List of the "World's Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories"
From the Swallowing The Camel blog, a list of "The World's Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories." Here are a few of my faves, in no particular order. The author of main proponent of each is listed beside the theory. From the post:
• Stephen King killed John Lennon. (Steve Lightfoot)Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)
• WWII was staged. It never really happened. The Illuminati employed elaborate special effects, stage magic, and phony journalism to scare the world into pacifism. (Donald Holmes)
• The doomed Franklin Expedition was sent to the Arctic not only to find the Northwest Passage, but to secretly investigate UFO sightings that had been reported since the 1700s. The men were captured, experimented upon, and eaten by giant aliens. (Jeffrey Blair Latta)
• The 1939 War of the Worlds radio broadcoast was a psychological warfare study funded by C.D. Jackson on behalf of the Rockefeller Foundation, designed to find out how Americans would react to an enemy invasion. Funny... in a trailer for his mockumentary F is for Fake, Orson Welles did say the WoW broadcast had "secret sponsors". (Daniel Hopsicker)
• Aspartame, flouride, genetically modified foods, and vaccines are used specifically to keep us sick and open to suggestion, and/or as part of a secret depopulation plan designed by the world's elite.
the latest
latest episodes
And this is where we get the phrase "Holy infant, so tender and mild."
You forgot one!
* Blogger publicizes a list of truthful facts labeled as "weird, stupid conspiracy theories" -- CIA agents in charge of blogs promoted by the NSA's Technorati circulate link, where the disinformation is distributed everywhere.
j/k ;-)
Aspartame, flouride, genetically modified foods, and vaccines are used specifically to keep us sick and open to suggestion, and/or as part of a secret depopulation plan designed by the world's elite.
That one I don't find so hard to believe...
Aspartame and flouride keep us sick! Thats not stupid or weird....
I really hate to nitpick here, but flouride is actually part of an international Communist plot to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
That's why those of us with slightly more interesting palates tend to add barbecue sauce.
"The Illuminati employed elaborate special effects, stage magic, and phony journalism to scare the world into pacifism."
Oh, well that was certainly a rip-rousing success.
true dat!
i'm partial to the idea that we are living on the inside surface of an air bubble, the sun is tiny and hangs in the center of the bubble and the universe is solid rock but then again i haven't eaten or slept in 6 years so what do i know.
Odd list, Gnosticism isn't really a 'conspiracy theory'.
Nation of Islam: White people were created in a lab.
Well, that one is true.
You're just trying to get us to sing that babyback ribs song, aren't you?
but seriously folks...
ASPARTAME:
57 reports that aspartame is dangerous from mainstream scientists:
http://aspartametruth.com/57reports.html
i had a personal experience with my mentally sharp mother experiencing bizarre early memory loss and having the symptoms i was able to notice disappear when she stopped drinking diet coke.
here are 100s of other personal accounts of aspartame toxicity:
http://www.holisticmed.com/aspartame/adverse.txt
donald rumsfeld being CEO of g.d. seale & co. at the time of aspartame's approval gives some credence to the "powerful people make other people sick or die on purpose" theory as it reminds me of other homicidal/ecocidal acts he has been very openly involved with, although he may have made less money on the iraq war than he made with aspartame.
CONSPIRACIES:
each person forms multiple "conspiracies" with each other person they interact with, forming tangled alliances. even though you might be a skull & bones member, you might also be a bohemian grove attendee, or part of another "group of friends". that being said, it is obvious that people get powerful when they get together. what is in question is the specific scale of some powerful collectives on earth, and who does what.
One word: Matrix
I just love it how the site has all kinds of attributions for conspiracies revolving around 'reptilian space aliens' and 'the evil jews' and yet it doesn't list any attributions for the fluoride or aspartame 'conspiracies.' So let me be the first to point out The Fluoride Action Network.
If you look at the peer reviewed studies themselves -- when you get down to actual science, you'll find that fluoride and aspartame actually are quite harmful. Unfortunately, David Pescovitz here doesn't seem to be much interested in actual science.
C'mon David Pescovitz -- who's stupid now? Do your research before you broad brush everything as a 'stupid conspiracy theory.'
