Thanks to the mass sharing allowed by social media sites,
we’re currently living in the golden era of the conspiracy theory. The truth may be out there,
but there are millions of lies out there, too - We’re sorry to burst your bubble,
folks, but Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Tupac are definitely dead, Wayfair Furniture isn’t
involved in human trafficking, and we’d advise you to leave any lizard people theories at the door.
But that doesn’t mean every conspiracy is false - In fact,
some of the ones that turned out to be true are often the craziest of all.
First, we’ll open with a classic: MKUltra - The CIA’s Secret Mind Control Plot. When LSD,
a hallucinogenic chemical compound, became a popular drug in the mid-20th century,
hippies were using it to touch the face of God at music festivals, and the CIA - Who,
spoilers, will come up a lot in this video - were trying to weaponize it.
The concept of the CIA developing a secret mind control program sounds like something
you might hear being discussed extensively at your local psyche ward, but believe it or not,
this really did happen during the covert MKUltra project. They tricked heroin addicts into taking
LSD doses and recruited unsuspecting men at fake brothels, followed by electroshock and hypnotism
experiments. As far as we’re aware, no useful results ever came out of this project - Despite
the experiments destroying the lives of many of their subjects. When a Freedom
of Information Act request spilled the beans on this project in 1977, it gave the American
public yet another reason in an already turbulent decade to distrust the government.
But the US Government isn’t the only one who was up to some crazy, conspiracy-inspiring science
experiments. This may seem like a lowbrow joke, but in the 1960s, the Canadian government funded
the creation of a real-life Gaydar. Before you all start snickering like high schoolers,
you should know that despite seeming pretty silly on the surface, this had horrible consequences
for the lives of around 400 people. Frank Robert Wake, a Professor at Canada’s Carleton University,
designed the machine to measure pupil dilation in response to images of a homosexual nature.
This incredibly unscientific device was then tested on a huge number of
government employees, 400 of whom were fired after testing positive for gay.
The cruelest insult on top of all of this financial injury? The real-life gaydar was
internally nicknamed “The Fruit Machine”, a nod towards a common homophobic phrase at the time.
Stay classy, Canada.
Let’s hop away from North America and over to North Korea, one of the weirdest countries in
the world. There are very few countries that are actively friendly with the DPRK,
but one country that has a particularly strained relationship with them is Japan,
so much so that there was a long-running conspiracy theory of the North Korean
government disappearing Japanese Citizens. And as you’ve probably guessed from the title of
this video, this conspiracy theory turned out to be completely true.
In 2002, the now-deceased former Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il straight-up admitted that
the country had kidnapped at least thirteen Japanese citizens. To their credit, they did
give five of them back after this. The location of the other eight is still an open question.
Okay, back to the United States now. Though this conspiracy was performed against the US
Government rather than by it: The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes
Booth. Even our framing there suggests that John Wilkes Booth was a lone-wolf triggerman,
a deranged, racist, out-of-work actor willing to bet his life to take down Honest Abe. Naturally,
conspiracies popped up that Wilkes Booth wasn’t working alone - And yep,
that conspiracy turned out to be true. Wilkes Booth worked with at least nine
other Confederate co-conspirators, most of whom were would-be assassins themselves.
These include George Azterodt, who tried and failed to assassinate Vice President Andrew
Johnson; Lewis Powell, who tried and failed to assassinate Secretary of State William Seward;
and Mary Surratt, who would become the first woman to ever be hanged by
the new United States government. Not exactly a successful bunch.
From a deified American leader to a deified Tibetan leader,
you may have heard a number of conspiracy theories about the Dalai Lama - the
spiritual figurehead of Tibet. Given that the Dalai Lama is opposed to Chinese expansion,
many have accused the United States of funding the Dalai Lama as a form of proxy opposition…
And they’re right. Reports extrapolated from US Intelligence accounts have shown that the CIA
has given His Holiness a $180,000 yearly stipend for at least several years since
1960 as part of a wider project to fund the Tibetan Exile Movement during the Cold War.
Let’s take a little break from sinister dealings performed by governments and look
at some of the shady things that private companies have been up to. It’s generally
accepted that sugar isn’t exactly great for you, but if the sugar industry had their way,
you wouldn’t know that. In 1967, the Sugar Research Foundation,
a lobbying organization funded by companies that deal heavily in sugar products, oversaw
a study that downplayed the links between sugar consumption and cardiac diseases. But corporate
sugar conspiracies like this aren’t a thing of the distant past. The Coca-Cola company paid
millions to commission a study muddying the link between sugary sodas and obesity back in 2015.
