Conspiracy Classics: Apollo Moon Missions

Between 1969 and 1972, six crews of Apollo astronauts landed on the moon. They collected rocks, played golf, planted a flag and drove around in a lunar buggy.

Or maybe they just did all that in studios either in Nevada or California, and no human being has ever set foot on the moon.

That NASA hoodwinked the American public for years, spending billions of dollars on space exploration, and yet never meeting John F. Kennedy's goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, is one of the most famous conspiracy theories, ever.

Thirty-nine years ago this past Sunday, 20 July, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were supposed to have walked on the moon, put the ol' Stars & Stripes into the surface and leave a commemorative bronze plaque that they had "come in peace" to the lunar realm. Did Armstrong really take that "small step for a man," or did the government and/or New World Order dupe us again?

Why do it? To impress the Soviets during the Cold War, for one. Another reason is to justify the space program and the billions of taxpayer dollars required.

William Kaysing and Ralph Rene are two of the leading moon hoax conspiracy theorists.

Kaysing (1922-2005) could be called the "father" of the moon hoax theory. He was a Navy veteran and later technical writer and analyst at Rocketdyne, a NASA contractor, where he said he looked at numerous documents linked to the Apollo, Mercury, Gemini and Atlas programs. He concluded, after sorting through all those files, that NASA had created one gigantic hoax. In 1974 he published a book, We Never Went to the Moon, in which he lays out why he thought the Apollo missions were bogus. His daughter maintains a Web site with this book and many others here.

Rene describes himself as "a mostly self taught 'extra bright kid from the slums.' " He also has been an inventor, tradesman and small press publisher. He turned to researching and writing after the onset of athritis limited his capability for physical labor. He wrote and self-published NASA Mooned America!, another text which tries to prove that no one has ever seen the moon in person. Rene is also a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and his Web site can be accessed here.

Other hoax theorists are filmmakers David Bradley and Bart Sibrel. Sibrel, based in Tennessee, made two movies, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon and Astronauts Gone Wild. Both are sold by a site called Moon Landing Hoax. In the second film, Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin actually punched Sibrel after he confronted him, demanding that Aldrin swear on a Bible that he landed on the moon. In fact, most astronauts Sibrel has confronted have become angry when he questions their moon experiences.

David Bradley is English and connected to the Aulis Web site that explores not only space travel but also the origins of humankind. Bradley wrote and produced the documentary What Happened on the Moon?, which questions the Apollo programs. Being a filmmaker-photographer, much of the DVD covers analysis of film and photos to show how NASA faked the moon landings.

Here is a summary of the main points of contention of Kaysing, Rene and other moon conspiracy theorists:

• Computers in 1969 had a total memory capability of 256,000 bytes, about the equivalent of a pocket calculator, and were giant machines that took up an entire room. The Apollo 11 computer was supposed to have 32,000 bytes of memory. Somehow this machine expertly pushed a rocket through the atmosphere, flew men 240,000 miles to the moon, landed and then came back.
• The film and photos released by NASA and broadcast on the TV networks were doctored, sometimes sloppily. One of the most commonly cited photos is a picture of a rock with a letter "C" on it, near a letter "C" on the ground, as if marking a place on a movie set.
• The photographs and film are perfectly focused and framed almost every single time.
  
• How was Neil Armstrong filmed coming out of the lunar module when he was the first man ever to set foot on the moon?
  
• The Van Allen belts of radiation around the earth are so lethal that people would be killed leaving the atmosphere, and the lunar crafts did not have adequate shielding or materials to protect the astronauts. In addition, the space suits the astronauts wore also were not sufficient to protect them from the moon's temperature extremes and radiation.
  
• There were no stars in any of the photos or films of men on the moon.
• The moon atmosphere is a vacuum, and yet film of the flag planted into the surface show it flapping and waving.
• Shadows of astronauts and objects are inconsistent with the light sources that would have been on the moon.
• Film and cameras subjected to the moon's environment would have destroyed them due to its harsh nature, such as radiation and temperature swings. Ordinary cameras by Hasselblad of Sweden, and Kodak Ektrachrome film, were taken on the missions.

