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The problem with laughing at conspiracy theories is that they actually happen. Governments, corporations, and regular people sometimes do horrible things to each other for personal gain. They sometimes even manage to keep it secret. By definition, a conspiracy is a secret plan by two or more people to commit an illegal, immoral, or subversive action against another without their knowledge or agreement. A conspiracy theory is an idea so far-fetched, so evil, so elaborate, so unlikely, or that goes so strongly against popular opinion that it is deemed ludicrous.

And then you hear about a real conspiracy that seems too evil and ridiculous to have actually happened. The Tukegee Syphilis experiment was a clinical study carried out over four decades between 1932 and 1972 to observe the natural progression of syphilis in the African American population. 600 impoverished men were given free food, medical care and burial insurance in return for participating in a medical study for a condition they were told they had called “bad blood.” The catch was that they actually had syphilis, a painful, contagious, debilitating, disfiguring, and often fatal venereal disease. The disease has been easily treatable since the discovery of penicillin in the 1940s. This treatment and information on the disease were withheld from the test subjects, and they were actively prevented from seeking healthcare in other places.

Another example of a mad scientist-level conspiracy: “Operation Sea-Spray” was a secret experiment conducted in 1950 in which the US Navy released microbe-filled balloons over urban areas of San Francisco. The microbes were thought to be innocuous, and the drop was done to map the spread of microbes through the population. Unfortunately, 11 people ended up seriously sick in hospital, and one man, Edward J. Nevin, died as a result of the microbe. His family didn’t have any idea of the origin of his disease until decades later when the documents
were unclassified.

In the light of these despicable stories it is hardly surprising that distrust of authorities, such as the government and medical community, runs deep in society. Sometimes conspiracy theories have dramatic and even devastating consequences in society, such as the current anti-vaccine movement. A controversial paper written in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield claimed to link the MMR vaccine with the onset of autism in children. His findings have since been discredited, with accusations of data manipulation and fabrication leading to him losing his licence to practise medicine. But the disciplinary action against Wakefield has actually increased support for him, as it makes it look as though he was a threat to the pharmaceutical companies and so had to be removed. Support for the anti-vaccination movement has caused huge drops in the percentage of children being immunised in the past 15 years, and the re-emergence of diseases like measles and whooping cough in countries where they were previously well controlled.

While real conspiracies often pass by undetected and cause minimal outrage when they are finally discovered, popular conspiracy theories usually pivot around the idea that a major event was actually an elaborate hoax or a cover-up for another major, covert event by people in power. They often involve ascribing God-like control to shadowy government figures.

According to moon landing conspiracy theorists, the moon landings of 1969-1972 didn’t actually happen and were instead hoaxes dramatised for TV. The supposed clues that fuel this conspiracy can all be rationally explained (for example, there are no stars in the sky because the photos were taken in the day time on the moon, where the sky appears black because of the lack of atmosphere). But more to the point, the Russian competitors in the space race never accused NASA of a hoax, and nobody who would have been involved in the filming, such as actors, camera crew, or set designers, have come forward to tell their story.

It’s nice to believe that humans really did land on the moon, but unfortunately there is a real, documented conspiracy involved in the moon landing that is not nice at all. The adorably named “Operation Paperclip” was an un-adorable move by the US government to recruit top scientists to work on their space program after 1945 – from the upper echelons of German Nazis. The chosen scientists were given American passports and clean criminal records. Only “good” Nazis who hadn’t committed any war crimes were supposed to be allowed into the country, but some very bad people were recruited, such as Arthur Rudolph, who was forced to renounce his US citizenship when research appeared to connect him to the use of forced labour to move rocket parts during his time in a Mittelwerk factory during the war.

The reason why conspiracies such as the Tuskegee Syphilis scandal and Operation Paperclip were successful is because they involved only implicit conspirators: people who would get into huge trouble if they talked about what was going on, having been crucial to instigating the crime. As soon as a conspiracy requires complicit participants, such as hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses given orders to keep poisoning entire generations with dangerous injections, the theory becomes less likely.

