26 of the Most Unbelievable Conspiracy Theories

Dozens of theories exist surrounding the assassination of JFK, a major one being that the CIA ordered the killing because of the president’s stance on Communism or Cuba. Movies have been made and books have been published on the subject. JFK’s nephew Robert Kennedy, Jr. – who is also a prominent anti-vaccine conspiracist – has stated that there is “overwhelming evidence that the CIA was involved in his murder.”

Since the 1947 Roswell incident, in which a top secret military surveillance balloon crashed in the desert and was subsequently collected and concealed by the government, theories about UFO coverups have persisted. Following a recent rise in Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP), otherwise known as UFOs, Tennessee Republican congressman Tim Burchett has alleged that the government is not sharing all that it knows about alleged spacecrafts.

Some historians believe that the woman who would become Queen Elizabeth I died of bubonic plague as a child and was replaced with a young boy who grew up to be the queen. Theorists have pointed to her intellect and financial acumen, as well as the fact that she refused to be married and never bore children, to support the theory.

Former president Donald Trump alleged that a “deep state” organization of clandestine government officials was working against him to halt his progress. Deep state theories have existed for decades, but have become more prevalent in recent years as theorists suggest that this group of sinister officials will use their influence over financial and industrial entities to further their private agenda.

Numerous school shootings have been followed by theories that these tragic events are fabricated in order to push gun control laws. Popularized by Infowars broadcaster Alex Jones, the theory that the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 first grade children and six staff, was a hoax, featuring so-called “crisis actors,” has led to harassment and death threats against the aggrieved parents. Juries in Connecticut and Texas subsequently awarded families of the victims a total of $1.487 billion in damages.

Desperate to beat the Russians to the moon, the U.S. government faked the moon landing – or so some people believe. Many theorists assert that filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was responsible for the footage, and the alleged proof of the hoax ranges from the movement of the flag in a supposed vacuum, to the tread pattern on the astronauts’ boots not matching the famous moon footprint photograph.

Before she was elected to congress, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a theory on Facebook connecting the Rothschilds, a Jewish banking family, to the California wildfires. The post asserted that space lasers may have been used to start the fires in order to clear the area for a high speed rail project.

After the accidental death of Princess Diana, the public unleased a series of theories about who had caused her death and why. One surrounded a note that the princess allegedly wrote in 1993 that claimed her husband was orchestrating a car accident by tampering with her brakes so that he could marry their children’s nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke.

As HIV has disproportionately affected the gay community, theories have arisen that assert that the CIA or another government organization manufactured the virus, which they began testing on unsuspecting victims in Africa, with the intent of killing off marginalized populations including gay and Black people.

Even after well over 6 million deaths worldwide, some people still insist that the pandemic was a hoax cooked up by the global elite and disseminated by the media in order to instill fear and control the masses. Some theories suggest the hoax was intended to coerce people into getting vaccines that carry secret components or to help pharmaceutical companies get rich.

One of the most widespread vaccine theories to come out of the pandemic was that Microsoft founder Bill Gates – who announced $1.6 billion in funding for immunizations in poor countries – was secretly planning on using the vaccine to implant unsuspecting people with location-tracking microchips.

Largely stemming from the 2011 found-footage style film “Apollo 18,” which was promoted as a collection of lost footage from a real mission to the moon, many people believe that NASA conducted a second, secret moon mission after Apollo. This one ended in an alien encounter and the deaths of the astronauts.

Some scientists and architects have asserted that jet fuel does not burn hot enough to have melted the steel beams of the Twin Towers and caused the collapse of the buildiwildngs. This, and the fact that some witnesses claim to have heard explosions as they were evacuating the buildings, has led to a common belief that the buildings were actually destroyed by bombs.

James Earl Ray, the man who initially confessed to shooting civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., later recanted his confession – leaving room for all kinds of theories. King’s family, believing that the murder was organized by the Mafia or a government agency, raised a civil suit in Memphis in 1999. Though the jury agreed that the murder was a result of a conspiracy, there was little proof of who might have been responsible. Nevertheless, many people believe that some faction of the U.S. government ordered the assassination.

A series of facts have been woven together to create the fantasy of a secret Nazi base on Antarctica that the U.S. nuked after WWII and subsequently covered up. The Germans did send an expedition to Antarctica in 1938, and after the war ended in Europe, two German U boats showed up in Argentina. The U.S. also launched an Antarctic expedition in 1946 and detonated nuclear weapons in the region in 1958. None of these disparate occurrences, however, are enough to prove the existence of the secret Nazi base.

The Denver International Airport is full of quirky art and odd decor. Its construction went nearly $3 million over budget, which some allege went to the construction of an underground lair beneath the airport where the rich will wait out the apocalypse. It is also sometimes said that the airport is the secret headquarters of the Illuminati, the New World Order, or lizard people.

Although it is generally accepted that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide in Hitler’s bunker in April 1945, Soviet disinformation after the war led to many theories that the pair survived. Some people believe that they actually escaped to Argentina and had two daughters.

In 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) discovered a particle called the Higgs Boson. A theory soon emerged that CERN accidentally created a black hole during the process, and that the Earth has been sucked into the black hole.

Among the numerous antisemitic theories floating around is the assertion that the Holocaust never happened, or that while it may have happened, the death toll of 6 million Jews has been drastically inflated. Holocaust deniers claim that the Allies or the Jews invented the tragedy in order to help justify the creation of the State of Israel.

A secret military base used for testing new aircraft technology, Area 51 became the center of an alien conspiracy theory in the decades after the Roswell incident, as reports began surfacing of alien bodies recovered in the wreckage of the spy balloon that many people believed was a UFO. This theory has been fleshed out in multiple television series and films.

The belief that there is an international Jewish syndicate bent on world domination is nothing new. A hoax text called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” proposed the idea in 1905, and since then, many public figures, politicians, and celebrities have repeated ideas from the discredited book.

Airplanes are known to leave streams of condensation, called contrails, behind them. Beginning in the late ’90s, a theory emerged that some contrails last longer than they should, and are vehicles for the mass dissemination of chemicals that the government is using to either control the masses, manipulate the weather, or experiment on target populations.

According to research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2014, 37% of Americans believe that the FDA is hiding natural cures for cancer due to pressure from pharmaceutical companies.

The University of Alaska Fairbanks runs an atmospheric research facility on 33 acres of land with over 180 antennas. Rumors have reported that the facility uses the antennas as experimental long range mind control devices.

A devastating tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri in May 2011 killed 161 people and destroyed the town with winds of 200 mph. Because of the strength of the winds, some people theorized that the tornado was man made, possibly by the U.S. government.