# Least stupid major conspiracy theory ? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 18, 2017, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230 "2017-10-18T14:14:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 1:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/61 "2019-05-02T01:20:45Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > I also believe that Sarah Palin’s youngest “son” is actually the offspring of her oldest son and an unidentified girlfriend. I don’t think that would be covered by “conspiracy theory”. More like, “convenient lie by trailer trash woman no one cares about any more.” It’s very plausible, granted. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/62 "2019-05-02T01:22:37Z")
> [@Asuka](#): > > What Glenn Greenwald has said, the mainstream media (basically everyone but FOX News) went out of their way to bury stuff critical to President Obama, which is how Obama is somehow able to say he was the “Scandal-Free President” with a straight face. Nope. Not nearly the least stupid. Keep trying. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/63 "2019-05-02T06:38:21Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > The attack on the USS liberty was a secret agreement between the US & Israeli government to sink a US ship, kill its sailors and blame it on Egypt so the US could get involved in the 1967 war between Israel and neighboring Arab states. The Israelis called off the attack when they saw a soviet sub watching the event. Still pretty stupid. Moral issues aside, first of all, by June 8 Israel had already effectively won the war and needed no help from the United States; second of all, if they wanted to frame Egypt, why did they attack in broad daylight, with clearly marked Israeli planes, \*after \*the Egyptian air force had already been effectively wiped out? Why not just have a submarine or torpedo boat sink it in the middle of the night? ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/64 "2019-05-02T07:00:49Z")
> [@Busy\_Scissors](#): > > I don’t know if you’ve heard the story of Karen Wetterhahn - v sad case of a chemistry professor at Dartmouth who spilled just one or two drops of a dimethylmercury on her gloved hand during the preparation of an NMR sample in the late 90s. She fell seriously ill a few weeks later and died subsequently of mercury poisoing - it was not widely appreciated at the time just how penetrant the organomercurial would be through a light plastic glove and then the dermal barrier. It’s now a H&S test case that is used worldwide. > > Obviously this would be a concentration of the organomercurial many 1000s of times higher than one would see with thiomersal use Not thousands: billions. Nowadays you’re unlikely to hear references to it, but the notion that it was the Americans who sunk the Maine in what turned out to be the opening bang for what you guys call the Spanish-American War and we call the War of Cuba used to be widely believed in Spain. Given some of the things the US government has done to its own people and that the Spaniards had nothing to gain by causing that explosion, it’s not terribly far-fetched. I expect that it was accidental, but what’s proven truth is that the American press spun it as an attack. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/65 "2019-05-02T13:39:08Z")
In the area of the JFK assasination, there’s very little that I consider to be a possible conspiracy-type thing. Let’s get the basics out of the way: 1. Oswald killed JFK. On his own, no other gunmen or anything. He was a nutjob with delusions of grandeur who didn’t work and play well with others. That’s all it was. 2. Ruby killed Oswald on a whim. The timeline in the hours before the shooting positively prove this wasn’t anything staged in anyway whatsoever. But: There’s something really odd about the FBI and CIA’s actions after the assassination. Really odd. I think that they had been watching Oswald more closely than they let on (or knew they should have been) and if the full truth was known would have taken a lot of heat for letting this happen. So many CIA people esp. have danced around this that there has to be a reason for so many oddities. Hoover wrote a note to cc Bush I in the margin of a memo. He was apparently the CIA’s point person on the investigation. Yet he claimed he couldn’t remember where he was on the day Kennedy was shot and a ton of other “memory hole” stuff. What the what??? So I think there was a cover up of stupidity. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/66 "2019-05-02T13:53:43Z")
I still think that Bush and Cheney had a fistfight, provoked by Cheney, and that the stupid pretzel story was made up to distract from the facial bruising. Note that Cheney also had facial bruising at the same time, allegedly caused by his dog jumping up and hitting him in the face with its head. If so, it makes no difference whatsoever to anything (other than to reconfirm that Cheney is an asshole), but it’s actually more plausible than “the president choked on a pretzel”. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/67 "2019-05-02T14:05:40Z")
> [@snowthx](#): > > Hillary Clinton was the subject of a vast, decades-long smear campaign orchestrated the right. Yep. I’m not a big Hillary supporter, but this is pretty much a fact. ---
