Is Obama behind the Ebola outbreak? Are planes poisoning us? Is Lady Gaga part of an evil Illuminati plot? The five conspiracy theories you won't believe people believe
The best conspiracy theories are like enchanting mazes of logic whose thresholds, once crossed, are hard to return from. As ludicrous as they can appear from a distance, the closer you get, the stronger their gravity and the greater the danger of being sucked in.
How else to describe the extraordinary rebirth of David Icke? Best known to some as the former BBC sports presenter who appeared on Wogan in a turquoise tracksuit implying he might be the son of God, to the post-Twin Towers generation he’s the visionary master of conspiracy, performing his unscripted 10-hour lecture about the secret forces that rule the world to sell-out crowds at Wembley Arena.A 2011 BBC poll found that 14 per cent of Britons believed 9/11 was an inside job. Just as conspiracy websites are flourishing, so are those dedicated to undermining them, such as Snopes, The Skeptic’s Dictionary and Skeptoid. The number one debunking podcast on iTunes, The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, claims a weekly listenership of 120,000 and tens of millions of downloads since its 2005 launch.
Icke often describes his work as “dot connecting”. But connecting dots is precisely how all sorts of mistakes about reality arise. “Our brains evolved to spot patterns in the environment and weave them into coherent stories,” says psychologist and conspiracy theory expert Dr Rob Orchard. “We’re all conspiracy theorists because of the way our minds work. It’s how we make sense of the world. But it’s easy to connect dots that shouldn’t be connected.”
So humans are rampant dodgy dot connectors, and they also suffer from an array of biases that make them susceptible to faulty belief. “We’re biased towards seeing intentions in the world, to think things were done deliberately instead of being chaotic,” says Dr Orchard.
“There’s also a proportionality bias, so we want to think that when something big happens in the world it has a big explanation. In the case of JFK, you don’t want to believe some guy you’ve never heard of killed the most important man in the world and changed the course of history. Another is confirmation bias – when we get an idea in our head it’s very easy to find evidence that seems to support it. It takes a very unusual mind to de-convince itself. We’re made to believe.”
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And some of the theories out there at the moment really take some believing. Here are five:
1. The Ebola virus is an escaped bioweapon
Some believe the Ebola outbreak started with sinister armed men poisoning wells, a successful attempt at mass murder that led to arrests in Liberia. Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, reckons the virus has been designed to affect only black people. “If you are black or brown, you are being selected for destruction.”
Others believe it’s an escaped military bioweapon. This theory’s chief proponent is Prof Francis Boyle, a noted scholar of biowarfare and international law at the University of Illinois. In the US Prof Boyle literally wrote the rules of biowarfare. He was a member of the government’s Committee of Military Use of Biotechnology and principal author of the Biological Weapons Anti Terrorism Act of 1989 which was signed into law by George Bush Snr. “This isn’t normal Ebola at all,” he says. “I believe it’s been genetically modified.”
Boyle points to the existence of US government laboratories in Africa that are creating bioweapons under the guise of innocently working on cures. “What they tell you is, ‘We can imagine some exotic disease out there that could be used as a biological weapon, so therefore we have to look into it. The first step is to weaponise the disease so we can develop a vaccine for it.’ ” What diseases are they working on? “Every type of biowarfare agent you can possibly imagine, including dengue fever and Ebola.”
One of these laboratories, says Boyle, is in Kenema, Sierra Leone. “Kenema is the absolute epicentre of the outbreak. Something happened there. It could have been an accident in the lab or they might have been testing an experimental vaccine [on the population] using live genetically modified Ebola and calling it something else.” The proof, for Boyle, that this is a modified form of Ebola is in both the speed of its spread and the number it is killing. “In the other outbreaks it’s a 50 per cent fatality rate and it was contained. Right here, we’re dealing with a 70 per cent and it’s not contained. All the evidence I’ve been able to locate leads me to believe it came out of the Kenema lab.” How high does the cover-up go? “I think the people at the top know. Probably Obama too.”
Critics of the theory observe that if this was an altered version of the disease, the changes to its structure would be observable to scientists. However, DNA analysis of samples sourced from 78 individuals affected by the current outbreak was recently published in the journal Science. It found this subtly different variant likely diverged from central African lineages around 10 years ago before spreading into west Africa in May. It is, in other words, perfectly natural.
2. Aeroplanes are killing us
We are being sprayed by sinister aeroplanes. We are being poisoned, en masse, from the heavens. You can tell by looking up. Why is it that some condensation trails, or contrails, left by commercial craft dissipate after a short amount of time, whereas others remain for hours and expand? And why is it that these suspected chemical trails, or “chemtrails”, tend to be laid out in rows of the same direction, as if they’re part of a meticulously planned pattern?
The Chemtrails Project UK is one of hundreds of websites devoted to the popular chemtrails theory. It confidently asserts the streaks are “highly toxic trails left by jet planes” that “contain high levels of heavy metals”. Their purpose? It’s a geo-engineering project, perhaps an attempt to control global warming. Others say they’re brain-numbing chemical agents used to control the population.
