OK Be Paranoid: Crazy, Crackpot Conspiracies That Were Real

by Brent Swancer        November 14, 2017         (mysteriousuniverse.org)

• This article contains a collection of so-called “conspiracies” that are very true and worthy of your paranoia.

• The Bohemian Club – Founded in San Francisco, California in 1872 as a social group for artists, musicians, writers, poets, and journalists, including Mark Twain. By the 1930s it had become a place where the western world’s rich and powerful meet annually for two weeks of heavy drinking, opulent feasts, and all manner of debauchery. Historical deals, government and business decisions, and even the Manhattan Project were all hatched there.

• The Bilderberg Group – Around 150 of some of the planet’s most powerful elite meet every year for private and highly guarded conferences that began in 1954 at the request of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to promote U.S.–European relations, which has evolved into the promotion of a one-world government. Members sworn to absolute secrecy.

• Propaganda Due (P2) – In the 1980s, an offshoot of the Freemasons in Italy known as the P2 comprised of thousands of members of influential businessmen, military, police, government officials, and intelligence operatives who infiltrated and secretly controlled Italy from within. When it was discovered that his cabinet was stacked with P2, the Italian Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani was forced to resign.

• MKUltra – Originating in the 1950s by the CIA and the US Army Chemical Corps, the project investigated the use and effects of mind control techniques on human beings. It started small and escalated rapidly until it was being pursued in an estimated 86 universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.  These “experiments” included electroshock treatment, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and verbal and physical abuse, and many of the patients developing brain damage and permanent mental and behavioral issues. The vast majority of the files were destroyed in 1973.  There has never been any accountability for the horrors the program carried out on American citizens.

• The Tuskegee Experiment – In 1932 the US government launched a program to study the effects of syphilis on black males in Tuskegee, Alabama. Four hundred poor, illiterate, black males were infected with the disease and intentionally not treated. The program was not revealed until 1972.

• Operation Sea Spray – In 1950, the U.S. Navy sprayed a bacteria all over the San Francisco Bay Area to monitor the effects of the pathogens on a population of 800,000. One person died as a result.  The program wasn’t revealed until 1977.

• Operation Drop Kick – in 1955 and 1956 U.S. military dumped 330,000 mosquitos all over the state of Georgia, and particularly in Savannah, to monitor diseases such as yellow fever.

• Project SHAD – In the 1960s the Department of Defense released dangerous chemical and biological agents aboard Naval ships to test the crews’ reaction.

• Project Sunshine – Beginning in 1957, the government snatched hundreds of stillborn babies and adult corpses for use in experiments, including the testing of radioactivity.

• Project Mockingbird – In the 1950’s the CIA began a worldwide program to use journalists to gather intelligence and print propaganda designed to mold and shape public opinion, with the consent of the news agencies. Over 400 American TV, radio and newspaper  journalists participated over the course of nearly three decades.

• Operation Northwoods – In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff made plans to turn the American people against Fidel Castro in Cuba by orchestrating a false flag terrorist campaign in Florida, planting bombs, shooting down passenger planes, and sinking boats carrying innocent Cuban refugees.

• The Gulf of Tonkin Incident – In 1964 the Navy reported a North Vietnamese attack on two ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, and responded with a barrage of artillery. President Johnson used this opportunity as an excuse to go to war in Vietnam. It was later revealed that no such attack ever took place.

• COINTELPRO – In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, the FBI implemented program to infiltrate, harass, and smear a variety of civil rights leaders and political groups critical of the Vietnam War, and attempt to sow dissent and fracture these groups from within, bolstered by bogus media reports, slander, and psychological warfare. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was a prime target.

• Soviet Sabotage – During the Cold War, the Soviets had implemented a desperate last resort plan to sabotage the US with firearms, bombs, mines, and sleeper agents hidden throughout the country to create as much mayhem as possible.

