Some people have been pointing out the story, originally published in Sports Illustrated this week, about how cryonaut Ted Williams’ body had been “mistreated.”

The article, which was on newsstands Wednesday, also said Williams? head was shaved, drilled with holes and accidentally cracked 10 times.

What the article doesn’t say, of course, is that this is standard procedure for the type of suspension being done here. The cracks are likely hairline, and unavoidable when things are frozen to liquid-nitrogen temperatures. The story also implies that Alcor has threatened to take the body out of storage because the bills haven’t been paid.

Now, they do quote Alcor officials and directors as denying the story.

As far as I can tell just from this article, we have the word of a single ex-Alcor employee against everyone else in the organization, and a lot of the horror is based on rank ignorance of cryonic suspension protocols. Combine that with the fact that I know some of the principals at Alcor, and I was pretty skeptical, and thought that SI gave entirely too much credence to it (likely out of both the desire to get a sensational story, and possibly a high yuck factor on the part of whatever reporter did it).

While I think that it’s possible that someone at Alcor may have joked about returning the body, if so, it was only that. Alcor has a huge trust fund set up to take care of contingencies like this, and I don’t think that they would ever deliberately thaw a patient in their care.

Anyway, now the plot thickens.

Note this story from the Concorde Monitor, which says that Larry Johnson, the ex-employee in question, was fishing for a book deal in May. Combine this with his attempts to sell pics on his web site, and one sees potential motives for his actions that are not wholly pure, or relating to what’s best for Mr. Williams.

Another interesting aspect that’s revealed here is that he and Ms. Farrell, the daughter who’s been trying to get Ted thawed, share a lawyer, but that’s apparently because he got a referral from the Concorde author that he contacted, so it doesn’t necessarily mean that they were in cahoots.

For those interested in more of the backstory, there’s an interesting discussion going on here, which is possibly being trolled by Johnson himself. Note in particular this post, in which the SI article is roundly fisked.

I think that it’s a tempest in a dewar myself, and I hope that it will blow over soon, for the sake of the folks at Alcor.

[Update at noon PDT]

Here are a couple more articles about this. This one’s from the NYT, and it’s a little more balanced. Note that, other than the “unnamed source” about the “floating packets of DNA,” the only source for these accusations is Larry Johnson–he has no corroborating witnesses or evidence.

And here’s a real hack piece, from a Florida sportwriter, who’s crying about how undignified this has been for Mr. Williams and how his death has overshadowed his life achievements. Of course, that’s largely because his daughter fought it so hard, and all of her allies in the media, just like this sap, have overplayed it so much.

The piece gets pretty well shredded here, but just as a hint of the hackery, check out this part:

“To be honest with you,” Johnson told me in a phone conversation Wednesday, “I fear for my life. The people at Alcor are whacked. They’re unstable and dangerous, all of them. They’re a cult. Fanatics. Cryonics is their religion and the dewars are their god.”

Dewars?

Johnson says the cylinders where bodies are cryonically preserved “look like what you’d make scotch whiskey in. So they — the cryonicists — refer to them as dewars, like the Dewar’s brand of scotch whiskey.”

Bizarre? It is only the start.

Not just bizarre, but totally ignorant bravo sierra. Dewars have been used by cryogenicists for many decades, and they have nothing to do with whiskey. They are named for their inventor, Sir James Dewar.

This columnist’s mind is already made up, and there’s no indication that he even attempted to get Alcor’s side of the story–he just ate up Larry Johnson’s nonsense like ice cream in August, because it was exactly what he wanted to hear.

Sorry, but Johnson’s got zero credibility with me at this point, and from everything I’ve read to date, Alcor’s got a pretty actionable basis for a slander and libel suit. It might be a good use of funds to pursue it, to clear their name. It might also provide a little more favorable publicity than this fiasco has, assuming that they can blow all of this out of the water in the courtroom. It might also teach the deathists in the media to think twice before running crap like this.

By the way, for newcomers to this site, you can find what I had to say about the Ted Williams situation, and cryonics in general, at the time here and here.