We know some of you readers here at The MALESTROM like to take slightly different outlooks of the world, seeking other perspectives and viewpoints, perhaps taking an interest in conspiracy theories that some might deem a bit weird. Previously we’ve brought you some interesting, and slightly wacky theories about the Titanic, and whether it was actually the ship of that name that sank that fateful night in 1912, and we also let you in on the strange ideas some people have had about our very own moon.
This time around we’ve collated five of the most bizarre conspiracy theories from down the years that are as mad as they are absolutely fascinating. We start with one of the biggest.
Stanley Kubrick Faked the Moon Landings
It will have been difficult to live your lives up to the stages their currently at and not have heard at least some sort of whispers about the historic moon landings being a staged event. Ridiculous most will cry, but lets at least have a quick overview of the facts of the time. During the 60s Cold War period, The United States were deep in a space race with Russia, both powers were keen to show they had the best science and technology in the world and after WWII both nations knew rocket research was essential for military dominance.
The first to get to the moon would display that they were numero uno in all these vital departments. So there’s your set up, it’s of such prime importance, you’d do anything to make it there before the other, but would that anything include filming the whole thing on a set and pretending the footage was being beamed from outer space?
That’s a theory many to this day hold true. And the man the government and CIA are said to have made responsible for creating this great lie, the great director Stanley Kubrick.
As the story goes it’s said Kubrick was approached by NASA, hot off the heels of space epic 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the shady proposal to direct the first three Moon landings. The launch and splashdown would all happen, but the spacecraft would stay in Earth orbit and the fake footage created by Kubrick would be broadcast as if it were being beamed live from the surface of the Moon.
Purported evidence of this ‘hoax’ includes the US flag fluttering in the lunar breeze, yet with no atmosphere in space many wonder where this breeze came from? Some of the photos from the moon show scenes supposedly lit solely by sunlight, but these contain shadows that don’t run parallel with each other, which would tend to indicate that some sort of extra artificial light was used, which it’s been insisted there wasn’t.
Another theory as to why no one ever actually got to the moon is that surrounding the Earth, starting at an altitude of 1,000 miles and extending an additional 25,000 miles, is the Van Allen radiation belts, which holds lethal bands of radiation. So the danger to anyone entering that field could be quite deadly.
It’s said Kubrick left a trail of clues as to his involvement. Rodney Ascher’s 2012 documentary Room 237 details that The Shining included a number of references to the space mission, amongst them, Danny’s sweater with Apollo 11 on the front, hexagonal launching pad details in the carpet and with Jack’s creepy repeated typewriter lines, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”, “All”, should be read as A11, short for Apollo 11. Also for his film Barry Lyndon, NASA loaned Kubrick lenses to recreate the candle-lit scenes in the film.
Did the space organisation owe the director a debt of some kind? Kubrick died in 1999 after making Eyes Wide Shut, a film about secret societies. Some say the hidden hand played a part in his death, with the movie being subject to a big re-cut that the director was purportedly not happy about. Whatever the truth really is, speculation around one of the greatest conspiracy theories of them all will rumble on for some time.
The Hadron Collider Was Built to Summon Gods
One hundred and seventy-five metres beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva sits the largest machine in the world, The Large Hadron Collider. Built over a ten year period for around $9 billion, it’s is a 27 kilometre long ring of superconducting magnets. This particle accelerator (think a super charged Ghostbusters backpack), works by colliding two high-energy particle beams travelling at close to the speed of light.
The machine is owned by CERN, which is the European Oganisation for Nuclear Research, who supposedly commissioned the Large Hadron Collider to test theories of particle physics and chiefly to confirm whether the ‘God Particle’, or Higgs Boson, exists. But does this super powerful machine have a more nefarious purpose?
Russian scientists have theorised that when the LHC concentrates its energies into a subatomic particle, the things of which it was built to accelerate, the particle will distort the fabric of the universe, spacetime. And it could distort spacetime so much that it creates a wormhole. This is a portal in points in spacetime that could see things traverse galaxies, or even universes in the blink of an eye.
That being said theories have abounded that the real reason for bringing the LHC into existence was to create a wormhole, or gateway to bring a God to Earth. The God being Shiva, often know as the great destroyer in Hinduism. His role being to bring an end to the Universe and then in doing so opening the path to create a new one.
A statue of Shiva sits in a prominent position outside CERN’s headquarters, we’re just saying. In June 2016 a large storm appeared above where the LHC is situated, leading to conspiracy theorists fearing that the end of the world may be nigh. Although clearly that wasn’t the case on this occasion.
Scientists do admit that wormholes could be created at CERN, but they would only exist on very small levels, about 10–33 centimetres across. So if any Gods have slipped through any wormhole there recently, hopefully, they’ll be too tiny to destroy the Universe.
The Earth is Flat
Many have called the flat Earth conspiracy the greatest of them all. Many ancient civilisations subscribed to the thought that the Earth was indeed flat rather than a spherical body. It wasn’t until the 6th Century BC when Pythagoras piped up, and then around 330 BC when Aristotle provided evidence for the spherical shape of the Earth on empirical grounds, when this theory began to become the accepted view of things. In recent times there’s been renewed support for the flat Earth theory, with a number of celebs wading in on the issue. Former England cricketer Freddie Flintoff has argued that,
“Evidence suggests the world isn’t round. If you’re in a helicopter and you hover, why does the Earth not [rotate under you] if it’s round?”
And he’s joined in that thinking by basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who said,
“I drive from Florida to California all the time, and it’s flat to me. I do not go up and down at a 360-degree angle, and all that stuff about gravity.”
