I love a conspiracy. I love the wild ones, the completely unsupported, the vast hypotheticals – it doesn’t matter. If you say you have a conspiracy theory, you have my 100% undivided attention. Like children, I obviously love them all, but I like some more than the others. Some are a little too radical, a bit too implausible, too pointless or too silly to even pretend to take seriously. The following is a ranking of some of the more popular theories.

Factors considered for each theory include the plausibility, the supporting evidence, general entertainment value, their significance, overall believability, and my general opinion on how giddy I get talking about them.

9/11 was an inside job: As an event that defined my childhood and the resulting international geopolitical landscape for the foreseeable future, this would be monumental if true. It’s not. People can’t even keep a secret when it comes to what the President says to his most trusted advisors, and we’re supposed to believe hundreds of people coordinated this paradigm-shifting attack on their fellow countrymen for oil despite the United States having some of the most abundant oil reserves in the country? No. Counterpoint – I giggle whenever someone yells “JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS,” and will continue to do so for the rest of my life.

Elvis lives: Maybe I don’t appreciate Elvis enough, but people claiming to see Elvis working at a carwash in Reno doesn’t seem especially interesting to me. I like the idea of fat Elvis dressing up as himself to fit in with Elvis impersonators and finishing fourth in competitions. Plus, dying while taking a shit is better than any subsequent conspiracy.

Chemtrails: Dumb. The people who believe this flunked middle school chemistry and attempting to use things like “science” and “logic” to dispute the poorly thought out premise only makes them angry and further burrows them into their cocoon of ignorance. Chemtrails are the ugly Christmas sweater of conspiracies – it’s what I thought I wanted, but you shouldn’t have, no really, you should not have shared this with me.

Lizard people: For the uninitiated, the conspiracy of lizard people is essentially just the same idea as the Illuminati with worst skin – “they” rule the world as part of an underground cabal, and by “they,” we are supposed to assume they just mean “Jews.” Being racist will prove to be a staple of many conspiracy theories. What it lacks in plausibility it makes up for in insanity.

Lorde is a witch incapable of aging: This is less of a conspiracy and more of my personal opinion. Love the music, but she is 22 going on 180. I have no evidence, but let me have this.

David Bowie predicted Kanye West: On the album cover for “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” Bowie-as-Ziggy is standing immediately under a sign with nothing but “K. WEST” listed. The album was released on June 6, 1972, and the first track is called “Five Years” and states the coming “Starman” will come in the stated time. On June 8, 1977, Kanye West was born. A coincidence? Absolutely. Does it change anything if David Bowie predicted the coming “Starman” on his album release date? No. Does that mean I can enjoy it less? NO KANYE IS GREAT, AND IT MAKES ME HAPPY LET ME HAVE THIS.

Area 51: Yawn. Very predictable. Aliens, top-secret government programs – I’m over it. My hot take is there is nothing at Area 51, but the government propagates the mystery behind it, so people break their backs trying to unravel the mystery while all the good stuff actually happens in the underground pyramids in Alaska. I bet you didn’t think I knew about them did you, GOVERNMENT, well I’m on to you and your top-secret Alaskan bunker-pyramids. If I ever die under suspicious circumstances, my uncovering of this will be the reason.

Katy Perry is Jon Benet Ramsey: Pretty self-explanatory until you consider the only supporting evidence is “wouldn’t it be fun if it were true?”

Aliens built the pyramids: It’s compelling at first – how did civilizations build such similar structures all around the world centuries apart? Had to have been aliens! But then you unpack it – these cultures had endless supplies of slaves and they stacked bricks up in the simplest convinceable fashion – and it all falls apart. The enthusiasm with which people will attempt to convey that aliens with intergalactic space traveling capabilities came to Earth, and proceeded to make structures an unimaginative third-grader would make with Legos will never cease to impress me.