Conspiracy theorists say that the astronauts ever never went up in the Apollo rockets, or if they did, they never left earth's orbit. The moon landings and explorations were filmed in advance in a studio, allegedly in either Nevada's Area 51 or even at The Walt Disney Co, and with help from Hollywood; Stanley Kubrick has been implicated because he directed 2001: A Space Odyssey. NASA's TETR-A satellite was probably used to broadcast communications back and forth between astronauts and Houston to create the illusion that they were on the moon. After a few days orbiting the earth, the astronauts splashed down in the ocean to complete that illusion.

In addition, all those moon rocks were really collected in Antartica and then irradiated to make them seem as if they came from space, or were meteorites. One theorist claimed that Wernher von Braun, head of the NASA rocket program (and formerly of the Nazi rocket one, too) went to the South Pole shortly before Apollo 11 and collected a bunch of meteorites to use in the phony mission.

One awful theory proposed by Moon Landing Hoax, a maker of conspiracy DVDs, is that the launchpad fire of January 1967 that killed Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger B. Chaffee was actually a homicide. Apparently Grissom was going to go to the press and tell the truth about moon hoaxing, so NASA put out a contract on him and his colleagues. Grissom put a lemon in the window of the Apollo capsule as a sign of his betrayal, the site says. Later Chaffee's wife Pat committed suicide, which is alleged to also be actually a murder, so they were all being silenced!

One question, and one I ask about all conspiracy theories, is if there were thousands of people involved in NASA space programs, how have they been able to keep this "truth" secret all these decades?

Moon Landing Hoax has made about seven DVDs about the moon hoaxes, and it gives the best answer to this: perhaps only a couple hundred people knew about the moon fakery and cover-up, and everyone else was in the dark and honestly believed like most of the public that we did go that deeply into space. Further, the idea that multiple teams were assigned to many, many different small moon projects was a way that the hoaxers kept any one employee from knowing too much about the missions. The full body of knowledge was open only to a select few at NASA and the U.S. government.

Another page I found that nicely summarized the allegations against NASA are on this, of all things, a British Web site, on this page. One of the more intriguing claims is that some Australians were the very first viewers of the 1969 mission films, and one woman said while watching Neil Armstrong walking around, she actually saw a glass Coca-Cola bottle in the right hand of the picture! Several others said they saw the soft drink bottle, enough to be covered by a local newspaper. When the footage was rebroadcast in North America, of course there was no Coke bottle on the moon.

In 1978, Hollywood released a movie about a variation of this conspiracy theory called Capricorn One. Three astronauts are coerced into filming a fake Mars mission over several months. The government then decides to kill off the astronauts after their capsule burns up in space, in order to make the illusion appear real. One of the astronauts, strangely enough, was O.J. Simpson years before his infamy (the other astronauts were Sam Waterston and James Brolin). It appears this movie will be remade for release in 2010. No doubt the moon conspiracy theories inspired these movies.

Conspiracy Classics: TWA Flight 800

Twelve years ago today, a routine flight from New York to Paris became anything but when it plunged 2-1/2 miles out of the sky and into the Atlantic Ocean, near the shore of Long Island, New York.

At 8:02 p.m. on Wednesday, 17 July 1996, TWA Flight 800 took off from Kennedy International Airport, with 212 passengers, 14 flight attendants, two flight engineers and two pilots. Among the passengers were business professionals and young students headed for a cultural exchange in France. The flight was supposed to last seven hours and land at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. At 8:32 p.m., the Boeing 747-100 exploded in a massive fireball and rocketed toward into the ocean.

The remains of all 230 aboard were recovered, along with 95 percent of the plane's debris. The National Transportation Safety Board conducted the usual investigation that follows crashes, concluding that the explosion originated in the central fuel tank. The NTSB interviewed 670 eyewitnesses, analyzed the cockpit voice and data recorders and examined the debris, which today is still kept in a hangar in Viriginia and used to train aviation accident investigators.

Where conspiracy theorists see a cover-up or lack of truth is in the explanation of what caused the jet to blow up and drop like a rock out of the sky.

The two main organizations for Flight 800 truth on the Web are The Flight 800 Investigation and Flight 800 Independent Investigators Association. Flight 800 Investigation is the Associated Retired Aviation Professionals and was formed in early 1997. Membership consists of "former military, civilian, and aviation professionals who are committed to independently investigating the mysterious crash."

The Independent Researchers group was formed in 1999 by "citizens concerned with the course of the official investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 ... ," and says that "...during the investigation, the FBI unlawfully denied the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) access to forensic results and eyewitness interview documents."

