Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  There were all kinds of other crazy ideas about the flight. One (unscientific) poll on the CNN website found that 9 percent of respondents believed one of several supernatural fates had taken the plane, including alien abduction, a time warp, or some parallel dimension.

  One theory held that the plane was hijacked to the island of Diego Garcia, a British territory in the western Indian Ocean where the British and Americans both have military and intelligence facilities. According to some theorists, it landed there and the passengers were killed for some unclear nefarious purpose; according to others, it was shot down as it approached. French author and former airline executive Marc Dugain has been a staunch proponent of this theory, and pointed out that residents of the Maldives claimed to see a plane fly low over their country early that morning. However, the Maldives are not on the way to Diego Garcia, and there do not appear to have been any such reports from islanders until some three months after the disappearance.

  The Russians have been implicated in at least two conspiracy theories. One holds that Russia hijacked the plane and had it secreted away in Kazakhstan to retaliate against the United States for sanctions, but that theory is odd because MH370 was not an American plane. Another theory is that a Russian satellite detected the plane crash, but Putin would not reveal the location to anyone to protect the secret of the satellite’s existence.

  Even North Korea has been suggested as the mastermind. In one theory, North Korea hijacked the plane and brought it there in order to reverse engineer it to benefit their own struggling aircraft industry. Another suggests MH370 was being used to deliver a nuclear weapon to North Korea, so the Americans shot it down in flight.

  All of these hijacking theories are, of course, in direct violation of what’s known about the plane’s flight path.

  The Explanation

  Within just a few days of the disappearance—and well outside of the conspiracy theory community—airline pilots were already writing about what they believed had happened, and it’s a much more plausible scenario without Russians, aliens, or time warps. All of those weird things about the flight that confused conventional reporters fit right into the pilots’ theory. All it required was a minor electrical fire.

  If pilots smelled smoke in the cockpit, the very first thing they would do is shut down all the electronics they could possibly spare. This would include the ACARS and the radio. They would even physically pull out the fuses if they could. Thus, the automated communications stopped. The voice communications would stop too, but mainly because pilots are trained that communicating is the last priority when dealing with an emergency. Aviating—keeping the plane flying—is always the first priority, and this meant doing whatever was necessary to keep the plane safely in the air. If a fire was suspected, putting it out would have taken precedence over anything else. The second priority is to navigate—to make sure that wherever the plane is headed is actually a useful direction to go. In this case, Shah was probably heading not back to Kuala Lumpur, because of its mountainous terrain, but to a preferred backup airport at Pulau Langkawi, with longer runways and easier access. That their first turn put them on this course tells us a lot about what was happening on board.

  After a pair of later turns that eventually left them headed south on autopilot from a position just west of Thailand, the pilots eventually became incapacitated, either from carbon monoxide or possibly from decompression. The plane, which by then could well have been a flying tomb, made it at least as far as the Inmarsat arc before it ran out of fuel or a fire did sufficient damage to bring it down.

  The third priority, communicating, is something they obviously never got around to. Thus their lack of radio communication is not suspicious, but rather it is telling. It tells us they had more important things to worry about before calling for help.

  From the expert perspective—that of pilots who saw what the plane did and recognized that it was exactly what they themselves would have done—there is no mystery surrounding the loss of MH370. Unfortunately, we can’t know exactly what happened without seeing the wreckage. And that particular riddle remains as deep as the ocean.

  PART 8

  Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be . . . True?

  We’ve spent the preceding parts of the book looking at conspiracy theories that were just too crazy to be true. A large majority of theories fall into this bucket. But there are real conspiracies, and people go to jail for them every day. And if you’re a conspiracy theorist, the fact that some conspiracies are real makes you think that the theory that you believe in is real as well.

  Of course most conspiracy theories that have been proven to be true didn’t actually have a theory attached to them until they were proven by investigators. But surely there must have been some, right? Surely the conspiracy theorists must have been proven right in at least a few cases? It is the most common question received by researchers of conspiracy theories: which are the ones that have been proven true? It is an eager search for validation by our naturally conspiratorial brains; it’s the hope that knowing previous theories turned out to be true in the past will mean that some of our current theories will turn out to be proven true in the future.

  What follows are a few theories that are most often claimed to be the ones that turned out to be right—we’ll look at each of them to see how true that is.

