6 Insane Conspiracy Theories (That Actually Happened)

6 Big Auto Killed the Electric Streetcar

The Conspiracy Theory:

Ask a crazy conspiracy theorist enough questions, and you'll eventually get to a dark boardroom full of evil billionaires secretly manipulating world events ... like puppeteers, but with money. They come in all shapes and sizes -- the New World Order, the Illuminati, Masons, Scientology, the Jews, the "gay mafia" that allegedly controls Hollywood. To get a nuanced understanding of how the average conspiracy theorist thinks the world runs, watch the scene in Trading Places in which two old guys ruin Dan Aykroyd's life over a one-dollar bet, and punch yourself in the part of your brain that contains a sense of humor.

Fortunately, modern societies reward companies that give people what they want, and we have laws designed to punish fat cats who try to gang up on the little guy. Unfortunately, breaking those laws pays extremely well in certain circumstances. While they may not be as smart or capable of weather control as we give them credit for, the extremely wealthy do occasionally meet up in dark boardrooms and make decisions that make themselves richer, and you more miserable. And that, boys and girls, is why you drove a car to work this morning.

The Reality:

There was a time in America when even small towns hummed around on electric trains and trollies. Around the end of World War I, urban railways accounted for 90 percent of trips taken in vehicles, and there was no reason to believe they were going anywhere. Urban railways meant that the average workaday citizen didn't have to invest time and money in learning to drive, paying for gas and maintaining a car. At the time, driving a car was considered a novelty. A fun thing to do on a Sunday that allowed the moderately wealthy to feel fancy without having to buy a boat. Plus, the railways were so lucrative that the local government didn't have to pay a dime to maintain them, since small businesses did the work for them. Everyone was a winner, except for a handful of very rich people who had overestimated the demand for automobiles back when they were known as horseless carriages.

In 1921, only 10 percent of Americans owned cars, and after losing $65 million in a year, General Motors had to face the fact that cars just weren't worth it for the other 90 percent. Today, the ascendance of the automotive industry is a foregone conclusion, but at the time it seemed more like a bunch of rich guys had forgotten that not everyone was rich. Imagine if the wealthiest people in your city invested all their money in limousines, under the assumption that everyone would stop taking cabs because why take a taxi? Limos only cost a couple hundred dollars extra!

This is where less successful men would have come to terms with the fact that they'd backed the wrong horse. Capitalism had spoken, and its answer was: "We'll take the clearly superior alternative that doesn't cost half a year's paycheck up front." Instead, General Motors decided to find a way to make cars worth it to the average citizen. After waiting for the laughter in the room to die down when someone suggested that they lower car prices, the car industry looked at the people who rode electric rails to work and decided to make them what's known in the mafia as "an offer they can't refuse."

According to a Senate report, in the 1930s, GM, Goodyear, Firestone Tire and a bunch of oil companies joined together to form a number of fake rail companies. They would buy up all the small companies that operated America's small town railway systems, then destroy the systems, and soon enough America would run on gasoline-powered tires. By the mid-1950s, the fake rail companies had replaced 900 of the 1,200 public railway systems with gas-powered buses and cars and were ready to take on the biggest electric railway system in the world: Los Angeles. Yes, the city that's famous for bumper-to-bumper traffic once hummed along on 1,500 miles of electric railways. GM bought out the local railway companies, and a few years later there wasn't a single electric streetcar operating in Los Angeles. Today, the smog over LA is so thick that most of the people who live there have no idea they that live at the foot of a beautiful snowcapped mountain range.

Of course, you can't just form an illegal monopoly and get away with it. In 1947, the government convicted 10 of the biggest corporations in America of conspiracy, and fined GM $5,000. GM was able to survive the fine, since the illegal conspiracy had made it one of the most successful companies of the 20th century. And all they had to do was destroy the infrastructure of some of America's biggest cities and screw the next dozen or so generations who lived there out of clean, affordable transportation.

