Conspiracies Declassified
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The Truth
There is no such thing as reptilian beings wearing electronic disguises and replacing world leaders.
The Backstory
Today’s believers in the reptoids can pause video to see the evidence they seek, but that wasn’t always the case. This conspiracy theory is an old one, and while only the video version of the theory shows up today, the story’s origins stretch back to the early days of the American West.
Back in 1934, a mining engineer named G. Warren Shufelt was searching for gold in southern California. Using a device he called a radio X-ray, he discovered a series of tunnels underneath the city of Los Angeles. By taking readings all over the city, he eventually put together a detailed map. It was a complex labyrinth, many rooms connected by tunnels, some wet and some dry. Shufelt’s device detected the presence of large quantities of gold scattered along the tunnels and stacked in some of the rooms. It was a treasure beyond accounting.
Seeking investors to fund the mining that would be needed to reach the treasure, Shufelt went to the newspapers. The Los Angeles Times published an account of his findings along with a reproduction of his map, and investors stepped forward to fund enough of Shufelt’s project to bore a shaft down to 250 feet. Unfortunately, it promptly filled with water. The mine was never able to get ahead of the water problem, and Shufelt’s dream of extracting gold from beneath Los Angeles soon ended.
Bolstering Shufelt’s story of buried gold was the testimony of a man named L. Macklin, who went by the name Little Chief Greenleaf and identified as a Native American from the Hopi tribe. Macklin corroborated Shufelt’s claimed caverns with what he said was an old Hopi legend of an underground city built some 5,000 years ago by a race known as the Lizard People.
Macklin’s testimony catapulted the story of the underground Lizard People into popular culture—and the community of people who believed the tale was just getting started. A growing community also believes that Lizard People live in caverns inside Mount Shasta, a peak in California. Mount Shasta is frequently referenced in New Age mythology, and in addition to Lizard People, some New Age practitioners believe it’s also populated by an ancient race called the Lemurians. Creatures such as Bigfoot and small dwarflike beings called Guardians are also believed to live inside Mount Shasta, in a grand multilevel city called Telos.
Based on little more than these mythological foundations—the Hopi legend and the ancient Lemurians—belief in a race of reptoid beings is actually not all that rare. Today, the leading proponent of the reptoids is David Icke, a British conspiracy theorist best known for his book The Biggest Secret, in which he laid out his “discoveries” about many world leaders being reptoids in electronic disguises. (Icke has also argued that the Moon is a hologram projected from Saturn.) For many theorists—bolstered by the legitimacy of an ancient Hopi legend—the video evidence of glitchy electronic disguises constitutes a solid case that many world leaders are actually reptilian beings.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
According to conspiracy theorist David Icke, and the many who follow his beliefs, the reptoids are not necessarily enemies of the human race. A separate conspiracy theory concerns an alleged secret base outside Dulce, New Mexico, where there is a deep, multilevel city that houses as many as 18,000 gray aliens, who are there as a result of some sort of deal with the US government. Here the aliens perform experiments on human subjects. Icke and his followers believe the reptoids are actually the sworn enemies of the grays. However, the claims about who is allied with whom don’t really seem to be all that consistent.
The Explanation
In recent years, there has been less repetition of the conspiracy theorists’ claims when it comes to the video evidence of the reptoids. The reason for this decline is likely the advent of high-definition video. Today when we pause a video, there is much less compression artifacting. In fact, most of the time you can’t see any at all. But when David Icke first began promoting this idea, pausing video meant pausing a VHS tape. If you remember seeing this, you’ll recall that, when paused, the picture would jitter and flash and sometimes flicker between two frames, and that every edge was shattered into interlacing lines. It was easy in those days to pause a video and see just about anything you wanted to see. And in the early days of YouTube with low-resolution, highly compressed videos, the situation was only marginally better.
Now let’s talk about the foundations of the reptoid legend. First, let’s make it clear that there was never anything to G. Warren Shufelt’s alleged city underneath Los Angeles. He showed his “radio X-ray” device to a Los Angeles Times reporter, and it had nothing to do with either radio or X-rays. It was a dowsing pendulum, the same trinket used in “water witching,” where a practitioner swings a small pendulum, believing that its movements guide the way toward water or some other valuable discovery. Shufelt’s dowsing pendulum was suspended from a tripod with an elaborate (and hollow) glass and metal case he’d constructed. It actually had no capabilities of any kind. Shufelt’s claim that he took detailed photographs of the caverns with it strains credibility.
The other problem is that the interpretation of the Hopi legends that emerged was deeply flawed. No known Hopi legend ever referred to people who were half lizard. Searching through modern volumes of collected Hopi legends, one finds numerous references to clans who took their names from animals: the spider clan, the bear clan, the lizard clan. But these were not to be interpreted as half-human hybrid creatures. In addition, nothing in the Hopi literature references underground cities, gold, or anything else in the tales told by Macklin to Shufelt.
