Conspiracies and Secret Societies: The Complete Dossier of Hidden Plots and Schemes

By Brad Steiger, Sherry Hansen Steiger and Kevin Hile

• From an established author and expert on conspiracies, the unexplained, and the paranormal
• Prior edition (9781578593682) sold more than 150,000 copies
• More than 250 conspiracies examined and revealed from the conspiracy expert
• Each entry footnoted to allow for further investigation
• Draws links most people fail to recognize, and presents the evidence on an invisible world of influence and power
• Uncovers and examines the hidden agendas and agreements, the secret cabals and fraternal orders
• Conspiracy theories are widely believed
• Conspiracies have become integral to modern pop culture and politics
• Conspiracies, plots, and the powerful have affected society throughout history
• Facts enhanced with compelling stories
• Prior edition extensively and positively reviewed, including School Library Journal ("Riveting tome"), Orange County Register ( In a straightforward manner, [the Steigers] present evidence for a theory and evidence against it ), and Booklist ( This primer hits the highlights of murder plots, suicides, extraterrestrials, government cover-ups, and religious mysteries throughout the centuries. )
• Logical organization makes finding information quick and easy
• Numerous black-and-white photographs
• Thoroughly indexed
• Authoritative resource
• Sure to appeal to politics enthusiasts, conspiracy buffs, history readers, and true-crime aficionados
• Publicity and promotion aimed at the wide array of websites focused on the paranormal, unexplained, and conspiratorial
• Promotion targeting more mainstream media and websites with a popular topic
• Promotion targeting national radio, including Coast to Coast AM  and numerous other late-night radio syndicates looking for knowledgeable guests
• Promotion to local radio
• Promotion targeting current events magazines and newspapers politics editors 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Visible Ink Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781578598038

Brad Steiger

An Adams Media author.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Photo Sources

Introduction

Note for the New Edition

Index

Numbers

9/11 (1) . . . 2020 Presidential Election (6)

A . . . 1

Agenda 21 (9) . . . AIDS/HIV (10) . . . Airship of 1897 (12) . . . Alchemy (14) . . . Alien Abductions (15) . . . Alien Autopsy (18) . . . Al-Qaeda (20) . . . American Protective Association (23) . . . Anarchists (23) . . . Anonymous (26) . . . Antichrist (27) . . . Antifa (28) . . . Apocalyptic Millenialism (29) . . . Area 51 (32) . . . Ark of the Covenant (33) . . . Army of God (36) . . . Aryan Nations (37) . . . Asian Tsunami 2004 (38) . . . Atlantis (39) . . . Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) (41) . . . Aztlán (42)

B . . . 43

B-25 Ghost Bomber (43) . . . Barcodes (44) . . . Louis Beam (44) . . . Dr. Fred Bell, a Mysterious Death (46) . . . Bible Code (46) . . . Big Brother (48) . . . Bilderbergers (48) . . . Osama bin Laden (50) . . . Biochip Implants (52) . . . Biomagnetic Implants (54) . . . Black Helicopters (56) . . . Black Sun (56) . . . Bohemian Grove (58) . . . Boogaloo Bois (58) . . . British Petroleum Oil Spill (59) . . . Ron Brown Murder (61) . . . Mae Brussell (63) . . . George H. W. Bush (64) . . . George W. Bush and the Missing WMDs (67) . . . The Business Plot (70)

C . . . 73

Cathars (73) . . . Cattle Mutilations (74) . . . Central Intelligence Agency (75) . . . Christian Identity (78) . . . Church of the Lamb of God (79) . . . Clinton Body Count (79) . . . Club of Rome (82) . . . COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Covert War against America (83) . . . The Constitution (84) . . . Contrails and Chemtrails (85) . . . William Cooper (88) . . . Father Charles Coughlin (90) . . . Council for National Policy (91) . . . Council on Foreign Relations (91) . . . Creativity Movement (92) . . . Crédit Mobilier (93) . . . Crop Circles (93)

D . . . 97

The Da Vinci Code (97) . . . Dead Musicians (98) . . . Decided Ones of Jupiter (99) . . . Deep State (101) . . . Denver International Airport (102) . . . Department of the Unorthodox (102) . . . Diana, Princess of Wales (103) . . . Dominion Theology (106) . . . Drugs and the CIA (107)

E . . . 111

Ira Einhorn (111) . . . Eisenhower and the Extraterrestrials (112) . . . Electronic Spying, Tracking, and Harassment (114) . . . ELF (118) . . . Jeffrety Epstein (119) . . . Exopolitics and Obama’s Trips to Mars (120)

F . . . 121

Face on Mars (121) . . . Falun Gong, The Wheel of Law (123) . . . The Family (124) . . . Federal Emergency Management Agency (125) . . . Federal Reserve System (126) . . . Fish and Bird Kills (128) . . . Flat Earth (128) . . . Fluoridation (130) . . . Henry Ford and His Great Jewish Conspiracy (131) . . . Vincent Foster: Murder or Suicide? (133) . . . Fountain of the World (134) . . . Free and Accepted Order of Freemasons (136) . . . Fukushima and HAARP (138)

G . . . 141

Garduna (141) . . . Jim Garrison (142) . . . Bill Gates (144) . . . The Gemstone File (145) . . . Genetically Modified Foods (145) . . . Germ and Biological Warfare (146) . . . Gold (151) . . . Great Pyramid of Cheops (151) . . . Great Replacement Theory (153) . . . The Great Reset (154) . . . Gulf of Tonkin Incident (155) . . . Gulf War Syndrome (156) . . . Gun Control (157)

H . . . 159

HAARP (159) . . . Fred Hampton (160) . . . Hangar 18 (161) . . . Hashshashin (161) . . . Haymarket Bombing (162) . . . Heaven’s Gate (164) . . . Hellfire Club (165) . . . Adolf Hitler (166) . . . Hollow Earth (168) . . . Holocaust Revision (171) . . . Holy Grail (172) . . . Holy Vehm (173) . . . Howard Hughes (175) . . . Hurricane Katrina (176) . . . Saddam Hussein and the Al-Qaeda Connection (177) . . . Hypnosis, False Memories, and the New World Order (179)

I . . . 181

David Icke — The Reptilian Conspiracy (181) . . . Illuminati (182) . . . The Illuminati and the New World Order (185) . . . Iran–Contra Affair (186)

J . . . 187

January 6 Insurrection (187) . . . Jack the Ripper (188) . . . Jacobinism (190) . . . Jesuits: The Vatican’s Assassins (191) . . . John Birch Society (193) . . . Alex Jones (194)

K . . . 197

Kennedy Death List (197) . . . John F. Kennedy, Assassination of (199) . . . John F. Kennedy Jr., Death of (206) . . . Robert F. Kennedy, Assassination of (207) . . . Martin Luther King Jr., Assassination of (211) . . . Knights of the Golden Circle (213) . . . Knighs Templar (214) . . . Know-Nothings (217) . . . Ku Klux Klan (218)

L . . . 221

Mark Lane (221) . . . Large Hadron Collider (222) . . . Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. (223) . . . Lavender Mafia (224) . . . League of the South (225) . . . John Lennon, Assassination of (226) . . . Leopard Society (228) . . . Liberty Lobby (229) . . . Lightning from the East (230) . . . Abraham Lincoln, Assassination of (230) . . . RMS Lusitania (235)

