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PAN-IDEOLOGICAL CONSPIRACY THEORIES

DENIALISM AND COVER-UP

From amongst the chaos . . . emerges one obvious question: “Is the left wing or the right wing correct?” The answer is: Neither. These concepts are wrong. They were implanted in the mind of man through heavy, media conditioning.

Stan Deyo, The Cosmic Conspiracy

The period spanning roughly from the Kennedy assassination to the election of Ronald Reagan marked more than just a turning point in conspiracy theorizing. Aside from the massive level of interest in assassination conspiracies, conspiracism in general seemed to be on the decline. Beneath the surface, however, conspiracy theories were mushrooming, incorporating new topics, a much wider segment of the public, and even distinctively new approaches. The underlying phenomenon behind this expansion was the unprecedented decline in trust in government as well as other authoritative institutions, such as organized religion, the business community, and eventually even science, the military, and the media. With regard to the government in particular, declining trust was transformed into active mistrust, an outlook extremely compatible with conspiratorial thinking.

The End of Trust

Many attribute the growth of mistrust in this era to high-profile events: the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, the King assassination, the war in Vietnam, and the Watergate hearings. There were, however, many more events contributing to mistrust, and even alienation, among different segments of the public. Some of these events seem mild today, and it is hard to recapture the impact they had. For example, environmental activism and reporting in the 1960s shook the confidence of many moderate Americans by exposing hazardous business practices and lax regulations. And during the 1970s, a relentless series of revelations of governmental wrongdoing created a climate in which conspiracism was able to flourish. In 1971, anti-war activists exposed COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program operation against civil rights and black power activists. The Washington Star broke the story of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments in 1972. In 1974, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published stories of CIA spying on Americans. Interest in JFK’s assassination rebounded strongly in 1975 when the Zapruder film was shown on network television.

These and other conspiracy-friendly subjects received even more media and public attention due to a remarkable series of government investigations and hearings. Senator Edward Kennedy held hearings on the Tuskegee experiment. More prominently, the Church Committee held hearings on the FBI’s counterintelligence program and various CIA practices. These hearings revealed FBI efforts to undermine civil rights organizations (including Native American and Hispanic groups) as well as the anti-war movement. More alarming to most people, they also revealed the CIA’s practice of assassinating foreign leaders, including embarrassing accounts of the CIA’s efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro, which also exposed the collaborative relationship between the CIA and organized crime. At the same time, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller oversaw the Commission on CIA Activities in the United States, devoted in part to uncovering the CIA’s MK-Ultra (mind control) experiments. During Representative Otis Pike’s tenure as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, hearings on the activities of the FBI, the CIA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency proved so incendiary that the committee’s report was not even published by the Government Printing Office. Deteriorating public confidence in the Warren Commission’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination led to the 1976 House Select Committee on Assassinations, the ambivalent conclusions of which fueled conspiratorial thinking about both the Kennedy and King assassinations. Also in 1976, Representative Sonny Montgomery’s Select Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia issued its unambivalent finding on POWs that “no Americans are still being held alive in Indochina, or elsewhere, as result of the war in Indochina.”1 However, mistrust of government had reached a point where many refused to believe this.

A conspiratorial meme took hold in popular culture alongside the news coverage and investigations, with any number of conspiratorial movies in the mid-seventies. In 1972, George C. Scott starred in Rage as a Utah sheep rancher faced with the cover-up of a military nerve gas leak that killed all his sheep and his son as well. The Conversation, from 1973, highlighted creeping surveillance technology. The Parallax View (tagline: “There is no conspiracy. Just twelve people dead.”) and Three Days of the Condor (1974 and 1975, respectively) featured conspiracies by a multinational corporation and the CIA respectively. In 1976, All the President’s Men compressed the Watergate scandal into two hours. A NASA mission was shown to be a hoax in the 1977 film Capricorn One. Chuck Norris faced down a military establishment determined to deny the existence of POWs in 1978’s Good Guys Wear Black. And, wrapping up the decade, Winter Kills, a black comedy about the Kennedy assassination.2