5 The Insane Government Scheme to Get Rid of MLK

The Conspiracy Theory:

You can usually tell an insane conspiracy theory by asking what the bad guy's motivation was. Woodward and Bernstein uncovered an actual conspiracy by knowing to "follow the money." Less sane conspiracies answer the question of motive by screaming "Everybody's lizards!" So you can be forgiven if you're a little skeptical when someone claims that there was a conspiracy to destroy the life and career of Martin Luther King Jr., one of the great heroes of the 20th century. It's like learning that Henry VIII sexually assaulted Martha Washington in order to sire a son, or that terrorists conspired with Karl Malone and John Stockton to poison Michael Jordan before the flu game. The good guy is too good. The bad guy's too pointlessly evil. Vast government conspiracies need a motive beyond just being villainous creeps, right?

The Reality:

For reasons that range from outright racism to paranoia in the face of a powerful revolutionary, the FBI secretly made Martin Luther King Jr. an unofficial enemy of the state. Reading the details of the FBI's response to King's famous rise to power makes you wonder why it hasn't been made into a movie, while making you simultaneously realize that it would be impossible to make the truth not seem like an over-the-top exaggeration.

For instance, King's "I Have a Dream" speech was the defining moment of the civil rights movement. It brought the struggle of African-Americans into stark focus for white Americans while giving the oppressed black community a reason to hope. It is considered by many to be the most important speech given in the 20th century, but at FBI headquarters, it was considered a sign that King was the "most dangerous and effective Negro leader in the country." That's from a memo that went around the FBI right after King's speech.

This wasn't just idle, water cooler racism, either. The heads of various departments met to "explore how best to carry on our investigation ... to produce the desired results." While that might sound sinister, later memos cleared up that they were only interested in "neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader." OK yeah, we're definitely getting a sinister vibe over here.

The meetings produced a many-pronged approach involving all the basic stuff that bad guys are only supposed to do in movies, like bugging every room he stayed in and every phone conversation he had. Records reveal thousands of discussions inside the agency, tens of thousands of memos discussing his every action, and FBI head J. Edgar Hoover's raging hate-boner for one of the most important moral leaders of the 20th century. The FBI files give historians unique insight into Hoover's motivation, like the article about King receiving an award, on which Hoover personally scrawled "disgusting," or the article about King meeting with the Pope, on which he wrote "I am amazed the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate," or the article about King being nominated for a Nobel Prize, on which he wrote "King could well qualify for the 'top alley cat' prize!"

In case you're not up on your casual 1960s-era racism, "alley cat" is a term for an urban street cat that has multiple sexual partners. The FBI's extensive wire-tapping had revealed that King, unlike any person in a position of power in the history of the United States, was carrying on an extramarital affair. We like to imagine that Hoover scrawled his disapproving references to King's embarrassing sexual indiscretions while dressed as a woman, and that his boss, Robert Kennedy, read them while having sex with one of the three women he and his brother bragged about needing to sleep with to prevent headaches.

The culmination of the FBI's operation -- at least the part that made it into their official records -- was an anonymous letter to King in which they called him a fraud, compared him to Satan and told him that if he didn't want his affair to be revealed, he knew what he had to do. The celebrity hate mail was found in the FBI files long after an assassin had taken care of the FBI's problem for them, but analysts believe they were suggesting that King should kill himself if he didn't want to be disgraced.

So if you thought King was heroic before, try to imagine the balls it would take to continue going out in public after the FBI tried to blackmail you into offing yourself, and then realize that your mind's eye doesn't have the bandwidth to imagine balls that big.

4 The Election Conspiracy That Might Have Killed Hundreds of Thousands of People

The Conspiracy Theory:

Election season is when conspiracy theorists really earn their paychecks. It's the one time when politicians don't run screaming from them, since even the most insane rumors about their opponent can sway public opinion. In 2000, Bush was able to win the primary after a rumor circulated that John McCain's adopted daughter was actually the love child from an illicit interracial affair. In 2004, Bush got hit with claims that he orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, or knew they were going to happen, or was secretly cool with it, while he in turn accused his opponent of having exaggerated his record in Vietnam, and also wind surfing.

And it's not just our sensationalist media. Crazy conspiracy theories have been affecting American elections for almost as long as we've had them.

Of course, you've probably heard about that one time the paranoid election conspiracy theories were true -- when the Nixon campaign bugged the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. But you might not know about the first, far more evil election conspiracy Nixon orchestrated to get elected in the first place.

