I do love a good conspiracy theory. They are entertaining little pieces of fiction, which in most cases can never be proven or disproven, making them endlessly fascinating. We live in a pretty amazing world where often times truth is stranger than fiction, but at the same time the truth can be mundane. As I've gotten older when I hear the sound of hooves I think horses rather than zebras. That's not to say that I've given up on my ability to over think wildly exaggerated ideas about various topics. Occam's razor tends to suggest that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, which is just a nice way of saying keep it simple, stupid. With that said which is more likely, in 1969 a government agency successfully launched three humans 225,000 miles to the Moon in a vehicle that cost over 24 billion dollars and was only used for six missions over the course of three years or the entire event was faked on a sound stage and the billions of dollars reported were actually spent on other things entirely? Maybe it's more fun not knowing the "truth"
As humans we're storytellers. It's just part of who we are. In 1947 something crashed in the New Mexico desert and I'm betting that someone saw something they didn't understand so rather than simply admitting that it was likely man-made, they instead believed it was alien in origin. I would imagine in 1947 Roswell coming across the debris of a high-altitude surveillance balloon with anthropomorphic test dummies would seem pretty other-worldly. One guy tells another guy and the story grows from there. It must have been like the game telephone with a big fish story at its center. When man was first sailing the oceans there were stories of mermaids and leviathans. These must have been based on something someone saw and due to whatever circumstances they were gradually exaggerated. Even nautical maps had notations "Here Be Monsters". We have essentially replaced our sea monsters with space monsters. Maybe in another thousand years space monsters will have been replaced by dimensional monsters. Really whatever we don't fully understand becomes a tall tale.
When I was in college I knew someone who really believed in the idea that Area 51 was home to alien spaceships and recovered bodies. He had in his possession pictures of Groom Lake taken about 25 miles from the base, just before the government bought up the surrounding land. At the time it was interesting to see this fabled secret location. Of course the pictures were somewhat blurry being taken with a telephoto lens on top of a ridge. All you could see were a few dozen buildings and a runway, but that was enough for us to imagine what could have been going on there. We would scan the picture, looking for Hangar 18, where we knew the evidence of extra-terrestrial life was hidden away.
The thing about Area 51 is that if I know about it then it must not be a secret. I think of it as classic misdirection. In this case Area 51 is the beautiful girl in the magic act. You're looking at her while the secret to the trick is being done just out of view. I'm sure at some point the Groom Lake area was used as an actual secret facility, but the secrets there aren't that mysterious. They were developing top secret planes. The U-2, SR-71, and even F117 were developed there or places like it. By the time the public found out about the SR-71 Blackbird it was already being scheduled for retirement, after being in service for nearly a decade. The first flight of the F-117 Nighthawk was in 1981, but the Air Force didn't acknowledge its existence until 1988. You can't do something like that if everyone knows you're building it. So it's better to just let people say it's a UFO. And technically speaking at the time it was just another unidentified flying object, but just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean someone somewhere else is also as clueless about its origins. I'm guessing if there are secrets being kept, be it alien or otherwise, they're not being kept at a place as publicly known as Area 51. It's more likely that some random, seemingly abandoned location in the middle of nowhere is the new home for super top secret projects.
Another person I knew in college was a major conspiracy theorist. Some of the stuff he believed makes me think that he's locked away in some bunker right now, living off the grid. He told me that the moon landing wasn't faked, we actually landed there just fine. What we found there was never revealed to the public though. Just on the horizon there were multiple alien crafts. A message was sent telling us that we shouldn't return. He believed that was one of the reasons why NASA had stopped live broadcasts of lunar landings. Aliens were real reason why we stopped going to the moon in 1972. It had nothing to do with the crippling cost of launching people into space. According to him the military knew about alien spacecrafts for awhile. In fact they had even come up with protocol in the event that someone saw something that couldn't be explained. The codeword was "Santa Claus". This way if someone saw something they could they just saw Santa Claus off their port side. Anyone not in the know would chuckle, but in secret there would be a mad scramble to find out where this alien craft originated from. He had found this information through research of various sources, some of which he allowed me to read. He told me that by reading these books, which were published on a limited basis, my world view would forever be changed. Then one day I never saw him again. He still has my copy of Office '97. A conspiracy theorist could think that he was silenced, but more likely he dropped out of school like about 85% of the other students who started the same year as I did.