  Numbers Stations

  * * *

  Date: 1914–Present

  Location: Worldwide

  The Conspirators: Government intelligence agencies

  The Victims: Governments who get spied on

  * * *

  The Theory

  Ever since World War I, but most especially during the Cold War when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in an arms race and all its accompanying espionage, the airwaves have carried dozens of mysterious radio broadcasts. These broadcasts come over shortwave, a radio frequency band notable for its extreme long distance capability. Each of these mysterious radio programs has certain specific days and times on which it broadcasts. Typically, the broadcasts consist of a spoken voice reading long strings of nonsense letters and numbers. Conspiracy theory hypotheses have abounded for years about what these mysterious radio stations might be, but the leading theory is that they are governments transmitting information to spies located in foreign countries.

  The Truth

  In this case, the conspiracy theory is spot on. In at least some cases, stations have been proven to be encrypted communications to spies.

  The Backstory

  Encrypted transmissions via Morse code began to be widely used during World War I, allowing militaries to communicate over long distances without their broadcasts being understood by the enemy. Over the decades, these encrypted Morse code broadcasts gradually evolved into what we now call a numbers station. It’s now a spoken voice reading off numbers instead of those characters being sent as Morse code, but all work the same way: Important information is encrypted into nonsensical letters or numbers, then transmitted via shortwave radio, and received and decrypted on the other end back into readable text.

  During the Cold War, amateur shortwave operators began finding and cataloging these encrypted broadcasts, which they called numbers stations because most of them broadcast long strings of numbers, in groups of five at a time. Nobody knew what they meant, and all of these broadcasts were on unlicensed stations. Amateur investigators used direction-finding technology to try and locate the sources of the numbers stations. Many of them turned out to be broadcast from inside secure military bases.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Many of the discovered encrypted broadcasts had unique characteristics. One named “Yosemite Sam” would start with an audio clip of the famous cartoon character shouting “Varmint, I’m a-gonna blow you away.” Another named the “Lincolnshire Poacher” began with a short musical clip from the English folk song of the same name.

  One popular alternate hypothesis
has been that numbers stations are utility broadcasts, which typically include info like weatherfax data (a system for sending satellite pictures of storm fronts) and ice warnings to ships at sea, fishery fax data, oceanographic buoy data, and other such things. But most utility stations send data signals consisting of dots or blanks that come out as visual images on the receiving end, not encrypted strings of spoken numbers. So this hypothesis never seemed to fit very well.

  Eventually, a series of high-profile arrests proved the true explanation for number stations:

  • In 1989, a Czech spy was arrested in the UK, caught receiving and decoding numbers stations broadcasts from Romania.

  • In 1998, five spies called the Cuban Five were arrested in Miami, having received communications for years from a Cuban numbers station nicknamed Atención.

  • Nine days after September 11, 2001, in an event that might have been overshadowed by other news, the US Defense Intelligence Agency arrested one of its own senior analysts, who was also found to have been decrypting messages from the Cuban station, Atención.

  • In 2009, a retired US State Department official and his wife were arrested in Washington, DC. For years, they had been spying for Cuba, and had received instructions via a Cuban numbers station using a shortwave radio given to them by the Cubans.

  • A ring of ten Russian spies headquartered in New York City were arrested by the FBI in 2010, having been caught listening to a numbers station and writing down all the numbers.

  • In 2011, a Russian couple was arrested for espionage in Germany, having received information via a Russian numbers station for more than twenty years. Interestingly, they were caught only after upgrading to more modern encrypted satellite communication gear.

  So it does appear, after all, that the conspiracy-theory version of numbers stations turns out to be the true one: governments communicating worldwide with spy networks.

  The Explanation

  Shortwave is used for numbers stations and other services that require a signal to be carried over very great distances, even all the way around the world. While most radio bands have ranges limited to line of sight, shortwave can reflect and refract from the ionosphere, allowing them to propagate as far as needed. If the transmitter is powerful enough, you can rest assured a shortwave signal will get there.

  Shortwave also has a number of other important and unique benefits. First, it’s virtually impossible to determine who might be listening to a radio station, and there is no practical way to find an active receiver because they don’t transmit anything back. Compare this to Internet signals, which go through routers and servers and get logged.

  This radio band is also immune to massive infrastructure failure, since it doesn’t depend on the Internet, or physical wires, or satellite communications. All you need is a transmitter and a receiver, and a shortwave radio will work very well anywhere in the world. The receivers are widely available worldwide. Anyone can buy one at a thrift or surplus store for very little money, even in underdeveloped nations, and they can even be built relatively easily. They are the ultimate untraceable receiver.

  Most numbers stations transmit numbers in blocks of five digits, and the voice usually repeats each block of five once. There can be any number of five-digit blocks, depending on the length of the message. The use of five-digit blocks is simply a convention in encryption. There are any number of encryption schemes out there, but a transmission in groups of five characters is the standard. It makes it easy for the recipient to write them down or type them into a computer. Each block is repeated to minimize transcription errors, and it also helps for times when the signal strength isn’t great. Seeing that the numbers stations transmit in this form gave a very big clue that they were sending some encrypted message.

