Conspiracy Theory

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Hello again and welcome back to Geek Time. Hi, Brad.

Hello.

What are we gonna talk about today？

Have you heard about conspiracy theories？

Ah, yeah! Conspiracy theories就是阴谋论,  It's about, basically, things in the world that's hidden from the public. It's like an evil plot by certain groups of people, right？

Basically yeah. It can be like individuals or governments working together, basically, people behind the scenes and they've got some nefarious plot. 

I think especially nowadays, with a lot of things going on, a lot of negativity in the world,  people are losing control of their life,  so I think there are more conspiracy theories popping up.

Definitely.  

So could you give us just a little bit of background about conspiracy theory and the definition？

So basically like conspiracy theory is when someone sees something that’s strange in the world. Like for example,  if we talked about light bulbs, we can see that for a time the light bulbs were basically being manipulated in a way so they would stop working very quickly, and it turned out that all of the light bulb companies were coming together in meetings and talking about what they should do to sell more light bulbs.

So they’ve decided to make substandard light bulbs, so they can sell more.

Uh-huh, and that's like a more mundane example of like a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true,  but there are other conspiracy theories that are much more nefarious, talking about UFO Cover-Ups or assassinations something like that, and beyond that, there's false flag operations where like ...

False flag operations, i've seen it somewhere, it's translated into 伪旗行动. How is that related to conspiracy theory？

Basically like a false flag operation is when like a government does something to its own people to make it look like it's an attack by a foreign government or something like that like a terrorist attack,  so they can basically control the public's opinion about a specific group or country and something that they do on their own.

That's really scary,  basically, it sounds like these orchestrated attacks on the Internet of trying to get people to target a specific group thinking that they pose a threat.

Eh-huh, definitely.

False flag operations, you mentioned is linked with the government, so conspiracy theories are they always linked with government or it can be any organization?

It can be organizations that are hidden and behind the scenes,  the most famous is probably like the Illuminati, but it can also be the government or individuals, even like a just a small group of individuals, like rich people or something like that within a particular area. 

So government hidden a secret organizations or even group of individuals. So let's talk about some of the very common conspiracy theories like you mentioned just now,  UFO Cover-Ups. Whenever people talk about UFO, there are always conspiracy theories saying that, in fact, we already have aliens among us. 

Yeah,  there's the whole Roswell crash that happened,  and this was something that was over 70 years ago now,  but a lot of people think that the government covered it up and made it look like it was just like a weather balloon that crashed.

We talked about that in our alien episode, so it was a crash then the government is saying it's just a normal happening. But in fact, many people believe that was actually an alien spaceship that was 51区Area51. But do they have any evidence？

Well, there are some really particular bits of evidence that show that it's possible that’s still unlikely, but there's a lot of like redacted government files that show the possibility of UFOs throughout history, right？When we look at, for example, the military, the air force, whenever they see a UFO, they listed as a UFO because it's an unidentified flying object, of course. 

Of course, it's not necessarily alien.

Right, not necessarily aliens. It can be something from another government or just an airplane or maybe even like a weather balloon, right? Of course, but whenever they have these type of sightings, they take records of these and they put it in the files, and after about 50 years, these files become public domain, and so people can read about them and a lot of like UFO people like to go through these and they like to find and see if there's any correlations between some of them. But because the so much information is redacted that they can't actually see it because it just got black marks over it. People can't see the entire story, so they fill in the blanks with what they think. 

其实这些机密文件在解密之后还是会有黑的条去盖住一些关键的信息People were just filling the blanks with their guesses. You see this very often in movies and TV series. Basically the documents you just described sound really similar to X-Files.

Basically, it's like X-Files actually came from that type of thing.

But that brings us to the question--Why would they even bother covering it up？I mean, can't they just tell the public it is an alien?

Can you imagine what people would do if they realized that there were aliens out there？Like if there was proof that aliens existed, people would freak out. 

True,  I probably be the first one to freak out. I guess it's because the general public it's just not ready for that kind of information and then when you can't process that information, you tend to freak out. Actually have you ever watched an American TV show called Wayward Pines？

I have not. I’ve heard of it, but I haven't watched it.

