I have gotten laughs at the expense of persons convinced of chemtrails, repressed cancer cures, and smart meters tracking their movements. And I had an especially good chortle when an online poster deduced the diabolical nature of NASA. He noted mission controllers often employ the term “T-minus,” and when one adds that ‘T’ to NASA, then rearranges the consonants, it becomes SATAN. It would also work as SANTA, and top-secret warp speed devices would help deliver a world’s supply of toys in one night.

Not funny, however, is the plight of those who are not paranoid about the government in a generic sense, but according to the clinical definition of the word. A subset of these persons refer to themselves as Targeted Individuals. The usually suspect the targeting to be coming from the government, although others think it’s Free Masons, Illuminati, Jews, or aliens. Whatever the source, the key point is that they believe their minds and bodies are being controlled by external nefarious forces. Though going by the moniker Targeted Individuals, these persons come together online and in conferences, which allows communal reinforcement to strengthen their delusions.

Conservative estimates have at least 10,000 persons suffering from this, and the Daily Beast documented one such victim, Cheryl Welsh. She was a college freshman when she began suspecting that electrical appliances were being remotely controlled to torment her. She observed that telephones, cars, streetlights typewriters, and televisions would stop working at times they would most cause the most disruption. What most persons would see as a power outage or mechanical malfunction becomes a coordinated attack from a powerful malevolent entity to those suffering from paranoid schizophrenia or similar conditions. Similarly, what most people known is a horn honking is, to the Targeted Individuals, a message to a member of Stalking Gangs, their term for agents out to get them. And while the Stalking Gang is usually faceless, it can manifest itself in more concrete forms. That new Human Resources director might really be a CIA agent dispatched to keep closer tabs on you.

The Daily Beast also profiled Kevin Bond, who believes an implanted microchip controls his thoughts and actions. A third person was convinced his brain is manipulated by electronic frequencies coming from a nearby government installation.

When friends or family members attempt to help these sufferers, it is often interpreted as the would-be benefactors being in on the plot. And good luck getting them to take any medication they feel comes from Big Brother’s pharmaceutical wing. These attempts to help fuels further paranoia, which is made even worse when online advice to suffers includes, “Do not visit a psychiatrist.”

While there are efforts made to counter this online, this also is usually futile. Some persons seek online reassurance that their anorexia is beneficial or investigate ways to commit suicide. But those same searches will also yield counterpoints. The same is true for those suffering this stalking syndrome, but those persons are likely to deduce that the counterpoints were planted by gang members.

A century ago, persons suffered similar delusions centering on crankshafts and gears instead of microchips and rays. Five hundred years before that, the thoughts were presumed to be coming from the devil. While that idea is not extinct, these days it’s more like to be Democrats instead of demons, Senators instead of Satan. This is consistent with an era technological advancements, eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, and NSA abuse.

Certainly, attempting to harness mind control is not beyond the federal government. The CIA’s infamous MK Ultra program had agents give LSD-spiked drinks to unsuspecting human guinea pigs as part of just such an experiment. Also, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research tested whether pulsed microwaves could be used to transmit words to a subject’s brain.

So research may be ongoing and perhaps even a product has been developed. But that’s a long ways from there being evidence that evil overlords are targeting 10,000 everyday citizens.

For those convinced this is happening, there are electronic shields available. One merchant touts his products’ ability to “end electronic harassment and protect against implants, radiation, and voice/data/image induction that is intended to make an individual think they have a mental illness. Any directed energy attack is deflected off this energy field, giving the targeted individual the ability to get ongoing relief.”  

One of his competitors, Total Security Inc., reassures prospective customers, “You’re not crazy! We listen and care.” This compassion manifests in the form of “non-invasive body scans to identify implanted microchips and other forms of electronic tracking chips.” Never addressed is how many chips they’ve found.

Meanwhile, the QuWave Defender is said to generate a Scalar Wave Field intended to “interfere with harmful rays, reduce the effect and functioning of implants, and act as a barrier to psycho-electronic harmful signals aimed at the individual.”

The paranoia these companies are targeting is occasionally an issue. Many customers refuse to allow the company to use the United States Postal Service, which surely is part any plot. Others demand tamper resistant seals. All of this raises the question: If forces are controlling the person’s mind, why would those forces allow the mind to order products intended to stop the control?

