8 Conspiracy Theories and What They Get Right

Grab your tinfoil hats—it’s time to get paranoid. Let’s take a look at some conspiracy theories that get a few details right.

Conspiracy: The government is trying to control my mind.

The Truth: The government has invested millions in mind control technologies.

Who doesn’t want a telepathic ray gun? The U.S. Army sure does. It’s already researched a device that could beam words into your skull, according to the 1998 report “Bioeffects of Selected Nonlethal Weapons” [PDF]. The report says that, with the help of special microwaves, “this technology could be developed to the point where words could be transmitted to be heard like the spoken word, except that it could only be heard within a person’s head.” The device could “communicate with hostages” and could “facilitate a private message transmission.”

In 2002, the Air Force Research laboratory patented a similar microwave device. Rep. Dennis Kucinich seemed concerned, because one year earlier, he proposed the Space Preservation Act [PDF], which called for a ban of all “Psychotronic weapons.” It didn’t pass.

The mind games don’t stop there. The CIA’s massive mind control experiment, Project MKUltra, remains the pet project of paranoid people everywhere. Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA started asking strange questions in memos, like: “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self-preservation?”

In April 1953, the CIA decided to find out. The Agency wanted to develop drugs that could manipulate Soviet spies and foreign leaders—essentially, a truth serum. The CIA brimmed with other ideas, too, but Director Allen Dulles complained that there weren’t enough “human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques.”

That lack of test subjects drove the CIA to wander off the ethical deep-end, leading the Agency to experiment on unwitting Americans.

About 80 institutions—44 of them colleges—housed MKUltra labs. There, the CIA toyed with drugs like LSD and heroin, testing if the substances “could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.” The CIA tested LSD and barbiturates on mental patients, prisoners, and addicts. It also injected LSD in over 7000 military personnel without their knowledge. Many suffered psychotic episodes.

The CIA tried its hand at erasing people’s memories, too. Project ARTICHOKE tested how well hypnosis and morphine could induce amnesia. And when the CIA wasn’t trying to develop a memory-killing equivalent of the neurolyzer from Men in Black, it studied Chinese brainwashing techniques: Project QKHILLTOP examined ancient mind-scrambling methods to make interrogations easier.

In the wake of the Watergate scandal, the CIA destroyed hundreds of thousands of MKUltra documents. Only 20,000 escaped the shredder, and the CIA shifted its efforts from mind control to clairvoyance. In the mid 1970s, it launched the Stargate Project, which studied the shadowy phenomenon of “remote viewing.” (That is, the CIA investigated if it were possible to see through walls—with your mind.) The project closed in 1995. A final memo concluded, “Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated.”

Conspiracy: The government is poisoning me.

The Truth: It poisoned alcohol supplies to curb drinking during prohibition.

As the ’20s roared, alcoholism soared. Booze was banned, but speakeasies were everywhere. Few people followed the law, so the Treasury Department started enforcing it differently—by poisoning the watering hole.

Most liquor in the 1920s was made from industrial alcohol, used in paints, solvents, and fuel. Bootleggers stole about 60 million gallons a year, redistilling the swill to make it drinkable. To drive rumrunners away, the Treasury Department started poisoning industrial hooch with methyl alcohol. But bootleggers kept stealing it, and people started getting sick.

When dealers noticed something wrong, they hired chemists to renature the alcohol, making it drinkable again. Dismayed, the government threw a counterpunch and added more poison—kerosene, gasoline, chloroform, and higher concentrations of methyl alcohol. Again, it didn’t deter drinking; the booze business carried on as usual.

By 1928, most of the liquor circulating in New York City was toxic. Despite increased illness and death, the Treasury didn’t stop tainting industrial supplies until the 18th amendment was repealed in 1933.

Conspiracy: The government is trying to ruin my reputation.

The Truth: The FBI’s COINTELPRO did it for 15 years.

The FBI has never been a fan of critics. During the second Red Scare, the Bureau fought dissenters, launching a covert program called “COINTELPRO.” Its mission? To “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” rebellious people and groups.

Under COINTELPRO, the FBI oversaw 2000 subversive smear operations. Agents bugged phones, forged documents, and planted false reports to create a negative public image of dissenters. COINTELPRO targeted hate groups like the KKK, but it also kept close watch on the “New Left,” like civil rights marchers and women’s rights activists. It tracked Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, John Lennon, and Ernest Hemingway.

Few, however, were watched as closely as Martin Luther King Jr. After MLK gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, this memo floated through FBI offices:

“In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech yesterday he stands heads and shoulders over all other Negro leaders put together when it comes to influencing great masses of Negros. We must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation from the standpoint of communism, the Negro, and national security.”

King became an unofficial Enemy of State. Agents tracked his every move, performing a “complete analysis of the avenues of approach aimed at neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.” When a wiretap revealed King’s extramarital affair, the FBI sent him an anonymous letter, predicting that blackmail was in his future. “You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that,” the letter said. A month later, MLK accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

COINTELPRO shut down in 1971, although the FBI continued to monitor certain groups. In the 1990s, it tracked PETA and put members of Greenpeace on its terror watch list.

Conspiracy: The government is germ-bombing its own people.

The Truth: It was a common practice during the Cold War.

From 1940 to 1970, America was a giant germ laboratory. The U.S. Army wanted to assess how vulnerable America was to a biological attack, so it spread clouds of microbes and chemicals over populated areas everywhere.

In 1949, the Army Special Operations released bacteria into the Pentagon’s air conditioning system to observe how the microbes spread (the bacteria were reportedly harmless). In 1950, a U.S. Navy ship sprayed Serratia Marcescens—a common bacteria capable of minor infection—from San Francisco Bay. The bacteria floated over 30 miles, spread through the city, and may have caused one death.

