Conspiracy theories are nothing new, nor is the term, despite an indefatigable claim the CIA coined the phrase after JKF’s assassination to make those arguing for them seem unhinged.

The differences today are how easy they are to spread and, stemming from that, how even trivial items can become the focus of conspiracy theories. Previously, they centered only on major events, such as assassinations, pandemics, and war.

For example, there was a belief by some that the Roosevelt administration had prior knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and allowed it to happen, perhaps to get the country out of the Depression by means of a wartime economy. This thinking falls flat because the U.S. could have still been on high alert, or better yet, launched a preemptive strike based on this supposed intelligence. In these scenarios, Roosevelt still gets his war and does so without the handicap of losing battleships, destroyers, aircraft, and the 2,459 service members who perished in the Japanese onslaught.

But let’s look at some of the specific arguments. One of the more repeated lines among theorists is that the only three U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific Fleet were away from Pearl Harbor the morning of Dec. 7, 1941. The theory holds that the U.S. could keep its carriers while still having a justification for war.

However, it was only during the following year’s Battle of Midway when the value of aircraft carriers were understood. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the Pacific fleet featured three times as many battleships as aircraft carriers.

Besides, the idea that the three carriers were kept ensconced by being away from the Harbor is mistaken. Each was alone at sea in an area known to be vulnerable to unfriendly elements .The Saratoga was making the long journey back from Seattle at the time of the attack. Meanwhile, the Enterprise and Lexington were ordered away from Pearl Harbor at separate times for reinforcing missions to Midway and Wake.  The Enterprise was scheduled to return by Dec. 5, at which time the Lexington would leave, so that at least one would be docked at Pearl Harbor at all times. The Lexington left on schedule, but bad weather kept the Enterprise at sea for two more days, one of those being Dec. 7.

Another theorist claim is that a Japanese midget submarine was spotted four hours before the attack, but was left alone. This is inaccurate. What really happened is that the USS Ward destroyer responded to the report, failed to find the submarine, but did locate and sink a second sub.

Conspiracy theorists are adaptable. While the failure to sink the first sub is considered evidence of a stand-down order, so too is the torpedoing of the second sub. With the latter incident, the assertion is that complicit U.S. officials wanted to hush the report of a lone sub so as to not alert American service members about the aerial onslaught about to commence.

However, as soon as Admiral Husband Kimmel, the Pacific Fleet Commander, heard about the sinking, he dispatched the USS Ward to the area to determine the submarine’s significance. But this was less than half an hour before the first bomb fell, so this mission led the destroyer into the invading enemy’s path. Had Kimmel been following stand-down orders, he would not have wanted the sinking investigated.

A third conspiracy theory point centers on the actions of 1st Lt. Kermit Tyler. Less than an hour before the attack, radar operators at Opana Point detected incoming Japanese aircraft and alerted Tyler, their supervisor. He failed to make any report of it, preferring to take his soldiers to breakfast. However, this misfortune was based on equipment shortcomings and inexperience.

According to Sketoid’s Brian Dunning, when operators detected incoming planes, the radar station was not yet fully operational and was, in fact, still being constructed. The Pearl Harbor Intercept Center on the Point was only partly activated. Further, it was staffed by those without training and the soldier manning the scope was using it for the first time. Meanwhile, Tyler was a fighter pilot, not a radar specialist, and was on just his second day at Opana Point. When underlings informed him of the inbound attackers, he assumed them to be U.S. B-17’s scheduled to arrive from the mainland, which is why his response focused on waffles instead of weapons.

Another point centers on U.S. intelligence expressing concern about just such an attack a year prior, yet still being unprepared for it. Indeed, in late 1940, Kimmel, wrote to his bosses in Washington that an attack “on Pearl Harbor is a possibility, and we are taking immediate practical steps to minimize the damage inflicted and to ensure that the attacking force will pay.” Then 10 days before the attack, Kimmel was ordered to a defensive deployment of the fleet.

