the Grand Canyon is almost meaningless, because you have no perspective. You can't even tell how big it is! If you have an expensive camera and some fancy editing software, you can probably make it look dramatic, but even then the viewer's eyes glaze over very quickly. Beautiful but boring!

Now imagine a photo of the Grand Canyon with a single person in it. He or she is a tiny figure in the lower corner of the frame, looking out on the vastness of the canyon. Suddenly, the Grand Canyon means something! The tiny person is someone the viewer can identify with. The viewers is thinking, "That could be me!" Now the canyon is not just mindless erosion anymore. We can now measure it, get lost in it, be frightened of it, be in awe of it.. The simple addition of a tiny figure makes us capable of processing it.

Here is a simple rule for better photos: No matter what you are taking a photo of, make sure there is a human or human-like presence in it. Furthermore, there should be only one human focus, even if you are taking a photo of a crowd. The viewer's attention should be drawn to one specific part of the photo, and the whole rest of the photo is judged by that reference point.

The human reference does not always have to be an actual human. It can be an animal that looks human, like a dog or cat, or it can be an animal that humans hate like a spider. It can be a lone tree on a cliff, because that has a human feel to it. It can be something that implies a human presence like a tiny cabin in the woods. There are all sorts of things that can serve as stand-ins for humans—a car, a sign a cactus, an empty road—but the human center always has to be there. You can call anything "art", but I contend you don't have memorable and emotionally compelling art without a human in the picture.

Once you have a single human in your Grand Canyon photo, how do you know where to crop it? In this case it is pretty easy: You want to show as much of the canyon as you can while still allowing the viewer to quickly identify the human figure. (The photo above is a little weak because the humans are the same color as the background.) Obviously, if you show too much canyon and too small a figure, viewers are not going to see the figure. If you show too little canyon, then you've wasted all that canyon. The message of a photo like this is, "Look how big it is!" so you want to show as much of that bigness as you can while still preserving the human reference point.

Your cropping will also be dictated by practical real-world considerations, like the size of the final print. If you are preparing a wall-size mural, you are going to crop the photo differently than if you are displaying the photo on Facebook. With more attention space at your disposal, you are probably going to make the human figure smaller, just to maximize the apparent size of the canyon.

You are also constrained by your raw materials. You can't crop the photo any wider than the photo you originally took, and not all of the frame may be usable. Maybe there is a distraction on one side of the original frame that you would like to keep out—like some tourist picking his nose. You are going to crop him out, even though you would have liked more canyon.

Real world photography (and all art) is filled with these practical constraints—working with what you've got and keeping distractions out of the frame. Thanks to the magic of editing, the viewer is never going to know about that tourist picking his nose. You may have lost some of your spacious canyon but you probably haven't lost much in overall impact.

Why do you want your human subject in the lower corner of the photo rather than the center. Simple: You want the biggest canyon possible within the constraints of your frame. A reference point in the center sometimes works, but in this case you would be splitting the canyon into two smaller areas and it might not feel as big.

Grand Canyon Portrait

Aside from shooting the Grand Canyon without reference points, what other framing mistakes to tourists make? Here's one thing you see all the time: They take pictures of each other in front of the canyon, with the canyon in the background and themselves in the middle foreground where we can see them almost from head to toe. We can hardly make out their faces, but they are apparently smiling and obviously saying to the folks back home, "Ha, we made it to the Grand Canyon and you didn't!" (BTW: None of these Grand Canyon photos are mine. All swiped from the web.)

What is wrong with this picture? It is the same bland photo every tourist takes at every tourist attraction. While there is certainly a human reference point in the photo—the tourist being photographed—it is not being used to the best effect.

There are two ways you can use a human subject. The subject can give perspective to the background, as in our Grand Canyon landscape photo, or the background can be used to give perspective to the subject. Let's be honest, that shot of you at the canyon isn't about the canyon; it's about you, so let's frame it that way. Bring the camera to within two feet of the subject, the same way you would shoot a a close-up portrait with no canyon out there. The Grand Canyon will appear blurred in the background and will be almost unidentifiable.

