The World is Full of Conspiracies
by Alec Guzov
Assistant Features Editor
If school doesn't give you enough worries to keep you up at night, or you crave that great feeling of paranoia and senseless delirium, read on. When conspiracy theories come to mind, you might be wondering, "How can something so huge be true if I have never heard of it?" To this, I simply refer you to the wise words that Jack White penned: "Truth doesn't make a noise." Clearly, hushed up news possesses the greatest validity, and it is my duty as a journalist, a beacon of truth, to amplify it. Now that that little inconvenience has been cleared up, let the anxiety begin. Oh, and one more thing, if you are offended by potentially un-American writing, please kindly leaf to the next page. But now, suspend your belief, and without further ado, the theories.
What if I told you that the early Middle Ages never happened? More specifically, the time period from 614-911 AD, which puts today at the glorious year of 1711. The German historian Herbert Illig arrived at this fantastic conclusion with several arguments, but I'll only relate the oft-repeated ones. First of all, he points out that language, farming technology, and architecture seem to stagnate in development over that time period. The radiometric and dendrochronological methods used to date artifacts from the period are inconclusive and little archaeological evidence reliably exists from the period, and so medieval historians rely on mostly written documents, which could easily have their date fabricated. If we accept this, then that means that, among other things, that Charlemagne was fictional. Weird. But the medieval chroniclers, most often monks, didn't just do this for grins. One hypothesis suggests that they were trying to avoid the millennium, but a more compelling explanation exists. When the big bad calendar switch went down in 1582, from the Julian calendar to the Gregory calendar, the Julian calendar was wrong by only ten days because the Julian calendar is 1.3 minutes too long. BUT, the calendar should have been off by thirteen days, which would imply that the Julian calendar was only used from the fourth century. How about them apples? Credibility rating: 2.
But now on to a true conspiracy. Even the House of Representatives admitted its validity in the McCormack Dickstein Committee. The Business Plot, as it is referred to as, was organized by leading business leaders in 1932. The cronies consisted of the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush. The plan consisted of recruiting Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to organize a coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead of our government, we'd be run by a fascist dictator, supported by business leaders who continued trading with Nazi Germany up through World War II. But unfortunately for them, and fortunately for us, Butler had supported FDR in his last campagin, and so he reported the plot in 1934 to a congresssional committee. Credibility: 9.
Most of us have heard of Mark David Chapman, the Catcher in the Rye-loving murderer of John Lennon. But this man was merely a look-alike, a pawn of sorts, and the really killer was...Stephen King directed Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. First of all, the famous picture of Chapman getting Lennon's aoutgraph several hours before his assassination are not actually of Chapman, because the glasses' prescription in the photograph are wrong, the hair texture doesn't match, and the facial features aren't aligned the same. The man who does match this description is the beloved horror writer Stephen King. Newspapers such as Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report published large headlines around the time of the assassination eerily hinting at the musician's death. They included "Johhny Comes Marching Home," "Thinking About John Lennon," and "Who's In? Who's Out?" which hints at John Lennon's death and Reagan's recent election. In Nixon's book The Real War, he writes, "...Trendies...rock stars... ‘Beautiful people of New York...who say ‘war' is ‘bad' and ‘peace' is ‘good'...must be removed from the stage of public debate...by whatever means...a flyswatter...are needed." And lastly, three weeks before Lennon's death, Chapman wrote that he was, "...armed, a pawn, waiting to be moved into a hostile square...by the giant hand of Ronald Reagan..." Credibility: 3.
Now, shooting forward abut 30 years in time, let's look at the demise of Paul McCartney. The University of Miami professor Dr. Henry M. Truby actually ran several experiments over the course of 20 hours in which he put sanples of Paul McCartney's voice to a "sound fingerprint" test. He concluded that he heard three different McCartneys. McCartney apparently died in a car crash in 1966, and this incident is referenced in several songs. In "She's Leaving Home" they say he was pronounced dead on "Wednesday morning at 5 o'clock as the day begins", in "Strawberry Fields Forever" during the final refrain, some people claim that John Lennon slowly says "I buried Paul", and if "Revolution 9" is played backwards, "Turn me on, dead man" can be heard. On the Abbey Road album cover, the four members appear as if they are performing a funeral march, and McCartney is the only barefooted Beatle and is out of step with the rest of them. Credibility: 3.
For those few of you still reading, I've saved you guys a treat. Most of you have heard of the Cold War, but it has a skeleton in its closet that conveniently escapes most textbooks. I'm talking about Project MKULTRA. The program definitely deserves its intimidating title. To counter supposed mind control efforts by the commies, the CIA authorized hundreds of subprojects, among which they experimented with LSD, psychosurgery, lobotomies, the use of Electro-Convulsive Shocks, and constant replays of the test subjects' own voices through helmets. With these dubious techniques, the government hoped to develop novel interrogation strategies, mind control, and the creation of alter personalities in the patients to attempt to revert the supposed Red Threat. It may sound a bit farfetched, but Dr. Estabrooks, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, documented the use of his discovery on an Army Service Corps Captain. But interestingly, these tests were not even done on enemy targets, but rather on unaware US citizens. Many people with anxiety issues suffered permanent comas and one man even died. The Rockefeller Commision and the Church Committee exposed these activities in the 1970s, but Richard Helms, the CIA Director at the time, ordered the evidence to be destroyed. Credibility: 8.