The new conspiracy theories that grew out of this milieu of journalistic exposés, congressional investigations, and popular culture are typified by the moon-landing hoax conspiracy. This constituted a new approach to conspiracism; its proponents built it out of nothing, and it appealed to a wider array of people by avoiding the overtly political or ideological. In the years after the moon landing, public opinion surveys consistently showed that a noticeable minority of people doubted that it had in fact taken place. Seizing the opportunity, a public relations practitioner and writer of books such as How to Eat Well on Less Than a Dollar a Day, Bill Kaysing, coauthored a short book depicting an elaborate hoax. We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle took advantage of the fact that, as Kaysing explained, “government deception, supported by a pervasive system of official secrecy and an enormous public relations machine, has reaped a harvest of massive public distrust.”3

One problem facing Kaysing was logistics: how could NASA, or anyone, fake a moon landing? The other problem was motivation: why should they? Kaysing offered some desultory arguments about intimidation of astronauts and control of the media, but he was more interested in asking questions along the lines of “Why were all transmissions to be public via TV and radio, media of communications easily faked?” and “Why did so many astronauts end up as executives of large corporations?” Kaysing then offered up considerable technical detail, daunting, but relatively pointless: the composition of “hypergolic propellants” and a cutaway illustration of the Lunar Excursion Module to show how many parts it had that might misfunction. Third, he relied very heavily on visuals, printing grainy images of the moon, with captions such as “NO evidence of the surface being disturbed beneath the engine nozzle,” “Again, no stars!” and “No dust on face shield.” Less compelling were pictures of a patch of Nevada desert having a “striking similarity” to the moon and of the buffet at the Sands Hotel and Casino, where the astronauts presumably ate while the hoax was going on.4 This scattershot approach, heavy with visuals but light on argumentation—“just asking questions”—has become a standard method of creating and defending conspiracy theories. It replaced the ideology in earlier conspiracy theories, which had given people a framework for accepting them. Disaggregated information, provided to the point of overload, with strong visuals and loaded questions turned out to be a powerful tactic for drawing people in (not to mention selling books).

The moon-landing conspiracy also illustrates the staying power of conspiracies in today’s media environment. Flimsy and inconsequential as it was, Kaysing’s conspiracy received a boost from the 1977 movie Capricorn One, a thriller depicting a Mars mission hoax. Five years later, one William Brian II went in a different direction, arguing that NASA was covering up data that proved the earth to be hollow and hypothesizing alien interference with the moon shot. This idea did not catch on but did help keep the conspiracy going. Ralph René’s 1992 NASA Mooned America! returned to the original hoax idea, but since it was embedded in extraneous material such as a new value for the math constant pi and denial of the existence of gravity, René’s work fared no better.5 Even Bart Sibrel’s “documentary” film Astronauts Gone Wild was marginal, although Sibrel gained some notoriety by provoking astronaut Buzz Aldrin into punching him. At the same time, Fox television, avoiding gratuitous weirdness, promoted the original hoax in a much more sophisticated way. Expanding the number of bogus missions from one to six, and hinting at a number of suspicious astronaut deaths, Fox’s “news special” “let the viewer decide” whether the hoax-touting “experts” (such as Sibrel) were convincing.6 Today, a quick Google search will bring anyone to what is essentially an expanded version of Kaysing’s original book: a seemingly endless parade of photographs with loaded-question captions. Repeated efforts by NASA to explain such “evidence” have been declared to be just part of the conspiracy.

The moon-landing conspiracy is one of several conspiracy theories that can appeal to people across the political spectrum. Similarly, UFO conspiracy theories are largely pan-ideological in all their variants, including abductions, secret underground bases, and alien technologies.7 Probably the most prominent area of pan-ideological conspiracism today deals with health and medical issues: pandemics, alternative medicine, genetically modified food, AIDS, and, of course, vaccines.8 In a slightly different fashion, MK-Ultra-based mind-control conspiracies invariably have a political dimension, whether a left-wing conspiracy about corporate-fascism or a right-wing one about global government’s plans for its critics. Even 9/11 conspiracy theories, initially dominated by leftist attacks on the Bush administration, have become more politically balanced as leftist interest has faded and rightist interpretations have emerged. And sometimes nonideological conspiracy theories have been moved by a particularly strong faction into one or another ideological camp. This is essentially what happened to the conspiracy theory that the government was covering up the existence of POWs in Indochina, which shifted violently to the Right in the 1980s.9