Conspiracy theorists believe the U.S. government covered up the actual cause of the crash. The most common theory is that Flight 800 was shot down by a missile, either by the U.S. Navy during a training exercise on the night of the crash, or by terrorists wielding a shoulder firing missile launcher. A second theory is that a bomb made it aboard the jet and caused the disaster.

Many witnesses, first to media on the scene and later to the NTSB, said they saw a streak of light or a flash moving toward the jet before the explosion. This serves as the main basis for the missile theory. People described the object as a red streak or flare moving toward the plane, that there was horizontal travel and that it turned in midair before striking the aircraft, as noted on this page.

The page also notes that the Navy later admitted there were three submarines in the Long Island area, all equipped with missiles. Another page on Hidden Mysteries quotes James Sanders' book on the disaster that the Navy was in the area on 17 July 1996, testing a new secret missile system.

Hidden Mysteries also presents a letter sent by a retired Navy officer that he and a team had assembled evidence that Flight 800 had been downed by a shoulder fired missile. Known as a MANPAD, or Man Portable Air Defense System, this device dates to the 1950s and can shoot a surface to air missile at an airborne object. In this post-9/11 environment, the greatest concern is of MANPADs being used by terrorists to knock out planes, particularly those of the United States and its allies. Flight 800 Investigation notes that the FIM-92 Stinger MANPAD could have easily taken out the TWA jet, if indeed terrorists had caused the explosion and the crash.

The NTSB investigation concluded there were no explosives aboard the jet, but even mainstream media, such as The New York Times and CNN, carried reports that explosive residue was found on the wreckage. Their explanation? It was left behind by bomb sniffing dogs that had gone through the plane.

Some CT's have declared something was even more sinister about the flight, that perhaps Bill Clinton and Al Gore thought passengers were carrying damaging evidence on board that could have doomed their re-election that fall -- in this case, two Arkansas state troopers who wanted to talk about Clinton's evil ways. This was later found to be a hoax. A second suggestion was that terrorists really had destroyed the plane, another factor that could have affected the presidential election.

The NTSB's accident report is also available online, with the conclusion that a short circuit by the central wing fuel tank set off the explosion.

But a dozen years later, that explanation still does not hold water with the conspiracy world, and to this day they demand that the government tell the truth about TWA Flight 800.

Conspiracy Chasers: David Icke

Those of the world of conspiracy theory are often as colorful as their speculations on the real history of the world and those who control it. As the old saying goes, you couldn't make this stuff up.

Take David Icke, for example. Born in 1952 in Leceistershire, England, Icke -- rhymes with "bike" -- grew up to become a pro soccer player, a newspaper reporter and finally a sportscaster for the BBC. After the 1988 Olympics, Icke left broadcasting to become spokesman for the Green Party.

And, in 1990, he donned turquoise clothing and declared himself a "son of God." He had received a message from the "other side" that he was supposed to dedicate his life to healing the earth. After that stirred up some controversy, the Greens kicked him out. For most of the '90s Icke said he couldn't walk down the street without people pointing at him and laughing.

As the new millennium dawned, Icke came out swinging at the New World Order, declaring that the British royal family, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were all human-repitilian alien hybrids who could change their shapes at will. Not only that, but these hybrids worshiped Satan, routinely performed human sacrifice and drank human blood. They are in league with purebred reptilian aliens from the "lower Fourth Dimension" who have been on earth for centuries and wish to dominate and exploit the earth. These claims were the cornerstone of one of his best known books, The Biggest Secret. In that book, Icke writes:

These hybrid human-reptile lines carry the reptilian genetic code and thus can be far more easily possessed by the reptilians of the lower fourth dimension. ...these bloodlines became the British and European aristocracy and royal families and, thanks to the "Great" British Empire, they were exported across the world to rule the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and so on. These genetic lines are manipulated into the positions of political, military, media, banking and business power, and thus these positions are held by lower fourth dimensional reptilians hiding behind a human form or by mind-puppets of the these same creatures. They operate through all races, but predominantly the white one.

A question: how believable is that the most powerful players in the New World Orders are part reptile? And additionally, how many people are going to believe a guy who makes these claims who still wears a mullet in 2008?

