conspiracy theories that ended up being true

03/05/09

Operation Northwoods and Operation Dropshot

To be fair, the CIA/Military-Industrial Complex/etc. engineer these types of plans all the time for every kind of weird-ass strategy out there. For every Dropshot "let's nuke Russia in 1957" plan there's probably an "Iceland Maximal" war plan that Weinberger demanded because it was on the WOPR list in WarGames.

Watching a documentary about the history of planned obsolescence and quite a bit of time is spent on the Phoebus Cartel - a cartel of lightbulb manufacturers that capped bulb lifespan at 1000 hours and fined members who developed bulbs that could last longer.

cool

the reagan/carter 'october surprise' theory seems pretty likely to be true.

going back to 1857: president buchanan did some behind-the-scenes meddling with the dred scott case.

did they ever confirm/prove that the u.s.a. knew in advance of the pearl harbor attacks, but let them happen so we'd have an excuse to get into wwII? i used this as an example that demonstrated the government's willingness to knowingly let hundreds of people die a fiery death just to get the populace at large to agree it's a fine idea to wage war (a la 9/11) but i was informed this was still a crank theory rather than an irrefutable fact

the 1950s

oh and the house committee on assassinations found in 1976 that you-know-what had almost certainly been a conspiracy, not that they could say between whom

sry, found in 1979. was convened in 76.

mk ultra - cia doing mind control stuff?

Honestly don't know the history - was this conspiracy-theorized at all before it was publicly known? I thought this was in the category of things that got revealed through all-at-once leaks or FOIA or Pentagon Papers or something.

Pearl Harbor is definitely NOT established canonical fact, last I read it was a gray area thing where like, there are some telegrams that might have indicated the Japanese trying to send an ultimatum but they didn't reach the right people. Certainly don't think there's been any smoking-gun evidence that ROOSEVELT KNEW! or w/e.

afaik, pearl harbor was def seen as a top potential target along with the phillipines and the Japanese were seen as very likely to go to war with the USA at any moment. But the US Navy intelligence did not have a clue that the Japanese fleet was approaching Hawaii on Dec. 7.

Therefore, the attack was expected only in the vaguest and most general way, and the US gov had no clear idea that an attack was forming or imminent. The conventional wisdom was that we'd have more clues, more signals and more warning, and a declaration of war would precede any open hostilities.

But COINTELPRO rules this thread for me IMO, as I argued on JFK assassination: was any consensus ever reached as to who actually did it and why? , it's like, the most crucial indication that, fuck, yeah, there ARE legit conspiracies, the government DOES pull this kind of shit on people.

xpost Yeah, kinda what I thought. Also, intelligence back then wasn't what it is today, surely, and we still get taken by surprise sometimes. Also, if the plan was just to find a way to get into the war, was it really necessary to risk eight battleships and however many cruisers and destroyers, not to mention all aboard? If they knew there was an attack coming AND where it was going to happen...

the pearl harbor theory is pretty much baseless. There's not even any strange coincidences like in the JFK case.

the FBI really did wiretap and try to get MLK jr to kill himself

well i guess i can sleep easily at night then

the plan for a new american century

CIA (indirectly) started crack epidemic in inner cities

What does "indirectly" mean in this regard? That they didn't plan the crack epidemic to happen, but their supposed involvement in cocaine trafficking was one of the factors that lead to it? How can it be a conspiracy if it wasn't planned?

also, there's stuff like bilderberg where a load of politicians and business types do go and have a no-press-coverage secretish meeting each year.

The conspiracy theory isn't just that the Bilderberg meetings do happen (which is a fact that no one's ever denied), but that those people secretly run the world, which is very unlikely, considering how much conflict of interests there must be in a group of that size. You really think Swedish and Finnish social democrats or Spanish socialists are gonna agree on the New World Order with some neoliberal bankers, or that they wouldn't blow the whistle if some shady business was going on there?

But COINTELPRO rules this thread for me IMO, as I argued on JFK assassination: was any consensus ever reached as to who actually did it and why? , it's like, the most crucial indication that, fuck, yeah, there ARE legit conspiracies, the government DOES pull this kind of shit on people.

I think the issue is that most conspiracy theories are so ludicrous they could never correspond with real conspiracies, and most real conspiracies are either so mundane or so well-hidden there are no juicy theories about them.

Jimmy Savile really was a corpse-fucking ephebophile after all.

COINTELPRO's so significant because it seemed to validate all the wilder conspiracy theories tearing through African-American communities in the 70s, like the King Alfred Plan. It was like, well they can do this so why not all this other crazy stuff?

did they ever confirm/prove that the u.s.a. knew in advance of the pearl harbor attacks, but let them happen so we'd have an excuse to get into wwII? i used this as an example that demonstrated the government's willingness to knowingly let hundreds of people die a fiery death just to get the populace at large to agree it's a fine idea to wage war (a la 9/11) but i was informed this was still a crank theory rather than an irrefutable fact

i think general consensus is that roosevelt admin thought it was likely that the japanese would try something but did not actually anticipate anything like pearl harbor. the conspiracy angle doesn't make so much sense here anyway: why would any president want to kick off a war by sacrificing the entire pacific fleet?