M . . . 239

USS Maine (239) . . . Majestic-12 (241) . . . Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 (242) . . . Malcolm X, Assassination of (243) . . . Manson Family (246) . . . Jim Marrs (250) . . . The Matrix and Simulation Theory (251) . . . Mau Mau (252) . . . Medical Cures and Technologies Are Suppressed (253) . . . Men in Black (MIB) (254) . . . MK-Ultra (257) . . . Molly Maguires (260) . . . Marilyn Monroe (261) . . . Montauk Project (264) . . . Moon Mysteries (265) . . . Mothman Death List (267) . . . Mystery Schools (270) . . . Mystical Societies and Altered States of Consciousness (274)

N . . . 277

Nation of Islam (277) . . . Nativism (279) . . . Nazi UFOs (279) . . . New Age Movement (281) . . . New World Order/One World Government (284) . . . Nixon — The Conspiracy President (286) . . . Noah’s Ark (289) . . . North American Union (291)

O . . . 293

Obama Conspiracies (293) . . . The Octopus (295) . . . Oklahoma City Bombing (296) . . . Operation Gladio (298) . . . Operation Midnight Climax (299) . . . Operation Northwoods (300) . . . Operation Paperclip (300) . . . Operation Resurrection (302) . . . Order of the Golden Dawn (302) . . . Order of the Solar Temple (304)

P . . . 307

Patriot Act and Homeland Security (307) . . . George Patton and Operation Unthinkable (309) . . . Pearl Harbor and FDR (310) . . . Pentagon Papers (314) . . . Peoples Temple (315) . . . Philadelphia Experiment (316) . . . William Pierce (318) . . . The Popes (319) . . . Posse Cometatus and Sovereign Citizens (320) . . . Project Monarch (321) . . . Project Silverbug (323) . . . Project Spellbinder (324) . . . Project Stargate (325) . . . Propaganda Assets Inventory (327) . . . Propaganda Due (P2) (327) . . . The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (328) . . . Psychedelics and the CIA (330) . . . Psywar (333)

Q, R . . . 335

QAnon (335) . . . Raelians (337) . . . Ronald Reagan, Attempted Assassination of (338) . . . Wilhelm Reich (340) . . . Report from Iron Mountain (342) . . . Restoration of the Ten Commandments (343) . . . Rockefel-ler Family’s Alien Conspiracy (344) . . . Roman Catholic Church’s Conspiracy of Silence (345) . . . Rosicrucians (347) . . . Roswell, New Mexico, UFO Crash (349) . . . Ruby Ridge (354)

S . . . 357

Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting (357) . . . Satanic Cults (358) . . . Satellites and Snooping (360) . . . Richard Mellon Scaife (361) . . . Scientists’ Suspicious Deaths (362) . . . Scientology (365) . . . Skull and Bones (367) . . . George Soros (369) . . . Sphinx (370) . . . Students for a Democratic Society (371) . . . Subliminal Messaging (373) . . . Subproject 94 (373)

T . . . 377

Nikolas Tesla: The Genius and the Aliens (377) . . . The Tesla Magnifying Transmitter and Weather Control (379) . . . Thuggee (380) . . . Thule Society (381) . . . Triads and Tongs (383) . . . Trilateral Commission (385) . . . Donald Trump (386) . . . TWA Flight 800 (387)

U . . . 389

UFO Cover-Ups by the Government (389) . . . UFO Researchers’ Mysterious Deaths (393) . . . Unabomber and the Harvard Drug Experiments (395) . . . Underground UFO Bases (398) . . . Undersea UFO Bases (400) . . . Unit 731 (402) . . . U.S. Government’s Secret Experiments on Its Citizens (403)

V . . . 407

Vaccines (407) . . . Vril Society (408)

W . . . 411

Waco (411) . . . Watergate Death List (414) . . . Weathermen (415) . . . Paul Wellstone, Murder of (417) . . . Werewolves for Der Fuhrer (418) . . . West Nile Virus (420)

Y . . . 423

Y2K (423) . . . Francis Parker Yockey (425)

Photo Sources

Kenneth Arnold/U.S. Air Force: p. 390.

Ollie Atkins/The White House: p. 287.

Australian Transport Safety Bureau: p. 243.

Sean Barry-Weske: p. 249.

Bbieter (Wikicommons): p. 358.

Bibliothèque Municipale, Besançon, France/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY: p. 216.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France: p. 94.

Blacksonne (Wikicommons): p. 57.

Shawn Breen: p. 226.

Bright Path Video (Wikicommons): p. 78.

California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: pp. 210, 246.

CentralAsiaOnline.com: p. 21.

Central Intelligence Agency: pp. 258, 322.

ClearWisdom.net: p. 123.

Cmglee (Wikicommons): p. 47.

Cmichel67 (Wikicommons): p. 314.

Dallas Times Herald/Robert H. Jackson: p. 204.

Giovanni Dall’Orto: p. 273.

Dell Publications: p. 261.

Direccion de Divulgacion y Prensa Ejercito de Nicaragua: p. 108.

The Evening Times [Washington, D.C.]: p. 240.

Joost Evers/Anefo: p. 227.

Executive Office of the President of the United States: p. 114.

Federal Bureau of Investigation: pp. 84 (top), 396, 412.

German Federal Archives: pp. 133, 419.

Ghostieguide (Wikicommons): p. 401.

Gorilla Warfare (Wikicommons): p. 59.

Gryffindor (Wikicommons): p. 92.

Harper’s Weekly: p. 163.

Robert Hartnell: p. 318.

Harvard Fine Arts Library Special Collections: p. 213.

HeathSchultz.com: p. 415.

Heritage Auctions: p. 231.

HMman (Wikicommons): p. 82.

Bob Jagendorf: p. 212.

Library of Congress: pp. 76, 168, 244, 414.

Logansport Pharos-Tribune: p. 23.

Los Angeles Daily News: p. 366.

Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum: p. 372.

Peter Maerki: p. 353.

Jim Marrs: p. 250.

Tyler Merbler: p. 182.

MesserWoland (Wikicommons): p. 136.

Michiel1972 (Wikicommons): p. 49.

Ministry of Defence Post 1945 Official Collection [United Kingdom]: p. 252.

Minnesota Historical Society: p. 211.

Hamid Mir: p. 50.

Le Monde Colonial Illustré: p. 229.

Mary Ann Moorman (Mary Krahmer): p. 201.

Michiganensian: p. 221.

Museras (Wikicommons): p. 223.

Narenda Modi: p. 80.

NASA: pp. 206, 265, 301.

NASA/JPL/University of Arizona: p. 122.

National Portrait Gallery [United Kingdom]: p. 409.

Naval History and Heritage Command: p. 155.

New York Daily Mirror: p. 263.

New York Times: p. 235.

New York World-Telegram and Sun: pp. 278, 344.

NsMn (Wikicommons): p. 381.

Russ Quinlan: p. 104.

Ronald Reagan Presidential Library: pp. 64, 339.

RootOfAllLight (Wikicommons): p. 347.

Roswell Daily Record: p. 350.

Rzfrie (Wikicommons): p. 374.

San Francisco Call: p. 13.

