I covered mainstream conspiracy theories in my previous post. Now I'd like to talk about some non-mainstream ones. These are conspiracy theories that exist mostly because the people that come up with them really just cannot stop themselves. Once they get on the kick it is apparently hard to stop. It's sort of like being a meth addict only without the glamor of being a strung out neurotic shell of a person with ruined teeth.
#3 Red Bull Stratos
On October 14th of 2012 Austrian skydiver—and suspected robot assassin from the future—Felix Baumgartner decided to do something so bold and stupidly dangerous it sounds more like the kind of thing a super villain would threaten their most hated enemy with. He stepped out onto a platform 127,851 feet (38,969 meters) above sea level in the skies above Roswell, New Mexico. He turned to a camera attached to the pod that supported the platform he was standing on while ensconced in a pressure suit. Gave a salute to the camera. Then he stepped off the platform.
And fell.
Breaking the sound barrier on the way down.
And landed safely!
It was an incredible, if completely unnecessary, feat. His jump started from an altitude that was nearly twice that of the Armstrong Limit which is the height where exposed water will boil at the temperature of the human body. He was damned near all the way to the stratopause which is where the stratosphere ends and the mesosphere begins (it is also the point where the temperature stops increasing with altitude and starts falling again). The whole thing was sponsored by energy drink giant Red Bull a company notorious for sponsoring anything that seems like a good way to film a person meeting a particularly bloody end to their life then naming it an "extreme sport". Why this company sponsors such things completely mystifies me. Especially since the average Red Bull consumer tends to count going to the bathroom as their daily exercise (that's based on my anecdotal evidence only).
And somewhere on the internet someone decided the entire thing was a hoax.
Actually they decided it was a hoax even before it happened. Back when this was only something Red Bull was planning a poster on a particularly notorious conspiracy theory forum decided it couldn't be done. His reasoning? According to him balloons don't go that high.
Of course in the real world that we inhabit weather balloons have been reaching 40,000 meters (higher than the Red Bull Stratos) for many, many decades. But reality matters not to a conspiracy theorist. So, in spite of the entire idea being built entirely out of invented facts, the conspiracy folks piled on. When the jump actually took place they scoured the footage for signs of special effect trickery. They questioned why some cameras had better resolution than others (the cameras that tracked the fall from a distance were way zoomed in). They wondered why the balloon looked so small down on earth but so big up in the sky (because they apparently don't know about the decreased in air pressure as altitude increases).
It was, in other words, a gigantic circle jerk of ignorance and incredulity. One person started it, the others lapped it up and at the end of the entire debacle they congratulated themselves on being educated free thinkers as opposed to us Sheeple that believe things like weather balloons exist.
#2 Satellites and the Space Shuttle
Okay, now believing the moon hoax is one thing. That was a pretty miraculous achievement not duplicated since. But putting satellites in orbit via the space shuttle was so mundane that thinking it is a hoax is kind of like thinking the trans-Atlantic communications cables are a hoax (when was the last time you actually saw one?).
So up on the same conspiracy forum that thought balloon technology was out our bumbling ape hand's reach comes this idea that pretty much all space flight is faked. That means no space shuttle and no satellites.
Of course a great deal of you will instantly think of that grey dish attached to your house that lets in all those awesome TV channels you never watch. Well, according to the proponents of this idea you are actually getting your signal from giant mega-transmission towers that bounce the signals off the ionosphere. They note that the typical satellite dish isn't pointed straight up as evidence for their claim because they apparently don't freaking understand what Geo-stationary satellite actually is.
And perhaps more amusing is the idea that we have giant transmission towers that are somehow kept invisible. Somehow I think the technology to do that is actually the one us bumbling apes have yet to invent. But, whatever, they'd rather believe in invisible mega towers than in the idea that rockets can actually deliver payloads into orbit.
