I’m endlessly fascinated by conspiracy theories and their believers. I confess a morbid curiosity about the mental contortions believers go into when confronted with facts or logical arguments that go against their pet beliefs.
Personal favorites include “chemtrails”, hollow earth theories, and the one about nine recovered alien spacecraft being kept at a site called S-4 in the Nevada desert. And I’ll just remain silent about Christianity, which after all has more than a whiff of conspiracy about it.
If I had to pick just one, however, I’d go with the idea that for thousands of years, the earth has been secretly ruled by an elite group of shape-changing reptilians (the Queen of England is one! Really!), as described by David Icke and his followers:
This organization of militant smokers believes the NIH, AMA, National Cancer Institute, Harvard University, and other respected institutions are fabricating evidence about tobacco health risks as puppets of a vast international conspiracy.
On a more serious note, I was speaking with my father on the phone tonight. I made a reference to a Cinemex special from the late 1980’s, which made the joking claim about Canadians invading through the entertainment industry.
My father makes a serious claim that Jews are taking over the country.
I haven’t told my parents yet that I am converting from Roman Catholicism to Judaism.
I floundered through the rest of conversation and then poured myself a drink.
Sheesh.
Doesn anyone still believe the Protocols of the Elders of Zion shit in the USA?
Obviously, but to have it come out of your own father.
I’m full of bile right now, thinking of the casual hate that spewed from my own father…
There’s this guy with this really wacky theory that I love about all the pyramids on Mars, evidence of an ancient civilization that ruled solar system. I think they also believe there are also visible roads and highways on the moon that NASA is covering up.
But more importantly I am in a giant experiment and all of you are scientists, or aliens, or robots, or robotic alien scientists watching my every move. There’s no way out, everyone is in on it but me. “The Truman Show” was a cruel joke on me parodying my situation. And dammit you will all pay!!! Eh maybe not, I’m pretty lazy.
I’ve been following the Chemtrail theory ever since it’s introduction to me here on the straight dope. The responses I’ve received to my questions have been similar to yours. Few of them try to even make an intelligible answer. The chemtrail conspiracy is so lame and it’s supporters so vile in their animosity I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was started by a troll and now exists soley because of trolls feeding each other.
Well, someone I know told me that Michael Jordan’s father was killed by the Mafia because they had ordered Michael to stop playing professional basketball and he wouldn’t. But this same person believed that most crimes are committed by cops, who then plant false evidence and pay people to give false testimony to convict innocent people. The fact that her husband was in jail for a very bizare crime spree may have something to do with her beliefs.
Hearing her take on the whole O.J. thing would have been funny if she hadn’t actually believed it!
One of my favorites is that the governemnt monitors how much money you have with those little strips in the dollar bills (hold them up to the light and you will see it about half an inch from the edge).
Small-time conspiracy: William Shakespeare was the love child of Elizabeth I. (Check their portraits and notice the similarity of their hairlines).
Big-time conspiracy: The Knights Templar were killing and sterilizing members of western European dynasties to get Charles V to be a universal monarch (planning to be his puppeteers, of course). They missed with Francis I of France; then the proposed match between Charles V and Mary Tudor fell through, and things really went to Hell.
(References books will tell you that the Knights Templar were eliminated as an organization in 1314. This is, of course, what they want you to believe).
I just love the Bob Lazar working to back engineer crashed UFO’s at Area 51 story. It has great pseudoscience, and lots of cover-ups and intrigue. Just to clarify, I don’t buy it - I just like the story. He has a his own site at http://www.boblazar.com, which goes into these great discussions about gravity and element 115. Check it out.
For me, it’s a close tie between the “liberal media” and the Illuminati… though I’d probably give it to the Illuminati, just out of respect for its venerated age.
[Bad joke mode]
“Cecil Adams, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and a smart blonde are in plane about to crash. There is only one parachute. Who gets it?”
[/bad joke mode]
Ah, the perpetuation of fictional characters is one of the greatest conspiracies around. Think about it. Millions of children each year are being told that…
::Wolverine dragged off. Muffled sounds coming from the back room::
[sub]What? What do you mean I can’t talk about that.
Shut up, we’ve warned you before.
You can’t stop me.
Just watch us.[/sub]
::Silence::
::More silence::
::Screaming::
::More silence::
[sub] Yes sir, I’ll obey.[/sub]
::Comes back out::
Yes Virginia, there is a Cecil Adams and I love Big Brother.
For me, it has to be the Philadelphia Experiment. That’s the one where supposedly during WWII the military was fiddling with new ways of camouflaging ships and managed (I believe it was with magnetic fields) to transport a ship instantaneously from one port to another hundreds of miles away. However, apparently some rip in space/time occurred, and when the ship was returned some of the crew were dead, some insane, and some were melded into the metal of the ship itself, still alive.
Just the sheer creepiness of it gets to me.
I also like the ones about how Tesla (the scientist, not the band ) came up with a sonic weapon so powerful it could crack the world in two.
When I visited the family in Texas, I met a friend of my cousin’s who believed that Tesla had figured out how to transmit electricity through space without wires. I tried to tell him that there can be no current of electricity without a conductor. He wanted to know what conducts lightning. I said, “The air.” The conversation went even further downhill after that.
Shawn? Is that you?? (Seriously, I had a friend who said the exact same thing. He disappeared one day and I haven’t seen him since. Maybe they killed him…)
And I have in fact been to Wyoming. Not that long ago either.
http://www.enterprisemission.com, yay! Richard Hoagland is thoroughly wack, but I find the articles on his page incredibly entertaining. He’s the original “face on Mars” guy, but recently he’s “discovered” liquid water on Mars, bushes on Mars, a Martian underground train system, a crashed spaceship on Mars, and Martian trilobites about a kilometer across. And then he’s got a whole “everyone in NASA and the government are freemasons” thing going, too. It’s great. Check out the messageboard there, too. Yikes.
I corresponded with a wacko for a while who insisted that the entire Universe could be explained by things spitting other things out. The Earth spit the moon out, and it evolved outward into its present orbit. The black hole at the center of the Galaxy spits stars out. Some universal-spitting-outing-thing spits out galaxies.
He had all the earmarks of one of the great wackos. His little paradigm explained everything. He didn’t suggest it as a possible explanation for a few phenomena. It was the answer to all astronomy’s questions, and the origin of all things. His stubbornness was majestic. I firmly disproved his favorite physical mechanism: magnetic fields. His response? "Well, I hear there are some researchers in Australia who have discoverd a Fifth Force. . . " All the same, he was unfailingly genteel and polite, even when I lost patience and got snippy. (You are all thinking, snippy? Podkayne? Nawwww. . . )
I do hope that he publishes a book sometime, and gains a following. He’s such a sweet guy, I can’t help but wish him well.
But how can they be covering them up when the moon landings were faked on a soundstage? I mean, the technology to get to the moon has only ever been owned by the ancient Aztecs…
) came up with a sonic weapon so powerful it could crack the world in two.