Mysterious red mercury
Red Mercury was a scam back in the ‘70s. While working at DSIR (Government Research, New Zealand) I received a set of specifications of “red mercury” from a puzzled client who asked me for an opinion. He said extraordinary and contradictory rumours were circulating about this substance.
Its properties were vague, perplexing and revolutionary. It was a compound of mercury, and variously ascribed to Russian or Chinese research. Some said it was an explosive nearly as powerful as a nuclear explosion, others a rocket fuel, or even a way of tracking rocket flight. This was all hush-hush and very hard to understand.
I could understand some parts; the tabulated isotopic composition of the mercury was very specialised, but was quite orthodox. But the document contained measurements for specialised scientific properties I had never even heard of (but were genuine). Judging only by the part I knew, the rest looked as though it would be reasonable as well. I checked with great difficulty one section completely new to me, and found that the data in there appeared to be orthodox as well, but not extraordinary.There must have been half a dozen fields in the specifications and no one scientist could authoritatively give an opinion on all of them – it would be very hard to find the correct array of experts. As a result the general reaction from any individual scientist would be that as far as their individual expertise went the material appeared to be within normal specifications without extraordinary properties, suggesting that all the properties were genuine, but most of the areas were beyond their competence. Perhaps there was indeed something revolutionary about the substance. There remained an air of mystery but technical accuracy as far as was checkable. On this basis quite a number of people were persuaded there was something important here, parted with real money to see a sample – and lost their money.
There was no false material in the actual documents – but it was unexceptional. The falsity was in the rumours about the centre substance, the red mercury. This was a very clever scam. But it had real consequences – the vacuum in the centre sucked money out of some victims, never to be seen again! Truth exposed many people’s willingness to believe a lie.
But it is also a parable. What was at the centre of the specifications? Red Mercury, which did not exist. Nothing
was the centre. It appeared to hold everything together, but was really a kind of vacuum cleaner for money!
Jesus holds everything together and is the only true centre. Any other apparent centres are illusions – indeed, scams. Don’t get sucked in.