Favorite Conspiracy? (or the one you believe in)

I somewhat agree, but I wouldn't call them favorites because of the shitload of actual damage conspiracie theories like these do, by tricking people into not seeking real medical care and the formation of religious extremist organizations.

Chemtrails, garden hose rainbows and Lizardpeople (which are revealed in ways that look suspiciously like regular image encoding errors) are just funny and don't do a lot of real damage, so I'd probably put those up as favorites.

As for conspiracy theories that I think may hold some grain of truth to them, I'd pick the sinking of the M.S. Estonia in 1994. That one has some actual weird behaviors from the involved governments, and I think it would be appropriate for that event to be reinvestigated. The conspiracy theory goes that the ship was sunk deliberately, possibly by Russia, as it was (allegedly) secretly carrying Soviet military equipment for NATO, some of the conspiracy theory believers say parts of a dismantled Nuclear submarine was on-board, and that possible radioactive contamination was the reason the governments of the involved countries did not recover any bodies from the wreckage, and instead decided to cover the ship with a concrete sarcophagus similar to the one covering the Chernobyl power plant. Ten years after the fact (in 2004), the Swedish military actually admitted they had carried Soviet military equipment on board the ship a few weeks prior to the incident (no nuclear subs though), but not on the night of the sinking.

So, yeah, I'm not a firm believer in it, but at the very least I think there are half-truths to that conspiracy theory, even if the actual sinking was due to a poorly maintained bow visor getting detached due to bad weather like the official accident report says.

I have a hard time believing most diet/ health advice.

1. Because it seems to change ever other week. No one ever seem to agree. One day coffee is the most unhealthy shit, the next day it gets you cancer, the day after, it's suddenly super healthy again. Just 10 years ago fat was public enemy nr. 1, today no one seems to give a shit.

2. Food and off the counter drugs seems like maybe the two biggest markets riped for misleading and manipulating. So many people and so much money evolved. Which makes me very skeptical of any science or breakthroughs that gets media attention.

This sometimes leads me down some dark conspiracy like paths. Especially cornering the proposed danger of cholesterol.

For those who have not heard this clip. This is possibly the greatest audio I've ever heard.

9/11 is the most believable. Although so many people would have to be in on it.

The Bermuda Triangle is the first thing that comes to mind. If any of you saw the guy from about half a month back building an extremely weak version of a warp drive in his garage he has a theory that somehow the energy from storms in the Bermuda Triangle acts as power and somehow creates really shitty warp drive that moves people relatively small distances. I want to believe if nothing else.

OPEN YOUR EYES PEOPLE, BILL GATES IS A DEMONIC ELF WHO'S TRYING TO BRING DOWN THE HUMAN POPULATION. I'M GOING TO GIVE YOU ALL A WAKE UP CALL, AND I'M GONNA BRING THE JUSTICE. YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN. I'M GOING TO UNLEASH HUMANITY.

@jerseyscum: Here's a longer version. He keeps bringing it up during the interview.

I think the issue with those pretty much come down to how the media mishandles science reporting. Media treats every new science paper as if it's overthrowing all previous knowledge, when in fact no single paper can do that, since science is consensus based and the point of these papers are to get other scientists to repeat the studies and see if the results are the same or not, and to try to find flaws within the methodology of the previous published studies. Reaching a consensus takes years or decades and hundreds of studies reaching the same conclusion, but media treats the outliers - the one off studies that wildly deviates from consensus as the "new truth", when in fact most of the outliers are due to poor methodology or small sample sizes resulting in unreliable data.

Time Cube and the Flat Earth Society are among my favourites. Reptilians also get an honourable mention. Also, Tupac Serbia...

Yeah you are totally right. It's not that I don't trust science. It's that I don't trust how the way media/ Food corporations / Big Pharma / etc. treat that date, and translate it into products or life styles.