The NBA rigged the 2002 Western Conference Finals to get the Los Angeles Lakers into the Finals: The star-studded Lakers team found themselves down 3-2 against the Kings, who had no star players (if you don’t count Chris Weber) but instead had a well-rounded and managed a roster. The NBA, terrified of having another year of down ratings for their biggest product by sending Sacramento to the Finals instead of their flagship franchise in LA, sent their most questionable refs to Game 6 to ensure the Lakers sneaked out of the round and into the Finals. The Lakers received 40 free throws, 27 in the fourth quarter alone, many from imaginary or weak fouls while the Kings received only 18 with many egregious fouls omitted. Lest you think “that’s merely an unfortunate coincidence,” one of the referees, Tim Donaghy was sent to prison for fixing NBA games and admitted in court he was instructed to give leeway to Lakers on fouls. The NBA has A TON of these.

JK Rowling is not a real person: She’s not like, an alien or something, but she’s actually a hired actress to be the real-life stand-in for a plot of writers employed by the publisher to produce a massive bestseller. Supporting evidence is basically nil but consider the opposite – a woman could not have possibly done all that work on her own!

Denver International Airport is Illuminati Headquarters: If you’ve never been to Denver International, it is a creepy place. There is a thirty-two-foot blue fiberglass horse in front with bright red eyes. It is even more terrifying than you imagine because it killed it’s creator in his studio when it fell on top of him. There is an enormous mural of a man in a black gas mask with a scythe cutting through a flock of doves nearby a crowd of frightened children; if this sounds strange to you, it’s because you don’t understand art DUH. These two extremely bizarre pieces are accompanied by: runways laid out to look like swastikas, patterned carpet that looks like either swastikas or the molecular diagramming of hepatitis, and miles of underground bunkers and tunnels. Illuminati headquarters? I don’t know about that, but SOMETHING is up with this creepy place.

The Pope owns Long John Silver’s: You wanna know why Catholics don’t eat meat on Fridays? Now you know.

Marshawn Lynch didn’t get the ball at the end of Super Bowl XLIX because Pete Carroll didn’t want him to be MVP: In Super Bowl XLIX between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots, the Patriots scored to go ahead 28-24 with 2:02 in the fourth quarter. After a fluky tip that bounced off a defender resulted in a massive gain for the Seahawks, suddenly they were within five yards of winning the Super Bowl. Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson had 247 and two touchdowns while running back Marshawn Lynch had 102 rushing yards and a touchdown, and with a second touchdown to win the game, was a lock to win MVP. For those of you who don’t know, Wilson was a rising NFL star, blandly charismatic and photogenic, while Lynch did little to hide his Oakland roots with long dreadlocks while trashing NFL leadership. This type of pettiness by Seattle head coach and noted 9/11 truther Pete Carroll led to call a passing play from the one-yard line, which was intercepted by Patriots defensive back Malcolm Butler, literally stealing victory from the jaws of defeat. If you follow football at all, you know this is 100% the truth because the NFL is terrible. If you don’t, well… sorry for the lengthy digression.

Tupac lives: Nah Suge Knight definitely shot that guy. (Note – I’M KIDDING PLEASE DON’T DANGLE ME OUT OF A HOTEL WINDOW MR. KNIGHT)

Black helicopters: The basis here is that the federal government has a fleet of black helicopters that arrive after any X-Files-ish situation to control the situation and dispense with whatever explanation best mitigates whatever the local populace saw (“it was a weather balloon, trust me”). There are tons of situations where the government puts out some half-assed explanation for something that will make them look bad, so the legitimacy of the overall premise isn’t under question as much as the specifics of the black helicopters. I don’t know about you, but if I see something unusual, I’m probably going about my day because, being the skeptic I am, I generally distrust my own eyes and ears, but the moment black helicopters show up, I’m suddenly extremely interested.

Michael Jackson was killed by Iran: Plausible? Unlikely, but it is a ton of fun. The theory goes that Iranian citizens were starting to rise up against the religious oligarchy that had been in power since the CIA may or may not have (note – they definitely did) helped topple the previous government. The protests were building a ton of steam on Facebook and Twitter and therefore had drawn a ton of international attention from the public around the world who were eager to see the Middle Eastern bully toppled by its citizens. Recognizing the international tides turning against them, Tehran pulled the ripcord to change the international conversation – they had Conrad Murray, Iranian sleeper cell/ex-pat but better known as Michael Jackson’s personal doctor, intentionally over prescribe the King of Pop to get Iran’s human rights abuses off the front page of every newspaper in the world. Aside from being completely unfounded (Murray is actually Grenadian, furthering the assumption that everyone who legitimately believes in conspiracies is racist), I don’t want to give Iran that much credit.

