Conspiracy Theories – Some classics and some oddities

The 1963 assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas has been the subject of numerous conspiracy theories that challenge the conclusion of the original official investigation that the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. Subsequent contradictory investigations, suggestions of official cover-ups of botched investigations and examination of incomplete and contradictory evidence have not provided a conclusive answer and have fuelled theories of the involvement of many different conspirators who were thought to have both the motive and means for the assassination.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the 1969 to 1972 Apollo moon landings were faked by NASA on a movie sound stage in the Nevada desert to claim victory in the space race against the Soviet Union. The theory is based on supposed irregularities in photographs from the moon; the camera equipment, light sources, camera angles and the effects of lower gravity and no atmosphere. In 2003, the airing of a US television program about the theory prompted NASA and independent expert astronomers to respond by carefully discrediting the specific details of the allegations.

Since the morning of September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon and one into a field in Pennsylvania, conspiracy theories on different aspects of the attacks have emerged. One claims that the administration of President George W. Bush knew about the attacks beforehand and purposefully allowed them to occur to generate public support for an invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. Other conspiracy theorists go further and claim that the CIA was behind the attacks and used either a missile or a truck bomb to cause the damage to the Pentagon and explosives to cause the collapse of buildings at the World Trade Center. There have been many attempts to discredit these theories but the refusal of the US Government to publicly release information from its investigations is seen as evidence of a cover-up.

Following the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi al-Fayed in a car accident in Paris in 1997, Dodi’s father, Mohamed al-Fayed, publicly rejected the findings of the official investigations and stated that he believed that the British Government orchestrated their murders. Conspiracy theorists have since claimed that the British secret service carried out the murders either independently or at the request of the British Royal family.

But wait, there's more. Other popular conspiracy theories contend that:

A secret international society of powerful individuals has manipulated world events for hundreds of years and is conspiring to assume control of the world under a global totalitarian dictatorship known as the New World Order.

The CIA allowed drug traffickers from Central America to sell crack cocaine to African-Americans in US inner cities.

The number 666, the biblical 'mark of the beast' that identifies followers of the anti-Christ, has been deliberately hidden in all barcodes used on consumer products.

HIV was created in a laboratory by US government bio-warfare researchers to wipe out gay and black populations.

In 1996, a passenger jet, TWA flight 800, was shot down by the US navy soon after take-off from Kennedy International Airport and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island.

The US military is withholding evidence of intelligent life on other planets and,

Area 51, a top secret US air force research base in the Nevada desert, is used to study aliens and their spacecraft.

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