I went to school in a small town in Ontario, Canada. There was a man in town who drank about two 2 litre bottles of aspartame sweetened Coke almost every day. I don't know the details surrounding his (early) death, but I remember hearing that the official cause of death was "aspartame poisoning".
Btw, I've heard airline pilots cannot drink beverages containing aspartame prior to flights, because of it's negative effects.
Aspartame does break down into methanol, which is not good for you. However, one diet soda a day contributes about 10mcg of Methanol to your body, which is equivalent to what you get from natural sources. That is to say it approximately doubles your methanol intake to drink one diet soda. While twice is a lot, it's probably okay. Twelve-pack a day, probably not. I drink one or two every few days, and haven't had my brain leak out my ear yet, and am not really worried about it. I'll stop right around when I quit welding in my (poorly ventilated) garage...
Fluoridated water is just good health policy.
If common things like fluoride and aspartame were really bad for you, our average life span would not have increased over the last century. We've just recently gotten to the point where we live long enough for cancer (etc) to be a major issue, so now we have to start working on the low-level long-term effect stuff.
But I'm still sticking to fluoride toothpaste. I like my teeth.
I have one for you: A completely incompetent Bush & Co. somehow successfully masterminds a conspiracy to fly planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The hundreds of people necessary to pull it off manage to keep quiet about it. The people flying the planes and who were talking to people on the ground were merely faked. Bits of flight 77 (both human and metal remains) at the Pentagon are strewn about the lawn to make it look like it wasn't a missile that hit the building. Mhmmm.....
Brushing your teeth with floride toothpaste and drinking floride in the tap water is two different things...
The government medicating out water with floride or anything is wrong...
There is no way to control intake...People should have a choice of what they put in their bodies.
Aspartame...THATS ANOTHER STORY!
You absolutely have a choice. It's called bottled water.
I've seen one of the main propagandists of the Stephen King/John Lennon theory! During my teenage years of 1994, I was driving through Connecticut on I-84 and his windowless, Econoline van was completely plastered with newspaper articles, insanely bizarre typed pages, pictures of Stephen King next to Mark David Chapman -- it looked like a mid-80s punk zine had exploded all over his van. The biggest alert was the huge headlines that read about Stephen King was the real killer of John Lennon. Now that I think about it, he was probably on his way to Maine...but certainly my curiosity was piqued and only reinforced my love of conspiracy theories for edutainment purposes.
The definitive text on this stuff is of course Robert Anton Wilson's "Everything is under control"
http://www.rawilson.com/undercontrol.html
I was disappointed that David Icke didn't get a mention. The UK royal family as shape shifting, blood sucking lizards from Zeta Reticuli, running everything in the world for their dark eldritch purposes, really appeals to my sense of humour. That and Prince Charles performing baby sacrifices in the pyramid at the top of the phallic symbol, Canary Wharf, on the main intersection of ley-lines in London. It gets even better when the underlying ideas end up as story lines in Doctor Who.
I've got one for you:
The Soviet empire feigned defeat and went underground. They will rise again, any day now.
Think about it -- they were masters of chess, and central planning. They had entire cities dedicated to science. The confrontational tactics of the Cold War were getting nowhere. The Soviets knew that capitalism is cyclic, and planned a opportunistic coup for a time long after its planners were dead.
They implanted a neurovirus that could be activated at a later date. Infected people would be unwitting sleeper agents, who could be activated with a signal.
One day, people wake up, and forget their bourgeois identity of yesterday.
Suddenly it seems absurd that we could ever have let comrades starve, for the sake of a now obsolete accountkeeping method, called "money".
The neurovirus hasn't been sitting dormant in your brain. Part of your brain is actually a node in a distributed supercomputer designed by the Soviets.
The Soviets pwned us a long time ago!
Unbeknowst to you, you have been exchanging datasets with fellow nodes in the Soviet botnet for years. Subtle messages, cues, steganographic, compressed datasets. Your conscious mind ignores them. But the virus knows how to read them.
One day, the botnet will emerge. Your brain will have newly freed resources. It will feel as though you had just spent a lifetime, with one arm tied behind your back.