The president of StopBeamWeapons.com, which offers a magnet shield to “minimize partial brain disablement from covert anti-brain beam weapons,” admits his customers “oftentimes can’t really articulate what they’re trying to shield from.”

That’s because it’s all in their minds and these persons deserve sympathy and access to therapy, not unscrupulous offers to fix it with a Buck Rogers Ray-Gun Deflector.

One of th­­­e stronger arguments against conspiracy theories is the decades-long silence that would need to be maintained by the extraordinary number of people that would have to be involved in them.

To be sure, governments have perpetrated misdeeds and attempted to cover them up. But the difference between, say, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments and the moon landing is that a whistleblower exposed the former, while none of the thousands of NASA employees or o­­ther scientists have come forward to explain how a lunar hoax was perpetrated.

And whereas Watergate was blown open by two tireless reporters, thousands of birthers have dedicated eight years of what passes for their lives to proving where Obama was born and have yet to produce a birth certificate from a Nairobi hospital. Anyone genuinely interested in the truth would have been satisfied with a birth certificate from Hawaiian officials and birth announcements in Honolulu newspapers. But conspiracy theorists, by their nature, consider contrary evidence to be part of the cover-up.

But I wanted to address perhaps the only case of overwhelming evidence being denied, at least officially, by persons that would probably not be called conspiracy theorists. It centers on Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I.

Many governments and academics have endorsed this idea. With national governments, the denial is usually through inaction. Where’s an Asimov robot when you need one? The governments probably won’t say it didn’t happen, they will just resist all requests to acknowledge it. Denialists in academia, meanwhile, hold a stronger position.  

Governments are reluctant to acknowledge the genocide because of Turkey’s position in the world, both literally and figuratively. Istanbul is the only city that occupies two continents and this is symbolic of Turkey’s not-quite-east, not-quite-west status that gives it an advantageous middle ground from which to operate. It sits between two vastly different regions and cultures, as one can drive from Bulgaria to Syria and hit only Turkey in between. It may be the only nation that maintains friendly ties with both Israel and Iran. Evidence for the Armenian genocide is as strong as is proof for the ones perpetrated in Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, but those other countries lack Turkey’s diplomatic power standing.

The U.S. is one of more than 150 countries that has refused to acknowledge the genocide. Even Israel, founded largely because of the Holocaust, has remained silent. This has sparked a conspiracy theory that Armenian genocide denial is fueled by Jews so the Holocaust will remain the sole focus of genocide studies and remembrances. An even smaller competing claim is that the denial is an Islamic invention, an assertion that ignores that Syria and Lebanon have recognized it.

Ironically, Armenian genocide denial IS a conspiracy that should cause theorists to drool on their keyboards. It involves powerful governments and universities working in concert do hide an atrocity and even attempting to punish those who dare expose it. But the truth is too widely known to excite conspiracy theorists, who prefer to operate outside the mainstream, so they instead dream up Israeli and Islamic angles.

As to the garden variety denial, much of it comes from Turkey’s funding of academic studies, a funding which evaporates if genocide denial is insufficiently parroted. Israeli scholar Yair Auron has explained, “The Turkish government has supported the establishment of institutes affiliated with respected universities, whose apparent purpose is to further research on Turkish history and culture but which…further denial.”

Of course, the fact that academics are being paid indirectly by Turkey to promote its position is not enough to prove the genocide. For that, one must look to history. 

Young Turks came to power in 1908 and they made it clear they wanted non-Turks out, especially if they were Christian. The genocide has a known staring point of April 24, 1915. On that day, the Turkish government ordered the arrest and execution of several hundred Armenian intellectuals. Soon after, everyday Armenians were targeted. Roving bands known as Butcher Battalions employed barbarous execution methods such as throwing children overboard or adults off cliffs. Other victims were burned alive or crucified.

The genocide had two phases. The first was the killing or enslavement of all healthy males. Next came women, children, the elderly, and the infirm being forced to walk to the Mesopotamian desert without food or water. Those denying the genocide are so pedantic that these death marches are referred to as “immigrant relocation.”

Turkey concedes that many Armenians were killed in areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to 1918. But they contend this was a byproduct of war, not the systematic murder of more than one million unresistant civilians and children. However, there is strong documentation to refute the Turkish denials. There is photographic evidence shot by diplomats and missionaries, as well as reports from German soldiers to their superiors.  There also exist many telegrams from Interior Minister Talaat Pasha that made clear the Turks’ genocidal intent. One read, “Kill every Armenian man, woman, and child without concern.”

