Last night I couldn’t sleep again so I once again placed my Ipad by my bed and went looking for some conspiracy theory podcast to listen to.  Nothing better then turning off all the lights and listening to paranoid people talk.  In this particular interview, these podcast hosts I’ve never heard of were talking to some self-proclaimed CIA guy I never heard of who was making all these bizare claims about the Obama administration, and how he’s now free to talk because he’s moved to Canada.

I started to fall asleep, and then when I woke up, imagine my surprise when about 22 minutes into the podcast, the self-proclaimed CIA guy is claiming that when Obama was a child, he took the WISC (Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children) and obtained an IQ of 128.  Now the WISC was originally normed in 1947.5 and published in 1949.  In 1972, it was substantially revised and renormed, and published as the WISC-R.  It was revised and renormed again in 1989 (WISC-III) and there’ve been a couple versions since then (WISC-IV and WISC V).

Let’s say Obama took the test in 1971 when he was 10.  Then his IQ of 128 needs to be reduced to 121 because IQ test norms become obsolete at a rate of about 0.3 points a year, thanks to the Flynn effect, which was not acknowledged in those days.  On the other hand if he took the WISC-R the year it was released (1974), his IQ would only need to be reduced to 127.

But is this story even true?  In all the years I’ve seen bloggers and their readers obsess about President Obama’s IQ, no one has ever mentioned this stat.   The self-proclaimed CIA guy claims to have got it from the Chinese.  The Chinese government has been known to spy on America, and they are more open to the idea of IQ and HBD than Americans.  Given that there is a lot of racism in Asia, they might have been intrigued by the fact that America had a black president and perhaps they were curious to see if he was dumb enough to take advantage of, and went snooping through his childhood records.

On the other hand, this “CIA guy” might just be making stuff up to get attention.  A lot of the other claims he makes (Obama was born in Kenya, Obama’s dad is Frank Marshall Davis) sound so silly, that it’s hard to believe anything he has to say.  But then I fell asleep again and missed most of the interview.