The collapse of today’s “Mikhail Leontyev sensation” is, of course, absolutely spectacular. There are already plenty of debunkings of this fake, and there will be more. For now, you can look here, here, and here. Better yet, here in the comments.
It’s not even clear whether the drunkard Leontyev convinced Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel) that this was real and they actually aired it, or whether they simply care so little that they’ll broadcast any nonsense, without paying attention to the fact that it gets debunked literally within 30 minutes.
But what struck me as interesting was not the clouds or the traces in the image, but the Russian engineers. It sounds impressive, and somehow even unpleasant, that Russian engineers “carried out a detailed analysis of the image and modeled the situation,” yet the forgery was exposed so quickly.
So what kind of engineers are these? And how did it end up looking so bad with some apparently very important Russian engineer, so respected that the other engineers made him their vice president?
The website of this “engineers’ union” is rather odd and heavily geared toward their “sensational report on the Boeing.”
All four of the main items on the homepage are the report in different languages, plus the Foreign Ministry’s thanks for that report.
That aside, what is very, very, very troubling is that the hero of Leontyev’s program—our vice president of all engineers—is a Candidate of Economic Sciences (roughly equivalent to a PhD in economics).
Further attempts to find out about the vice president’s engineering background lead us to something wonderful:
Why, he’s a double vice president. In his spare time, when he’s not engineering exposés of the crimes of the Ukrainian Banderites (a derogatory reference to Ukrainian nationalists), he also commands financial directors.
He works in business consulting.
And he received a medal for “nuclear support.” So we’re lucky that the Boeing was supposedly shot down by nothing more than a Ukrainian fighter jet, and not a Ukrainian nuclear missile.
Our hero’s VKontakte and Facebook pages also speak to his wide-ranging interests, but unfortunately reveal no information whatsoever about professional activity in the field that concerns us here.
As for the “Union of Russian Engineers” as a whole, there is no record of any scientific or engineering activity on the part of the organization’s chairman, Nikolai Karyakin.
And a long article about the hard fate of the Russian engineer indicates that this entire “Union” consists of employees of a single shady outfit:
So this is the caliber of “engineers” whose expertise the report on the downed Boeing relies on.
Roughly speaking, it takes quite a lot to manufacture a Channel One sensation: not just one drunk host, but a drunk host paired with a clownish con man calling himself an engineer.
PS This is such an insult to engineers that someone ought to ask Dissernet (a Russian volunteer network that investigates plagiarism in academic dissertations) to check this idiot’s dissertation. He probably stole it.
People