7 Really Dumb Conspiracy Theories Americans Actually Believe | Across America, US Patch

ACROSS AMERICA — When it comes to the things it’s hard to believe that people actually believe, the coronavirus pandemic may have fed Americans’ seemingly insatiable appetite for conspiracy theories.

We’re not just talking about “the big lie” regarding voter fraud that persists five months after the 2020 presidential election, though the number of people who believe the election was “stolen” from former President Donald Trump includes about 6 in 10 Republicans answering a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in late March.

About half of Republicans believed the deadly Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was mostly nonviolent and the work of left-wing activists aiming to make Trump “look bad,” according to the poll.

The findings of the Reuters/Ipsos poll aside, there are several things Americans believe that require an even greater leap of faith. That they have gained such traction over the past year of the coronavirus pandemic isn’t a big surprise to Joseph Pierre, a psychiatrist and researcher at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.

“There’s good evidence that conspiracy theories flourish during times of crisis,” he told Discover magazine. “When we feel insecure, we often look for information that provides an explanation for chaotic events.”

In our last look at how dumb Americans are, Patch examined the culture of denial around the Holocaust and climate change, the belief that Earth is flat and the rejection of evolutionary theory, among other conspiracy theories. Here’s an expansion on that list of dumb conspiracy theories Americans believe, along with facts that debunk them:

1. COVID-19 Is A Head Game

Researchers say the conspiracy theories surrounding COVID-19, the illness that by mid-April had killed more than 564,000 Americans, are a result of an “infodemic,” a term used to describe the crisis of COVID-19 misinformation.

The coronavirus pandemic conspiracy theories run the gamut from easily debunked notions that 5G networks sped the virus’s spread to the idea that it provides a convenient excuse for Bill Gates to vaccinate all Americans while secretly implanting microchips to track and control them, to the obvious lie that COVID-19 doesn’t actually exist.

The coronavirus pandemic has been an umbrella for groups and individuals with a shared distrust of institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others. They include the far-right groups challenging lockdowns and mask mandates, anti-vaxxers and QAnon followers, who painted Trump as a warrior in the secret war against a powerful cabal of satanic cannibals.

“People need big explanations for big problems, for big world events,” John Cook, a cognitive scientist and conspiracy theory expert at Monash University in Australia, told The Associated Press. “Random explanations — like bats, or wet markets — are just psychologically unsatisfying.”

These theories spread quickly on social media before major platforms saw the danger they were creating and started clamping down on them. Putting the genie back in the bottle is difficult, though, in a politically charged atmosphere that has transformed a public health issue into a debate over individual liberties surrounding mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccines.

2. Lizard People Have Taken Over

With roots tracing back to the second half of the 19th century, the idea that lizard people are taking over the planet is an oldie but goodie. Among those who embraced the idea were Ashli Babbitt, a QAnon supporter fatally shot by police during the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, and Anthony Quinn Warner, the accused Nashville, Tennessee, Christmas Day bomber.

NBC News called such theories “a very old trope with disturbing links to anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic hostilities dating to the 19th century.”

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The conspiracy theory might have died if not for David Icke, a British sports reporter-turned-conspiracy theorist who believes genetically modified reptilian-human hybrids known as “lizard people” control Earth and its political machinations.

Icke claims a number of lizard people have served as U.S. presidents or in other leadership positions around the world. The conspiracy theory contains just enough truth about things that have taken place for his belief to “start to make sense in some capacity,” according to an Ohio State University blog post.

3. Old New World Order Theory Is Back

According to the anti-government extremists subscribing to the New World Order conspiracy theory since the 1990s, we’re already doomed by schemes of a diabolically clever and unscrupulous secret organization to bring about the downfall of the United States, the last bastion of freedom.

Here’s what these folks believe, according to the Anti-Defamation League:

“Through repressive measures, as well as manufactured crises such as terrorist attacks and pandemics, the globalist conspirators seek to eliminate dissent and to disarm Americans so that the ‘New World Order’ can move in and enslave them. ‘New World Order’ conspiracists also commonly believe that hundreds of concentration camps have been built in the U.S., ready to house dissenters; that the government will declare martial law, possibly on a pretext such as responding to a terrorist attack; and that the government will engage in mass gun confiscations.”