Sentinelle del Mattino International: p. 319.

Shutterstock: pp. 2, 7, 9, 11, 15, 18, 26, 29, 31, 32, 34, 39, 44, 53, 56, 60, 84 (bottom), 88, 95, 98, 101, 102, 114, 117, 125, 127, 130, 139, 144, 146, 148, 151, 154, 157, 167, 172, 177, 186, 188, 192, 194, 219, 222, 251, 268, 275, 279, 283, 285, 289, 291, 295, 308, 312, 331, 336, 352, 361, 369, 370, 386, 398, 408, 424.

State of Florida: p. 120.

State of Hawaii Department of Health: p. 294.

Susan Sterner/The White House: p. 67.

Patricia Targ: p. 325.

U.S. Air Force: pp. 160, 334.

U.S. Department of Defense: pp. 109, 178, 297.

U.S. Marine Corps: p. 71.

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration: p. 385.

U.S. National Transportation Safety Board: p. 388.

U.S. Navy: p. 393.

U.S. Senate: p. 417.

Sven Walnum: p. 207.

Nancy Wong: p. 316.

Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database: p. 367.

Public domain: pp. 3, 24, 37, 42, 74, 113, 165, 170, 174, 184, 190, 233, 260, 270, 281, 303, 310, 328, 337, 341, 378, 403.

Introduction

In spite of his expressed reservations, on December 31, 2011, President Barack Obama brought in the new year by signing the National Defense Authorization Act, which gives the government enhanced powers to detain, interrogate, and prosecute its citizens. Under this new act, government agencies may order the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens without charges or trial, the possible military detention of ordinary citizens who would normally be outside of military control, and the transfer to the Department of Defense those law enforcement, penal, and custodial powers currently held by the Department of Justice. In the words of U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, an enthusiastic supporter of the bill, The homeland is part of the battlefield in the global war on terror.

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the American public has tended to believe that their government increasingly lies to them and conspires against them. Rick Ross, whose Ross Institute of New Jersey investigates conspiracies, has observed that more and more Americans see manipulative forces working behind the scenes of their own government.

Conspiracy theorists are quick to respond that they have many good reasons to suspect the government of dirty dealings behind the scenes. While only a few whistleblowers — officially dismissed as kooks and dissidents — tried to warn the general public about secret government agencies, it was later learned that in the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s the FBI’s COINTELPRO really did have orders to defame, disgrace, and dispose of war protesters, radical political groups, and freedom marchers by any means necessary. The CIA’s insidious, topsecret MK-ULTRA really did conduct ghastly brainwashing and mind-altering drug experiments that may have produced the perfect assassins, as well as the Unabomber.

In 1950, when nuclear weapons were still in their infancy, the Department of Defense detonated nuclear devices in desert areas, then monitored unsuspecting civilians in cities downwind from the blasts for medical problems and mortality rates.

In 1966, more than a million civilians were exposed to germ warfare when U.S. Army scientists dropped light bulbs filled with bacteria onto ventilation grates throughout the New York City subway system.

In 1977, Senate hearings revealed that between 1949 and 1969, 239 highly populated areas, including San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Key West, Panama City, Minneapolis, and St. Louis had been contaminated with biological agents.

In 1995, evidence surfaced that the biological agents used during the Gulf War had been manufactured in Houston and Boca Raton and tested on prisoners in the Texas Department of Corrections.

The years following the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, have seen what Mike Ward, writing in PopMatters (January 3, 2003) termed probably the most staggering proliferation of ‘conspiracy theories’ in American history. Angry speculation — focused mainly on government dirty dealings, ulterior motives, and potential complicity in the attacks — has risen to a clamor that easily rivals what followed the Kennedy assassination.

Conspiracy theories are often replete with internal paradoxes, and some are easily dismissed by rational folks as completely weird and crazy. Often, the truth lies in the middle, and the task of the serious researcher is to make an intelligent discernment. To dismiss some conspiracy theories as too wild and off-the-wall to deserve attention may only result in the last laugh being enjoyed by those who seek to control and manipulate others.

Conspiracy theorists warn that Big Brother’s eyes and ears are becoming increasingly active throughout the United States. Cameras are showing up on street corners in cities across the United States, as well as other countries like England. Ostensibly, they are there to help police scan license plates on stolen cars and capture thieves and escaping killers, and many of the cameras have the capabilities of facial identification and can cross reference any citizen suspected of antisocial behavior of even the most minor of offenses with an extensive database.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips smaller than a grain of sand are being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school, the sale patterns of retail merchandise, and the habits of factory workers. Plans are allegedly underway to place a chip in all newborns in the United States and Europe.

Government agencies can easily monitor both landline and cell phones, making a private call an anachronism. The FBI has been forced to admit that it regularly monitors internet radio talk programs throughout the United States, as well as email and website browsing patterns.

Even the average American citizen who is more interested in sports and paying the bills, rather than politics and conspiracies, may become queasy at the idea that the power of the Patriot Act has become enhanced by the National Defense Authorization Act, and that three of the Republican candidates in the 2012 presidential race openly supported waterboarding as a tool of interrogation. Just how far might the government extend its new powers to the process of making the unfortunate citizen suspected of treason or terrorism confess to those accusations?

America has been a cradle for conspiracies and secret societies from its earliest beginnings. Christopher Columbus, for example, held apocalyptic beliefs and claimed to have received a vision that the world would end in 1650 and that it was his divine mission to find a new land that would be the location of the new heaven and new earth promised by St. John in the Book of Revelation. In the 1600s, the master Freemason Sir Francis Bacon believed that America was the New Atlantis and that it would bring forth a New World Order that would restore all humankind to the earthly paradise that existed in that Golden Age of old.

Petty conspiracies that circulate about political or business rivals are as old as the human psyche, Daniel Pipes tells us in Front Page magazine (January 13, 2004). But fears about grand conspiracies, such as some secret society seeking to take over the world, go back only 900 years and have been operational for just two centuries, since the French Revolution. While royal heads were being lopped off by Madame Guillotine, some citizens were blaming the revolution on the political manipulations of the Bavarian Illuminati and its hold on the Jacobins.

Fear of such conspiracies and shadowy societies have made American history replete with warnings of secret plots by the Freemasons, the Zionists, the Roman Catholics, the Communists, the World Bankers, the Bilderbergers, the Illuminati, the Secret Government, New Agers, and extraterrestrial invaders. Charges of conspiracy have grown to self-perpetuating histories of sinister cabals responsible for the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Princess Diana of Wales. Polls indicate that increasing numbers of Americans believe that they have not been told the truth about Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, the Oklahoma City Bombing, the fires that consumed Waco, or the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Sometimes, it seems these paranoid people are really on to something. When such conspiracies as those cited above prove to be true or partially true, the assertion that there is a kernel of truth in even the most farfetched conspiracy theory appears also to be true. Michael Barkun, a political scientist at Syracuse University and the author of A Culture of Conspiracy: Apolcalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003), has identified what he believes to be three principles to be found in every conspiracy theory: Nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; everything is connected. The essence of conspiracy beliefs, Barkun says, lies in attempts to delineate and explain evil. Barkun also states that contemporary conspiracy theories have taken on a major new development, the joining of the occult, the heretical, and the unfashionable, such as spiritualism, alchemy, and theosophy.