Why? Well, it’s unlikely Macklin had any actual knowledge of Hopi legends. Hopi birth and death records are available online through the website of the Navajo Nation, and no person with the names of Macklin or Greenleaf (or any reasonable variation of these names) was recorded during the period when these men lived. Given common practices in the mining days, the persona of Little Chief Greenleaf was almost certainly an invention intended to excite potential investors with promising tales of buried gold.
But what not even Shufelt could have foreseen was the unusually long legs his story would prove to have, and the extraordinary nature of its eventual mutations—no matter how far out they all are.
PART 2
Government Oppression
Do you wish you were wealthier? Healthier? More successful? Whose fault is it? The oppressive government’s, of course. The government overtaxes you to keep you at the poverty level. The government keeps you sick by providing inadequate healthcare, covering up miracle treatments, and perhaps even spreading germ agents. The government suppresses technologies and discoveries that could help you. It’s all done in the name of power.
Notice how much fiction has been written about the concept of an overreaching government: Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Atlas Shrugged, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Hunger Games . . . These books and other fiction found online feature governments that have grown so powerful that they control people’s everyday lives. It is a theme that is deeply attractive to us at a gut level. Why? Well, this fiction satisfies our idea of something called agency detection, the evolved trait that favors a certain amount of natural paranoia to help protect us from threats. Overgrown government control is the ultimate validation of our native paranoia.
What does all of this mean? It means it’s natural for all of us to believe that the powers that be have a hidden agenda to persecute us . . . but conspiracy theorists take this idea and run with it. They assign the ideas undue importance and alter their lives to avoid these perceived threats, which gives us some interesting theories about the various ways the government is supposedly out to get us. Let’s take a look and debunk some of these extreme theories.
Vaccines
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Date: 1809–Present
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments
The Victims: Innocent civilians
* * *
The
Theory
Today, vaccine conspiracy theories are everywhere and could easily make up an entire book of their own. Most take the general form of governments secretly knowing that vaccines do more harm than good, but forcing vaccines onto the public anyway to give the government more power. Other theories promote the Big Pharma version of this, which puts forth the idea that Big Pharma makes huge profits from vaccines by having the government force people to buy them. Some also push a connection between vaccines and autism, claiming that the government conspires with Big Pharma to force vaccinations in order to give as many people autism as possible, in order to then profit from people seeking autism treatments.
The Truth
Vaccines are the single most important and successful public health initiative. They are responsible for saving more lives than any other medical intervention in history.
The Backstory
By 1800, smallpox was responsible for about half a million deaths annually, but scientists knew that inoculating a person with material from a cowpox lesion could cut the chances of contracting smallpox by about 95 percent. This has been widely recognized as the first major medical advance in history.
It was so effective that in 1809 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts enacted the first compulsory vaccination law that required all citizens to receive the smallpox vaccine. Opposition—and conspiracy theories—took hold right from the start. Many felt that it was a forced intrusion of government into people’s private lives—which, of course, it is. Mistrustful and ignorant of the science, some people concluded that there must be an unknown dark purpose behind the government’s forced medication initiative, and vocal opposition was mounted. Although embattled, the law stood, and other localities also began mandatory vaccinations.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
In 1905, nearly a century after the Massachusetts law went into effect, the United States Supreme Court declared that public health justified compulsory vaccination. This decision remains the primary ruling on the subject even today.
Throughout the twentieth century, schools began requiring vaccinations before students would be allowed to attend. Because children are the most vulnerable to disease, and schools are where children are most likely to infect one another, this policy is actually one of the most important public health initiatives on the books.
Skeptoid ® Says . . .
The early American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin deferred the smallpox inoculation for his son Francis because the boy was sickly, so Franklin feared he might be too weak to tolerate the vaccine. It was a decision Franklin soon regretted. In his autobiography, he wrote:
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and therefore that the safer should be chosen.
Unfortunately, toward the end of the twentieth century when the worst diseases were all but eradicated, an amazing new phenomenon occurred: parents began seeking exemptions from compulsory vaccinations for their children, usually citing religious or ideological reasons. Ever since, the rates of some vaccine-preventable diseases such as whooping cough have been growing steadily. It’s as if parents have been saying, “We know it’s been proven that this vaccine will save lives, but we want our child excluded, which will put them at risk as well as other children around them.”
Why? Conspiratorial thinking.
