There is a conspiracy. People who say the word in a conversation are more likely to be looking for someone who won't bring up wild theories about how Elvis, JFK and Bigfoot are frozen in an underground bunker.
There are conspiracies that do exist. Major companies have been found guilty of conspiring to fix prices and reduce competition. Any planned criminal act committed by more than one person could be considered a conspiracy.
Many conspiracy theorists see a hidden hand behind the world's major events. Conspiracy theories are hard to get rid of: Some may contain truth or provide an emotional need for believers. Hardcore believers are good at rationalizing evidence that doesn't jive with their beliefs. Eyewitnesses who disagree with their conclusions are mistaken.
The truth is out there.
There are some good videos for you.
There are 9/11 conspiracy theories.
An aerial view of the NYC Custom house after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. HUM Images/Universal Images Group is a part of the Universal Images Group.
There is overwhelming evidence that the 9/11 attacks were the result of a conspiracy.
This is too easy for some. Conspiracy theorists have a variety of explanations for what happened at the World Trade Center and Pentagon that day, many of which involve knowledge by President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and top Bush advisors.
The attacks being orchestrated by Israel are often used as anti-Semetic tropes in conspiracy theories. The Twin Towers must have been brought down by controlled demolition because jet fuel can't melt steel beams. A 2006 NOVA documentary debunks these claims. It is possible for the columns holding up skyscrapers to fail catastrophically when exposed to fires.
If a hijacked airplane did not crash into the Pentagon, where is Flight 77 and its passengers? Are they with the Roswell aliens? bureaucratic incompetence is often mistaken for a conspiracy. Our government is so efficient, knowledgeable and capable that it could not possibly have messed up the job so badly in detecting the plot ahead of time or responding to the attacks.
Princess Diana was murdered.
Tim Graham Photo Library has this image.
Conspiracy theories swirled around Princess Diana's death in 1997. It was a shock when John F. Kennedy died so suddenly. Princess Diana died of old age, political intrigue, and eating too much rich food; they don't get killed by a drunk driver.
The billionaire who promoted it was the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who was killed along with Diana. The Royal Family requested that the accident be an assassination, according to Al-Fayed. The 2006 inquiry dismissed Al-Fayed's claims as baseless, and the inquest into Diana's death concluded that the conspiracy theory was without substance. The New York Times reported that on April 7, 2008, the coroner's jury concluded that Diana and Al-Fayed were killed because of negligent driving by their drunken chauffeur and pursuit of the photographers.
Germi_p is the image credit.
Have you ever been watching a movie and then got high? Are you sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly want to buy a car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy. Proponents of the conspiracy theory include Wilson Bryan Key, author of "Subliminal Seduction", and Vance Packard, author of "The Hidden Persuaders". The books caused a public uproar and led to FCC hearings, but many of them have since been discredited and several studies of the effects of subliminal advertising have been faked.
In 1990 the band Judas Priest was sued for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages, but the case was dismissed. Mental processing can be tested. Just because a person sees a message or advertisement subconsciously doesn't mean much. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, even if you see a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time. Getting a person to do something based on that split-second is not easy.
There is a moon landing hoax.
There is a picture of Buzz Aldrin saluting the U.S. flag on the moon. The image is from NASA.
The astronauts were on the moon. The moon landing never happened in the 70s.
The book and movie "We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle" describe the conspiracy. There was a Fox documentary in 2001 called "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?", which claimed that the whole Apollo moon-landing program was faked.
There are lots of debunkings of the various moon hoax claims, and then there's the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as being of extraterrestrial origin. How did NASA get the rocks? Why would scientists from all over the world agree to participate in a hoax?
Many astronauts are offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In 2002, when Buzz Aldrin was called a liar and Coward by Bart Sibrel, Buzz punched him in the jaw.
The death of Paul McCartney.
Paul McCartney will perform at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio in October of 2021. Kevin Mazur is the photographer for The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Paul McCartney is alive and well. If the coronaviruses hadn't canceled his shows, he would still be touring. He has a website and occasionally appears in the tabloids.
It's good for a guy that some theorists think died in 1966.
The "Paul is dead" conspiracy is based on the fact that Paul McCartney was decapitated in a car accident after getting into an argument with the other Beatles. The band hired a look-alike to cover the whole thing up.
The band took great pains to let the public know that something wasn't right after they went through all this trouble. On the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed crossing a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot and out of step with the other three. This must mean something. Despite public denials by the band, fans came together to look for more clues.
John F. Kennedy was killed.
President John Kennedy and his wife are in a motorcade that goes from the Dallas airport to the city. Bettmann's image was used.
John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Was Lee Harvey Oswald alone? Was there a second shooter on the grassy knoll?
These questions are the beginning of a vast arena of conspiracy theories that have spawned hundreds of books, articles and films. It didn't help that Lee Harvey Oswald was murdered in the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters by a guy with ties to the Mob just two days after the assassination. People thought the whole thing stunk.
There are many culprits that have been suggested as the masterminds of the Kennedy assassination, including the government of Cuba, anti-Castro activists, the CIA, or Vice President Lyndon Johnson. The official investigation into Kennedy's death found no evidence of overarching conspiracy, though plenty of theories still flourish.
Roswell crash and cover-up.
The Roswell Daily Record was published in 1947. The Roswell Daily Record has an image.
Almost all skeptics and believers agree that something crashed on a remote ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The government initially claimed it was a saucer, but then said it was a weather balloon. The best evidence shows that it was a high-altitude, top-secret military balloon called Project Mogul.