Additionally, using the Great War as an excuse fails since the genocide outlasted the Armistice. Turkey ignored a 1920 treaty that created Armenia­ and occupied the nascent country, continuing extrajudicial executions until 1922.

Turkish authorities insist the responsible parties were convicted, and there is a small measure of truth to this. As early as 1915, Great Britain, France, and Russia had warned the Young Turks they would be held accountable for war crimes. When hostilities ended, the victors demanded that the Ottoman government prosecute the accused, and the resulting verdicts acknowledged the genocide and the perpetrators were sentenced to death. However, most of the guilty were granted amnesty in 1921 or were allowed to escape the country, and d­­enial has since been Turkey’s official position. The only perpetrators to be held accountable were those who were tracked down by intelligence service agents, who then tipped off vigilantes to the perpetrator’s location.

Historians Torben Jorgensen and Matthias Bjornlund have written, “Denial of the Armenian genocide is founded on a massive effort of falsification, distortion, cleansing of archives, and direct threats initiated or supported by the Turkish state.”

Normally, denial of something this heinous in the face of overwhelming documentation would be confined to YouTube channels and Illuminati hunters. But Turkey’s powerful diplomatic standing and its academic funding means Armenian genocide denial is afforded a much loftier status than it would normally attain. And it’s sadly ironic because Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide to describe what had happened to the Armenians.

Despite the pressures, there are 30 countries that recognize Armenian genocide, including the usually neutral-at-all-costs Switzerland. A handful of those countries make denying the genocide a crime, a gesture than may be well-meaning but which  ironically uses the power of government to deny the power of government. The opposite is true in Turkey, where espousing that the genocide took place is illegal. The criminal offense is “Insulting Turkishness, ” which is an amusing term until one realizes that violating it can bring three years in prison. So those reading this in Ankara should refrain from sharing it.

World Net Daily first gained prominence by being the most fervent and dogged defender of birtherism. While it has largely abandoned that pursuit, it regularly attacks ideas that have a strong scientific consensus, such as evolution, the Big Bang, and climate change. Its headlines today included, “U.S. alarm: Unprecedented demonic outpouring.”

So I am pleased to announce that this blind squirrel found an factually-accurate nut this week when it published an exclusive article that dismissed the idea of chemtrails. The article’s primary source was a peer-reviewed report the detailed the findings of atmospheric chemists and geochemists.

Predictably, this earned WND the wrath of its readers. One can envision the bug eyes and hyperventilating as they posted about the naivety of believing what the government said – a non sequitur since the report was issued by scientists, not government officials.

There were also mocking comments about peer review, science, and sheeple. Completely lacking, however, was any scientific evidence for the chemtrail position. The few posters who requested this proof were chided to do their own research, which is a euphemism for, “I’ve got nothing.”

For all the fury they displayed and certainty of their conviction, none of the believers identified which planes are involved or which chemical is being deployed. Nor could they provide a sample from an unleashed chemtrail, nor explain how the toxins would have any potency left after being spread over the thousand miles they would be if dropped from 30,000 feet. Contrasted to the near-unanimity of geochemists as to what contrails are, chemtrailers are split amongst themselves as to what the unleashed poison is doing. Suggestions include altering genes, testing war weapons, mind control, sabotaging the weather, or altering the climate. While the ideas are disparate, they are equally groundless, as none are backed by any science or evidence.

Believers have no answer when quizzed about the chemistry behind chemtrails or about how thousands of pilots would be convinced to poison the population, which includes their loved ones, and would never make any attempt to expose this. Similarly, there is no explanation for how those behind this would make themselves immune from this ubiquitous danger.

As to the article itself, WND reported that the peer-reviewed study verified that chemtrails are actually just contrails. These occur when water vapors freeze around aerosols in aircraft exhaust, causing lingering condensation. Lead researcher Steven Davis reported that, “The experts we surveyed resoundingly rejected contrail photographs and test results as evidence of a large-scale atmospheric conspiracy.”

The team interviewed 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists, with 76 of them saying they see no evidence of a clandestine, widespread plot to unleash dangerous amounts of aluminum and barium in aerial assaults. The outlier, while not championing the idea of a political-pilot alliance to control our minds, nevertheless said there was no ready explanation for his observation of an instance of “high levels of atmospheric barium in a remote area with standard low soil barium.”

