Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  Steorn did challenge an actual independent jury to test its device in 2007, but in 2009 the jury came back and announced that the production of energy had not been demonstrated. It soon became clear that the Orbo was simply one more attempt at a magnetic motor.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  In 2009–2010 Steorn put their free energy device on display in Dublin, Ireland, where it was powered by a battery—which didn’t really impress anyone. They brazenly claimed that it was charging the battery rather than running off of it—which didn’t really fool anyone. The company closed and went out of business in 2016.

  The free energy community today is tightly wrapped up with the conspiracy theory community, and interestingly, with the UFO community as well—both communities sharing a belief that governments are keeping enormous secrets from the people. For a long time, UFO proponent Steven M. Greer has promoted what he calls the Disclosure Project, whereby he expects to compel governments to disclose all sorts of secret information about UFOs that he believes they are withholding. Increasingly he promotes free-energy technologies as well, and also calls on governments to disclose the devices he believes they are suppressing.

  The Explanation

  The fundamental reason that free energy machines can never work is hinted at in their name. They produce something from nothing. The way the universe works is defined by physical laws—and those laws don’t work that way.

  The first law of thermodynamics says that the energy level of any closed system remains constant. If we take energy out of it to do some work—for example, spinning a rotor—then we must put an equivalent amount of energy back in. (In point of fact, we must put more energy back in, because the act of doing these things would have consumed some energy as well.)

  The second law of thermodynamics says that systems seek thermal equilibrium. Basically, heat energy will never flow on its own from a region of lower temperature to a region of higher temperature. If some of that heat energy is converted to work (spinning that rotor again, or some other job), energy from some other part of the system must flow to it as the system seeks equilibrium. You cannot extract work and still have the same amount of energy left. No way, no how, can any perpetual motion device (or any other “over-unity” claim) ever be possible. Physics is physics, and whether your device is an overbalanced wheel or the most precise magnetic motor yet derived, it can never work.

  Of course, any company that could design and patent a functional free-energy machine would become fantastically wealthy, which is the basic logical reason that the conspiratorial claim of suppression is nonsensical. Why would anyone keep something that would make them rich under wraps?

  Another reason that suppression can be trivially dismissed is that there does not appear to be any sort of suppression campaign in place. One need only glance at the Internet, especially YouTube, to see that free-energy devices are widely and freely discussed. They are most obviously not suppressed.

  Zero-point energy—on which so many of these claims depend—is a real term, but it does not refer to a source of energy. It’s a term in physics that refers to the minimum possible energy state of a system. Such a system is said to be at its ground state. Logically, energy could never be drawn from such a system, because it is already at its minimum. The example most often cited is so-called vacuum energy, which refers to the ground state of a pure vacuum, such as in outer space. The ground state of a pure vacuum is non-zero, because of quantum fluctuations—constant, minute changes in energy levels which are part of the universe’s basic nature. That energy, which is vanishingly small, cannot ever be extracted, because doing so would leave the vacuum with an energy level that is less than its ground state, which is an impossibility. Yet, nonexperts will sometimes look at the words used and misconstrue that they mean a source of energy. You can’t take speed away from a stopped car, and you can’t take energy away from a system that is at its physical minimum.

  Unless the fundamental laws of the universe are proven to be dramatically wrong, which seems unlikely, it’s equally unlikely that we’ll need to worry about governments suppressing perpetual motion machines.

  The Big Pharma Conspiracy

  * * *

  Date: Era of modern medicine

  Location: Worldwide

  The Conspirators: Pharmaceutical companies

  The Victims: People suffering from disease

  * * *

  The Theory

  Half a billion people worldwide regularly take prescription medication, supporting a trillion-dollar industry. That’s a lot of commerce—commerce that its beneficiaries might well like to protect. The conspiracy theory here is that those pharmaceutical companies could easily cure almost any disease with some simple natural cure, especially cancer. However, they choose to suppress these simple treatments because curing people would convert them from paying customers into noncustomers. Instead, the companies choose to offer only semi-effective drugs that they can patent and sell at the highest possible profit margin, and they keep the simple “real drugs” suppressed and off the market.

  The Truth

  There is no simple, magical cure for all cancers or all other diseases, and no rational reason to suspect one exists or would ever be suppressed. Treating all the thousands of diseases in the world is a complicated task and only variously effective, and something that we’re always trying to improve.

  The Backstory

  Distrust of the pharmaceutical industry is very popular throughout all levels of society in many developed nations. This seems counterintuitive; if the most advanced nations are the ones doing the most advanced drug development, why would people in those same nations be distrustful of their own efforts?

  The answer has to do with what was happening culturally when this particular conspiracy theory took root. Before the 1960s, the pharmaceutical industry was one in which many people took great pride. We saw dramatic successes like the polio vaccine and penicillin. But then, even as our medical technology advanced further, people began to view it with derision and suspicion. What changed?

