Amazing Conspiracy Theories E-Book

Fox Thompson

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 201

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Amazing Conspiracy Theories is an exploration of some of the most incredible conspiracy theories in the world. Among the conspiracy under discussion are Polybius (the deadly video arcade game which allegedly frazzled young minds in the 1980s), The New Coca-Cola Conspiracy, Jack the Ripper, Shapeshifting lizards, The Montauk Project, aliens, the moon landings, secret societies, The Catcher in the Rye, Nazi Germany, and Princess Diana. You can read about all of this and much more besides in Amazing Conspiracy Theories!

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Amazing Conspiracy Theories

Fox Thompson© Copyright 2023 Fox Thompson

ContentsPolybius The Coca-Cola ConspiracyJack the RipperShapeshifting LizardsHitler Survived the WarThe Montauk ProjectPrincess Diana & Other Conspiracy Laden DeathsThe Illuminati & Secret SocietiesExtraterrestrialsMoon Conspiracy TheoriesCatcher in the Rye Conspiracy TheoriesNazi Germany Conspiracy TheoriesPOLYBIUSThe legend of Polybius goes something like this. In 1981 a mysterious new game appeared at the arcade in Beaverton, Oregon. The arcade machine was called Polybius and was a strange puzzle game featuring geometric shapes. Polybius was a fiendishly addictive game that arcade kids couldn't get enough of. They found themselves compelled to return to play the game again and again. There was something about the game which seemed to almost take over anyone who played it. This had dire consequences for the kids in question. They began to suffer from seizures and nightmares. Some of them disappeared or went mad. Once a week mysterious 'men in black' would come into the arcade and tinker with the Polybius machine as if they were collecting data. Polybius allegedly didn't even require coins to play and continued running even when it was unplugged. And then one day there was an empty space in the arcade where the Polybius machine had been. It was gone. Did this game actually exist? Was any of this real? Was it some sort of secret MK-Ultra type experiment? The MK-Ultra project only became public in 1975 after a congressional investigation into CIA activities. This top secret operation was uncovered because someone forgot to shred all of the files. MK-Ultra was a surprisingly far flung project considering its secrecy. There is evidence that the CIA conducted MK-Ultra operations in Canada and even Europe. MK-Ultra experimented with LSD and basically sought to see if there was any validity to psychics, remote viewing, and mind powers. Despite the claims of people like Uri Geller it seems that there wasn't any evidence that any of these things were real. The psychics you see on television claiming to talk to dead people are patently frauds just out to make moneyThe roots of the Polybius legend seem to be a blurring of both fact and fiction. In many ways the legend draws on the real life 'Satanic panic' created by the board game Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal music in the 1980s. Dungeons & Dragons is a roll the dice fantasy board game first released in 1974. In 1982, a young man named Irving Pulling shot himself and his family blamed his obsession with Dungeons & Dragons. An organisation called B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and conservative Christian groups tried to get the game banned because they believed it celebrated demonology and witchcraft. The game was banned from a few school libraries in America but most people seemed to feel the campaign against Dungeons & Dragons was silly. The video game Doom and the Harry Potter films would later experience similar moral panics from conservative groups.In 1979, 16-year-old child prodigy James Dallas Egbert III vanished from his room at Michigan State University. He was later found in tunnels underneath the university. Egbert, who had mental health problems, later shot himself. His disappearance and later death was all blamed on Dungeons & Dragons. The moral panic over Dungeons & Dragons got so bizarre in the end there were even stories about participants in the game seeking to heighten the experience by having Dungeons & Dragons sessions in caves and underground catacombs and then vanishing - never to be seen again. These strange (and patently ludicrous) urban legends, along with the real life James Dallas Egbert III incident, inspired a book called Mazes & Monsters which was turned into a 1982 television movies starring a young Tom Hanks. What made the Dungeons & Dragons panic especially silly was that many in the outraged moral minority didn't have the faintest clue what Dungeons & Dragons even was in the first place. The fact that anyone believed your average Dungeons & Dragons player was a Devil worshipping occultist who spent their spare time in caves and catacombs was laughable. Another real life factor which plays a part in the Polybius legend is that in the early 1980s men from the FBI really did visit and monitor some video game arcades. The reason for this is that some arcades were suspected of flouting gambling laws and arcades were also sometimes used for drug dealing. Stories of kids falling ill or having seizures from playing video games were also real. A kid named Michael Lopez passed out after