Luna

i was resisting that...

...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_apartment_bombings#Theory_of_Russian_government_conspiracy

still unknown afaict

Wot? No KGB? Maybe not a "conspiracy theory", but interesting and relevant: simulated response to nuclear attack on USA!

Operation Sagebrush

(Had a family member at Fort Polk in mid-fifties)

mk ultra - cia doing mind control stuff?

Honestly don't know the history - was this conspiracy-theorized at all before it was publicly known? I thought this was in the category of things that got revealed through all-at-once leaks or FOIA or Pentagon Papers or something.

It all basically poured out in the wake of the Church Committee hearings in 1975: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

Outstanding update on the 1972 disappearance of congressman/Warren Commission member Hale Boggs
http://www.seattleweekly.com/home/961602-129/story.html?Src=longreads

does the phoenix program count?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

or Unit 731 being given immunity/their files destroyed by the US? i don't know in either case if people were theorizing about them beforehand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

Conspiracies definitely happen in government, in corporations, anywhere there is money and power that can be grabbed through collusion. It's just that all the conspiracy theories that are widely discussed in public fascinate people because of their mythic qualities, not their plausibility. A conspiracy to fix the price of vitamin supplements has no mythic resonance.

Dick Cheney really does subsist on a steady diet of human babies

http://www.9jumpin.com.au/show/60minutes/stories/2015/november/nugan-hand-bank/

It’s one of Australia’s biggest mysteries, involving drug trafficking, money laundering, CIA spies and claims of murder. The collapse of the infamous Nugan Hand Bank wiped out tens of millions of dollars, most of it from mum and dad investors. When Frank Nugan, one of the founders of the bank, was found dead it meant just one man knew where the money was, and the answer to many more questions. Then he disappeared – vanished from the face of the earth. For 35 years he’s been out of reach of the Australian authorities – but now 60 Minutes has finally caught up with Michael Hand.

tl;dr: In 1980 an Australian bank with CIA/drug/mafia ties collapses mysteriously. One co-founder commits suicide. The other disappeared... until he was just found in Idaho Falls where he sells combat knives to the prepper/special ops crowd.

Original news story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT95dZSb4yk

What about the whole thing with heroin use by troops during Vietnam and that the CIA was smuggling back heroin in body bags? Was that true?

It's touched on briefly in that VH1 "Drug Years" documentary from 2006. They present it as pure fact in that documentary, but of course have no sources to back it up.

CIA was definitely smuggling heroin into Thailand through their Air America operation, but that was to fund opposition to Mao. Wouldn't be surprised if they did similar stuff later in Vietnam.

The heroin-in-body bag story comes from Frank Lucas - the big time NYC drug lord that Ridley Scott made American Gangster about. There's a great true crime book called Sergeant Smack about the guy who ran the Army side of the operation. He contradicts Lucas - so does the DEA investigator.

tl;dr it's far easier to send heroin in plain ol army mail rather than caskets.

Aside, I just lost an hour in http://www.air-america.org

This is a long read on #freeBritney and its afterlife as it spirals down into conspiracy.

https://www.medusone.com/blog/how-conspiracy-theories-became-increasingly-prevalent-in-the-free-britney-movement

Hoo boy, that looks like a very long read... but I should probably sit down and do it. I have an old friend whose posts of late, very often related to this subject but full of shorthand I cannot penetrate, make me fear she's slid into conspiracy-land.

I've read 2/3rds of it. It's an interesting arc: #freeBritney went from being maligned as conspiracy (as reported by the press) to truth and victory but it has had a very strange afterlife.

joe biden gets taller every day

huh...

The US Department of Energy has concluded that the COVID-19 virus most likely originated from a ChiCom government laboratory in Wuhan, China, the Wall Street Journal reports in an “exclusive.”

Not sure what the Dept of Energy has to do with pandemic forensics, but whatever

That conclusion has got a lot of pushback from virologists etc, ie the people who actually know about how viruses evolve and jump species.

I wonder what the Dept of the Interior thinks lol

Dave Emory thinks the whole "lab leak theory" is cover for what was a bio attack by the U.S. against China.

i don't understand the 'most likely' statement when it's immediately followed up by 'low confidence'. I personally think it seems plausible that this leaked from a lab. who fucking knows.

it's really less of a big deal than the "rah rah China did it" xenophobic assholes want it to be

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lab-leak-theory-report-covids-origins/story?id=97493392

I mean in 15 years the CDC, Department of Energy, and Department of Education will all be folded up into the Division of Stuff and it will all be run by a high level executive at Exxon so

COVID spread wayyyyyyyy earlier than anybody knew.

people on the metal cruise of 2020 with me started a rumor that it ripped through our boat, as several passengers got ill with flu-esque symptoms, but it was never corroborated. however, was entirely possible - people from all different countries were on that boat.

