Most popular conspiracy theories without JFK assasination?
- Thread starter MorphyVSFischer
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Archibald
Banned
Never heard about that one before. Pretty shitty when you think about it, for the exact reasons you explained.
While UFOs were big before Kennedy, and there was always an element of "the government knows more than it's telling", the conspiracy side of it didn't really get going in a big way until after Kennedy's assassination. That didn't really happen until the late 70s/early 80s, with the Bennewitz Affair, Milton Cooper, alien abductions, and UFOlogists' discovery of the Roswell crash - although the Roswell incident made a few headlines in 1947, it had been completely forgotten until Stanton Friedman's interview with Jesse Marcel in 1978. In the early 60s we were still firmly in the lights in the sky/space brother period of UFOs. Whether that change would still happen would depend a lot on the general course of history with no JFK assassination.
What about "Pearl Harbor was deliberately let happen by FDR," "fluoride is a Communist plot" and "there's Red agents in the government and the medias"?
Flouride and red agents were big during the 50's red scare but lacked staying power, though there was always an undercurrent of paranoia so long as the soviet union exists.
Pearl Harbor theories might be bigger here. They did get a bit of a revival after 9/11 as a sort of "look they've done it before!" justification.
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Not that big. The John Birch Society wasn't exactly the mainstream, nor even more than a minority of a minority, problematic as that minority was in all the back alleys and basements of American society it found itself in.
I'd say it's pretty close between "FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen" and the Philadelphia Experiment.
Project U.F.O.
I think it was also known as Project Blue Book, or at least closely identified with that phrase. I took it pretty seriously as a kid, and along with Close Encounters, it is probably one of the main reasons that I, too, associate the late 70s with the heyday of UFOlogy.
Well, there's also the fact that canadiate Goldwater refused to renounce them, which probably gave people the impression that they had influence in high places.
An Angry American Fights Back!
From National Lampon, 1973. Written, I believe, by Christopher Cerf, long-time Sesame Street writer.
From National Lampon, 1973. Written, I believe, by Christopher Cerf, long-time Sesame Street writer.
An influence so great that it accounted for a landslide loss in the Presidential election, and a Democratic sweep of Congress.
The 1970s really was the heyday of UFOlogy, or at least of UFOlogy as UFOlogy. After they discovered Roswell and alien abductions - and FOIA - most of UFOlogy (not all) soured into just another branch of conspiracy theories.
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Yes, but for a group described as being on the margins of American political life, the fact that they had a Republican presidential candidate(even a spectacularly unsuccessful one) wanting to appease them might give people the impression that they had some clout.
And I doubt they had much, except to the extent that, in coalition politics, smaller groups can have an outsized influence because the candidate might need them to push him over the top. Even if, as in Goldwater's case, it doesn't work.
Yeah, the X-Files phase(not just the show but the general milieu), when UFOlogy started getting tied in with everything from the banking conspiracy to Satanic Ritual Abuse, kind of ruined it. There was a certain honesty to the 1970s Project Blue Book/In Search Of era, when the theorists, however deluded they may have been, did seem to sincerely be exploring UFOs as an issue in itself, rather than just trying to impress everyone with their abilities to construct the most byzantine conspiracies possible.