A Dutch woman called Janet Ossebaard recently has quite some succes – measured in views – with a 10 part video series on YouTube that propagates the far right QAnon conspiracy theory. The series is called Fall Cabal, and you will have no trouble finding it on your own.

According to Ossebaard a big change is about to happen, but most people don’t seem to have a clue. So therefore she is going to tell the hidden truth to us. She claims to have access to privileged knowledge, because she knows the Great Plan that is unfolding before our eyes.

Janet Ossebaard, who calls herself a researcher, used to be mostly involved with crop circles, UFOs and extraterrestrials. She is also one of the staunch supporters of medium Robbert van den Broeke who has been caught cheating many times. (photo: screenshot Twitter)

Ossebaard usually just bombards the viewer with unsubstantiated claims, which you could of course answer with Hitchen’s Razor – “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” – but I’ll try to debunk those claims anyway.

The first episode of the series is titled: “The End of the World As We Know It – Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…” In the text before the title screen Ossebaard urges the viewer to accept nothing as the truth, asks to do your own research and to double-check everything she presents. So I did.

Below follows a list of the more or less factual claims Ossebaard makes in Part 1 of her video series. They are preceded by the timestamp for easy reference. Fellow Dutchman Harry Hol also made a decent debunk of this episode on his YouTube channel. You can find that video embedded at the end of this post.

Debunking the claims made by Ossebaard

02:23 Ossebaard claims: Fires forgot to burn trees, and they were able to cut through houses.

Ossenbaard hints at the conspiracy theories that were circulating around the huge wildfires in California in 2018. In fact there is nothing extraordinary about what Ossebaard shows here. Metabunk has some good threads in which these claims are debunked: Explained: Unburned trees next to burned down structures as evidence of secret “energy weapons” and Explained: House “Cut in Half”, Tubbs Fire, Santa Rosa, Coffey Park.

A hollow tree burning from the inside

02:32 Ossebaard claims: The wildfires burn trees from the inside out.

This might seem strange, but it concerns hollow or partially rotten trees. If the outside of the tree is damp, the dry inside can easily burn faster, especially when filled with dry leaves, and helped with a chimney effect.

02:40 Ossebaard claims: The wildfires were able to lift cars, tilt them and smash them down.

It is hard to tell from the picture what events could have led to it ending upside down. Many people tried to escape in vain from the fires by car. It is entirely possible that in the panic that arose, accidents happened that would turn over a car. Another possibility is that the car was swept aside by a buldozer during the clean-up.

02:45 Ossebaard asks: “Are you sure that these are ordinary forest fires?”

Ossebaard suggests otherwise and although she doesn’t explicitely mention what is happening according to her, it is most likely a hint to the bizarre conspiracy theory that these fires were started by Directed Energy Weapons fired from satellites.

02:55 Ossebaard claims: Mercury is considered highly toxic, but not when we inject it into children in absurd quantities.

Mercury as a metal is toxic, but isn’t a compound in any vaccine. The chemical compund Thiomersal, which contains a mercury atom, was used in some childhood vaccines as a preservative, but that’s not longer the case. Thiomersal is not the same as the metal mercury, like ordinary salt is not the same as chlorine gas although salt contain a chlorine atom. It’s basic chemistry.

03:07 Ossebaard claims: No doubt you’ve heard about chemtrails. Long time denied by our governments, but recently acknowledged and refered to as geoengineering aerosols.

What Ossebaard shows are ordinary contrails. Geoengineering is a suggested, but highly controversial, solution to climate change. This could in theory be done by spraying sulphure compounds in the upper atmosphere. For this new aircraft will have to be designed as the existing ones which could be used for spraying, can’t reach those altitudes. In no way did governments acknowledge that the ordinary contrails you can observe frequently in our skies have anything to do with geoengineering experiments.

One of Herndon’s retracted articles.

03:24 Ossebaard claims: We are being sprayed with heavy metals.

Simply false. The contrails consists of water. The idea that they contain chemicals like Aluminium, Barium, Cadmium and Titanium (only the last two are considered to be heavy metals, by the way) is a fantasy from chemtrail believers and only substantiated by flawed research by Marvin Herndon who saw a couple of his articles retracted.

03:27 Ossebaard claims: These metals are stored in our brains, where they have been proven to cause Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.

Wrong. Although naturally-occuring metals might play a role in the development or progression of Alzheimer’s disease there is no convincing evidence that for instance aluminium can be a cause.

For Parkinson’s disease there are clues that particular metals could play a role, but these metals (maganese and lead) are not on Ossebaard’s list.

03:39 Ossebaard claims: In Holland (The Netherlands), if we don’t explicitly opt out as organ donor “our organs will be property of the state as soon as we are declared braindead.”

Wrong. Even if you didn’t make your whishes clear about organ donation, your relatives have the last say. Nothing is mentioned in the law about bodies being property of the state, that’s an absurd idea.

03:48 Ossebaard claims: The last time it was arranged this way by law was during the nazi occupation.

