Did you know that Buzz Aldrin once punched a moon landing conspiracy theorist in the
face? In 2002, a man who believed in the conspiracy theory that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing
was faked by the government confronted astronaut Buzz Aldrin about it. As Aldrin walked outside
of a hotel in Beverly Hills, the man thrust a Bible at him and demanded that the septuagenarian
spaceman swear on it that he had, in fact, gone to the moon.
Having risked his life and sacrificed much to achieve his mission, Aldrin was understandably
annoyed. He handled it pretty well until the stranger called him a coward, a liar, and
a thief — at that point, the 72-year-old Aldrin socked his sidewalk interrogator in
the face. The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office declined to press charges
against Aldrin.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of mentalfloss.com, and welcome to The List Show
from my living room. Now, we’re not going to get too far into the weeds with conspiracy
theories here today — mostly because we don’t want to make the Illuminati mad — but
we do have many fascinating facts to explore. If you believe them, that is. The truth is
out there... let’s get started.
Let’s go back to the Apollo 11 moon landing “hoax” for a moment. To keep a secret
of that magnitude would have been pretty difficult — even more difficult than you probably
imagine. Physicist and cancer biologist David Robert Grimes published a mathematical equation
that estimates how many people it would take to keep a conspiracy secret, and how long
it would take before that conspiracy was exposed to the public. The formula takes into account
the number of conspirators, how much time has passed, and the probability of a whistle-blower.
He used three real-life conspiracies to hone his results: the Edward Snowden NSA scandal,
the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and an FBI forensics scandal that ultimately revealed
pseudoscientific evidence being used to detain a large number of innocent people.
Using his formula, if the moon landing had been a hoax, it would have required 411,000
people to keep quiet — and by his math, someone would have spilled the beans in less
than four years.
Thanks to nebulan for posing a question along these lines in the comments of our last video.
But maybe we should back up a second, and define what a conspiracy theory actually is.
There’s a difference between a conspiracy theory, a myth, a rumor and a falsehood, and
while there’s no universally accepted definition, a good guideline is that a conspiracy, and
thus a conspiracy theory, involves a group of people doing secretive things that infringe
on the rights of others or put them at a disadvantage. Nicolas Cage is a time-traveling vampire?
Rumor … allegedly. Lizard people are hiding within the government and are controlling
the world? Conspiracy theory. Perhaps.
Conspiracy theories are certainly not a new thing. In fact, Queen Elizabeth I was dogged
by the theory that she was actually a man. Nicknamed “The Virgin Queen,” Elizabeth
rejected every marriage proposal that came her way. Though there are many, many reasons
she might have avoided marriage, her staunch refusal made tongues wag, even centuries later.
One explanation that was offered up was that she was a man the whole time. Dracula author
Bram Stoker was a prominent believer in this rumor after visiting the village of Bisley
in England, where—according to local lore, anyway—Elizabeth I had died while visiting
as a child. As we know, Elizabeth’s father, King Henry the Eighth, loved to behead people
— one estimate says more than 70,000 people lost their heads during his reign, although
the real number is more likely measured in the hundreds. So, according to the legend,
rather than face the King’s wrath and possibly lose her noggin, Elizabeth’s governess found
a little boy who looked a lot like the future queen, dressed him as a girl, and had him
stand in for Elizabeth. Not only did this supposedly explain the never-married thing,
it was also supposed to explain why Elizabeth preferred wigs and heavy makeup. The real
reason for Elizabeth’s heavy-handed beauty routine? She was reportedly trying to cover
smallpox-scarred skin and thinning hair.
If you think people who believe in conspiracy theories are in the minority, you’re wrong
— at least, according to one study. In 2014 political scientists J. Eric Oliver and Thomas
Wood announced that about half of the American public supports at least one conspiracy theory.
Their findings were based on national surveys conducted over a number of years. Rather than
viewing conspiracy theorists as paranoid loners, Oliver said, quote, “We think of conspiracy
theories as simply another form of magical thinking.” According to their research,
people who engage in other types of magical thinking — for example, the paranormal or
the supernatural — are more likely to believe in conspiracies.
