Which of these conspiracy theories is most plausible?

JFK

also, ban.

I hate all of these so fucking much

So do I. Amazingly, 48% of the UK population believe in the Area 51 theory.

what was the question? who did they ask it to?

US government knew about attacks on Pearl harbor and let them happen

they decrypted stuff about the attacks a couple hours before they actually occured (specifically, instructions to break off negotiations in anticipation) so this is the most plausible

people under-estimate how much fun it is to believe this shit

It's gotta be lizard people.

David Kelly, followed by JFK.

surely the whole point of barcodes is to provide some control over certain elements of human interaction, namely buying & selling & stock control etc. its not exactly a conspiracy is it? ooh traffic lights are designed to control people!!

i've met someone who believed AIDS was created as a form of population control, which is...mindboggling, to say the least

yeah we all know it came from space

US government knew about attacks on Pearl harbor and let them happen

Not really

The things on this list which make me least angry are David Kelly (a few things don't seem to add up about his death, but then a whole bunch of things don't add up about any conspiracy theory either) and scientologists, not because I believe they control anything much, but if anything increases general suspicion about them then I guess it's a good thing. Or something. So I suppose most plausible = Dr Kelly.

The conspiracy theories which make me most angry are the moon landing ones and global warming denial. NNGGHH.

Aliens most "plausible", out of a list of very implausible shit. The "moon landing was a hoax" people piss me off the most, because they're prepared to believe the most stupid bullshit in the face of libraries and archives full of evidence. And because they are completely ignorant of how impossible it would be to get hundreds of thousands of people to keep a secret in order for the "hoax" to remain undetected. And because they refuse to believe actual physical evidence, like being able to bounce a laser beam off a mirror that was put on the moon by Buzz/Neil...

However this makes me feel better...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOo6aHSY8hU

i believe 5 of those things

There are remains of aliens/UFOs in Area 51

i choose to believe this one the most often

john d otm, forget this garbage.

on the bright side, it seems like this kind of thinking is becoming much less prominent.

?!?!!?

What kind of fantasyland do you live in

Mythbusters is going to do one on the moon landing hoaxers, aren't they?

also, tonight on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, we have...

You've been Pentaconned!

i dunno, maybe i've grown up or something or changed my media consumption habits. but i hear very little about any of this kind of thing anymore, compared to say a decade ago.

maybe it seems like obvious bullshit and i don't pay it much mind.

http://www.avclub.com/content/interview/matt_taibbi

AVC: In The Great Derangement, you document your infiltration into John Hagee's Cornerstone Church and your incognito participation in 9/11 Truth Movement meetings. Have you gotten a reaction from either camp since the book's publication?

MT: Oh yeah. Among the people that I was in church with, one of them actually saw me on television earlier this spring and called me up right afterward. So my cover was blown before the book even came out, which was kind of embarrassing. But I haven't heard too much from that whole crew. Weirdly enough, the letters I've been getting from a lot of Christians—not specifically from that church, but from other fundamentalist Christians—have been strangely positive in a way that I really didn't expect. A lot of people are very critical of Hagee's church, that it's deviating from the real message of Christ. I get a lot of letters of the "If only you'd experienced Christ through our church" variety. There's a lot of that, but relatively little abuse of the sort that you would've expected. The Truthers, on the other hand… [Laughs.] I think they're probably the most self-Googling sliver of humanity on the planet. The instant you write anything about them, your e-mail is flooded with letters. I haven't gotten a single positive reaction from anybody who's a self-described Truther.

AVC: You'd think a movement devoted to seeking truth would encourage debate as a way to arrive at the truth, rather than trying to suppress whatever doesn't already align with their own views.

