Conspiracy Theories

I love conspiracy theories.  They are the alternate history (or present) that usually make my craziest ideas seem pretty sane by comparison.  But while almost all conspiracy theories sound pretty crazy, that doesn't mean that they're all wrong.  In fact, some of the craziest sounding conspiracy theories wound up being right on the money.  These theories turned out to be things like:

Operation Snow White

You may have heard of Scientology, the religion that was founded by a Science Fiction writer and has had some issues with public relations in the past, both recent and not so recent.  So in the 1970's the Church of Scientology decided to go with the basic reaction of any group with a bad public image: they infiltrated the government to get rid of any records that portrayed them in an unfavorable light.

Over the course of about 2 years, the Church of Scientology had as many as 5,000 covert agents infiltrate various branches of the government, including the IRS, the Coast Guard, and the DEA.  The main goals were to gain a tax-exempt status as a religious group and to remove any evidence of Scientology's crazier plots (including when they tried to get a journalist committed to a mental institution).

Amazingly, the plan worked.  Then, in early 1977, one of the agents got arrested while breaking into a government building.  After that, it all unraveled very quickly, culminating in 11 high-ranking members, including the founder's wife, getting indicted in 1978.  6 of the 11 went to jail for four years, and each had to pay a $10,000 fine.

I would call that pretty light punishment for the people who orchestrated the single largest infiltration of the government in the history of the United States.

Government Media Control

Everyone has heard at one time or another the theory that the government actually controls everything that we see and hear in the media.  Most of the time, the people that you hear it from are also convinced that a secret organization actually rules the world, so I wouldn't put too much stock in the theory itself.

Then again, reality can be a strange thing.  In 1948 Frank Wisner, who was in charge of the sinister-named Office of Special Projects, started Operation Mockingbird.  This goal of this operation was to infiltrate every major media outlet with reporters who were on his payroll.

The program was astonishingly successful.  In under ten years, there were over 400 reporters on the government's payroll, including some of the big shots at ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.  This level of infiltration allowed the government to suppress any story they didn't like as well as planting pro-government stories.  Apparently, this was all so easy because, as one operative noted, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month."

Luckily for us, the entire operation was disbanded in the mid-1970's.  Or not, according to much of the internet.


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For this post, much of my research and some of my sources came from Cracked.com, who I strongly recommend that you check out, especially this article:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18955_6-crackpot-conspiracy-theories-that-actually-happened.html#ixzz2JQs0GPDN

Interesting History: Troy

Troy is an ancient city made famous first by Homer in the Iliad (c. 1250 BC) and then by Brad Pitt in the film Troy (c. 2004).  It is best known as the namer of the Trojan Horse and the site of the Trojan War, which serves as something of a prequel for The Odyssey, making it the bane of high school students everywhere.  The city itself was thought to be mythical for a while, on account of how no one could find it.  And that's where the story gets interesting.

The man who actually discovered Troy was Heinrich Schliemann, a German archaeologist.  When he got to the site, he discovered that there were actually ruins of at least nine ancient cities, all stacked on top of each other.  This was fairly common practice in ancient times, because if somewhere was good enough to live (and like Troy, right on a lucrative trade route), there was no reason to let a few ruins get in your way.  You just built right on top of them.

When Schliemann saw this, he figured that since the Troy of the Trojan war was from Grecian times, it had to be on the bottom.  So he went right to blasting.  He went all the way down to the bottom level, where he claimed that he had discovered Troy and King Priam's treasure.  The only problem was that this left about a thousand-year gap in Troy's history.  But screw that, he found treasure!

See, treasure!

People just accepted this for about 20 years, until another archaeologist found that one of the other cities in the pile matched up with Homer's description much better.  A city five freaking levels above where Schliemann had claimed Troy was and almost 2,000 years younger.  So in his fervor to find Troy, Schliemann had actually blown straight through it, and did such a good job of it that archaeologists are still complaining about how much he destroyed to this day.