Icke has said that Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had Princess Diana killed in 1997 -- she was just plain human, though was married to the reptiloid-human Prince Charles and had two equally scaly boys, Princes William and Harry. He has also said the list of hybrid Satanists includes the corny country singer Boxcar Willie, whom he additionally accuses of pedophilia.

I remember Boxcar Willie once in my life. I was a teenager in the late '70s, and he was on this TV commercial selling a mail order LP of his greatest hits, with footage of him singing framed by, not surprisingly, the doors of a train boxcar. He seemed folksy, annoying and goofy -- I guess it's those people we suspect the least of being the absolute depths of evil.

The David Icke official Web site is extremely busy, with one of the longest homepages I have ever seen. There is a store where you can buy something like 20 books by him and numerous DVD lectures he has given around the world. The Web site has been jazzed up since my last visit, now even using bizarre Photoshopped pictures to continue building a picture of the New World Order plans.

To repeat, would anyone believe a guy who has a mullet in the year 2008? The answer is more and more people each day. Icke lectures around the world, and these talks are often well attended.

Another player in Icke's world is Arizona Wilder, a woman with a name straight out of American soap operas (real name is Jennifer Greene). Beyond her real name, I have been able to find little biographical info on her beyond her own claims. In fact, the only page I found was this one, where a reader emailed Trash City that she worked as a nurse along with Wilder/Greene at a psychiatric unit -- where she was also a nurse, not one of the patients!

In The Biggest Secret and her own video, Revelations of a Mother Goddess, she says as a high priestess she personally conducted human sacrifices and blood drinking rituals for the British royals, George Bush Sr. and Henry Kissinger. She says she also has seen some of these power players shift into their reptilian forms. She adds that she had led a life where she was both psychically trained and ritually abused in order to become an employee of the New World Order, receiving personal instruction from Josef Mengele himself, the "Angel of Death" doctor from the Auschwitz concentration camp.

So why hasn't the NWO taken this woman out, and why hasn't she been charged with first degree murder for killing people? Maybe because many regard her as a nut and no threat to the Secret Leaders, and her admitted crimes are also imaginary.

I got a kick out of this quote from her about the late Queen Mother (1900-2002), Elizabeth, wife of King George V and mother of the current queen:

[She] was cold, cold, cold, a nasty person. None of her cohorts even trusted her. They have named an altar (mind-control program) after her. They call it the Black Queen. I have seen her sacrifice people. I remember her pushing a knife into someone's rectum the night the two boys were sacrificed. One was 13 and the others 18. You need to forget that the Queen Mother appears to be a frail woman. When she shape-shifts into a reptilian, she becomes very tall and strong. Some of them are so strong they can rip out a heart and they all grow by several feet when they shape-shift.

Icke has faced controversy, nost surprisingly. He has been accused of being among the anti-Semitic arm of the Conspiracy Theorists due to his writings about Jewish bankers. He has aroused the attention of the Anti-Defamation League, which like many CT's he claims is a front by the Rothschilds. He found himself also linked with Combat 19, a British neo-Nazi group that listed his lecture tour in its magazine in 1995.

Icke's defense has been that he's not anti-Jewish but is against people (or reptile-people?) who pretend to be Jews -- such as the Rothschild banking dynasty -- and exploit everyday Jews to continue to fatten their wallets and increase their power. He has said that he worries about the Jewish race because those members of the New World Order who say they're Jewish are using it as a pawn in their secret plans.

And finally, I have to agree with this writer that how were the reptilian identities of Princes William and Harry protected, as well as their dad. "[Icke] also mentions Wilder's claim that the royal lizards change back when they sleep, which must have made Prince Charles' time at Gordonstoun public school and in the armed forces very entertaining for those sharing his sleeping quarters..." What happened when the princes attended exclusive boarding schools? Did they have private bedrooms with armed guards at the doors so no one could see those big slippery slumbering lizards within?

9/11 -- Unamercian Activities: Part I, Overview

Part of the inspiration for doing this blog about conspiracy theory was all the hundreds of pages I must have waded through since 2002, which accuse the New World Order of destroying New York's largest building, damaging the Pentagon and killing 3,500 just so some elites can make money, wage war and steal our civil liberties.