All 77 agreed that four commonly-circulated images touted as chemtrails were merely contrails, and they provided peer-reviewed citations to support their position. The survey results were published last week in Environmental Research Letters and marked the first peer-reviewed journal paper addressing chemtrails.

The researchers acknowledged this won’t change a hard core believer, who will merely consider the researchers to be shills or part of the plot. But they felt it necessary to present the science and let it stand on its merits.

A few chemtrailers have conducted experiments, but arrived at their conclusions based on faulty methods. Mick West at Metabunk reported that some chemtrailers announced they found toxins in soil and water, and that this confirmed the existence of chemtrails. Setting aside the magical thinking this entails, the samples had been placed in jars with metal lids, which contaminated the data.

This was a silly elementary mistake, but seemingly more serious attempts to uncover chemtrail residue have been made utilizing heat. If one takes rock or aluminum and keeps heating it, it will eventually melt, then in turn become a liquid, a gas, and plasma. West describes the latter as, “a cloud of individual atoms stripped of their electrons.” This is crucial because when testing for the presence of elements in this way, there is no way tell if the atoms are in metallic or mineral form.

Aluminum, barium, and strontium all occur naturally in Earth’s crust and will probably be found if tested for. However these are not found in their metallic form in nature. Aluminum needs to be extracted from rock and oxidizes, while barium and strontium both react to air.

So there is an easy answer when chemtrailers ask, “If the metallic forms of aluminum and barium do not occur in nature, why are our tests finding it?” Because the tests used for these metals do not distinguish between the metal and the mineral that contains the metal. It would be almost as mistaken as finding a buried aluminum soda can in a cornfield and using that as evidence.

In the 1910s, the discovery of zinc, lead, and iron ore turned Treece, Kans., from a desolate outpost into a mining boomtown. The population went from a few dozen to more than 20,000, and billions of dollars worth of iron ore were produced, much of it during the two World Wars.

But when the mines were exhausted, so were the jobs, and the town then lost the restaurants, clothiers, grocers, hardware stores, car lots, furniture dealers, barber shops, and construction companies whose existence had been made possible by the mining income.

All that was left to indicate the town’s mining past were rusting signs and unsightly chat piles. But the few persons who remained had to deal with more than the loss of jobs, stores, and friends. The lead pollution made it an unsafe place to live, so the EPA offered buyouts to the residents, with plans to clean up the soil once the town was emptied. Of the 80 residents who were offered payments to leave, all but two accepted. The UK’s Daily Mail profiled the pair of holdouts as part of a backdrop on an article that detailed Treece’s rise, collapse, and poisoning.

There was no fooling reader John, who fumed, “Utter bull. This is Agenda 21 in action. Using taxpayers’ money to clear people out of an area and into bigger population centers. It’s all in the UN documents.”

He got that last part right. Most conspiracy theories center on something being kept secret: Area 51, 9/11 being an inside job, a hidden cancer cure. But some theories, like the one centering on Agenda 21, takes publicly available information and misinterprets or distorts it.

Agenda 21 grew out of an international UN conference in 1992. It is related to sustainable development and is a non-binding suggestion to local, regional, and federal governments. It aims to combat poverty, achieve a more sustainable population, protect the environment, and strengthen the underprivileged. Its implementation has been hampered because of a misinformed opposition.

Opposition can include reader John, or others more prominent, such as Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes, who described a proposed bike-sharing program as an “attempt to turn Denver into a United Nations community.” Meanwhile, the Republican Party platform opposes Agenda 21 as a violation of U.S. sovereignty, and some states have prohibited government participation in it.

Most of this fear has been sown by Glenn Beck, who offers such phrases such as, “They will put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it, we will not be able to survive.”

Beck wrote a novel about the country being completely enveloped by Agenda 21, and one line reads, “Once-proud people of America have become obedient residents who live in barren, brutal Compounds and serve the autocratic, merciless Authorities.” While that sentence is from a work of fiction, it is indistinguishable from the language Beck and other opponents used to portray what they call a future reality. I relish dystopian novels like 1984 and Darkness at Noon, and it’s a shame Beck wasted a potentially fine example of such in order to tilt at UN windmills and stoke fears of an imaginary enemy.

