Crazy Conspiracies

I love this stuff. It's amazing what people will shovel into their head and believe. Some top items:

• Hitler and some associates escaped to the Arctic in a submarine, to live with super-advanced aliens who reside within the hollow earth. (This story originated with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel The Coming Race, was treated as fact by the pre-Nazi Vril Society, was bolstered by the forged "secret diary" of Admiral Byrd, and was adopted by the likes of Ernst Zundel)
• Denver International Airport was built expressly to conceal a vast underground complex, headquarters of the New World Order elite. Clues are hidden in the airport's peace-themed mural.
• Scientology: Billions of years ago the intergalactic overlord Xenu used a film to brainwash our souls ("Thetans") into believing in the world's major religions, which he invented.
• Gnosticism: The entire material world is an evil trap created by the imposter God of the Bible.
• The early Middle Ages (614-911 A.D.) never occurred. Everything that supposedly happened during those years was either a misunderstanding, an event from a different era, or an outright lie - Charlemagne, for instance, is a fictional figure. And we are actually living in the 1700s. (Herbert Illig's phantom time hypothesis)

One writer I follow, Ken Hite, writes about conspiracies and hidden history with regards to role playing games. The column he writes for Pyramid magazine has been collected into two volumes:

• Suppressed Transmission: The First Broadcast
• Suppressed Transmission 2: The Second Broadcast

There's some really crazy stuff there. He's covered some of these conspiracies.