Conspiracy theorists don't believe the official story for 11 September 2001, just as they do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone to kill John F. Kennedy. We know the official story: 19 Middle Eastern men became radicalized and grew to hate the United States. They trained in al Qaeda camps, came to the U.S. and carefully blended in by being as western as possible. They took flying lessons and then hijacked four planes, with plans to ram them into three national landmarks. United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was supposed to have struck the White House or Capitol building. The World Trade Center towers collapsed because their steel beams were weakened by burning airline fuel, and 7 World Traded Center tumbled because fires had been burning in it all day.

National polls have shown at least a third of Americans believe this explanation is false, and that the United States government, possibly with help, actually staged the attacks (an inside job.) A Scripps Howard poll from August 2006 found 36 percent thought it was "somewhat likely" to "very likely" a U.S. plot. A Zogby poll take in May 2006 indicated 42 percent of people felt the government covered up the truth about the terrorist attacks. At least three New York Times polls showed a range from 65 percent in May 2002 to 53 percent in October 2006 of those who believe the feds lied about 9/11.

In future posts I wish to go in depth and include links to various discussions of the conspiracy in this 9/11 series, which I have called Unamerican Activities. In this first entry, a brief overview of conspiracy theorist claims is given.

1. The jets that hit the buildings were flown not by the terrorists identified by the FBI, but using remote control devices on the ground that tapped into the autopilot. Sites discuss the existence of this remote control technology, such as its use in surveillance drone planes, as well as news reports that the terrorists were terrible flight students who could hardly pilot a Cessna, let alone a Boeing 767. This story from October 2001, about a technology called Home Run, was the earliest story I ever read on the remote control theory.

2. The projectiles that struck the buildings were not jets at all, but missiles. This especially applies to the Pentagon. This claim originated most likely with French CT and writer Thierry Meyssan, whose "Hunt the Boeing!" seems to be no longer online (but see a mirror of it here). The page said that only a missile could have hit the Pentagon, due to the size of the hole left after the attack, the lack of aircraft debris and relatively minor damage.

3. A similar claim was made about Flight 93, that whatever crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was not a jet, but more likely another missile. A site similar to Meyssan's called "Hunt the Boeing II" presents similar claims: a shallow crater left by the jet's crash, lack of debris, smoke from the crash looked more like that from an explosive, and lack of scorched earth that would have been caused by hundreds of gallons of jet fuel. Another claim was that Flight 93 never crashed but was diverted to the Cleveland airport. Another variation is that 93 crashed not because of valiant struggle between passengers and terrorists, but because the military shot the jet down.

4. The towers in the WTC did not collapse due to weakened beams and fires burning out of control, but by controlled demolition. These claims stem from various analyses of photos and especially video and audio. Both main WTC towers 1 and 2, as well as 7 WTC, dropped cleanly and perfectly straight down, just like buildings loaded with explosive charges that are supposed to tumble like this.

Theorists have looked at video and said they could see puffs of smoke and small explosions that are evidence of bomb "squibs" going off in the towers' frameworks to bring the structure down. The 9/11 truth movement also has its share of academics who also have weighed in on the collapse causes, as shown here and here.

The WTC towers were the first ever skyscrapers to collapse due to fire. Site reports, such as this one at Serendipity, show how even the Windsor Building in Madrid, Spain burned for two days and still did not fall.

A quote by Larry Silverstein, owner of the WTC complex's management company, about his order to "pull" 7 WTC has been presented as evidence that he ordered that building to be destroyed. This quote came from a PBS documentary called America Rebuilds that aired late in 2001. You can see Silverstein on this link at YouTube.

5. The U.S had help, by Mossad, the Israeli security agency, the British spy agencies MI5 and MI6, or all of them. One theory of the New World Order is that England wants to still control and influence the U.S. government and foreign policy (maybe they're still angry over 230 years later that we beat them in the American Revolution). The U.S. protection and favorable treatment of Israel suggests to some theorists how America is in league with Israel/Zionists as members of the New World Order...

6. ...And, most of all, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are most to blame. The Bush administration did this to the United States so that all of his and Cheney's friends and business associates could get even richer from war, oil production and huge government contracts (here is where you hear about Cheney and Halliburton, for example). And Bush-Cheney also want to turn the USA into a police state, so as to control us even more heavily because we must be protected from The Enemy.

7. The devil and/or aliens made them do it. There have been claims of UFOs at the World Trade Center site, based on flying debris in video, as well as photos and video of what look like demon faces appearing in the concrete powder clouds that were pushed out as the towers fell or were struck by jets. To some, this is evidence of an evil beyond this world, either from hell or outer space.