• The Satanic Panic – From 1972 to 1974, in response to dissention in Northern Oreland and knowing that the Irish are very superstitious, British military intelligence agencies set up a campaign of psychological warfare by planting Satanic imagery such as black candles and upside-down crucifixes in rundown areas of the region, and releasing fake news stories of black masses, human sacrifices, and sinister rituals to convince the Irish that their dissenting paramilitary forces were responsible for evil forces unleashed across Northern Ireland, as if they had opened a portal to darkness and evil.

There have been conspiracies for as long as we have contemplated such things. In many cases these can be paranoid delusions openly mocked by the masses and yet forever debated in the shadows of the fringe. After all, how could any of these crazy, far-out notions be real? Yet, sometimes the tinfoil-hat wearing crackpots are not as crazy as one might expect. From secret societies looking to rule the world from the shadows to strange human experiments, cover-ups, and insane government plots, sometimes truth can be just as weird as fiction, and here is a selection of conspiracies that turned out to be every bit as insane as advertised, and which show that perhaps paranoia is not always such a bad thing after all.

Secret Societies

Shadowy secret societies have long been a staple of the sprawling domain of conspiracy theories. The Freemasons, the Illuminati, secretive powerful cabals pulling the strings from behind the scenes and seeking to start a new world order are the bread and butter of many good conspiracies, and their plots must mostly seem like they must surely be set within the world of pure fiction, except for those times when they aren’t. Indeed there are many conspiracies involving such groups that have been proven to be very real indeed.

One such very real secret society is known as the Bohemian Club, which was founded in San Francisco, California in 1872, mostly as a social group for artists, musicians, writers, poets, and journalists, including amongst their number the author Mark Twain and the poets Charles Warren Stoddard and George Sterling. It was meant to be a casual venue for these artistic, creative individuals to get together to throw around ideas and talk shop together. As time went on, some of the more influential, wealthy, and powerful members sought to fashion the burgeoning club into something more, and they began to become highly associated with a massive campground in Monte Rio, California known as the Bohemian Grove, where members would make an annual pilgrimage in order to meet and carry out ever stranger rituals.

By the 1930s, the Bohemian Club had gone from informal get-togethers for starving artists to almost exclusively a gathering place for the rich and powerful, and would gather prominent members such as former presidents Richard Nixon and Herbert Clark Hoover, business and media tycoon William Randolph Hearst, and numerous influential politicians, CEOs of major companies, industry leaders, corporate major players, military officials, senior media executives, and various other people of power, and its waiting list for membership would get to be over 33 years long. What went on behind closed doors during their secretive get-togethers has always been top secret, and although they claim that there is no business discussed during their meetings and that ulterior motives are all left at the door, one does wonder what they get up to in there. It is known that there have been many important, even historical deals, government and business decisions, and projects laid out here, including the concept of the Manhattan Project, which was first laid out here and led to the development of the atomic bomb, so something is definitely going on to some extent or other.

The Bohemian Grove where these important figures would meet for 2 weeks a year, and still do, is itself dominated by towering redwood trees and a large stage and 30-foot-tall idol shaped like an enormous owl. The stage is used for various performances and ceremonies, such as the “The Cremation of Care,” which is a lavish, extravagant production complete with pyrotechnics that is meant to signify a “banishing of worldly cares,” and which culminates in the burning of an effigy. There are also supposedly various Druidic rituals carried out at the grove, all set to the backdrop of heavy drinking, opulent feasts, and all manner of debauchery. It is a place that has been described in The Washington Post as “a place where the rich and powerful go to misbehave,” and of which former president Richard Nixon said in 1971:  “The Bohemian Grove (an elite, secrecy-filled gathering outside San Francisco), which I attend from time to time. It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine…”.