The Reality:

The presidency went to Richard Nixon's head like a Four Loko chugged from a chalice of dissolvable PCP. Watergate wasn't the most sinister or even reckless thing Nixon did in office -- we'd humbly submit the time he openly discussed putting out a hit on a journalist he didn't like. It takes a messy brain to get busted for committing low level espionage while you're the president of the United States. It takes a Bond villain to commit treason and get away with it so hard that instead of being put to death like you're supposed to, you become the goddamn president. That's what Nixon pulled off in '68, and he only had to extend the Vietnam War by five years to do it.

The 1968 presidential election featured Nixon in the Republican corner, squaring off against sitting vice president Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was running on what was known as the "peace plank" -- his assurance that the Johnson-Humphrey administration was in the process of negotiating an end to the increasingly unpopular war in Vietnam. For Humphrey, everything hinged on the Paris Peace Talks, where the Johnson administration had brought Vietnamese leaders from the North and South together, and claimed to be making progress. Most Americans weren't buying it, and Nixon was leading Humphrey by a large margin for most of the campaign.

But everything changed in the weeks before the election when Humphrey called for a bombing halt in Vietnam, and both the North Vietnamese and the Johnson administration agreed to it. Just three days before the election, peace seemed imminent in Vietnam, and Humphrey was starting to look like a total boss. He surged in the polls, making up an insane amount of ground just a week before the election. As October turned to November, the election was a tie, and Humphrey had all the momentum.

And then something weird happened. The day before the election, America's South Vietnamese allies suddenly withdrew from the peace negotiations. It seemed suspicious that America's own ally would pull out, and doubly suspicious that it happened on the eve of the presidential election. In taped phone conversations that would only be revealed later, Lyndon Johnson explained how things had broken so conveniently for the Republican candidate: Nixon's campaign had been telling "the allies that 'You're going to get sold out'" if they agreed to the offer on the table. In an effort to screw Humphrey's election, Nixon had intentionally sabotaged the peace talks. As Johnson would later point out, this is technically treason, since it means Nixon directly sabotaged the interests of the United States for his own personal gain.

And it worked. Without the momentum of the peace talks, Humphrey lost the popular vote by an extremely narrow margin. Had the peace talks continued to succeed through election day, Humphrey almost certainly would have continued to surge past Nixon, and more importantly, the Vietnam War might have ended in 1968, saving tens of thousands of American lives. Instead, Nixon was elected president and let the war drag on for five more years before he and Henry Kissinger finally brokered peace. The agreement they did it with was almost identical to the one that had been on the table when Nixon's people had blown up the peace talks five years earlier, with one important distinction: Nixon and Kissinger got to take credit for it.

3 Everyone Is Nazis

The Conspiracy Theory:

Calling someone a Nazi is the easiest way to out oneself as a lunatic. As we've covered before, Hitler comparisons are par for the course on the Internet. You can't legitimately call yourself a politician if you haven't been compared to Hitler. But when someone calls someone else a Nazi, it just makes you wonder why they didn't go full Hitler.

Do they think the accused is actually a card-carrying member of some secret Nazi party? It gives off the lunatic aroma of the weirdo Nazi memorabilia collectors like Marge Schott and Charles Manson. Hitler comparisons make it clear that they're angry and probably stupid, and that their Caps Lock key could probably use a breather. Nazi comparisons suggest a much more permanent brand of insanity. One that suspects that behind closed doors in the halls of power (or just at parties they're not invited to), everyone's secretly goose-stepping around in Nazi armbands, waiting for the right moment to make their move.

The Reality:

Unfortunately for sane people everywhere, even the craziest people on the face of the earth are right every once in a while, and that time was during the space and nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

After the Nazi regime collapsed in a pile of starving jackboots in May 1945, the Allies had no qualms about going through the rubble of Hitler's failed empire for stuff that might be useful. In some cases, they went sifting for actual Nazis.