Yet on the day that lives in infamy, service members were sleeping, ships were anchored in the Harbor, and most U.S. aircraft were in the open close together. All of these made for easy targets. Additionally, ships sunk in the harbor could be raised and repaired, whereas those lost at sea would not have this option. If wanting to be attacked but lessen the damage, this would be an avenue.

Also, U.S. cryptographers had broken Japan’s diplomatic code and were making progress on breaking its military code, giving American intelligence some access to Japanese secrets.  Putting all this together, it seems possible that U.S. leadership knew. However, that’s only if these facts are viewed in isolation. As we look closer at these points, the conspiracy angle falters.  

This was detailed in Henry Clausen’s book, Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement. In 1944, the Secretary of War ordered Clausen, then an Army lawyer, to investigate what happened in the months prior to the attack. He learned that the key to why the U.S. was unprepared was a lack of organization. With agencies acting independently and having no central oversight, decoded messages were more likely to be in a file drawer than in a military planning room.

Ten days after the attack, the Navy demoted Kimmel and removed him as Pacific Fleet commander. Conspiracy theorists consider this a scapegoating, insisting Kimmel was following stand-down orders from the Pentagon. However, U.S. action that fateful day resulted from Kimmel’s orders, not Washington D.C.’s

When Kimmel received the order to assume defensive positions on Nov. 27, 1941, the main threats were thought to be espionage and sabotage, not military attack. So Kimmel had aircraft move into the open and consolidate, which made for the best defense against infiltration.

The final point by theorists is that the war did indeed lift the U.S. out of the Depression and the economic boom lasted 15 years. The war also helped to cement Roosevelt’s fourth presidential election victory. However, this desire to connect unrelated dots is prevalent in conspiracy theory circles. Most large-scale tragedies are going to indirectly benefit some persons in some way. But that’s a separate issue from whether those persons orchestrated it.

The idea that FEMA maintains a network of sprawling camps for the roundup of undesirables seems a garden variety conspiracy theory. But legal justifications for this to happen exist and it has precedence. Whether that means most of us a moment’s notice away from a Darkness at Noon existence courtesy Bilderberger henchmen is what we’ll look at today.

Considering the secrecy the supposed camps are allegedly shrouded in, they are conspicuous in their appearance and location. They are said to populate the likes of train yards, shipping ports, and former military installations, and sometimes feature a barbed wire or steel fence accoutrement.

If these are meant to house unwilling, innocent U.S. citizens, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid notes they have legal cover and it has happened before. Regarding precedent, there were World War II internment camps and the Obama administration executed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki without trial.

As to the law, through a civil disturbance plan called “Garden Plot,” the Department of Defense asserts the right to assist local authorities during times of civil unrest. Authority for this stems from Article I of the U.S. Constitution, which reads, “Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.” Also, Title 10 of federal law authorizes the suppression of insurrections, rebellions, and domestic violence by executive order. Further, the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act, both of which put checks on these powers, have been curtailed Sept. 11, 2001. Meanwhile, the Patriot Act contains many nefarious, terrifying, and perhaps already-in-use clauses that may allow for the kidnapping and holding incommunicado of U.S. citizens. 

So any conspiracy theorist worried about government overreach needn’t make stuff up. The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, CIA black sites, and a serial torture program run by the Chicago Police Department are proof of that. But theorists are generally not reading Seymour Hersch or exposés in The Atlantic. They don’t want mainstream media doing the exposing, they prefer their niche market with less-stringent evidence standards, smaller audiences, and feeling of being more in the know than the braindead masses.

For example, the CDC posts on its website a page outlining its ability and authority to detain an unlimited number of Americans without charge for any duration. But directing someone to a website where the government admits its plan doesn’t allow for self-congratulation, foreboding speculation, or the thrill of digging through the official story to get truth to fellow Woke People. So instead of sounding a call to action on the CDC policy, theorists instead give warnings about FEMA manning a “fully-staffed gassing/cremating death camp” overseen by “high level Illuminati Luciferians.”