So why do they even think this? Well near as I can tell they have a grotesque misunderstanding of gravity and orbital mechanics. They seem to think putting something in orbit is impossible. That gravity will either cause something to fall to earth or escape velocity will cause it to scream away (which I guess means they accept that Voyager was real). Now how this all works in the same solar system where our moon orbits the earth which itself orbits a sun is beyond me. Maybe they think all astrophysics after Copernicus was also hoaxed?
#1 The sinking of the Costa Concordia
Owned by parent company Carnival Cruise Lines (also responsible for the recent cruise ship fire that left the Triumph stranded in the Gulf of Mexico) the Costa Concordia was a fairly new vessel in the great norovirus (stomach flu) distribution system known as vacation cruise ships. But all things come to an end and for this ship it came much earlier than planned on January 13, 2012 when the ships captain, Francesco Schettino, decided that avoiding collisions with islands is for wusses and ordered his ship into water too shallow. The ship ran aground, sank, and captain Schettino decided "honor" was also for wusses as he abandoned ship and made for shore while hundreds of people were still aboard. Oh yeah, all those people were still aboard because good old Schettino also didn't believe in running emergency drills and had his crew not get ready to evacuate the ship until it was too late. I'm sort of thinking he got the job of captain purely because of his awesome name.
So immediately the conspiracy theorists got on the case. They first noted that Concordia is a lot like Condorde. For some reason this is suspicious. Then they note that some years earlier a ferry named the Estonia had sunk killing a lot of people. Apparently in conspiracy theory world this also made the Costa Concordia suspicious since it was also a ship that sunk.
So what was the deal? Was it faked? Well the initial speculation is that wasn't fake it was just staged. Why? To promote the upcoming 3d release of Titanic of course! Because absolutely no one would have been aware of the film otherwise.
Other posters start chiming in. Some think it was staged and no one was actually on board when it sank. All the supposed passengers were just actors. Then there is speculation that the ship was actually trying to sabotage underwater communication lines, because when I want line cut my first choice to do the job is a $500 million cruise ship! Screw those underwater combat specialists.
In the end it was sort of concluded that the whole thing was staged in order to convince people to not travel. Because I guess someone out there is a real meany.
So there you all go.
#3 Red Bull Stratos
On October 14th of 2012 Austrian skydiver—and suspected robot assassin from the future—Felix Baumgartner decided to do something so bold and stupidly dangerous it sounds more like the kind of thing a super villain would threaten their most hated enemy with. He stepped out onto a platform 127,851 feet (38,969 meters) above sea level in the skies above Roswell, New Mexico. He turned to a camera attached to the pod that supported the platform he was standing on while ensconced in a pressure suit. Gave a salute to the camera. Then he stepped off the platform.
And fell.
Breaking the sound barrier on the way down.
And landed safely!
It was an incredible, if completely unnecessary, feat. His jump started from an altitude that was nearly twice that of the Armstrong Limit which is the height where exposed water will boil at the temperature of the human body. He was damned near all the way to the stratopause which is where the stratosphere ends and the mesosphere begins (it is also the point where the temperature stops increasing with altitude and starts falling again). The whole thing was sponsored by energy drink giant Red Bull a company notorious for sponsoring anything that seems like a good way to film a person meeting a particularly bloody end to their life then naming it an "extreme sport". Why this company sponsors such things completely mystifies me. Especially since the average Red Bull consumer tends to count going to the bathroom as their daily exercise (that's based on my anecdotal evidence only).
And somewhere on the internet someone decided the entire thing was a hoax.
Actually they decided it was a hoax even before it happened. Back when this was only something Red Bull was planning a poster on a particularly notorious conspiracy theory forum decided it couldn't be done. His reasoning? According to him balloons don't go that high.
Here. Have a Clue Soda.
