13 ‘declassified’ conspiracy theories that live on, from Reptoids and JFK to fluoridation and 9/11

The Apollo 11 command module lands in the Pacific Ocean in 1969. (AP)

We are living in a golden age of conspiracy theories. Even the president of the United States embraces them.

This surely isn’t a good thing for our democracy or our mental health — and yet it can be hard to resist the urge to investigate the various theories of secret governmental oppression and alien invasion.

And investigate is exactly what Brian Dunning has done in his new book “Conspiracies Declassified: The Skeptoid Guide to the Truth Behind the Theories.” The Bend-based host of the Skeptoid podcast has delved into “50 of the most notorious (and well-known) conspiracy theories of all time.” These even include a few that, he writes, “have elements of truth that are tough to deny.”

Is “Conspiracies Declassified” for you? Poke your head out from under your bed and find out. Below we examine 13 of the conspiracy theories covered in the book.

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Knights Templar

What some people believe: The secret religious military order secretly rules the world.

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What’s real: The Knights Templar operated during the Crusades and sought the beneficence of wealthy Christians, leading to the Templars’ reputation as the shadowy force behind powerful political and financial moves around the world. In the 14th century, France’s Philip IV tried to destroy the order, and this supposedly sent the Knights underground, where all these years later they continue to wield influence. In fact, writes Dunning, the Catholic Church in the 1300s merged the Templars’ assets with those of the Knights Hospitaller, which is still in operation, and dissolved the Templars. Adds Dunning: “Since [the Knights Templar] no longer exist, they have no influence.”

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The Denver International Airport

What some people believe: Built in the 1990s, complete with underground train tunnels, the DIA’s physical massiveness (53 squares miles) and other quirks (its crisscrossing runways sort of resemble a swastika) have led to theories that the planes that come and go from it are nothing but a front. That it’s really the headquarters of the New World Order, which is something along the lines of a secretly reconstituted worldwide Nazi Party or genocidal Illuminati sect.

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What’s real: It’s an airport, albeit a very expensive one (it came in at about $2 billion over budget).

The Reptoids

What some people believe: The so-called Beautiful People who make up the celebrity class aren’t really beautiful. In fact, they aren’t even human. Many powerful politicians and movie stars are actually “reptilian beings” whose apparent human form is simply an “electronic holographic disguise.”

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What’s real: Dunning says we can blame 20th-century video technology for this sci-fi conspiracy theory. “Have you ever paused an old video of almost any world leader … and caught a strange-looking frame of the person’s face?” he writes. That’s supposedly the holographic mask slipping. Or maybe it’s just, to use the technical term, a “compression artifact.”

Water Fluoridation

What some people believe: Most cities add fluoride to their H2O, but not Portland. Should we consider ourselves lucky? “Some [conspiracy theorists] say fluoride is a dangerous neurotoxin and the government wants to give us all brain damage so we can be easily controlled,” Dunning writes.

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What’s real: “Abundant evidence suggests that a small dose of the chemical can help prevent cavities,” the non-profit organization FairWarning wrote last year. “But it turns out that, when it comes to fluoride, there is a risk of getting too much. … The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its parent agency, Health and Human Services, consider fluoride concentrations in water of 0.7 parts per million, or ppm, the sweet spot — a level high enough to prevent tooth decay but low enough to avoid mild dental fluorosis or more serious problems.”

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FEMA

What some people believe: The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is officially tasked with “helping people before, during and after disasters,” secretly runs prison camps that house American political dissidents. (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job,” indeed.)

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What’s real: That patriotic, law-abiding Japanese-Americans were hauled off to internment camps during World War II, Dunning writes, “gives the FEMA prison camps conspiracy theory a unique hint of plausibility. However, it seems improbable.”

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Chemtrails

What some people believe: The contrails left behind by most aircraft are “some poisonous or otherwise harmful gas or drug being sprayed by the airplane in order to hurt the people below.”

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What’s real: The explanation that debunks this conspiracy theory is as straightforward as they come. “The contrails you see behind airlines are normal and unavoidable condensation created by the plane burning fuel in certain high-altitude conditions,” Dunning writes.

JFK assassination

What some people believe: This one’s difficult to quickly summarize, seeing as it’s the mother of all American conspiracy theories, the subject of endless books, documentaries and even a feature film directed by Oliver Stone. Lee Harvey Oswald, the former soldier arrested for President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, claimed he was “just a patsy” — shortly before he was murdered himself. Theories range from Vice President Lyndon Johnson directing JFK’s killing to the Mob, the CIA or Cuban dictator Fidel Castro doing so. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump suggested that the father of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz might have been involved in the assassination.