But all of that seems like small potatoes compared to a small group of companies
getting together and planning a fascist takeover of the United States of America.
It feels almost like the textbook premise of a conspiracy thriller, but it actually
occurred in 1933 with the Business Plot. Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush,
teamed up with business leaders from Chase Bank, Goodyear, Standard Oil,
GM, and the Du Pont family with the goal of funding a military coup to take down FDR and
install a fascist dictatorship. The one flaw in their evil plan was reaching out to Marine Corps
Major General Smedley Butler to lead the military part of the military coup, despite the fact he
was a vocal FDR supporter. He blew the whistle and smothered the plan before it ever took off.
Despite being involved in a literally treasonous conspiracy, none of the Business Plotters were
ever punished. We can at least thank Smedley Butler for nipping the fascist takeover plan
in the bud, but the fact that the son and grandson of Prescott Bush would become
the Presidents of the country he tried to overthrow really just feels like a sick joke.
But somehow, a diabolical fascist takeover is nowhere near the most horrifying and
disgusting corporate conspiracy in this video. A real contender for that would
be the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company, and one of their very sinister-sounding subsidiaries,
Cutter Biological. In the 1980s, Cutter Biological moved into the
business of selling blood-clotting medicine to hemophiliacs manufactured from the blood
of non-hemophiliacs. But for the medicine they were selling to Latin America and Asia,
they didn’t properly screen their donors. The result? Cutter Biological sold products that
infected 20,000 patients with HIV, a travesty that they then spent years trying to cover up.
What could possibly be worse than infecting 20,000 hemophiliacs with HIV? Probably being
complicit in a coverup that could spark the end of the world. While climate change has become a
hot-button topic recently, due to the fact that we’re currently living through its effects,
the people behind the ExxonMobil fuel company knew about it as early as the 1970s due to
climate research they funded at the time - Then spent millions suppressing. Their lobbying has
muddied the waters and delayed action on climate change because it would affect their bottom line,
putting millions, if not billions, of lives at risk in the process.
Now that we’ve exposed the shadowy horrors of the corporate world,
let’s return to crazy governmental conspiracies for the rest of the video. And believe it or not,
these are literally all conspiracies that the United States government is
responsible for. USA! USA! We’re number one, baby! That includes being number
one to hire ex-Nazi scientists right after the conclusion of World War II.
Operation Paperclip was created as an effort to give the US a technological and scientific edge
during the Cold War, even if it meant making a deal with the devil. Though that’s not entirely
accurate - It was more like taking a deal with 1,500 devils, all of which were given
full clemency, having their slates wiped clean and new, with Nazi-free backstories written for them
by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. These included the diabolical Nazi scientists Wernher
von Braun, Hubertus Strughold, and Arthur Rudolph. Some truly monstrous people were able to get away
with their crimes scot-free, but hey, at least we got the V2 rocket and the moon landing out of it.
Let’s not move away from evil science just yet, either. One of the most infamous stories of
unethical medical testing is the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. It was a conspiracy
between the US Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute to turn around 400 Black men
into unknowing guinea pigs for Syphilis studies, all while lying to them that they were, in fact,
being treated for their painful and debilitating conditions. The study was kept under wraps for
40 years before the shameful exploitation of these men was revealed for all to see. In 1974,
there was a ten million dollar payout to the surviving victims of the program,
but nothing could ever give them back the years wasted in unnecessary suffering.
But even death can’t necessarily save you from being involved in a horrifying scientific
conspiracy. As a general rule, if a government project has a strangely innocent-sounding name,
it’s probably trying to hide the fact that it’s enough to give you nightmares. This was
definitely the case with Project SUNSHINE, a 1950s study on the effects of radiation
on human bodies. It goes without saying that this is extremely important research, but it
doesn’t mean that it was conducted ethically. In order to have a varied collection of data,
the scientists involved in this project had their personnel steal parts of corpses like
Victorian graverobbers - including those of children and even infants.
This would be macabre but ultimately ethical if the families had consented to donate their
relatives’ bodies to science, but when these tests were performed,
the families had no idea. Burke and Hare would be proud that their legacy lives on.
