The public story of the Glomar Explorer was that it was a ship built by Howard Hughes to harvest manganese nodules on the ocean floor. This story was backed up by popular magazine articles talking about the bounty of manganese nodules, caused investment in other comp ies prepring to look for them, etc. I even remember reading a kid’s adventure book about finding manganese nodules around that time.
The reality was that the ship was specially built for the CIA for one purpose: To raise a lost Soviet nuclear submarine. Investigative reporters published some information about it a year or two later, but it remained secret for a long time.
When I was young, there was a conspiracy theory that the CIA were experimenting on people with LSD. That turned out to be MK-Ultra, and was true. Same with the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment.
The idea of a secret island where the rich and powerful go to have sex with young women was a conspiracy theory before all the details of Epstein Island came out.
That was a well-kept secret, not a conspiracy theory. Were there wide-spread rumors about what the Glomar Explorer was really doing before the secret got out?
Well, the CIA suppressed and delayed stories about it for almost two years, and managed to keep a lot of the details out of the two stories that did get out. The full story, including the video of a funeral of Soviet sailors found in the sub, didn’t come out for another 15 years or so.
I’m not sure whether there was a conspiracy theory about it during that time, honestly. But I believe the CiA did try to throw cold water on the whole thing for a while, and there was at least one FOIA request for information later on, so someone was looking for something…
Ahh, subliminal seduction. Naked women etched into ice cubes. Vulgarisms baked into Ritz crackers. “Eat Popcorn” flashed onto movie screens for 1/24th second. One of the scenarios was that Blue Swede was actually chanting “Who got sucked off” in the background of Hooked on a Feeling. It took me years to get that out of my head and then Marvel had to go and stick it in Guardians of the Galaxy and it was back in my head. Now Ghosts uses the phrase, and I’m like an alcoholic who keeps falling off the wagon.
I will say the whole Jeffrey Epstein case makes it hard to talk sense into a lot of conspiracy theorists because they will use it as justification that conspiracy theories actually happen.
The British suppressed the Bletchley Park story for about 30 years, so 2 years is chicken feed.
The US government put all sorts of hydrophones in the Baltic Sea to track
Russian submarines. I was offered a job at Bell Labs to work on it, but I was told they were listening to whales. (I didn’t take it, and I assume they would have told me the truth after I got my security clearance.) The “bodyguard of lies” is not a believer in CTs.
Like I said, ISTM that the existence of official disinformation contradicting a popular suspicion about government secrets does not automatically make that suspicion a “conspiracy theory” in the usual sense of the term.
For example: IMHO, hypotheses that the CIA may have secret spy satellites as part of spacecraft launch payloads aren’t necessarily “conspiracy theories”, even if the CIA denies any such involvement. Claims that the Apollo moon landings were faked with decades of elaborate coverups, on the other hand, do qualify as conspiracy theories in the full crackpottery sense.
Oh, okay, you’re basically saying that any popular suspicion about the possible existence of any secret activity counts as a “conspiracy theory”. Well, that’s a somewhat different definition from the one I’m using, but YMMV.
ISTM that there’s a difference in theories about secret activities conducted by organizations like the CIA and the NSA, whose JOB is to do secret things and keep them secret, vs. secret activities by clandestine organizations of ordinary people like doctors, scientists, historians, airplane mechanics, Jews, etc. The latter cases are loony because there’s no way that, for example, every one of the thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on Apollo, or every researcher and doctor who worked on Covid vaccines, could be trusted to keep a secret for years. Professional spies keeping a secret for years, that I can certainly believe.
I’m not saying it’s not a conspiracy theory. I’m saying it’s less implausible that the CIA did it and successfully kept it a secret for 50 years, than that the whole Apollo program was a sham and all the ordinary people involved kept it a secret for 50 years. The CIA’s job is to keep secrets. Scientists and engineers, not so much.
The nutty “conspiracy” angle would be that the virus was intentionally released. But the idea that it was a product or byproduct of research that got into the wild due to incompetence isn’t really a conspiracy theory, just unsupported speculation. It’s just as plausible as the speculation that it arose naturally from “wet markets” .
