now busted, the cover-up begins: jimmy barfield and the copper scroll project

Jim Barfield, leader of the 'Copper Scroll Project,' testing a metal detector in preparation for his search for the treasures of the Copper Scroll.

jimmy barfield and his copper scroll project disciples have been hard at work responding to a barrage of charges of false claims, pseudoscience, and manipulative marketing. the most recent example comes from their facebook page. this blog revealed on august 27, 2009 that jimmy barfield publicly encouraged his followers to go to their jerusalem post article by supporter shelly neese and pad the ratings by attaching positive feedback (click here to see image of copper scroll project facebook page as of aug. 23, 2009 :

One last request….could you all go to the end of the article at the link below and please rate it…..the higher we get on the ratings the better the chance will be that they do the next article. Shelly Neese has another article just waiting in the JPost office if can get enough of you guys to help out…so…if you would please give it a high rating…we need support from Israel. Thank you, Jim. (August 23)

i also noted that barfield placed a picture of the ark of the covenant on their page.

well, after exposing this not-so-subtle marketing scheme, barfield and his disciples removed the request by barfield to pad the jpost article with positive feedback and the picture of the ark of the covenant. the screen capture below shows the page as of august 23, 2009 (with my annotations in red).

The Copper Scroll Project Facebook Page (as of Aug 23, 2009). Note the red arrows pointing to a picture of the Ark of the Covenant and to a paragraph encouraging supporters to navigate to the linked Jerusalem Post article and provide positive comments on it.

the screen capture below shows the copper scroll project facebook page on august 31, 2009, after i posted the exposé of their marketing scheme (my annotations in red).

The Copper Scroll Project Facebook Page (as of Aug 31, 2009). Note that the picture of the Ark of the Covenant has been replaced with a pic of the Shrine of the Book, and that the post encouraging followers to pad Shelly Neese's Jerusalem Post article has been deleted.

it seems someone doesn’t want the rest of the world to see how the behind-the-scenes media manipulation works in jimmy barfield’s world. so, after reading this post on aug 27, it appears that barfield attempted to remove the evidence of his fluff marketing scheme. he deleted the post encouraging his supporters to rush to the jpost article and praise it, and he reposted the link to the tamar yonah interview, but only after removing the pic of the ark of the covenant and replacing it with an image of a scroll and the shrine of the book.

it’s a good thing that everything ever published on the internet is cached (and that i screen capture things when i see them ;-).

i shake my head.

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