Conspiracy 101, Part II: More Secret Groups

In my last post, I discussed what a conspiracy theory was and began to talk about some of the members of the New World Order (NWO), or Secret Leaders as I call them, who most commonly appear in Web sites dedicated to uncovering the clandestine goings-on of those who rule us.

In my discussions and all of my blog posts from here on out, I will provide links directly to conspiracy theory sites from which I have drawn information, and a list of links to some of the most prominent sites will be started and constantly expanded on the right side of this blog page.

To recap, conspiracy theory may be linked to Christian millennialism or prophecy or be strictly secular in an analysis of politics, business and world economy. The NWO may be, according to the many different CT's, (1) all Jewish people/groups or Zionists; (2) Jews and supporting gentile families/societies; (3) a general collection of secret groups and families not defined or bound to religious or ethnic definitions; (4) an alliance of malicious aliens and ambitious humans; or (5) malicious aliens alone masquerading as humans. The fifth version of the NWO, I think, is the rarest and probably the material of Hollywood movies (another industry controlled by the SL's, the conspiracy theorists would say).

Millennialism is based on an interpretation of the prophecies of the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. In general, a millennialist believes that first Christians will be taken up to heaven in a mass action called the Rapture; there will be seven years of hell on earth ruled by the Anti-Christ called the Tribulation; Jesus will come back to earth and defeat the Anti-Christ; and then He will reign over the earth for a thousand years (a millennium; thus the name of the belief).

A second definition: the term New World Order first appeared in print around 1939-40, in publications by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Congressional Record, and British science fiction writer H.G. Wells in a book called -- The New World Order. To the CT, the NWO is not a concept of international cooperation, unity and peace, but a global plan for domination and exploitation of the common man by the clandestine families and related organizations.

I also mentioned the Masons and the Illuminati in my previous entry. I would be remiss if I don't mention the Order of the Skull and Bones, a secret society at Yale University in Connecticut that has existed since 1830. Among its members are the Bushes -- Sen. Prescott Bush of Maine (1895-1972), President George H.W. Bush (1924- ) and President George Walker Bush (1946- ). Among other members were President William Howard Taft, Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite, numerous university presidents, business magnates, bankers, politicians and government officials. If you want to see even more of who's who, Wikipedia offers this page.

Because Yale is an elite university, and the members of Skull and Bones often came from prominent and powerful families ... well, that explains it. The group exists as part of the network of NWO families and groups to provide support and lines of communication for the evil plotters. Secondly, it another organization that grooms all these young men (and recently women) to take their places in the NWO and continue to exploit and oppress us.

Simply being a secret society casts suspicion on the Skull and Bones. Some CT's believe that the Central Intelligence Agency was founded by Bonesmen (as members are called) and membership in the Order was a requirement in order join in on the spying fun. Some Bonesmen who shaped the CIA are Tracy Barnes, who oversaw the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; McGeorge Bundy, advisor to John F. Kennedy; and George Bush Sr., CIA director in the 1970s. Many Yale alumni did go into the spy biz in the last half of the 20th century, which also could be presented as more evidence that the CIA and Skull and Bones are connected.

The Illuminati, the Bavarian group banned in the 1780s but is supposed to exist today, is commonly cited as a NWO group. One theorist, Fritz Springmeier, has written about the 13 Illuminati "bloodlines" of extremely old and wealthy families. They not only control everything -- global banking, major multinational corporations, media and government -- but worship Satan and practice horrifying rituals, such as human sacrifice and drinking blood. Names you ought to know: Rockefeller, Rothchild, Astor, Bundy, Freeman, Kennedy, Li, Onassis, Reynolds, Russell, Van Duyn and the Merovingians (a European royal family originating among the ancient Germanic tribe called the Franks).

Springmaier further contends that the Illuminati families founded the Jehovah's Witnesses (and its related Watchtower & Bible Tract Society) and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or "Mormons"). He also says they created the Trilateral Commission and Bilderberg Group, which also come up on a lot of CT Web sites. It is obvious in reading his book online that Springmaier is of the Christian/millennialist theory school.