There is always the argument how come someone like him would know this information? If aliens did exist why do they always buzz by Farmer Bob's field and not land in Manhattan? How come the guy with the super secret knowledge is someone who seems to be a couple tacos short of a combination plate? Maybe it's because those Illuminati guys know that no one would believe him when he starts spouting off about reptile people infiltrating the highest levels of the government. Or it's more likely that the poor bastard is bordering on delusional because in addition to alien cover-ups, they believed they were the reincarnation of Napoleon.
Now I'm not saying that there aren't secrets being kept from us. Some are for our protection and some are kept from us simply because they're dirty and we wouldn't like it very much if we heard about them. There are things that the common civilian doesn't need to know, even if we feel it's our right. Tell you what, how about the government reveal their secrets after you reveal your darkest secrets to the world. There is this sense of entitlement by some. They believe that everything should be revealed to them regardless of the circumstances. It doesn't make a lot of sense to share certain things because we're not the only ones who watch CNN. There are some very bad people out there who are constantly looking for an edge to use against us. So maybe it's better that I don't know if the CIA is secretly assassinating troublemakers in various parts of the world.
Now there are some situations where the official story just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's times like that where due to a poorly constructed explanation people attempt to fill in the gaps with whatever they can. Example: I think that there was more to the Kennedy Assassination than what was revealed in the Warren Commission's report, but I have a feeling the real explanation is probably nowhere near as interesting as the theories that have been floating around for the last fifty years. Did Oswald act alone? Was he a patsy? Were their rogue elements in our own government that wanted to essentially pull off a coup de tat? Who knows? What I do know is that the President was riding in an open-top car in the middle of Dallas and was considered by many to be contrary to the status quo. It didn't help that the last successful Presidential assassination was in 1901 and the last reported attempt on a President's life was over ten years before Kennedy was killed. In the end it really doesn't matter what happened because in the almost half century since that event there have been so many other things that take priority.
I think in some ways a conspiracy theory is also meant as a comforting device. In a strange way it's better to think that there is some secret series of events, which are controlled by someone. It's either that or the world really is chaotic and no one knows what could happen next. Which is more scary to think about? Is it easier to think that 9/11 was something the government knew about and even promoted in order to push their war on terror or that nineteen guys managed to slip through shoddy security and slam planes into buildings because no one had considered that idea to be one to worry about? It's a popular theory because something like the PATRIOT Act wouldn't have a chance of passing on September 10th, 2001, but on September 12th the door was open to what many believed was a serious breach of civil liberties. At the time there was a phone call from Flight 93 that indicated the flight had been hijacked, this information coming after the world knew America was under attack. This plane was the only one to not reach its target, instead it crashed in an empty field, only a few miles short of hitting a populated area. I remember at the time, before the details got out about what happened, there was a thought that the plane had been forced down by the Air Force. By then the military had to be aware of the situation and the possible target being the White House. Rather than allow the flight to continue, they shot it down over an unpopulated area to minimize casualties. The thing is no one wants to hear about that. We know it's the right thing to do, but it's not something we want to know about. I know there are some people today who still question what really happened because they can't accept the official story.
In the years since 2001 there hasn't been another successful terrorist attack on American soil. Now that could be because everyone is hyper aware of the world around them or because the threat wasn't as great as we were lead to believe. I have a feeling it's probably somewhere closer to the middle of those two ideas. Every so often we'll hear a report of how a potential attack was stopped. The suspect had a bomb in his shoe or they were carrying binary liquid explosives. Whatever it was, it was stopped. Then on the other side you hear about the fundamental failings of security that's in place. One might wonder how is it that there can be such gross negligence and yet we haven't suffered the consequences since the September attacks? So maybe the story that it was all just an elaborate plan to get us to go to war is horrifying, but less scary than the idea that at any moment it could happen again.
Did Paul McCartney die in a car crash in 1966, only to be replaced by a lookalike? Did the USS Eldridge vanish into another dimension when the military attempted to render it invisible? Was the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean actually caused by a nuclear experiment by the Indian government? Is there a secret society that's quietly controlling the world for their own gain? Or is it that when more than two people attempt to share a secret it inevitably gets out, meaning that it's next to impossible for all these secrets to stay secret for very long? Maybe the conspiracy is to make sure that there are always conspiracy theories out there to distract us from the truth, whatever that may be.
