Draft:Verum Est! Totoo Ba Ito?

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Anyone with the right mind could tell that the answer is a resounding no.

It's fun to pretend Paranormal

Fails from the crypt

Near-death experience John A. Keel William Fix Craig Weiler Geraldine Cummins The Haunting Of Michael Schmicker Estelle Roberts Hans Bender Enfield Poltergeist Time slip Eva Carrière Ghost rockets v - t - e

Because Heaven sounds lame anyways Satanism

God's own scapegoat

Satan Satanism

A devilish plan

Satanic ritual abuse Emmanuel Eni Mike Warnke Lauren Stratford Michelle Smith Role-playing game Jason Rapert Washington, D.C. street design conspiracy theory Transvestigation Kurt Saxon v - t - e

Verum Est! Totoo Ba Ito? (lit. Verum Est! Is This True?) was a Filipino paranormal schlockumentary series aired by ABS-CBN from 2001 to 2003 and hosted by veteran broadcaster Tony Velasquez. As is typical with many paranormal "investigative" shows, Verum Est discusses phenomena such as ghost sightings and paranormal incidents in the Philippines as well as recurring subjects like occultism and alleged Satanic infiltration of popular media, from backmasking to lurid end times prophecies and allegations of public figures being aligned with the antichrist such as John Paul II and even Bill Gates of all people.

Topics discussed

Bill Gates, the Pope and the Antichrist

“”I feel dumber for having searched for this.

—Ross Comer, former Excel 95 developer

One segment in an episode called "Kampon ng Kadiliman" (English: "Forces of Evil") talks about a rather lurid endtimes prophecy with public figures shoehorned in for good measure. The show parroted a then-popular email shitpost about Gates having been somehow branded the Antichrist and is supposedly in control of critical infrastructure through a hidden feature in Microsoft Excel of all things.

According to interpretations by some, the Antichrist is said to be Bill Gates, the inventor of computer software. It is said that Windows 95 contained secret number codes, which if calculated would show the title 'Hall of Tortured Souls'. And since computers are used to control nuclear arsenals, security systems, Internet, and stores throughout the world, it is said that Gates wields immense power, and he can lead the destruction of the world.

- Tony Velasquez, Verum Est

Most viewers unsurprisingly drank ABS-CBN's Kool-Aid and took to the anti-Gates crap as gospel, apparently unable to pick up a litany of factual errors and outright lies the show peddled. Gates was far from the "inventor of computer software"–not by a long shot, though to be fair his prominence in the computer industry made him a poster child and therefore easily misattributed by the uninformed; he did programming work since his teens for one, but one of the few pieces of commercial software credited to him was DONKEY.BAS, a rudimentary driving game written in BASIC as a demo that came with the original IBM PC, on top of him co-developing Altair BASIC. The "Hall of Tortured Souls" title refers to the Excel minigame, and is not part of the antichrist calculation. And even without any reverse engineering involved, it is clear that Excel or any other Microsoft software would NOT contain any code that somehow taps into computer systems and takes control of them unless modified or explicitly found to do so, e.g. the controversial data collection scheme in Windows 10 and later (which can be neutered if not completely disabled anyway) as well as the later controversy surrounding the AI-powered Recall feature in newer editions of Windows 11.

“”Of course, if you really are anti-Catholic, you'd do everything and come up with a way to make it appear that the Pope is 666. In this system they used the Latin phrase "Vicarius Filii Dei". There are only five letters with a numerical equivalent; what about the letter "A", letter "R", letter "F"? What are you going to do with it then? So you'd make stuff up and come up with certain assumptions.

—Hernando "Ding" Coronel - Media Director, CBCP

The episode also covered the gematria controversy surrounding the Latin phrase "Vicarius Filii Dei" as first used in the forgery Donation of Constantine and popularly ascribed to the Pope. Archive footage from the late John Paul II was used where they took to discussing his supposed alignment with the devil through a chronogram invented by Protestant writer Andreas Helwig supposedly equating the Latin phrase to 666 not unlike the Barney the Dinosaur shitpost equating the faux-Latin spelling of "cute purple dinosaur" as "cvte pvrple dinosavr" to the number of the beast. To be fair however, they did interview Hernando "Ding" Coronel, media director of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) and rector of Quiapo Church in Manila, who dismissed the 666 calculation as nothing more than anti-Catholic nonsense with a healthy dose of made up pseudo-Roman numeral malarkey as Coronel pointed out. Besides flying in the face of devout Catholics who'd raise their eyebrows at such a spurious accusation, there is something of a double-standard for ABS-CBN to seek the opinion of the accused group, in this case, the Roman Catholic Church, but not with computer experts regarding the Bill Gates calculation hoax, let alone Microsoft themselves. ABS-CBN later ran ads for Microsoft some years after they aired the Bill Gates segment which arguably served more to boost their ratings through sheer gossip than anything factual.^{[citation needed]}

Is that Satan in the World Trade?

See the main article on this topic: 9/11

One episode ran a story about the supposed demonic faces showing up in the smoke plumes as the Twin Towers collapsed following the fateful terrorist attack in September 11, 2001. The show went on to claim that freelance photographer Mark Philips corroborated the claims and stated that he did not in any way fabricate the apparently diabolical apparition. While the segment (and the show in general) ended with a question supposedly for viewers to sit and contemplate on whether the phenomena was real or not, its sensationalist presentation certainly scared the heebie-jeebies out of impressionable people and convinced them that the devil was literally in the details.

In actuality, the faces in the smoke clouds were merely a case of pareidolia, i.e. people were just seeing things that aren't actually there and thus interpreted them as something completely creepy or sinister. While the Mark Philips photograph was at least attested to be "real" i.e. not photoshopped at all, there have also been cases where the Luciferian plumes were indeed doctored for shock value and/or misinformation, case in point the hoax images of similar demonic clouds made by the satirical supermarket tabloid Weekly World News, whose "news" reports are nothing more than glorified shitposts sold at the check-out counter for both the lulz and to prey on those who would potentially snatch a copy in a whim.