With the advent of the internet, anyone can become a conspiracy theorist and broadcast his or her unchecked, unquestioned, and unchallenged claims of government corruption, racist propaganda, or alien abduction all over the world. On Google alone, there are thousands of active websites devoted to conspiracy theories and dedicated to secret societies. Sharing stories about conspiracies and secret societies is very much like spreading sinister gossip, and one needs to develop a sense of what is true and what is merely a reflection of someone else’s personal prejudices and beliefs.

For many years now, we have studied and evaluated the enormous influence of conspiracy theories on society and how people’s beliefs can be manipulated for good or for evil by the promulgation of certain idea, theories, and beliefs. While this book may appear to document the more shadowy visages of human history, the images that appear in the dark mirrors that reflect portraits of chaos, confusion, and deceit down through the ages, we have tried our best to approach this work without any personal agendas. We do not subscribe to any particular conspiracy theory, and we do not belong to any secret society. It is up to each reader to decide whether this book presents a work of entertainment or enlightenment, a work of wonderment or of warning.

— Brad and Sherry Steiger

Note for the New Edition

Since the last edition of Conspiracies and Secret Societies was published in 2013, the trends that the Steigers noted about the impact of the internet on conspiracy theories have only accelerated. What is more, the explosion of social media from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — not to mention whatever new applications have become the next hottest thing by the time you read this — has supercharged the creation and distribution of information. In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is no longer necessary for conspiracy theorists to painstakingly compile mailing lists or secure time on a public access television station to get their messages out.

The faster things change in a hyperkinetic, wired world, the more destabilizing it can feel. In reaction, people who wonder why so many climactic events seem to be occurring one after the other may be more likely to feel that there is something going on behind the scenes. With the increasing infiltration of conspiracy theories into mainstream political discourse, it is more important than ever that even those who question the existence of these conspiracies should learn about them and gain a greater understanding of how they affect our society.

In this new edition, a team of researchers at Visible Ink Press built upon the Steigers’ monumental work. We updated existing material with new developments and ideas, and also added many new entries on topics as varied as Antifa, the Deep State, COVID vaccines, the January 6 insurrection, President Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Jeffrey Epstein, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the Large Hadron Collider, and QAnon, among many others.

Numbers

9/11

For the vast majority of Americans, it seems unthinkable that our own government could have had a hand in orchestrating the awful events of 9/11, but conspiracy theorists argue that the evidence for such terrible complicity continues to mount.

Everybody knows what happened on September 11, 2001. Here is a timeline of how the awful morning began:

7:58 A.M.: United Airlines Flight 175 departs Boston for Los Angeles carrying two pilots, seven flight attendants, and fifty-six passengers. Shortly after takeoff, the Boeing 767 is hijacked and diverted to New York.

7:59 A.M.: American Airlines Flight 11 departs Boston for Los Angeles carrying two pilots, nine flight attendants, and eighty-one passengers. This Boeing 767 is also hijacked and turned toward New York.

8:01 A.M.: United Airlines Flight 93, a Boeing 757, carrying two pilots, five flight attendants, and thirty-eight passengers, leaves Newark, New Jersey, for San Francisco.

8:10 A.M.: American Airlines Flight 77 (also a Boeing 757), carrying two pilots, four flight attendants, and fifty-eight passengers, leaves Dulles International Airport for Los Angeles. Flight 77 is hijacked after takeoff.

8:46 A.M.: Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower at the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York.

9:03 A.M.: Flight 175 slams into the South Tower.

9:45 A.M.: Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.

10:05 A.M.: The South Tower collapses.

10:10 A.M.: A large section of the Pentagon collapses.

10:10 A.M.: Flight 93 crashes in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers rush hijackers.

10:28 A.M.: The North Tower collapses.

Many conspiracy theorists who do not accept the events of that terrible day as millions of people around the world saw them transpire. A number of them believe that the attacks had in fact been orchestrated by the American government, possibly in league with elements of the nascent New World Order, and likely in order to begin a war against Iraq that would allow them to seize that country’s oil fields.

Officially the result of terrorist attacks, the destruction of the World Trade Center (shown here) and the Pentagon appeared suspicious to some conspiracy theorists, who consider it a false flag operation.

Here are a number of the most common conspiracy claims and the arguments rebutting them:

Claim: The jets that struck the WTC and the Pentagon weren’t commercial planes but refueling tankers or guided missiles.

Rebuttal: If the planes that struck the WTC and the Pentagon were tankers or missiles, then what happened to United flights 175 and 93 and American flights 11 and 77? Where are the airplanes, the passengers, and the crew members of those flights? The fact that Islamic terrorists took over the four airplanes is supported by mountains of evidence, including cockpit recordings and forensics.

Claim: Photographs and video taken of Flight 175 just before it struck the South Tower clearly show an object under the fuselage at the base of the right wing. This pod is most likely a missile or a bomb.

Rebuttal: Photo experts who have compared the image with other photos of a Boeing 767 have concluded that the pod that conspiracy theorists see is nothing more than sunlight glinting off the fairing that contains the landing gear and exaggerating its size.

Claim: There are twenty-eight air force bases within close range of the alleged four hijacked flights, and Andrews AFB had two squadrons of fighter planes protecting the skies over Washington. Yet there was no military interference with the suicide flights because the Air Force was ordered to stand down. Someone at the highest level of authority had prior knowledge of the attacks and allowed them to take place.

Rebuttal: The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) was not prepared to perceive domestic passenger flights as threats. Beginning at 8:37 A.M., NORAD’s Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) was called three times to report that Flight 11 was hijacked, but at 9:21 A.M. they were erroneously given Washington, rather than New York, as its destination. Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 A.M. NEADS was notified of Flight 175’s hijacking at 9:03 A.M., the precise time that the airplane crashed into the South Tower. Two F-16s had been scrambled from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and three from Langley Air National Guard, but none got near the hijacked planes. Regarding Flights 93 and 77, once the terrorists shut off the planes’ transponders, it became impossible to sort the hijacked planes from the 4,500 other blips on radar screens at some of the nation’s busiest air lanes.

Claim: The first hijacked plane crashed into floors 94 through 98 of the WTC’s 110-story North Tower. The second jet impacted floors 78 to 84 of the 110-story South Tower. There is no way that these two planes, though loaded with fuel, could have destroyed the structural integrity of the WTC towers. Demolition charges had to have been placed throughout the towers before the crashes occurred.

Rebuttal: According to initial findings of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), plane wreckage plowed through utility shafts at the North Tower’s core, creating a conduit for burning jet fuel to course throughout the building. On October 19, 2004, federal investigators released a five-hundred-page report stating that the twin towers failed because the structural columns at the buildings’ core, damaged by the impact of the airliners, buckled and shortened as the fires burned, gradually shifting more load to the towers’ exterior pinstripe columns [which] ultimately suffered such extraordinary stress and heat that they gave way (New York Times, October 20, 2004).

Claim: Jet fuel cannot burn hot enough to melt steel.

Rebuttal: Although it is true that jet fuel burns at only 1,517 F° and steel melts at 2,777 F°, experts agree that the towers’ steel frames didn’t need to melt to collapse; their loss of structural strength would have been enough. Thomas Eagar, engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained that steel loses 50 percent of its strength at 1,200 F°, and with 90,000 liters of jet fuel continuing to ignite other combustible materials, the temperature would continue to rise.