The botnet has been carrying out massive computations using a genetic algorithm. Entire toolsets and technologies have been developed just for you, army of Soviet Max Bournes.
We'll emerge from the matrix of capitalism, and make a giant leap forward in cognitive abilities. Revolution through evolution. An egalitarian society, without war, or poverty. Power to the people!
I love Big Brother!
Yeah, the vaccine conspiracy, cause smallpox is a great loss to mankind. Kept us on our toes.
These are what are in the vaccines we get.
diphtheria,
tetanus,
pertussis (whooping cough),
polio
Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib)
measles,
mumps
rubella
Then there are the others like tetanus, typhus, yellow fever etc.
I do know that in some rare cases, vaccines can cause all sorts of problems. As an ADD person, I've heard the theories about vaccines causing ADD and autism, and it seems quite likely. But I still prefer this situation.
It's a miracle that in our days that most children in the developed world LIVE. They don't die before their fifth birthday. This is unprecedented in human history.
In times past, women gave birth to 8 kids to have 2-3 survive who might fall foul of typhus, war, robbery or starvation in later years.
Measles, whooping cough are still around due to some parents not vaccinating their children.
Read up on every one of these diseases and think of the alternative.
Don't forget smallpox. Many people are not vaccinated, no need to really with only two labs in the world having it, but it can be used as a biological weapon. And I seem to remember there was a breakout of the vaccine a couple of years ago in some british lab.I have my ugly starburst smallpox vaccination on my arm so I'm not too bad. Though what I would do with ebola (Soviets trying to make it airborne! Shudder), who knows?
About aspartame, sheesh, cigarettes are probably worse for you and they are legal. Yea, it's all part of the conspiracy to make you fat and stupid.
Coke in general is terrible for your health.
Boing Boing is a plot by the Reptilians to take over the world via overwhelming certain media outlets with accurate information from a Happy Mutants' POV.
I am from Maine, so I can start such rumors and rumors of rumored plots.
8-)
Space Race Ace,
I've also seen that van, completely covered in stick-on letters spelling out the conspiracy -- except in my case, it was in 1998, in Monterey, California, when I was stationed at the Defense Language Institute there. I gave the guy a dollar for his xeroxed pamphlet "proving" that Stephen King had killed John Lennon. It was a hoot. It was passed around the barracks for a while, and never made it back to me, which is a shame. I wish I still had it.
I lived in Berkeley in the 80s, and that's where the "Stephen King killed John Lennon" hung out then, being very hard to miss as he passed out his flyers and stapled them to phone poles. The local alt-weekly (The East Bay Express) even did a big cover story on him.
World War II in Europe was sparked not by invasion and annexation of Poland, but instead was due to the Nazi Saucers having stolen the Moon out of the sky and sealing it in the Underground Sea, via Interlaken, Switzerland.
"The Greatest Generation" don't like to talk about that, now do they?
Think about it -- Why would turning off your lights during the Blitz have any effect on Nazi bombing runs, unless there were no moonlight illuminating the landscape???
After the US enveloped Switzerland (before the Soviets could seize it!), the Operation Paperclip scientists assisted the Americans in transporting the Moon under the high deserts under Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico.
This is the reason why the images of the Apollo Moon "Landings" a) have no stars and b) convince the naked eye.
They were filmed on a soundstage... ON THE MOON!
It's true©
I've said for years that World War II was a hoax. I guess I just didn't tell the right people. Maybe I should be grateful to Donald Holmes for getting the word out, but instead, I feel suspicious, like he's rying to cast doubt on my theory by saying it in a silly way.
Has anybody taken credit for TV making everybody stupid on purpose so that employers can pay less and sell more stupid junk to everybody? It's not the same as "The Marching Morons." Same effect, different cause.
Gnosticism? Seriously? Muight as well include Buddhism for espousing a near-identical philosophy.
Sheesh.
