The earth is flat.
The moon in hollow.
Evolution didn't happen.
These are only some of the wild, laughably ridiculous theories that a disheartening number of people actually believe.
In spite of ample scientific evidence proving them wrong.
Nonetheless, they go on believing these ludicrous theories.
Some of which are creepy enough even to make those with the toughest skin have trouble going to bed at night.
"What is the scariest/creepiest theory you know about?"
How It All Began...
"This isn’t a theory, but I just think it’s cool."
"Y’know how movies and shows always have this ‘ancient alien race’ that came way before us, and we’re the new species?"
"Well technically, most likely thats wrong."
"We are near the beginning of the universe, if the universe was a person, we would literally barely be a cell, not even formed
In reality, we are the ancient species, we are the ones that come before, we are the ones some future civilization may see."
"Just a crazy thing to think about."- Podomus
A Whole Other Life
"I have a sleep disorder that causes nightmares and dreams that are often indistinguishable from reality."
"I live whole lives with partners and kids or work jobs in strange places for decades in full technicolour details and reach old age before waking."
"Sometimes it’s so intense that I sob and grieve for the lost relationships as if my real life partner has died."
"I am confused to be my own age and be here, now."
"The theory that this life is a dream/simulation type thing feels pretty real to me."
"My brain seems to create whole viable realities anyway."- Isolampg
Tired Season 4 GIF by The SimpsonsGiphyIt Just Doesn't Add Up...
"I find numbers stations to be pretty creepy."
"Their purpose is technically a theory, as the groups that broadcast them won't officially confirm even their existence for the most part."
"Essentially, spying is still a very real thing for most world governments."
"One of the most foolproof ways of delivering a coded message is through a one-time code, a code used just once before being discarded."
"Your spy has the key, you have the message, and once the key is used it is discarded and the next message is sent using a different key."
"Additionally, shortwave radio is an extremely secure way of sending these messages."
"It sounds weird, that a radio station anyone with a shortwave radio can listen to, would be considered 'secure'."
"But the beauty of the method is that shortwave radios are ubiquitous, cheap technology throughout most of the world."
"What looks more suspicious, a person traveling with a radio, or a person traveling with a sophisticated computer or satellite phone?"
"While the signal can be received by anyone, it leaves no record of who received it and can't be intercepted and traced by a middleman."
"They don't care if you listen, because the stream of numbers is nothing without the code, and because you're using a one-time code, it can't be cracked as it's randomly generated and used once."
"The only time a one-time code has ever been broken was an instance where the code was re-used."
"So your spy just tunes in to the radio at a specific time on a specific day, writes down the numbers."
"Decodes the message, discards the key, and no one is any the wiser."
"Most stations are identified by a call sign or little jingle, and these can range from kind of cute and cheerful to pretty eerie sounding."
"If you listen in frequently, you'll hear messages repeated over and over until one day they change up - it's believed they'll repeat the message until their spy can communicate they've received it."
"Essentially, if you have a shortwave radio, you can listen in on highly secret spy communications from countries all over the world."
"You can also listen in on countries jamming the communication, either by broadcasting state radio on the same signal, or trying to jam it with noise or static."
"You'd think the frequency of these transmissions would have gone down after the Cold War, but they're still going strong!"
"The very first numbers stations appeared in the very early days of radio, during World War I."
"I find it fascinating, but also super creepy, that all of this secret communication is happening right out in the open, for us to tune in to at any time, without any way of knowing who it is intended for or what is being transmitted."- Tintinabulation
loop numbers GIFGiphyBefore There Were Even Dinosaurs...
"Not much of a 'theory', more of a conjecture but:
"Fossilization is actually quite rare."
"It takes extremely specific set of circumstances for a dead organism even to become fossilized let alone survive intact to the modern day to be found by humans."
"Because of this, there are likely millions of species we will simply never know about because none of them ever fossilized."
"For all we know, we might not even be the first intelligent species to evolve here on Earth."
"There could’ve been a species that formed a civilization at some point and then went extinct later on, but we’ll possibly never know that because there are no fossils that formed/survive today."
"It probably wouldn’t have been an advanced, industrialized civilization like the kind we have today as we would’ve surely found evidence for it by now, but I could easily see something on par with Ancient Egypt disappear completely after millions of years."- DannyBright
"How Can I Remember Things That Never Happened?"
"Telling this story makes me feel uncomfortable, even today, so I will tell it here."
"I don't know how much this story fits into this thread, but I've never had a platform that seemed appropriate to share it, so here we go.'
"When I was 20 (14 years ago), I moved from Iowa to Boulder, Colorado with my best friend Cory."
"We moved there during the month of August, and shortly thereafter I got a phone call from a number I didn't know."
"I answered it, and it turned out to be this girl that had attended the same high school as us, Ashley."
"Ashley had heard that Cory and I had just moved to Boulder, and she was calling because she, too, had just moved to Boulder to attend CU."
"She wanted to know if we wanted to get together some time and hang out / party."
