[balaspa]

OK, I am hestitant about this one.  I do NOT want people to start fighting or calling each other names.  If you are a passionate believer in a particular theory, then that is fine.  I don't want anyone to be insulted here.

That being said, as a writer of fiction, I enjoy dipping my toe into the "conspiracy theory" waters.  It keeps the weirdness generator in my head (where my fiction comes from) primed, it's often good for a few laughs and sometimes it's just interesting. 

Does anyone else?  What are your favorites?

I have become quite fond (in a humorous way) of Alex Jones.  His recent appearance on Piers Morgan was a classic and his paranoia is amazing.

A former weather man has as site called WeatherWars.info that he claims proves the weather has been weaponized.

And everyone's faovite: David Icke from the UK. Man, he really should have been a sci-fi author (althought I guess you could say his supposed non-fiction books are really that).  His supposed "truth" about intradimensional alient reptilian beings who have taken over the planet is so vast and complicated that I could NEVER conjur a plot quite like it.  It is so huge that just about anything and everything that happens can be enolded into it.

Of course, there are standards like JFK and UFOs, but I am curious if there are any other odd ones out there.

Again, please be courteous.

 

[NogDog]

Some good fodder here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy_theory)

A rather tongue-in-cheek fictional approach, which could give you lots of inspiration:



Personally, I tend to discount a lot of such theories on the grounds that many of them depend upon hundreds or even thousands of people keeping a secret, and that doesn't seem to happen often now if ever ("three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead"). I mean, a president of the US couldn't keep an affair with an intern secret? Oh, wait, maybe the Bavarian Illuminati exposed it for their own purposes?

 

[Christopher Bunn]

My favorite conspiracy theory is Satan and Santa Claus. If you closely examine their names, you'll see that Santa is merely a cleverly and thinly disguised version of Satan. Notice the cunning placement of the N. Also, they both are fond of the color red and sneaking around at night. They both associate with creatures that have horns.

Furthermore, they both happily give people what they want, but not what they actually need.

 

[Scheherazade]

Much more mundane, but I'm pretty convinced that the media always pushes violence on video games because those games are competitors for people's time.  Time spent playing games is time these people aren't watching their networks.  This happened with books at one point as well.  I can't count the number of instances my grandmother has heard some horrible thing about games on Facebook or World of Warcraft or any other number of things that some talking head on a show like Nancy Grace convinced her to believe, usually out of the blue without even a shooting to set them off.  I think too many people blindly take these news sources as reliable and out to help their viewers when they're just out for ratings and revenue.  So yeah, that's my one boring conspiracy theory...

 

[balaspa]

There was a time, back in high school, where I was probably firmly in the ranks of conspiracy theorists.  Then I kind of woke up to the fact that pulling off the vast and complex conspiracies I was reading about would have been virtually impossible.  Someone would talk - and the evidence would really be overwhelming.

I just discovered that there are people who actually believe there is a planet called Nibiru that is on a collision course with Earth!  And that NASA is covering it up.  You'd think you'd see a whole planet approaching in the sky somewhere.

 

[Scheherazade]

I just discovered that there are people who actually believe there is a planet called Nibiru that is on a collision course with Earth! And that NASA is covering it up. You'd think you'd see a whole planet approaching in the sky somewhere.

That must be where Xenu is from. Another, actually destructive, thing I can't believe there are people who believe.

 

[Tam]

I used to just chuckle and shake my head at those conspiracy theories - until my own sister started believing them. She is on the bandwagon for everything from Chemtrails (the white streaks in the sky left by airplanes are supposedly a release of poisons into the atmosphere by the government to dumb down the population. Every commercial airplane has a special tank for the chemicals.) to fluoride being another secret government poison. Since my husband is a dentist, that one in particular irks me. She recently sent me a link to some nut jobs that think the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings were faked by the Obama administration to start the process of taking away everyone's guns - complete with some of the same actors portraying Aurora survivors and Sandy Hook grieving parents. That one was very offensive. My daughter lives 10 minutes from Newtown and though she did not know any of the families who lost children, she knows others families who attended that school.

I have not seen my sister for two years and I told her not to contact me with these kinds of emails ever again. She is either willfully ignorant incredibly mean and nasty, or mentally ill.

 

[J H Bogran]

Vey interesting topic.