Of course, there are sceptics. In October, 41-year-old Chris Bovey rather uncharitably pranked the believers with a video upload (above) of a plane dumping excess fuel. Despite his admission that it was nothing sinister it’s been viewed more than 90,000 times. In the US, the Federal Aviation Administration has politely pointed out that in conditions of high humidity, ice particles form in the condensation trails that aeroplanes make. These tiny dots of ice grow in size as they absorb moisture from the air around them. Such trails can linger for hours. And the sinister parallel rows of trails? They tend to point in the direction of an airport…
3. Israel uses spy vultures
In December 2012, in the Sudanese town of Kereinek, officials arrested a vulture for spying. The evidence? Electronic equipment attached to its leg that, they suspected, enabled it to broadcast images back to its Israeli HQ. Had the Mossad begun recruiting agents from the vulturine world, eager to capitalise on their ability to fly 375 miles a day in virtual silence? Or was the truth, as Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority insisted, that they were merely tracking the birds with GPS for scientific study?
It wouldn’t be the last time such suspicions were raised. In July 2013 Turkish authorities detained a mysterious kestrel that was tagged “24311 Tel Avivunia Israel”. After X-rays found no evidence of listening devices on its body, the kestrel was declared not guilty. A month later, the Egyptians arrested a stork. In 2010, a Zionist vulture was the centre of an investigation by security forces after a hunter discovered a tag reading “Tel Aviv University”. The same year, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, a run of shark attacks was blamed on Israel. “What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm,” a cautious but not-that-cautious-at-all-really South Sinai Governor, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, told local reporters.
4. The Middle Ages never happened
What’s not a secret is that, at some point prior to the 16th century, we all got a bit muddled up with our timings. The problem was our dates were falling out of sync with the astronomical cycles. Since around 45BC, we’d been using the simplistic Julian calendar, which gave us a leap year every four years. By the time we switched to the slightly more complex but superior Gregorian calendar, in 1582, it was reckoned we had “lost” around 10 days. That drift was corrected – we jumped from October 4 to October 15 – and we carried on anew. But if you do the maths, something strange will become apparent.
You’ll see that it would have taken 1,257 years for us to accumulate those 10 days of error. And if you subtract those 1,257 years from the year in which we changed to the new calendar, you’ll find yourself not in 45BC, when we began using the old calendar and the drifting began, but AD 325. We have, it seems, lost more than three centuries.
Researchers such as German scholars Heribert Illig and Dr Hans-Ulrich Niemitz believe it’s not 2014, right now, but 1717. Postulating a complex conspiracy between Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII and his relative Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who they say wanted the records to falsely show that he was reigning at the symbolic fall of the first millennium, they’ve concluded that the Middle Ages never happened. After all, wouldn’t this explain why, following the fall of the Roman Empire, nobody in the west really did anything? For 300 years, there weren’t really any wars or works of literature or technological advances. Were we asleep? Stoned? Tying our shoelaces? Or were the Dark Ages dark because they didn’t actually exist?
Critics of what’s known as the “phantom time hypothesis” claim the theory’s grand error is that the correction, back in 1582, wasn’t actually for the purposes of correcting for 10 days. Rather, the intention was to put Easter back in the right place. It was the Council of Nicea that originally decided where Easter should be and its position was set in 325BC – which, boringly, means the maths add up.
5. Lady Gaga is an Illuminati puppet
The splendid irony about the shadowy group of dukes, diplomats and intellectuals known as the Illuminati is that their mission was, in part, to counter superstition. Founded in 18th-century Bavaria, they existed for less than a decade, fading into the fog following an order of abolishment for all secret societies by the Prince Elector, Charles Theodore. Or did they? Could it be that they actually went underground, as some suspected at the time, and conspired to cause the French Revolution? Worse, does the Illuminati still exist? Is it silently manipulating the minds of the young through the seductions of modern pop music?
“Mass media conducts a large-scale mind-control project, which starts at birth with Disney movies and continues with Hollywood flicks and music videos,” says concerned website The Vigilant Citizen. The site goes on to allege that pop singer Lady Gaga is an “Illuminati Puppet”. “Her vacuous, robotic and slightly degenerate persona embodies all the ‘symptoms’ of a mind-control victim.”
The evidence? You’ve only got to look at her name: “Gaga refers to absent-mindedness… this state of mind is achieved after successful mind control.” And her logo: “A headless female body with a bolt of lightning going through her and exiting her genitalia… implies that her thoughtless body has been ‘charged’ with a force that gives it life.” And what about that famous Illuminati symbol known as the All Seeing Eye? “You only need to look at a couple of Lady Gaga pictures or videos to notice that she is constantly hiding one of her eyes.” And her first appearance in her tour video? “Lady G is talking in a vaporous and robotic way, as if she was lobotomised, singing about a man who ‘swallowed her brain’… If this is not about mind control, I have no idea what it’s about.”
It’s not only Gaga. Didn’t Rihanna once wear a T-shirt that said “Daughter of the Illuminati?” Didn’t Beyoncé once wear a pair of shoes that were each decorated with a single eyeball? And what of her and Jay Z’s child, Blue Ivy? An odd name. Until you realise it’s an acronym for “Born Living Under Evil, Illuminati’s Very Youngest”.
But what’s the actual mission of these powerful pop puppets? What are the practicalities of the evil plot they’re engaged in? Alas, such details aren’t entirely clear, and the mysterious “Vigilant Citizen” failed to respond to the Telegraph’s emails. Hardly surprising, what with us being mind-warped shills spreading misinformation to the sheeple masses on behalf of our shadowy Illuminati bosses, who are secretly ruling the world from their lizard kingdom inside the hollow moon.