"Ashley was a couple years younger than us and we didn't run in the same crowds, so we didn't hang out much."
"But I remember her coming over to our apartment to smoke and chill once, then I remember asking her to get us weed--she did."
"She came with us to a party once, and I also remember us asking her for weed a second time, and her texting me back saying 'You guys just message me when you want weed, so no'."
"After that I don't think we talked to her again."
"Fast forward 3-4 years, Cory and I are living back in Iowa."
"One night, I was out with a couple of people I'd gone to high school with, and we went to this dive bar called Thumbs.'
"In the back of Thumbs there is a single pool table, which is where my group went because we had planned on playing."
"We got to the pool table, and there's Ashley, racking a set of pool balls."
"I was super surprised to see her there, so I walked right up to her and said something like 'Ashley, long time no see! What are you doing here? Did you move back from Boulder?'"
"Ashley just stared at me for a second and then said 'What?'"
"So I repeat myself and say 'Did you move back from Colorado? I haven't seen you since we hung out in Boulder!'"
"She looked truly confused, and then she said 'Um.. what are you talking about? I never lived in Boulder'."
"At this point I thought she was f*cking with me because I specifically remembered hanging out with her more than once. So I laughed and was like 'You're f*cking with me, right?""
"She shook her head no, and one of the girls I was with, who knew both of us, actually overheard it and butted in to confirm that 'Ashley had lived in [our hometown] the whole time'."
"I completely dropped the subject to save face, but the experience was so unsettling that I made a bee-line for the front door."
"I walked out onto the sidewalk, pulled my phone out of my pocket, and called Cory."
"I said 'Cory, do you remember when we lived together in Boulder and Ashley came over and hung out with us?'"
"And Cory said 'No man, that never happened'."
"He was my best friend so I knew he wasn't f*cking with me, plus there was a zero percent chance he and Ashley had ever talked to set something like this up."
"When I pressed the issue, he insisted that no one we had gone to high school with had ever moved out to Boulder, and that we certainly hadn't hung out with them."
"Since then, I've brought this up to Cory several times, and his position has never changed."
"To this day, I don't know what happened."
"I specifically remember hanging out with her."
"She wore a tie-dye t-shirt when she came over the first time."
"And we hung out with her multiple times, I remember it so clearly."
"I still have those memories, but apparently they never happened."
"Even though the timeline matches exactly; she would have graduated high school that year and moved to Colorado in August for school."
"I know that the human memory is super unreliable, and I'm sure that's all this is, but that doesn't change that I am absolutely 100% sure that this happened."
"14 years later and I still stand by my story, wrong as it may be." - morbowillcrushyou
black and white love GIFGiphyThey Can Hear Us From Beyond The Grave...
"The last neuron in the brain can fire up to 72 hours after clinical death."
"What is classed as still being alive?"
"Your heart stops or your brain activity stopping?"
"As a nurse this plays on my mind, I always talk to the recently deceased as I would usually do."
"Hearing is the last sense to go anyway so chances are people can still hear for a short time after death."
"I have to confirm death on a daily basis, we check heart sounds, breathing, eye response, and pain response, but part of me knows that electrical activity is still going on in there."
"I’m a hospice nurse and morbid thoughts are what I do best."- jowiejojo
Life Goes On...
"Some smart people I know say life extension tech will exponentially explode in the next century, transforming adult life spans the same way antibiotics, vaccines, and sanitation irrevocably transformed childhood survival rates."
"If we hadn’t blocked stem cell research, we could be the ones living youthful, nearly disease-free lives but we’ve missed our chance by one or two generations."- Lemontreelumur
What The Government Doesn't Want Us To Know
"The Vela Incident."
"September 1979, a US Vela satellite detected a double flash of light over an area of the ocean between South Africa and Antarctica."
"The prior 41 double flashes observed by the satellite were from nuclear explosions as this is what they were designed to observe."
"There also happened to be a typhoon happening in the area at the time so it seemed like someone wanted to detonate it without being caught."
"Carter administration reported that it was a natural occurrence due to a small meteorite hitting the satellite."
"However many other independent sources and even other countries have reported that they did indeed find traces of fallout and radiation."
"Because of the geopolitical climate of the times, there’s very strong evidence that it was in fact a joint nuclear weapon test carried out by South Africa and Israel, and the US scrubbed the information regarding it because they didn’t want to paint their allies in Israel in a bad light for working with apartheid-era South Africa."
"Strangely enough, Israel and South Africa have never denied having nuclear weapons programs, nor have they ever denied a joint test being responsible for the Vela Incident."- DJCJ42
nuclear explosion bomb GIFGiphyWas He Ever Really There?
"The man from Taured."
"He was going through an airport and when asked for his passport he gave the people a fully legitimate passport."
"Except the country he was from didn’t exist."
"He argued that it was right between France and Spain and had been there over 200 years."
"Since the passport was legitimate but the country wasn’t on the map they put him up in a hotel for the night with guards outside his 4 story room."