In the closing years of the war, the Nazis were desperate to create a superweapon that might save the Third Reich and destroy the rest of the world. Once the war ended, the U.S. government decided that they needed to tap some of those Nazis minds before the commies got their red hands on them. To this end, the Americans drew up a plan to round up German scientists, giving jobs to the best and the brightest even though most of them deserved to be on trial for war crimes.

President Truman approved what was known as Operation Paperclip soon after the war, but added strict directives to ensure that the worst Nazis not be included, presumably in a last-ditch effort to be able to go to sleep at night.

Of course, this turned out to be a completely empty gesture. The most valuable scientists would also have been the most heavily utilized in the Nazi regime. To get around Truman's moral objective, the American military created the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency, which was tasked with creating fake background information for brilliant scientists who were unapologetic, Dr. Strangelove-grade Nazis. With their records bleached, hundreds of Nazis were able to get past Operation Paperclip's "only good Nazis" vetting process and move to America as high level government employees.

Key Nazi figures like Arthur Rudolph became key figures in the U.S. space program, even though the U.S. government knew they were responsible for tens of thousands of inmates' deaths.

The Conspiracy Theory:

We can't blame JFK conspiracy theorists. We all want to be the only person on the planet who knows something really important, and it's hard not to feel intriguing while quietly confiding to someone that "There were men who wanted Kennedy dead. Powerful men. Men who would kill me if they knew I was telling you this." To quote True Lies' Bill Paxton, our favorite movie spy of all time, people "need some release! Promise of adventure, a hint of danger."

Whether they're doing it to get laid, to feel smart or because taxes make them furious and they don't have the luxury of being a Libertarian, there's one thing the JFK conspiracy theorists would never suspect: that they themselves are unwitting parts of a vast conspiracy drawn up by powerful men, and that if those men knew they were explaining "the truth" about the Kennedy assassination, those powerful men would probably have hugged them.

The Reality:

Of the acronyms that people like to blame for the Kennedy assassination -- FBI, CIA, LBJ, NBA (one of Bill Simmons' more far-fetched David Stern conspiracy theories) -- the KGB has always been one of the least popular, even though it's probably the most straightforward. Oswald was a communist sympathizer who spent a couple years in Russia, giving the KGB easy access to his washable brain.

Of course, the Russian intelligence community was probably aware that assassinating Kennedy would be strategically pointless and needlessly risky, since the U.S. Constitution doesn't grant power to whichever political party killed the president. We didn't say it was perfect, just the least convoluted. Which of course is why it's probably unpopular with conspiracy theorists, who tend to prefer more surprising theories like the ones that appeared in Oliver Stone's movie.

But the one thing the KGB theory has that none of the others do is documented proof that they were actively involved in a conspiracy connected to the JFK assassination. In 1992, when a former high level KGB official defected to the U.K., he brought along an archive of detailed, top secret information known as the Mitrokhin Archive. Since it hit the intelligence community like a new Harry Potter book, the information it contains has been authenticated by everyone from the FBI, members of the British Parliament, the United States Air Force Academy, the American Historical Review and perhaps most impressively of all, Wikipedia.

One of the more surprising revelations was that the KGB was actively involved in an extensive campaign to spread misinformation about the Kennedy assassination and undermine the U.S. government. In short, there was a KGB-led Kennedy conspiracy... to spread conspiracy theories!

That might sound suspiciously meta for a Russian intelligence community not written by Dan Harmon, but it makes sense when you realize that the CIA and the KGB were openly engaged in a culture war (even backing opposing styles of modern art). The KGB was acutely attuned to American popular culture, and were particularly impressed with Americans' ability to generate and believe new JFK conspiracy theories that fly in the face of the evidence.

Using handwriting samples and phrasing from letters written by Oswald while he was in Russia, the KGB forged a letter from Oswald to a known CIA operative that referenced a secret meeting just days before the assassination. It was so expertly done that everyone from handwriting experts to Oswald's freaking wife confirmed that it must have been written by him. After the KGB sent the letter around to conspiracy theorists in America, the letter eventually made it to the mainstream media, in accordance with the trickle-up law of sensational b.s. The New York Times reported that three handwriting experts had confirmed its authenticity. An official government inquiry was launched into the letter. By the late '70s, the KGB were pleased to find that "far more Americans believed some version of conspiracy theory ... than still accepted the main findings of the Warren Commission."

