Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  But these only prove that a region called Finland existed; it doesn’t prove that it is located where the maps say it is. Proving that is even easier. Go to the coast of Estonia, maybe to its capital city, Tallinn, and look north. On practically any clear day, you can actually see Finland; it’s only about 37 miles away. One other method proves Finland is there: at night, the bright city lights of Finland’s capital city Helsinki cast a glow in the sky over what the maps show is Helsinki, but what the conspiracy theory claims is open ocean. That’s a lot of lights for a smattering of Japanese fishing boats.

  It turns out that the only history that’s related to this conspiracy happened in 2014 on the online forum Reddit. There was a discussion in which people were sharing stories of things they learned from their parents that they grew up assuming were normal, only to later discover that they weren’t. One user, using the online name Raregan, answered:

  My parents never believed in Finland, I grew up to never believe in Finland until I researched it further. It’s a pretty heated topic in my family.

  Asked why, he continued:

  Well firstly they say that the actual “place of Finland” is just Eastern Sweden. Helsinki is in Eastern Sweden and when people fly there it’s not like they would notice.

  World maps are altered as it’s a UN conspiracy to keep people believing in Finland. And the idea that an entire country is made up seems so bizarre that nobody would ever believe it, making it easy to do.

  Finland’s main company, Nokia, is apparently owned by the Japanese and they’re a main player in this.

  Now as for “why” people would want to invent Finland as a country that’s a bit more in depth and there’s a few reasons as to why Sweden and Russia go along with it but it’s mostly to do with Japanese fishing rights.

  You see the Japanese love their sushi but tight fishing regulations and public outcry mean they can’t fish as much as they want. So after the Cold War they agreed with Russia to create a “landmass” called Finland where they could fish. After all, if people thought there was a country there nobody would expect the Japanese to be harpooning whales would they?

  The fish is then transported through Russia where a small percentage of the food is given to the population (they were of course starving at the time of Finland being invented), and then is shipped to Japan under the disguise of “Nokia” products. Japan is apparently one of the world’s largest importers of Nokia products despite the fact that “nobody there owns a Nokia phone” apparently.

  The crux of all this however, and my favourite part, is the homage that the Japanese gave to this entire conspiracy theory.

  What do fish have? Fins. Therefore they named their imaginary country Finland.

  So far as anyone has found, this one Reddit post constitutes the entirety of the evidence that Finland doesn’t exist.

  But if you still find this one old Reddit post more persuasive than everything about Finland in the entire world, then simply board the Tallinn to Helsinki ferry from Estonia. In about two hours, you’ll be in Finland. By 2030 you will be able to drive there through the Helsinki to Tallinn Tunnel.

  Men in Black

  * * *

  Date: 1956–Present

  Location: Worldwide

  The Conspirators: Unknown government or alien agencies

  The Victims: UFO eyewitnesses

  * * *

  The Theory

  Ever since the flying saucer phenomenon became a part of pop culture in the 1950s, there has been a parallel belief in Men in Black. Their descriptions vary somewhat, but all share the black clothing, usually a plain black suit. Often they are very large, and often their facial features have something just a little bit unusual. Some believe they are government agents; others believe they are alien beings trying to look like humans. All believe their purpose is to intimidate UFO witnesses into staying silent, to protect the secret knowledge of alien visitors to the Earth.

  The Truth

  Although some government agents have no doubt worn black suits at certain times in their career, there has never been any reliable evidence of anyone matching the descriptions and described behavior of Men in Black. At least, that is, not outside the realm of blockbuster movies.

  The Backstory

  The stories often go something like this:

  Standing at the door were two tall men, but only one spoke, while the other made only odd twitches of his head. The strange man repeatedly asked in broken sentences to come in and discuss Peter’s UFO sighting. Peter asked who they were, but instead of identifying themselves they simply repeated the request to come in. They had no eyebrows, no stubble, no blemishes, almost as if their skin was plastic. No matter what Peter asked them, they could only repeat the same broken sentences.

  Or this:

  They were young men, tall, and dressed poorly in very cheap suits that didn’t quite match. They wore black sunglasses and their hair was so greased it appeared to be a single mass. I refused their request to come in and they seemed to quickly get nervous, and when I asked another question or two, they suddenly turned and scurried back to their car. It looked like a long black Cadillac, but made no noise as it drove away. I ran out and copied the license plate number, which I gave to the police to report the men as suspicious. The next day when the police came by, they told me that plate number was invalid, and to call again if the men ever came back. I am certain I copied it down correctly.

  Or this:

  The visitor would only stand in the middle of the lawn, and ignored our invitation to come up into the light. He seemed to be having trouble breathing, and kept asking to learn about the UFO we reported. As we spoke I noticed he had some kind of red wire coming out of his leg which appeared to go up under his shirt. Soon my wife went back into the house, and right away he began backing away toward the street. A dark car came along with no headlights and stopped precisely when he stepped backward off the curb. He reached behind himself to get into the car, which seemed to be illuminated inside with a green light. The car drove away into the night, still with no headlights.