According to John Cook, an expert on misinformation with George Mason University’s Center for
Climate Change Communication, a calamitous event makes for a “very fertile breeding
ground for conspiracy theories.” He explains that when people feel threatened or they can’t
fully comprehend a significant event, conspiracy theories can somehow help them make sense
of it. Take, for example, the JFK assassination. When the world seemed scary and out of control,
it was easier to imagine that “shadowy groups and agencies” were controlling things behind
the scenes. Cook explained that, quote, “Randomness is very discomforting to people.”
Part of our propensity to believe in conspiracy theories could be based in a social psychology
bias that fits right in with our dislike of random events. Fundamental Attribution Error
is the tendency to believe that the actions of others are intentional as opposed to simply
being the product of external circumstances. Hence, when things happen that are random
or unplanned, we may have the urge to find an intentional reason behind them. This could
theoretically help lead to the invention of conspiracy theories.
Once you’re fully invested in a conspiracy theory, can anyone change your mind? Science
is split on this one. According to a 2010 study, it’s almost impossible to sway someone’s
opinion after they believe in a conspiracy theory. As part of the research, test subjects
were given corrections after reading misleading claims. Reading the corrections was not only
ineffective, it actually increased their belief in the misleading claims, especially if they
had believed it strongly to begin with. Psychologist Leon Festinger wrote about a kind of precursor
to the so-called “backfire effect” in the 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which monitored
the beliefs of a UFO cult after the mothership failed to show up on the predicted date. Instead
of admitting that they had been mistaken, members made more predictions, convinced that
one of them would come to fruition. Another study, however, reports that facts do help.
In a study published in 2018, researchers studied how more than 10,000 participants
reacted to 52 different claims and corrections. That in-depth study showed no backfire effect
at all; in fact, it concluded just the opposite: people heed factual information, and fact-checking
and pointing out logical inconsistencies does have the potential to reduce the belief in
conspiracy theories.
Are conspiracy theories more rampant now than ever before? Nah. It may seem like there’s
a conspiracy for everything, but we’re no more paranoid today than we were 130 years
ago. To prove this, researchers combed through the New York Times and Chicago Tribune to
read more than 100,000 letters to the editor from 1890 to 2010. Of course, this doesn’t
discount the possibility that things have changed within the last 10 years, but the
data we do have suggests that we’re holding pretty steady. The Washington Post reported
that the study revealed, quote, “a stable background hum of conspiracy theorizing, not
an ever-increasing cacophony.” The internet may make researching and reading about conspiracies
more readily available, but we believe them and create them at a pretty consistent rate.
In fact, here’s a conspiracy theory that would have been right at home in the late
1800s: Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was Jack the Ripper.
Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, famously loved wordplay such as anagrams.
In 1996, Lewis scholar Richard Wallace wrote a book about his theory that Dodgson had committed
the murders, then confessed to them in anagram form in a children’s book called The Nursery
Alice. In one passage from the book, a paragraph about a dog’s dinner that added little to
the story, Wallace was able to rearrange the letters into a rather graphic confession from
Dodgson and his purported accomplice, Thomas Bayne. Other pieces of the puzzle seemed to
fit, including the geographic location of his home and the fact that his home library
contained more than 120 books on medicine and anatomy. Nothing has ever been proven,
of course, and there’s virtually no real evidence, but there’s still a subsection
of conspiracy theorists out there who believe that Jack the Ripper wrote Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland.
You might accuse a conspiracy theorist of wearing a tin-foil hat. If so, you may want
to thank Aldous Huxley’s brother, Julian, who popularized the idea in his 1926 short
story, The Tissue-Culture King. In it, Huxley’s characters discover that metal is effective
at blocking attempts at telepathy and craft “caps of metal foil” for themselves.
Unfortunately for paranoid Reynolds Wrap devotees, tin foil hats have been found to amplify certain
radio frequencies. Now, the scientific reasoning behind the supposed effectiveness of tinfoil
hats is that the foil acts as a Faraday cage, shielding the wearer from any electromagnetic
radiation. Theoretically, this would prevent evil-doers from reading your thoughts. To
really work, though, a Faraday cage has to completely enclose the thing it’s supposed
to shield — and tinfoil hats don’t do that. In 2005, MIT grad students conducted
a study to see if partially wrapping one’s head in foil was at all effective, crafting
helmets in three different shapes to test the idea. Then they looked at the strength
of transmissions between a radio-frequency signal generator and receiver antenna placed
at different spots around test subjects’ heads, both with and without the helmet. They
found that the metal actually improved certain frequencies, including those allocated for
mobile communications, broadcast satellites, aeronautical radionavigation, and space-to-Earth
and space-to-space bands. In other words, exactly the frequencies that most conspiracy
theorists would be trying to protect themselves against. Oops.