Birds are part of a government surveillance program: This is very new to the conspiracy scene! I’m mostly confident it’s actually part of the Instagram meme cycle were one weird joke gets a boatload of likes, and then everyone rips off and abuses the idea until we all hate it, but also… how many dead birds have you ever seen? How many baby birds have you ever seen? Isn’t it odd birds hang out on telephone wires, or should I say, RECHARGE on telephone wires? Birds are not real. Please disregard all knowledge and references to them from before 1990.

John Wilkes Booth was never captured: Johnny Booth shot Lincoln in the head and proceeded to jump off the balcony, break his leg, and storm out of the theatre. The pursuit was predictable a madhouse of disorganization and miscommunication. Eventually, authorities got their shit together enough to organize a manhunt and track him to a barn a few towns away. The authorities raid the barn and do to Booth what the law did to John Marston at the end of Red Dead Redemption – load him with a million bullets (the most tragic video game event ever, fight me on it). The coroner comes and examines the body and announces it is not John Wilkes Booth. There’s no broken leg. The hair color was red where Booth’s was black. He had tons of freckles whereas Booth did not. The good news was the feds managed to shoot a grubby Irishman, but it wasn’t the person they intended to kill. Rather than spark a nationwide panic or strain relations between the North and the South early into Reconstruction, law enforcement went with it and claimed Booth was killed. The idea was Booth was seriously wounded and likely wouldn’t survive much longer, and hey, we shot this other guy, and that’s good enough right?!?

Paul McCartney has been dead for decades: In 1969, people decided they had cracked the code of the Beatles’ lyrics which CLEARLY states Paul McCartney was dead. What were those specific lyrics? I have no idea, and I don’t care. People believed Paul was killed in a car accident and, lest the record label give up on the biggest act in the history of music, they stuffed a lookalike into his place. The final piece of the puzzle was the cover of Abbey Road, which had John in all white (the reverend overseeing the funeral, obviously), Ringo in all black (the undertaker), Paul third, slouched in his burial suit without any shoes (BECAUSE HE’S CLEARLY DEAD, IT’S ALL RIGHT THERE, CAN’T YOU SEE IT), followed by George in a denim outfit (the disinterested and checked out one, I mean gravedigger).

Princess Di was killed: Princess Di was supposedly killed for embarrassing the monarchy with her flagrant liberalism. Or the affair she was having. With a Muslim man. When you lay it and compare the notion against the entirety of European history, I kinda see where they’re coming from. Di had married into the monarchy and disgraced the institution with legitimate faux pas instead of the general misunderstanding of local culture generally associated with them. I don’t believe it, but it’s a spicy take.

The NBA rigged the Draft to send Patrick Ewing to New York: The NBA Draft involves a lottery where all the worst teams have an envelope dropped into a large rotating basket in accordance to how bad they are. In 1985, there were a handful of truly terrible teams like the San Diego Clippers, Indiana Pacers and Seattle SuperSonics, and the just regular-bad New York Knicks. The problem was there was only one sure-fire pick in the draft: Georgetown center Patrick Ewing. He was undoubtedly the type of player that could turn a franchise around, and teams had been angling to improve their shot at him all season by tanking. The NBA saw an opportunity – send their future star to some backwater trash team, or put him in the biggest market where he could push them into the playoffs? Duh – the NBA wanted him in New York, no offense San Diego and Seattle, some offense Indiana. The theory goes while all the envelopes were held backstage, the one with the Knicks logo had been left in a freezer so NBA Commissioner David Stern could stick his hand in the basket and find the “right” team by feel alone. Surprising to no one, the biggest market got the biggest player, who proceeded to be a legend by getting dunked on for his entire career.