Many conspiracy theories with ambiguous politics fall into one of two general categories: denialism and conspiracy by cover-up. Both grow primarily out of mistrust of authorities and may well be most pronounced among “cynical individuals who support democratic principles.” These are people who wish they were able to trust their own government. Psychologists maintain that denialists’ belief in conspiracy theories “allows them to exert some control over their lives.” To denialists, the “official story” comes to be thought of as a conspiratorial construct in its own right, making any alternative attractive by comparison.10 The construction of a conspiracy by cover-up begins similarly but moves on to at least one widely believed conspiracy theory. The template for this method of conspiracy building is the UFO movement.

Denialism

“Denialism” is a relatively recently coined term used to differentiate between professing a conspiracy theory and merely refusing to accept a well-established official explanation. Although the term arose in the context of climate change and vaccines, denialism is of course much older. Looking back only to the beginning of the twentieth century, denial of scientific advances in any number of areas was fairly common. Flat Earth advocates published their explanatory maps, creationists resisted the onslaught of evolutionary theory, quacks stood up to the authority of the medical establishment. We can see denialism in Kennedy assassination conspiracism as well, in that, of the millions of people who disbelieve the explanation that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone shooter, only a small percentage believe any particular other narrative. More troublingly, today there are people who consider themselves “sovereign citizens,” a status rooted in their denial of the “corporate existence” of the government.11

Contemporary denialism, however, is more than just a refusal to believe; it is an active process—what Robert Proctor calls “agnotology” or “the cultural production of ignorance.” While the earliest example of this could well be Bill Kaysing’s moon-landing denialism, Proctor suggests that the “evil genius” behind it may have come from the tobacco industry: “The idea was that people would continue to smoke so long as they could be reassured that ‘no one really knows’ the true cause of cancer. The strategy was to question all assertions to the contrary, all efforts to ‘close’ the controversy, as if closure itself was a mark of dogma, the enemy of inquiry. The point was to keep the question of health harms open, for decades if possible.”12 This strategy links denialism to pseudoscience in two complementary ways. First, pseudoscientific claims are used to bolster denialist views, and second, the very concept of science is attacked and discredited. The pseudoscientific claims are sometimes the work of scientific “gadflies,” or they may come out of well-heeled corporate labs. Or they may simply be made up. One study of anti-vaccination websites found that over two-thirds claimed “scientific” backing for bogus claims such as vaccines’ causing “brain damage.” Similarly, AIDS denialist Matt Irwin has claimed that an HIV-positive diagnosis causes stress, which suppresses the immune system, thus generating “immune system disregulation that may later be called ‘AIDS.’”13

Denialism, pseudoscience, and conspiracism are closely related. Some beliefs begin as denialism but slowly become conspiratorial to answer critics who wonder why everyone else believes what they deny. Anticipating this, deniers frequently describe the cover-up and censorship they face. This was the case for Bill Kaysing’s moon-landing exposé; HIV and polio denialists have followed the same practice; and (replacing scientists with historians) Holocaust deniers have done the same for years.14 More frequently, denialism and the accompanying conspiracy emerge together. Vaccine-induced autism believers saw early on “massive academic fraud and conspiracy to discredit Dr. Andrew Wakefield” by authorities who spread “provably false lies about his research.” (Wakefield’s discredited research began the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine scare.) Much the same is true of food-related conspiracies, such as those surrounding pasteurized milk and genetically modified organisms. A third situation arises when denialism is purposefully used in support of a conspiracy theory. This, of course, was the tactic pioneered by the tobacco companies but applied to climate change.15

Discrediting science outright, rather than co-opting it, is today’s prominent strategy. By subtly discrediting “scientism,” which suggests a gullible willingness to believe whatever orthodox science claims, conspiracists can use “alternative” scientific findings while at the same time disparaging the scientific establishment. This is where denialism most strongly intersects with conspiracism. The “conspiratorial element of denial,” as Stephan Lewandowsky puts it, “explains why contrarians often perceive themselves as heroic dissenters who—in their imagination—are following Galileo’s footsteps by opposing a mainstream scientific ‘elite’ that imposes its views . . . for political reasons.”16 For example, conspiracist Russell Blaylock, a neuroscientist, took exception to an article by the psychologist Sander van der Linden that had noted the troublesome societal implications of climate change denial. Blaylock complained: “This statement makes the declaration that the debate over climate change is finished and settled and no more discussions are needed. Despite the fact that the proposed solutions to climate change demand a virtual destruction of the free market and the private ownership of private property, this writer and the climate change scientists in general insist that we charge ahead.”17

