“The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters’ fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.”
—Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197 (on Da Vinci Code author, Dan Brown)
“The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.”
—Phillip K. Dick, VALIS
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
I’ve always loved a good conspiracy and the debates that surround them. So this week I asked our Entropy brain trust to take off their tin-foil hats and come into the light and bring their favorite conspiracy theories with them. To be clear, the adjective “favorite” used to modify “conspiracy theories” is in NO WAY meant to denote or connote that our contributors or editors endorse or have conspired in any of these theories. I added some links and images to the materials sent by our conspirators to add some fuel to the fire.
All materials were delivered by courier and transported in stainless steel attaché cases handcuffed to the previously mentioned couriers. All unrelated information has been redacted to protect national security. Hopefully, no one was followed.
BYRON CAMPBELL
- The Matrix (The Cave/Brain in a Jar) Hypothesis: Your entire lived experience is just false memories being fed into your mind. Nothing you know is real.
- The Red Pill/Men’s Rights Activists (if by “favorite” you mean “most despised.”)
- Otis Eugene Ray’s Time Cube
ROBIN MYRICK
- Being from Houston, and raised as a wee astro-nut there during the golden era of manned space exploration, I’d have to say the staged moon landing conspiracy will always be #1 for me. A simple google of the term “fake Apollo 1969” is a great start if you want to get into a colossal headache of a debate about whether we ever really went to the moon at all. Snuggle nice and tight into that rabbit hole, and you’ll also eventually arrive at my other two favorite conspiracy theories
- Stanley Kubrick was the one who helped NASA pull off the grand illusion.
- The Shining was Kubrick’s confession to same. I’m a believer in the holy moon landings myself, but it’s fun to watch how this ball of conspiracy yarn just keeps spinning bigger.
NICOLAS GRINDER
- Jews secretly run the banks and media. This would be nice because I’m converting so maybe I would get a lot of books published and get a big check in the mail. How it got started: There was a Jewish guy, last name Rothschild, who became the most powerful banker in 19th c. Germany through skill and luck. He had a lot of kids, and raised them all (sons and daughters) multilingual etc. and taught them his banking stuff and sent them off to live in all the major European cities where they replicated his success so for a while they were the most powerful family in Europe. Also Jews in Hollywood is because Jews couldn’t get jobs on the East Coast so they moved to Los Angeles in the early 20th c. and guess what’s there: the film industry.
- Vaccines cause autism. How it got started: some vaccines used to contain trace amounts of mercury, and a quack scientist in England decided that the mercury was crossing the blood-brain barrier and causing autism but that doesn’t make sense given there’s a long history of knowing what mercury toxicity does (mad hatters) and mercury stopped being used decades ago. But people are desperate for a cause so they latched on and now tons of kids are getting measles and Rubella because their parents are idiots.
- Something about freemasons. I don’t know anything about them except reading a little and seeing bits of Matthew Barney films but it seems like they have the secret weird ritual part down pretty well, so maybe they secretly run the govt. or whatever.
ALEX VLADI
- [pretty unknown, but very awesome] There was a secret society in Germany, 19th century, called NYMZA. They supported financially the Aero Club in Houston, Texas, whose members built and flew aero crafts long before such were officially known. They perhaps use to fly them till now, and sightings of such flights are mistakenly taken for UFO sightings. The only source about the whole story are detailled sketches, notebooks, collages and messages written in a code, by a former butcher from Berlin, Charles Dellschau. They were found on a dump. The most beautiful thing about the whole story is: you don’t know, where the fiction ends and reality begins in this story. The interesting sidenote: read the books, they are honest, and if I think more and more about it, it isn’t a conspiracy theory at all. (What am I talking about?)
- Jews rule the world. For left-wing they are bad capitalists. For right-wings they are bad left-wing. They all seem to stay in a permanent communication with each other, wherever they are, in order to overwhelm the world. They even use meta-discource for ambivalent ambiguity for the sake of worldwide confusion [As I lived in Russia I was often confronted with this sentence (spoken not as a joke, but as earnest conviction by some people): “There is no antisemitism in Russia, it were invented by all those Jews”]. Anyway, I ask myself, if it’s everything truth, where the heck is my piece of cake?
- THEY. Yes, THEY. The most productive theory. THEY (whoever or whatever THEY are) are guilty on just EVERYTHING with happens to innocent US (whoever WE are). THEY are always the OTHERS and are bad, in contrast to US, who are always right and endangered by THEM. This is the most productive conspiracy theory, or perhaps the basic substance of every conspiracy theory, where paranoia meets selective perception and, you know, “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” as Goya once said.
BERT ELLINGSEN
- The theory I probably laugh at the most at is the theory of Nemesis, the invisible companion star or giant planet that’s supposed to exist in orbit close to the solar system and occasionally send comets or asteroids to Earth (perhaps as punishment for our wrongdoings?). Search after search has failed to find it and astronomical or mathematical findings no longer support the theory, yet its proponents still insist it is there, we’re just not looking hard enough. It’s a stellar example of how far the proponents of failed theories will go, even after most everyone else have accepted that the theory is erroneous and moved on. It also reminds me a little of how the supporters of other and even less supported ideas behave and insist that others also agree with them and accommodate their beliefs. Ahem. To paraphrase the paranoia quote: “Just because you failed to find it, doesn’t mean it’s not there”.
- Not strictly a conspiracy theory in itself, since the facility does exist, but there are many theories about what goes on there: Area 52 – or Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, a military test area. At least the music in this video is awesome.
- The rather stupid theory that OMG wild birds are dying out because of house cats that was banded about on the net a while ago. The sad fact is that it’s humans and our cities and population density and vanishing woodland areas that kill birds. The amount house cats kill is tiny compared to that. This meme is a fine example of how big and difficult to change facts are sidelined by smaller findings that are easier to dislike or like. As this article points out, about 1 billion birds per year alone die from flying into buildings.
JUSTIN PETROPOULOS
- Bruce Lee’s Mysterious Death
- Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Plays?
- The Location of Jimmy Hoffa’s Body
CARLA GANNIS
- 1.This first one I remember being terrified about as a child, The Bermuda Triangle. Some purport there have been alien abductions, and time holes and vortexes that have caused the disappearance of planes and ships — that they are sucked into other dimensions. Other theories include that it’s the Lost City of Atlantis. See: Top 10 Weird Bermuda Triangle Theories.
- Skull & Bones as “America’s Secret Establishment” that “plays a role in a globalist/corporatist conspiracy for world control”.
- And hmmm, the Wikipedia Skull and Bones page has a link to this article, “33 Conspiracies That Turned Out to be True, What Every Person Should Know…” Note: I tried to do a little research on its author Jonathan Elinoff, to determine the “truth” of all of his 33 claims. But it’s the Internet, and well our universe is a hologram (“our universe is a hologram” gets About 159,000 Google results btw!), so who really knows? Conspiracies include CIA mind-control projects from the 1950s through the 70s, Iran Contra, the Shadow Government (aka COG), and The Kennedy Assassination.
DAVID S. ATKINSON
- Jerry Fletcher: July eighth, 1979, all the fathers of Nobel Prize winners were rounded up by United Nations military units, all right, and actually forced at gunpoint to give semen samples in little plastic jars, which are now stored below Rockefeller Center underneath the ice skating rink.
EMILY STERN
- HIV/AIDS is Eugenics plot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V7jDX56AL0
- U.S. employed Eugenics practices on American Indian Reservations.
- The educational “common core” curriculum is really governmental higher ups in bed with the media moguls to devolve our brain’s ability to think critically, and in turn, be more compliant, complacent, and confused.