The Bilderberg Group

Another secretive meeting of the world’s elite is called the Bilderberg Group, which meets every year in a private conference of around 150 of some of the planet’s most powerful figures, including monarchs, high-ranking politicians, senior military officials, economic leaders, powerful journalists, and experts from industry, finance, and academia. The covert meetings began in 1954 at the request of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and were originally intended as a way to promote the strengthening U.S.–European relations in a concept known as Atlanticism, but it has grown to cover wide ranging topics and agendas, most of which pertain to, well, no one really knows for sure. Although it is well-known that these meetings really do take place and it is even known who attends them to some extent, the contents of the meetings are highly guarded and the members sworn to absolute secrecy. This has of course led to the idea that this is an honest-to-God Illuminati type group seeking to impose one world government. The Bilderberg Group itself has been rather vague in dealing with such accusations, with one founder and member of over 30 years named Denis Healey somewhat ominously saying:  “To say we were striving for a one-world government is exaggerated, but not wholly unfair. Those of us in Bilderberg felt we couldn’t go on forever fighting one another for nothing and killing people and rendering millions homeless. So we felt that a single community throughout the world would be a good thing.”

It is unclear just what these powerful individuals get up to behind closed doors, but it is certainly not just to idly chit chat. In the meantime the conspiracy theories on this very real secret society go deep, with claims ranging from they are controlling the world with an iron fist to that they are actually alien lizard people invading Earth. All we know is that the group does exist and they still have their incredibly secretive powwows every year.

Propaganda Due (P2)

While it is unclear if these secret organizations and shadowy meetings are really controlling world affairs to any degree, there has been at least one case where this actually did happen. In the 1980s, an offshoot of the Freemasons in Italy called the Propaganda Due (P2), which was led by the notorious fascist Licio Gelli, crawled into society like a parasitic worm. The group had the expressed goal of infiltrating and secretively controlling Italy from the inside via a shadow government, and to this end it had thousands of members including influential businessmen, military, police, and government officials, intelligence operatives, and other prominent figures among their ranks. Through these members the group was able to influence the press, burying certain news stories, exert pressure in the government on key issues of policy, including bringing Juan Peron back to power in Argentina, and cover up crimes such as the 1980 bombing of a Bologna train station, which killed 85 people and was orchestrated by Italian terrorists sympathetic to P2.

This may have gone on indefinitely if the hugely influential banker and P2 member Michele Sindona had not been busted for money laundering. Authorities would find within his records a list of around a thousand members of the secret society embedded like vermin all throughout the government and media, eventually leading to the resignation of Italian Prime Minister Arnaldo Forlani, whose cabinet was found to be absolutely crawling with P2 members. Some political figures linked to the group committed suicide rather than face charges, and the leader of the sect, Gelli, promptly hi-tailed it out of the country to Switzerland, where he would stay until he was eventually extradited for fraud.

Secret Government Experiments

Another fixture of any good conspiracy theory is the idea that the government is covertly carrying out secret experiments on human beings, sometimes on whole populations against their will for nefarious purposes, and I hate to say it but there is a depressingly long list of occasions where this has really happened. One of the more well-known and dramatic secret government projects that was very real was the shadowy mind-control project known as MKUltra. Originating in the 1950s, the project was launched by the CIA and the US Army Chemical Corps, and sought to investigate the potential use and effects of mind control techniques as well as to “develop a capability in the covert use of biological and chemical materials.” Although it started small, the program escalated rapidly, blowing up until it was being pursued in various institutions including an estimated 86 universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies.

Many of the often sadistic experiments involved heavy use of mind altering drugs such as LSD, the effects of which were poorly understood at the time and which were often given to unwitting test subjects in highly dangerous doses, which would lead to many of the patients developing brain damage and permanent mental and behavioral issues. There were also various chemicals tested, as well as gas propelled sprays and aerosols. In a lot of instances these tests were performed on terminal cancer patients to limit any lifelong problems they would have from the treatments and cover the tracks of the program. Other techniques pursued were electroshock treatment, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and verbal and physical abuse, often with no medical personnel on hand and the effects of which left at least two dead and many others mentally or emotionally scarred, with one report stating:  “The deaths of two Americans can be attributed to these programs; other participants in the testing programs may still suffer from the residual effects. . . . The fact that they were continued for years after the danger of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting individuals was known, demonstrate fundamental disregard for the value of human life.”