  Some encryption schemes can be decrypted with pen and paper by a recipient who has the key, typically a single-use key called a one-time pad. This is a long string of random text for which the number value of each letter is added to the number value of each letter in the message to be encoded. It is only ever used once, making it impossible for a cracker to find common patterns. While low-tech, a code encrypted with a one-time pad is essentially unbreakable. The downside is that the recipient will need to have some kind of book or list of one-time pads, and that’s evidence that could be used against him. On the other side of things, it’s very easy for the intended recipient who has the correct keys to use computer software to decrypt a message from a numbers station, but again, the presence of this program on a computer is evidence that can be used against the spy. However, such a program can use more advanced encryption like RSA, the modern standard used today that powers web browser encryption and financial transactions.

  The question of whether numbers stations are a conspiracy theory that was proven true is a sticky one. While even the most conspiratorial interpretation of them has been proven true, what’s not clear is that a conspiracy theory ever existed before the first spies who used these numbers stations were arrested. Yes, the use of these stations in espionage has been documented since World War I, but this hasn’t always been public information. Newspaper reports of arrests, on the other hand, have freely discussed how the numbers station was employed by the spy and how it constituted evidence against him. So, while it isn’t really appropriate to credit conspiracy theorists for having uncovered this one, we can certainly give them credit for their interpretation being the correct one.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Most often cited as proof that conspiracy theories often come true is the conspiracy to murder Julius Caesar in the year 44 B.C.E. It is a historical fact that he was murdered by a conspiracy. However, it’s quite a stretch to regard this event as proof of a conspiracy theory that was proven to be true. Why? Well, it never existed as anyone’s conspiracy theory until after it had happened. If anything, it was an example of a successful conspiracy that eluded all discovery—until the conspirators themselves went public.

  MKULTRA

  * * *

  Date: 1953–1973

  Location: United States

  The Conspirators: US Central Intelligence Agency

  The Victims: Unwitting test subjects

  * * *

  The Theory

  Mind control is the ability to make people think or act differently than they normally would. For twenty years, the conspiracy theory says, the CIA attempted to achieve successful mind control by conducting unethical experiments on human subjects both with and without their knowledge and consent—using drugs, psychology, and combinations of both. This twenty-year series of experiments was called MKULTRA. They were top secret and nobody was ever punished for them. MKULTRA was most notable for giving LSD to people without their knowledge.

  True believers in the conspiracy theory think that MKULTRA lasted for so long because it was successful, and that the government can, in fact, cause people to think and act in certain ways.

  The Truth

  The CIA did fund MKULTRA and did perform experiments for twenty years hoping to find something like mind control, but were never remotely successful. A small percentage of these experiments were extremely unethical, especially by today’s standards.

  The Backstory

  As soon as World War II ended, the United States found itself fighting a new kind of war: the Cold War. This conflict was more about intelligence and espionage than about weapons. The CIA was on the lookout for new tools that could be used in this type of warfare.

  Two particular events triggered the CIA’s interest in mind control. The first was the arrest of Cardinal József Mindszenty for treason by Communist authorities in Hungary. The CIA knew him to be innocent, but they watched him make a very mechanical confession to a list of absurd crimes. The second event was when American fighter pilots who were shot down over North Korea and captured made strange robotic anti-American statements on TV. The CIA figured that some kind of mind control must have been causing these people to think and act differently than they usually would
and they decided that they needed to learn all they could on the subject. And Project MKULTRA—which focused on the study of LSD and its effects—was born!

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  There were many programs aside from MKULTRA that were also studying mind control—both in the CIA and at other agencies. They were all trying to learn how to make the enemy think and act in some desired way. Project ARTICHOKE was one, as were MKSEARCH, MKOFTEN, Project BLUEBIRD, and Project CHATTER. Some of these projects involved pharmacological experiments, others used psychological persuasion. All of them did ultimately result in important research and increased our knowledge in the relevant fields, but none of them ever provided the useful mind control the CIA hoped for.

  The world’s top experts in LSD and mind control aren’t found at the CIA, but at universities and research institutions. So when the government runs a program like MKULTRA, they fund a research project at a university. With MKULTRA, they set up front organizations to disguise their true identity, and used those organizations to fund various research projects. The “Society for the Investigation for Human Ecology” was one of front groups. It funded research projects at as many as eighty-six institutions, including universities, hospitals, and prisons. Without realizing it, scientists all over were fighting the Cold War on a very subtle front, trying to see if they could exert finely tuned influence on the minds of the enemy.