Such scenarios take place in what I call an Eternal Tomorrow, which is prevalent in conspiracy circles. The roundup plans are always in their final stages, yet remain so for a decade. Any terrorist attack, high-level talk, or economic downturn can be labeled a ruse that will be the impetus to begin a wholesale detainment, enslavement, and genocide. Yet we never see the arrival of the initial truck or the first victim being hauled away. Still, it has to be always on the cusp of happening for the theorist to get excited. An investigative report that unearths a 150-year plan to bring this to fruition would get no traction in conspiracy circles.

If detainments begin, there will be plenty of places for housing the victims, as anything can be deemed a FEMA camp. For example, Wal-Mart or NFL stadiums are said to be ready to serve this purpose. Untold years at Wal-Mart, that’s got even me scared. Videos purporting to show other camp locations have turned out to be North Korean gulags, National Guard training centers, Amtrak repair shops, private company storage facilities, and medium and minimum security prisons.

While there are genuine FEMA facilities, they are usually mundane storage and temporary-housing locations, consistent with the agency’s mission of preparing to care for displaced persons

There are several YouTube videos purporting to show clandestine camps. Producers mosey up to these sites, record them, upload the imagery, narrate and distribute it, all without reprisal. That they can do this defeats their claim that they are exposing a heavily-fortified, armed-to-the-teeth, fully-staffed, death-camp-in-waiting, which an all-powerful government wants to keep secret.

Nearly every war has missing soldiers, but those who did not return from Vietnam are the subject of long-lasting rumor that they are still being held prisoner.

The rumor can serve multiple purposes. For loved ones, it is a means of holding out hope their friends and relatives are still alive. For those with a more jaded view, it is part of a conspiracy theory aimed at no-good commies and/or corrupt U.S. government officials.

When the war ended with the signing of Paris Peace Accords, the 591 known American POWs were released in exchange for a U.S. withdrawal. Besides this, there were 2,646 service members listed as missing in action. About 1,000 of those have since been accounted for, either through their remains being identified, or having been found alive in the U.S. or overseas.

The idea that some service members might still be held captive began after the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. Part of this was because U.S. investigators lacked access to the battlefields and sites of former POW camps. Around this time, a Vietnamese family moved into my neighborhood. They were part of the influx of refugees, some of whom brought with them tales of having seen Americans still in captivity.

But since the late 1980s, U.S. officials have had full access to battlefields and former POW locations, and Southeast Asian nations have cooperated, allowing Americans to maintain research offices in their countries. In these 30 years of increased joint action and investigations, no American POWs have been found in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos. The only missing service members to show up alive were those who deserted or otherwise were lost in military bureaucracy, and none of these had been held after the Accords signing.

According to a 1992 New York Times article, reports from refugees were investigated by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The majority of the sightings, however, were of Americans who returned in 1973. About sixteen sightings were unresolved. The article explains that, according to DIA officials, “Most of the unresolved cases may not be related to American prisoners of war because they describe individuals who were not under guard, but were with Vietnamese wives and families, or were walking freely in Saigon. They could be Soviet advisers or Western European Diplomats.”

War represents a stain on mankind, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese military engaged in barbarism, and POW camps in Vietnam were unconscionable violations of human rights. Further, many were buried deep in almost impenetrable jungles. With all this, it would seem not implausible that unscrupulous types could hold onto prisoners, for slavery, future bargaining, or simple cruelty. However, decades of sustained searching and investigation in periods of openness between former combatants have yielded nothing. The sites could have been moved, the cooperation could have been a ruse, but speculation like this is not the same as proof, which has never been forthcoming.

There have been far more detached-from-reality conspiracy theories than this one, but believers are still vulnerable to falling for a defining trait of conspiracy theories: The lack of evidence being seen as the evidence. To staunch believers, the lack of recovered, living POWs shows the extent and efficiency of the system that keeps them hidden.