The Bilderberg Group is an annual meeting of elite of governments, business, mass media and finance. Just over a hundred people get to attend this invitation only gathering, held at five-star hotels in Europe or the Americas. All Bilderberg Group meetings are closed to the public and the general media. The Group gets its name from the first of its meetings in 1954 -- the Bilderberg Hotel in Arnhem, Netherlands. The group's strict secrecy, along with attendance limited to elites, makes it ripe for accusations for membership in the New World Order.

The Trilateral Commission has close ties to the Council on Foreign Relations, and both are cited as members of the Secret Leaders cabal. The TLC was founded in 1973 under the direction of banker David Rockefeller, head of the family's Chase Manhattan Bank and at the time chair of the CFR. On its own Web site, the TLC says its purpose is "to foster closer cooperation among ... core democratic industrialized areas of the world with shared leadership responsibilities in the wider international system." He was assisted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, later national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.

The CFR dates back to 1921 and had its roots in a group of scholars commissioned by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as World War I ended to study the direction of global politics and international relations. That earliest group included future President Herbert Hoover and Paul Warburg, member of one of the infamous banking families you might meet on conspiracy Web sites, and early advocate for creation of the Federal Reserve (which is often looked upon as an NWO plot). Others involved in the 1920s included the Rockefellers, their PR manager, banker J.P. Morgan's lawyer and Averell Harriman and John Foster Dulles, two future members of presidential cabinets.

The CFR today says its purpose is to research, understand and improve the relation of the United States with the rest of the world. The council, essentially, bills itself as a think tank on international relations. But its push for global cooperation, along with meeting in secret and the council's birth among financiers and political leaders, makes it the perfect target for conspiracy theorists. To compare, look at the CFR's Web site, and then this description on the popular site Illuminati Conspiracy Archive.

Conspiracy 101, Part I: Conspiracy Defined; Secret Groups

To define "conspiracy theory," I like the Merriam-Webster Dictionary's little summary: a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.

In science you're told a theory is a carefully tested concept proven through rounds of countless experiments and proven hypotheses, a major effort constructed using the scientific method.

That isn't the case necessarily with conspiracy theory. Many of the sites throw massive amounts of facts at you and scream loudly about the diabolical Masons/Illuminati/Rockefellers/Rothschilds/aliens/reptile-human hybrids are trying to enslave us all and mwah-hah-hah ... rule the world!

But conspiracy theory can be summed up by another Merriam-Webster entry for just the word "theory": the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another. A lot of the Web site articles do try, amongst the rhetoric and fury against the Forces of Satan and other secret leaders, to figure out what the facts are and how they connect. Some are hampered by the ridiculous sounding theories or guesses at who is really ruling the earth, such as previously mentioned repitile-humans and other creatures from outer space who want to control us.

Conspiracy theorists (CT's) don't accept the official version of history, and they distrust the media's report on current events. The media, they say, are simply an extension of the secret world leaders and print/broadcast/post online whatever these dominators tell them to. The leaders' firm control of the press, banks, oil supply, major corporations and governments around the globe is how they are enslaving us. Some theorists say the plot has patiently been unfolding for centuries, as Secret Leaders (SL's) pass on the enslavement plan from father to son or old members to new members.

The theorists are surprisingly diverse, though politically they lean toward extreme left or right. Theorists also can be divided into secular and religious, with the latter often seeing Satan as the underlying cause for everything and possibly tying into the prophecies of the Book of Revelation. The non-religious theorists range from those who try to rationally claim bankers and other SL's pull all the strings, all the way to those who sound like something out of The X-Files: elite humans have joined up with aliens who want to conquer earth.

One of the more disturbing aspects of conspiracy theorists, most often to the Jews, is the accusation that some are anti-Semitic and fascist. The theory that Jews and/or Zionists are either the leaders of global domination or are a major part of it may mainly be traced back to The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a pamphlet that appeared in 1905 and contained in 24 parts a plan for Jews to completely take over. Many today believe Protocols was actually written not by Jews, but by the Russian czar's secret police in the 1890s.

Just to give an example out of the Protocols:

The abstraction of freedom has enabled us to persuade the mob in all countries that their government is nothing but the steward of the people who are the owners of the country, and that the steward may be replaced like a worn-out glove. It is this possibility of replacing the representatives of the people which has placed them at our disposal, and, as it were, given us the power of appointment.

Zion is the Biblical name for the Israel of the Old Testament; it is derived from Hebrew for "highest point." That ties in with Mount Zion, on whicih there once was a Canaanite fortress that King David defeated and established his own city.