MT: Absolutely. I make this point with Truthers all the time, that the whole direction of everything they do is the opposite of what finding out the truth is. They approach the subject matter in much the same way a defense attorney does. A defense attorney takes a case and he sees six pieces of evidence that are going to convict his client, and he sets out to destroy those six pieces of evidence, irrelevant to the actual truth of the situation. That's not to denigrate defense attorneys, but that's what they do. It's exactly the same thing that Truthers do. They just take the 9/11 Commission Report piece by piece, and they try to break down links in that evidentiary chain that compose the official story, but they never really try to find out what happened. They're just trying to convince you that the official story couldn't possibly be true. For instance, the stuff about Hani Hanjour—the hijacker who reportedly made that maneuver into the Pentagon. They're really hopped up about the fact that he was a bad pilot and couldn't have made that sophisticated maneuver. But they make absolutely no effort to tell you what actually did happen. They're like, "Oh, it could have been a remote-controlled plane." Offhandedly, they'll say that. [Laughs.] Like that's a very simple thing. It's really weird.

AVC: The whole "smoking gun" of the Truth Movement seems to revolve around the collapse of Building 7, near the Twin Towers. There's this matter-of-fact assertion that the government obviously blew it up.

MT: I love when you ask them, "Okay, so let's just say for instance that it wasn't collapsed by the fire. Why would you demolish Building 7? What would be the propaganda purpose of doing that?" They're like, "Oh, you know, they're hiding the evidence." I'm like, "They need to blow up a whole building to hide the evidence?" It's just crazy. But whatever. I mean, once you jump on board that train, you're on it for life. [Laughs.]

AVC: This "great derangement," as you've coined it, do you think it's unique to these times? Conspiracy theories and apocalyptic religious dogma have been around in various forms for a very long time. What's different about it now?

MT: America's always had a real passion for lunatic movements. That's one of the things we're probably known for around the world, I would imagine. I think what's different about it now is that we had a relatively cohesive national society for a while. For a giant industrial country, we had a situation where pretty much everybody agreed on the same sets of facts when they talked about the news, and they believed in the media. When somebody reported something, they generally accepted that it was true. For a long time, I think that was the case in this country. But recently, because of a bunch of things—there was a general collapse in faith of the mainstream news media, because of Jayson Blair. And the 2000 election was a situation where if you were on the Bush side, you believed X set of facts, and if you were on the Democratic side, you believed Y set of facts. The wound was never healed. You got a situation where people decided to reality-shop and search for their own sets of facts at their own news sources, and they just kind of stopped coming to this common meeting-place where we all had the same commonly accepted set of facts. And because of the Internet, which is a new phenomenon, people can do that more than ever before. You can have somebody living next door to you and you can live in a completely different world from that person, which is definitely something we've never experienced before. So I think just because of the media landscape and the way we get our information now, we're more atomized and isolated from each other than ever before.

AVC: The Internet has fed a lot of the suspicion people have for "mainstream media," but does the Internet suffer from its own distortions? Aren't there a lot of so-called "news" sites that manufacture their own version of events to play on fears and serve their own needs just as much as the established media?

MT: Yeah, sure. It's just for different reasons. Obviously the commercial news media tries to get you worked up and terrified so you'll buy products that they're advertising. I think the Internet is a completely different phenomenon. When you have movements like this that are preying on fears, or your misconceptions, they're doing it basically just to bolster their ranks and to self-aggrandize their movement objectives. It's not for commercial reasons, which is maybe a positive. It's a very similar phenomenon, it's just that it's for different reasons...

I think the internet has helped fuel the networks to allow many of these to flourish in a way that was if not unheard of at least away from the mainstream. It seems to be that if it's online it makes it more credible. I've received several emails at work from colleagues who will happily forward a story they received in an email, when a quick check at Snopes would debunk it.

buzz aldrin otm

in that youtube :D

Scientology! Well, if they don't "control" Hollywood they'd certainly like to.

jayson blair?!? shyeah right

surely the whole point of barcodes is to provide some control over certain elements of human interaction, namely buying & selling & stock control etc. its not exactly a conspiracy is it? ooh traffic lights are designed to control people!!