Further, any documentation with contrary information is considered part of an governement cover-up. For example, according to Brian Dunning of Skeptoid, a Library of Congress website, “POW/MIA Databases and Documents contains more than 150,000 declassified documents from the Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office. This source allows a by-name search of MIAs and POWs, which will produce documents related to the searched individual. While this indicates transparency, a cynic would consider it a deflection meant to convince the gullible. In conspiracy theory parlance, it is merely a continuation of the official narrative.”

Proving that there was never a single POW held past 1973 would be impossible, but it is not on the skeptics to disprove a point. Rather, we should examine the best available evidence without bias and follow Occam’s Razor and the conclusions to their logical ends. Between the aforementioned website, POW databases, and the continued unearthing of MIA remains, claims of surviving prisoners seems untenable.

As with Bigfoot, each year that goes by without a confirmation of U.S. prisoners being held is a sign of its increasing unlikelihood. We know some that some MIA soldiers died in combat, some deserted, and some assumed aliases. We cannot completely dismiss the idea that some of them were held after the war, perhaps even still today. But a thousand pieces of hearsay, speculation, and third-hand reports do not equal one solid piece of proof.

Except for passing references when writing about conspiracy theories in general, I have never written about Sept. 11 truthers. For starters, it is one of the more hackneyed skeptic topics and so much has been written about it already.

Second, I’ve never understood what point the theorists were supposed to be making. Let’s allow that explosives brought down the twin towers. Where’s one piece of evidence that the devices were planted by Bush minions (or Israelis or Russians or Saddam henchmen, if favoring those alternatives to the alternative)? Perhaps bin Laden had his agents infiltrate the towers and hide explosives there as a backup in case the hijackings failed.

Third, I lack the technical knowledge to add anything to claims and counterclaims regarding building strengths, cut beams, how fires spread, and so on.

But after one of my passing references to truthers, I was challenged by a couple of them on what happened at the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Of course, it’s up to them to prove their claim; it’s not on me to disprove it. But in the spirit of generosity, I’ll examine some of what they say.

Islamic terrorists overpowered those aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and flew the hijacked plane into the Pentagon, killing 59 crew members and passengers, 125 military personnel, and the five perpetrators. Evidence for this includes communication between the airliner and air traffic control, phone calls from victims to those on the ground, and eyewitness accounts.

However, theorists dismiss what they call the “official story,” a term that carries no meaning and which is intended to disparage and cast doubt. There is no official story, merely a mainstream one. When the term is used, it is meant to suggest cover-up, tainted authorities, and a lie that enterprising conspiracy theorists must courageously break through and expose.

But such investigations are almost invariably threadbare in terms of actual, provable evidence. When theorists allegedly examine whether a particular mass shooting was fabricated, they fail to take even the rudimentary step of checking with the county clerk’s office where the tragedy took place to see if victims’ death certificates are on file. Another major problem with how they operate is that if such documentation is presented, it is considered to be part of the conspiracy. That also goes for any grieving family member, hospital worker, or reporter who corroborates the “official story.”  

Standards of evidence are so loose that one conspiracy website found it unusual that there would be a dozen reporters at the World Trade Center and Pentagon within minutes, even though that could be said of persons in most professions in cities that size. Additionally, most major news agencies have police scanners running 24-7 and reporters go to work each day ready to speed to the scene of breaking news.

There is overwhelming evidence that the Pentagon was hit by a hijacked airliner, but in an event that momentous, there are going to be a few anomalies and conspiracy theorists seize on these half dozen or so while ignoring the hundreds of pieces of proof that deviates from their narrative.   

This is not an attempt to wade through the muck of the multiple five-hour YouTube videos on the topic, but rather we will be hitting some of the lowlights.

Perhaps the most frequently-raised point is that security video showed a missile (or at least something that is not a 757) slamming into the Pentagon. There is only one frame showing a slender white streak approaching the building and then an explosion. Theorists assert the object is too small to be an airplane. Again, I’m unsure what this is meant to prove. Be it an airplane, missile, rocket, or unknown secret weapon, that still says nothing about who sent it barreling into the Pentagon.