(me, personally, I don't think so - it would have lit up that boat with way more cases than the number of people who claim to have gotten sick)

yeah - there was a woman who died near San Jose CA in Nov 2019, and she was later found to test positive (blood samples)

is it even widely known yet approximately how many people carried and/or spread Covid without having any symptoms themselves? even when people were being tested constantly it still felt like a self-selecting group that made it hard to draw conclusions. I know a lot of people (including myself and my wife) who got Covid but never reported it, idk it wouldn't surprise me if the "official" numbers were way undercounted. combine that with the wide latitude of symptoms and severity and Covid is pretty much the perfect disease for conspiracies

I was also in the Philippines right before the pandemic started (one month) and had a weird, unspecified flu-like illness (though I was worried it was dengue fever, as I'd been bitten by mosquitoes), but I think it was just a garden variety cold. but who knows - it was unlike my usual illnesses and it put me on my ass.

(mighta been dengue as well! we didn't test)

i am convinced i had it in late 2019, i was the sickest i've ever been, i felt like i was going insane. could have just been a bad flu but who knows

It very well may have been covid.. it was definitely making the rounds by then

My wife swears we both had it in late 2019 as well. She remembers being phenomenally ill with something we both caught after I went into NYC for a jazz gig. I don't remember myself, but it's certainly possible.

My family and I also got sick around December 2019 with something that had flu-like symptoms, though we tested negative for flu. However, it does seem like all the evidence points to this emerging in Wuhan maybe October 2019 at the earliest, with only probably very isolated pockets of cases outside Wuhan until January 2020. There are so many flu-like viruses out there and this was during flu season, so I think the most likely explanation is that it was a coincidence. Not everyone who has an anecdote of being sick in late 2019 could have had Covid, otherwise it would have had to be circulating much more widely than any evidence shows.

for two days in December 2019 my wife was unable to taste anything but salt. everything she ate outside of fruit & vegetables tasted really salty to her. then it suddenly went away. that was kinda weird.

My whole family also caught a bad, non-flu virus that was rampant in late 2019. What we had was not covid.

the reagan/carter 'october surprise' theory seems pretty likely to be true.

going back to 1857: president buchanan did some behind-the-scenes meddling with the dred scott case.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, October 17, 2012 3:39 PM (ten years ago)

I actually didn't realize the October surprise theory wasn't accepted fact (can't remember where I first heard it), but this is pretty conclusive:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html

Good overview of how a lot of discourse about Covid got dismissed as conspiracy theory:

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/covid-19-pandemic-lab-leak-conspiracy-theory-scientific-method-partisan-politics-evidence/

Oh hey you're back with that

The scientific community never ruled out lab leak, but believed it's not the most likely origin.

The people arguing lab leak weren't arguing for its consideration, they were arguing that it happened and wanted the scientific community to embrace it

Ok sure

it has been an odd few years because the lab leak thing was one of the first things I heard about covid (in late 2010 when it was "everyone in wuhan is saying sars is back") and the Chinese dissident communities (for all their various faults) have stuck with it ever since, while opinion in the west seems to bubble and sway on the basis of very little evidence one way or the other. it helps if you already knew wuhan as being well-known for this I guess.

lol 2019 not 2010, my arthritis is flaring up terribly and I can barely type on this stupid phone

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government

The "War on Drugs" was started by the Nixon Administration as a way to crack down on Black people and "hippies."

xp I posted earlier in the what are you reading thread about the ufo book I'm in the middle of. Just picked it up for the first time today and the chapter I started leads with the skinwalker ranch. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?

hadn't seen this before: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5.pdf?fbclid=IwY2xjawFDcHFleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHbEIz2kbroKqBnN9Fy-NIdfO3ulHZ9Vi3gphxLgh8s8EeXRfz6CaQP56Sw_aem_BUr2t4WOc1wIGlqaytHBlQ

Elle Magazine's correspondent provides context and gets into Gateway: https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/a60129270/gateway-process-monroe-institute/

that pdf is one of the wackiest things I've read and that's saying something

These claims are supported by science. Quantum physics tells us that subatomic particles behave differently depending on how they’re observed. Our perception (thoughts) has the power to influence particles (matter).

Thanks elle magazine, I will look elsewhere for science information in future.

Seems like Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M. McDonnell had such an open mind he let it get filled up with complete garbage.

the covid lab leak theory refuses to die (most other links are behind paywalls)

https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/world/covid-lab-leak-evidence-biden-kept-in-dark-as-spy-chiefs-silenced-fbi-and-scientists-from-briefing-report-says/story