We jump on Conspiracy Theories because they are, by definition, based on ignorance. If there is actual evidence, we don’t call it a Conspiracy Theory. The whole point of the word theory in all that is not the scientific use, but the colloquial use of “something that sounds plausible.”
We are a board devoted to fighting ignorance. Of course we’re going scoff at someone who is using ignorance to support a proposition.
Remember that another hallmark of many CT’s is that they revolve around the action of Genius Fools. Here we’ve got a conspiracy that somehow managed to intercept Flight 93 and destroy it, but then they don’t take credit for the competent and well trained US pilots who downed it in order to protect America, or claiming that they made brief (but unrecorded) radio contact during which the good, brave American men on the plane stated that the terrorists were fighting back and the might soon lose control of the cockpit so please, do what’s right and down the plane. Instead, they create an elaborate conspiracy and have the pilot who flew the sortie sworn to secrecy, and all the base personnel who saw a fighter take off and return low on ammunition sworn to secrecy, and all their wives, girlfriends, drinking buddies and confidants. And all the experts who analyzed the wreckage were in on it, too. And there has been not one whistle blower after more than a decade.
All that, because on 9/11 of all fucking days, they couldn’t have said “we were forced to destroy Flight 93 in order to save thousands more American lives, their sacrifice will always be remembered.”
Lack of objective, repeatable evidence. The same reason to reject any wild idea or religious theory for that matter.
Lets look at a classic CT. “The government is covering up evidence of extraterrestrial visitors!”
Okay, on the surface this seems plausible. After all, given the general level of education and religiosity in America at the moment, announcing such an event would probably cause panic. Additionally, up until very recently, the Government has been pretty good about keeping certain things secret.
When you start looking objectively at it though, it all starts to fall apart. It assumes that the US government has the capability to track and respond to every single ET event before it becomes a major public incident. It assumes that the ET’s are either complicit in this or are able to be overwhelmed by the Govt. despite having technology that allows them to travel the stars. It assumes that ALL other world govts. are also in on this. It assumes that despite the vast ubiquity of cell phone cameras, nobody has been able to get a better video than a blurry one of flashing lights. Hell, it assumes that all ET’s are inherently benevolent and non hostile for that matter. All of THOSE points assume the ET’s are visiting us regularly, that they exist, and have technology that we currently are unsure is even physically possible by our rapidly solidifying theory of physics.
See? There just isn’t much there to actually chew on other than hypothesis. Regardless of how plausible the idea is, with nothing to back it up it all falls apart when viewed in the context of Occam’s Razor.
It is more likely that :
ET’s Don’t exist
ET’s Cannot visit us due to problems of distance
ET’s COULD visit us but simply Choose not to
Most ET event are mistaken identity or delusion
ANY of that is more plausible than the CT. Thus without any objective evidence to the contrary there is no reason to give further credence to the least plausible option.
This is it for me. The government admits that a fighter was en route to intercept Flight 93 and Bush had given the order to shoot the plane down, but it crashed before the fighter could intercept it.
Since all of that is admitted, why would they cover up the fact it was shot down if it indeed was?
If you work at it hard enough, you can always come up with a theory that fits the known facts better than the truth.
Reality is messy and inconclusive. People make mistakes, witnesses change details in their stories, some things you never do figure out. Conspiracy theories are neat and tidy and all wrapped up. That’s appealing.
People think what they see on TV is real. That makes it easy to treat the latest CT as another docu-drama.
And people, to a greater or lesser degree, decide what they want to believe and then look around for evidence to justify it, especially in politics. Birthers are mostly on the right; the “Bush knew!” and Diebold conspiracy crackpots are on the left.
Add a good big dose of “the fact that there’s no evidence proves the conspiracy exists”, the ability of the Internet to spread rumors world-wide in moments, and you get - well, what we have now.
SOP.
Regards,
Shodan
Everyone who is not dumb or blind knows the US government planned the entire 9/11 thing. They knew where flight 93 would be and on what day, so they painted out the markings on a small Cessna, installed air-to-air missiles on it and parked it near Shanksville.
They also hired Todd Beamer and bought him a ticket on flight 93, telling him he was going to Disneyland for an all-expense paid vacation. They gave him an envelope of instructions, and told him not to open it until over Pennsylvania. The instructions told him to storm the cockpit and what to say.
When flight 93 was in the right place, the little white plane with missles took off and tried to shoot down the airliner, but the explosives planted in advance went off first. When the white plane’s pilot landed, he was whisked away by the CIA and sent to Yucca Mountain. The plane was dismantled and the dismantlers whisked away to Yucca Mountain to join the others.
The whiskers were whisked away too.
Todd Beamer survived the crash and is now being held at Yucca Mountain.
Then operatives on the ground, hired in advance and sworn to secrecy, gathered at the crash site and bulldozed all the scattered debris to one spot and dug a hole to cover up the fact that it exploded in mid-air.
Finally, all the workers were transported to Yucca Mountain, where they are to this day, playing cards, watching movies and enjoying hookers until the next government coverup operation.
Because I can’t get 9 people in my office coordinated to order lunch in fewer than two hours because they’re constantly derailing the process bitching about the menu chosen and/or gossiping about the latest employee who quit. I simply don’t believe that dozens or hundreds of people can work together effectively and secretly for very long. Conspire? Sure. But someone will blab, sooner rather than later, and then…
this.
This.