Most fervent of all the rich and famous has to be rapper B.o.B who spits plenty of lyrics about his feelings on conspiracy of a global nature and in order to prove the flatness of our planet recently set up a crowd-funding appeal to launch a satellite to send back pictures that would definitively prove the flatness of our planet. Now that’s dedication.
The leading flat-earther theory is that Earth is a disc rather than a sphere, with the Arctic Circle in the centre of the disk and Antarctica, a 150-foot-tall wall of ice, based around the rim. It’s thought by some that NASA employees guard the wall to stop anyone from climbing over and falling off the disc. They also believe the moon and the sun are the same size, a tiny 32 miles in diameter, and that they orbit around the North Pole.
There is a shared opinion that an invisible “antimoon” obscures the moon during lunar eclipses. Earth’s gravity is too supposedly an illusion. With objects not accelerating downward; instead, the disc accelerates upward at 32 feet per second squared, driven up by dark energy.
And onto the cover-up conspirac. Flat-earthers believe all pictures of the Earth are photoshopped, with GPS devices built to make pilots think they are flying planes in straight lines around a spherical object, when they are actually flying in circles above a disc. But why the big conspiracy? That’s not so clear, but it would seem money is the motivator here. That NASA is funded to fake a space program and let those involved profit from the huge amounts of money they make. Indeed most believers subscribe to the view we wrote of earlier that the famous moon landings were faked. The Flat Earth’s website reads,
“Most Flat Earthers think Astronauts have been bribed or coerced into their testimonies. Some believe they have been fooled or are mistaken.”
Far fetched? Certainly seems so. A massive cover up to make everyone think the world is round sounds like a lot of work, Flat-earthers may have watched The Truman Show one to many times. Saying that we’ve been lied to before, just where were those weapons of mass destruction?
The Mossad’s Mind Controlled Sharks
In 2010 a spate of shark attacks in Egypt’s Red Sea, one that saw a 70-year-old German woman washed up dead on the shore at Sharm el-Sheikh, helped fuel one particular conspiracy that there were no coincidences in this surge of incidents. The conspiracy suggested was that a secret plot by Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency could indeed be responsible.
Famous diver Captain Mustafa Ismail alleged that the GPS tracking device found on one of the sharks responsible was in fact a “guiding device” planted by Israeli agents to control the minds of the sharks and turn them into bio-weapons to decrease tourism in the region. South Sinai Governor Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha was quoted as saying,
“What is being said about the Mossad throwing the deadly shark (in the sea) to hit tourism in Egypt is not out of the question, but it needs time to confirm.”
At the time other local diving experts said single shark attacks are extremely rare in the area and were scratching their heads as to why so many people were attacked in such a short time frame. The sharks meant to be responsible for the attacks, oceanic white tips, are rarely seen on these shores and records of any such incidents historically are very low.
The question is were the sharks being guided on deadly Mossad missions by GPS? Unlikely. If they’re anything like our sat-navs you know they’d never get anywhere near their targets but would instead have got stuck down a random cul-de-sac fifty miles away.
Elvis Hasn’t Left the Building
According to official records arguably the greatest showman of all time, Elvis Presley, died on 16 August 1977, in the toilet of his mansion Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. Yet despite seemingly irrefutable evidence that this was the case, from doctors and a coroner, and the mourners who viewed him in an open coffin at his funeral, many devotees to ‘The King’ are convinced he is still very much alive. The general consensus of this conspiracy is that Elvis faked his own death to go into hiding.
The author of the 1988 book Is Elvis Alive?, Gail Brewer-Giorgio, told Time magazine that after sifting through a host of FBI documents, she’d come to the conclusion Elvis had to go into witness protection after the FBI enlisted him to help take down a mob like criminal group named ‘The Fraternity.’ And when he was found to be a mole pretending to be dead was the only option. Brewer-Giorgio said,
“Elvis faked his death because he was going to be killed and there was no doubt about it.”
Believers see Presley’s gravestone as one major clue to his faked death. His middle name Aron is misspelled Aaron on the headstone, some fans believe that the misspelling was intentional, and a way of letting them know their man is not dead. Then there’s the pool house photo taken on New Year’s Eve 1977 by a man visiting Graceland with his family. The picture was rumoured to show Elvis relaxing in his pool house.
There’s certainly been enough supposed sightings of the star over the years. Not long after his death a man headed to Memphis airport and purchased a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The man was said to look uncannily like Presley and even gave the name ‘Jon Burrows,’ which was the same pseudo name Elvis used when booking hotels. In 2016 a bearded man working at Graceland as a groundsman had Elvis fans all shook up that this chap was in fact the aged king of rock and roll.
And most recently at the celebrations for what would have been Elvis’ 82nd birthday a large man with white hair and a white beard was spotted on camera standing among the crowd as a cake-cutting ceremony took place on the front lawn of Graceland. He was flanked by security guards seemingly keeping an eye on him for protection.
Our favourite of all the sightings has to be this one though, that he appeared as an extra in the 1990 smash hit Home Alone. In the scene in the airport terminal where Macaulay Culkin’s screen Mum is trying to get a flight home an actor viewed over her right shoulder has an uncanny look of the star. The video here gets a bit hung up on head movement though.
So is Elvis really alive and kicking? Evidence points to that not being the case, but people have faked their own deaths before. Most big stars yearn for time out of the ever so bright spotlight, where they can live a perceived normal life, so you never know. Whatever the truth is, his music will outlive the lot of us.
What’s the craziest conspiracy theory you’ve heard? Let us know in the comments.
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