playing Tempest for hours on end trying to beat a record. A similar thing happened to a boy named Brian Mauro when he played Asteroids for 28 hours. Now, playing a video game for 28 hours is obviously not recommended. You are bound to be a trifle doolally after that experience. One can see though how these extreme incidents of marathon gaming led to somewhat misleading headlines of how video games were literally driving kids insane.The company behind Polybius was supposedly called Sinneslöschen (which roughly translates as 'sensory deprivation'). The biggest clue about the legend of this game was its title. Polybius was a Greek historian who warned of printing things as fact which couldn't be verified. Sure enough, the evidence for Polybius being a real game didn't exist. The origins of this legend are believed to have originated on Coinop.org in 2000. Stories that the legend began in the 1990s are impossible to verify as there is no evidence but it seems possible that Polybius existed as an urban gamer legend before 2000. Some game historians think that people who mistakenly think they played Polybius in the 1980s were actually playing a game called Cube Quest.There seem to be a number of fictional influences for the Polybius urban legend/conspiracy. One such is Nightmares. Nightmares is a largely forgotten four story horror anthology film released in 1983 and directed by Joseph Sargent. Sargent directed The Taking of Pelham One, Two Three and was a solid television director but he is most famous for Jaws: The Revenge and probably has the Razzies to prove it.Three of the segments in Nightmares were produced for an anthology television series called Darkroom but Universal decided to film a fourth segment and shunt them all into this theatrical feature instead. It was probably an attempt to latch onto the success of George Romero's Creepshow the previous year but Nightmares didn't do terribly well and is only really remembered today for the third story (The Bishop of Battle) where a teenager obsessively attempts to reach the mythical thirteenth level of a weird computer arcade game.The Bishop of Battle is a gloriously 1980s piece of nonsense. JJ Cooney (Emilio Estevez) is a video game obsessed teen with bleached hair and a Walkman the size of a brick. We meet JJ in the arcade where the graphics are predictably laughable these days and there are hustlers with headbands and bumfluff mustaches. JJ is very nifty at arcade games but - a cautionary tale if ever there was - his relationship to the real world and humanity is suffering as a consequence. He's flunking his grades, he barks at his mum and dad.JJ's life has become a quest that revolves around a game called The Bishop of Battle. He's heard that a boy somewhere once got to the thirteenth level, a feat generally considered to be impossible. When the kids at the arcade (including no lesser figure than Moon Unit Zappa) tire of watching him trying to beat the game and the manager pulls the plug on the machines, he is predictably crestfallen. "Go home losers!" he snaps. JJ is not willing to admit defeat just yet though and sneaks out of his bedroom in the dead of night to break into the empty arcade. He's determined to get to that pesky thirteenth level but what will happen if he does? There are some enjoyably dated Tron-esque special effects in this segment that I think probably blew most of the budget for Nightmares. It's fun to be in those eighties video game arcades with dated punk music blasting away when JJ goes into battle. The twist (of sorts) is relatively satisfying too.Another influence on the Polybius legend is The Last Starfighter. Some contend that the Polybius legend was actually an influence on this movie but that would mean that the Polybius urban legend was around circa 1983. That's not impossible but there isn't any evidence for that. The Last Starfighter is a cultish 1984 science fiction adventure film directed by Nick Castle. The story revolves around young Alex Rogan (Lance Guest), a teenager living in the remote Starlite Starbrite trailer park, a close-knit community where everybody knows each other. Alex, in the tradition of all adventure heroes from Luke Skywalker to Harry Potter, feels restless in the park and constricted by his mundane life of chores and obligations. He yearns to escape away to college with girlfriend and fellow Starbrite resident Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) but is shattered when his college loan application is refused. Alex consoles himself as usual by playing 'Starfighter' - a game in which he is an expert - on the park's outdoor arcade machine. But after Alex sets a new record for the Starfighter game he is paid an unexpected visit by eccentric old huckster Centauri (Robert Preston), the game's inventor. Centauri is in fact an alien from the planet Rylos and the Starfighter game is based on a real life crisis far away in a distant galaxy. His record score on Starfighter means that the bewildered Alex (with shades of Galaxy Quest) is promptly whisked off to Rylos by Centauri to join the real Star League pilots in the battle against the evil Xur and the Kodan Aramada. Some alleged that Polybius was used by the CIA as a recruiting tool. If you got a high score you were recruited. This obviously has parallels with The Last Starfighter. Another influence on the legend of Polybius