  It was largely the rise of the New Age and hippie movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the United States that shifted public attention away from pride in technical achievements and toward the spiritual, the natural, and the metaphysical. Sociologists call this the Western esotericism movement. The embrace of traditional natural healing and the rejection of science-based medical treatment were key to this movement. It was epitomized with the explosive interest in traditional Chinese medicine beginning in the early 1970s, and it continues today with anti-vaccination sentiment and naturalistic food fads like organic produce, trends that seek to vilify what we’ve learned through science. The time line of the rise of holistic medical treatments matches perfectly with the rise of the Big Pharma conspiracy theory, for reasons which seem clear, given the cultural context.

  By now, this basic set of ideologies has become pretty solidly entrenched in Western culture. Thus, we can expect there will always be a native tendency among many to seek fault with science-based medicine in general, and with the pharmaceutical industry specifically. Given this climate, it was virtually inevitable that many adherents to these philosophies would be receptive to the idea of some remarkable all-natural herbal treatment, untainted by science, that would prove miraculously effective, while simultaneously proving that the pharmaceutical companies were corruptly suppressing it.

  The Explanation

  There is an obvious aspect to this conspiracy theory that makes it fundamentally illogical: it accuses Big Pharma of acting in a purely profit-motivated way, by doing something terribly unprofitable. If any pharmaceutical company could invent a single cure for all disease, it would be the most successful and profitable product in history. It would be disastrous from a business perspective for any company to suppress such a product, as doing so would risk having a multinational competitor launch it tomorrow, thus crushing them out of existence.

  It is a fact that intense public demand for
new medical treatments drives all segments of the pharmaceutical industry—from the huge international public companies to the independent, unregulated supplement maker—to innovate and release the best products. That all the world’s competitors would agree to not release the Holy Grail of medicines, without a single opportunistic whistle-blower speaking up, doesn’t make any sense.

  The first thing that should tip you off that this conspiracy is improbable is that pharmaceutical executives and their families die of the same diseases everyone else does. If these executives truly had a secret vault with The Ultimate Cure to Everything inside, wouldn’t they use it for themselves and their loved ones at least? Yet they don’t appear to do any such thing.

  The idea that a cure for cancer is suppressed is also trivially disproven, as there are, in fact, many cures for cancer on the market. Cancer is not a single disease, but many hundreds of different diseases with different causes and different treatments. There could never be one single cure for all cancers any more than there could be one single fix for all possible automobile mechanical problems, so this idea that there is a single wonder drug in some pharmaceutical company’s vault is simply fiction.

  There are many cancers that we have cured. When we catch them early enough, we have very successful treatments for breast cancer, most skin cancers, testicular cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and some types of leukemia. Any of these is fatal if left untreated, and yet the supposedly suppressed cures for them are widely available from Big Pharma and widely used.

  Unfortunately, there are also many cancers for which we have not made much progress, but many more for which we have made some amount of progress and we can slow or stop their spread. Taken as a whole, the history of cancer treatment over the past seventy-five years is one of the great success stories in the history of medicine. The claim that treatments are suppressed is blatantly at variance with easily observable facts.

  Now, it is true that pharmaceutical companies prefer to sell patentable drugs for which they can own a monopoly for a time to recover development costs. However, this is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry; it is standard practice in every manufacturing industry. The need to be profitable is a foundational principle of all business. That its use in the pharmaceutical industry constitutes a conspiracy is a bizarre concept that could only be held by someone with a dismal naiveté of economic fundamentals.

  Further, the belief that natural cures are more effective, but are suppressed because they cannot be patented, is both true and false. It’s true that effective cures often come from nature, but false that they are not patentable and are thus suppressed. In fact, the study of molecules originally found in nature is a huge part of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies maintain research stations throughout the world, with researchers focusing on the most diverse possible set of compounds. The basic process is to take some plant or animal extract that researchers hope might be useful, and go through an exhaustive iterative process of testing its effect against various disease agents. When something useful is found, it is studied further. Then if it proves to be a useful treatment, it’s generally synthesized if possible in order to bring production costs down and to maintain stricter control over quality, purity, and dosage. There are many drugs on the market that cannot be synthesized and where the natural compound itself goes through this process of purification and dose control. But at some level, virtually every drug on the market today traces its lineage to a natural compound.

  While it’s relatively harmless to society for a person to decide to avoid pharmaceutical drugs for themselves, it obviously poses a problem when people who are genuinely sick and need these treatments hear about the conspiracy theory and avoid going to the doctor as a result. When belief in the conspiracy theory is promoted—as we see happening with prominent Hollywood “shockumentary” films promoting natural cures and Big Pharma conspiracy-mongering—sick people suffer. It is far from a harmless conspiracy theory, but given that its roots are both deep and ideological, it is a sad probability that it will remain popular for generations to come.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  So who makes up “Big Pharma”? You’ll recognize some familiar names at the top of the heap, like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer, Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and more!