"He was gone, along with all his things the next morning."
"Not a trace."- 1122Sl110
When The Stars Align...
"Not a theory but a matter of fact."
"The Milky Way and many other nearby galaxies are hurtling towards the same point in space, being attracted by something."
"We don't know what because our view in blocked, but it's pulling GALAXIES towards itself."
"Big ones too, the Milky Way is a rather large galaxy."
"Whatever this 'Great Attractor"'(as it's been dubbed) is, it's insanely massive."- Lui_Le_Diamond
Surely, none of these things ever happened, right?
Depending on who you ask, who knows...
Fan theories are almost like the conspiracy theories of fandom.
Except they don't lead to people refusing to follow public health guidelines during pandemics or storm the United States Capitol Building.
Instead they can spread so far and so often the line between wishful thinking on the part of fans can get confused with canon—the works of a particular fictional realm that are recognized as genuine.
Fan theories generally arise to fill in the gaps or resolve unanswered questions from the original work.
Sometimes those lines blur.
Redditor redhead_in_red asked:
"What unofficial fan theory makes so much sense you consider it canon?"
Diversion, Just a Diversion
"James Bond is the loud distraction that lets the real spies do their work undetected."
"As soon as he rocks up to a new location he says 'BOND. JAMES BOND IS HERE. THE SPY. I'M HERE'."
- Legitimate-Suspect-3
GiphyTwo Sides, One Coin
"Mary Poppins is the same species as Pennywise (It), except she feeds off children's joy instead of their fear."
- perishingtardis
GiphyRebel Scuma
"Admiral Ozzel in the Empire Strikes Back is a rebel spy. He does everything possible to deflect suspicion from Hoth, first by trying to prevent Piett from reporting the finding to Vader, and then by trying to deflect suspicion to smugglers once Vader overhears."
"Then, once Vader has made up his mind to attack the rebel base, Ozzel "goofs up" the hyperspace jump, alerting the rebels to the Imperial fleet and giving them time they otherwise would not have had to evacuate the base."
"Everything he does is either hilariously incompetent, even by imperial standards, or perfectly designed to give the rebels the best possible chance to survive."
"'Clumsy as he is stupid' or an agent who sacrificed his life to give the rebellion a chance? You decide."
- JustafanIV
Animated GIFGiphySee an Optometrist
"Dora the Explorer is visually impaired."
- Shatterphim
"This one is true. I get so sick and tired of showing her where sh*t is on the map like how tf do you not see it bruh??"
- Alm8360NoScoPro
Giphy*pew-pew*
"Storm Troopers are actually very accurate, but in both New Hope and Empire, they were under orders to not shoot to kill."
"In New Hope, Vader knew Obi-Wan was on board. He wanted to face him personally."
"In Empire, it's because they needed them to escape on the Falcon in order to follow the tracer they installed on it, and thus find the new rebel base."
- ArcadianDelSol
GiphyWhich Witch Is Which?
"Nothing supernatural happened in the original Blair Witch project. It was just two friends conspiring to murder another friend, and terrorizing her before doing it."
- SnooChipmunks126
blair witch horror GIF by LionsgateGiphyDoes Michael know?
"KITT (Knight Rider) was built from a crashed Cylon (original Battlestar Galactica)."
- MadMacs77
Kid Smoking GIF by YK Animation StudioGiphyAn Eye Open
"King Of The Hill: Dale is in fact under surveillance."
"In the final episode, we learn that Boomhauer is a Texas Ranger. There is a theory that Dale was just wacko enough for the feds to notice, and they looked for, and found, a ranger who had known him from boyhood."
"It is more or less his job to monitor Dale. Since Dale isn't really dangerous, Boomhauers job is very easy."
"It's why we never really see him work, he just drinks beer with Dale, files reports weekly, and has plenty of time to chase women."
- Elendilmir
GiphyHoungry
"Palpatine siphoned Padme’s life force to keep Vader alive. That was his Sith secret to eternal life - draining the life of others."
- DJZbad93
GiphyMeta Morty
"Rick in Rick and Morty knows that they are in a TV show and actively makes an effort to keep the show entertaining because he knows that cancellation would be the true end to his existence."
- Yoctatrine
GiphyAndy's Dad
"In Toy Story, Andy's dad got Woody from a special promotion in cereal boxes that was stopped early because the show was canceled. That's why he's so rare and doesn't know his own backstory."
"Woody doesn't remember Andy's dad as a past owner because his name is also Andy and his kid looks a lot like him."
- Haterade_ONON
GiphyBetter Failsafe Than Sorry
"That Batman's plans to take out all the Justice League members in case they 'go rogue' isn't just about in case we get yet another Superman goes fascist story."
"It's a long term failsafe for future generations in case the Speedster or Kryptonian 5 generations down the line when the original leaguers are all dead isn't as nice as the original."
- Nayko214
GiphyR.R. You George?
