Las Vegas, just after 10pm on Sunday, October 1st 2017. More than 20,000
people were enjoying a music festival on Las Vegas Boulevard. Country singer Jason
Aldean was on stage when suddenly his performance was interrupted.
There was like four random shots had come out which I had mistaken
for fireworks. And evidently there was no fireworks around, which was then sort of
followed up with 11 minutes of bullets and automatic gunfire constantly. Now,
I had never been in a situation with gunfire and we just sort of ran.
Stuart McCormack was at the festival with his wife when 64 year old Stephen Paddock holed himself up
in a hotel room overlooking the event and started firing indiscriminately at the people attending.
It was a case of just trying to run back to your safe place,
which you didn't really know where that was. Thankfully,
we were never in the bits where we seen people getting harmed, we got away early enough.
Tragically a lot of other people didn’t. 60 people died. At least
413 were wounded. Another 400 injured in the panic that followed. Stephen
Paddock was found dead an hour later with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
He'd committed the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in US history.
There was a lot of anger, a lot of grief, although you didn’t know anybody who passed
away personally, you think to yourself, ‘Did I rub shoulders with somebody who’s
not gone home?’ My and my wife’s hardest part was, that was our honeymoon so always
attributed to being married would be, this happened two days later and we thought we
could never separate those memories but thankfully at this point we can.
Stuart first got in touch with me last October - six years after that fateful day in Las Vegas.
His message read: "I was just wanting to reach out as I’m a survivor of the Las Vegas mass
shooting and actually suffered from attacks online. I would also love to discuss the
process of how I fell down the rabbit hole of conspiracy surrounding my own tragedy”.
I’m Marianna Spring, the BBC’s disinformation and social media correspondent and you’re
listening to BBC Trending’s Power series. I’m currently working on a podcast series
called Why Do You Hate Me, where I’m investigating extraordinary cases of
online hate. This particular case is about more than online vitriol though - it’s
about the power of social media to persuade people to question reality.
I get a lot of messages. Some of them are abuse directed at me - but others
are from people - like Stuart - who want me to talk to me about their own stories.
Stuart’s message really stood out to me. I’ve heard from lots of people who’ve lived
through attacks and tragedies - and who have experienced online abuse. But never
from someone who ended up believing conspiracy theories about the traumatic event they survived.
We messaged and chatted several times before I headed out to meet him in Northern Ireland
where he lives. I wanted to find out more about how Stuart had fallen into,
and then rejected, these conspiracy theories.
He lives with his family in a picturesque village by the sea in County Down,
about an hour’s drive from Belfast.
It’s very rainy.
Yes, the weather’s been terrible for you, since you got here.
It’s normally quite nice in this area if you can get the sunshine.
When Stuart returned home after the shootings in Las Vegas he was still
struggling to cope with what he’d witnessed. He started reading material online to try and
help him process his experience. While doing that he started reading accounts that were
questioning the official narrative of what happened on that fateful day in Las Vegas.
Stuart became fixated with one particular account. It’s username was Weg Oag. He
first came across it on Twitter, now X, but it was also active on YouTube and Facebook.
Weg’s account posted some factual content about the shooting,
things like police reports that Stuart found very helpful. He could spend hours
and hours each night looking at it. He even went as far as printing it all off,
and storing it away in folders, which he now keeps in a black bin bag in his attic.
Let’s take a look at this bag.
These are some of the information that the Weg account would have supplied.
And why did you print it all off?
It was just the fear that it would be taken down before I could, in my head read it all but
I haven’t really read much of it. What I did was took Weg’s lead in pointing out parts and then I
would work my way through and sort of note important pages that would have been referenced there.
But Weg’s account also discussed a number of conspiracy theories surrounding the Las
Vegas shootings. One suggesting that a Saudi prince had been the real target
and the victims were collateral damage, another, that a hotel worker who tried to
stop the shooter was really a government plant of some kind – and a third saying
that a helicopter flying over the hotel that night had been firing the bullets.
I’ve trawled through Weg’s account myself and what underpins all these conspiracy
theories is the belief that the shooting had been staged by the
government and security services in some way, contrary to the evidence available.
Stuart’s increasing fixation with Weg’s account started to take its toll. He was struggling
to process his trauma. He says the conspiracy theories Weg’s account discussed were part of
his way of making sense of what had happened. But they also left him feeling paranoid and isolated.