But beyond that, there are reasons to reject the missile claim. Its apparent size was due not to object itself but what was capturing it. The security camera has an ultra-wide angle lens, which allows it to capture a wider area but which also distorts objects. It makes the Pentagon looked curved and this distortion is why the airplane appeared sleeker and narrower that what it was.

Onto the second point. The modus operandi of most theorists is to take two disparate facts and tie them together without seeing if there is a connection. One of the few times that I engaged a 9/11 truther, I raised my usual objection that even if explosives were smuggled into the World Trade Center, there was no evidence that the government did it. The totality of her response was that Marvin Bush was in charge of security for the Center on Sept. 11. This is where conspiracy theorists make their biggest error. They presume that any fact that might be consistent with their narrative constitutes evidence for it. Yes, if George W. Bush wanted to fly airplanes into the twin towers, having his brother in charge of security could conceivably aid in this, but that’s a long ways from meaning that this happened. She was content to throw out a fact, tie it to a wholly unsupported notion, then declare victory. She presented no conspirators coming forward, no video tape of the planning meeting, no unclassified documents, no purloined FBI or CIA letters, no forensic evidence of Bush DNA on explosives residue, and no criminal convictions from the deadliest crime in U.S. history.

Similarly, theorists make a big deal about Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office being at the opposite end of the building from where the Pentagon was struck. Yes, if Rumsfeld plotted the attack, he may have taken steps to ensure his security. But by this logic, any military bigwig that wasn’t in the Pentagon that day could be tagged as a perpetrator. Or one could blame any Congressman or Senator since the Capitol was spared that day. Hell, just pin this one on Monsanto as well; after all, the company was completely unaffected.

Another frequent objection of theorists is that a 757 has a 125-foot wingspan, yet the hole it put in the Pentagon was barely half that size. Popular Mechanics tackled this issue and reported, “A crashing jet doesn’t punch a cartoon-like outline of itself into a reinforced concrete building. In this case, one wing hit the ground and the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon’s load-bearing columns.” This is consistent with what was seen by eyewitnesses, including USA Today eyewitness Mike Walter. There are dozens of such witnesses, compared to zero who report having seen a missile.

The three points we’ve examined so far were at least based, very tenuously, on things that were true: The image looked too narrow to be a plane, the hole it left was 75 feet wide, and it plowed into the part of the building that was away from where Rumsfeld worked. But now we look at claims that are 100 percent false, beginning with the insistence that there were no airplane parts on the ground.

Skeptoid’s Brian Dunning examined this claim and he found that even a rudimentary search showed this to be wholly in error. He wrote, “Debris from the plane was everywhere, including easily identified mechanical parts from the landing gear and engines and lots of twisted aluminum painted in Boeing BAC452 Green Epoxy Primer.” Further, wreckage was reported by Pentagon employees, rescue personnel, and reporters, and was even seen on live reports of the event.

Beyond this, there are transcripts of conversations between air traffic controllers and those onboard, in addition to graphs from the flight data recorder which show the plane’s descending altitude. Another falsehood is the claim that this descent would be impossible for a full-sized passenger plane. But this requires ignoring the graph data, calls from passengers to family members, eyewitnesses, and fight transcripts. Refuting all this, at least in the theorists’ bug-eyes, is one seeming anomaly, that of a Dulles air traffic controller saying, “You don’t fly a 757 in that manner.” Conspiracy theorists often cite this comment as evidence that the controllers knew it was not a 757.

But this misrepresents what the controller, Danielle O’Brien, said in totality. The full quote was, “All of us experienced air traffic controllers thought that it was a military plane. You don’t fly a 757 in that manner. It’s unsafe.” She wasn’t asserting that a 757 was incapable of flying in the manner she was observing. Rather, she was saying it would be dangerous to do so. And obviously, flying the aircraft in a dangerous manner is what the hijackers intended.