The mistrust that much of the public came to direct at government spilled over to science, especially in areas where the two were intertwined, such as public health. Sometimes the spillover happens naturally. A public health nurse trying to stem the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014 was driven out of a village by residents who believed Ebola was part of an international conspiracy. “They thought nurses had been given poison by the president to inject into people,” the nurse reported, “so they’d die and the UN would send money.” More often, denialists help the mistrust spill over by stressing the politics of science. Denialists of HIV promote conspiracies involving Big Pharma, the government (including all its public health bodies), international organizations and foundations, scientists, and AIDS activists, all working to “kill healthy people with toxic drugs for a profit.”18

Carl Sagan observed that pseudoscience set forth ideas “often framed precisely so that they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof.” Then, scientists’ refusal to accept pseudoscience becomes evidence of “conspiracies to suppress it.” Science denialism works the same way.19 Accordingly, the denial of science comes up in a variety of conspiratorial settings. A “creation scientist” explains that everyone was satisfied with Bishop Ussher’s date for the creation of the earth (22 October 4004 BC) until “the rise of the scientific intelligencia [sic], and the woeful apostasy of modern times” created the “ridiculous THEORIES of the origin of the universe . . . used by Satan as a Trojan Horse for many other sins.” No less peculiar are those who deny fiction. A lengthy reply to an article about the Lucifer Project, a conspiracy theory in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, denied that the Lucifer Project was fictional at all, “given all the incredible suppressed findings of the Apollo program, as well as the large-scale alien presence in the solar system (as evidenced by the mind-blowing exposé of Bob Dean and others at the ’09 European Exopolitics Summit in Sitges, Barcelona, which I attended), I venture that about nothing is impossible. . . . Stanley Kubrick codified the very impressive, silenced knowledge in 2001, and the sequel 2010 is a worthy successor” (emphasis in the original).20

As a mainstay of the charge of “scientism,” conspiracists frequently target the political and economic forces that they say manipulate science behind the scenes. The most prominent area where this occurs continues to be climate change. Sincere environmentalists, conspiracists contend, “have become dwarfed by those with ulterior motives,” for whom environmentalism “has become a religion that worships at the altar of global socialism.” College students are “brainwashed with a green agenda, a ‘climate change’ hoax that no one is backing up with science.” Senator James Inhofe, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, claims that young schoolchildren are so inundated with the “green agenda” that “you have to un-brainwash them.”21

Cover-up Conspiracism

Many people come to hold beliefs that are offbeat or at least out of the mainstream. Ideas about occult phenomena, unknown creatures, miracle cures, prophecies, and any number of other topics are common but not inherently conspiratorial. Psychologists, however, have linked such beliefs with a tendency to conspiracism. A series of studies has found that poor reality testing is a characteristic of people who believe in the paranormal and among conspiracists. Not surprisingly, acceptance of pseudoscience and of superstition was found to correlate with conspiratorial thinking as well. Perhaps more surprisingly, anthropomorphism correlates with conspiracism. Apparently, anthropomorphism links back to hyper agenticity by searching for an “intelligence” of some kind behind the scenes of disturbing events. This is essentially what Karl Popper had in mind by writing off conspiracy theories as the “secularization of religious superstition.”22 These correlates may lead people to embrace conspiracism if their beliefs are refuted by the authorities and belittled by intellectuals or the media. Rather than undermining the beliefs, refutation is taken as an indication that the authorities have a reason to hide the truth—a cover-up of whatever conspiracy is afoot.23