Of course in the real world that we inhabit weather balloons have been reaching 40,000 meters (higher than the Red Bull Stratos) for many, many decades. But reality matters not to a conspiracy theorist. So, in spite of the entire idea being built entirely out of invented facts, the conspiracy folks piled on. When the jump actually took place they scoured the footage for signs of special effect trickery. They questioned why some cameras had better resolution than others (the cameras that tracked the fall from a distance were way zoomed in). They wondered why the balloon looked so small down on earth but so big up in the sky (because they apparently don't know about the decreased in air pressure as altitude increases).
It was, in other words, a gigantic circle jerk of ignorance and incredulity. One person started it, the others lapped it up and at the end of the entire debacle they congratulated themselves on being educated free thinkers as opposed to us Sheeple that believe things like weather balloons exist.
#2 Satellites and the Space Shuttle
Okay, now believing the moon hoax is one thing. That was a pretty miraculous achievement not duplicated since. But putting satellites in orbit via the space shuttle was so mundane that thinking it is a hoax is kind of like thinking the trans-Atlantic communications cables are a hoax (when was the last time you actually saw one?).
So up on the same conspiracy forum that thought balloon technology was out our bumbling ape hand's reach comes this idea that pretty much all space flight is faked. That means no space shuttle and no satellites.
Of course a great deal of you will instantly think of that grey dish attached to your house that lets in all those awesome TV channels you never watch. Well, according to the proponents of this idea you are actually getting your signal from giant mega-transmission towers that bounce the signals off the ionosphere. They note that the typical satellite dish isn't pointed straight up as evidence for their claim because they apparently don't freaking understand what Geo-stationary satellite actually is.
And perhaps more amusing is the idea that we have giant transmission towers that are somehow kept invisible. Somehow I think the technology to do that is actually the one us bumbling apes have yet to invent. But, whatever, they'd rather believe in invisible mega towers than in the idea that rockets can actually deliver payloads into orbit.
So why do they even think this? Well near as I can tell they have a grotesque misunderstanding of gravity and orbital mechanics. They seem to think putting something in orbit is impossible. That gravity will either cause something to fall to earth or escape velocity will cause it to scream away (which I guess means they accept that Voyager was real). Now how this all works in the same solar system where our moon orbits the earth which itself orbits a sun is beyond me. Maybe they think all astrophysics after Copernicus was also hoaxed?
#1 The sinking of the Costa Concordia
Owned by parent company Carnival Cruise Lines (also responsible for the recent cruise ship fire that left the Triumph stranded in the Gulf of Mexico) the Costa Concordia was a fairly new vessel in the great norovirus (stomach flu) distribution system known as vacation cruise ships. But all things come to an end and for this ship it came much earlier than planned on January 13, 2012 when the ships captain, Francesco Schettino, decided that avoiding collisions with islands is for wusses and ordered his ship into water too shallow. The ship ran aground, sank, and captain Schettino decided "honor" was also for wusses as he abandoned ship and made for shore while hundreds of people were still aboard. Oh yeah, all those people were still aboard because good old Schettino also didn't believe in running emergency drills and had his crew not get ready to evacuate the ship until it was too late. I'm sort of thinking he got the job of captain purely because of his awesome name.
So immediately the conspiracy theorists got on the case. They first noted that Concordia is a lot like Condorde. For some reason this is suspicious. Then they note that some years earlier a ferry named the Estonia had sunk killing a lot of people. Apparently in conspiracy theory world this also made the Costa Concordia suspicious since it was also a ship that sunk.
So what was the deal? Was it faked? Well the initial speculation is that wasn't fake it was just staged. Why? To promote the upcoming 3d release of Titanic of course! Because absolutely no one would have been aware of the film otherwise.
Other posters start chiming in. Some think it was staged and no one was actually on board when it sank. All the supposed passengers were just actors. Then there is speculation that the ship was actually trying to sabotage underwater communication lines, because when I want line cut my first choice to do the job is a $500 million cruise ship! Screw those underwater combat specialists.
In the end it was sort of concluded that the whole thing was staged in order to convince people to not travel. Because I guess someone out there is a real meany.
So there you all go.
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