One type evidence of the simulation is the amount of irony in the world.
Get this: of everyone in the world, the most unlikely person to make a faithful film about the witnesses of the Nephite plates is Dan Peterson.
Yet he was the executive producer of the film Witnesses!
Dan famously disbelieves what the witnesses said about Cumorah in New York. But that's not all he disbelieves.
Dan teaches--he insists on--the stone-in-the-hat theory (SITH), contrary to what both Joseph and Oliver expressly taught.
He even gave an interview, published in the Interpreter, in which he intentionally or ignorantly misstates the evidence to suit his theme.
It’s really important to distinguish between the three witnesses and the eight witnesses. The three witnesses definitely claim to have seen things, to have heard the voice of God, to have seen an angel, to have seen the plates and other objects. They never claimed to have touched the plates. That’s an experience that’s reserved to the eight witnesses who did.
Yet here's what Oliver said when he rejoined the Church.
“I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages) as it fell from the lips of the Prophet as he translated it by the gift and power of God by means of the Urim and Thummim, or as it is called by that book, holy interpreters. I beheld with my eyes and handled with my hands the gold plates from which it was translated. I also beheld the Interpreters. That book is true. Sidney Rigdon did not write it. Mr. Spaulding did not write it. I wrote it myself as it fell from the lips of the Prophet.
http://www.lettervii.com/p/oliver-returning-to-church-reuben.html
Naturally, we wonder why Dan would have made such a basic error when Oliver's account is so well known.
We can't read minds, but we can see that Oliver's statement once again repudiates the entire SITH narrative that Dan promotes. Oliver insists that Joseph translated the gold plates with the Urim and Thummim, which he saw.
Recall that Oliver was living in a time when SITH had been promoted for over 20 years by critics of the Church, and when the Spalding theory was widely accepted by mainstream media.
We can reasonably infer that Dan omitted Oliver's statement because he wouldn't want to bring attention to it, just as he omits Letter VII and other statements because he insists Cumorah is not in New York.
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Recall that when he said this, Oliver had Joseph's brown seer stone in his possession. Joseph had given it to him because he didn't need it any longer.
SITH sayers claim Joseph didn't need it any longer because he had finished the translation. An alternative interpretation is that Joseph didn't need it any longer because he no longer had to demonstrate the translation process without displaying the U&T or the plates.
Either way, Oliver did not display the stone to his audience. He did not explain that he and Joseph referred to the stone as the Urim and Thummim. Instead, he ignored the stone in his possession when he testified that Joseph used the Interpreters to translate the plates.