Racially-motivated testing and graverobbing are one kind of horrible, but indiscriminately
releasing a bioweapon on an entire area is another. If you enjoy spending time near
large bodies of water, the name “Operation Seaspray” might evoke pleasant and relaxing
vibes. Nothing at all like the US Navy releasing two different types of dangerous and infectious
bacteria from a boat on the San Francisco Bay in 1950, infecting eleven different people with
aggressive urinary tract infections that killed one of them. Why? Because they wanted to know
how the city’s population would react to the release of that kind of pathogen. The details
were all kept under wraps, until being revealed to the world almost three decades later in 1977.
But the US Government wasn’t quite done playing God just yet. During the Vietnam War,
the CIA engaged in a secret project called Operation Sober Popeye. This was a plot to
control the very weather in Vietnam, and use it as a weapon in the war against the Viet
Cong. For years, the CIA attempted to seed rain clouds in Vietnam that would extend
the country’s natural monsoon season, bogging down their forest-dwelling commando enemies.
Thankfully, they didn’t fully succeed, and in 1978, military applications of
weather-manipulating technology was classified as a War Crime. The CIA,
at least theoretically, would be forced to take their combat weather aspirations off the table.
How about another CIA weapon that sounded like an
insane conspiracy theory before being revealed to be terrifyingly real?
Every year, 805,000 Americans suffer from heart attacks - Many of them fatal. It’s a terrible
consequence of the cardiac illness epidemic in the country… But could it also be the result
of elite CIA assassins taking out targets? And how would a CIA assassin induce a heart
attack without a trace? A specially designed Heart Attack Gun, of course! One that fires
a frozen dart carrying deadly blowfish poison, which then melts after transfer,
inducing a heart attack and leaving a small, red dot on the body as the only evidence of foul play.
While this may seem like a bizarre fantasy cooked up by someone who’d watched a few too
many James Bond movies, Senator Frank Church revealed the very real Heart Attack Pistol
during a public hearing in congress about some of the seedier activities of the CIA.
So let’s give the CIA a bit of a break - Before the Infographics Show HQ undergoes
a mysterious series of simultaneous heart attacks - and look at the shady,
conspiratorial antics of the US’ domestic intelligence agency: The FBI.
There are plenty of conspiracy theories about celebrities - Ironically, they normally consist
of theories that a dead celebrity is actually alive, like Tupac, or that a living celebrity
is actually dead, like Paul McCartney - but we’re interested in a different Beatle today:
The band’s frontman, John Lennon. It was theorized for years that the FBI had it in for Lennon,
and those theories were actually completely correct. The FBI didn’t take kindly to Lennon’s
Anti-War Songs, so rather than giving peace a chance, they decided to take a peak at Lennon’s
dirty laundry in hopes of finding something juicy as a basis to blackmail or even deport him.
But Lennon is hardly the only celebrity who’s had the FBI on their back. Singer
Aretha Franklin was frequently stalked and hassled by the FBI for her leftist political
stances. The Bureau kept background check files on a shocking number of famous people,
including Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston, Helen Keller, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney,
Charlie Chaplin, Rock Hudson, Truman Capote, and even sitcom superstar Lucille Ball.
But their stalking of celebrities is nothing compared to how they destroyed
American activist groups under J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO plan,
where they engaged in everything from blackmail to gaslighting to even straight-up assassination,
taking on everything from Unions to hippy peace groups to the Black Panther movement. By the
time COINTELPRO was through, activism in the United States was a shadow of its former self.
Okay, we have one more CIA story for you, because those guys create conspiracies like Willy Wonka
makes Chocolate. Anyone who watches a lot of news might start to get the sense there’s some
spin going on - That the seemingly impartial reporting of information might actually be a
Trojan Horse for an agenda. While these days, that agenda comes from the various
corporations that own all major news stations, for several decades in the mid-20th century,
it was coming from the CIA, courtesy of an initiative known as Operation Mockingbird.
Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s Office of Special Projects, spearheaded a far-reaching
media influence campaign that gave him control of key figures from The New York Times, CBS,
and members of the Washington Press Corps. At the height of this program, 3000 CIA employees
were tasked with maintaining Wisner’s complex propaganda machine, as they spied on journalists
who worked with whistleblowers and paid other journalists to disseminate false information that
served the CIA’s narrative. It was a conspiracy theorist’s dream and nightmare come true.
Now check out “What Actually ARE the Illuminati?” Or check out this video instead!