is the 1984 novel Arcade by Robert Maxxe. In this novel a woman named Carrie Foster becomes concerned when her son Nick becomes addicted to a game called Spacescape at the local arcade. When she tries to investigate the arcade and game in question she becomes embroiled in a most puzzling mystery. Arcade has a lot of parallels with the Polybius legend in that a game has deep psychological effect on those who play it. Gameplay in Polybius supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player.It seems that the Polybius urban legend was created by Kurt Koller (who took over coinup.org in 198) in an attempt to drum up traffic for his website. Koller has denied this though. Polybius was clearly inspired by real life elements and though not real doesn't seem as outlandish as some other conspiracy theories you could mention. As for genuine links between government agencies and video games, well, we know that the United States Marines used a modified version of Doom II in the 1990s for soldiers to train on for combat. Polybius was not real but this myth has woven its way into gaming lore and become an enjoyable - if fictitious - legend in its own right. THE COCA-COLA CONSPIRACY In 1985 the popular beverage Coca-Cola was rebranded as New Coke and had its taste altered. The general theory behind the change seems to be that Coke was losing the sales battle with Pepsi at the time so decided to make Coca-Cola sweeter and smoother to compete with Pepsi. Well, as you probably know, there were a lot of protests at the change and after about six months later they got rid of New Coke and brought back the original Coca-Cola. The old formula was brought back and the company lost tens of millions of dollars in unsold bottles of New Coke.It was all a legendary marketing disaster... or was it? The conspiracy goes that the company did it as a ruse to serve two ends. (1) they knew, with the introduction of New Coke there would be a rush to buy the last reaming units of "Old Coke" and (2) they always intended to bring the old Coke back anyway - but now with cheaper ingredients. Because the original Coke had been "offline" for a while, people were less inclined to notice a change in taste from the fact that cheaper corn syrup had replaced sugar. The third brick in the conspiracy theory is of course that the company would anticipate a spike in sales from the return of the classic coke. Was it really a marketing ruse? The company themselves denied this and maintain that it was a genuine attempt to introduce a new and improved Coca-Cola - just one that the American public overwhelmingly rejected. The odd thing is that blind taste tests suggested people actually preferred the taste of New Coke. However, people simply didn't like the original cherished Coke being replaced by something new. When you have an established and iconic product like Coca-Cola and you suddenly decide you are going to rebrand and replace it, well, you'd have to be stupid not to expect some people to complain about this. The big mistake the company seemed to make was that they discontinued the original Coke when they launched New Coke. They should have simply launched New Coke as a new variant (as opposed to declaring this is now the ONLY Coke). When the original Coke was brought back it soon outsold New Coke. By 1986 the demand for the (now returned) original Coke was so great that it displaced Pepsi to become the biggest selling soft drink in the United States again. The whole point of New Coke had been to try and keep up with Pepsi but now - in a circuitous and complex way - the original Coke had dealt the knockout blow on the company's big rival. This is basically then the nuts and bolts of the Coca-Cola conspiracy. Some allege it was all a big ruse to create publicity (Which certainly worked, when the company announced the original Coke was coming back, American networks interrupted TV shows to report the news!) for Coca-Cola. One of the main arguments put forward in this theory is that the Coca-Cola company couldn't really have been stupid enough not to deduce that getting rid of Coke and replacing it with something new would draw protests. Therefore some allege the whole thing was a brilliant marketing trick conjured up by clever executives.  Added to this was the (alleged) fact that during the rumpus they had been able to secretly tinker with the ingredients with the original Coke to make it cheaper to produce. Because the original Coke had been absent from shelves for a while people were less likely to notice a change to the taste (and so happy to see the 'original' come back that they didn't care anyway - they just ASSUMED it was the same drink). It seems slightly doubtful that all of this could be true (the marketing scam that is - the change to cheaper ingredients seems more believable) but who knows? Stranger things have probably happened. There was another failed attempt to launch New Coke in 1990. This time is was branded Coke II but no one was very interested. Sensibly, the original Coke did not have to maker way this time! The company had learned their lesson. There was also another (more vague) attempt to do a 'New Coke' in 2004 with Coca-Cola C2. Coca-Cola C2 was marketed as a 'healthier' version of Coke in that it had half the sugar and calories of the main version. Coca-Cola C2 didn't do very well though and it was soon