Beck says code words bely the danger. Sure, some are phrases conservatives are already averse to: wetlands, climate change, social justice. But also be wary of “local,” “vision,” “high speed rail,” “economy,” “restoration,” and “consensus.” The list of more than 100 words that will lead to our eventual displacement and internment are here.

So “safe school route” is to be properly read as “forced resettlement behind barbed wire.” Once persons are concentrated and restricted to overcrowded barracks, they will be dressed in mandatory uniforms, while the government suspends the Constitution and asserts ownership of all natural resources.

The John Birch Society warns that Agenda 21 “seeks to curtail your freedom to travel, own a gas-powered car, live in suburbs or rural areas, and raise a family.” Trying desperately to match the society for hyperbole, Beck offers that “sustainable development is just a really nice way of saying centralized control over all human life on Earth.”

In actuality, Agenda 21 is merely a suggestion that local planning and zoning boards consider environmental impact when doing expansion or renovation. Most of these mid-level bureaucrats had never heard of Agenda 21 until they were descended on by Beck minions, who accused them of stamping out civil liberties and plotting a roundup of the masses.

Unlike most conspiracy theories, the adherents of this one are able to influence government action, or more accurately, the lack thereof. A proposal to increase development and reduce traffic around a Maine highway was interpreted thusly by the theorists in a Tea Party alert: “This is the hard core agenda 21. This is the centralized planning for the de-industrialization of large segments of Maine, and the relocation and isolation of the population into human habitation zones.”

Stacy Benjamin, Maine’s Department of Transportation project manager, said she had never heard of Agenda 21 or its human habitation zones until a handful of believers showed up during a public comment session and succeeded in getting the project shuttered.

Then in La Plata County, Colo., a 17-member group was tasked to “to rein in sprawl, encourage bicycling and public transportation, protect agriculture and promote sustainability.” For theorists, this was not a local solution to land use issues, but was instead a dictate from NWO headquarters to invade and conquer. The proposal was voted down.

Meanwhile in Tampa, Agenda 21 opponents engineered the defeat of a measure to fund light rail and road improvements. The Tampa Bay Examiner suggested this proposal was a “cover for an agenda to transfer American sovereignty to various tentacles of the United Nations.”

In these cases, the proposed changes are not being debated on their merits. Opponents of sustainable growth are able to succeed without making logical, deductive arguments against sustainable growth. Even if the proposal makes sense for the community, this is overriden by the warnings of it being ordered by international subjagators. 

In Wyoming, the Constitution Party candidate for Laramie County Commission, Frank Smith, learned of Agenda 21 through his membership in the John Birch Society. He wasn’t too concerned until his hometown was visited by the horror of smart meters.

“New appliances have smart chips in them, and these meters can be shut off at the headquarters,” Smith said in an interview with the Wyoming News. “It also allows people to monitor your electric usage minute by minute. It’s another way of controlling things and giving them the ability to spy on you.”

Suddenly, Smith saw what was going on. “You’ve got the EPA and HUD coming into communities to do public projects. The idea is to throttle transportation, narrow the streets, and get people out of their personal vehicles into mass transit. “

Today, choosing to get on the bus. Tomorrow, forced by bayonet into a cattle car.

Without question, there are conspiracies, which occur when two or more people plot to do something, usually illegal or harmful. It’s also certain that there are theories, which are a set of ideas intended to explain facts or events.

So strictly speaking, the idea that the Tsaranev brothers were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing could be considered a conspiracy theory. But this designation fails in any meaningful sense because what we call conspiracy theorists reject ideas propagated by the mainstream media or government. Many theorists highlight a list of incidents in which the government was caught doing something unsavory, and use it to establish that conspiracy theories are real, and say they are out to expose more. However, what are passed off as proven conspiracy theories were exposed by government insiders or investigative journalists, not by WakeTheSheeple’s YouTube channel.

For example, the Lincoln assassination involved at least nine conspirators and there were plans for George Atzerdot to take out Vice President Johnson and for Lewis Powell to kill Secretary of State William Seward. This was revealed in a court room, not a chat room, and the details were announced by government prosecutors, not by those whispering about captive aliens, Rothschild wars, and other sinister secrets.