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What’s real: Well, we know for certain that President Kennedy was shot to death in Dallas on November 22, 1963. “All available evidence shows that JFK was assassinated by a lone gunman [Oswald] whose psychological profile matches very closely with similar killers today,” Dunning writes. “No evidence suggests otherwise.”

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Paul McCartney

What some people believe: Legendary musician Paul McCartney died in a 1966 car accident, at the height of his fame and creativity, and was replaced in the massively popular band the Beatles by a lookalike named William Campbell.

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What’s real: Macca remains very much alive and is now 75 years old. “Paul McCartney’s fatal car crash never happened,” Dunning states. The “Paul is dead” conspiracy theory apparently started in 1969 when a man called a Michigan radio show to report that McCartney had been in a wreck. A couple of college newspapers soon jokingly reported that the Beatle had died — and that the other members of the band had replaced him with a double. Then there’s the aural evidence, such as: At the end of the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” you’ll hear John Lennon say, “I buried Paul.” (Lennon claimed he said “cranberry sauce.”)

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The Holocaust

What some people believe: Racist conspiracy theorists argue that the Holocaust is a fictional story invented by Zionists as part of their effort to gain sympathy and take over the world. “Believers in this conspiracy theory,” Dunning writes, “sometimes say that all Germany did was relocate a large number of the Jewish population.”

A visitor takes a photograph at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. (AP)

What’s real: Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime systematically murdered around 6 million Jewish people in the 1930s and ’40s. “Anti-Semitism,” Dunning points out, “is, sadly, a cornerstone of many conspiracy theories.”

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9/11 World Trade Center attack

What some people believe: The U.S. government secretly set off explosives inside New York City’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The reason: “to create anger against Islamic states and breed support for a war.”

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What’s real: Two hijacked commercial airplanes struck the Twin Towers. Dunning states clearly: “There were no explosives used … the U.S. government wasn’t involved, and there was nothing unexpected about their collapses from an engineering perspective.”

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9/11 Pentagon attack

What some people believe: Another 9/11 conspiracy theory involves the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., being hit by a warhead instead of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. This theory insists “there was no Flight 77. Instead, theorists say, what struck the Pentagon was a missile fired by the U.S. government as part of an enormous ‘inside job’ the government itself planned.”

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What’s real: Flight 77 was real, and Islamic extremists hijacked the Boeing 757 and purposely crashed it into the Pentagon.

Moon landing

What some people believe: U.S. astronauts never landed on the Moon. Doing so would have been too difficult and expensive. Instead, NASA faked it to score “the ultimate propaganda victory” over the Soviet Union. Proponents of this conspiracy theory have even ambushed Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the Moon, and demanded that he swear on a Bible that he landed on the lunar surface. Aldrin famously clocked one of them with a right cross.

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin on the Moon. (AP)

What’s real: American astronauts have walked on the Moon. “The very best proof that humans went to the Moon is the rocks that were brought back,” Dunning writes. He adds: “Soviet scientists especially would have loved nothing better than to prove them fake, but they couldn’t.”

Finland

What some people believe: Have you ever been to Finland? Neither have the conspiracy theorists who believe the country doesn’t exist. They say that “instead of the landmass shown on maps, it is actually just more Baltic Sea.”

What’s real: If you fly into Stockholm, Sweden, charter a boat and set off into the Gulf of Bothnia heading northeast, you will eventually crash into Finland.

Bonus

Conspiracy theories typically are bizarre delusions or flat-out lies. But every once in a while a conspiracy theorist gets one right. An example examined in “Conspiracies Declassified”: so-called Numbers Stations.

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What some people believe: About 100 years ago, shortwave-radio listeners began picking up broadcasts that chiefly consisted of a droning voice “reading long strings of nonsense letters and numbers. Conspiracy theory hypotheses have abounded for years about what these mysterious radio stations might be, but the leading theory is that they are governments transmitting information to spies located in foreign countries.”

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What’s real: “In this case,” Dunning writes, “the conspiracy theory is spot on. In at least some cases, stations have been proven to be encrypted communications to spies.”

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“Conspiracies Declassified” author Brian Dunning is the producer and host of the podcast “Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena.”

— The Oregonian