Real conspiracies can sneak by virtually unnoticed, while conspiracy theories swarm the world like epidemics. Like many people I was completely convinced by Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre were actually an inside job by the US government. While the counter-conspiracy arguments are largely numbers and factoids too numerous to list (the explosive puffs coming from lower windows, the melting steel beams, the supposed “free-falling” of the buildings’ collapses all have good explanations) the most convincing part of Moore’s conspiracy – that the Twin Towers fell down in a way identical to a controlled demolition – is discredited by the most convincing counter-conspiracy argument – that they didn’t. I use this example because rather than relying on data from other people, you can go on YouTube and compare the buildings’ collapses with those of controlled demolitions. In controlled demolitions the buildings always collapse from the bottom up, not the top down, as in the 9/11 disaster. Also the first building doesn’t fall directly downward as would be expected in a controlled demolition. It falls slightly in the direction of where the plane hit it. There is also the problem of stopping all of the thousands of people involved – in the government, the media, the military, the rescue teams – from talking about the conspiracy, which none of them have.

It is distressing for the families of people who lost their lives to be told by conspiracy theorists that their loved one did not die or even that they did not exist. Journalist Jon Ronson interviewed Rachel North, a survivor of the 7/7 terrorist bombings of the London Underground in 2005. She escaped the disaster, wounded and traumatised, only because the train carriage she was on was so packed with people that she was shielded from its full force by other people’s bodies. 26 people were killed in the attack. Unable to cope with what had happened to her, she started a regular blog that eventually attracted an online community of fellow survivors. Through her prolific writing she unwittingly became a spokesperson for a group of conspiracy theorists who believed the 7/7 attacks had never happened, and everybody involved had been an actor in a carefully staged performance organised by the UK government. They claimed Rachel’s descriptions of the event, such as everything going “totally black,” were evidence that the event was caused by an accidental power surge and not a bomb.
Eventually the group claimed that one person could not have possibly written as many blog entries as Rachel had, and therefore she was not a real person, but a team of people tasked with creating a persona to trick the UK population into thinking the events were bomb attacks. Rachel ended up crashing one of their meetings and yelling at the group of men assembled “I was in the carriage!” She talks about the lack of empathy needed to construct the conspiracy: “They would, for example, cut and paste the most harrowing descriptions by emergency services officers of going into carriages and seeing buckled walls that were streaming with blood and pieces of human flesh and stepping over body parts and stepping over a hole where the bomb had torn a crater in the floor. They’d post this and you couldn’t read it without wanting to weep, and they would say, ‘Ah! See? The hole appears to be on the right-hand side.’ And that would be their comment.” This disregard for the abject horror others have suffered makes sense if you believe, as the above group of people did, that the entire event was a hoax designed to instil fear in the population.

Lack of empathy features heavily in the most surprisingly huge conspiracy theory I came across: the Holocaust denial conspiracy. Most Holocaust deniers don’t actually deny that huge numbers of Jewish people were killed in WWII, but that the number of Jews killed was significantly smaller than what historians claim (two million rather than five-to-six million) and that they were not systematically executed primarily because of their race. They claim that the majority of deaths in concentration camps were comparable to those in any prisoner-of-war camp, and that the gas chambers and crematoriums were not used for mass murder, but for fumigating lice-infested clothing and disposing of the bodies of people who died of natural causes. The millions of missing Jews were actually herded out of Germany and into the surrounding countries where they found shelter. Because of its anti-Semitic intimations of a Jewish conspiracy to advance the Jewish “race” at the expense of other people, Holocaust denial is illegal
in 17 countries.

The fact that the Holocaust is one of the most well documented atrocities in the history of the world actually works to the benefit of the deniers, who can sift through massive amounts of data in order to find scraps of evidence supporting their theories. When Holocaust historians argue over some detail the deniers see it as evidence that the discussed event never happened, or has been wrongly remembered. They emphasise inconsistencies between eye-witness accounts as evidence that the witnesses are lying or deluded, while believing any witness who supports their claim. In fact, in a series of small events grouped together to form something like a holocaust, unvarying numbers and details from different eye-witnesses would actually be less realistic than varying ones. To use an unpleasant example, some eye-witnesses remember the people in the gas chambers taking 20 minutes to die, while others say it was only three or four. This can be explained in several ways: the gas may have been faster-working at different temperatures, depending on the number of victims and the size of the chamber, the amount of gas used, and people tend to experience time differently (particularly during traumatic events). So if all of the eyewitnesses had reported the same figure it would have been more suspicious than
differing ones.