  The reports have come from eyewitnesses to UFOs, and even to some who only heard about UFO sightings, since the 1950s. There don’t seem to be any reports of people being harmed, only frightened, called upon, and followed. There are no photographs of Men in Black; something seems to go wrong with security cameras whenever they appear.

  These foreboding characters were first reported in the 1956 book They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers, a nonfiction collection of stories, compiled and published by UFO writer Gray Barker. The book tells of a number of UFO researchers, once prominent, who went silent, one by one, after being visited by the Men in Black.

  Barker had been in a unique position to collect these stories. In 1952 he began writing for a periodical called Space Review, which had previously been the one-man show of a UFO writer named Albert K. Bender, who referred to himself as the International Flying Saucer Bureau.

  In 1953 the CIA released the Robertson Panel Report, which analyzed the Air Force’s Project BLUE BOOK, an effort in the 1950s and 1960s to collect and classify as many UFO reports as possible. The report concluded that UFOs did not appear to constitute any threat to national security. However, the Robertson Panel Report did make an ominous mention of UFO researchers:

  The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” (Los Angeles) and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin). It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.

  It was like a switched flipped in Bender’s mind. He notified the newspapers that he was closing his International Flying Saucer Bureau immediately, and he withdrew from the publishing of information about UFOs. In November 1953 the Bridgeport Sunday Herald newspaper reported:


  Bender said “three men wearing dark suits” came to his home, flashed credentials showing them to be representatives of the “higher authority,” and asked him many questions about the IFSB . . . . They told him “not roughly, but sternly and emphatically,” to stop publishing flying saucer information.

  At that point, Barker took over from Bender. Bender’s story, and the stories of others who reported similar experiences, became the centerpieces of Barker’s They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers.

  Coupled with the publicly known fact that Project BLUE BOOK actually was sending Air Force personnel out into the world to personally interview UFO eyewitnesses, the revelations in Barker’s book became the foundation of modern Men in Black conspiracy theories.

  The Explanation

  Sadly for the legend, it turns out that Gray Barker never believed a word that he wrote—he made most of it up and exaggerated the rest. He was also something of an unsavory character who didn’t mind making crank calls to provoke reports, and if his crank call didn’t produce any interesting reports, he’d invent something and write it up anyway. He once telephoned UFO author John Keel and disguised his voice to make a false UFO report. How do we know he did this?

  John Sherwood is an author who got his start under Barker’s tutelage, and he later wrote a series of articles for Skeptical Inquirer magazine after Barker’s death revealing the lengths Barker would go to for a great story. Barker would often encourage Sherwood to make up or sensationalize his stories. Sherwood wrote that Barker:

  hawked his books and magazines by embellishing stories and encouraging others to fabricate more. He launched hoaxes, joined others’ deceptions, and manipulated people’s beliefs.

  Barker’s book, though it claimed to be nonfiction, was in fact anything but. It was indeed inspired by Bender’s report of what happened to him, but “inspired by” should be taken pretty loosely. After publishing his own version of Bender’s experience, Barker persuaded Bender to write his own book about it (which Barker then published). It was titled Flying Saucers and the Three Men. In it, Bender revealed what he really meant when he told the newspapers about his visit from the Men in Black.

  Their visit, he wrote, had not been an actual one by three men dressed in black suits. Instead, it had been a psychic visitation. They came from Antarctica, where the aliens had their secret base. The aliens came in three genders. Bender learned of all this by astrally projecting himself there. Sadly, Bender probably suffered from delusional disorders and might have even needed psychiatric treatment. Barker unfortunately took advantage of the situation to make some money.

  Are strange Men in Black—who might be from the government, or might be aliens—actually going around to the homes of UFO witnesses and trying to compel them to remain silent? Nope. It was the fictional invention of a fraudulent author, who highlighted a mentally ill man’s delusion to make it even more sensational. If you ever are lucky enough to have a UFO sighting, you can focus on the extraterrestrials and not the Men in Black.

  Polybius

  * * *

  Date: 1981

  Location: Portland, Oregon

  The Conspirators: Unknown government agencies

  The Victims: Portland arcade customers

  * * *

  The Theory

  This legend claims that government agents conspired to construct an arcade game to collect information about players for some unknown purpose, a game which had the collateral effect of sickening the players. It is said to have been installed in a few video arcades in Portland, Oregon, in 1981, whereupon several players fell ill or committed suicide. Government agents would collect player data from the machines, then one day—as mysteriously as they appeared—the games were all taken away.

  The Truth

  Although some parts of the legend are based on real events, the Polybius game itself is completely fictitious and never existed.