"Almost" unidentifiable is the key. You going to frame it in such as way that just enough of the Grand Canyon appears in the background that it is identifiable and authentic. The intended effect is to understate your presence at the Grand Canyon, which paradoxically heightens its value. You are no longer a rube tourist from Iowa. You are a seasoned world traveler who just happened to be at the Grand Canyon when this portrait was taken. See the difference?

You see this in fashion photography: models cavorting at base the Eiffel Tower where you don't actually see the whole tower, maybe only a bit of the base, just enough to reveal subtly to the viewer where we are. The message is that we just happen to be in Paris. It's no big thing. The more you understate a visual asset like this, the more you imply to the viewer a whole big world beyond the frame—much bigger than reality!

Framing in Film

There are similar analogies in film (apart from the obvious ones of deciding how to photographically frame the shot). For example: When something disastrous happens or an evil character does something outrageous, you have to have a sympathetic human in the scene to give that action perspective. There is no point in Darth Vader using the Death Star to destroy Alderaan if Princess Leia isn't present to witness it. Leia is our human reference point. We are going to see what she sees, and the scene will end when the emotional impact has been made on her, not us.

In film, things shouldn't just happen, with an omniscient camera recording them. Most significant actions need to be witnessed by somebody. The audience is sees the story through that person's eyes (even if that "person" is R2D2). The scene is presented from their perspective, even if it isn't shot from their literal point of view. That is the reason Darth Vader has sympathetic human commanders under him. Even though they are his henchmen, we see the horror of what he does through their eyes. A crew of mindless droids would not serve the same purpose.

Natural Boundaries

In photography, here is another framing issue: Every original scene has natural boundaries where it can be most easily be cropped. Even if you are shooting a random forest, there are always gaps in the trees where it feels right to crop. Once you decide the general boundaries dictated by character focus, you can look for natural places in the frame you will make the actual incision.

For example, note the golden frame in the main illustration at the top of this blog entry. (This is my own photo taken yesterday in Puerto Rico. Album) Notice that I placed the frame just above the palm trees, so there was a little bit of blue sky above them. In general, you want to crop out any useless empty space, like too much blue sky above the palm trees. When you have useful information available, you keep it. When you run out of information, you crop it out. (You can see how I actually cropped the photo here.)

However, sometimes you do NOT want to crop at natural boundaries. Sometimes you want the opposite: you want details to bleed off the edge of the frame. This takes advantage of a powerful human illusion: Whatever you see bleeding off the edge of the frame is assumed to continue indefinitely. Look at the still of Princess Leia above. Notice the simple fact that the background continues off the frame. This leads the viewer to believe there is a whole Imperial Star Cruiser beyond the frame. In fact, the set may end six inches beyond the camera's view, but because we don't see it end we assume it goes on forever.

If you are shooting the Grand Canyon, you want to give the impression that it goes on forever, so you let it bleed off the edges of the frame. This also how a filmmaker can make a group of 20 extras seem like a mob of 10,000. They cut people off at the edges so you have only half a person on either side. This is not the natural way to crop, but it is the way you do it to imply infinity.

This is one of the ways photos can lie. They imply an infinity beyond the frame which may not be real. Even reputable photojournalists will show you a close up of 10 protesters, making you think there are 1000. I am unashamed about using this illusion myself. What I do is art, not journalism. While I rarely use Photoshop to change details, the impression created by a photo almost never matches the original reality. That's just the way art works. You can't let reality get in the way.

The framing concepts of photography also apply in analogous ways to other arts like writing, music and public speaking. You have to have an emotional focus—some person you are playing to. You're not just stringing words or notes together because they sound good. You working within an emotional frame of reference that was established by sticking a human in there someplace.

Only humans have meaning. Without them, all you have is erosion.

