I've always had a soft spot for conspiracy theories. The first magazine I bought regularly was Fortean Times, and would still had the cover price not gone up.
A personal favourite is Paul is Dead, the endearingly loopy theory that McCartney of the Beatles died in a moped accident as the hight of their fame. Undeterred, the band covered up the death, replaced him with a lookalike and carried on as normal - but slipped covert references into their later albums. The evidence ranges from the silly to the very silly:
Silly: "Turn me on, dead man!" "Paul is dead, miss him", "I buried Paul" e.t.c. can be heard when you play certain songs backwards. The "father McKenzie" who walks from the grave in Eleanor Rigby was changed from "father McCartney". Before his "death" in 1966, Paul's natural parting was on the left side of his head - afterwards, it jumped to the right, and apparently this is highly unlikely. Pre-1966 and post-1966 Paul look uncannily different, according to some amateur forensics, and more like Phil Akrill.
Very silly: The number plate of the Beetle behind George on the Abbey Road album cover has the number "28IF", referring to the fact Paul would have been 28 had he survived. This theory is slighly derailed by the fact he would have been 27, but you can't keep a good conspiricist down: it's well known that the Beatles were into their Indian stuff, and in India age is dated from conception not birth. Making him 28. "The walrus was Paul" from Glass Onion refers to the song "I am the Walrus". The walrus is, reputedly, a symbol of death in certain cultures - but good luck in actually finding which ones.
And one from the back cover of Abbey Road, which I reproduce in full from the Officially Pronounced Dead site:
Another favourite crazy theory is the Alice in Wonderland-The Wall synch up. It's less famous than Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz, but I've never had the right CD-DVD combo to play that one. It's simple: you watch the movie with the sound off, while listening to the album, and trippy stuff happens. Much like Paul is Dead, the likelihood of it being real is miniscule - but when you watch it, you can't help but wish it were true...highlights include the doorknob singing the line "if you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life", Alice on the water during "daddy's gone across the ocean" and the terrifyingly creepy garden of wild flowers sequence, choreographed perfectly to "Goodbye Blue Sky". I can't find the instructions I followed on the web, but I think you had to line up that first guitar hit with the moment Alice's finger touches the pool and the White Rabbit appears.
I believe all the big assassinations of the 60s were controlled by the same body. Illuminati, CIA, Jewish Conspiracy, Freemasons - whatever. It was a bad decade to be famous.
A final fave is the faked moon landings. Convenient for the arms race, landing then was, and the BBC created more convincing spaceships in 60s Doctor Who. It does seem unlikely, especially when you consider the Lunar Module was never tested before going into space, and that three lives were risked before NASA had ever tried landing a non-manned mission on the moon. Then again, I still get excited when ice blocks crack in glasses of water, and when pitta bread swell up in the microwave, so I actually do believe we landed on the moon - if it had been a total fake, then other nations who had since landed would have blown the whistle on it. The dust would be different, and so would the landscape. But then there's the moon photos, and that's where it gets suspicious. Most of us can't do decent photos standing still in a normal situation, yet the moon photos/footage are surprisingly good. There are all sorts of anomalies picked out by experts/nutcases, about the direction of shadows or amount of light.
Now this does make sense to me. Man went to the moon. But the photos and stuff were really crappy, so they reproduced it in a studio later. This is the best way to put the evidence together.
Incidentally, the original moon footage was taped over. I know they used to do that in the 60s, but this was the original moon footage. Surely someone would have known it's value?
Here's the best site I could find, although there is better evidence around. I particularly like the way they continually refer to people who believe we landed on the moon as skeptics...
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
Incidentally, ever see the reality TV show when they faked sending people into space? Yeh. That.
I suppose my reaction to all of these is I believe it, because they are cool theories, because it doesn't really matter a damn what my opinion on it is and because it is more fun to do so. I also believe in Father Christmas, and in fairies. And I believe Gallifrey exists as well. Why shouldn't I? The key word is "believe" - that's the problem with the atheist argument that God can't be proved. It presupposes that proof matters.