During the times when you weren't mentally well with all this I believe when I was
talking on social media that I was being tracked by America. These were the theories
in your head that if I went back to America, somebody may detain you. And be like ‘you're
getting too close to the secret here’. Not that I was in the conspiracy game,
but you were pulling out the threads and you worried about these things,
so you became sort of reclusive with your information, you know, keep it all to yourself.
You needed a crutch and this was my crutch, find the answer and then you can move on.
Stuart asks me whether I can find out who Weg is. I don’t have much
to go on. The username seems to be a pseudonym and all of its profiles on
the different social media sites use a picture of the 16th Century astrologer,
Nostradamus. I send messages to all of the accounts, but those go unread and unanswered.
So then I start contacting anyone I can find that Weg had interacted
with online. One woman who appeared in Weg’s photos tells me she can’t
remember his real name. Others don’t respond to me. I’ve almost given up.
But then one person replies saying he has an old email address for Weg.
I send a message to that address. And wait…
Finally – I receive a response, and he says he’s was happy to have a call.
When we speak, he tells me his real name is Joel and he lives in Phoenix, Arizona. He’s
really polite and friendly when we chat. I can’t believe I’ve found him. Nor can Stuart.
Weg’s content played a huge part in Stuart falling down
the rabbit hole - convincing him that the shooting was actually a government plot.
Stuart no longer believes these theories but is still really intrigued to find out more about Weg,
the man who helped him through a traumatic period in the most unorthodox of ways.
And now we’ve found him, Stuart wants to meet Weg in person.
To be honest, I'm excited to meet somebody who for a year of my life was quite important.
Do you know what I mean? It was probably part of falling apart, which allowed you to get better.
It was in that period of when it was crashing down. I'm hoping it's like a really good thing,
you know, to track down somebody who didn't really exist and actually have him six feet from me.
So I ask Weg whether he’d be interested in meeting Stuart. I explain what a
big impact his content has had on Stuart and amazingly, quite quickly, he agrees.
He’s somewhat retired from his Las Vegas conspiracy theory days,
but he says he dedicated so much time to the content he wants to know how it affected his
followers. He has some reservations but after he’s checked me out online, he’s in.
And so, Weg flies all the way from Arizona to Belfast ready to meet Stuart face to face.
We’ve found a quiet cottage to meet in, a few miles from where Stuart lives.
Weg and Stuart are both nervous and the relief is palpable when
they finally shake hands and sit down next to each other.
Hi Stuart. This is Weg. How are you doing? You know me as Weg I
guess? My real name is Joel. Come on in. Nice to meet you. Take a seat.
Tell us about Weg, where does that name come from?
So I made it up and it doesn't come from anywhere. I just needed something to register new internet
accounts that weren't associated with my true identity and it was easy to type. I would never
have been able to guess that I would eventually start being called that in real life by people.
Why did you choose that event then? Why was it the 1st of October, the mass shooting?
Mass shootings have always been, I guess, an interest of mine in just
looking into because I want to understand them, why they happen, what's the cause,
what's the motive? When the Vegas shooting happened, I felt that there was a huge gap
between what was being reported by the mainstream media and what was being reported by just like
people on YouTube that seemed to have access to a lot more resources than the news channels did.
You mentioned you were interested in other shootings before. Had you
ever posted about them on social media before?
No. Maybe like a little question here and there but never had I gotten this
interested in it to the point where I felt that I needed to create, you know,
an alternative identity or secret identity to start to look into things.
Why did it have to be a secret?
If I'm being honest, part of it was that when I first started researching
I had no idea where it was going to take me, right? I just wanted a way for it to
be separate from my normal life. I work for a large corporation in the States,
I contract for them and I didn't want any chance of it having anything to do with them.
Despite that in 2018, Weg actually moved from Phoenix to Las Vegas. He was able to do his
day job remotely and spend the rest of the time investigating the Vegas shootings in more detail.
It was a huge decision. It was a huge decision. But it was very clear to me
that it was what I was supposed to be doing with my life at that time.
So I picked up my life and my dog and I moved to Las Vegas,
lived in an apartment three miles from where the shooting took place and very embedded there,
went to the Las Vegas police headquarters every week to get the evidence drops. There's
like Wall Street Journal, CNN, Las Vegas Review-Journal and then there's just me.
Every week I go in there I’d be like this is so bizarre that I was able to do this somehow.
He was able to do so by using some unorthodox tactics.
Well they seem to want press credentials so I’ll just make up a company and I’ll
print out a press card and hopefully, I’ll show you actually, one of the show and tell things.
You had a press card?
Yes. Did you actually? Yeah. I had two of these printed out, I had a lanyard.