  The Backstory

  Tales of how Polybius worked and what it did are a bit scattered, but most follow the same general theme.

  Sometime in 1981, people claim a few Polybius consoles appeared in arcades in suburbs of Portland, Oregon. The games were wildly addictive—teens would line up to play them. But then some players began having serious side effects after playing, ranging from insomnia to hallucinations. There are even stories of suicides and permanent insanity resulting.

  To add to the intrigue, mysterious government agents, sometimes described as Men in Black, would apparently come to the arcades and download data from the Polybius games, but seemed uninterested in collecting any money from them. This happened for about a month, and then suddenly, all the games disappeared, removed from the arcades by government agents.

  Nobody has ever unearthed an actual Polybius console game, although quite a few people have built replicas, and there is now even a standard logo that’s always used and descriptions of how the game was played. Some enterprising coders have actually written 1980s-style gaming code to make their Polybius consoles functional, though they just made up a game themselves.

  Due to its dark and compelling history, the game has become a fixture in arcade culture. It was famously seen in a 2006 episode of The Simpsons where Bart went into an arcade. It has had various other appearances in media since: comics, TV, and even as a meta reference in other video games.

  The Explanation

  There don’t appear to be any references to the Polybius legend until decades later. In fact, there is a handy time machine that allows us to go back and verify with certainty that there was never any such arcade game anywhere in the early 1980s. Electronic Games was an industry magazine that covered every minute detail of gaming and arcades. If it happened in arcade culture, it was covered in this magazine. All its issues from 1981 through 1984 are available and electronically searchable, and there is neither any mention of Polybius nor any of the events associated with the urban legend. For all practical purposes, case closed.

  Nevertheless, we can go back and find specific events that likely inspired the legend. Newspapers reported that two arcade players had gotten sick after playing at the same arcade in Portland on November 29, 1981. One was twelve-year-old Brian Mauro, who was at the tail end of an attempt to beat the Asteroids record, with local TV crews on hand. After playing for twenty-eight hours straight, Mauro became ill with stomach cramps, attributed to anxiety from all the attention coupled with the prodigious volume of Coca-Cola he’d been consuming.

  In a separate event, police were called to a scene where teen Michael Lopez was found collapsed on a stranger’s lawn. He had been playing Tempest at the same time and the same place as Mauro, but had developed a severe migraine and left. Unfortunately, he didn’t make it all the way home before falling. Two players, arguably both taken out of action by arcade games in Portland in 1981. That’s kind of suspicious, right?

  But there was more to come. Unrelated to the two boys, authorities had been scoping out Portland area arcades for some time for illegal gambling activity. Some older arcade games could be rigged with hardware counters to total up game scores, and some arcades would make cash payouts to players who reached certain high scores, as a way to attract more players. The legality was disputed; arcades said these were games of skill, but the Feds said it was illegal gambling. And so, ten days after Mauro and Lopez went down, multiple law enforcement agencies made raids at several Portland arcades, seizing cash and rigged games. And thus was another element of the urban legend satisfied: government agents removing video games.

  There is even a close match for a true historical event referencing the name of the game. It was called Poly Play (close to Polybius). Poly Play was a crappy East German console game that was a rip-off of eight popular Western games, and sold to Eastern Bloc arcades in 1985. But they broke a lot, and with the dissolution of the Iron Curtain, were suddenly subject to copyright claims. So the factory, VEB Polytechnik, recalled them all and destroyed them.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  A mo
vie and a book from 1984 may have inspired the Polybius legend. The movie is The Last Starfighter. In this film, a mysterious “man in black” recruits a teenage gamer by planting arcade consoles all around the world, looking for that one most skilled player. Another is the novel Arcade by Robert Maxxe, which features a nearly identical arcade game except it’s called Spacescape instead of Polybius, and turns out to be a government mind control project.

  Digging through all possible archives and resources, the earliest reference to the Polybius video game that anyone’s found so far is an entry on www.coinop.org, which is sort of a Wikipedia of video games. An anonymous author posted the basics of the Polybius legend. The post is dated August 3, 1998, but some researchers believe that date is fake and the post was not actually created until February 6, 2000. It included the game’s publisher, Sinneslöschen. There was no actual software publisher of that name, and it’s not even quite proper German. Loosely translated, it means something like “lose your senses” and is a word you might come up with if you didn’t know any German but had access to a German–English dictionary. If this is indeed the earliest published mention of the game, then it’s likely that this anonymous poster was the originator of the urban legend.

  Sometime after that, Coinop.org owner Kurt Koller advised GamePro about the post. GamePro magazine ran an article in 2003 called “Secrets and Lies,” and the urban legend took hold.

  Suppose the author of the Coinop.org entry saw The Last Starfighter or read Arcade, and/or had heard about the Portland arcade raids, and/or the teens being sickened. The story practically writes itself. And that’s probably how this urban legend was born.