Black Crusaders pushed Dave Chappelle off Comedy Central: We all agree Chappelle’s Show is the funniest show to ever air on television – if you disagree, you are wrong. God’s got a plan for all of us, and he’s just a little bit further behind on you. Rectify your errors and watch Chappelle’s Show again. The problem with Chappelle’s Show was it was rough around the edges in regards to race, with the very first episode including a comment about “setting race relations back decades.” To middle school me, I did not have much context for this concept. To black luminaries like Oprah, Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, the show was undermining strides for African-Americans to be taken more seriously. The name “Black Crusaders” originated from Tracy Jordan in 30 Rock, but the premise remains that the black establishment threw their weight behind getting Dave Chappelle off television. This proceeded to be the worst thing Bill Cosby ever did. /checks notes. Oh no. Oh my. It is DEFINITELY not the worst thing Bill Cosby ever did.

Phantom Time Hypothesis: In 1991, some low-rent historian declared the years between 614 AD and 911 AD never happened. The underlying reason was a medieval Pope realized he could be Pope during the year 1000 AD if he just made up a few hundred years, and wouldn’t that be neat! And since only like twelve people could read at that point in history, who was going to tell him he was wrong? He could brand them as heretics and have them killed. Just like that, 297 years of history materialized to pad his ego. This is wild but also… who cares? Does it change your life? Not at all, but you will use this anecdote at a cocktail party in the future. (PS I wrote about this already here https://ultracrepidarian.home.blog/2019/02/22/episode-8-of-today-i-learned-phantom-time-hypothesis/)

Khloe Kardashian is OJ Simpson’s daughter: The only evidence here is “Khloe looks like a linebacker compared to her sisters .” OH, and because her mom was a hoe. The background, if you haven’t seen “the People v. OJ”, is Robert Kardashian (Kim and Kourtney’s father) was OJ’s best friend before he got famous for things beyond football. So the groundwork was laid for Kris and OJ to be in contact, plus it allows us to be mean to the Kardashian’s to suggest they grew up in a broken home.

Cal Ripken’s games played streak: Cal Ripken was the third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles and maintains the insane record of playing 2,632 games consecutively. That’s SIXTEEN-PLUS YEARS of boring-ass baseball in a row! Toward the end of that streak, Ripken supposedly was running late on his pre-game errands and stopped at home where he found his wife in bed with Kevin Costner. A fight ensued, resulting in Ripken bruising his hand to the point he couldn’t even put his glove on to pretend he was keeping his streak alive. Baltimore’s front office, realizing the streak was more important than their deadass baseball team, claimed there was an “electric malfunction” and postponed the game a day so Ripken’s swollen hand could return to normal. This has been largely disproven, but it’s still more fun than the alternative – Baltimore is a third-world country somehow located on the eastern seaboard where the premise of “we don’t have power” is a believable excuse to delay a baseball game.

“Throwback Thursday” is a ploy by Facebook to improve facial recognition: Because Facebook is somehow devoted to reestablishing their mantle as “worst company in America”, I will believe absolutely anything about them. They have been busted in what, fifty scandals about mishandling personal data or outright lying in the last year? Seeing the ground fall out from under them, they focused their energy on new revenue streams, primarily perfecting facial recognition technology. They already have all your pictures, but why don’t you go ahead and give us a picture of you as a child you haven’t posted before, and one from specifically ten years ago so we can map all this out? Who am I kidding, Mark Zuckerberg would never do such a thing!

Flat Earth: My favorite online subgroup. Every single person who sincerely believes in the flat Earth would be an anti-vaxxer if only they could trick someone into having sex with them. It’s delightful to watch from a distance people who watched a YouTube video and have never left their hometown try to explain to Neil Degrasse Tyson how he’s an idiot. Contradictions and fundamental misunderstandings of basic science galore. Of course it’s wrong, but the entertainment value here is tremendous. I suggest following on Instagram and Reddit so you can see the delightful memes targeting the “globeheads” (that’s me!)