Brian Dunning at Skeptoid has identified two criteria that need to be satisfied if we are to credit someone with exposing a conspiracy. First, the theory must be falsifiable. Dunning explained, “You can’t just say ‘Some airplanes spray an unknown chemical.’ But if you say ‘United Airlines tail number NC13327 is equipped to spray VX nerve gas, and that one right there is spraying it right now,’ then that’s a claim that can be disproven with a single inspection.” So if I write, “The Illinois government is doing something corrupt with tax dollars,” that’s probably going to be “proven” at some point. But it lacks any specifics that would make it an exposé on my part.

Second, any secret knowledge needs to be uncovered by the theorist first. Richard Nixon’s presidency did not unravel because of the dogged determination of conspiracy theorists. It happened because two investigative journalists did interviews, examined evidence, and pieced together a puzzle that revealed the truth behind the Watergate break-in and cover-up.

And when doing genuine investigations, the only goal is the truth. If a reporter or detective comes across a piece of evidence that cast doubts on their suspicions, they weigh that with other information they’ve gathered and, if justified, will go down another path. By contrast, a conspiracy theorist considers any evidence that disproves the theory to be part of the conspiracy. Consider Barack Obama’s birth announcement in Honolulu newspapers. Birthers answered this by insisting his stateside relatives were tipped off by his parents in Kenya, then submitted a request for a Certificate of Live Birth from the state of Hawaii, and finally submitted this certificate to the newspapers. Likewise, Earth’s image on the moon during a lunar eclipse is attributed by Flat Earthers to an unexplained object that orbits near the sun. NASA knows when this mystery object will pass between the sun and moon, then announces there will be as a lunar eclipse at that time.

No one is claiming we live in a world free of government malfeasance and attempts to keep it quiet. But we learn of corruption and abuse from reporters and government insiders, not from Alex Jones, Jesse Ventura, and David Icke. They and their fellow theorists claim they are bringing evil to light and point to what they consider conspiracy theories that were proven to be true.

Usually topping the list if the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was used as a pretext for the United States to enter the Vietnam War. No one disputes that on Aug. 2, 1964, a small naval battle took place between U.S. and North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin. It was a purported skirmish two days later in the same locale that is doubtful.

That day, U.S. forces fired on radar targets, but no one reported seeing any North Vietnamese. As the action, or lack thereof, was unfolding, the USS Maddox commander communicated to the Pentagon that no enemies were giving or receiving fire. What’s more, Sen. Wayne Morse held a press conference that day saying the supposed attack was unsupported by evidence. All of this played out in public from the start. The U.S. entered the war following an attack that was either intentionally fabricated or based on sloppy intelligence. But this was all pointed out by military officers and senators right away and nothing was exposed by conspiracy theorists.

Another example touted as a genuine conspiracy theory was the FBI attempting to foil the U.S. civil rights movement. This really happened, under the bureau’s domestic counter-intelligence program. But this was exposed by eight men who broke into an FBI office, seized 1,000 documents related to the program, and mailed them to newspapers. Until this point, no one had leveled accusations that the FBI was working to hamper the civil rights movement, especially in the specific ways that were exposed in the stolen documents. This might have been a victory for vigilante justice, but not for conspiracy theorists.

Then we have the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, one of the most revolting events in U.S. history. For 40 years, the government provided free health care to black sharecroppers, many of whom had syphilis. This appeared benevolent, but after the disease became treatable with penicillin, the government withheld the cure in order to conduct further studies on 600 blacks. These victims suffered painful deaths, blindness, and other ailments that could have been prevented. Theorists consider this another feather in their tinfoil cap. However, no theorist had suggested the government was engaging in this specific atrocity. It became known only when a former Public Health Service investigator revealed it in 1972.

Dunning studies this issue extensively and has said he “can’t find a single case of a conspiracy theorist having made a specific, falsifiable claim that was later proven true by investigators.”

Indeed, Watergate, the Gulf of Tonkin, FBI domestic counter-intelligence, and Tuskegee were all exposed by reporters or whistleblowers. Meanwhile, we are still waiting for WakeTheSheeple and his cronies to provide solid evidence that the government created AIDS, is poisoning the populace with chemtrails, and brought down Pan Am Flight 103 with the assistance of drug smugglers.

Montauk, N.Y., was once home to a radar dish intended to detect Soviet missiles. Computer technology rendered the device obsolete and its use was discontinued in 1969. Authorities fenced off the dish site and made the surrounding area a state park.

The federal government donated the land to New York, with the stipulation that the feds “retain the rights to everything beneath the surface and the right to reoccupy the land if made necessary by a matter of national security.” Conspiracy theorists are adept at filling in the blanks, and putting this one-sentence statement on a page would leave  almost nothing but blanks, so there was plenty of room to scribble away.