"George R.R. Martin died after the last book release. He’s been impersonated by mall Santas in the off season so people would keep watching the show. All they had to do was switch hats."
‐ Pancake_Guardian
"What if the George R R Martin we know isn’t the writer, just the public face, and the ghost writer actually doing the books died and so he’s just stalling pretending he’s still writing them?"
- Thebogusgasman
GiphyNeverland
"Peter Pan is actually a villainous demon who murders children to prevent them from growing up while Captain Hook is the one who got away."
- ChampionshipRemote94
"He's a changeling so aside from the murder, yeah. It's Tinkerbell that originally stole him cos faeries are messed up."
"I totally think Captain Hook was a stolen child that came back to try and free the other kids."
- ghostofmyhecks
GiphySpongeBob Mutated Pants
"Bikini Bottom was the sight of atombomb testing, that's why everybody is so weird. They are mutated fish."
- MonoDilemma
Giphy"An aging covert operative brought out of a kind of forced retirement to infiltrate an island and prevent a group of mercenaries from killing millions with experimental missile-based military technology."
- AdvocateSaint
Giphy"Yeah, my brother and I decided that Connery's character in The Rock is an aged 007 and Eastwood's character in Unforgiven is a Man with No Name who survived into late middle age and tried to put down his pistols."
- Devi1_May_Cry
GiphySome of these make perfect sense.
Others stretch the canon pretty thin.
So what do you think?
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I'm still on the fence about this whole extraterrestrial situation. I need more proof. Now I'm not naive enough to think that in this vast, endless universe only the human race exists. I just need proof, tangible, solid, didn't see it from my trailer through beer goggles proof.
I also need proof about the afterlife, another out there topic. Truth be told, I've never been that into this whole conversation. I've got enough daily problems on this planet, let alone worrying about making Will Smith's biggest hits into documentaries and not just popcorn/comedy space farce.
But let's compare thoughts...
Redditoru/ValencikHannibal197wanted to discuss life beyond this planet, what do we really think? They asked:
What's the best theory on UFOs or aliens you've ever heard??
I definitely wouldn't turn down an excursion to AREA 51. I'd like to poke around and get a sense of the place. I've never personally been up close and face to face with a "non-Earther." Not sure I'd like to be...
TV Truth
x files monkey pee GIF by The X-FilesGiphy"UFOs/Aliens are a cover for all of the secret projects that the government is working on. Actually stole that from the X files."
Birth
"How human birth parallels alien abductions:
- Babies are taken from their home (womb)
- They still developing sight, so they see bright lights and grey figures.
- They hear an "alien" language they don't understand.
- They suddenly feel cold after leaving their womb.
- They are in a surgery room being poked with tons of instruments.
Long story short: some people suggest that abductions are just people who had memories of their birth."
In the Mind
"I just don't think anyone will ever see this. But I think that UFO's are the projection of our unconscious collective mind. Everything that exists in reality, also exists, in our immaterial mind. Is it possible that the insides of our mind are also just one drop in the ocean of consciousness... and together we create the material reality were in, simply by experiencing it in a real way, inside-out through our senses."
Flyover...
"My father was an aircraft mechanic and fabricator for test and spy aircraft for the USAF. He spent 75-85 working with test aircraft. He said that when they were going to do a test, that could possibly be seen by the public, they would make a betting pool on how many UFO reports local authorities and flight towers received."
Under the Sea
sci-fi ufo GIFGiphy"I like the idea that some UFOs aren't machines. Instead they are some sort of Upper-Atmosphere Jellyfish. I found the issue of Fortean Times that had this article. Here's the cover: https://ft.gjovaag.com/q/images/a/ae/FT291.jpg"
- BigD1970
Interesting. There are some ideas we can look into. None of it proof, but possibilities. There are certainly plenty of future film ideas.
Like 2012...
"We are like that un contacted tribe and everyone agrees not to bother us."
"I've heard it explained from a channel (idk if you know what channeling is) kinda like this. First of all, we as a species tend to freak out, shoot first and ask questions later. Most humans would have a literal psychotic break. You have to believe in vibrational energy as it relates to our consciousness."
"The aliens (certain ones) are at such a higher level that it would be jarring for us to come in close contact with. We are slowly getting there but it's a process. Like 2012, end of the Mayan calendar, wasn't the end of the world it was the end of an energy cycle that we as the human race had never made it past before."
"Previous civilizations have been destroyed or destroyed themselves before they got this far. We passed a point where we are very unlike to destroy ourselves anymore. This doesn't mean we won't see some real bad hardships yet but we will keep progressing."
- falecf4
"train your eyes"
Dancing GIFGiphy"I was a firm believer in t em when I was in high school and kept googling theories and info in my spare time and during my study halls. They said their bodies were so lightweight or something that the reason why you can't see the evidence is that they disintegrate before hitting the ground."
"And then LOL it was so funny, some people would swear you could "train your eyes" to see rods... HhhahAHAHAHA. Like there were these experts. Video showed him walking around with a serious face, then pointing. And he's like, "that was one just there." "You can't see them, you have to be used to them... like me."