I don't know all the science behind cholesterol fat, I won't outright deny that it can have harming effects on some people. But the market that has been build around cholesterol lowing drugs and diets is disgusting.

Been having a lot of fun watching the awful "documentary" series "Ancient Aliens" on Netflix (it's where this guy is from). Might have been watching too much of it too fast, as I am almost starting to believe some of it. You should watch at least one episode. Having a lot of fun with it, in the same way I have a lot of fun with bad horror movies from time to time.

Well the standards are different. For medicine they do randomized control trials which is a fairly robust way of doing things. After your sample is large its pretty credible science. For food its mostly nonsense, you can't randomly allocate diets to people as part of an experiment, and if you asked for volunteers it would probably not be representative of the population. Science in the media is often a joke, in fact even in science journals its often not very accurate. My training is as a statistician and if whenever I look at top journals in neuroscience or biology its often a whole lot of nonsense, I don't know enough about the subjects to say if their methods were correct but their inference is usually bogus. The thing is that statistics doesn't tell you what's true it only can show you what's false, and in bio/neuro its not as clear as "good or bad" its usually increased activity of some kind but the interpretation is shady at best. I think they have been upping their game in the last 5 years, I hear most journals now hire statisticians to infer stuff.

I think people who talk about science, whether it be scientists or journalists should all read Popper, just to get some grounding on falsification and the scientific method.

Arrrrrgh, there was a show that tried to simulate a potential situation when the magnetic north and south would swap and it did it stages where by patches of opposing magnetic areas would form in each hemisphere and would continue until the switch happened. One of them was discovered between Barbados and Florida. I wish I knew what it was, could have been a Horizon (bbc science show) programme but not sure.

My favorite is the Paul McCartney died and was replaced with a look alike. It's just so dumb.

I hate people that actually think the moon landing was fake.

I actually talked to a person that thought the Earth was the center of the Universe and stuff rotates around us. Apparently there's a lot of those people.

I was in a public speaking class at university and someone did a presentation saying Dinosaurs never existed. His source was a religious book. This was in a room full of mostly engineering students and we all looked at each other in disbelief.

@cbyrne: i assume in disbelief because you always thought they were real? Mind blown!!!

I view creationists to be on the same level as conspiracy nuts. We dont get a lot of them in Ireland, but there was a girl in college (we actually got on very well) who firmly believed dinosaurs never existed and the earth was 5000 years old. I would provide her with very simple and easy to understand proof and she would just shut down, like her brain stopped working. I often wonder if conspiracy theories and certain religious beliefs effect people in a similar way.

I guess the Kennedy assassination conspiracies are kind of believable. I mean, it's not too crazy to think that several people would want the president of the U.S. dead, especially during the height of the cold war.

I don't really believe any of them though, I just think that as far as conspiracy theories go they're relatively logical.

If anyone is a lizard it is Benedict Cumberbatch. Just look at that face and those proportions. It is also said that lizardmen are seductive, which explain the deep and sultry voice that people seem to enjoy so much. Just you wait and see when that kid comes out with all scales like in 'V'.

Atleast he is a shoe-in for the eventual Air Force Gator live action movie.

I think my favorite is "FDR let Pearl Harbor happen." I don't necessarily believe it, I just like thinking about it occasionally. Basically in the vein of "would he be that desperate to go to war with Germany?"

FDR is one of my favorite Presidents, and I tend to fall on the "no" side of that argument, but I'm willing to acknowledge it as a possibility.

When I let my mind indulge a bit in the crazy I enjoy thinking about what could be credible in a conspiracy. Take the moon landing conspiracy for example. What if the film was shot in Hollywood? Not because the moon landing did not happen, but because there was a problem that prevented them from filming in space? Or the real 911 conspiracy is not that 911 was staged, but used as an opportunity to push the Patriot act (deflated footballs?) and send a force to occupy Iraq to a very scared American public because off a real act of terror

Occam's razor then promptly cuts them down and places them in my mind's X-files.