Claim: The collapse of the twin towers resembled controlled implosions, such as those used to demolish old buildings.

Rebuttal: The weight of all the floors above the collapsed zones of the towers would begin to smash down with massive force on the floors below, creating a kind of chain reaction. Experienced engineers term the process pancaking, and they say that it need not require an explosion to begin.

Claim: Seismographs at Columbia University Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, indicate that the strongest jolts were registered before the collapsing towers struck the earth, thereby proving that massive explosions brought them down.

The Twin Towers that were hit by planes are the WTC 1 and WTC 2 buildings shown in this diagram. But why did WTC 7 (top) also collapse when it was not hit?

Rebuttal: Seismologists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory state that their work was misrepresented. Their graphs show only seismic readings produced by the two planes crashing into the towers and by the collapse of the buildings.

Claim: The forty-seven-story WTC 7 building fell seven hours after the collapse of the twin towers, the result of controlled demolition. The buildings fell straight down through themselves, maintaining radial symmetry. Witnesses to the collapse of the towers claim to have heard demolition blasts and seen clouds of dust and smoke shooting out of the towers. The towers came down suddenly and completely with the rubble falling at the same speed inside and outside the former buildings’ profile. This is an impossibility unless the towers fell by controlled demolition.

Rebuttal: According to the NIST, there was one basic reason for the WTC 7 collapse: Because of an unusual design, the columns were assigned exceptionally heavy loads, approximately 2,000 square feet of floor area for each floor. Shyam Sunder of the NIST states that preliminary analysis showed that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors, it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.

Claim: The two crash holes visible in the Pentagon are much too small to have been made by a Boeing 757.

Rebuttal: Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University, reminds people that a crashing jet airplane doesn’t leave a cartoon cutout outline of itself on the ground or on a building. In Sozen’s opinion, what was left of the Boeing 757 flowed into the reinforced concrete building in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass.

Claim: There was no plane wreckage found at the Pentagon, thereby proving that a missile or a bomb was responsible for the damage.

Rebuttal: Blast expert Allyn E. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive on the scene. He states that he saw the marks of the plane wing on the building, picked up parts of the plane with airline markings on them, held the tail section, and found the black box. There is no mistake, he says, it was an airplane that struck the Pentagon.

Claim: Flight 93 was brought down by a heat-seeking missile from an F-16 fighter.

Rebuttal: There were no F-16s in the area, but a Dassault Falcon 20 business jet owned by the VF Corporation of Greensboro, North Carolina, was on a descent into the Johnstown-Cambria airport when the FAA contacted them and asked them to investigate. The Falcon 20 pinpointed the location of a hole in the ground and smoke rising out of it.

Claim: One of Flight 93’s engines was found a considerable distance from the crash site with damage consistent to that which a heat-seeking missile would cause.

Rebuttal: Investigators on the scene reported a fan from one of the engines in a catchment basin about 300 yards south of the crash site. Experts say there is nothing extraordinary about an engine tumbling that distance from the crash site, especially when considering that the plane probably hit traveling at 500 mph, moving 700 to 800 feet per second.

Claim: After take-off, the four doomed aircraft were ordered by secret government agents to a deserted airbase where the passengers from Flights 11, 77, and 175 were placed aboard Flight 93, which was electronically controlled and programmed to crash in Pennsylvania, eliminating all witnesses. The three aircraft that struck the WTC and the Pentagon were empty, controlled by implanted electronic systems from afar. The frantic calls from cellphones, allegedly from passengers, were all prerecorded by trained actors. The shadow government then used the phony attack by foreign terrorists as an excuse to declare war on Iraq.

Rebuttal: This scenario reconstruction was suggested by retired University of Western Ontario professor A. K. Dewdney. Reactions to his theory range from total agreement to profound disgust.

Claim: New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani banned all independent investigators and civilians from Ground Zero so that any physical evidence of explosives among the rubble would be hauled away before it was detected.

Rebuttal: Mayor Giuliani recognized that Ground Zero was a historic location, but it was also a crime scene, and he didn’t want people getting hurt while trying to take pictures of the destruction or destroying any evidence that might be useful to federal investigators.

Conspiracy theories about 9/11 grew quickly. Days after the horrible events, William Rodriguez was proclaimed a hero for saving numerous lives at Ground Zero and being the recipient of a miracle for himself. Not many people have heard his story, conspiracy theorists maintain, because it tends to expose the 9/11 investigation as a sham and indicates that the government is involved in a cover-up about the truth of the WTC disaster.

Rodriguez was a janitor on duty the morning of September 11, and he heard and felt explosions shudder the basement sublevels of the North Tower beneath his feet just seconds before the jetliner struck the top floors. The walls cracked around him, and he pulled a severely burned man from the basement. Rodriguez and other conspiracy theorists do not believe it possible that a jetliner could slam into the tower ninety floors above the ground and burn a man’s arms and face to a crisp in the sublevels within seconds of impact.

According to Rodriguez, NBC News spent a full day at his house interviewing him about the serious allegations that he had made. His eyewitness account was backed up by fourteen people who were on the scene with him and felt the explosions go off. At the last minute, he says, NBC dropped the story, and some reporters told him to keep quiet or his life would be in danger.

Conspiracy theorists state that Rodriguez’s testimony clearly demonstrates that the WTC towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Rodriguez says he lost two hundred friends when the towers collapsed and that he became their voice speaking out for the truth.

As the years pass, even more conspiracy theories about the 9/11 attacks have sprung up, such as the following claims:

IGNORED WARNINGS

A top-secret U.S. agency eavesdropped on a conversation before September 11 between an individual later suspected to be the terrorist commander of the 9/11 attacks and the chief hijacker, but it took no action.

An Iranian deportee called police from his jail cell and warned of the planned attack on the WTC. No action was taken.

The National Security Agency intercepted a conversation in Arabic in which the participants discussed something big about to happen in the U.S. very soon.

U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages on September 10 that a terrorist attack would take place on the next day: Zero Hour is tomorrow.

INDIVIDUALS WHO RECEIVED ADVANCE WARNINGS ABOUT THE ATTACKS

Mayor Giuliani admitted to ABC anchorman Peter Jennings that he received a warning that the South Tower was about to collapse.

Newsweek magazine learned that top Pentagon officials were warned not to fly after September 10.

A former U.S. senator warned Condoleezza Rice on September 6 not to travel in the next several days because a terrorist attack inside the U.S. was imminent.

The FBI learned that some Middle Easterners in the New York area were warned not to go to lower Manhattan on September 11.

In 2005, Dylan Avery’s documentary Loose Change was uploaded to the internet and quickly amassed millions of views. Among the theories that Avery popularized were the claim that the towers could only have been brought down by previously planted demolition charges and the United 93 flight never crashed in Pennsylvania but was rather landed at Cleveland and the still-living passengers sent to a NASA research center.

Believers in the various 9/11 conspiracy theories are known as Truthers and they stubbornly cling to their beliefs. Conspiracy historian Kathryn S. Olmsted has categorized most of these Truthers into two categories—LIHOP (Let It Happen on Purpose) and MIHOP (Made It Happen on Purpose)—both of which presume that the U.S. government knew more than it let on.