中文叫黑松镇. It's that sort of idea. It's basically way in the future like, I'm not gonna go into details, but that really describes people cannot know all the truth because they can't handle it, so I guess that's probably why. And are there any other really famous cases of conspiracy theories？

If you think about it, there is,  the HARRP, which is the high-frequency active auroral research program, it's basically, it's something up in Alaska and it's used to check for ionization patterns in the weather. But a lot of people have this idea that it's actually something that the government uses to control weather and patterns. 

Why would they want to control whether? For me, maybe I'm very innocent in this. I'm thinking controlling weather, maybe it's a climate change thing, maybe it's for the better.

Think about it used as a weapon. If you could control the weather in another country, take away the rain, give them too much rain...

Wow, that is a dire thought. Okay, so weather control is also like a conspiracy theory.

Big one.

But obviously you said it's a big one obviously is shared by people. I'm assuming there are promoters of these type of conspiracy theories. People who are going around, telling everyone, look, it's like this is what the government is doing.

It goes anywhere from like people on Youtube talking about what they see to big TV shows with really famous people. If we look at, there is a conspiracy theory TV show by Jesse ‘The Body Ventura’, he was a professional wrestler who became the governor of Minnesota and after that he turned into a conspiracy theorist. A lot of people think that because he was in the government for a while that he was privy to some sort of special information. 

Okay, but he was basically a wrestler. He was a sportsman. He wasn't a scientist or anything like that, had no background in that.

Right.

But people believe them.

Right, because they see him as being someone who is on the IN. He was in the government and now that he's out. He can tell people about what he saw because he is not like a professional politician. He was an entertainer, but they saw that he went in there and then he came out and he was telling people about it. So they think that he must have had some sort of inside information.

所以就是那种又要有内部消息, 但又不是主流的政客那种人. People believe that those people got the truth and they are likely to tell people the truth. So he had his own show, basically talking about all sorts of conspiracy theories?

Yeah, this was probably the most popular of them all of all the episodes he did. This was the most popular and like the most shared. Because it had like the biggest connotations as far as like world domination so to say. But it was a very short-lived show. I think it was only probably one or two seasons.

Apart from all these science-related and like military-related things, conspiracy theories about history, certain historical events like the first thing that jumped to my mind is the assassination of JFK. 刺杀肯尼迪的这件事情. There are a lot of different conspiracy theories out there.

Right. That's mainly because of like what people remember. The thing about memory is everyone kind of remembers things a little bit differently, especially like a high stress situation like that. So a lot of people kind of remember the way he moved after being shot slightly different. And because of this, there's a lot of difference conspiracy theories based on what actually had happened that day, right？And so there's the main shooter, right？The shooter that actually was there in the library, Harvey Oswald.

And he was caught, obviously.

And he admitted to doing it and everything. They found the gun, but there's lots of people who think he wasn't the only shooter.

But didn't the forensic evidence法医的证据Wouldn’t they’ve cleared any possibility of that?

But a lot of people think that's where the cover up began. A lot of people think because some people remember seeing multiple gunshots, not multiple gunshots, but multiple bullet wounds. Because they think they remember seeing multiple bullet wounds. They think there must have been a magic bullet or something that hit him and kind of ricochet and went around or maybe that's like the theory that people have to say why there is only one shooter, but a lot of people say because of that there was actually multiple shooters and that's why you hear the phrase the Grassy Knoll, right？They think that there was a second shooter and he was actually up the Grassy Knoll hiding behind things.

Grassy knoll is where the second shooter or whatever the 3rd shooter was standing. When you were saying about the cover up at the forensics, it just makes me feel like these conspiracy theories, they are all about a deep rooted mistrust of authority of any organization that are having control over things, would you say that？

Definitely.

But what is your take on this？Why do you think people are so into conspiracy theories？

I think the main reason why a lot of people are into it so much is because puts them in like with a group of people. It's not a large group of people, but it's a small close net group of people. Oftentimes it's much like kind of like the people who meet up and talk about aliens at conventions. There’s also these groups of people who get together and they talk about their ideas, their conspiracy theories, and it really makes them feel like they're part of a group, a very small group, but part of a group.

Interesting,  So basically it's about being a non-conformist, but with a small group of people又要找到归属感, 但是又要跟大众比, 要有与众不同的这种感觉. All right, so I think we pretty much covered the basics about conspiracy theory, the definition and some of the main cases. In the advanced episode, let us get more into it and let's talk about secret societies and some of the really out-there theories.

Sounds good.

I'll see you next time.

See you everyone.

Bye.