Here are my favorite ones:

JFK. I find it amusing the extents people go to defend their side of the theory. I recall an episode from Quantum Leap where the protagonist took the form of Oswald, indirectly confirming the solo-shooter theory along the way. Then Penn and Teller did an episode with exploding watermelons to prove bullet trajectories.

The trip to the moon. Did they actually landed on the moon? My money is on "yes." My only problem is that I don't quite understand why they stopped making more trips. Did you know there is a guy in South America who filed a claim with his government and now he has paperwork that says he owns it? I read an interview where he said Nasa asked him permission to go on the first trip, but stopped asking for subsequent ones. The URSS didn't ask, it's a miracle he didn't shoot them for trespassing.

UFO's: Yes, I think there is live outside of our planet. I don't quite believe they come and visit, though.

Government knowing the end of the world in 2012: I guess the sunrise of Dec 22 proved that one wrong, but I'm sure another date will be selected as the new firm date for all things to end.

Alligators in the NYC sewers. Well, that's more an urban legend, but I can see people on either side of the fence for that one, too.

 

[bce]

The trip to the moon. Did they actually landed on the moon? My money is on "yes." My only problem is that I don't quite understand why they stopped making more trips.

I thought this was the best answer as to whether or not we went to the moon:

http://xkcd.com/1074/

As for why we stopped. Too many people didn't care anymore and didn't see any "tangible" benefits from the space program.

 

[MayoSoda]

There's definitely a lot of corruption going on in politics, but honestly Alex Jones obviously takes everything too far and makes a shit ton of money doing it. Plus, you gotta look at the big picture: we have more opportunity, wealth, better health, etc. than humanity has ever had.

 

[JimJ]

She recently sent me a link to some nut jobs that think the Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings were faked by the Obama administration to start the process of taking away everyone's guns - complete with some of the same actors portraying Aurora survivors and Sandy Hook grieving parents. That one was very offensive. My daughter lives 10 minutes from Newtown and though she did not know any of the families who lost children, she knows others families who attended that school.

I recently saw a horrible video where they showed a father of one of the victims doing a press conference, with text popping up on the screen pointing out how he's obviously an actor because he's laughing before he starts talking, and other things like that. It really irks me when people analyze people's grief as if every one responds the same way to tragedy. And the comments on the video were even worse.

 

[mom133d (aka Liz)]

As for why we stopped. Too many people didn't care anymore and didn't see any "tangible" benefits from the space program.

Yep. Nothing "tangible"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

And that list doesn't even mention astronaut ice cream

 

[balaspa]

I am quite sure we went to the moon.  I have zero doubt on that.  Just for the record.  And I do not believe that 9/11 was an inside job, at all.

 

[geniebeanie]

One I followed for year is the murdered Romanoff Family of Royal Russia.  They were killed in 1918 in Siberia.  When the grave was finally found in 1994 two skelentines were missing.  There was claimes by the killers they burn't two bodies,when it was raining, shorteges of fuel,they were doing the horrible crime in secret, remaines were found of the two missing children years later.  I believe the missing Grand Duchess died in Virginia in 1994.  Anna Anderson saw her family killed and went insane.  She was also pregnant due to being raped by the guards "protecting her family".  It is funny that the missing two were found because she had identical  scar from a operation to remove a mole on her sholder,height,eyes,knew thing like her uncle Ernest visiting to try to work out a peace treaty with Germany.  I have read everything on this subject I can find.  The reason the family turned against her was the English Royal Family refused to let the Russian Royal Family to enter England condemning them to be murdered.  They also have a lot of their jewerly which belonged to Anna Anderson.  It was inportant foe the English Royal Family not to be embarresed. It is very possible remains from the original grave were used to produce the missing children.  A lot of people do not believe the grave in Pig's Meadow was that of the Romanoffs at all.  It is a very interesting conspiracy/mystery.  I do not think we will ever know the truth.

 

[William Meikle]

I'm rather obsessed with the Montauk time tunnel / Philadelphia experiment stuff. If you follow all the trails of that one it gets very weird, and strangely compelling.

I don't believe a word of it, but find that people who do make interesting characters in my stories.

 

[balaspa]

I guess it was JFK that first sent me down the rabbit hole. These days, though, I believe Oswald acted alone.  I am amazed at the Sandy Hook and Aurora theater conspiracy theorists out there now. 

 

[Scheherazade]

Having thought about it, I guess the whole Roanoke Colony Mystery is full of conspiracy theories and I'm pretty interested in that whole event, or non-event... however it actually happened... or didn't.