Met a dude last summer who, I shit you not, believed that 9/11 was caused by lasers that the U.S. had started development on in the early 1980s and by 2001 they finally had a working prototype and needed something to test it with. His reasoning was something around the lines of "Look at the rubble pile compared to the height of the building - it's way too small compared to buildings as big as they are after they collapse. Lasers vaporised a ton of the debris, no plane explosions could've melted that much of it." I think that topped my list of batshit crazy conspiracy theories.

The only ones that ever interest me are 9/11 and the JFK assassination.

hollow earth, i mean how the fuck would they ever be able to hide something like that?

That there are/have been time travellers. Of all the crazy theories, I want that shit to be real. How awesome would that be.

Evil corporations purposefully withholding breakthrough medical research like the cure for cancer to sell more drugs. Because come on, the amount of money you would get from having an actual cure for cancer would net you more profits than all the other medicine markets combined.

There's also a great one about an inventor in Australia who created an engine with efficiency of 300-500%. So basically the guy invented free energy. Tragically, he doesn't have the money to mass produce it (also the evil oil corporations are desperate to surpress the invention), but with a small investment you too could be a part of a generator which will usher a new age of technology!

@splodge: Mind blown. Exactly! lol.

Typically there is a lot of religious people in science fields, it's almost weird, but most of them keep personal lives and professional lives separate. They would also look at the facts and evidence of dinosaurs and call that person irrational. One day I might understand how this crazy world works.

Its not a government conspiracy but to this day I know that David Stern and the NBA rigged the draft lottery to ensure Ewing ended up in NYC.

I like the "earth is flat" one. I feel like it should be easy to disprove without getting all sciencey.

My favorite concerns Stanley Kubrick and The Shining. That movie Room 237 contains about 5 different conspiracies (He helped fake the moon landing! It's about the plight of Native Americans! etc.) and each subsequent one is more ridiculous than the last.

The CDC manufactures multiple flu strains every year and sends them out as "vaccines" so that people will willingly be infected. My wife is a nurse and she had 7 flu patients this year, every one of which had gotten vaccinated. My wife got the shot to prevent A & B strains, then months later brought home Flu A.

Why does the CDC do this? Extraterrestrial defense. It's really hard for aliens to invade when we are creating several new strains of the flu every single year and dispersing it around the globe.

The flu. Proof that extraterrestrial life does exist!

The CIA allowed the Contras to distribute massive amounts of cocaine into Southern California to fund an illegal war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The power cocaine was then turned into crack and distributed all across the United States.

But pot is still illegal.

I'm partial to the Lost Cosmonauts conspiracy. Though, maybe that just reveals me as a Secret Racist/Culturalist.

I always loved the one about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landings. Maybe it's because there is so much freaky stuff to see and discover in that movie.

@beachthunder That is just crazy talk. Dr. Tracksuit wears sunglasses and is a doctor. Jeff doesn't and isn't. I mean, I can see the legitimacy behind lizards or chemtrails, but this? Poppycock.

@hobozero: Ok.....THAT's an interesting spin on the Moon Landing Hoax theory. .

I love the new one where the government is trying to kill Scott Stapp, the lead singer of Creed:

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6406377/creed-scott-stapp-obama-threat-secret-service

I'm inclined to believe that the Kennedy Assassination isn't what it seems to be. Not so much that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill him because obviously he did, but more about the behind-the-scenes stuff. Everything that happened afterwards with LHO being shot by Jack Ruby (a known mob hitman) for no apparent reason, guys in jail talking about things that nobody would know unless they were there or knew about it beforehand... Lots of unanswered questions, that's all.

I watched this video not too long ago, if I remember correctly he does a decent job of running everything down with pros/cons of each theory. Worth a watch if you are interested in all of that. Kinda long, but tons of details.

If you haven't seen it already, good read. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_advance-knowledge_conspiracy_theory