Believing The Final Con

Newcastle Herald

Monday October 27, 2008

Jeff Corbett

NONE of his own concoctions, trinkets, harmonisers or whirring machines could save Hans Rex last week, but nor did modern medicine.

A machine kept him breathing after he had a heart attack on the previous Saturday night, but when his family agreed to turn it off on Tuesday he stopped breathing. And so departed an extraordinary man at age 62.

Hans Rex, of West Wallsend, was an extraordinary conman, so extraordinary that I was tempted to accept occasionally that he actually believed his incredible claims. His delivery of these claims was an onslaught of earnestness that could overwhelm his target and I bore the full force of it often enough.

But, no, not even in full flight could he believe himself.

Take the magical trinket that took him to the Willesee television program in 1986, seven years after he arrived in Australia from Germany with claims to degrees in rocket science and whatever else. It was a car fuse with wire wound around it seven times the windings numbered seven, he told viewers, because seven was the number of life, as in Jesus Christ 777.

His trinket had treated 5000 ill Novocastrians, he told Willesee. Hundreds had been suffering from cancer and the trinket had cured all of them!

A charge against Rex of giving medical advice when not a doctor was dismissed in Belmont Court the following year because his cancer patient was too ill to attend court.

Were it simply a matter of money it would have been worth having Hans Rex around simply to marvel at his inventiveness. He could have been feted around Australia as the quintessential quack. But because he preyed on the sick and dying, because he enticed desperate people away from conventional medicine with outlandish claims of a cancer cure, he was not worth having around. That said, I had not heard of him extending his expertise to cancer treatment and cure for some years.

The public debunking of Rex's outlandish assertions was always good fun, and the ABC's Inventors program that featured Rex in 1990 was a ripper. Rex had continued inventing cure-all devices after his Willesee humiliation, and he told The Inventors that one of those devices cured AIDS. But Rex seemed to forget that he was talking on public television, not in his home overwhelming an AIDS patient with ridiculous hope, when he said that a prominent AIDS expert had found that one of his devices had made one in 15 AIDS patients "virtually better overnight".

The AIDS expert came on the screen to reject that as nonsense.

About Rex's Diagnostic Computer, which used a patient's saliva to diagnose cancer, tuberculosis, ulcers and diabetes, an Inventors engineer found it was wired in such a way that the saliva could have no bearing on the meter showing the result.

There were two pendants called The Neutralizer and The Harmonizer, and a machine that could beam Rex's life-saving treatment to people who were not present.

There was Eco Gem, which was ethanol with magical metal additives and which Rex said increased fuel economy, and later Aqua Gem, which was hydrogen peroxide with magical metal additives that sterilised water. There was much, much more.

The measure of Hans Rex the conman was not his duping desperately ill people that's fairly easy, as we can see from the worth of the people who do. Rather, it was his power to convince people who should have known better that his ludicrous inventions were scientifically credible.

Just eight years ago, for example, BHP used his Aqua Gem as a legionnaires' disease prevention system in air-conditioning towers for a year until journalists pointed out that the company was being taken for a ride.

For another layer of credibility Rex listed a Chinese medical university address at the top of his webpage, harmonology.com.au.

Amazing.

Blog with jeff @ www.theherald.com.au

Is there a difference between concocted credibility and real credibility? In other words, how can we spot a conman? jcorbett@theherald.com.au

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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