No source is given, but it is highly unlikely that this was the case as during that period (1940-1945) organ transplantation was only in an experimental stage. It would still take many years before physicians tackled the problem of transplant rejection. Setting up a system for organ transplantation during the nazi era therefore wouldn’t have made sense.

This claim is most likely made to suggest that organ transplantation is an evil thing and could be seen in the light of other nazi activities, like their medical experiments in concentration camps.

03:57 Ossebaard claims: The current pope is the first to state that hell doesn’t exist, but the devil does.

The story of the pope denying the existence of hell went viral in 2018. It was based on remarks by Eugenio Scalfari, a 93-year-old former editor of La Repubblica and friend of Francis who is known to bring sensational stories about their conversations. The Vatican issued a statement indicating that none of the quotes ascribed to Francis can be considered faithful transcriptions.

04:06 Ossebaard claims: The Vatican’s audience hall is full of references to reptillians.

Like Ossebaard has never heard of pareidolia… For the intended symbolism of the sculpture I refer to the Wikipedia article, no reptillians mentioned there, so Ossebaard simply misrepresents the artist’s intention.

04:20 Ossebaard claims: The Vatican’s telescope is called Lucifer.

False.The Large Binocular Telescope, part of Mount Graham International Observatory, has an instrument that used to be called LUCIFER, but that name was changed to LUCI. The Vatican Observatory co-operates another telescope on the same mountain (The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope).

04:25 Ossebaard claims: Popes make the sign of the devil.

Nope. The picture of Francis making the sign was taken during a visit to the Philippines, where this gestures means ‘I love you’ (probably the gesture was taken over from the American Sign Language).

The photo of Benedictus XVI turns out to be a photoshop job. In the original photo he doesn’t make the sign.

Original image on top, altered image below.

04:39 Ossebaard states: On 9/11 two planes managed to cut through steel.

No explicit claim here, just the suggestion that this would be impossible. The idea that the planes couldn’t have damaged the Twin Towers like we all saw, usually indicates a lack of understanding of the physics involved and underestimating the kinetic energy of the planes.

04:44 Ossebaard claims: A third plane mysteriously dissappeared in a building. And number four plunged in the earth without leaving any debris or bodies.

There is nothing mysterious about the crash of AA77 into the Pentagon, which was well investigated (ASCE report).

The crash site at Shanksville, where UA93 came down, was also investigated thoroughly and most of the plane was recovered from the site. Also remains of all crew members and passengers were identified from dna.The Wikipedia article is pretty good and complete on this matter.

04:52 Ossebaard claims: The planes were piloted by terrorists that only had had a few flying lessons in a small Cessna.

Completely false. Some of them had quite some training and practised in flight simulators. All this is well described in the 9/11 Commission Report.

05:11 Ossebaard claims: The same victims can survive up to three different attacks.

Mason Wells is shown. He was badly injured during the terrorist attack on Brussels airport in 2016. He witnessed the Boston Marathon attack in 2013 from a block away, and during the attacks in Paris he was in France. In my opinion it’s a bit exaggerated to say he survived three terrorist attacks.

The story of the Australian woman is even less impressive. Maybe these persons see themselves as victims of three seperate attacks, but a serious researcher would definitely nuance that claim as merely a presence in the vicinity of such attacks doesn’t make one a victim.

5:25 Ossebaard claims: Rome Shubert suffers a headshot but only needs a band-aid.

“A bullet sliced clean through the back of the Santa Fe High School sophomore’s head” according to CNN. It just happens occasionaly that a bullet only hits soft tissue and no vital structures.

5:33 Ossebaard claims: One of the victims is actually a cloth doll.

Without any evidence a victim of the Barcelona terrorist attack in 2017 is assumed to be a cloth doll. Seriously? An insane claim, 16 people were actually killed.

5:44 Ossebaard claims: Several images of animated movies contain hidden (sexual) images.

Some of these might just be pareidolia, some might be intentional jokes by the animators. You can find many websites that collect such naughty hidden secrets.

The swastika on the skin of the mother dog in the 101 Dalmatians, however, is a vile hoax, it’s just not there in that scene.

On the left the photoshopped version , on the right an original screenshot from the same scene.

6:00 Ossebaard claims: Fully grown fetuses can be legally aborted in many American States.

We just have to guess on what information Ossebaard bases this claim. It could be that she confuses ‘fully grown’ with ‘viable’. There are some states that allow abortion up to 24 weeks, and there are some examples of babies that were born a little earlier (22 weeks) and lived.

6:08 Ossebaard claims: Advocates of full-term abortion state that unborn babies can not feel pain.

No idea which ‘advocates’ Ossebaard has in mind here. I don’t know any. At best she is confused again and mixing up full-term and late-term.

6:22 Ossebaard asks: “Is abortion of a fully grown baby not the same as murder?”

But in which state is infanticide legal ? Ossebaard is inventing stuff to get her message accross. It is quite likely that Ossebaard picked up this theme from Donald Trump as he made ludicrous remarks about abortion; he suggested that some abortions are performed after a baby is born (which would be infanticide).