But isn’t there also, and this is the flip side of it,
there’s a risk to that too which is that people who haven’t had that experience
of investigating stories like that who risk putting things out there that are
subsequently then aren’t true and then cause harm? How do you mitigate that?
I don’t think that should be a way to stop citizen journalists from showing up at press conferences
and evidence drops. I think it encourages pressure on the powers that be to disseminate information.
While turning into this alter ego Weg did seem to give Joel purpose,
meaning and a niche community, he didn’t profit financially. He’d just kept up his
usual job remotely from Las Vegas. He moved back to Phoenix in 2019 and both
Stuart and I had the sense he’d genuinely been trying to find out what had happened.
How much was this for you about feeling like you weren't being told the truth because I
think there's a really important question about the difference between conspiracy theory and
then also when people legitimately feel like they’re having information withheld from them.
The Las Vegas police weren't being transparent because they hadn't provided
the evidence. So it wasn't like there was like a conspiracy around that. It was just like,
we know that people had their body cams, you've referenced it in your report,
but we don't have that information and so them withholding that it was a big problem.
I contacted the Las Vegas Police force about this and they directed me to their
action report on the shooting. In it they say that the police force is committed to
maintaining transparency with the media and community during critical incidents,
but say that this must be done correctly and that security during large-scale incidents is
important when it comes to maintaining the integrity of the investigation.
I’ve encountered too many conspiracy theorists and trolls to remember. They
take various forms but a lot of them post maliciously and some go as far as
suggesting those killed in shootings - like in Las Vegas - never really died,
or that survivors like Stuart are paid so called “crisis actors”. Weg’s conspiracy theories
stopped short of that but he was still able to reflect on the possible harm they could cause.
I feel like now you're really reflective about your content and about what you shared. How
much did you think about how conspiracy theories could be harmful to people,
could be harmful to survivors who are trying to process something.
How much did you factor in? And how much do you reflect on that now?
I think that there are real world dangers to conspiracy theorising if you want to call it
that. So at the time my thought was if we continue to focus on the facts and the evidence that that
would help to keep people away from, you know, maybe taking action on things that were based
on conspiracy and not fact based. It was in the back of my mind because I felt like, okay, well,
I’m emotionally stable and healthy and I'm still, like, thinking there might be something going
here. If somebody was not in that situation, they're depressed or anxious or, you know,
they have mental problems and they come across this that could cause the wrong kind of actions
to be taken. So yeah, it was always in the back of my mind that that was a possibility.
And I know Stuart we chatted about the degree to which you actually felt this
started to become perhaps too much. Do you want to tell Weg a little bit about that?
It was the vessel for me to search for the answer, do you know what I mean? So I would
wait and see any comment that would come up, you know, I’d have the notifications
on Twitter to see your information coming through. I would be at the page instantly,
I mean, my real life would stop what I'm doing to keep up with what was going on. You know,
the rabbit hole I was falling down in and thankfully counselling and stuff pulled me back
out of that. Getting counselled for mental health to try and get out of that. But at that time,
as I say, it was a crutch that I’d have used, this information coming to make peace. This
to me could have led to me finding out what was wrong overall. So it was very important.
I think it's interesting because having spoken to both of you in some ways,
you kind of entered the world of conspiracy and have both kind of come out come out the
other side. To what degree do you think conspiracy theories were and are important to that process?
It's normal for us to question and to try to fill in gaps with story. You can't be
human without that. I think the fact that people come up with conspiracy theories,
it's not something that's going to go away. I think what can go away is how
those people know to approach the theories that they have and meaningful ways that
push the conversation forward and then two, having authorities and powers that
be being transparent about why you're why you can't be fully transparent.
Like how to be an ethical conspiracy theorist?
Yes!
My chat with Stuart and Weg lasted for more than two hours. I was struck by how
having the conversation face to face, rather than online,
led to moments of real reflection and candour between the two men.
Stuart wanted to find a way to rationalise an event that caused him trauma. Weg couldn’t
accept the gaps in the official narrative and wanted to find his own version of the truth.
This led to both of them believing conspiracy theories they now broadly accept aren’t true.
The concept of the ethical conspiracy theorist interests me but the question of whether they
can operate in a way that avoids causing harm, particularly to those who who’ve
already lived through some of the worst things imaginable - remains an open one.
That’s it this week from BBC Trending. Thanks to producers Ben Carter and Emma Close,
and Tom Brignell who mixed this episode.
If you liked this episode please us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts from.