I don’t know if you’ve seen this one before, but this video is brilliant in its nutbar insanity and complete disregard for physics.
This was my thought when I saw the thread title. I’m not sure you can get more crazy than that.
Tiny but nonsensical portions of bigger theories
“FEMA Concentration Camps” located inside a military base that I spent considerable time at. Included were pictures of one of the camps visible from outside the base fence. The pictures seems kind of scary with wire, guard towers, access control points and trailers for housing in the supposed concentration camp Unfortunately what they don’t show and is visible from the public road is that the training site in question doesn’t extend 360 degrees. Over half of the “camp” perimeter is completely open and you can just walk out. The contradictory evidence is plainly visible to the theorists taking the picture.
The stickers on the back of road signs marking the “UN invasion routes.” Apparently the tiny stickers on the back are much better than the giant lettering on front of the signs that everyone else uses to navigate.
There was a Hollow Earth theory in the mid 20th Century that believed we were actually on the inside of the Earth.
Does Time Cube count as a conspiracy?
My favorite is that Jews not only run the world, but are trying to destroy white people and white culture by using blacks and other minorities as puppets/biological weapons. This may not be the craziest, but many of the craziest ones are fringe as hell. This view is quite popular and there are large sites and communities formed around it. A lot of effort and intellectual energy is spent connecting the dots and finding the Jews responsible for pretty much everything that’s happened in the last 200 years.
I can believe the lizard people CT. Hillary, Obama, Kerry, Cheney, Krauthammer – it’s almost too obvious. The biggest problem though is if you were a shape shifter, why would you choose* that *shape?
That the moon landings were faked. Sorry, far too many people were involved in that for it to be successfully pulled off.
I was going to say chemtrails. If you omit the ones that are so completely batshit crazy, like lizard people and time manipulation, and consider only the ones that have some faint possibility of being “real,” the whole chemtrail conspiracy is right up there at the top. Look, we can panic every time there’s a natural or man-made straight line of clouds…
The maddest conspiracy theories I have heard, were right here at the SDMB.
Seethruart’s variant on the moon landing conspiracy - where (not really sure I got this right) the moon landing was faked, but the lunar surface in the fake photos was composited from real photos of the lunar surface, which contained tiny (or maybe giant) alien spaceships.
Karol’s thing about the Earth being hollow and we live on the inside, and the convex appearance of the Earth being an optical illusion, along with space, the Solar system, etc, and this could be proven by a man standing in a pond, using the zoom function on his camcorder.
So’s disorganized religion. In that vein, I nominate Jesus Christ was a space alien and rides in a spaceship. Which my idiot brother actually believes.
Along the lines of the hollow earth, I’ve encountered the theory that the Moon is hollow, and presumably some kind of alien spaceship. Supposedly, NASA knows this, because when they crashed an old Apollo rocket stage into the Moon, the Moon “rang like a bell” thus proving that it was hollow.
So do people who believe that not know that sound can’t travel through a vacuum, or is there a prerequisite conspiracy theory that explains that one away?
Wow, these are entertaining.
Just for kicks, I googled “tunguska event conspiracy” and got something blaming it on Nikola Tesla and a particle beam that went on to (of course) involve the Soviet Union. That’s good. The flavor of the day involves Caitlyn Jenner and the government trying to create more gay people via estrogen-mimicking BPAs.
But for my money, the craziest is the anti-vaxxers. It’s off my charts when you can get basically all the octogenarian Walt Kowalski-types to say “you’re f***ing nuts”.
The United States Postal Service did 9/11.
Other conspiracy theories have been worse in other ways (meaner to innocents, more full of race-hate, etc.) but this one is still my benchmark for pure insanity.
Why do you hate our military?
The CIA killed Bob Marley using a cancer causing virus in a gifted pair of shoes.
Actually it’s not got anything to do with vacuums.
Various craft have been deliberately crashed into the Moon so seismometers previously installed on the Moon could feel the Moonquakes & the data gathered would give us information about the Moon’s interior composition.
Various NASA press releases have used metaphors such as “rings like a bell” to describe the vibrations coursing through the planet. “Ringing” is a semi-technical term for certain vibratory modes of 3D solids. For example, the Earth was detectably ringing for about a day and a half after the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion.
Nobody was sensibly suggesting we on Earth could hear the Moon’s ringing. Or the Chelyabinsk ringing either.
That some scientifically illiterate conspiracy loon could fasten on the terminology and decide “ringing” implied “hollow” is pretty plausible.
Why should I believe someone who ADMITS they were involved?
I’ve heard since the 1980s that the heelstick done on newborns to test for metabolic diseases is actually the implantation of a microchip. In the meantime, I asked some OB nurses if this was true, and they said it wasn’t. They knew where I was coming from (I never believed it either) and said it also wasn’t the first time they’d been asked about it.
I have seen the procedure being done. There’s no way you could fit a microchip on the point of the lancet they use to do this.