6:38 Ossebaard claims: The migrant caravan travelled for 2000 miles and took just one and a half month.

Ossebaard is a bit vague which caravan she is talking about (there have been several of those in recent years), but as she mentions the midterm elections it must be the one around October 2018. She uses, however, also images from a caravan in 2017 which was about a completely different issue and wasn’t bound for the United States border.

Somehow Ossebaard thinks these migrants are thought to have walked the whole way, but I could not find anyone claiming that they had done so. So it remains a question what exactly makes Ossebaard go ‘hmmm…’ here.

Ossebaard includes this photo in her video, but it is from an entirely different ‘caravan’ in 2017.

7:12 Ossebaard claims: Hollywood stars promote facial creams that contain forskins of baby boys.

Actually the cream contains epidermal growth factors derived from stem cells taken from the discarded foreskins of newborn babies in Korea which are then cloned.

Celebrities do al kind of weird stuff, but it takes some evil fancy to suggest that the next thing for them might be drinking baby blood. (Which is of course exactly what Ossebaard later in the series does when she starts to talk about Satanists.)

7:38 Ossebaard claims: Diseases such as aids, zika, sars and ebola are patented and therefore man-made.

Highly misleading. Some of the patents are for genetic variants of the viruses that cause the disease and that might be used for vaccine development, some are for the virus itself but are patented by governmental organisations (like CDC) to make sure that the information stays available in the public domain. See this article from Fullfact.org for more background.

8:00 Ossebaard claims: Spyware in electronic devices works 24/7 even when the device is switched off.

Of course this is not possible unless a device is set on stand-by and not switched off completely. For the claim that every conversation is recorded, Ossebaard provides no evidence at all.

8:24 Ossebaard claims: Now that Bayer has bought Monsanto our food supply is largely controlled by producers of carcinogenic poison.

The only product specifically mentioned as toxic is RoundUp. Although that substance is under a lot of criticism and there are concerns about its safety, there is no clear evidence that it poses a risk to humans if used appropriately. And of course the sweeping condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry is preposterous. It’s not the product they sell which is scandalous, it is their greed to make money from their products. If they were really poisonous, nobody would want to buy them (or would die very soon after purchasing the product if there is any truth to her claim).

8:47 Ossebaard claims: Monsanto started producing Agent Orange.

Agent Orange was developped by US and Great-Brittain. GB used the compounds first for military purposes during the Malayan Emergency. During the Vietnam war the US bought Agent Orange from a dozen companies. Monsanto was the second largest producer after Dow Chemical.

9:20 Ossebaard claims: Hillary Clinton deleted 33.000 emails from a private server that she used as Secretary of State. Furthermore she destroyed evidence stored on electronic devices.

A large investigation has been done by the FBI into the issue of this private server. In the end (2016) they didn’t find enough reason to press charges. For the claim that she smashed her phones with a hammer, see Snopes.

The fire metioned was actually just a small fire in a building used by the Secret Service. This happened in 2018, so quite some time after the FBI decided not to prosecute.

9:55 Ossebaard claims: President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 when he was just nine months in office.

This is a fact. The Nobel Committee awarded Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people” citing Obama’s promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and a “new climate” in international relations. It was not an uncontroversial decision at the time, and it is not clear what Ossebaard is trying to imply here.

10:30 Ossebaard claims: These issues have in common that they were completely ignored by the mainstream media.

A ridiculous claim when you just think about the Hilary Clinton email controversy, the effects of Agent Orange, or the law on organ donation in The Netherlands which were heavily debated issues at the time. Also Ossebaard regularly shows images from newspapers and tv channels to illustrate what she’s talking about.

12:35 Ossebaard claims: Seth Rich leaked info to Wikileaks.

The idea that Rich leaked emails to Wikileaks has been contradicted by the official research into his murder. It has also become clear that the emails were obtained by Russian intelligence groups via hacking. See for instance this factcheck from Politifacts.

Conclusion

In this first episode of the Fall Cabal series Ossebaard makes lots of claims without providing her sources or giving any indication that she performed even the most basic factchecks. No explanation is given, there is only the suggestion that the so called official version can’t be true and that the mainstream media (MSM in code) is lying to the public and therefore can’t be relied upon for giving reliable information.

Many of the claims can be debunked without much effort. Ossebaard just reiterates claims she found on conspiracy websites. She is not actually putting forward an alternative explanation, but instead tries to instill doubt in the viewers.

Thanks go out to Peter Zegers who provided useful suggestions and read my concept version.

Harry Hol’s debunk

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, there is also a debunk by Dutch journalist/writer/stand-up comedian Harry Hol. He touches almost the same topics as I do and he might have used quite a few of the same sources for factchecking. Ossebaard did respond to his debunk on Twitter, but failed give any substantial arguments.

I’m not sure whether Hol plans to debunk the rest of the series as well (he also did a video in Dutch on de covid-19 video series by Ossebaard). I’ll keep an eye open for that.