"I've spent many years immersed into hunting them finding them. That's why I can see them." And then one day China, who loves occult stuff, had like a lab that set up a nighttime camera to capture footage of rods at night... then realized they were normal bugs at overexposure. lol"
Lurking
"The Dark Forest theory. Basically the theory that the reason we haven't made contact is because all the other civilized life in the universe/galaxy knows not to broadcast their location. They've learned that there's something awful or predatory lurking in the dark forest of our galaxy, and that it's better if they keep to themselves."
Unknowns...
"That the universe is so vast that we haven't been discovered yet."
- neoastic
"This makes sense to me because traversing the distance to or from even our our stellar neighbors would require technology that is not known to us now or likely to be known by us anytime soon if it's even possible at all. To assume without evidence that aliens could possess this technology and have visited us does not meet my skeptical standards."
- KZED73
Back and Forth
back to the future great scott GIFGiphy"Time travel exists, and UFO sightings are actually future humans coming back to our time. That is why they are so discreet, and never openly make contact."
I hope time travel exists. Now that I'm onboard for. If aliens do exist... just come on out guys. We could probably use your help.
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People Share The Strangest Conspiracy Theories They've Ever Heard That Turned Out To Be True
Part of the reason conspiracy theories are so tempting to so many people is that sometimes, they turn out to be terrifyingly accurate.
One Reddit user asked:
What's the strangest conspiracy theory you heard that actually turned out to be true?
We're absolutely not encouraging, condoning or supporting any currently popular conspiracy theories, but we all need to be honest with ourselves. Current outlandish conspiracy theories seem plausible to some people because past outlandish conspiracy theories were factual:
Mind Control
Project Mk ULTRA, aka CIA mind control program.
That stuff is terrifying.
- [Reddit]
One of the people believed to be a researcher involved in MKUltra was Henry Murray, a famous psychologist and professor at Harvard. He was responsible for developing the field of Personology and developing some early profiling tests.
He's also partially responsible for driving the Unabomber off the deep end.
During the 50's and 60's, he was commissioned by the US government in order to condition pilots in case they get captured if their planes get shot down so they don't reveal secrets under torture. Unfortunately, he tested these theories to fine tune them on students which meant just screwing with them.
In a separate experiment, which the Unabomber was a victim of, worked like this - students were instructed to write an essay summarizing their personal philosophy on life and underlying principles, then went into a room expecting to debate philosophy with a fellow student. They instead faced an interrogation by a far more experienced opponent, whose sole purpose was to attack and ridicule their beliefs at length. Since one of the main goals of the experiment was to induce stress and upset the subject as much as possible, it's not surprising that many students came out feeling traumatized.
A Little LSD
lsd GIFGiphyOperation Midnight Climax
Us government hired sex workers to dose "johns" with LSD to test mind-control capabilities. Then, they expanded the program to dose citizens at restaurants and other public places.
Sex workers and LSD sounds like fun... Until you murder a 12-year-old girl and have no memory of it. Yes this actually happened to one of the victims.
If you're someone who's never done psychedelics and get dosed without you willing.. Man depending on the dosage I can only imagine what the toll on the psyche be...
It could cause a total breakdown if you thought it was just you going insane.
- whazzah
Leave Britney Alone
The #FreeBritney conspiracy.
I saw so many people on Instagram especially that were just convinced that all her weird Instagram videos were cries for help because she was being controlled by the scenes and thought it was kind of a ridiculous theory, but with everything that came out in her court cases in the later half of 2020, it seems like all of that was actually correct.
Britney Spears really was in an abusive overbearing conservatorship for over a decade.
I heard the court ruled in favour of the father because he has increased the value of her assets... So they couldn't say he was a bad at looking after her interests.
Basically, Britney Spears isn't a "legal adult" anymore. You know how kids can't take care of their own stuff and have to have their parents make decisions for them? That's basically what happened to her. Her father is her guardian (meaning he gets to control her money, legal stuff, everything about her life), and there's no real way for her to free herself because she doesn't have the legal options to do that, nor do they think she's supposed to be allowed to decide that ("She's mentally ill, what does she know?" type of reasoning).
She was put in that kind of situation in ~2007 when she had a severe mental health episode, since it was believed that she couldn't take care of herself due to her mental illness. Her family takes advantage of her vulnerable position and takes control over everything in her life, including locking her up, censoring her, pushing her to do stuff she doesn't want to, and making sure she can neither leave nor ask for help. The only reason we know about it is because her fanbase noticed subtle cries for help and other signs that something is wrong. It was a huge thing, and the story was more or less confirmed shortly after.
She's not even asking for freedom. She's just asking her father to be removed as conservator, not for the conservatorship to be ended entirely.
CIA vs JFK
The CIA proposed "Operation Northwoods" to JFK.