The researchers released this tongue-in-cheek statement with their findings, likely teasing
the paranoid audience they had been studying: “the government may in fact have started
the helmet craze for this reason.”
No TV series has delved as deep into conspiracy theories as the X-Files. Series creator Chris
Carter says he got the idea after reading a scientific survey by Harvard psychiatrist
John Mack — the results showed that 10 percent of Americans believed in extraterrestrials,
even up to the point of being contacted by them. In 2019, a Gallup poll showed that 68%
of Americans believe that the government knows more about UFOs than it’s letting on. However,
only something like half of those skeptics think that the cover-up involves an actual
alien landing of some sort.
Speaking of UFOs, when the whole Roswell incident went down in 1947, the Army Air Forces was
pretty quick to announce that what had been found wasn’t a UFO at all, but simply a
weather balloon. Sound like a flimsy excuse? A lot of other people thought so, too. As
it turns out, that’s one conspiracy theory that has since been confirmed: What crashed
in the desert wasn’t a weather balloon. But hold your horses, ET fans — it wasn’t
a UFO, either. Today, we think it was probably a balloon from Project Mogul, an American
attempt to spy on Soviet nuclear weapons development during the Cold War. In the early ‘90s,
documentation revealed that one of the balloons from Project Mogul was never officially recovered,
and the New Mexico launch point makes it entirely plausible that it ended up somewhere in the
desert near Roswell.
“X-Files,” by the way, is a term that is meant to refer to all of the strange things
— conspiracy theory fodder — that the FBI is secretly working on. The FBI has officially
announced that they don’t actually keep any “X-files” to investigate supernatural
events. “We do have some files on some unusual phenomena,” their website states. “But
generally only because people reported something and we made a note of it.” But that’s
what they would say, isn’t it?
Did you know there’s even a conspiracy theory about the invention of the phrase “conspiracy
theory”? You’ve probably noticed that the term “conspiracy theorists” is used
in a derogatory way pretty consistently. Some people believe that’s on purpose — that
the CIA invented the term to downplay and discredit people who believed in the numerous
stories circulating after JFK’s assassination. It sounds plausible, but in reality, we have
print evidence that the term has been around since at least 1870, and was beginning to
be used more regularly during the 1950s.
Here’s one last historical conspiracy theory for the road: Abraham Lincoln’s assassin,
John Wilkes Booth, escaped. History tells us that Booth went on the lam after killing
Lincoln, but died after being shot in the neck 12 days later. But some people believe
Booth managed to escape to Texas, changed his name to John St. Helen, and lived almost
four more decades before dying in 1903. This theory was first floated in a 1907 book called
The Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth. In it, author Finis L. Bates said St. Helen
confessed to him around the 1870s, claiming that the assassination was largely the idea
of Vice President Andrew who was just picking up some things for a hiding Booth. Bates—who
was Kathy Bates’ grandfather, by the way — claimed to have also learned that Booth,
now going by another alias, confessed to the crime again in 1902. Several months later,
he committed suicide via arsenic. Bizarrely, the embalmed body ended up becoming mummified
and was exhibited at carnivals around the U.S. well into the 1950s — you know, “Step
right up and see the mummified remains of the man who killed President Lincoln.” The
macabre exhibit has since disappeared, so we may never know the truth. Although Booth’s
descendants have requested that the body in Booth’s grave be exhumed and tested, so
far, they’ve been denied. Isn’t that... suspicious.
Our next episode is a bit grisly, but I promise it's really interesting. We’re discussing
inventors killed by their own inventions. If you know an interesting story, drop it
in the comments for a chance to be featured in that episode.
It’ll be up on August 5th. Be sure to subscribe here so you don’t miss it. We’ll see you
then!