**Author:** ![Annie-Xmas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecc23a/32.png) [@Annie-Xmas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Annie-Xmas)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/68 "2019-05-02T14:09:48Z")
Re: Oswald killing JFK. In the afterword to his heavily researched book 11/22/1963, Stephen King states that he is 100% certain that Oswald was the sole gunman, acting alone. Oswald was too much of a paranoid nutjob to work with anyone, and nobody would want to work with him. ---
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/69 "2019-05-02T14:44:28Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > I still think that Bush and Cheney had a fistfight, provoked by Cheney, and that the stupid pretzel story was made up to distract from the facial bruising. Note that Cheney also had facial bruising at the same time, allegedly caused by his dog jumping up and hitting him in the face with its head. > > If so, it makes no difference whatsoever to anything (other than to reconfirm that Cheney is an asshole), but it’s actually more plausible than “the president choked on a pretzel”. I don’t think it’s all that plausible. I spent a lot of time studying Cheney and sat through 20 hours of interviews with him. Nothing I learned or heard suggested to me that he would take a swing at anyone, certainly not after he straightened up in his early 20s. I always thought it was much more plausible that Bush fell off the wagon and fell down. Now that I think about it though, it’s possible BUSH instigated a melee while drunk, but you’d expect Cheney to have come off worse. Cheney was an old man with heart disease, Bush exercised every day. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 3:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/70 "2019-05-02T15:50:49Z")
> [@TSBG](#): > > I don’t think it’s all that plausible. I spent a lot of time studying Cheney and sat through 20 hours of interviews with him. Nothing I learned or heard suggested to me that he would take a swing at anyone, certainly not after he straightened up in his early 20s. I always thought it was much more plausible that Bush fell off the wagon and fell down. > > Now that I think about it though, it’s possible BUSH instigated a melee while drunk, but you’d expect Cheney to have come off worse. Cheney was an old man with heart disease, Bush exercised every day. On the other hand, Cheney remained belligerent and confrontational throughout his stint as VP. Enough to take a pop at someone? I don’t know. But I’m not ruling it out. ---
**Author:** ![Raza](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/raza/32/213_2.png) [@Raza](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Raza)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/71 "2019-05-02T19:06:57Z")
I think nearly all conspiracy theories are, at least, _prima facie_ stupid based on the twisted logic they frequently employ. But I think it timely to bring up a decades-old conspiracy theory that the US Census Bureau provided block-level and even individual data about Japanese citizens to other Federal agencies during World War II. Such activities would have involved probably dozens of people, and no one from that time ever admitted such involvement. The Census Bureau itself said, and I think believed, that such information sharing wasn’t true, and of course the Federal government as a whole denied it over and over. It wasn’t until around 1998 that researchers found evidence (some in Commerce Department files) that these information releases occurred. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2019, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/72 "2019-05-02T19:07:44Z")
> [@bibliophage](#): > > A conspiracy theory argues that the [1999 Russian apartment building bombings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings) were false-flag attacks orchestrated by then President Yeltsin and/or then Prime Minister Putin and/or some high-ranking official in the FSB, the successor agency of the KGB. The official story is that Chechen terrorists were responsible. I’m not convinced by the conspiracy theory but it wouldn’t surprise me much. I don’t think this even fall in the “conspiracy theory” spectrum, even though it would be a conspiracy. Many serious commentators believe it to be true or at least possible. It’s not an idea only entertained by some loons. I personally don’t see Putin as above doing such a thing. He really wanted to “settle” what he perceived as an issue in Chechnya and has been totally ruthless in the pursuit of this goal. ---
**Author:** ![ADedman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de0a6/32.png) [@ADedman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ADedman)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/73 "2019-05-03T05:24:37Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > I’ll point out that it wasn’t just modern materials, modern engines far lighter than anything available to Gustave were needed. I have no idea why or if there was any conspiracy involved here, but it doesn’t sound unusual for underhanded dealings by inventors of that time period. The part that is hard to explain is why there were a number of photographs of the machine taken, some at the time of purported flights, but none showing it in flight. I’m not sure what the quality of cameras available was at the time, possibly short brief flights weren’t captured, but I think more likely it’s because they didn’t happen. > > Now, when it came to aviators and engineers in Europe and South America who initially though that their experimental flights had preceded the Wright Bros, as far as I know they all conceded that they had not achieved