Therefore, the Montauk Project became credited with time and interdimensional travel and a psychic ability to manifest objects, which in an extreme case produced an angry Yeti who ran amok, possibly with machetes.

There have also been alien visitors, some of whom were lost and others who were recruited, with there being conflicting reports on whether that’s a euphemism for kidnapped. Then there’s teleportation and a particle accelerator that occupies about one percent of the space that would normally be necessary for a device. Perhaps this is a sign of Montauk’s futuristic technology, much as how computers that once filled a large room can now fit in your hand.

The project has also managed the bending of space, including a large bubble of space-time at the site’s center site. There is also a pyramid of pure titanium constructed for unclear purposes. Some say it was where the moon landing was faked, which seems a supremely underwhelming claim to make considering what else was going on there. It would seem that all this super-advanced and alien technology could easily manage a moon landing, if not continued travel to Pluto or even Andromeda. The project is also responsible for subliminal messaging READ MY BLOG that actually works READ MY BLOG. And it’s all run by Nikolai Tesla, who either rose from the dead or who never died, in either case owing to technology he created. Screw you, Edison

This all began when the United States liberated France and began shuttling away Wernher von Braun and other German scientists in Operation Paperclip. Around the same time, low-ranking U.S. soldiers stumbled upon trainload of Nazi gold in Paris. When their commanders found out, they killed the soldiers, kept the precious metal for themselves, and used it to start funding the Montauk Project. They lobbied Congress for more funds, which was denied. The Department of Defense then secretly diverted money to the project, which means Congress would had to have lost track of billions of dollars. (This is the one part of the tale that seems plausible).

In 1983, Tesla and Co. encountered two men from aboard the USS Eldridge of Philadelphia Experiment fame. When the battleship disappeared, it got stuck in hyperspace and transported Al Bielek and Duncan Cameron to Montauk, where they encountered physicist and mathematician John von Neumann, 26 years after his supposed death. This is according to Bielek and Cameron, although von Neumann has yet to corroborate.

The Eldridge was not the only transport device to get sucked to southern Long Island. Flying saucers observing the Philadelphia Experiment ran into a time warp and endued up at Montauk, where they demanded a large quartz crystal to restart their spaceship’s engine, lest everyone find themselves on the business end of a ray gun. The quartz was obtained by time traveling to another planet.

The facility was expanded to 12 levels and several hundred workers. No person or equipment is ever seen going from the facility, which is either a fatal blow against the conspiracy theory or evidence of that inhabitants have indeed conquered time and interdimensional travel.

They have also engaged in mind control experiments on orphans, spawned an authentic Jersey Devil, and created AIDS. Despite these abominations, that project has not been entirely malevolent. The South won the Civil War, but workers form Montauk traveled back in time to change that. Stonewall Jackson was no match for M1 Abrams, black helicopters, and technology purloined from the 25^th Century.

The story had largely faded from conspiracy lore until an unknown animal or replication thereof washed ashore in 2008, and was dubbed the Montauk Monster. What kind of animal it was, or even if it was real, was never determined. Photos were taken of it, but the carcass/stuffed animal disappeared. The animal was featured on Ancient Aliens despite it being neither of those things.

Some zoologists thought it was fake, though most suspected it was a raccoon whose decidedly un-raccoon appearance was the result of decomposition from prolonged water submersion. To theorists, however, it was an escaped chimera from the Montauk laboratory. Perhaps even a descendant of the psychically-created, machete-wielding Yeti.

Most of this comes from the imagination or repressed memories of Preston Nichols and Peter Moon. The introduction to their book “The Montauk Project: Experiment in Time,” at least admits the claims are not backed by hard evidence. With 90 percent conviction, however, the authors say the book is true. They do add that it can be enjoyed as either fiction or nonfiction, which requires the generous concession that the book would be enjoyed at all.

Before conspiracy theories were plentiful, easy to access, or even a term, we had the tale of the Rothschild family. Patriarch Mayer Rothschild was born to German paupers but became a shrewd moneymaker who started his own banking company in the mid-18^th Century. At the time, many Jews were forbidden to own property, so they became adept at commerce and finance since liquid assets could be easily transferred or hidden. With substantial imagination, this constant movement and concealment of money became the cause of wars and a means of worldwide financial control. The family being Jewish made it easy to win over many believers.