My Position on UFOs and Area 51

By Glenn Campbell in Jackson, Tennessee

In the 1990s, I was the unofficial spokesman for Area 51, the secret military base in the Nevada desert. I lived just outside the base and dedicated much of my life at the time to finding out what goes on there. I still appear on TV from time to time, guiding TV crews to a viewpoint overlooking the base and delivering sound bites that make you think there is something out there. Although I no longer conduct any research into UFOs or Area 51, I have chosen to continue playing at least a passive role in publicizing the base, mainly because I enjoy the process of making television. (I don't WATCH television, mind you. I can't stand sitting in front of it. But I enjoy MAKING television.)

WARNING: Don't believe any TV show I am in! It is all cooked up to make you think there are aliens at Area 51 when the actual evidence of an alien connection is nonexistent. These paranormal shows don't "lie" exactly; they just fail to give you the whole story. They may show you "evidence" of an alien or paranormal presence, but they won't give any opposing view that might show how this evidence has been misinterpreted.

Here is a handy little 44-second video to explain my position. It is my most popular—and hated—video on YouTube!

In short, there IS a secret base at Area 51 that the U.S. government doesn't talk about, but merely the fact that it is secret does not prove there are aliens there. Looking at the buildings seen in satellite images, we now know what most of those buildings were built for. There's the hangars for the U-2 program, and those over there were used for SR-71 development. If there are aliens at Area 51, they would have to be in the back of a closet somewhere or underground.

Oooo, underground! That must be where the aliens are!

Could there be alien or alien evidence somewhere at Area 51? Sure! Anything is possible. But there is no more evidence for aliens there than anywhere else on earth. If the aliens are truly advanced, they can probably hide themselves anywhere—maybe under your feet or over your head. There is nothing special about Area 51, apart from its secretness, to make you think aliens are more likely there.

Every past claim about UFOs at Area 51 has disintegrated on closer inspection. The main stimulus for alien claims at Area 51 came from Bob Lazar, an alleged "physicist" who claimed to have worked with flying saucers near there in 1989. Here is my position on Lazar. Bob suffers from the Boy Who Cried Wolf syndrome, meaning that he has lied about so many things that it is hard to believe he is telling the truth in this one special case. We also have found no evidence for a facility where he claims one is (Papoose Lake or "Area S-4" as he calls it) and substantial evidence of nothing there at all (no significant roads and different geography than Lazar describes). Could Lazar be telling the truth? Sure! Because the area is secret and you can't get in, there is always some way you can construe reality to make the Lazar story possible. But, to me, the main issue is that it is just not worth my time to investigate anymore.

In fact, that is my position on UFOs and paranormal phenomena in general. I don't believe or disbelieve. I will only say that investigating them is not the best use of my limited time on Earth.

I am an "agnostic" regarding UFOs, paranormal phenomena, religion and everything else science hasn't pinned down yet. My simple position is: "I do not know." There are lots of things I do not know. I acknowledge a whole big universe of things "out there" I don't have a clue about. As long as these things remain ephemeral, I have to rely on what I DO know. If nothing else, UFOs and paranormal phenomena are unreliable. We haven't been able to figure out the rules for them. You can't base your life on something that follows no known rules.

Until rules become apparent, you have to base your life on things you can control and predict. No matter what you think about the Afterlife, it is pretty clear that each of us has only a limited time on Earth. You have to use it for something. I have simply concluded that, compared to other things I could be doing in my dwindling time, UFOs are not the best use of my resources.

If aliens exist and are visiting our planet, you got to respect the fact that they are not interfering in our society in any obvious way. They seem to be obeying the Prime Directive, which is all you can expect of any advanced race. Aliens cannot and should not solve our problems for us, because "solving" a problem for a weaker party always creates other problems. (See my theories on marriage.) These aliens seem to be taking a hands-off approach to our planet, and you wouldn't want it any other way.

Do I feel bad about misleading people on television? To some extent, I created the Area 51 mythology by publicizing the base. In the beginning, we were desperate for the mainstream media to take an interest in UFOs. Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and any kooky claim gets airtime without the slightest skepticism applied to it. How do I feel about being involved in this process?