Zionists are people who wanted to re-establish a Jewish state in Palestine in the Middle East. The modern Zionist movement is credited to Theodor Herzl, an Austro-Hungarian Jew who called for forming a Jewish state in the 1890s. Herzl was covering the court trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish captain accused of spying for Germany. Dreyfus was acquited, and Herzl believed his accusation in the first place was caused by anti-Jewish sentiment in France. Herzl believed the only way to get away from anti-Semitism in Europe was for Jews to create their own country in Palestine.

More recent example of Jewish involvement was cited on a number of sites of the 9/11 truth movement, whose stories may have appeared either once in the media or simply in those endlessly forwarded emails. One example was a report that someone saw agents from Mossad, the Israeli security agency, cheering on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River as the World Trade Center towers fell. Another claimed that all of the Jews who worked at the WTC were warned a couple days before 9/11 not to go to work that day because something was coming. A third accuses Larry Silverstein, owner of the WTC property, of using terrorist attacks as a cover for actually blowing up the buildings so he could get multi-billion dollar insurance settlements.

(Speaking of the 9/11 truth movement, I also will be doing a series of posts discussing the conspiracy theories around this terrorist attack and the sites and people who do not believe the official "al Qaeda did it--the jets hit the towers and collapsed them--a jet hit the Pentagon" version of history.)

Though there are the theorists who do include the Jews and/or Israelis in their writings, there are actually Jewish CT's as well. Their interpretations are often similar to other theorists about a band of secret societies; they just don't include Israel, Zionists or similar.

The two most commonly cited non-Jewish groups cited as SL's are the Masons and the Illuminati (sometimes they are cited as Jewish creations, other times as born from secret, ancient families). The former is famous as a "fraternal" society, with lodges all around the world and degrees of membership to which a man can attain (women join Order of the Eastern Star). Masons appeared in the 1500s or 1600s and have always had some set of secret rituals and beliefs. Nine signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence were Masons, as were 14 U.S. presidents, including George Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Gerald Ford.

CT's have accused many of the world's leaders of being high-degree Masons who engage in Satanic ritual and physical and sexual abuse of women and chlidren, and Masons in general are part of the Great Overall Plot.

The Iluminati movement grew out of the Enlightenment in the 1700s, a movement that looked to reason, scientific method and questioning of the metaphysical. Adam Weishaupt is credited with founding the Illuminati in Bavaria in the 1770s. His chapter was supposed to have a huge cache of books on the occult, witchcraft and other "forbidden" subjects and were trying to either overthrow or infiltrate governments. The Bavarian government banned all Illuminati chapters by the mid-1780s, and CT's will say that organization didn't die, it simply went underground.

In my next entry, I will introduce you to even more Secret Leaders of the world domination and aspects of conspiracy theory.

First Post: They're All Out to Get Us

George W. Bush is part reptile.

The U.S. government committed 9/11, not al Qaeda.

The government has a weather machine that creates big hurricanes like Katrina.

Area 51 in Nevada, USA, has miles and miles of secret underground research facilities shared by both humans and several types of aliens.

The world isn't ruled by kings, presidents or premiers, but by bankers, Masons, old rich families and Satanists.

Jets flying overhead are seeding clouds and atmosphere with who knows what -- just look how long their contrails stay around.

Ridiculous claims? Sure, but there are people who truly believe such things about our world. Anywhere on the Web, you can find everything from several articles to entire sites that try to explain and prove all of the theories and claims stated above.

Welcome to the first post of Be Very Afraid, a blog devoted to looking at conspiracy theories and those who create them, as well as the sites that host them.

There is a whole subculture on the Net devoted to conspiracy theories. The Web sites are often massive, with hundreds or even thousands of articles, full of angry and strident prose and a thousand accusations. The most common targets seem to be the United States and its government.

This blog will introduce you to conspiracy theories, Web sites and some of the more colorful theorists who are out there. Believe if you want, or call it a pile of bunk, but the theorists aren't going away. And, with rising oil prices, recession and endless war, the fear factor is only going to grow.

Do I believe in conspiracy theories? I believe there is a possibility, but I would like more of these sites to offer more proof, harder facts, more eyewitnesses. Then I might just believe that THEY want to take over the world...