It is unknown just what exactly went on within the program because the CIA director at the time, Richard Helms, had the vast majority of the files utterly destroyed in 1973. In 1976 and 1977 the U.S. Senate made serious investigations into the goings on of MKUltra, but this got nowhere. There has never been any accountability for the horrors the program carried out on American citizens, and all of the researchers who contributed to it have had their names withheld from the records, their names exempt from the Freedom of Information Act due to the CIA wanting to protect them as “intelligence sources.” The true horrific extent of MKUltra and their murky activities remain unknown.

The list of experiments such as these goes on and on, and some of them are rather reprehensible to say the least. In 1932, the U.S. government launched the “Tuskegee Experiment,” in which they planned to study the effects of syphilis and analyze those who had the disease. The study was carried out in Tuskegee, Alabama, and involved gathering around 400 poor, illiterate black males who had contracted the disease in order to put them under the microscope so to speak. Throughout the whole thing none of the patients were given any form of treatment for the disease, even though this existed, and many of them didn’t even know they had it, and they were put through various physical tests such as painful spinal tap procedures without their consent until they died, after which the corpses would by dissected, analyzed, and swept under the carpet. It would not be until 1972, 40 years after it began, that the whole experiment would be blown wide open by the whistleblower Peter Buxtun, who went to the Center for Disease Control with the whole sordid story.

In this case at least the government did not actually go about deliberately infecting people, merely going through the motions of doing so, but this would not be the case in other “studies.” Surely the government would not test possibly dangerous substances on its own citizens?  Oh, how wrong you would be. In 1950, the U.S. Navy put into effect Operation Sea Spray, in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria, the effects of which we had no idea of at the time, were liberally sprayed all over the San Francisco Bay Area of California. The idea was to monitor the effects of the pathogens, and nearly 800,000 people were exposed during this time. 11 people would check into hospitals complaining of urinary tract infections and at least one patient died from complications. There was also a spike in cases of pneumonia during the time, as well as other health complications, with rates of these cases far beyond the norm.

During the whole operation the Navy made no attempts to alert the populace or even health authorities that this was all going on, and the experiment wouldn’t even come to light until 1977, when it was brought before a Senate subcommittee. Unbelievably, it would be decided that all of these various infections had been incurred within the hospitals, and that they had no relation to the experiments. Cover up? What do you think?

This is not even the only such shadowy experiment carried out by the U.S. government on its own citizens by a long shot. In 1955 the U.S. military went about dumping around 330,000 mosquitos all over the state of Georgia in an effort to conduct the feasibility of entomological warfare, or basically spreading diseases such as Yellow Fever among the enemy through insect vectors. The study aimed to investigate the logistics of such a thing, the dispersal rate, and the survivability of the insects during the process, and although none of the mosquitos was actually infected, someone forgot to tell the hundreds of thousands of civilians in the area that this was all going on. Similarly we have Operation Drop Kick in 1956, in which hundreds of thousands of mosquitos were dispersed over Savannah, Georgia and then monitored for how aggressively they infiltrated homes and bit people. It was a success in that the mosquitoes survived the drops and went about biting people with relish.

In the 1960s there was also Project SHAD, which saw the Department of Defense authorizing the release of dangerous chemical and biological agents aboard Naval ships in order to test the crews’ abilities to detect and react to the invisible threat. The thing is, many of these subjects were not at all aware that any of this was going on. This sort of experimentation with human guinea pigs goes way back, with the government conducting tests of the effects of radiation on unwilling or ignorant participants as early as the end of World War II, when the government engaged in willingly giving people radiation infused food, releasing radioactive substances into populated areas, and injecting radioactive substances into people, including pregnant women and prison inmates.

The cases involving such unethical tests are numerous, and the government even went to such lengths as robbing graves in order to gain tissue on which to experiment, including the corpses of babies. In one case from 1957, a mother named Jean Prichard lost her baby during childbirth, but when she requested to receive its corpse she was told that it was not available, and it later came to light that it had been gathered by the government for use in experiments. This would not be the only such case, and the U.S. government allegedly secretly procured hundreds and hundreds of adult and stillborn baby corpses for use in testing the effects of radioactivity in what was called Project Sunshine. These are just the tip of the iceberg, and the list of such experimentation is long, but I would suggest not going through it too carefully if you want to keep some semblance of faith in humanity.

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