I feel fine! When I give TV interviews, I say exactly what I think, including everything mentioned above. TV, however, is going to pick out that 15-second sound bite out of my 1-hour interview that makes you think I believe in UFOs. That's just television. That's the way television has always been and always will be. It is an entertainment device, doing and saying whatever attracts viewers. Don't confuse it with journalism.

If you believe what you see on television, there is nothing I can do to save you. If you see one of these shows and find something intriguing, it doesn't take much initiative to do a Google search to find out the real story. Most viewers won't do that, however. They'll just change the channel to the next paranormal show. I don't really feel bad about tacitly deceiving these people. They are meant to be deceived.

The only thing I am afraid of is people coming to the desert and getting in trouble there. The desert is harmless to me but could be extremely dangerous to an idiot. Fortunately, these TV shows usually build up how difficult and dangerous the whole expedition is. Climbing the mountain overlooking the base is made out like a nearly impossible Everest expedition, which is going to discourage most of your couch potatoes. The rest, hopefully, will Google it up to find the facts.

(A good starting point is my Area 51 Viewer's Guide from the 1990s, which is now available for free online.)

I don't regret my time spent lurking around Area 51. It was a hugely valuable education in ways completely unrelated to aliens. I learned about government, law, media and human psychology. I consider it a graduate-level program in human relations. Although I wouldn't spend any time on Area 51 now, I think it was a reasonably good use of my time in the 1990s.

As long as you don't expect them to save you, it is useful to think about aliens and what they teach us about ourselves. In a sense, we are all aliens. We were all stranded here on this planet, without any knowledge of where we came from and where we are going after. We all have to figure out this planet as aliens—which I think is the most important concept I gained from my UFO research.

Glenn Campbell on Marriage: The Turkish Interview

Here is a new interview with my Turkish publisher regarding marriage, coinciding with my new book being published in Istanbul this week.

The full transcript of the interview is available in this 5-page PDF File.

See info on the forthcoming English language edition: The Case Against Marriage.

Excerpt of interview:

The world even fifty years ago was a much different one. The main change is birth control. Throughout most human history, having sex meant having babies, and a society had to have a mechanism to assure that young people didn't have sex or babies randomly. You needed this institution of marriage to assure, for example, that a man didn't abandon the woman he impregnated and that stable conditions were in place to raise the child. Marriage was a perfectly logical process in, say, medieval Europe. If you wanted to have sex you had to be prepared for the babies that followed and this meant a stable, socially sanctioned relationship with the blessings of the community.

Today, marriage and childrearing are almost completely separate issues. . At least in America, if a mans father a child, his legal responsibilities for it are exactly the same regardless of whether the couple is married or not. Either you’re in the household helping to support the child or you are paying child support. Your marriage status has nothing to do with it. So the original purpose of marriage is now gone, yet people still get married. Why do they still do it? I think it’s delusion. People think that by joining this thousand-year-old tradition they are somehow improving their lives and improving the relationship, which simply isn't true.

The Panhandler (story for a short film)

"The Panhandler" is a hypothetical short film of 5-10 minutes, written by Glenn Campbell. The treatment linked below describes the main dialog and general sequence of events, with details to be filled in later.

Synopsis: A homeless alcoholic experiments with marketing techniques.

The 11-page treatment is available here as a PDF file. 

The story was inspired in part by the photo above, which I took in Seattle. Here is the original version on Facebook.

This story was concieved on 12/19/12 and written on 12/20/12. This document was announced on the same day it was written with this tweet.

For more of my screen stories, see my Virtual Film Studio. 

I am now a published author—in Turkish!

By Glenn Campbell

After a lifetime of compulsive writing, I am finally a published author! The book is in TURKISH mind you, but it has actually been published (as of this week) and I am actually getting paid! Here is the publisher's catalog entry (and the English translation via Google). Of all the famous English-language authors, how many have had their first book published in Turkish? Not many. Not Stephen King, Charles Dickens or Oscar Wilde. In fact, pretty close to none of 'em I'll wager!