-- Thomas, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 8:34 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

I voted pretty much in line with this thought, semi-pedantic as we might be for sharing it.

The Pearl Harbor one is really strange: the complete unpreparedness and heavy losses there are a pretty good sign that nobody was calmly waiting for it as a pretext to joining the war, insofar as a pretext really doesn't require that you get bloodied.

You can kind of make a case that we SHOULD have known about the Japanese attack but the war that FDR was far more interested in getting into in '41 was in Europe and we only got into that one 'cause Hitler decided to declare war on us on Dec. 11 despite not having any treaty obligations to the Japanese to do so.

I remember reading one of them UFO books full of declassified top secret material saying that yup aliens do exist. I was quite taken with at the time, probably 'cause I was a lol gullible youth. Wouldn't mind taking another look with the advantage of cynicalcritical thinking. And the internet.

Yeah it's all a hoax, well that was easy.

Oh wait I forgot about the mysterious cattle mutilations. Wikipedia suspiciously unforthcoming there.

The Straight Dope knows all.

pearl harbor is the only remotely plausible one.

the moon landing hoax is the best one. anyone else remember the fox special on it?

xp I still think it's aliens. Aliens in desperate need of cow anuses.

Moon landing hoax is almost disappointingly easy to disprove.

Voted David Kelly, not because I think it's true, but it's about the only remotely plausible one here--more I think he was hounded to suicide.
Moon landing hoax people give me the shits. I helped organise a lecture once by a guy who goes around debunking the hoax believers, and the audience was about half made up of people who just refused to listen to what he said, and insisted on talking over him with their own batshit beliefs.

disappointed there's no "clintons killed vince foster" option, but thats probably because the jews control ilx

there isn't a genuine conspiracy theorist alive who isn't crazy, stupid, and egomaniacal

JFK, doy

Voted for Pope John Paul I murder. There's enough circumstantial evidence (even more than there is with JFK) with the Vatican Bank, the Propaganda Due lodge, and the fallout from the Pope John Paul II shooting that I'll buy into it.

As fun as all of this is, the 9/11 people have really made conspiracy politics a severely autocratic, reductionist land of ugly.

i hated the 9/11 thing most of all b/c it sorts of tries to shift responsibility onto u.s. black ops and ignores actual real world issues that are too complex for these numbnuts to wrap their tiny brains around.

Think the David Kelly one is most plausible (not that I necessarily believe it to be true, but it seems much less batshit crazy than the rest of them), or what James Morrison said minus the bit about organising fake-moon-landing nutjobs into a lecture hall.

http://i43.photobucket.com/albums/e372/tlthe5th/bush/bush_banner2.gif

awesome site for o_0 9/11 + vatican conspiracy mashup
http://www.spirituallysmart.com/bush.html

Anyway, there's a bunch of stuff missing from the list...

- Chemtrails
- Big Pharma's anti-depressants create Brave New World.
- HAARP leverages secret Tesla technology to control the weather
- TWA Flight 800 downed by some sort of military event.
- CIA involvement with People's Temple

the first one I thought of was Chemtrails. i have a friend who was utterly convinced that this stuff was real. i used to follow these things and read r3ns3 for lolz, but 9/11 conspiracy nuts really turned me off to all of this stuff.

who's that one mobster who claimed to confess to killing jfk on his deathbed? apparently they whacked him for cracking down on their activities even though they helped him get into office through the teamsters.

Barcodes are intended to control people

how the fuck does this work?

Barracudas are intended to control people

"Jews control Hollywood," is a CONSPIRACY to you people? OMG HAHAHAH WTF

Get one copy of Variety, jebus

Barcodes are intended to control people

Only people that get barcode tattoos!

I am kind of upset the entire Atlantis mythology was not mentioned but perhaps it is there in spirit. Most New Agers/Conspiracy Theorists tend to tie it into pretty much all the other ones.

i don't get how ppl think the aids one is plausible.