4. Black Helicopter Blades Still Whirling

How exactly did the architects of this coup gain control? With a fleet of stealthy black helicopters, of course. The operators of such ominous aircraft haven’t been cunning enough to escape detection, though, and they’ve been presented as evidence in grainy images that look as if they were taken with a first-generation flip-phone camera.

Stealthy black helicopters are, of course, real.

The U.S. government just doesn’t like to talk about its stealthy black helicopters because the U.S. government wants its black helicopters to remain stealthy. That seems logical enough.

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Experts are confident the pieces of a helicopter left behind at the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed in a 2011 Navy SEAL operation are from a stealth version of the Black Hawk helicopters, according to the Army Times. The aircraft had been modified to reduce noise and heat, and to escape radar detection.

If that isn’t proof New World Order grand poohbahs are planning to incarcerate dissenters in a vast network of concentration camps, what is?

5. Tupac Isn’t Really Dead

In your hearts, perhaps. In truth, though, rapper and actor Tupac Shakur has been dead almost as long as he was alive.

The gangsta rap star was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas on Sept. 7, 1996, and died six days later. The 25-year-old’s still-unsolved murder was an escalation of the feud between East Coast and West Coast rappers, according to Biography.com. Tupac’s body was cremated and his ashes scattered in his mother’s garden in Stone Mountain, Georgia.

So what’s the origin of the story that Tupac is alive?

It seems to have started with Michael Nice, Tupac’s bodyguard, who claimed he helped the rapper fake his death and smuggle him to Cuba. To make his point that he had the capabilities to fake the rapper’s death, Nice said in 2018 that he had faked his own death using a magic trick he had learned as a kid to stop his pulse. His ruse involved an ambulance, a hospital and a corpse at a morgue — though Nice himself is upright and breathing.

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No such evidence exists to support conspiracy theorists’ claim that Tupac is alive, though the son of Death Row Records mogul Marion Suge Knight claimed in a series of now-deleted Instagram posts in 2019 that one of the record label’s most successful artists was upright and breathing and living in Malaysia.

Of course, “deep fake technology” keeps the lie alive. Snoop Dogg brought Tupac back to life as a hologram.

6. The Moon Landing Was A Fake

How is it even possible that Americans believe the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, was a fake? After all, an estimated 530 million people watched on television as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took the first steps (hmm, that we know of) that man has ever taken on the moon.

As the conspiracy theory goes, this was one of the greatest hoaxes perpetrated on mankind, all to convince the Russians that the United States had won the space race. The proof? It’s as clear as the U.S. flag flapping in the wind in photos shared of the moon landing, according to History.com, which thoroughly debunks the fake moon-landing conspiracy theories.

Also, notice the absence of stars in moon landing photos. What’s up with that? For those for whom facts matter, Armstrong and Aldrin took the photos when the surface of the moon was brightly illuminated by the sun. There’s more, but some of it will make your brain hurt.

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The point is, faking the moon landing would have required deception on a massive scale, according to Rick Fienberg, the press officer for the American Astronomical Society, who has a Ph.D. in astronomy.

“About 400,000 scientists, engineers, technologists, machinists, electricians, worked on the Apollo program,” Fienberg told History.com. “If in fact the main motivation for believing in the moon hoax [is that] you don’t trust the government, you don’t trust our leaders, you don’t trust authority, how can you feel that 400,000 people would keep their mouths shut for 50 years? It’s just implausible.”

7. Chemtrails Are Government Poison

A research group at Harvard University gets a slew of questions about chemtrails — plumes in the sky that are supposedly similar to contrails — except that they carry poison to sterilize and reduce the life expectancy of us humans, control our minds and subject us to all kinds of wacky weather.

There’s no credible evidence they exist, the research group wrote, adding, “If we did see any evidence that governments were endangering their own citizens in the manner alleged in the chemtrails conspiracy, we would be eager to expose and stop any such activities.”

Journalist Carey Dunne, who spent a month with chemtrail conspiracy theorists on an organic farm in California, wrote in a 2017 piece in The Guardian that the Sierra Nevada Geoengineering Awareness group helped spread the theory on Facebook with posts about “aerosol attacks,” “toxic silver skies,” “mad men playing god with our weather, blocking our life-giving sun.”

Some of these folks looked at Trump as their savior who would end “the chemtrailing of America” by executive order. But the tweet turned out to be a fake from someone pranking Trump, though Dunne noted in the piece for The Guardian “it wouldn’t have been the most outrageous missive from the man who once supported the ‘birther’ theory.”