I mean, take the moon landings. I know nothing about science or photography, so I have no basis for judging whether humanity could have landed, or for whether those photographs truly are as incriminating as they look. It doesn't help that one of the things I don't believe in is evidence. The existance of slashfic assures me that if you want to see something hard enough, you can always back it up. My A-level history course featured us weekly having to assess different historians. They would take the same situation, and refract it through the prism of their ideas -
Marxist historians see every revolution as an act of the people against a repressive system, believers in the Great Man Theory would interpret huge social change as acts of individuals, Revisionists would pose any idea as long as it was the opposite of the accepted norm. And so on.
Or the in English literature - is Dracula about sex, female oppression, drugs, syphilis, or just about vampires? What you find depends on what you are looking for. It's all a matter of perception: give the same solar flare to a Christian, a UFOlogist and a meterologist, and one will see angels, one aliens, and one a natural phenomena. Does it matter if one is "right"? Take the ancients, who saw Zeus in the thunder and passed generations knowing no better. In the world as they understood it, Zeus existed. I've always belived real was relative.
I think this is why skeptics have a hard reconverting the religious. It's not so much that people who don't believe in God have a hard time understanding why he might exist - it's that people who believe in evidence have a hard time understanding why it doesn't exist.
So
Some hurting people
A personal favourite is Paul is Dead, the endearingly loopy theory that McCartney of the Beatles died in a moped accident as the hight of their fame. Undeterred, the band covered up the death, replaced him with a lookalike and carried on as normal - but slipped covert references into their later albums. The evidence ranges from the silly to the very silly:
Silly: "Turn me on, dead man!" "Paul is dead, miss him", "I buried Paul" e.t.c. can be heard when you play certain songs backwards. The "father McKenzie" who walks from the grave in Eleanor Rigby was changed from "father McCartney". Before his "death" in 1966, Paul's natural parting was on the left side of his head - afterwards, it jumped to the right, and apparently this is highly unlikely. Pre-1966 and post-1966 Paul look uncannily different, according to some amateur forensics, and more like Phil Akrill.
"In 1988 Warner Brothers released a video titled 'Imagine' which focussed on John Lennon and the 'Imagine' recording sessions. There is one particular scene where John and George are having something to eat and are talking about Yoko being a 'Beatle wife' and referring to the Fab 4. Then George corrects John and says 'Fab 3'. Realising his mistake John agrees."
Very silly: The number plate of the Beetle behind George on the Abbey Road album cover has the number "28IF", referring to the fact Paul would have been 28 had he survived. This theory is slighly derailed by the fact he would have been 27, but you can't keep a good conspiricist down: it's well known that the Beatles were into their Indian stuff, and in India age is dated from conception not birth. Making him 28. "The walrus was Paul" from Glass Onion refers to the song "I am the Walrus". The walrus is, reputedly, a symbol of death in certain cultures - but good luck in actually finding which ones.
And one from the back cover of Abbey Road, which I reproduce in full from the Officially Pronounced Dead site:
"The very name on the back cover could be conveying a cryptic message as to Paul's last resting place. If we read the full writing on the wall, and split the band's name we get "BE AT LES ABBEY". Les is the French definite article (though in plural). Furthermore, if we use numerologic on the next two letters and add the two together, (R and O are the 18th and 15th letters in the alphabet) you get 33, multiply this by the number of letters (2) and we get 66. What year did Paul die? But this is not all! 33 can also be read as CC (the third letter twice). Cece is short for Cecilia, suggesting that Paul couldpossibly be resting in peace in St. Cecilia's Abbey in Rhyde on the Isle of Wight."The totally nuts:
"After the Beatles' broke up, John went to America to find his killers. During the second half of 1967 he had discovered they were members of the KKK. After years of personal investigation John was getting close, very close to the truth. Yoko Ono is a spy of the foreign office. She was part of John Lennon's assassination."It's a shame so much of the "evidence" is so crappy, really, because the idea is so damn cool. I can't believe the Beatles didn't encourage the rumour. If ever I become famous, I am totally going to pull a hoax like this! All that rubbish about the lyrics and covers does mask some of the slightly more suspicious evidence, like the fact 1966 saw him suddenly get taller, change his hairstyle, and break up with his longtime girlfriend he was on the point of marrying, not to mention certain odd changes about his face. Nevertheless, this is basically this is the butt-end of conspiracy theoridom. I never believed it at all, until listening to "Day in the Life" - it sent a nasty shiver up my spine, and for a moment I knew exactly what they meant, where the rumours came from. So I now have a certain level of sympathy for the theory - no textual, solid proof, but thematic and tonal. It makes emotional sense, if not logical, especially during that song.