The new book, released this week, is EVLİLİĞE KARŞI: Bir İlişkinin Sosyal, Yasal, Ekonomik ve Psikolojik Sonuçları. That translates into "Against Marriage: Social, Legal, Economic and Psychological Effects of a Relationship". It is a translation of my online book "The Case Against Marriage", adding a few of my marriage-related essays from Kilroy Cafe and elsewhere. (Don't look for my online book on my own website. I have removed it so as to not taint the market.)

Here is a new interview with my publisher (12/22) which gives you an idea what the book is about. Also see information  on the forthcoming English edition: The Case Against Marriage.

Previously, my only "book" was the Area 51 Viewer's Guide from the 1990s, which is now available free online. It sold a respectable few thousand copies (perhaps as many as 10,000, but I lost track), but it doesn't really count as a published book because I did it myself. (It was a looseleaf document of 110 pages with no ISBN, so it never entered the stream of "real" books.)

The publisher of the new book is GeoActif in Istanbul. I met my publisher and translator on a visit to Istanbul a few weeks ago (photos). The publisher stumbled upon my work online about six months ago and felt it would be appropriate for a Turkish audience, where marriage is even more of a hot-button topic. In America, we can get married and unmarried relatively easily—and talk about it freely—but in Turkey even the idea of remaining single is quite radical. I can see this book could be quite subversive. (Hopefully not to the same extent as Salman Rushdie's work.) Even the cover (above) is bound to get attention!

(For the record, I know only two words of Turkish: "süt" for milk and "ayran" for liquid yogurt. I learned these words on a previous visit to Istanbul by pouring ayran on my cereal. photo)

An English-language version is in the works, presumably called The Case Against Marriage. I'll be much more active in this edition and will take part in the editing and possible rewrites over the next month or two. That edition will be published in Turkey but should be available in the USA via Amazon.

Publishing in Turkey may seem an odd start to ones publishing career, but I see great advantages in it. I'll have a lot more creative input into the English edition than I would with an American publisher. Sure, Americans have more resources, but there is also more competition and more layers of bureaucracy between me and the printed word. If the book is truly compelling and subversive, then seeding a few forbidden copies around the world could be just the right marketing strategy.

Until the English edition comes out, my only advice to you single non-Turkish speakers is DON'T GET MARRIED JUST YET! (Either that or learn Turkish fast!)

This is how the book looks in mass quantities...

11:59 from Prescott (screenplay for a short western)

Screenplay for a short film by Glenn Campbell (2009).

While organizing my new Virtual Film Studio, I came upon this short screenplay of mine from 2009. It could be my best, and it is one of my few screen stories formatted as a proper screenplay.

Read the full screenplay in this 11-page PDF file: "11:59 from Prescott"

Synopsis: A peaceful Arizona frontier town is menaced by three well-dressed strangers bearing unusual weapons. They offer the town "protection", but at a price.

The screenplay was originally announced in this blog entry.

Psychotherapy (treatment for a short film)

Treatment for a short film by Glenn Campbell

Synopsis: In the 1950s, a troubled young woman seeks help from a psychotherapist.

"Psychotherapy" is a hypothetical short film of 5-10 minutes. The treatment linked below describes the general sequence of events in the story, with details to be filled in later.

The film set is set sometime in the 1950s or early 1960s in two locations: (1) a medical waiting room/reception area, and (2) the ornate Victorian consulting room of a Freudian psychotherapist. There are three characters.

The 10-page treatment is available here as a PDF file.

The release of this document was announce with this tweet.

Inventacon: The Movie

By Glenn Campbell

Two days ago, I wrote the treatment for a short film, Inventacon. My exercise this morning is to imagine how it would be expanded into a full-length movie.