"Jews control Hollywood," is a CONSPIRACY to you people? OMG HAHAHAH WTF

― Vichitravirya_XI, Sunday, September 28, 2008 9:27 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark

"and the worldwide financial system," jebus.

fuck, I'm obsessed with lizard people now, because of this thread. Did you know Kris Kristofferson is supposed to be one??

The only man I've known to believe AIDS is manmade was a Mennonite!

how do the Mennonites and the Mormons roll?

i bet someone here knows.. i am looking for the Wikipedia article about a man who hi-jacked a plane, got the money and then took off and jumped. he disappeared forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper

thanks! :)

On February 10, 1980, Brian Ingram, then eight years old, was with his family on a picnic when he found $5,880 in decaying bills (a total of 294 $20 bills),

(...)

it was proven that the money found by Ingram was part of the ransom given to Cooper(...)

Ingram was eventually allowed to keep $2,860 of this money. On June 13, 2008, in accordance with Ingram's wishes, the Heritage Auction Galleries' Americana Memorabilia Grand Format Auction in Dallas, Texas sold fifteen of the bills to various buyers for a total of more than $37,000.[38]

HAARP project scientist busted for fraud - pleas out with the Feds http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/05/haarp-fraud/

DoD shuts down HAARP
http://www.ktoo.org/2014/04/14/haarp-research-facility-shut/

Shutting it down is obviously the perfect cover.

I feel like HAARP has taken the place of scientific Climate Change theories. Like for many libertarian types, they can just point to crazy weather and say it proves HAARP did it rather than Al Gore.

the other night I had someone telling me that the Rockefellers engineered the feminist movement to take people's attention away from the ~real~ issues.

Because the anniversary is in the news I spent some time going down the rabbit hole of Boston Marathon Bombing conspiracy weirdos. Which led to the amusing spectacle of infowars/alex jones types arguing **with each other** over whether Jeff Bauman and other victims were actors or not. Some came down firmly on the side of these people OBVIOUSLY being actors, others were of the opinion that this was so obviously a false flag operation by the US intelligence community that introducing the idea of "crisis actors" was unnecessary.

It's scary to think that probably 10% of the people around you at any given time are absolutely shithouse-rat crazy.

There is a conspiracy (of course) that the recent lost Malaysian airplane was actually piloted by remote and steered off course to a remote location, to later be used in a FF. Because that is so much easier than just using a random plane no-one has ever heard of.

Jesus, just the comments in that link ET posted.

9/11 too low imo

"I had a feeling [the shooter, Larry Steve McQuilliams] was a white man, and you can be sure the hostile aliens who really control the country are going to use this against US," wrote "Volodyamyr."

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/12/white-supremacists-worry-austin-antigovernment-shooting-will-harm-their-reputations/

via Ned, probably somewhere else on ILE

Others, like “FatherOdin,” agreed, claiming that “once the media picks up this story we will once again hear nonstop about how all Whites are racist, anti-government, violent threats to America.”

...

“The Federal Government is anti-white! The Federal Government is a lawless out of control violent mob! The only solution to the Federal Government is secession!”

isn't advocating secession a violent anti-government threat to America I am confused

So now that Mercedes is apparently vulnerable to the same types of hacking as GM, Jeep, etc. I'd love to see a proof-of-concept hack on the C250 that Michael Hastings was driving.

You mean like, could it be hacked back then? Not following

The big talks at both Black Hat and Defcon hacking conferences were all about car hacking remotely:
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
http://www.eweek.com/security/slideshows/black-hat-defcon-put-car-hacking-web-privacy-on-center-stage.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/540441/carmakers-accelerate-security-efforts-after-hacking-stunts/
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/212251-todays-car-hacks-bmw-chrysler-mercedes-benz-on-ios
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-hack-a-corvette-with-a-text-message/

The upshot is that these vulnerabilities are more common and far easier to exploit than what was previously thought. Would love to know if a 2013 Mercedes C250 (what Hastings was driving) can be hacked and taken over similar to what the conspiracy theory dictates - lock the door, floor the gas, and disable the brakes.