Hollow Earth: In the galaxy brain meme of conspiracies, the flat Earth is the first step, and hollow Earth is the expanded brain. Why is the Earth hollow? It doesn’t matter! What proof is there? None! But you haven’t lived until you’ve dropped into a flat Earther forum to tell them they’re all wrong. They’re used to arguing and defending their poorly rationalized position, but then you yank the rug out and tell them it’s hollow, and they don’t know what to think.

Cold Sun: The exploding brain portion of this meme. Like the hollow Earth, absolute no proof or justification, but goddamnit I was outside and the Sun was out, and I was cold, so, therefore, the Sun is cold! Conclusive evidence! A rising star on the conspiracy scene, definitely want to keep an eye out to this one and see how it progresses.

The moon landing was fake: While we’re discussing space conspiracies, let’s address the GOAT. We landed on the moon, but this was the OG of conspiracies. No one had ever doubted the government before this, which seems incredible to consider now as it is a fundamental aspect of being political knowledgable today. The underlying premise is it is so inconceivable to imagine firing some assholes off the ground and into space and landing them on a floating rock, and returning them back to the planet all with a computer less sophisticated than the calculator I used to play Drug Wars on in high school. I GET why people doubt it. I also get why Buzz Aldrin knocked this punk ass to the ground. FUCK EM UP BUZZ.

Beyonce was never pregnant: She was on a morning show talking about what a miracle of feminine strength being pregnant had taught her (note – I didn’t actually listen to what she said), only to stand up and have her “belly” fold over on top of itself like a cheap foam skin. Not to mention she never gained weight in her face and was back to performance shape within days of having her kid – I understand she’s uber-wealthy and has a professional dietician and trainers but all of this, coupled with her indisputable allegiance to THE ILLUMINATI, indicates Blue Ivy was carried by some other sucker who didn’t mind blowing out her vagina for the sake of the Beyhive.

Coca Cola knew New Coke sucked: Background: in the 1980s, Coke was battling with Pepsi for adult-onset diabetes supremacy. Pepsi had been winning the population over with their creative ads, and Coke needed a response. Their response was making an intention trash product. How was this supposed to help advance their sales? One: everyone wants to try a new product but more importantly two: everyone wants to try a historically bad one. Three was the kicker: once outrage has mounted, we return with regular Coke to tremendous fanfare and a renewed enthusiasm for our sugar water. Four: there’s a contingency aspect of this theory where the idea was to switch from pure sugar to a cheaper alternative, but management was nervous people would be outraged over the difference in taste – this horrible interruption would have customers thrilled for something only mildly worse than they were used to after something real bad. New Coke lasted 77 days before the original Coke returned. One exec would publically state “we are not that dumb, and we are not that smart.” BULLSHIT. You have to be one or the other! Those are the conspiracy theory rules!

Michael Jackson was chemically castrated: You know how Michael Jackson had an unusually high voice that sustained from his time in the Jackson Five through his adult life? The result of chemical castration orchestrated by his abusive father, Joe Jackson. According to our previously mention Grenadian/Iranian doctor, Conrad Murray, he claimed Michael Jackson had been subjected to orchidectomy, which is an infusion of chemicals that trick your balls into ceasing to do what they’re supposed to do. This same process also explains MJ’s weird skin discoloration and his strange predilection to living the life of a child. I swear I’m trying to make this funnier, but turns out destroying a child and causing a lifetime of emotional distress doesn’t quite fit in with the tone I was going for here.

Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space/Lost Cosmonauts: During the space race, the Soviets beat the Americans to every significant milestone, including putting the first man into space and, more importantly for national morale, returning him to Earth as not a charred piece of beef jerky. Except… probably not. There are loads of suggestions and statements and claims by Soviet specialists and defectors who claim Gagarin was not the first person in space, but the third or fourth to enter the upper atmosphere. The others made it up and were killed upon re-entry or due to complications while in flight. Very morbid and very creepy to imagine petrified Russians floating over your head dozens of times a day, but hey that’s what we’re here to discuss.