My short tells the story of how a naive amateur inventor, Jonathan Hopewell, gets cleverly fleeced by a con artist, Mr. Cloverfield. If this were expanded into a movie, we would have the choice of following the victim or the con artist. Definitely the con artist! He is far more interesting and complex. Cloverfield is the flamboyant head of an evil organization, like Dr. Evil, yet he is also a sympathetic character we are rooting for, like the heroes of Megamind and Thank You For Smoking. This movie is a black comedy where the hero is the bad guy!

My short would be the opening scene, with the movie continuing from there. Everyone on Cloverfield's team lines up for their pay (in cash), and we start to learn about the real dynamic behind their charade.

The most surprising thing we learn is that in spite of being a con artist, Cloverfield truly cares about the people who work for him! The Professor, the Receptionist, the sketch artist Emma, the financial clerk David and all the extras in the R+D room are not just Cloverfield's employees but his friends. They are loyal to him because he takes good care of them. He shares his profits generously and he never cheats them. He is a good manager who acknowledges the feelings and needs of everyone on his team while not shying away from the hard decisions about doing what is best for the whole organization. Cloverfield proves there can be honor among thieves!

("Honor Among Thieves" could be the working title of the movie, but it is NOT the final title. I have a MUCH BETTER TITLE in mind, but it is such a fantastic and culturally relevant one that I dare not reveal it here.)

The movie explores what I call the "inside-outside" phenomenon: how people can be completely loyal and honorable within their family or tribe but exploitative and immoral to anyone outside it. Cloverfield himself is the perfect illustration. If you aren't part of his team, then you're a "mark" and he is utterly ruthless and sociopathic in exploiting you. A funny thing about him is that the same sage motivational talk he uses to energize his team he also uses to fleece his marks. He talks a lot about personal responsibility and taking charge of your own life, which he uses on his victims to lure them into his web. When he uses similar motivating words on his team, he truly cares about them and wants the best for them.

Inventacon, the fake invention company, is only the first in an escalating series outrageous consumer scams we see Cloverfield pull off. He is smart enough to know that each operation has a limited shelf life before consumers and regulators catch on. Immediately after paying off his associates for the Hopewell scam, he announces that he is pulling the plug on Inventacon. Inventacon declares bankruptcy, as Cloverfield routinely does for all of his business ventures. Then he and his team skip town and start a new scam business elsewhere.

After Inventacon, Cloverfield moves into late-night infomercials and a series of ever-bolder consumer scams. He starts by creating a psychic hotline, then he opens a dubious for-profit university promising students lucrative careers in movies and the arts. He also invents and hawks dubious consumer products of all kinds. He invents these products himself with very little effort because they don't actually have to work, only seem to work on TV. He dabbles in virtually every telemarketing scam and even appears on some of the ads himself, as a fast-talking character reminiscent of the late Billy Mays. (The fast-talking part is not Cloverfield's normal personality and it only happens when the cameras are rolling.)

The greatest joy and humor of the movie is seeing all of our familiar TV ads being exposed as deliberately crafted frauds. The audience sees not only the final TV ad or infomercial but also the cynical deliberations that went into it. We see an American actress being auditioned and hired to play a Caribbean psychic. We see Cloverfield consulting with his main confident the Professor and a lawyer friend about how to pull this psychic scam off without running afoul of federal regulators. Although, Cloverfield has no empathy for his victims, he is assiduous about obeying the letter of the law wherever there is a chance of getting caught.

The actual psychic advice is written by Emma, the sketch artist, who also designs a computer program to feed it to the telephone workers who handle the calls. Emma turns out to be a multi-talented creative type who draws, writes, designs corporate logos, programs computers and manages websites and social media. She even becomes a TV director for Cloverfield's infomercials. Cloverfield calls her his "secret weapon" and although he invents each scam, he relies on her for the visual and operational design of it. Cloverfield and Emma have a warm father-daughter relationship that is completely honorable in itself. (Maybe she is even his daughter.) Emma is shy, doesn't like to draw attention to herself and would never directly lie to anyone. She just quietly facilitates the lies of others.