controlled, manned, powered flight after see the Wright flyer in action. That is of course what is recognized, not just any machine that managed or appeared to fly for a few moments, but what we consider a manned aircraft to be, something that can take off from the ground or water, and fly under it’s own power, change course, and return safely to the ground under the control of a human pilot. This is the part that gets skimmed over, getting into the air first isn’t the big “key”, control was (the Kitty Hawk powered flights were just hops, some really long), the real work integrating their controls from gliders started the next year at Huffman Prairie. Which is why Ohio concedes “first flight” so easily, Huffman was MUCH more important from a technical side. When the story of flight was being untangled (that is when the guys who had worked under Langley were out at the Smithsonian, and the other pioneers weren’t major players or were dead). Everyone remembered the 1908 demonstrations (Wilbur in Paris, Orville with the US Army), after many “flights” had happened. What turned heads was the quantum leap in control they had (one of their rivals famously said “We do not even exist!” after Wilbur demonstrated control in all 3 axis, figure 8s etc. That they had the earliest pictures and solid witnesses made credit simpler, but really they got into the books for being first in control more than first in flight, the later can be contended, the other just isn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/74 "2019-05-03T12:39:13Z")
> [@Raza](#): > > I think nearly all conspiracy theories are, at least, _prima facie_ stupid based on the twisted logic they frequently employ. > > But I think it timely to bring up a decades-old conspiracy theory that the US Census Bureau provided block-level and even individual data about Japanese citizens to other Federal agencies during World War II. Such activities would have involved probably dozens of people, and no one from that time ever admitted such involvement. I’ve never heard conspiracy buffs going off on that one, which I doubt qualifies as a “conspiracy”, seeing that the federal government was busy _incarcerating_ many thousands of Japanese-Americans at the time, and a federal agency sharing information about them with other agencies would scarcely have raised an eyebrow in comparison. Sounds more like something embarrassing to the government in retrospect which no one wanted to talk about. I await the day a dramatic government conspiracy/coverup alleged by Internet conspiracy-shouters is uncovered and proven to be just what they were claiming all along. I expect to wait a very, very long time. ---
**Author:** ![Gray\_Ghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c0e974/32.png) [@Gray\_Ghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gray_Ghost)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 8:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/75 "2019-05-03T20:19:21Z")
> [@Alessan](#): > > Still pretty stupid. > > Moral issues aside, first of all, by June 8 Israel had already effectively won the war and needed no help from the United States; second of all, if they wanted to frame Egypt, why did they attack in broad daylight, with clearly marked Israeli planes, \*after \*the Egyptian air force had already been effectively wiped out? Why not just have a submarine or torpedo boat sink it in the middle of the night? The only conspiracy theory I thought might have more than a hair’s thickness of truth is that Israelis were doing something that immediate instance that they really didn’t want anyone knowing about. I had thought it might have something to do with any Egyptian nuclear projects, but the distances don’t really match up. Others I’d heard was that the IDF was massacreing Egyptian forces, but I’ve read of no confirmation for that theory. Fog of war, poor deconfliction, and poor control over frontline air units seems to me a more likely explanation. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Tooth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c67d28/32.png) [@The\_Tooth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tooth)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/76 "2019-05-03T20:25:34Z")
Least stupid? It’s not stupid to think that maybe two or more people got together and decided Kennedy Must Die rather than thinking Oswald acted alone. It’s not true, but it’s hardly outlandish the way believing all the world’s climatologists are putting their livelihoods on the line so an unnamed American politician can raise taxes or that thousands of people took place in a big moon-landing scam for reasons that remain murky are. ---
**Author:** ![echoreply](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/echoreply/32/3641_2.png) [@echoreply](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/echoreply)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 8:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/77 "2019-05-03T20:37:22Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > I > I await the day a dramatic government conspiracy/coverup alleged by Internet conspiracy-shouters is uncovered and proven to be just what they were claiming all along. > > I expect to wait a very, very long time. The closest I can think of to meeting that requirement is [ECHELON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON), which was a global communications monitoring program run by the [five eyes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes) countries. For