AGAIN:
but seriously folks,
ASPARTAME:
PERLA says: "About aspartame, sheesh, cigarettes are probably worse for you and they are legal. Yea, it's all part of the conspiracy to make you fat and stupid. Coke in general is terrible for your health."
of course. the problem is that (almost) everyone knows about the dangers of cigarettes, but many consider aspartame to be healthy alternative to sugar. of course, large amounts of even unrefined sugars aren't that healthy, but i'd take honey or evaporated cane juice over aspartame unless i was dangerously overweight.
but to bring this back to the original topic...
CONSPIRACY:
it does seem somewhat conspiratorial that some of the most dangerous and questionably useful drugs are legal and easily available (low-quality alcohol, tobacco with additives, coffee with hormone-laden milk and white sugar, etc...) while the drugs with the most well-documented therapeutic benefits and lower health risks (cannabis, psilocybin, dmt, etc...) are illegal and even damned to "schedule 1" status.
it's totally obvious that the "public health" isn't something that governments, pharmaceutical companies or vice industries give a shit about, legal or illegal. just because you can acquire something doesn't mean it is good to consume.
so, as usual, you have to research your own interpretation of health. because every time someone makes themselves sick, the "illuminati" has an orgasm. a big, profitable orgasm.
Vaccines don't cause autism, god. Do some damn research, that asinine theory was fully debunked a decade ago.
As for aspartame being bad for you: well, duh. Anything is bad for you if you drink 2 liters of it a day. I've drunk 12-24 ounces of Diet Coke nearly every day for more than 2 decades now, and I don't yet appear to be suffering from it.
Similarly, I've drunk fluoridated tap water my entire life, and all it's ever done is prevent cavities. (Also, please note that there is a u in that word, it's not spelled "floride". Amazing how conspiracy-addled pinheads never know the correct spellings of the things they're ranting about.)
I don't doubt that there are people who react badly to tiny amounts of either, just like there are people who are allergic to aspirin or peanuts. That doesn't mean any of those things are harmful--in reasonable amounts--to the entire population.
but seriously, june...
JUNE says: As for aspartame being bad for you: well, duh. Anything is bad for you if you drink 2 liters of it a day. I've drunk 12-24 ounces of Diet Coke nearly every day for more than 2 decades now, and I don't yet appear to be suffering from it.
jamesgyre says: JUNE, you actually do appear to be suffering from several symptoms of aspartame exposure including irritability, aggression and anxiety. your need to insult people as "asinine" or "pinheaded" that have witnessed different observational data than you is strangely unscientific for someone that encourages research.
you betray some intelligence, so in an appeal to that, i encourage you to take the "aspartame challenge." stop all intake of aspartame products for a month. see if you find yourself less eager to insult others for poor spelling when you could instead be generously providing some solid research for them to think over (like research that proves that mercury poisoning has no connection to autism.)
Calton, I remember that guy..I even have one of his flyers somewhere. I used to have a decent collection from berkeley, inc. the guy who was being destroyed via fluorescent lights by the government, and the 'aliens are everywhere' guy..
I hate the Gold Medal flouride the worst.
Yeah, but the chocolate-chip cookies you bake with it are GOOD for you.
Jennifer, did you have any of the comic strips by the guy whose grand idea was consolidating all the banks to make them more efficient? As I recall, he was arrested when he took over a bank in an attempt to publicize his idea.
The Soviet Conspiracy? It has begun.
Your brain's totally rooted, and part of it is crunching numbers for the Soviets even as you read this.
One of these mornings, Tovarisch, you will join us.
...and the world will live as one. -- Lenin.
Well, for all you fluoridated water conspiricists, I have to report some empirical bad news. I grew up in an area that did NOT have water artificially fluoridated by the government because what few people lived there, drank untreated well water straight from an aquifer. I have lots and LOTS of fillings. I thought it was because I didn't get enough fluoride as a kid - until recently. I was surfing a mineralogy website and found out that the well water of my youth was chock full of NATURAL fluoride.
When you live several hours from the nearest trauma center or specialists, you ignore anything short of a missing limb. People without fluoridated water aren't necessarily healthier than 'city folk', it's just that there's no one to diagnose or record illnesses. Thus, the perception that "we were all healthier back in the good old days before the government came to town". We weren't, we just had no one to complain to.