It was a literal false flag attack on American soil perpetrated by Americans but framed up to start a "popular" war with Cuba. The CIA wanted to kill Americans (shooting down passenger planes, gunning down people in the streets, etc.) and blame Cuba as an excuse to start a war.
It was around this time and Bay of Pigs that Kennedy supposedly said he would "smash them into pieces and scatter them to the wind." (Meaning the CIA)
That was a man with convictions... and giant brass balls, to be honest.
- sbbart62
The way I remember hearing it is someone came to him about Operation Northwoods as a way to instigate a war with Cuba or the Soviets or both. Kennedy was horrified and he kind of lost it and decided to try and take down the CIA.
That goes in to the conspiracy that the CIA was involved with his assassination shortly after
Vietnam
The rumor that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (which is what got the US involved in the Vietnam Was) was fake turned out to be true.
It wasn't "fake" so much as a big embellishment. It was obviously still cynical and dishonest, but it wasn't an entirely fabricated incident, which I think it is often taken to be.
There were two incidents, the first on was nv troops firing upon us ships and the second was just a storm, So they are partially correct.
The official line from those in command during the incident was "playing with ourselves in the dark".
OK Buddy Sure
Seth Meyers Ok GIF by Late Night with Seth MeyersGiphySome customer I talked to somehow ended up on a rambling tangent about how he was part of a mission in the Vietnam War, where they were controlling the weather on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.. Yeah, okay buddy, sure.
I looked it up later and it turns out Operation Popeye actually happened.
Martha
I didn't hear about this because I wasn't born at the time, but Martha Mitchell whose husband was involved in the Watergate Scandal.
She tried to tell people but was called crazy and mentally ill and her husband and others eventually had her drugged and held hostage in a hotel for months. Later almost all the things she claimed were confirmed to be true.
Mental health professionals have to be aware of the Martha Mitchell Effect.
- slychd
Unarmed and Unprovoked
Not the strangest but the British army murdered 14 unarmed civilians during a peaceful civil rights march in my city, Derry, northern Ireland in 1972. The official line for years was that the victims were armed and had attacked the soldiers first.
The Sun "newspaper" in the UK printed a story the next day portraying the soldiers as heroes and the victims as terrorists. The government eventually admitted about 10 years ago that none of the victims were armed and the killings were not provoked.
Makes it hard to believe anything the government or media say.
- Mouts93
Black Farmers
The Pigford case where the USDA systemically eliminated Black farmers because of racism in the 80s and 90s.
None of the people involved were punished. The agency targeted and eliminated Black farms, paid the highest civil rights lawsuit in history out of taxpayer money, and those responsible are still employed or collecting a government pension.
It's disgusting.
I've never heard of this lawsuit wtf?
This is mind bogglingly recent.
Medical Experiments
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was ethically horrendous.
When the study began (1932), there was no established treatment since the relevant antibiotics did not exist, so the idea of following a cohort of untreated subjects to see what happens to them was a reasonable idea.
However, the subjects were misled about their diagnosis, what the study was doing for them, and how long the study would last.
And then later, when antibiotics became available that could treat syphilis effectively, the study continued without providing that treatment and just let the disease "run its course."
- ToxDocMD
There's also a lingering fear of vaccination in African immigrant populations due to forced sterilization and other medical experiments that happened historically.
Gay Frogs
"Chemicals are turning frogs gay!"
Not quite true, but close.
It turns out if you dump a bunch of (now banned) chemicals into the habitats of amphibians, which determine sex through hormones rather than chromosomes, then they can spontaneously change gender or be hermaphroditic.
Alex jones "they are turning the frogs gay". While his assertion that the goverment is trying to turn frogs gay an purpose is probably not true. The commonly used herbicide atrazine can turn male frogs into females and render them infertile
Civil Rights Leaders
COINTELPRO.
Basically, the FBI was conducting surveillance and running disinformation campaigns against civil rights leaders in the 50/60s, and were at least in part responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton and possibly MLK.
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This article is full of disturbing and unnerving theories.
There's a lot of talk about heavy topics like "good" and "bad" ways to die, worldwide catastrophic events, etc.
One Reddit user asked:
What is the scariest theory you know about?
Here are some of the more unnerving responses.
GRB Bye-Bye
I saw one about the potential of a specific type of supernova that would essentially fire out beam of radiation (or some other kind of energy.)
If it hit earth, we would see the entire sky covered with auroras. This is the ozone layer burning off and the last thing we would see before we all die, guess at least we get a pretty lightshow to end on
- grizwa
Astronomer here! You are thinking of a gamma ray burst (GRB).
However, for a star to do this to earth it has to be extremely close to us (within a few thousand light years), a distance within which we can see the bright, almost going supernova stars well, and the beam is just a few degrees wide and has to be directed exactly at us.
As such we don't think there are any GRB-killing potential events near Earth. They're also just so darn rare- we estimate a galaxy our size produces one every million years or so.
Serial Failures
michael c hall dexter GIF by ShowtimeGiphyIt is speculated that there are over 2000 active serial killers in the US alone. It makes you realize that many of the serial killers we know of today--- Bundy, BTK, Gacy, are ultimately failed serial killers.