years there were whistle blower claims, journalistic claims, internet claims, and lots of government denial and non-denial. Eventually the Snowden papers confirmed that it did exist. Now, does it qualify as a dramatic conspiracy/coverup? Probably, though how dramatic is subject to interpretation. Some of the conspiracy theories around it were pretty generic paranoia though: “the government is watching you; they’re watching us all”. Others were pretty specific: “the CIA can’t spy on American citizens, but the CIA can let New Zealand spy on American citizens for them.” For the typical conspiracy theory problem of how do all the actors keep it secret? The simple answer here is, they didn’t. There were leaks and whistle blower reports going back decades. That’s where I see the biggest problem in lumping it in with the traditionally crazy conspiracy theories, there was actually reasonable evidence that ECHELON existed for a long time, despite government denials. I mean reasonable in a SDMB General Questions sense of “reasonable,” not a nutjob sense of reasonable. ---
**Author:** ![Gray\_Ghost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c0e974/32.png) [@Gray\_Ghost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gray_Ghost)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/78 "2019-05-03T21:54:16Z")
> [@echoreply](#): > > …For the typical conspiracy theory problem of how do all the actors keep it secret? The simple answer here is, they didn’t. There were leaks and whistle blower reports going back decades. That’s where I see the biggest problem in lumping it in with the traditionally crazy conspiracy theories, there was actually reasonable evidence that ECHELON existed for a long time, despite government denials. I mean reasonable in a SDMB General Questions sense of “reasonable,” not a nutjob sense of reasonable. +1. Reading Bamford’s, The Puzzle Palace, gave a lot of the game away in the 1970s. Here’s another conspiracy theory, and on one of the big lunatic bugzapper lights: 9/11. I think the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was pushed so aggressively by the Federal Government, not to protect the interests of the victims, by reopening old wounds, etc…but to forego any discovery in Federal District Court. Victims gave up their right to sue in order to participate. Specifically concerning: any knowledge of the hijackers’ radical tendencies or any assistance the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave to the hijackers. Including flight training in the Kingdom before visiting the US. The shoddy construction of WTC 1 and 2 and how it contributes to the collapse. Not just design flaws, but poor construction, and pencil-whipped inspections. (Remember, the WTC project suffered from massive cost overruns, and an initial lack of tenants. Would it be surprising if the construction was rushed? Then fraudulently certified as completed?) Whatever movements were taken by the Federal government to interdict OBL and Al Qaeda before the 9/11 plot, or lessons for the lack thereof, and other governmental skulduggery the US would just as soon bury. Stuff like that, which might’ve come out in discovery, with actual testimony and documents. ---
**Author:** ![Sunny\_Daze](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sunny_daze/32/438_2.png) [@Sunny\_Daze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sunny_Daze)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 10:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/79 "2019-05-03T22:01:23Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > The idea that the Russian government colluded with Donald Trump’s campaign and intervened in the American Presidential election of 2016. I don’t think this qualifies as a conspiracy theory. ---
**Author:** ![TSBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/77aa72/32.png) [@TSBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TSBG)\ **Post date:** [May 3, 2019, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230/80 "2019-05-03T22:41:31Z")
> [@Gray\_Ghost](#): > > Here’s another conspiracy theory, and on one of the big lunatic bugzapper lights: 9/11. I think the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund was pushed so aggressively by the Federal Government, not to protect the interests of the victims, by reopening old wounds, etc…but to forego any discovery in Federal District Court. Victims gave up their right to sue in order to participate. > > Specifically concerning: any knowledge of the hijackers’ radical tendencies or any assistance the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave to the hijackers. Including flight training in the Kingdom before visiting the US. The shoddy construction of WTC 1 and 2 and how it contributes to the collapse. Not just design flaws, but poor construction, and pencil-whipped inspections. (Remember, the WTC project suffered from massive cost overruns, and an initial lack of tenants. Would it be surprising if the construction was rushed? Then fraudulently certified as completed?) > > Whatever movements were taken by the Federal government to interdict OBL and Al Qaeda before the 9/11 plot, or lessons for the lack thereof, and other governmental skulduggery the US would just as soon bury. > > Stuff like that, which might’ve come out in discovery, with actual testimony and documents. The problem is that some families did sue (unsuccessfully). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/least-stupid-major-conspiracy-theory/799230.md?page=5)