Over the years, those who believe in conspiracies theories have been given a bad rap. They’ve become synonymous with the paranoid and aluminum hat wearers while they are actually much more common than expected. Half of all Americans believe in some conspiracy theory. Keep in mind, not all conspiracies are about aliens or giant lizards controlling the world. A conspiracy theory is a hypothesis suggesting that two or more persons or organization have come together to cause or cover up an event or situation typically regarded as illegal or harmful. While some are made up as a joke, many of them take on a much more serious stance and cause us question what is valid in our society.
The government isn’t known for being truthful and has kept many secrets from the public before.
The Watergate scandal is one of the more famous examples of this as it was initially a cover up over the many abuses of powers by the Nixon administration concerning the FBI, CIA and IRS. It led to the indictment of 69 people and a presidential pardon on Nixon. But it wasn’t just Nixon’s presidency that was wrought with lies.
The Pentagon Papers, which were discovered by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, proved that the U.S. government had secretly enlarged the scale of the Vietnam War by bombing neighboring countries, costal raids and Marine Corps attacks which caused the deaths and homelessness of countless lives.
It wasn’t until recently that Edward Snowden released thousands of documents on the NSA revealed just how vast the government surveillance actually is and how little privacy the public actually has.
Not all conspiracies are fictitious as several of the more disturbing ones are actually correct.
Project MKUltra, or the CIA’s mind control program, was the code name given to a government program that experimented on unwilling human subjects in search of more effective torture methods. This meant subjecting them to drug injections, sensory deprivation, verbal and sexual abuse, isolation and many other various forms of torture. The full extent of the project is unknown as the CIA Director destroyed many of the files before they were uncovered with the Freedom of Information Act of 1977.
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a clinical study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service on the effects of untreated syphilis. Hundreds of impoverished, African American males were told that they did not have syphilis when they actually did just so the government could monitor them and the effects the disease would cause. The symptoms of syphilis include fever, headache, rash, and eventually, heart and brain damage when left untreated. Most of the subjects died and spread the disease to their wives and children despite that treatment for the disease was easily available.
Operation Northwoods was a proposal made in 1962 from the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States government calling for the CIA to commit acts of terrorism against the American public and military targets and blame it on the Cuban government to justify a war against Cuba. This included hijacking planes, crashing a plane filled with college students, killing Cuban refugees and bombing major U.S. cities such as Miami. Thankfully, it was rejected by the Kennedy Administration.
Several conspiracy theories are not so easy to dismiss as absurd since trust in the government is the only thing supporting the public belief.
Is it really so hard to believe that in the heat of competition during the Cold War that several people died while the U.S. and Soviet Union raced for space? The Lost Cosmonauts theory is that Yuri Gagarin was the first man to survive a human spaceflight and that several people died before this success. There are recordings and photos to support this theory while the only thing against it is the government’s word.
The Death of Diana, Princess of Wales has long been subjected to speculation as there are many unanswered questions surrounding the event. Occurrences such as how it took the ambulance an hour to reach the hospital when it should have taken less than half of that time, the illegal embalmment of her body that happened right after her death before the police could inspect it for foul play, differing blood test results of the driver and a letter that Diana wrote days before stating that her ex-husband, Charles, Prince of Wales, was trying to kill her just don’t add up like they should.
The Denver Airport is surrounded by dozens of conspiracies, many of them quite bizarre, but that is because of the many oddities about it. Construction of the airport went nearly $2 billion over the $4.8 billion budget which raise eyebrows as well as there are several morbid murals throughout the airport with dead children, demons and horrifying soldier give the airport a creepy atmosphere. Aliens might not be the cause, but there is something definitely off about the airport.
I’m not saying go believe in Bigfoot or alien invasions, just to open your eyes. Be sure to evaluate what you believe as truth. Don’t let the government speak it for you. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