The template for conspiracy theory through cover-up emerged from the UFO phenomenon of the 1950s. At the beginning of that decade, most Americans had heard the term “flying saucer” but few believed in them. J. Allen Hynek, a government consultant on UFOs, recalled, “I would have taken bets that by 1952, at the very latest, the whole mess would have been forgotten.”24 As early as 1947, the military had programs devoted to UFOs. Project Sign, Project Grudge, and finally the better-known Project Blue Book collected and analyzed information about UFO sightings for over twenty years. Over the same time, amateur UFO “investigators” were organizing into groups such as the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (1952) and the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (1956). Throughout this time, military authorities issued occasional reports designed to downplay UFO sightings. These reports were riddled with misinformation, since some of the “UFO” sightings were actually observations of secret, experimental aircraft. Moreover, the CIA muddied the water with misleading information to try to confuse the Russians.25 The government’s explanations of UFO sightings (e.g., clouds, planets, swamp gas, ball lightning) were rejected and even ridiculed. The first thorough assessment of Project Blue Book described the cover-up: “While the United States Air Force was offering the public pat denials that UFOs were ‘serious business,’ it was conducting intensive, highly secret inquiry into all UFO reports. These inquiries were being carried out by responsible Air Force personnel and respected civilian scientists. When their conclusions did not support the official position, the findings were suppressed.”26

Looking back at this period, UFO conspiracist John Keel noted that “the whole subject had, in fact, been totally misrepresented by both the untrained and uninformed UFO advocates and the various governmental agencies that had been sucked unwillingly into the fray.” Most ufologists were not as forgiving of the authorities and placed the blame for misrepresentation squarely on those “governmental agencies.” Charges of cover-up increased and were joined by countercharges of fraud when, in the late 1960s, alien encounters emerged as the natural extension of UFO sightings. The first alien abduction story, recounted in 1966, established the pattern and created the now universal image of the Zeta Reticulan (more commonly known as the “Grey”) alien: small and naked with a large head and huge eyes.27

The cover-up conspiracy-building process amounts to a backward, tautological syllogism. Beginning with the belief that UFOs are truly extraterrestrial, the authorities’ rejection of that belief automatically constitutes a cover-up of the truth. As part of this cover-up, the authorities must offer some non-truth (the “official position”) in place of the truth. This merely strengthens the conspiracist’s belief in the first “real truth” (UFOs are extraterrestrial) and adds to it a second, conspiratorial real truth (the government knows the first real truth and is lying about it). This is the case whether one believes that the aliens piloting the UFOs are peace loving or warlike, benevolent or given to cattle mutilation, greys or angels—and thus conspiracies tend to multiply. By the late 1960s, one conspiracy was based on evidence of visits by aliens that the Air Force was suppressing, while another held that this “evidence” was part of a CIA plot to fool the Air Force.28 Speculation proliferated. Was the cover-up “forced upon” the government by the aliens? Were UFO research organizations being “infiltrated and controlled” by the “secret government?” Perhaps everything about UFOs was a hoax, intended to distract the public from the true conspiracy being perpetrated by the occult forces of the Illuminati.29

The shift from simple cover-up to more complex UFO conspiracies was helped along by the passage of the Freedom of Information Act of 1975. Ufologists became prominent users of the act, which afforded the right to request for information, suddenly making hundreds of pages of documents available. Brad Steiger’s 1976 bestseller Project Blue Book is essentially just four hundred pages of documents—some rewritten, but others merely photocopied. Steiger does not even credit himself as being the author of his book, only the editor. Steiger’s work still depicts a basic cover-up conspiracy, but more serious conspiracies started to take hold. Stanton Friedman began building his conspiracy of the government working with aliens in 1978, an idea vaguely supported by the first book on the 1947 Roswell “flying saucer crash.” In this context, more important than the details of Roswell was the uncovering of the government’s “secret MJ-12 team,” also known as Majestic 12 or MAJIC 12, or in one case MAJESTYTWELVE.30