The photos of the Project Mogul balloons are very similar to the descriptions of the wreck first reported by the original witnesses. The stories about crashed alien bodies did not surface until decades later and no one considered the Roswell crash to be unusual until thirty years later, when a book on the topic was published. The cover-up did not hide a crashed saucer. It hid a Cold War spy program.
The protocols of the elders of Zion.
The Chronicle/Alamy has an image.
The book "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a hoax that claims to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. It was first published in Russia in 1905 and described how a group of Jews would target Christians' morality, finances, and health. The idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy has been repeated by many prominent people, including Henry Ford and Mel Gibson. In 1920, Henry Ford paid $500,000 to have half a million copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" published, and in the 1930s, the book was used by the Nazis as justification for its genocide against Jews.
The book is still in print and is widely distributed around the world.
The panic of Satan.
The image is from Shutterstock.
During the 1980s and 1990s, America was convinced that an underground network of Satanists was abducting, torturing and abusing children. The conspiracy theories destroyed lives and livelihoods.
Geraldo Rivera's NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground" was the highest point. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. It was the most watched documentary of all time. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said.
The idea that memories of abuse could be recovered with the help of hypnotism and a therapist caused the panic. The idea was popularized in the 1980 book "Michelle Remembers," which was co-written by a Canadian psychiatrist and the patient he eventually married.
The McMartin preschool trial in California in 1983 caused a lot of panic. The police sent a letter to the parents warning them that their children may have been abused and asking them to ask what happened. Children of networks of secret tunnels and witches flying through the air gave testimony to authorities.
The daycare owners were acquitted or had the charges dismissed after seven years. A person was jailed for five years while awaiting trials. Similar accusations spread through daycares around the country. The methods of questioning small children that were discredited led to children making sensational accusations because they wanted to please the authority figures questioning them.
The FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded in a 1992 report that the rumors about Satanism were not true. The greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century was the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists, according toPhillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
There are Chemtrails.
Nicolas Economou/Nur Photo is the image credit.
There are long water condensation trails left behind by airplanes as they travel. The tracks are cloud-like.
The condensation trails are more than just a joke to some conspiracy theorists. The "Chemtrails" conspiracy theory claims that scientists and governments are seeding other chemicals into the atmosphere. Why? Pick a reason. It could be biological warfare, population control, or an attempt to manipulate the weather.
Researchers who study clouds' impact on global temperatures are often harassed by Chemtrails believers, who think they're part of a large-scale conspiracy to secretly spray unknown chemicals into the atmosphere. A study in 2016 found no evidence of unusual or unexplained contamination in the environment. True believers aren't swayed, as reported by The Guardian.
Barack Obama is a birther.
The owner of a used car dealership paid $2,500 to have a billboard painted that said "birther" John Moore is the photographer.
The chemtrails conspiracy is in the background of certain communities, never really penetrating the larger public. Others have big impacts. One of the latter is the Barack Obama birtherism conspiracy.
The 44th president of the United States was born in 1961. "birthers" began to circulate a conspiracy theory that Obama was actually born in the country of his father's birth, as soon as he began his campaign for president in 2008. Even though his mother was an American citizen, they argued that Obama was not a natural born citizen of the U.S. and thus could not be president.
There were announcements of Obama's birth in the Honolulu newspaper, or that friends of Obama's mother remembered the day she went into labor. In order to fight the conspiracy, Obama had to release a copy of his birth certificate in 2008 and a new one in 2011.
According to Gallup polling, the number of Americans who believed in birtherism was reduced by the release of 2011. Conservative political activists and pundits advocated for birtherism. Among them? The soon-to-be president was Donald Trump.
5G and covert.
On August 29, 2020, anti-lockdown conspiracy theorists and coronaviruses deniers will protest in Trafalgar Square in London against the government and mainstream media who they say are behind misinformation about the COVID-19 epidemic. Richard Baker is the author of In Pictures.
The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned more conspiratorial thinking than any other event since 9/11. Every government's reaction to the virus is a conspiracy as well as the origin of it. Many people think doctors are lying about deaths caused by the COVID virus. Kevin Trudeau, bestselling author of "Natural Cures They Don't Want You to Know About", has fed into the conspiracy about medical by fomenting a distrust of Big pharma.
There is a conspiracy that mixes fears of 5G wireless technology with fears of the virus. The researchers reported in 2020 that people are sick with COVID because of the interference from cell phone towers. The COVID-19 vaccines contain tracking chips that connect to 5G networks so that the government can surveille everyone's movements, according to a conspiracy theory.
5G chips are too large to fit through a vaccine syringe, and even the smallest chips that could fit need a power source that couldn't make the squeeze.
Birds are not real.
The image is courtesy of temizyurek.
When is a conspiracy not a conspiracy? When it's a piece of performance art.
Does that make it more of a conspiracy theory?
Peter McIndoe, 23, started spreading the idea of the Birds Aren't Real conspiracy. McIndoe insisted in media interviews and online that birds aren't real, but rather are drones made by the U.S. government. Birds Aren't Real has a staff, has organized real-life protests, has bought real-life billboards, and has branded vans with their claim. McIndoe says the goal is to parody misinformation that Gen Z finds itself stewing in.
Birds Aren't Real is not a joke from the outside. He told The New York Times that it was from the deep inside. Birds Aren't Real has been a way for people to process the lunacy in all this.
Local media often reported on Birds Aren't Real as if it was a joke, as if it was something young people really believed. The organizers of Birds Aren't Real hope the joke will expose all the ways misinformation thrives.
McIndoe said that they have been spreading misinformation for the past four years. It's about showing America the way in the internet age.
Live Science published the original article.