It's like that Usual Suspects line--- " the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist"
Doesn't help that the entire profile of a serial killer is so well known that any serial killer with half a brain cell would be subverting it intentionally. The only serial killers that fit the standard profile of a serial killer are the most compulsive, incompetent serial killers.
If you're only looking in places where there's a pattern for a serial killer, a serial killer without a pattern is hard to trace. Add in "professional" serial killers like Israel Keyes and you have numerous types under the radar.
Non-Zero
Every year there are a non-zero number of near miss nuclear detonations.
I.e. through faults in the system a nuclear warhead is almost launched/detonated. In 2005 it was reported that Russia had 26 such near miss events.
As far I'm aware no stats have been published since and no info for the US has been made public, however it is believed:
a) the US had a higher number of events in the same year, and
b) as they are typically caused by aging equipment and the numbers were increasing prior to that year, the number of events each year after likely kept increasing.
Never Ending Story
I remember hearing one theory that every time we "die", we instead instantly switch to an near exact universe were we didn't die, as if nothing happened. Other people's death remain the same since it's not yourself.
For example if you were to be hit by a car, in other peoples perspective you die, but in your own instead of dying, its a near miss, or you're injured but don't die.
- Vexilus
What gives me a serious mind f*ck with this theory is that in this situation, you would transport to a universe where you still interact with your friends as if nothing happened but that those same friends are mourning you and go on without you in your previous universe. And what if you live in a universe that is one of your friend's alternative universes that they transported to after they died?
Overall, what if our personal universe is completely based around one person's death and their eventual transfer to the universe you're in? Super weird.
Losing Your Head
That, after decapitation, you may still be conscious and somewhat aware for at least a few seconds.
- Grinnzy
Also time and your perception of it is relative, and I have no idea WHAT it would be relative TO in this situation. So seconds could be soooo much more. ((Shudder))
Believe it's something like 2-28 seconds before you brain looses enough oxygen to fail.
Can't remember who it was but "death by beheading" (think it was using a guillotine) was stopped in the one country because the ruler was present and the guy who lost his head stared and blinked at him for long enough that he decided to stop killing people that way.
- TAOJeff
Selfish, Cowardly, and Scary
That theory about what happened on the missing Malaysian flight.
From looking at the evidence and the most likely scenario, (that being the pilot committing suicide) people have been able to piece together possible scenarios that happened on the plane. One of which is that shortly into the flight, the pilot deoxygenated(?) the plane, and accelerated to a high altitude, killing all on board very quickly.
He then flew for hours and hours south before crashing the plane. It's scary to me because he would have been flying in an isolated part of the Earth, with nothing ahead of him other than the South Pole. That isolated plane, flying in the dark, with hundreds of dead strapped in their seats...
The nearest city, Perth, is still asleep and only beginning to wake up. There is no one, and nothing. To think of that man, flying with all those bodies in the dark to nowhere is very scary.
So selfish, and cowardly, but also very scary.
Permafrost
As Artic permafrost melts, it will release diseases that have been frozen in the ground for thousands or tens of thousands of years, and life on Earth will have no immunity to them.
Wonder how the world will react if a disease suddenly infected the whole world. We're good at following orders and social distancing so it won't spread that fast right
To The Left, To The Left
beyonce queen GIFGiphyThe Great Attractor.
Over the years, scientists and astronomers have charted out space and we have a fairly good understanding of what's out there; planets, moons, stars, space, etc. Gravity plays a big role in showing what is attracted to what, moons around planets, planets around stars, stars around black holes.
But people have began to notice that everything out there in the galaxy, is slowly, SLOWLY but surely, scooting LEFT on our map of the cosmos.
Everything and anything is drifting ever slowly in one united direction and something hidden and astronomically massive is dragging us and all known & unknown matter towards it.
And we have utterly no say or action in the matter.
Carrington
The Carrington Event of 1859 might be something that happens on a natural cycle every 150 - 200 years or so, which means we are due.
A CME (coronal mass ejection) hit the Earth's magnetosphere and caused a giant geomagnetic storm. The entire ionosphere became charged and unstable with massive induced electrical current.
On the good side, such an event causes beautiful aurora ("northern lights") across the majority of the planet. On the bad side it's giant planet-wide solar EMP. It wreaked havok on telegraph systems, but they were about the only electrical equipment at the time.
If a similar event happened today, first the global satellite network would be annihilated, then any radio signals would break up (including your phone going dead), immediately followed by most radio equipment being fried.
Next, the power grids will go; not just a worldwide blackout, but power surges would destroy most of what's connected to the grid, including the chaos of the transformer and substations exploding.
Virtually every vehicle will suddenly shut off, and suddenly being very difficult to control will crash. Some heavily shielded military craft might survive, but in general commercial aircraft will suddenly fall from the sky.