By every account, MJ-12 is “a supersecret group of extremely important people” who may or may not exist, who know everything there is to know about the aliens. To some, they are behind the plan for a “world totalitarian socialist government . . . to be ruled by a behind-the-scenes council of wise men. A so-called benevolent dictator, will be presented as the Messiah.”31 Documents from MJ-12 became central to UFO conspiracies. Some saw the documents as real and as part of a CIA disinformation campaign, while others said that those who tried to cast doubt on the documents were part of a CIA disinformation campaign. Jim Keith saw both of those claims as part of the same CIA disinformation campaign, designed to make us think that UFOs are “extraterrestrial phenomena.” Everything about UFOs, aliens, and especially alien abductions is, according to Keith, manufactured by the CIA to distract the public from the agency’s mind-control experiments performed at the behest of the Illuminati. Psychopolitics conspiracist Martin Cannon has incorporated this view into his work, not, he stresses “as firmly-established historical fact, but as a working hypothesis and grounds for investigation.” Cannon cautions against being narrow-minded and wants “researchers” to “exhaust ALL terrestrial explanations before looking heavenward.”32

The controversy over CIA infiltration and disinformation has fractured the ufology community for years but is largely contained within it. Many of the specific issues that first arose with MJ-12, however, have been integrated into larger conspiracies, such as Keith’s. Foremost among these conspiracists was Milton William Cooper, whose 1991 Behold a Pale Horse connected every conspiratorial element of the day to UFOs and aliens. By the mid-nineties, Cooper came to agree with Keith about UFOs as disinformation. “For many years,” he wrote in 1997, “I sincerely believed that an extraterrestrial threat existed and that it was the most important driving force behind world events. I was wrong and for that I most deeply and humbly apologize.” Like Keith, Cooper came to believe in the Illuminati-led conspiracy, although he continued to toy with the idea that the original Illuminati had been aliens who established various cults across the ancient Middle East.33 But in Oscar Magocsi’s version of this conspiracy the Illuminati-aliens have a secret base of operations on the dark side of the moon. The “dark forces” from the region of Ursa Major are not powerful enough to conquer earth militarily and, so, they use their moon base for “subversion . . . by proxy, through the MIBs [i.e., men in black], the Illuminati, and other subordinates.” The base was discovered by NASA’s secret “Apollo 20” mission, the existence of which NASA denies.34

The most common large conspiracy centered on UFOs takes the view that aliens are real and that they have provided almost all of humanity’s technological breakthroughs. In this conspiracy theory, the government has not merely covered up the existence of aliens but has actively worked with them—even meeting face to face with their leaders and entering into “treaties” with them.35 The fundamental work here is Philip Corso’s The Day after Roswell, While Corso was not the first to argue for a human/alien cooperative arrangement, the fact that he claimed to have been a party to it made the argument his own. Many other conspiracists articulate versions of this idea. Tim Swartz connected it to the idea popularized in the 1960s by Erich von Däniken that mankind’s earliest gods were spacemen whose technology created ancient civilizations. The Anunnaki, Swartz’s designated spacemen from the planet Nibiru, may have literally created humanity: “The Anunnaki came to earth from Nibiru to mine for gold. The Anunnaki soon grew tired of the backbreaking labor. Ninharsag—the goddess in charge of medicine—combined the genes of the Anunnaki with a primitive ape-man . . . to relieve the Anunnaki of their labor. . . . Unlike its hairy ape-man ancestor, the hybrid had—according to the Atra Hasis text—‘the skin as the skin of a god.’ Man was created in the image of gods.”36 Some conspiracists were suspicious of Corso and his claims. Martin Davis concluded that Corso was a “provocateur whose ‘work’ is meant to disrupt serious inquiry into UFOs, . . . since the most likely impact of his outrageous claims will be reinforcement of the notion that ufology is strictly the province of lunatics and fools.” Corso’s campaign was painted as part of a right-wing conspiracy organized through the Shickshinny Knights of Malta.37

The technological breakthrough angle also managed to connect aliens with Nikola Tesla, a truly iconic figure in the tech conspiracy world. There are conspiracy theories about Tesla that are not connected with UFOs. Some describe him as a pawn in the battle between electricity entrepreneurs Edison and Westinghouse. Others suggest that he was able to tap into supernatural forces. Tesla technology has also been used to explain what really happened to the World Trade Center towers.38 But the most conspiratorial approaches to Tesla’s work involve extraterrestrial intelligence. The foremost voice here is William Lyne’s, whose Pentagon Aliens is typical in approaching its Tesla conspiracy from a libertarian perspective. The Pentagon in this conspiracy is merely the “enforcer” whose job is to contain the “one technology which more certainly than any other, has the capacity to drastically alter the Vested interests which sustain the elite . . . and even threatens to destroy it: electro-propulsive ‘flying saucer’ technology.” Lyne outlines several Tesla breakthroughs beyond flying saucer technology before moving on to his own Tesla-inspired inventions (sadly, all stolen, since “mentally retarded secretaries” employed by the patent office failed to notice “under-the-table dealings between the examiners and the large interests” the patent office actually serves).39