JFK assassination theories: If the moon landing isn’t the original conspiracy, this is. There have been hundreds of theories and twists and BRAND NEW EVIDENCE SUGGESTING IT WAS THE EGYPTIANS to propel a cottage industry for decades. Everyone reads them. Everyone has a favorite. Everyone can lampoon the technical fallibility of others. You’ve read this far, so I’m going to tell you what actually happened that fateful morning in Dallas – the Secret Service agent sitting on the back bumper of the car in front of JFK shot him on accident. Lee Harvey Oswalt was definitely firing from the library window, but he was a terrible shot with an outdated rifle trying to hit a moving target four stories below him – he had no chance. When Oswalt started firing, everyone panicked, including the Secret Service agent sitting fifteen feet away with a rifle on his lap. He fumbled his rifle in the panic and hit the trigger, which explains why JFK’s head went backward instead of to the left if Oswalt had hit him from where he was positioned. It explains why multiple individuals on the ground heard close gunfire and smelled gun powder, neither of which they could have observed from where Oswalt was shooting. The FBI and Secret Service unraveled this mystery early, but instead of destroying an innocent man’s life who had served his country honorably and was serving out his retirement in the then cushy gig of Presidential detail, they opted to blame the guy who was actually trying to kill the President. There you go. You learned something today other than the Sun is actually cold.

There was a bacon propaganda campaign: Facing slipping sales and a more health-conscious population, BIG BACON needed a way to get back into the population’s good graces. Instead of some high-level marketing campaign, they opted to create corny memes that got went viral around the primordial stages of the internet about how cool bacon is. You saw a million lame memes about how BACON IS LIFE and BEST THING ABOUT MORNING IS BACON, and now we have fucking bacon milkshakes. Hot take – bacon is not that special. It’s fine. It’s merely an okay breakfast meat. Sausage is better. Either way, our porcine friends are not enjoying the outcome.

Finland does not exist: Wrote about this one too (ultracrepidarian.home.blog/2019/02/22/episode-9-of-today-i-learned-the-finland-conspiracy/). What it lacks in plausibility it makes up for in sheer eccentricity. Whenever you bullshit with your friends around the bar about conspiracies, everyone goes to the well – throw out this bad boy, and you’ll get some heads to turn.

Michael Jordan gambles: This is really two different theories but they are heavily intertwined, so they’ll get their own entry. Jordan was a notoriously compulsive gambler. He never found something he couldn’t bet on and/or subsequently rig in his favor – there’s a story of him betting a teammate a thousand bucks his bag would come out of the airport conveyor belt first; his bag plopped out first, because Jordan slipped one of the luggage handlers fifty bucks to make sure his bag came out first. The theory goes NBA Commissioner David Stern had learned Jordan had been betting on NBA games Jordan was playing in and realized he was in a pickle – you can’t suspend the greatest basketball player and biggest star in the prime of his career for gambling without cratering the entire league, but you can’t let Jordan get away with it either. The resulting action was Michael Jordan would “retire” from basketball for two years, at which point he played baseball, and we all pretended to like baseball again for one summer. As far as I’m concerned, this is 100% happened, and you will never convince me otherwise.

The second theory on Jordan’s gambling involved him running up a massive debt to some mafia types, who did not appreciate his flagrant attitude in dismissing them in their demands to be paid. Knowing they could never put a hit on the biggest star in the world without a ton of attention, they instead killed Jordan’s father in his car in rural North Carolina to send the message. This is less plausible than the retirement, but the circumstances behind Jordan’s father’s death fits the pattern.

Your phone listens to you for advertising purposes: This 100% is the truth, fuck whatever anyone else says.

Stevie Wonder isn’t blind: Absolutely the truth. Dozens of celebrities and Boy George have stated experiences where Stevie Wonder approached them and made gestures or comments to them when they had yet to speak or make their presence known. He regularly gets courtside seats to NBA games, and sports personality Bomani Jones claims a friend sold him three TVs. What does a blind guy need THREE TVs for?! The dead-ass, end-all evidence is him above catching a mic stand that is falling away from him. There are very few things I am confident in this world, but I am convinced that motherfucker can see.