Unfortunately for Cloverfield, Emma also has a conscience. Although she likes Cloverfield, is loyal to him and is grateful for the creative opportunities he has given her, she becomes deeply distressed by what they are doing to their victims. Everyone else on the team accepts Cloverfield's rationalizations that they are "helping" the victim by conning him. ("We're teaching them responsibility," says Cloverfield. "If we didn't take their money, someone else would, and not as pleasantly.") Emma begins to see through this facade, is torn by her conflicting loyalties and will eventually be turned against him. This movie is really her story.

In one key scene. Emma returns to the gutted offices of Inventacon to retrieve a sketchbook. There she encounters the shattered inventor Hopewell and experiences his pain firsthand. For the first time, she is forced to directly lie to someone, and it is a wrenching experience for her. This is the turning point for her, bringing her back toward the path of good.

The overarching crisis of the story is that the SEC is on Cloverfield's trail. About a third of the way into the movie, after we have already bonded with Cloverfield and his team, our perspective shifts to the federal investigators trying to shut him down. We learn of the hundreds of victims he has left in his wake in dozens of carefully crafted rackets. To the Feds, Cloverfield is a supervillain. They know he's a scam artist and have the shattered victims to prove it, but he covers his legal tracks so well that he's nearly impossible to prosecute. One problem is the ironclad contract he has his victims sign, which essentially gives him permission to fleece them.

The lead investigator is a woman who makes it her personal crusade to bring Cloverfield down. As Clovefield's scams become more bold and open, she becomes more determined to trick him into making a mistake, even if she has to get personally involved and stretch the rules of investigation.

Meanwhile, buoyed by one telemarketing success after another, Cloverfield moves into the biggest scam of all: He starts his own religion! He is the head of the religion, of course, and he creates a TV show to spread the word. He becomes a sort of hybrid of Jimmy Swaggart, Tony Robbins and L. Ron Hubbard. He appeals to his audience with sermons about responsibility, emotional appeals for donations and a set of nonsense "procedures" you can only get by joining the religion. Of course, the whole process is focused on funneling donations to his bogus church.

The ultimate battle is between the crafty Cloverfield and the investigator. The sequence of events is yet to be worked out, but there will probably be some romantic involvement between the two. The investigator will also make contact with Emma and must convince her to switch sides. She must explain to Emma (and to us) why Cloverfield is evil and must be stopped. Emma reveals that Cloverfield is her father, which make the decision to turn against him all the more difficult.

At the same time, the audience is rooting for Cloverfield. He is so outrageous and flamboyant and his scams are so clever that we don't want to see him shut down!

All of these conflicts seem impossible to resolve. As they build to a head, we want the investigator to win, but we also want Cloverfield and Emma to win. In the final conflict, the investigator will somehow manage to out-scam Cloverfield, but then he out-scams her.

Cloverfield will be stopped, but only partially. Just as the investigators are about to close in on him, he confesses tearfully on his TV show, "I have sinned!" (a direct homage to Jimmy Swaggart). He announces that he will shut down his religion and give back all the donations he has received. He will also terminate all his telemarketing businesses, calling them "crass commercialism". Although he is contrite on the screen and we see tears streaming down his face, we all suspect this is just another scam. By making this bold move on national TV, he has evaded the investigators and avoided jail.

He simply shifts his energies to a new set of victims. He starts fleecing people the traditional and completely legal American way: by selling rich people things they don't need. When we last see him, he works as a high-paid consultant for luxury car makers and other high-end marketers, advising them on how to get more "yield" out of wealthy customers—like adding a 10-cent feature that allows them to double the price of the car. He has evolved from a pure con artist to a legitimate member of society, and because he is fleecing only wealthy people legally, we wish him well!

The investigator loses the final battle, in that Cloverfield doesn't go to jail, but she gets most of what she wanted because she stopped him from preying on the poor and weak. Once she achieves these aims, she resigns her position.

The only person who gets out cleanly is Emma, who cuts all ties with her father and becomes a legitimate artist. We learn, through her, what morality really is and how you can't make a decent life for yourself living in the shadow of someone else's scam.


© 2012, Glenn Campbell