  PART 6

  Space Conspiracy Theories

  Yes, NASA is real. But since much of its work is conducted in high-security laboratories and communication centers—and in outer space—NASA is a magnet for conspiratorial claims about UFOs, the Moon landing, and more. If you think about it, NASA is uniquely positioned to be able to pull off just about any nefarious task they want, in complete secrecy—and their reputation as a scientific agency means people will usually believe whatever they say.

  For their part, of course, NASA denies secret UFO knowledge and fake Moon landings. Their job is to explore space, they say, not investigate hundreds of UFO reports. Sure, that might be true, but it also fits nicely into what the conspiracy theorists believe NASA would claim anyway. NASA can’t win. Tell the truth, and it’s regarded as a lie that confirms the conspiracy.

  Let’s take a look at what conspiracy theorists think is going on in space—and closer to home.

  The Black Knight Satellite

  * * *

  Date: 11000 B.C.E.–Present

  Location: Low Earth orbit

  The Conspirators: NASA, unknown alien civilization

  The Victims: Unknown

  * * *

  The Theory

  According to conspiracy theorists, the Black Knight satellite is an artificial satellite of alien origin that has been orbiting the Earth for some 13,000 years. NASA and other space agencies know all about it, but they cover up its existence to prevent the general public from panicking from the knowledge of other civilizations. It is even alleged that there is at least one clear photograph of it, taken from the space shuttle Endeavour.

  The Truth

  There is no Black Knight satellite, and never has been. The photograph that allegedly exists of it actually shows a well-documented piece of debris from the space shuttle that took the picture.

  The Backstory

  Black Knight was first “discovered” by Nikola Tesla when he picked up a radio signal coming from space in 1899, a repeating click that was so regular that Tesla believed it had to have been artificially and intelligently created. He didn’t know what it was at the time, and neither did anyone else. But the signal he received is still being transmitted today.

  Then in 1928, Norwegian scientists experimenting with shortwave radio discovered a phenomenon called long delayed echoes (LDEs), and their explanation was that the radio signals were being reflected off something in orbit. This explanation seemed to be confirmed in 1954 when newspapers reported an Air Force announcement that at least two artificial satellites were currently in orbit around the Earth, at a time when no nation yet had such an ability. (It soon came out that this announcement was a hoax made up by an author trying to sell a UFO book, and that the Air Force had never made any such statement. There goes that evidence!)

  In 1960, newspapers reported that another unknown object had been found in orbit. It was in an eccentric semi-polar orbit (an elliptical orbit that’s almost, but not quite, in line with the Earth’s North and South Poles), and it made a complete trip around this orbit every 104.5 minutes. Astronaut Gordon Cooper’s 1963 flight on the Mercury-Atlas 9 mission brought a new dimension to the story. Over the radio, he reported seeing a strange, greenish object. NASA later reported that his CO2 levels were wonky and he had been hallucinating. However, about 100 people at NASA’s Muchea Tracking Station near Perth, Australia, also saw the object on the radar screens. Conspiracy theorists claimed that NASA was covering up whatever the object was.

  Stories about Black Knight always give a special mention to Duncan Lunan, a Scottish researcher who set about finding the cause of the LDEs in 1973. In studying the Norwegian data, he found that by plotting t
he LDE on a graph, the graph ended up looking like a map of the stars. This map led to the star Epsilon Boötis, a double star in the constellation of Boötes. One principal star, Arcturus, was not where it is today, but rather where it was 12,600 years ago. Thus, the story was born that Black Knight came to us from Epsilon Boötes 12,600 years ago.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  The photos taken from the Endeavour space shuttle during the STS-88 NASA mission are widely available online; do an image search for “Black Knight satellite” to find them.

  Rounding out the story were the photographs of Black Knight taken from the space shuttle. NASA’s Endeavour launched in 1998, and on a space walk, astronauts reported seeing something. They took numerous high-quality photographs that were soon published on the NASA website; however, they were available only very briefly before being mysteriously taken down. They reappeared on the site later with different URLs and with new descriptions explaining them away as pieces of space junk. But it was too little, too late. The story of the Black Knight satellite had become essentially complete, evidence included.

  All that remains unknown is why NASA is denying the existence of Black Knight, what its true purpose is, and who its alien creators might be.

  The Explanation

  Deconstructing the story of the Black Knight satellite is an exercise in trying to connect dots that don’t line up very well. Even the name Black Knight doesn’t seem to relate to anything! The name has been used many times in various nations’ space programs, most notably by the UK. None of the events surrounding the satellite’s discovery actually mention the name Black Night, though. So the name Black Knight was probably added in the modern Internet era.