Conspiracy! 49 Reasons to Doubt, 50 Reasons to Believe. Ian Shircore
the value of the coffin vaults lined up in the fields of Madison is huge. Vantage’s accountant told the taxman in 2000 that each liner was worth less than $75, which would make the stash of vaults worth between $3 million and $7 million, but America’s National Funeral Directors Association quotes a current price for a vault of over $1,000.
Even allowing for generous trade mark-ups, that would imply that there could be tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock waiting to be used.
And Vantage’s information shouldn’t necessarily be taken as gospel. In a reply to queries about the vaults from the Morgan County Citizen newspaper in 2008, the company’s vice president of operations, Michael A Lacy, wrote, ‘In the USA, there are approximately 1.3 million deaths each year … Of those deaths, there are about 900,000 in-ground burials performed every year. Only a small percentage of those people have pre-arranged their burials.’
This is interesting, though it is actually wildly inaccurate. Official figures give the annual number of deaths in the US as 2.42 million, according to the 2007 US census, with 1.6 million of those leading to burials.
But even with nearly twice as many burials as the Vantage spokesman quoted, it is clear that there would be only a tiny minority involving pre-purchased funeral plans – and even fewer using pre-purchase plans that involved the advance-payment deal Vantage talks about. Not all cemeteries require the use of vaults, so a rough calculation would put the entire annual US demand at about 40,000 to 80,000 coffin liners for this kind of pre-pay scheme. Add to that the fact that Vantage is only one of five major coffin-vault companies and it certainly looks as if there are far too many of them stacked in the fields of Georgia to be explained away quite so easily.
And there’s one last, awkward fact that has to be accounted for. Why, those who still have doubts ask, are some of the thousands of coffin liners to be found stacked on the Madison site actually Hercules Dome products, made by Vantage’s direct commercial competitor, Polyguard Vaults Inc, of Afton, Wyoming?
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