Conspiracy Theories: Expert Guides and Resources

The Roswell Incident is the most famous UFO story on record and is the cornerstone of an alleged government conspiracy to hide alien visits from the world. The initial discovery of a suspected UFO crash site in 1947 played out over a three-day period, then almost completely vanished from view for 30 years, before being resurrected in the 1970s by UFO researchers.

On July 20, 1969, the whole world stared into their television sets and watched blurry, flickering, black and white images as Apollo 11’s lunar excursion module, nicknamed “The Eagle,” descended from orbiting around the moon and touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. In 1960, deep in the heart of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, President John F.

The Vril Society is a troublesome topic because there's no authentic proof that this secret society really existed, even though there's no shortage of people who claim that it did. What makes the Vril Society really weird is that it started out as a science fiction story and from an author who is rarely connected these days with anything short of a joke.

The events written in the biblical Book of Revelation go by a number of names — Armaggedon, Apocalypse, The End Times — and for thousands of years, people have been seeing the signs of Armaggedon in the world around them. Remember Y2K? At the heart of this millenialism is the description of Armageddon, the final battle on Earth between God and Satan, in the Book of Revelation.

One of the strangest events surrounding the Beatles was the rumor in 1966 that band member Paul McCartney was dead. Not only was he dead, but was replaced with a double. More amazing was that the band seemed to be putting clues in their music and album covers to leak the truth — although the Beatles always denied any part in promoting the rumor.

On August 31, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, died after a high-speed car accident in the Pont d'Alma tunnel in Paris. Princess Diana was traveling with Dodi Al-Fayed (son of billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed). In the front seats were bodyguard Trevor-Rees Jones and the Hotel Ritz's acting security manager, Henri Paul, who'd been ordered to elude the cars and motorcycles packed with paparazzi that were chasing the famous couple.

In the past two centuries, and particularly in the last 50 years or so, people the world over have embraced conspiracism. When we refer to a conspiracy, we mean an honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned conspiracy, as defined by the dictionary — a plot by some dark and nefarious characters to do something sinister or evil.

The Pinto automobile was marketed by Ford from 1971 to 1980 to try to feed the new American appetite for smaller cars. With its dinkster four-cylinder engine, the Pinto was battling the Volkswagon Beetle and the Toyota Corolla for the hearts and minds of those who wanted sewing-machine engines under their hoods.