Believers in the various 9/11 conspiracy theories are known as Truthers and they stubbornly cling to their beliefs.

As of late 2020, roughly one in six Americans believed that the Bush administration knew about the attacks but did not act in order to bring about the Iraq War and roughly a third were not certain.

Sources

Attack Images and Graphics. September 11 News.com. http://www.september11news.com/AttackImages.htm.

Cox, Daniel A. and John Halpin. Conspiracy theories, misinformation, COVID-19, and the 2020 election. American Enterprise Institute, October 13, 2020. https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/conspiracy-theories-misinformation-covid-19-and-the-2020-election/.

Hoffman, Jim. Popular Mechanics Attacks Its ‘9/11’ Straw Man. https://911research.wtc7.net/essays/pm/index.html.

Lipton, Eric. Study Suggests Design Flaws Didn’t Doom Towers. New York Times, October 20, 2004.

9/11: Debunking the Myths. Popular Mechanics, March 2005. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/defense/1227842.html?page=1&c=y.

Olmsted, Kathryn S. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Scheer, Robert. The 9/11 Secret in the CIA’s Back Pocket. Los Angeles Times. October 19, 2004.

Shermer, Michael. Fahrenheit 2777. Scientific American, June 1, 2005. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fahrenheit-2777/.

2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

It is an article of faith in some parts of the American electorate that the 2020 presidential election results were fake.

For many supporters of President Donald Trump, the 2020 presidential election is not only one of the greatest outrages in American history but the result of a devious and wide-ranging conspiracy to upend the very foundations of democracy. This is not the first time that some Americans have believed that sinister plots were weighing against the power of their votes. In the early 1800s, the Anti-Masonic Party inveighed against Freemason elites they believed were corrupting government institutions and murdering their opponents. After the 2004 election, many Democrats thought that Republicans, possibly with the help of the Ohio secretary of state, had tampered with voting machines to deliver fake results that won George W. Bush reelection. But the 2020 election conspiracy theories proved far more long-lasting and popular.

It started years earlier in the 2016 election. Even though he won the presidency through a majority of Electoral College votes, Trump claimed that he only lost the popular vote because millions of undocumented immigrants had voted for Hillary Clinton. This built on long-running conspiracy theories about Democrats, and liberals like George Soros were either encouraging illegal immigration or actively importing people to gain votes. Though Trump’s voter fraud commission disbanded in 2018 after failing to substantiate its claims, he and his fellow conspiracy theorists continued to say that the results were faked by Democrats and warned preemptively that the 2020 election would be stolen as well.

When Trump again lost the popular vote that year to Joe Biden but also failed to secure enough Electoral College votes to win the presidency, he and many of his followers believed that the only way this could have happened was Democratic fraud on a nearly unprecedented scale. According to believers, the conspiracy to deny Trump the election was an organized, well-funded campaign that attacked the integrity of the vote from multiple angles, including:

Seemingly common paperwork errors by vote counters that saw numbers drop for Trump were intentional.

Democrats’ promotion of mail-in ballots, which they claimed was for safety concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, was a smokescreen for more easily faked votes. In October 2020, a former Houston police captain had pulled over a truck and held the driver at gunpoint, mistakenly believing that the man (whose truck was filled with air-conditioning repair equipment) was hauling 750,000 mail-in ballots signed by Hispanic children whose fingerprints could not be traced.

Convinced by President Trump and conspiracy groups like QAnon that the election was a fraud, Americans protested in the thousands after the 2020 presidential election results were announced.

Fake votes were being cast using the names of dead people.

An Italian defense contractor hacked into voting machines in several states via satellite and changed the votes in favor of Biden.

Cities known for having high Democratic turnout were reporting more votes than they had people.

Suitcases and truckloads of preprinted ballots were snuck into vote-counting centers.

The voting machine company Dominion, which was believed to have ties to high-ranking Democrats as well as the Clinton Foundation and George Soros, rigged the results in favor of Biden. Also, their machines may have been hijacked by foreign actors looking to unseat Trump, with some claiming that Dominion’s software was created on the orders of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.

Conspiracy theorists, including Trump and many of his high-ranking allies, continued fighting to overturn what they saw as an illegal result for weeks. Election officials in many states were shadowed and threatened by eager conspiracy researchers. Multiple audits combed through state results looking for fraud. Trump and his allies pressured state election officials to agree that many votes were faked.

The stolen election conspiracy came to a head on January 6, 2021, the day that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, was in the House of Representatives to officially certify the election results and declare Biden the new president. Leading a nearby rally called Save America, Trump—who had also repeatedly pressed Pence not to certify and promised that the rally will be wild!—called on attendees to head to the Capitol and take back our country. Thousands of conspiracy believers massed at the Capitol and began fighting their way through the undermanned police force protecting the building. The mob eventually broke into the Capitol, narrowly missing Pence, who some had said they wanted to hang. Others were later discovered to have lists of politicians to seize or assassinate. Eventually, the police were reinforced and the rioters either arrested or turned away. Five people died as a result of the riot.

Afterward, new conspiracy theories flourished about the January 6 riot being a false flag event. Some believed it had been incited by the FBI as an excuse to arrest Trump supporters. Others thought that secret elites had planned it all (a Three Percenter militia member said that Skull and Bones, Scientology, and Mormonism all somehow secretly conned him into attending), and still others claimed that the only violent actors at the riot were actually antifa members dressed in pro-Trump gear.

The conspiracy theory about the 2020 election’s fraudulence remained extremely popular to the point where it had become mainstream thinking in many circles. Over a year after the election, anywhere from half to two-thirds of Republicans believed that Trump was still the legitimate president.

Sources

Boburg, Shawn, Dalton Bennet, Neena Satija, and Ken Hoffman. Ex-cop hits truck thinking it held 750,000 fraudulent ballots, police say. It held air conditioning parts. Washington Post, December 21, 2020.

Inside the Capitol Riot: An Exclusive Video Investigation. New York Times, November 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/us/jan-6-capitol-attack-takeaways.html.

Larson, Erik. Militia Man Says Yale Secret Society Made Him Storm Capitol. Bloomberg, December 9, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-09/militia-member-says-yale-secret-society-made-him-storm-capitol.

Wolf, Zachary B. The 5 key elements of Trump’s Big Lie and how it came to be. CNN, May 19, 2021. https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/19/politics/donald-trump-big-lie-explainer/index.html.

A

AGENDA 21

A seemingly innocuous 1992 planning document is believed by some to contain a diabolical plan to establish a One World Government.

At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, nearly 180 world leaders signed a nonbinding agreement that they would work together in a global partnership for sustainable development. While to many observers, this seemed like just another boilerplate statement of intent to combat the looming environmental crisis, others saw nothing less than a blueprint for the New World Order.

A slew of groups from the John Birch Society to the Tea Party movement believed that Agenda 21’s support for limiting sprawl, encouraging mass transit, and reducing carbon emissions was just a smokescreen for totalitarian environmentalists to destroy property rights, among other developments. The UN’s vague wording likely helped the document to become a tabula rasa for conspiracy theorists to see it as confirmation of their fears.