dropped through lack of interest. The introduction of 'Diet Coke' products like Coke Zero made  Coca-Cola C2 seem like an obsolete idea in the first place. New Coke was released again in 2019 in a marketing tie-in with Stranger Things 3 and the demand was so great the Coca-Cola website crashed. It was rather ironic that New Coke - regarded to be one of the great marketing disasters in history - was now popular enough to crash a website! People were simply curious to learn what it tasted like. The general consensus on New Coke is that is that it simply tastes sweeter than the original Coca-Cola. Many people seem to prefer the slight acid citrus bite of the original rather than the more syrupy New Coke. Believe it or not, Cocoa-Cola, in the early days, were offered a chance to purchase the struggling Pepsi company but declined. In hindsight that was a very bad mistake. One of the reasons why some allege New Coke was a marketing scam is that profits allegedly rose by 15% in 1985 for the Coca-Cola company. It's not as if the New Coke affair made them all destitute. There are other conspiracy theories involving Coca-Cola. Some allege the beverage has anti-nausea drugs in it to prevent consumers from vomiting through all the sugar. Others allege the drink is loaded with sodium to deliberately make you thirsty. JACK THE RIPPERIn 1888, Jack the Ripper murdered and dismembered five women in the Whitechapel district of London in brutal fashion. However, he was never caught and we still don't know who he really was. The Ripper targeted prostitutes and left some hideously gruesome crime scenes. He hacked out internal organs and disfigured the faces of his unfortunate victims. During the Jack the Ripper murders, Queen Victoria received thousands of letters from women demanding that the police do more to catch the killer. Alas though, the killer was never found. The canonical victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. It is often presumed though that other murders around this time might possibly have been the work of the Ripper too. One of the first books inspired by Jack the Ripper was The Mystery of Jack the Ripper by Leonard Matters. The book suggested that the Ripper was a doctor who became enraged after his son was killed by a dose of syphilis he'd caught from a prostitute. In 1923, William Tufnell LeQuex wrote a book in which he suggested Jack the Ripper was a Russian doctor involved in a Czarist plot to murder women in London and make the British police and establishment seem weak and ineffective. There have been endless Jack the Ripper books proposing all manner of theories (some outlandish and long since debunked and others plausible and interesting) and all manner of suspects.William Withey Gull, physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria, is often lumped in with Ripper suspects. This is a blurring of fiction with fact. Gull has been portrayed as being responsible for the murders in a number of works of Ripper fiction but in reality was an old man recovering from a heart attack at the time of the murders. Stephen Knight’s book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution is responsible for the Jack the Ripper conspiracy that has Prince Albert Edward Victor and Sir William Gull plus a Freemson conspiracy all involved in the Whitechapel murders. A large number of conspiracy theories seem to feature the British Royal Family. The obvious explanation for this is that the royal family is rich, famous, ancient, and has many connections in the top stratas of society. They are therefore relatively easy to tie into numerous conspiracies both old and new.Knight's book is entertaining but more fiction than fact. Stephen Knight's royal and masonic conspiracy theory concerning Jack the Ripper was the basis not only of Alan Moore's From Hell but also the 1988 Jack the Ripper TV miniseries with Michael Caine. Some have suggested that the killing of Mary Kelly by Jack the Ripper was suggestive of masonic rituals in the way the heart was burned. Anyway, William Withey Gull was definitely not the Ripper though nor involved in a royal conspiracy. The notion of a royal conspiracy theory in relation to the Ripper murders has been floated in various books and inspired some entertaining works of fiction. In the 1960s Prince Albert Victor was mentioned in connection with the Ripper murders with the claim that he had a child with a girl in Whitechapel and this had to be hushed up by the authorities. Because some prostitutes became aware of the 'scandal' they had to be killed to ensure their silence. It was designed to make it seem like the work of a deranged serial killer. This theory has been widely debunked in fairly recent times and can best be described as a diverting piece of conspiracy fiction. A variation on the Prince Albert Victor/Ripper theory is that Albert went insane after contracting a STD from a prostitute and became a serial killer as a consequence. It is alleged that the royal family knew that Albert had gone bonkers and become a killer but they turned a blind eye and swept it all under the carpet. There is only one not insignificant problem with this theory. It has been established that Prince Albert Victor wasn't even in London when any of the canonical Ripper murders took place. It was therefore, you would presume, completely impossible for Prince Albert