History is filled with conspiracies. The Lincoln Assassination was one. When we talk about CTs like the 9/11 government conspiracies, the Kennedy assassination, the moon-hoaxers and the like, the number of people who would have to be involved is so massive as to make the whole theory ridiculous.
And not only that, but everything in these complex, twisting plots would have to be executed flawlessly. What if at the moment of the fatal head shot from the grassy knoll, some random passerby grabbed the shooter? That blows the whole theory out of the water by one stupid dumb luck (but very possible) chance.
And these conspirators were so brilliant that they deceived the Warren Commission, the FBI, and the public, but left little easter eggs so that some guy running a website out of his Mom’s basement could figure out the truth.
Not to insult any posters, but I think that is the dynamic that comes into play with most of these theories. Some guy with a poor lot in life thinks that he has outsmarted everyone by discovering that the moon landing was fake. It gives him a sense of purpose in life.
A lot of times its because the person making the claim is a well known nutjob.
I like the advice that Penn & Teller gave on Bullshit! regarding conspiracy theories - look at Watergate - that was a REAL conspiracy, and look how quickly it fell apart, because people couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Now look at how many people are supposedly involved with the moon landing “hoax”, or 9/11. Some of those require hundreds, if not thousands of people being involved in hiding the truth. Yet no one has come forward.
Somebody once said that so many people needed to be involved in a successful JFK assassination, that it ceased to be a conspiracy and started to approach “majority rule”.
Unfortunately, you can’t argue that way with a true CT believer. The fact that no conspiracy is revealed is evidence that there was a *successful *conspiracy.
Regards,
Shodan
I like reading books which have titles like Everything You Know Is Wrong (which is actually the title of one of them). They might summarize a hundred different conspiracy theories. Each of those theories has a little bit of evidence in its favor, stretched out by a lot of speculation and often by some making up of facts. I can’t say that I find it completely impossible that one of those theories is right. Indeed, of the hundred theories that are given in such books, I suspect that one of them is substantially right, another four aren’t right but offer some useful perspective on what’s going on in the world, and the other ninety-five are just ridiculous, making no contribution to understanding how things work. The problem is that there’s no way for me to figure out which one of those hundred theories is the correct one short of spending my entire life on investigating it.
So why should I spend any significant time on a theory with such a tiny chance of being true when there is so much more reasonably substantiated facts to learn about? I want to say to any believer in a conspiracy theory, “Yeah, your little bit of evidence is interesting. Why should I spend any time on your conspiracy theory and not on any of the vast number of others? Why don’t you believe in all the other conspiracy theories? If you believe that a little bit of evidence means that you can spend your life pushing your theory on everyone, why don’t you believe that it means that everyone else should be doing that with their theories too? I’m sorry, but I have better things to do with my life than spending more than a couple of minutes listening to your rather slim evidence.”
Sadly, many people who believe in one CT do believe in others. It seems to be a mindset, as pointed out by Carl Sagan in The Demon Haunted World. When Carl steps into a NYC cab, he finds the cabbie believes all the weird theories, but discounts the valid ones.
The lack of white plane doesn’t make it less likely that Flight 93 was deliberately shot down. I’m not saying it was shot down, but the “white plane” could be unrelated or just embellishment of real facts.
Tom,
I just had a moment and started skimming the replies to this topic. I should have spelled out what kind of plane a bit clearer. My apologies for the confusion.
According to witnesses, the plane was described as similar in look and style to a Lear jet, or a private corporate jet. Planes like this are supposedly owned and used by govt agencies like the ATF and DEA (I’m making no claim that either one of these agencies was involved.). I will assume that if the DEA and ATF own them, the DoD can also. One other item I seem to remember from the articles in the papers was that the plane had no identification markings of any kind (10 + years ago, so I could be pulling this out of some broken or damaged memory cell in my brain) If you remember, that day was beautiful and there were no visibility issues.
I would also like to add that a plane of this variety could easily be fitted with an air-to-air missile system that could launch a sidewinder or similar weapon to take out a passenger liner.
A theory needs evidence. Conspiracy theories get dismissed when they fail to produce that evidence. If a conspiracy theory is able to produce evidence that it’s true (like the Tonkin Gulf incident) then it stops being a conspiracy theory and becomes an accepted part of history.
And it’s not enough to claim that you have a piece of evidence. You have to show that your theory has more evidence to support it than the accepted mainstream theory has.
Ladies n’ gentlemen, we give you a CT in the wild.
Hi all,
I found one site that has quite a bit of the information I’ve been discussing. I don’t know when this was updated last, but a quick read of one of the pages seemed to indicate that some advertisers wrote some ad copy in some of the paragraphs, which seems to be an effective way to force me to read something I’d probably skip over. Here is the homepage to one of the sites I remember from a decade ago
If you select “mystery jet” and “eyewitnesses”, I think you will find some interesting stuff.
I also realized today that I know someone that lives in that area, but I’ve never spoken to them about it. I’m not sure if they lived there in 2001, but it’s worth a phone call to find out. (I recognized their small town’s name in one of the articles). I hope they did live there and can shed some light on it one way or the other. That would be pretty cool!
I think you will find it to be interesting reading.
I think this is a key factor. Conspiracy theories are like a shortcut to knowledge.
Let’s say you want to be an expert on history. The conventional way is to spend decades reading hundreds of books. And even then there are going to be other people who have learned more than you and can challenge your expertise.
Or you can read one book that says it contains the real truth and all the other books are lies. If you accept this then you now know more than everyone else. All the knowledge they have is meaningless so you’re ahead of them.
Touché! 