None of which proves anything of course. There are far easier ways to knock people off the playing field than a remote-controlled car hack, but I've always thought that the circumstances around it were interesting.

Thanks for the comprehensive reply, Elvis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8MNiMARh5c

Geocentric theory is coming back fwiw.

Might as well link this here, too. Why have a cruise for fans of one conspiracy theory when you could do them all?

http://www.divinetravels.com/ConspiraSeaCruise2016.html

(here's the donotlink for those not wanting to contribute to their google results: http://www.donotlink.com/gamz )

Note the guest list.

Is it safe for them all to be on the same boat? Bit of an easy target for the illuminati / lizard people / alien overlords / big pharma / Jews who run the government.

Aha! Andy Wakefield! So good to see you again

Discussion about this on the Jenny McCarthy vaccination thread

chem-trails is out of the running, looks like. sad!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/16/science/scientists-just-say-no-to-chemtrails-conspiracy-theory.html

well of course the scientists would say that

I only read about this deal for the first time last night: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Norwegian_spiral_anomaly

hard to find a non-"enhanced" image of what ppl said they saw: there's a youtube clip from (i think) CNN which is p poor quality but does have a wtf omg element once they zoom the camera in enough (= smoky but very orderly rotating spiral in the distant sky)… explanations = russians (rocket misfire), HAARP (chemtrails machinery malfunction), aliens (portal left open by mistake), more and worse if you google far enough

(it was retweeted last night by the ordinarily super-factual and gorgeous @StormHour, i think bcz a follower noticed SH had just tweeted a pic of s storm from the same part of tromsø, and commented with a link)

HAARP's new owner holds open house to prove facility 'is not capable of mind control'
http://www.adn.com/alaska-news/science/2016/08/24/haarps-new-owner-holds-open-house-to-prove-facility-is-not-capable-of-mind-control/

The University of Alaska Fairbanks now owns and operates the High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Program and invites the public to an open house Saturday. This is interested visitors' chance to learn about the scientific mission and research at the Gakona facility, which was transferred last year from the U.S. Air Force to UAF.

UAF officials are hoping for a high turnout.

"We hope that people will be able to see the actual science of it," said Sue Mitchell, spokesperson for UAF's Geophysical Institute, which operates the facility. "We hope to show people that it is not capable of mind control and not capable of weather control and all the other things it's been accused of."

'come to our mind control facility to allow us to implant in your mind the idea that we're not capable of mind control'

they must think we're fuckin idiots, man *adjusts tinfoil hat*

scientist doesn't understand how conspiracy theorists think

'Oh, so you hid all the evidence and then invited people?'

lately i've been trying to delve more into conspiracy theories from outside the english-as-a-first-language world. some of them are pretty good. there's the vietnamese conspiracy theory that ho chi minh died and was replaced by a chinese sleeper agent. and of course the great russian conspiracy theory that historians just made up a thousand years of history.

the jfk conspiracy theory is the one that everyone everwhere seems to believe and it's one of the most tedious and boring ones i can imagine. because the basis of it is stupid old "great man" theory, the belief that somebody as important as the president couldn't be killed by a lone nut.

i spent some time recently looking at the david icke forums and discovered they seem firmly pro-brexit, presumably because it's striking a blow against the reptilian-controlled new world order

Little do they realize the bitter irony that cutting off their noses to spite their faces makes them indistinguishable from their reptilian overlords.

I missed the David Kelly stuff, whats the consensus on what happened there?

This Rashid Buttar cat keeps popping up on youtube with a covid conspiracy theory. But its NOT the 5G one, in his one its something to do with Bill Gates wanting to force vaccines onto everyone, something about depopulation, and something else about RFD chips. I guess its an extension of the anti-vaccine movement?