Victor to have been Jack the Ripper. He was actually at Balmoral hobnobbing with German royals when two of the murders took place. Prince Albert Victor died of some sort of fever (an influenza epidemic is commonly blamed) at the age of 28 and because he died young and not that much is known about his day to day life he seems to have become a lightning rod for crazy Ripper conspiracy theories. It is often alleged that he was gay or bisexual but there is little evidence for this claim and in his time he courted numerous high society women in Europe while he was looking for a suitable bride. Because Prince Albert Victor died of a fever this gave rise to conspiracy theories that he'd picked up an STD or gone completely insane. In those days though it was entirely possible to die from a fever or illness at a healthy young age. Prince Albert Victor is essentially a red herring used as a plot device to spin Ripper conspiracy yarns and fiction stories. Much of what has been written about him is fiction - especially the part which attempts to connect him to the Ripper murders. The physician Thomas Stowell said in 1970 that Prince Albert Victor's participation in stag hunting would have given him the butchery knowledge necessary to be the Ripper. Then we had Joseph Gorman's (soon to be discredited) claim that Prince Albert Victor had a relationship with shop assistant Annie Elizabeth Crook and that prostitutes had to be killed to keep this a secret. Thus the establishment created Jack the Ripper. Stephen Knight then took up the baton and ran with the theory - throwing in a child and a masonic conspiracy. All of this has since been debunked.Press clippings and royal court diaries show that Prince Albert Victor was in Yorkshire when Mary Ann 'Polly' Nichols was murdered. He was in York at an army barracks when Annie Chapman was killed. When Mary Jane Kelly was murdered, Prince Albert Victor was staying at Sandringham House in Norfolk. And so on. He was never in London when any of the murders took place. Letters emerged some years ago in the public domain purporting to be between Prince Albert Victor and his doctor. The letters are alleged to indicate that Victor was suffering from gonorrhoea (the 'clap'). While this is not without interest (if true, from whom did he acquire this STD?) it still doesn't offer much in the way of proof that he was Jack the Ripper or a catalyst for a conspiracy. The royals are human beings just like us with faults and flaws and weaknesses but there is no evidence that they used their influence to murder prostitutes in 1888 in order to quash a scandal. This theory is a very entertaining one as far as theories go but it is purely fictional and best approached as entertainment or alternative history rather than fact. Elements of this royal Ripper conspiracy theory sometimes allege that Walter Sickert was involved too. Walter Sickert was a German-born British painter who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London. Walter Sickert has somehow become a recurring Jack the Ripper suspect - which is slightly ironic as he was apparently fond of sharing lurid Ripper tales at parties. The crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell famously wrote a book in which she argued that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. If you wanted to be really cynical you might say that Patricia Cornwell stuck to fiction with her tales of Sickert being the Ripper but she has her supporters and you'll inevitably find Sickert featured prominently in any list of Ripper suspects you encounter online. Is there anything in the 'Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper' theories or is it all a load of hogwash? Well, let's try and find out. The general consensus is that Patricia Cornwell's insistence that Jack the Ripper was Walter Sickert doesn't really hold water. She claims, for example, that Sickert was angered by his impotence. However, we know that Sickert committed adultery on his wife, had many mistresses, and once had a child out of wedlock. Most sources seem to suggest that Sickert actually had rectal surgery (as opposed to genital surgery) so Cornwell's entire thesis here seems to be based on a mistake. Cornwell claimed that DNA evidence from Sickert's paintings and the Ripper letters proved he was the Ripper but many would question if any of the Ripper letters were genuine and use of DNA evidence in a case this old is difficult to cite with absolute certainty. Even if Sickert did write a hoax Ripper letter, as Cornwell believes, that still doesn't make him Jack the Ripper. The hoaxer Wearside Jack didn't turn out to be the actual Yorkshire Ripper. Sicket was not a Ripper suspect when he was alive. In fact, it was only retrospectively many decades later when his name began to be linked to this infamous killer. Donald McCormick's 1959 book The Identity of Jack the Ripper and the 1976 book Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution by Stephen Knight both suggested that Sickert could be involved in the Ripper murders. Sickert and the Ripper Crimes by Jean Overton Fuller is another book which suggests Sickert was involved in the Ripper crimes and could have been the killer.The problem with the three books just mentioned is that they've largely been discredited since publication and treat hoaxes and inaccuracies as fact in places.