The lack of empathy expressed by Rachel North can of course be seen here. Sceptic Michael Shermer debated prominent deniers Bradley Smith and David Cole on the talk-show Donahue. The deniers were unmoved even by a Holocaust survivor in the audience, Judith Berg, who screamed at them “I was seven months in Auchwitz. I lived near the crematorium as far as I am from you.” They came back again and again to how some Holocaust rumours, such as soap made of human fat, have been proven false. Her descriptions of smelling human flesh being cremated were dismissed as false memories.

Shermer explains the many ways that deniers can keep denying evidence of the Holocaust. An account of a survivor who says he heard about the gassing of Jews at Auschwitz is explained by exaggerated, unsound memories. Another
similar account is blamed on overblown rumours. An SS guard claims to have actually seen people being gassed and cremated – the denier says he was forced to confess by the Allies. A Jew whose job it was to drag bodies from the gas-chamber to the crematoria is told that the Sonderkommando accounts make no sense and their figures and numbers of bodies do not correlate with each other. The camp commandant who confessed to orchestrating the gassing of Jews was, according to the denier, tortured. What about his autobiography written after his trial confirming his confessions? Sometimes people confess to ridiculous crimes for no reason, etc, etc, etc. The same goes for explaining away the thousands and thousands of documents, blueprints, letters, and military orders recording the events of the Holocaust. While no one thing on its own is evidence that the Holocaust happened, together they form a body of evidence pointing toward its reality. Discrepancies and unexplained irregularities are perfectly normal and expected; they do not mean the entire collected evidence is incorrect or fabricated. This is an example of a warning flag of a conspiracy theory: if a theory can be made to fit any observable phenomena, it could well be phony.

If you came up with the idea that a close friend actually doesn’t like you at all, and is actually a robot sent to trick you into thinking you are friends, you could find evidence to support your theory. If you scrutinised every text message they had ever sent you, every photo and post on Facebook, and remembered every conversation you had ever had with them, you could find clues and inconsistencies that could be used as evidence that your friend is not human. Look at a photo long enough and you will start to see shadows that look weird, strange expressions on people’s faces, objects that shouldn’t be there. This is roughly how paranoid people become convinced that someone or something is out to get them, or to trick them, or spy on them. Imagine how many pairs of eyes have scrutinised the moon landing photos or the 9/11 footage looking for inconsistencies.

Conspiracy theories often make the mistake of ascribing a predictable causality to the world that just doesn’t exist. An engineer may be able to suggest what might happen if a plane crashes into a building, but statistics and probability don’t work in isolated situations. There will always be irregularities. But more importantly, we love sensational stories. David Wong explains: “There is a fundamental flaw in how the human brain works and human society works where we tend to spread information not based on whether or not it’s true, but whether or not it’s striking. And in that case there’s actually a bias toward the crazy lie. But it is automatically treated as truth so it’s almost like there is something broken where our brains’ need for novelty overrides our need to get accurate information about our environment.”

By no means am I suggesting that governments, politicians, corporations, or any authority figures should be trusted implicitly. Of course there are hugely powerful people manipulating the economy and society for their own means. You don’t need to factor in Illuminati, mind control or alien lizards to show how bad this is. But people usually exercise power in overt ways, through harsh laws or dictatorships, or in ways that are so banal they are too boring to even write down; by messing with interest rates and whatever else banks do that I can’t be bothered learning to understand. What makes many conspiracy theories unlikely is not that people aren’t powerful, dishonest, and selfish. It’s that they are human beings who screw up, gossip, and are just as bad at predicting the future as you and I are.