Another favourite crazy theory is the Alice in Wonderland-The Wall synch up. It's less famous than Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz, but I've never had the right CD-DVD combo to play that one. It's simple: you watch the movie with the sound off, while listening to the album, and trippy stuff happens. Much like Paul is Dead, the likelihood of it being real is miniscule - but when you watch it, you can't help but wish it were true...highlights include the doorknob singing the line "if you should go skating on the thin ice of modern life", Alice on the water during "daddy's gone across the ocean" and the terrifyingly creepy garden of wild flowers sequence, choreographed perfectly to "Goodbye Blue Sky". I can't find the instructions I followed on the web, but I think you had to line up that first guitar hit with the moment Alice's finger touches the pool and the White Rabbit appears.
I believe all the big assassinations of the 60s were controlled by the same body. Illuminati, CIA, Jewish Conspiracy, Freemasons - whatever. It was a bad decade to be famous.
A final fave is the faked moon landings. Convenient for the arms race, landing then was, and the BBC created more convincing spaceships in 60s Doctor Who. It does seem unlikely, especially when you consider the Lunar Module was never tested before going into space, and that three lives were risked before NASA had ever tried landing a non-manned mission on the moon. Then again, I still get excited when ice blocks crack in glasses of water, and when pitta bread swell up in the microwave, so I actually do believe we landed on the moon - if it had been a total fake, then other nations who had since landed would have blown the whistle on it. The dust would be different, and so would the landscape. But then there's the moon photos, and that's where it gets suspicious. Most of us can't do decent photos standing still in a normal situation, yet the moon photos/footage are surprisingly good. There are all sorts of anomalies picked out by experts/nutcases, about the direction of shadows or amount of light.
Now this does make sense to me. Man went to the moon. But the photos and stuff were really crappy, so they reproduced it in a studio later. This is the best way to put the evidence together.
Incidentally, the original moon footage was taped over. I know they used to do that in the 60s, but this was the original moon footage. Surely someone would have known it's value?
Here's the best site I could find, although there is better evidence around. I particularly like the way they continually refer to people who believe we landed on the moon as skeptics...
http://www.ufos-aliens.co.uk/cosmicapollo.html
Incidentally, ever see the reality TV show when they faked sending people into space? Yeh. That.
I suppose my reaction to all of these is I believe it, because they are cool theories, because it doesn't really matter a damn what my opinion on it is and because it is more fun to do so. I also believe in Father Christmas, and in fairies. And I believe Gallifrey exists as well. Why shouldn't I? The key word is "believe" - that's the problem with the atheist argument that God can't be proved. It presupposes that proof matters.
I mean, take the moon landings. I know nothing about science or photography, so I have no basis for judging whether humanity could have landed, or for whether those photographs truly are as incriminating as they look. It doesn't help that one of the things I don't believe in is evidence. The existance of slashfic assures me that if you want to see something hard enough, you can always back it up. My A-level history course featured us weekly having to assess different historians. They would take the same situation, and refract it through the prism of their ideas -
Marxist historians see every revolution as an act of the people against a repressive system, believers in the Great Man Theory would interpret huge social change as acts of individuals, Revisionists would pose any idea as long as it was the opposite of the accepted norm. And so on.
Or the in English literature - is Dracula about sex, female oppression, drugs, syphilis, or just about vampires? What you find depends on what you are looking for. It's all a matter of perception: give the same solar flare to a Christian, a UFOlogist and a meterologist, and one will see angels, one aliens, and one a natural phenomena. Does it matter if one is "right"? Take the ancients, who saw Zeus in the thunder and passed generations knowing no better. In the world as they understood it, Zeus existed. I've always belived real was relative.
I think this is why skeptics have a hard reconverting the religious. It's not so much that people who don't believe in God have a hard time understanding why he might exist - it's that people who believe in evidence have a hard time understanding why it doesn't exist.
So
Some hurting people
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