The Explanation
According to UNICEF, vaccines save about nine million lives per year. They work, and they work amazingly well. They also do not cause harm—at least not to 99 percent of people who receive them. (For most vaccines, about 1 percent have some adverse reaction. Serious reactions, depending on the vaccine, range from about 1 in 100,000 to 1 in 1,000,000. Pretty darn safe.) And, the smallpox vaccine alone has been saving lives since the 1700s, probably totaling close to one billion lives. Vaccination is science’s greatest achievement in the fight against disease. No other public health measure comes close.
Should vaccines be discarded because they are a Big Pharma conspiracy? Well, to analyze this claim, let’s be clear about one thing. Pharmaceutical companies who manufacture vaccines do get paid for it. But not nearly as much as you might think. It turns out that vaccines are among the least profitable products that pharmaceutical companies make. Prices are often capped by the public agencies that buy most of them. Most vaccines go to developing nations, where money is scarce and it’s hard to cover costs. Financial incentives to manufacture vaccines became so low that companies started dropping out of the business entirely, in favor of selling more profitable drugs instead. In 1967 there were twenty-six pharmaceutical companies manufacturing vaccines; that number dropped to about half by the 1980s.
Today the number is rising again as more manufacturers get back into the business, driven by major public health initiatives to sell hundreds of millions of annual doses in poor countries, as well as newer vaccines such as hepatitis B and HPV that can be sold at a profit in wealthier countries. In 2014 Merck sold $1.7 billion in HPV vaccines, while the entire rest of their vaccine product line treating measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox brought in only $1.4 billion.
However, the short answer to the Big Pharma version of the vaccine conspiracy theory: at only about 2.5 percent of the global pharmaceutical market, vaccines are hardly the place where Big Pharma makes its money. So if Big Pharma were going to pay off the government to conspire to make their product required for all citizens, wouldn’t they be likely to choose a more profitable one?
And what about the conspiracy theory that vaccines—particularly the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine—cause autism? Is it true that autism is more common now than it used to be? No. Or, more accurately, there is no evidence of that. It is true that far more cases are being diagnosed today than used to be. There are two reasons for this. First is that the definition of autism spectrum disorders keeps getting broadened as we recognize more and more cases to be connected. Second is that the stigma of being autistic is going away, and parents are more likely to allow their children to be tested and diagnosed than they used to be. So while we do indeed have more diagnoses being reported, there is no reason to suspect that the actual prevalence of autism is higher today than ever before.
In response, science advocates have pointed out that the rise of autism more closely correlates with the rising popularity of organic food; shown on a graph, the lines match up astonishingly well. Although this is obviously a joke directed at the fact that the people who reject vaccine science are often the same people who reject food science, it is a perfectly serious lesson in the dangers of confusing correlation with causation. We can say that these trends correlate with the rise in autism diagnoses, but it’s clearly incorrect to say that they cause autism.
Each iteration of the vaccine conspiracy theory falls apart on its own under the slightest scrutiny. They simply make no sense. Vaccinate yourself, and vaccinate your children to keep them (and their schoolmates) healthy.
Water Fluoridation
* * *
Date: 1931–Present
Location: Worldwide
The Conspirators: Governments and municipal water suppliers
The Victims: Innocent civilians
* * *
The Theory
Claims that the government adds fluoride to our water to harm us are everywhere you look. Some say fluoride is a dangerous neurotoxin and the government wants to give us all brain damage so we can be easily controlled. Some say fluoride is a poison and the government wants to kill us as part of some mass eugenics or population control scheme. Others believe the government just wants to make us generally sick so that we will have to purchase more pharmaceutical drugs. About the only thing they agree on is their belie
f that the government’s official story about adding fluoride to prevent tooth decay is just a cover-up. As final evidence that fluoridation is a nefarious project of the US government, activists point out that many European nations choose not to fluoridate their water at all.
The Truth
Fluoride is added to America’s drinking water supplies at a rate of 0.7 parts per million (ppm), which is high enough to reduce tooth decay, and low enough to avoid tooth discoloration. The government wants to harm cavity-causing dental plaque, not you.
The Backstory
The idea that fluoridation is an evil government plot received its most public exposure in the 1964 movie Dr. Strangelove, in which the antagonist, General Ripper, says:
Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous Communist plot we have ever had to face? . . . Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? . . . It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hardcore commie works.
But the actual genesis of fluoridation has a much more down-to-earth cause. In 1901 a Colorado dentist named Dr. Frederick McKay noted that a lot of his patients seemed to have brownish teeth, and that those patients had better dental health than those with white teeth—with only about a third as many cavities! He called it Colorado Brown Stain. Dr. McKay subsequently spent thirty years collecting data on tooth discoloration and tooth decay. He even visited parts of Texas where brown teeth were so common that they were simply called Texas Teeth. The data were clear: the browner the teeth, the less likely they were to decay.