A year later, during Operation DEW, the U.S. Army released 250 pounds of cadmium sulfide off the Carolina coast, which spread over 60,000 square miles. The military didn’t know that cadmium sulfide was carcinogenic, nor did it know that it could cause kidney, lung, and liver damage. In the 1960s, during Project 112 and Project SHAD, military personnel were exposed to nerve agents like VX and sarin and bacteria like E. coli without their knowledge. At least 134 similar experiments were performed.

President Nixon ended offensive tests of the U.S. biological weapons program in 1969.

Conspiracy: The government is spreading disease with insects of war.

The Truth: You may have been attacked by a six-legged soldier, but you’re fine.

In 1955, the military dropped 330,000 yellow fever mosquitoes from an aircraft over Georgia. The campaign was cleverly called “Operation Big Buzz,” and the mosquitoes buzzed their way to residential areas. In 1956, Operation Drop Kick dropped 600,000 more mosquitoes over an Air Force base in Florida.

In both cases, the mosquitoes did not carry any disease. They were test weapons, part of the military’s entomological warfare team, which studied the bugs’ ability to disperse and attack. Results found that the six-legged soldiers successfully feasted on humans and guinea pigs placed near the drop area.

In 1954, Operation Big Itch dropped 300,000 rat fleas in the Western Utah Desert. The military wanted to test if fleas could effectively carry and transmit disease. During one test, a bug-bomb failed to drop, cracking open inside the plane. The fleas swarmed the cabin, biting everybody aboard.

At the time, the military planned to build an insect farm, a facility that could produce 100 million infected mosquitoes per month. Multiple Soviet cities were marked with buggy bullseyes.

Conspiracy: The government has exposed me to harmful radiation.

The Truth: If you’re over 50, it’s possible.

“It is desired that no documents be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified ‘secret.’” —Atomic Energy Commission memo, 1947

In the late 1980s, the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a damning report called “American Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens.” The report spotlighted Operation Green Run, a military test at a Washington plutonium facility. There, in 1949, managers purposefully released a massive cloud of radioactive iodine-131 to test how far it could travel downwind. Iodine-131 and xenon-133 reportedly traveled as far as the California-Oregon border, infecting 500,000 acres. It’s believed that 8000 curies of radioactive iodine floated out of the factory. To put that into perspective, in 1979, Three Mile Island emitted around 25 curies of radioactive iodine.

The report showed that the military planned 12 similar radiation releases at other facilities.

The government sponsored smaller tests, too. In the late 1950s, intellectually disabled children at Sonoma State Hospital were fed irradiated milk. None gave consent. In Tennessee, 829 pregnant mothers took a vitamin drink to improve their baby’s health. The mothers weren’t told the “vitamin” was actually radioactive iron. In Massachusetts, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission fed 73 intellectually disabled children oatmeal. The secret ingredient? Radioactive calcium. (Officials told the kids that if they ate the porridge, they would join a “science club.”) From 1960 to 1971, the Department of Defense conducted whole body radiation experiments on Black cancer patients, who thought they were receiving treatment. Instead, the DOD used the test to calculate how humans reacted to high levels of radiation.

The United States also conducted hundreds of unannounced nuclear tests. In 1957, Operation Plumbbob (above) saw 29 nuclear explosions boom in America’s southwest. The explosions, which 18,000 soldiers watched nearby, released 58 curies of radioactive iodine—enough radiation to cause 11,000 to 212,000 cases of thyroid cancer. Through the 1950s alone, over 400,000 people became “atomic veterans.” Many didn’t know it.

Conspiracy: The government is staging terrorist attacks on itself.

The Truth: Military officials once suggested staging phony terrorist attacks to justify war with Cuba.

In the early 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed the impossible: an American attack on America. The plan suggested fake terrorist attacks on U.S. cities and bases. The goal? To blame Cuba and drum up support for war.

Officials called the proposal Operation Northwoods [PDF]. The original memo suggested that, “We could develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities, and even in Washington.”

Northwoods suggested that U.S. personnel could disguise themselves as Cuban agents. These undercover soldiers could burn ammunition and sink ships in the harbor at Guantanamo Bay. “We could blow up a US ship and blame Cuba,” the memo says.

Northwoods also included a plan to “sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated)" and suggested “an incident which will demonstrate that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a charter civil airline.” Officials planned to fake a commercial hijacking, secretly landing the plane while an identical drone crashed nearby.

When the attacks finished, the government would release incriminating documents “substantiating Cuban involvement ... World opinion and the United Nations forum should be favorably affected by developing the international image of the Cuban government as rash and irresponsible.”

President Kennedy rejected the proposal.

Conspiracy: The government is manipulating the media.

The Truth: From 1948 to 1972, over 400 journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA.

If you think the spinning on news channels today is bad, imagine what it would be like if the CIA still steered the ship. Under Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s sticky fingers touched over 300 newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post.

Over 400 journalists were in cahoots with the CIA. They promoted the Agency’s views and provided services: spying in foreign countries, gathering intelligence, and publishing reports written by the Agency. Sometimes, CIA Head Frank Wisner commissioned journalists to write pro-government articles at home and abroad. And, as if a CIA spin weren’t enough, the Agency also paid editors to keep anti-government pieces off the presses. Journalists with ties to the CIA also planted false intelligence in newsrooms so that unconnected reporters would pick it up and write about it.

The CIA teamed up with journalists because many reporters had strong foreign ties. A journalist reporting from abroad could gather information that the CIA couldn’t, and he could plant propaganda better, too.

Although a congressional hearing in the 1970s put an end to inside jobs, Big Brother still manipulates markets elsewhere. In 2005, the government spent $300 million placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets—an attempt to hamper extremists and sway support.

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A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2024.