Another fabrication is that Pentagon missiles would have shot down any approaching kamikaze aircraft. But this missile defense system exists only in the mind of author Thierry Meyssan, who referenced it in his book 9/11: The Big Lie. Dunning wrote, “If such a defense system existed but was not used and not a single Pentagon employee complained about it. Even the friends of the 125 employees killed raised no objection. None of the hundreds of thousands of photographs and videos of the Pentagon show a missile defense system, nor do the blueprints nor construction photographs. No one has ever worked there has reported knowledge of such a thing.”

There are also logistical considerations. The Pentagon is situated very close to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Planes landing at the airport fly over the Pentagon at low altitude and two of its runways are barely half a mile from the Pentagon. Any missile defense system would have no time to react if a rouge airliner came its way. And again, even if there was a missile defense system, theorists have given us no evidence as to who it should have been aimed at.

The Knights Templar were a Christian religious and military order active during the 12th and 13th Centuries. They have assumed mythical forms in fiction advertised as such and an even more fantastic veneer in fiction presented as fact. The former has manifested itself in The Da Vinci Code, Ivanhoe, Indiana Jones works, Assassins Creed video games, The Game of Thrones, and the writings of Maurice Druon and George R.R. Martin.

Meanwhile, a movement seeks to give the pseudohistory surrounding the Knights Templar a cloak of respectability by piggybacking on the aforementioned entertainments. On the History Channel and likeminded websites, order members are said to be responsible for Solomon’s buried treasure, the Holy Grail, the Shroud of Turin, Shakespeare’s lost works, the advent of Freemasons, and scribblings on Jesus’ tomb. They are also alleged to have made a sojourn in present-day Minnesota during the 11^th Century. Along the way, they buried treasures off the Nova Scotian coast, which is the focal point of the television program, The Curse of Oak Island.

Turning off the History Channel and opening a history book, here’s what really happened. The Knights Templar were one of several Catholic military orders that lasted for about 200 years during the Middle Ages. In 1054, a chasm developed within Christianity, with those in the west forming what became the Roman Catholic Church and those in the east organizing the Eastern Orthodox Church. In time, the eastern Christians joined forces with Sunni Muslims in Turkey. Feeling threatened by this alliance, Pope Urban II convinced Byzantine Emperor Alexios to help him launch the first crusade in 1096, aiming to reunite Christianity under the papacy.

The effort, at first, was successful. The land that today comprises Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan was divided into four states controlled by the Catholic Church. However, securing these new nations proved problematic, expensive, and logistically challenging. In order to combat these issues, the pope chartered the Knights Templar as a monastic order. Like other orders, the Knights Templar was a charitable organization through which wealthy Catholics could donate money and lands, enabling the order to become self-sustaining and largely autonomous.  

Eventually, Crusade battles gave way to commerce, and the Knights, buoyed by the steady stream of lucrative donations, became merchants, entrepreneurs, bankers, and government officials. Their medieval origins, secrecy, rituals, symbols, and mystical dress, combined with their accumulation of wealth and power and relatively sudden demise made the Knights Templar ideal fodder for conspiracy theorists. There are two primary camps: One holds that the organization became the New World Order, the Illuminati, the Bilderbergers, the Bohemian Club, the Reptilians, or some such gaggle. The kinder, gentler version has these heroic, virtuous men and their furtive heirs protecting some of the Church’s most cherished relics, embarrassing secrets, and massive wealth.     

Whichever of these narratives one favors, it is held than on Friday the 13^th in October of 1307, Knights Templar members in Europe were executed at dawn to eliminate the debt owed to them by France’s King Phillip IV. A fortunate few escaped and kept with them the Templars’ valuable assets and hidden knowledge. Further, this knowledge has been passed down in a tightly-guarded secret that almost everyone knows about.

While King Philip IV was in deep debt to the Templars, his main motivation for the purge was to curtail the papacy’s powers. In 1302, Pope Clement had decreed that his was the only true religion and the sole path to Heaven. This was considered an insult and threat by non-Catholics, which included many French citizens, including the monarch. Also, several French officials were Knights Templar that were subject to Pope Clement’s influence. Philip therefore wanted to exorcise them and insert persons sympathetic to his crown.