So, there's good news and bad news, JFK conspiracy theorists. There was a JFK assassination conspiracy! Unfortunately, you were the puppets, making this the saddest example of fans getting manipulated by their obsession prior to the Star Wars prequels.

1 The Fictional Attack That Started a War

The Conspiracy Theory:

Any time America starts a controversial war, people are going to ask questions, and crazy people are going to shout them. By now, you're probably familiar with the nonsense theory that the U.S. government orchestrated the attacks on 9/11 in order to justify the Iraq War, but what about the Pearl Harbor Truthers? A popular conspiracy theory after America entered WWII was that FDR was in on the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

It seems that no war is just enough to keep crazy people from doing the political equivalent of claiming that America was secretly begging for it, and wouldn't have been dressed like that if it wasn't looking for trouble.

The Reality:

On the night of August 4, 1964, at the height of the tensions between the U.S. and North Vietnam, the communist navy made the bizarre decision to attack two American destroyers -- the USS Turner Joy and the USS Maddox. The American ships were outside of North Vietnamese territory when they radioed that they were being attacked by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats.

Since this constituted an act of war, this meant that America had the right to invade Vietnam. Hours after the first radio message from the Maddox, President Johnson was on TV announcing that the communists had attacked us in international waters and asking for permission to make the beef real in Vietnam. The incident is often cited by historians as the key inciting event that started America's involvement in Vietnam, and a few years ago, it was cited by the National Security Agency as utter b.s.

In 2005, an NSA report on the records from the night of the Gulf of Tonkin incident concluded that the event was blown out of proportion on purpose, which is pretty significant, since the NSA was the one who did the initial blowing. According to the report, "It is not simply that there is a different story as to what happened; it is that no attack happened that night." Yes, the North Vietnamese attack that started the Vietnam War didn't actually happen, and American officials knew it almost immediately.

An hour after the battle, the commander of one of the destroyers sent a message that there might not have been a single Vietnamese boat in the area, explaining that "Freak weather effects on radar and overeager sonar men may have accounted for" the initial reports. When the sun rose on the gulf and there wasn't a single shred of wreckage from the two torpedo boats they'd fired on and believed they'd sunk, it was pretty clear to everyone involved that the U.S. Navy had been playing with itself in the dark the night before.

Unfortunately, within 30 minutes of the imaginary attack, Johnson had already decided to retaliate. America had been aiding the South Vietnamese army for years, and they were just looking for an excuse to make their relationship official. While the Gulf of Tonkin attack was completely imaginary, there's no telling how long it would take the North Vietnamese to actually attack them. So Johnson and the NSA said good enough and made a "conscious effort" to make it look like there was an attack.

So in light of the truth about the Tonkin incident, is it really so crazy to think that 9/11 was an inside job? Yes. Still crazy. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin conspiracy makes such elaborate conspiracy theories seem even more unlikely (to the sane). It proves that you don't need to orchestrate elaborate conspiracies to justify an unjust war. All you need is the ability to ignore 90 percent of the facts and focus on the ones that support the case for war. In that way, the Tonkin incident bears a much closer resemblance to the many intelligence oopsies that happened in the run up to the Iraq War.

Now that was a conspiracy worth getting pissed off about. Like the Tonkin incident, the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq featured an ass-backward intelligence-gathering process that was designed to justify a war, rather than to answer the question of whether there should actually be one. But conspiracy theorists aren't interested in boring stories featuring things like incompetence and the truth. They want the story where evil people cause explosions. In this way, they're exactly like the presidents who they believe are a species of lizard people.

Eric Yosomono writes for GaijinAss.com and you should LIKE them on the GaijinAss Facebook page, all the cool kids are doing it! Jacopo della Quercia is on Twitter. Follow him! Mohammed Shariff can be found on Facebook, Twitter and email, but NOT on Google Plus.

For more conspiracies that we were right about, check out 6 Insane Conspiracies Hiding Behind Non-Profit Groups and 6 Crackpot Conspiracy Theories (That Actually Happened).

If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out Mathematical Proof That the Media Is Sexist and Bad at Math.

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