A story being heavily circulated online, “Obama Quietly Orders One Billion Dollars Worth Of Disposable FEMA Coffins,” is not true.
The story claims that President Barack Obama “has been operating behind the scenes to prepare an action in case of an American revolt that will not only squash a revolution, but kill many of its participants,” and that the first step is to disarm the American people and throw anyone that might be a threat into a FEMA camp.
“The current President of the United States, amongst other things, has already ordered $1 Billion dollars worth of disposable coffin liners,” the report from a website called Tell Me Now claims. “Around the country is stored the 5 million, what will be, FEMA coffins in various locations.”
The website contains many reports, including this one, that cite no actual sources for the information it outlines. Other reports on the site include “FEMA Stockpiling Body Bags Since Katrina’s Top Secret Gun Confiscation Scheme?” and “Illinois Tells Residents To Turn Guns In To Get Free Marijuana.”
This particular report about the FEMA coffins uses a haphazard collection of information from stories over the past seven years or so about the subject, without citing them.
For instance, without citing Jesse Ventura (“Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura”), the report makes use of information from Ventura’s show in an episode when he visits a location in Madison, Georgia, where plastic casket liners were being kept at the time.
The photos in the article, again used without any citation, are from Alex Jones, a well-known conspiracy theorist who visited the location in 2008.
During the visits, the men found “hundreds of thousands of plastic coffins,” according to Jones, who also accompanied Ventura.
“And you can fit four dead bodies per plastic coffin,“ Jones said when he was there. ”It’s basically a giant body bag.”
Both men said that the coffins were owned by the government in preparation for large-scale burials following people being put in FEMA camps.
“Apparently the government is expecting a half million people to die relatively soon, and the Atlanta Airport is a major airline traffic hub, probably the biggest in the country, which means Georgia is a prime base to conduct military operations and coordination,” Jones said at the time.
The origins of the theory appear to go back until at least December 2007, from the blog AboveTopSecret.com.
Michael Lacey, vice president of operations for Vantage Products Corporation--which makes the containers--told the Morgan County Citizen that the so-called coffins are actually “the outer container for caskets,” placed in the ground before coffins to protect them.
Lacey said that the containers were placed at the location beginning around 1997, and that there used to be as many as 80,000, a number that has decreased over the years to 50,000.
“It’s nowhere near the quantity they talk about on the Internet,” Lacey said.
The reason that there are so many of these containers is that they’re the least expensive model and the most in-demand because people often purchase them before their loved ones die.
And Lacey said that the burial vaults aren’t owned by the government; they’re owned by people, or they’re owned by his company because they haven’t been sold yet.
“They’re not owned by any one individual, company or the government,” Lacey said.
Stories about the theory date back to George W. Bush’s presidency and were changed to incorporate Obama when he became president.
The theory sometimes includes the citation of patent 5,425,163, which supposedly says that the patent contains proof that these containers are cremation containers for multiple bodies.
However, the phrase multiple bodies doesn’t exist in the patent, and the containers are described as “cremation containers” not casket liners, so the patent may be referring to something else.