The narratives of UFO conspiracists go off in many other directions. The ultimate conspirators in Lyne’s rendition are a combination of the Illuminati, the Jesuits, and the Khazarian Jews. Norma Cox’s conspiracy is headed by Lucifer, working with or through the Illuminati. Stan Deyo’s mystical conspiracy is composed of equal parts Illuminati, Freemasonry, and the Jesuits. Brian Desborough’s Illuminati hail from Atlantis but now appear to be headquartered in the Far East. He points out, for example, that Japan and Russia shared Tesla technology-based weapons capable of “not only creating earthquakes at a distance, but also flash-freezing a city’s inhabitants.”40 The major contender facing the Illuminati for control over Tesla’s technology were the Nazis. In this conspiracy theory, Tesla’s electrogravitic technology (essentially antigravity) allowed the Nazis to colonize the moon and perhaps Mars by 1942. After Hitler’s bodyguard Otto Skorzeny assassinated Tesla in 1943, the Nazis had complete control over Tesla’s ideas. From there, postwar Nazis either bargained with the United States to exchange technology for a safe haven (leading back to Davis’s conspiracy about the right-wing Shickshinny Knights of Malta), or they used their electrogravitic craft to establish a base in the interior of the earth accessible by way of Antarctica (leading back to an earth-bound explanation for UFO sightings).41

Both denialism and cover-up conspiracies are defined by their opposition to what is generally believed and to the authorities who propagate those beliefs. This provides a key to understanding why some offbeat beliefs evolve into conspiracy theories: how strongly the “epistemic authorities” try to discredit the beliefs to maintain the official orthodoxy. Thus, belief in cryptids (hypothetical animals such as Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster) has not generated much scientific or governmental attention, and so there are no notable conspiracy theories about cryptids. A recent scholarly history of cryptids does not mention conspiracy in its index.42

Any official pronouncements or reports provide a target for conspiracists, and the information contained in them can generate additional questions, expanding the conspiracy. The investigations by the military and intelligence agencies turned flying saucers into fodder for an array of competing conspiracies. Reassurances from the U.S. Public Health Service helped shift opposition to water fluoridation from a crackpot health notion into a “Red conspiracy” and a plot to “weaken the Aryan race.”43 Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories were kick-started by the (admittedly inadequate) Warren Report. Congressional investigations revealing the absence of any POW/MIAs served mainly to entrench conspiracist beliefs to the contrary. Official statements by psychological organizations against the “recovered memory” craze were cast as part of a CIA disinformation campaign on behalf of the Illuminati. And NASA’s efforts to prove that it truly had sent men to the moon have done nothing to thwart even the most bizarre conspiracy theories.44

Negative attention by the authorities is so vital to the success of a conspiracy theory that conspiracy advocates will pretend to have found it. Stan Gordon simply claims, without any specific accusations, that the government is trying to suppress the fact that Bigfoot is actually a space alien.45 Even absolute inattention can be turned around, as by Marshall Masters, proponent of the Planet-X-as-manifestation-of-the-Mayan-prophesy-of-the-end-of-the-world-in-2012 scenario. According to Masters, the fact that mainstream media and NASA have “avoided acknowledging” Planet X should be worrying. A comment on Masters’s website asks: “Why are they scared to give us the truth?!” Masters asks back rhetorically: “Why is the government quiet? Look up cognitive dissonance and put yourself in their shoes. People are denying and deflecting this threat with angry statements and acts. If they go public now, they’ll get swamped by it. That is why they’re waiting for something I call the britches event. When the weight of poop in the britches reaches critical mass, it pulls the ears open and shuts the mouth. Who are the stupids here?”46 Hard to say. Nevertheless, since they had no actual official attention with which to work, neither Masters nor Gordon was successful in that neither the Bigfoot-as-alien nor the Planet X conspiracy seems to have attracted many adherents.