Mayer Rothschild expanded his business to an empire by installing his five sons in the European banking centers of Frankfurt, London, Naples, Paris, and Vienna. While there are many flavors to the Rothschild conspiracy, the main theme is that the family keeps its fortune rising in perpetuity by instigating and funding an unending series of wars. Despite their incredible fortune, they are still so greedy that they are willing to put themselves at risk by starting wars that rage in their country of residence.

Depending on the conspiracy subset one prefers, the family also sank the Titanic, ordered 9/11, and broke up the Beatles. I think I’m joking about that last one, although it may be out there somewhere. They also tried to either wipe out their fellow Jews or greatly empower them, as they have been said to be responsible for both the Holocaust and the establishment of Israel. They have so much power that every head of state, CEO, and Mafia Don will kowtow to them, and the only ability they lack is being able to shut down WakeUpSheeple’s YouTube account.

The first widespread Rothschild conspiracy began with the English banking crisis of 1825, which had been brought on by the mismanaging of interest rates. Nathan Rothschild had previously bought massive amounts of gold from the Bank of England when metal prices were plummeting. When the Bank’s depositors started withdrawing most of their funds, the Bank suffered a liquidity crisis, so it borrowed money from Nathan. This was simply the buying of precious metals and an unrelated loan, yet it is passed off in conspiracy theories as the Rothschilds taking over the Bank of England.

Theorists lay out reasons the Rothschilds would allegedly benefit from wars, but even if true, it would require post hoc reasoning to use this as proof that they started them. The Rothschilds did make some of their money as arms dealers, but saying this funded wars would be like saying the Louisville Slugger Company is funding Major League Baseball.

Besides, historian Niall Ferguson has noted that by the mid-1800s, much of the Rothschild fortune was in government bonds, which would make instigating war fiscally illogical. Ferguson said wars tend to drop bond prices because they increase the chance a debtor state will fail to meet its interest payments since they might lose the war and some territory.

Consistent with this, the Rothschilds were partly responsible for helping maintain peace following the Franco-Prussian War. After Prussia won, it demanded harsh reparations that likely would have led to another war, much as like what happened after the Treaty of Versailles. This would not have been in the interest to those with money in French bonds, so the Rothschild Bank put together a syndicate that raised the money the armistice obligated France to pay.

The idea that the Rothschilds pull the puppet strings of countries at war is further countered by the family having their palaces and art seized by the Nazis, whom they were supposedly funding and controlling. The Third Reich also made a film that portrayed the family as manipulating the Napoleonic Wars for financial gain, and this is the genesis of the modern Rothschild conspiracy.

While the family amassed enough money that its members could have lived luxuriously from the interest on the interest on the interest, even they didn’t have enough to fund every combatant of both World Wars and virtually every other skirmish of the 19th and 20th Centuries. 

By the end of World War II, family members had branched into separate ventures with differing goals and incentives, and there was no longer a unified Rothschild establishment. Not that this has slowed down the theorists. One Internet meme claims the family is worth the preposterous amount of $500 trillion, more than twice the world’s financial assets. The richest Rothschild, Benjamin, is worth $2 billion, and only two family members are on the Forbes list, and no Rothschild companies are in the Forbes 200. This has spawned a sub-conspiracy that the Forbes family is helping keep  the Rothschilds’ true wealth secret.

While the family still has several highly profitable businesses, other entities are worth far more. As one example, Goldman Sachs investment firms make nearly 1,000 times as much money as their Rothschild counterparts.

However much money a Rothschild or anyone else has, any person with an interest-bearing bank account owns shares in whatever funds their bank invests in. Those funds own shares in other funds and public companies, and so on, so no single entity could control the world’s finances.

Another claim is that the Rothschilds own all or nearly all the central banks, even though these are publicly owned entities. One variation of this theme states, “There are only 9 countries in the world without a Rothschild Central Bank: Russia, China, Iceland, Cuba, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Hungary. Isn’t it funny that we are always at war with these countries?”

There are several reasons the U.S. has frigid relations with most of these countries, including conflicts over human rights, economics, geography, and trade. It has nothing to do with a family that somehow both harbors dark secrets and has their innermost workings exposed. And it’s hard to keep track of everything that’s going on, so I guess I missed the our invasion of Keflavik.