However, the solution was not the kill ’em all approach of Templar mythology. First, Philip’s power stopped at France’s borders, so only those in his country were effected. Those in the rest of Europe or the Middle East were safe, for now. Second, Templar members in France were arrested, not executed, though some of them were tortured into saying they were heretics.

About a month after the roundup of undesirables, Clement felt pressured by King Philip’s collection of coerced confessions, so he issued a dictate that Christian monarchs in Europe were to arrest all the Knights Templar. To avoid this fate, the great majority of Templar members joined the Hospitallers or otherwise left the order. In the end, about three dozen recalcitrant Knights were killed, but this was three years later, not on a Friday the 13^th bloodbath. Two years after that, Clement formally dissolved the Knights Templar by papal bull and transferred their ownings to the Hospitallers. The majority of the arrested Templars confessed heresy since this allowed them to be released, retain their property, and join other orders.   

In conspiracy circles, the Templar members hoarded silk, bullion, spices, royal jewels, and other valuables. They also harbored secrets about Jesus having married Mary Magdalene and about descendants of this union. Another oft-repeated rumor is that the Knights Templar are hiding evidence of Jesus having never resurrected. A further tale has them finding the Holy Grail, which obviously wouldn’t be holy if he never rose from the dead. Other myths are that they became the Freemasons or that the modern hoax order called the Priory of Sion is actually millenniums older and its members were compatriots of the Knights Templar.

The final resting place for their riches is often said to be Oak Island, Canada. In an isolated accuracy, Templar treasure hunter Rick Lagina asks and answers this question: “Has there been a find on Oak Island that we can say is a definitive tie-in to the Templars? No.”

That has not stopped him and his brother from squeezing five seasons out of the premise of finding this nonexistent fortune. There is likewise nothing substantial to corroborate the other alleged aspects of the order.  As an example of how loose the evidence standards can be, consider the assertion that modern Templars run the world from Switzerland. The “proof” for this is that the Templar flag was similar to the current Swiss one, that the country was long associated with clandestine banking, and that Switzerland always manages to avoid wars that leave other countries and regions ravaged.

However, these disparate items can be explained without invoking a lost mystical sect. The two relevant flags are somewhat similar. The Swiss one is square with a white cross on a red background, while the Templars banner was a rectangle with five red crosses on a white background. But there are 31 other countries or autonomous regions whose flag incorporates a cross and most of these also feature  red and/or white. Similarly, many other orders and societies include the cross image and red and white colors on their flag. Yet only the Templar/Swiss connection is alleged; no one is accusing the Red Cross of clandestine malevolence in Tonga.

While Switzerland did become synonymous with anonymous banking, persons took advantage of this for tax reasons and to keep safe the proceedings from shady dealings. It would not follow that the Knights Templar, who per the legend already had this stuff safely ensconced, would stash their cinnamon and myrrh in Zurich safe deposit boxes.

Finally, neutrality was an outgrowth of continual European wars which the Swiss had been involved in and which necessitated forming an exhausting series of continually changing alliances. For example, in the French Revolutionary War, the Swiss served as bodyguards for French royals. Just six years later, the Napoleonic Wars saw France invade Switzerland and splinter the Old Swiss Confederacy, which had been a loose compact of small independent states.

Several centuries of this had left the Swiss weary and presumably confused. So during the Congress of Vienna in 1814, they floated the idea of having an official policy of neutrality and the other parties agreed. This neutrality began about 600 years after the Templars’ dissolution, so the idea that the Swiss no-war distinction has benefited the Knights requires embracing highly selective history and ignoring the total lack of evidence for the claim. But those challenges are easily overcome by those who want to believe the mythic tales. As National Geographic’s Becky Little put it, “The Knights Templar are more interesting as protectors of an ancient secret rather than single men who gave out loans.”