All of this would happen extremely fast; from any one person's point of view it may seem to be instantaneous. If a bit stronger than the Carrington event it may also destroy the backup systems that protect critical infrastructure from disasters.
The Carrington event was over 150 years ago.
Earth been hit by significant (but much smaller) CMEs at least twice since then; they'd be enough to cause quite a bit of damage today, but manageable. A Carrington event sized CME had a near miss with Earth in 2012.
We actually have multiple solar flares hit our magnetosphere every year, just generally not that cause significant issues (though there are predictable events a couple times a year that interfere with some satellites for a couple hours a few days in a row)
Carrington event sized CMEs are common enough that within your lifetime it is pretty much guaranteed to see at least one or two more near miss events.
CMEs can be much stronger though. During certain parts of the 11 year solar cycle the sun regularly emits CMEs large enough that, if they hit Earth, would strip the atmosphere, boil off the oceans, and incinerate everything on the surface, sterilizing the planet.
There would be no real warning; depending where you were on the planet it would either be instantaneous or you'd have just enough time to see a glow in the sky from the wall of fire before it crested the horizon and engulfed you at several times the speed of sound.
GRBs are the only deadlier threat I am aware of.
The Bubble
We don't know whether the universe is in a true vacuum (lowest possible energy state) or a false vacuum (a local low, but not the lowest).
If the universe is a false vacuum, then at any point, at any moment, a quantum tunneling event could occur where that point spontaneously decays to a true vacuum. If that happened, a bubble would expand from that point at the speed of light that radically altered physics, instantly annihilating everything down to the subatomic level.
Since it travels at c, there'd be no warning, no way to see it coming. When it reached us you'd just instantly blink out of existence. Even if we are in a false vacuum, such an event doesn't become likely for at least 10 to the power of 139 years, which is an unimaginably big number - but it could happen at any moment at any point.
It could have already happened and the bubble could be heading straight for us, about to end us at any time. It's a great way to die as far as ways to die go, the scary part is just all planets, stars, and life that are or ever will be just up and disintegrating with no warning.
Not from a "it's bad for me" perspective, but a "everything that ever was or will be is just gone in an instant" perspective.
- fafalone
Reset
This is my theory or at least I haven't seen it before.
What if global warming is just the universe's way of resetting life before it gets too advanced? That's why we haven't met any other civilizations from other planets.
Kinda like a Rust server.
You'll Never Know
We are all strangers, including your family and your best friends.
No matter what.
You may know them, but they're different people truly. You will never really know what they are thinking of you or anyone in general.
They Won't Exist
It freaks me out that things that are so commonplace in nature won't exist by the end of our lifetime.
Eg. I went to Ireland and saw the dark hedges last year and the guide told us those trees are predicted to be gone within 20 years due to changed weather patterns and increased tourism.
Something so small but I remember seeing pictures of them as a kid and wanting to go there. Knowing they just won't exist quite soon is unsettling.
It Really Didn't End Well
GiphyThe Permian Triassic extinction event, also known as 'The Great Dying'.
It was the greatest mass extinction event in history, killing about 80% of all species on the earth.
One theory for how it happened is the Siberian Traps flood basalt erupting onto massive coal deposits, releasing an absurd amount of CO2, and causing catastrophic climate change.
Basically, climate change caused by burning fossil fuels has happened before, and it really didn't end well.
Strange Sludge
Strange matter.
Inside Neutron stars is a kind of quark soup. Strange quarks May naturally occur here which aren't usually likely to form matter. If the neutron starts was to collide with another it would spew out its insides.
Strange matter is perfectly stable and dense, therefore indestructible.
Whatever matter it touches becomes so 'impressed' by its stability, it will become strange matter too. If one of these 'strangelets' hit Earth, everything would just become hot dense strange sludge.
Dust
I have heard of a theory that if enough satellites get stuck in orbit, that if an explosion were to set the satellites in one direction around the planets orbit, that that one satellite would continue to crash into other satellites, causing those them to continue spinning with that force.
This would continue, the satellites breaking apart, becoming smaller and smaller, until the only thing left is a fine dust that is spinning in the planets orbit, causing a cloud to black out the sun.
And as much crap we have in earth's orbit, that genuinely worries me.
I think its called Kesslers Syndrome.
Blue
A Himba Tribe in Africa had a slew of words for the color 'green'... and not one for the word 'blue'. During a color swatch test, members of the tribe could distinguish between subtle shades of green at a glance, but due to a lack of a word for 'blue', could only identify a clearly and distinctly blue swatch half the time during testing. Possible Conclusion: Without a word for something, we might have trouble identifying that thing even if it was right in front of us. One Ref: [https://www.gondwana-collection.com/blog/how-do-namibian-himbas-see-colour/]
The Awareness Test: https://youtu.be/Ahg6qcgoay4
The Theory: without a word for a thing, we might not be able to identify or recognize a thing... even if it was right sitting right in front of us. Even if someone pointed it out to us. Even if we were told exactly what to look for.
What are cats staring at, anyway..?
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