During the 1990s, fringe antigovernment groups, UN haters, climate change deniers, and Newt Gingrich fueled these fears. Their theories hit the mainstream after the post-2008 rise of the Tea Party, after which numerous local and even state governments began passing resolutions that tried to block everything from public transportation to mandatory contraception to lists of concealed-carry firearms owners in the name of stopping Agenda 21. In 2012—the same year Glenn Beck published a novel named Agenda 21 about a future America ruled by despotic, socialist environmentalists—the Republican Party added a resolution to its national platform calling Agenda 21 destructive and insidious.

More recently, Agenda 21 theories have multiplied online, where they found a receptive audience with anti-environmental and antivaccine groups.

Conservative political commentator and radio host Glenn Beck published Agenda 21 in 2012, a fictional take on what happens in a world in which the UN’s agenda has taken effect.

Sources

Agenda 21: Programme of Action for Sustainable Development. United Nations Digital Library. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/170126?ln=en.

Agenda 21: The UN, Sustainability and Right-Wing Conspiracy Theory. The Southern Poverty Law Center. https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory.

AIDS/HIV

Conspiracy theorists argue that AIDS did not come out of Africa, but out of secret government laboratories that created this and other terrible weapons of biological warfare.

The Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, took full advantage of the international attention that she received in 2004 to state her claim that the AIDS virus was a deliberately created biological warfare agent. She disputed the theory that AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) had originated monkeys.

The U.S. State Department congratulated Maathai on winning the Peace Prize but disagreed with her claims that the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) believed to cause AIDS was invented as a bioweapon in some Western laboratory for the purpose of mass extermination. While one might expect such a response from the State Department, conspiracy theorists countered that what they believe to be a prime objective of the New World Order is the dramatic reduction of the Earth’s population.

Credit for the discovery of the virus that causes was settled by lawsuit in 1987 after Dr. Robert Gallo of the National Cancer Institute and Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris both claimed to have isolated the virus sometime in 1984. The co-discoverers of the virus have never agreed about the origin of HIV or the birthplace of AIDS. Montagnier believed that the origin of the virus remains a mystery and that it was important to distinguish between its origins and the AIDS epidemic. Gallo, the more influential of the two scientists, insisted that the virus could have stemmed from a common viral ancestor found in animals and that it was passed to humans by monkeys. Gallo claimed that Ann Giudici Fettner, a freelance journalist who had lived in Africa, told him in 1983, a year before he discovered the virus, that it came from green monkeys in central Africa. However, in her book The Truth about AIDS, Fettner never refers to green monkeys and emphasizes her opinion that AIDS began as an American disease. In spite of the paucity of scientific papers to substantiate Gallo’s green monkey theory, the explanation remained a favorite of the media and the public and circulated widely until the late 1990s when another group of American scientists claimed that they had discovered the origin of the virus in a species of chimpanzee.

A large number of conspiracy theorists have never bought these Africa-centered theories. Though the disease had likely spread secretly in the United States for years, it was not until 1981 that journalists and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began to report on clusters of a strange new pneumonia-like sickness sweeping through gay men in New York and San Francisco. By the time the CDC identified the illness as AIDS in 1982, it had already infected tens of thousands and was beginning to show up in Africa. In 1984 Gallo became famous for discovering that green monkeys in Africa that had been incubating the disease for centuries before the epidemic began. But it was clearly unlikely that every American contracting AIDS at the start of the epidemic had traveled to Africa and been bitten by green monkeys. Some began to suspect other causes.

Early in the 1970s rumors had begun circulating about secret government research in biological warfare and about scientists who were conducting experiments in species-jumping, mixing viruses and seeding them into animal and human cell cultures. In 1971 President Richard Nixon combined the U.S. Army’s biological warfare department at Fort Detrick, Maryland, with the National Cancer Institute. Although the combination was explained to the public as part of the president’s War on Cancer, the program also united the army’s DNA and genetic engineering programs with anticancer research and molecular biology projects. In addition, cancer research programs conducted by private companies were blended into anticancer research projects of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the CDC, and the World Health Organization (WHO). As research progressed, dozens of new laboratory hybrids, recombinant and mutant viruses, were engineered. A few scientists with social consciences began to warn others that some of the newly designed viruses could be extremely dangerous if released from the laboratory. Because of the efforts of a few whistle-blowers, word got out that government scientists had achieved a synthetic biological agent that did not exist naturally and for which no natural immunity could be acquired.

Knowledge of what had been achieved spread rapidly to other government researchers throughout the world. In 1973 the Danish pathologist Johannes Clemmesen warned that the transmissibility of such genetically altered viral agents could cause a world epidemic of cancer if they ever left the confines of the laboratory.

Although most people are content with Robert Gallo’s explanation that the AIDS epidemic is the result of a primate virus jumping species, conspiracy theorists have developed a number of their own explanations for AIDS/HIV. Here are some of the most persistent theories:

Edward Hooper, author of The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV-AIDS, advances the theory that HIV evolved from SIV (simian immunodeficiency virus), found in the chimpanzee. Hooper outlines a scenario that has as its villain Dr. Hilary Koprowski, a virologist working for Philadelphia’s Wistar Research Institute, who in the early 1950s used a hastily brewed chimpanzee kidney culture to concoct a million doses of oral vaccine for a mass experimental polio vaccination program in the Belgian Congo. Koprowski’s urgency and haste in conducting the mass vaccination was fostered by the pharmaceutical company’s putting pressure on him to beat Dr. Salk and Dr. Sabin to the market with the first commercially available polio vaccine.

The WHO, controlled by the New World Order, created the AIDS epidemic by deliberately administering contaminated vaccines to people in developing countries in the 1970s. Africa was targeted first, in a smallpox eradication program, so that a link could be subsequently made that AIDS had originated in Africa.

Sometime around 1977, U.S. military scientists bioengineered HIV at Fort Detrick by splicing the Visna and HTLV viruses. It was tested on prison inmates who volunteered to be injected with the virus in exchange for an early release. From these released prisoners, the virus spread to the wider population. A version of this theory was spread by Dr. Robert Strecker, whose self-produced video The Strecker Memorandum also claimed that AIDS could be spread by mosquitos.

The Soviet KGB created the viruses, then planted disinformation that the CIA was behind the spread of the disease.

HIV/AIDS is an international health crisis. Although effective treatments are now available, there is still no cure for this disease. Many charities and government agencies work around the year to promote AIDS awareness.

AIDS was the product of biological warfare research conducted by the U.S. government for the express purpose of killing minorities and gay men.

Dr. Alan Cantwell (AIDS and the Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot) argued that HIV is a genetically modified virus introduced by U.S. government scientists into the gay and bisexual population under the guise of hepatitis B experiments that began in 1978.

Dr. Gary Glum (Full Disclosure) claimed he received top-secret intelligence that the AIDS virus was created at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. His theory has it that the WHO and the Red Cross are complicit in a conspiracy to spread AIDS, which was released in 1978 as part of the Illuminati and New World Order’s overall population-control plan. Glum warns that the virus is far more easily transmitted than medical reports stated and can be spread through kissing, mosquito bites, and casual contact. Dr. Glum also maintains that medical cures for AIDS exist but have been suppressed by the government.

Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam and the New Black Panther Party accused Jewish doctors of creating AIDS as a means of destroying Black people throughout the world. In 2005, The Lancet reported that one out of seven Black Americans believed a different version of this theory in which the culprit was the U.S. government.

Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz (Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola—Nature, Accident, or Intentional? and Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism, and Toxic Warfare) theorized that U.S. defense contractors engineered AIDS to target Jews, Blacks, and Hispanics as part of a massive population-control program.

In a 1983 article from the Boston Gay Community News, Charles Shively referenced a theory claiming that AIDS originated with African Swine Fever Virus (AFSV), which spread to the U.S. accidently after the CIA introduced it to Cuba in another harebrained asymmetric warfare scheme. He also pondered whether CDC doctors would just decide to kill all the queers, Haitians, and IV [intravenous] drug users exposed to AIDS?

Philip S. Duke (The AIDS-ET Connection) believes that the source of AIDS was not actually Earth-bound but part of an alien plot to reduce the human population to the point where they could begin colonizing the planet.

In 1992, Evgenii Primakov, head of the FSB (the post-Soviet version of the KGB), admitted that in the mid-1980s the USSR had initiated a massive disinformation campaign to spread the idea that AIDS was created by experiments by the USA‘s secret services and the Pentagon with new types of biological weapons that have spun out of control. Operation Denver proved so successful, in part because it built on rumors that were already circulating, that it spread around the world. Theories that connected AIDS to the CIA proved particularly popular in Africa. A 1985 issue of Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine reprinted an English translation of an article about AIDS as a possible bioweapon that had originally been planted in a Soviet newspaper by the KGB.

Sources

Cantwell, Alan. AIDS and the Doctor of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic. Los Angeles: Aris Rising Press, 1992.

Doucleff, Michaeleen. Researchers Clear ‘Patient Zero’ from AIDS Origin Story. NPR, October 26, 2016.

Glum, Gary. Full Disclosure: The Truth about the AIDS Epidemic. Los Angeles: Silent Walker 1994.

Guyatt, David. Did the Pentagon Manufacture AIDS as a Biological Weapon? https://www.deepblacklies.co.uk/pentagon_aids.htm.

Hooper, Edward. The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV-AIDS. Boston: Little, Brown, 1999.

Nobel Peace Laureate Claims HIV Deliberately Created. ABC News, October 9, 2004.

Selvage, Douglas. Operation ‘Denver’: The East German Ministry of State Security and the KGB‘s AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986. Journal of Cold War Studies, (2019) 21 (4): 71–123.

AIRSHIP OF 1897

In 1897, years before any known terrestrial agency had accomplished heavier-than-air flight, members of a secret society in contact with extraterrestrials piloted a large airship, often described as resembling a cone-shaped steamboat, across the United States and later throughout the world.

In 1897 the world was poised confidently on the brink of the twentieth century. Four years earlier, Karl Benz and Henry Ford had built their first four-wheeled automobiles. In 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumière had invented the cinematograph, Guglielmo Marconi had invented radio telegraphy, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had formulated the principle of rocket reaction propulsion.

The Royal Automobile Club was founded in London in 1897, and cars on the ground were going faster every year. But there were no heavier-than-air vehicles racing across the skies—and a number of brilliant scientists declared that it was aerodynamically impossible to build such flying machines.

Nevertheless, on April 7, 1897, citizens of Wesley, Iowa, sighted a cone-shaped airship with brightly illuminated windows in its side. The witnesses were unable to determine how it was propelled or what sustained it in the air.

On April 15 the airship landed two miles north of Springfield, Illinois. The craft’s occupants explained that they had landed to repair their electrical apparatus and searchlight equipment.

On April 17 the airship returned to Iowa and set down outside of Waterloo. One of the occupants brandished a rifle to keep the curious several hundred yards from the machine. Journalists described the airship as being about forty feet long and constructed like a giant cigar, with winglike attachments on the sides and a steering apparatus in the rear. The machine was surmounted by a cupola on its roof.

On April 21 and 22, the airship barnstormed Arkansas and Texas. In Harrisburg, Arkansas, it awakened a former senator after midnight. Members of the flight crew informed him that the builder of the craft was a brilliant inventor from St. Louis who had discovered the secret of suspending the laws of gravity. Nineteen years had been invested in building the airship, but because it was not quite perfected, the crew preferred to travel at night. Once they had accomplished a successful voyage to the planet Mars, they would put the airship on public exhibition.

On April 24 a prominent Texas farmer was awakened at midnight by a strange whirring sound and the brilliant lights of what he assumed were angels in a celestial vehicle. The visitors informed him that they came not from heaven, but from a small town in Iowa, where five such airships had been constructed. The craft were built of a newly discovered material that had the property of self-sustenance in the air. The motive power was a highly condensed electricity.

Throughout the following weeks, landing and contact reports came from areas all across the United States.

During the summer months of 1897, sightings were reported from other parts of the world. In July and August mysterious aerial objects were seen over Sweden and Norway. On August 13 what appeared to be the same aerial craft was sighted off the coast of Norway and also over Vancouver, British Columbia.

Simply put, in 1897 no terrestrial agency had yet constructed an aerial vehicle that could traverse the globe with the speed and ease of the airship piloted by the mysterious inventors from Iowa or St. Louis. Because of this fact, many researchers believe that the builders of the 1897 airship belonged to a secret society, perhaps one that had been in touch with extraterrestrial intelligences—or their records and artifacts—for thousands of years.

Sightings of the mystery airship actually began in late 1896 as this illustration from the November 1896 San Francisco Call indicates.

Numerous European occult groups have been molded around the belief that a secret society centuries ago achieved a high level of scientific knowledge and has carefully guarded this dangerous learning from the rest of humanity ever since. A common theme in these beliefs is that certain men of genius in ancient Egypt and Persia were given access to the records of the advanced technologies of the antediluvian world. Many hundreds of years ago, these ancient masters apparently learned to duplicate many of the feats of the Titans of Atlantis—and so attracted the attention of extraterrestrials who had been monitoring Earth for signs of advanced intelligence.

Perhaps recognizing the awesome responsibility bestowed by possessing this ancient knowledge, the secret society may have then decided to keep their discoveries to themselves until the world became enlightened enough to deal wisely with such advanced technical accomplishment. But still, now and then the secret society may decide that the time is propitious to make one of its discoveries known to the outside world. Such intervention in the affairs of the great mass of humanity is usually accomplished by carefully feeding certain fragments of research to outside scientists whose work and attitude have been adjudged particularly deserving.

On the other hand, the secret society’s members may feel little or no such responsibility. They may be merely biding their time until they turn most of humanity into their slaves. For hundreds of years, certain scholars have worried about global conspiracies being conducted by secret societies waiting until the right moment to achieve complete world domination, perhaps achieved through air superiority.

The mysterious airship disappeared from the skies for twelve years. On March 24, 1909, a police constable in Peterborough, England, reported having heard a sound similar to a motorcar overhead. Looking up, he spotted an airship shining a powerful light and traveling as fast as an express train. By July the strange aerial machine was sighted in the skies over New Zealand, and it remained there for six weeks before it returned to the United States. There was one reported overflight in New England in August, then the airship disappeared until the night of December 12, when residents of Long Island heard a buzzing sound, resembling the rattle and