27 Strangest American Conspiracy Theories

In the 1950s, the U.S. government conspired with the tobacco industry to conceal the connection between smoking and cancer from the American public. The CIA and other organizations conspired to conduct ghastly experiments on unwitting American citizens in programs like Project MK-Ultra in 1953 and the Tuskegee experiment that ran for 40 years. Thanks to the internet, today's conspiracy theorists enjoy huge followings and a larger-than-ever platform. Some conspiracy theories refuse to die, including one of the more disturbing baseless conjectures involving a controversial radio show host whose claims have sent him deep into debt.

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Infowars host Alex Jones is to conspiracy theories what Jerry Garcia was to psychedelic rock. In 2019, the country’s preeminent theory-without-facts guru was ordered to pay $100,000 in legal fees for the father of a victim of the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre, which killed six educators and 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. Jones used his platform to spread a conspiracy theory that the massacre never happened — it was all a hoax, the 6- and 7-year-old victims were child actors, and their parents were paid to lie. His followers bombarded the still-mourning families with harassment, accusations, and even death threats. It was arguably the grossest, but certainly not the first or only, false-flag conspiracy theory. In the midst of Jones facing multiple defamation lawsuits, Infowars filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, estimating assets of $50,000 or less and liabilities of $1 million to $10 million. Relatives of some of the children and teachers killed in the massacre were listed as creditors in the bankruptcy filing. Jones is still going to come up short, though: A jury decided that he should pay $1 billion in compensatory damages to Sandy Hook families for his outlandish and unfounded lies while a Texas judge decided Jones owed $49 million in a defamation case.

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A picture of a Starbucks sign telling patrons that it would no longer accept cash payments October 1, 2022 caused quite the stir on social media. The post, which was shared on Facebook, ignited discussion amongst conspiracy theorists that when the end is near, the world will be forced into a cashless society, according to the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible. One user said: "Starbucks – blazing the trail towards a cashless mark of the beast society,” with the belief being that when the end of days is near, every transaction will become electronic and havoc will abound — resulting in the "beast" controlling all facets of society. But October 1 has come and gone, and Starbucks patrons are still able to get their overpriced lattes by swiping plastic, so maybe the end isn't as near as conspiracy theorists projected, or at least Starbucks isn't the catalyst.

Related:17 Things You Didn't Know About Starbucks

Bird flu is once again spreading through poultry farms and wildlife in the U.S., but many people online either don't believe it's real, or think it's something far more sinister than a disease that's pushing up the price of eggs. Similar to the latest outbreak in 2015, farmers are having to cull millions of chickens and turkeys in states including Wisconsin, Iowa, and Nebraska. Bird flu has killed bald eagles, and birds at zoos are being kept indoors because of the risk. Still, chatter on message boards and social media is full of theories that bird flu is actually COVID-19, a hoax specially designed to drive up food prices, or a plot to force us to become vegetarians. Still others even flat-out deny it's even happening.

QAnon emerged a few years ago from 4Chan and other dark corners of the internet. Today, right-wing conspiracy theories are so entrenched in this group that believers such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have won seats in the House — and 17% of Americans were QAnon believers as late as October 2021, according to the Public Religion Research Institute. Followers believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from former President Donald Trump by current President Joe Biden, despite numerous audits and court cases disproving the allegations. Their organizing principle is that the highest levels of Democratic leadership, including the Clintons and Obamas, are part of a secret cabal of Satan worshippers and pedophiles organized by Jews and funded by philanthropist investor George Soros. The FBI has declared QAnon a potential domestic terrorism threat.

Conspiracy theories about 9/11 started shortly after or perhaps even on Sept. 11, 2001. Virtually all of them center around the idea that the worst terrorist attack in American history was not perpetrated by al-Qaida militants, but by the U.S. government itself. The theories are too numerous to list, but the main ones involve a missile hitting the Pentagon, not an airplane, and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers in New York City being the result of controlled demolitions, an idea long debunked by engineers who understand how controlled demolitions work.

More than a half-century after the Apollo 11 astronauts walked on the moon, scores of conspiracy theorists continue to insist it was all a Cold War hoax. The theory goes that NASA, perhaps with the help of director Stanley Kubrick, staged the event in a Hollywood movie studio. Some say it was done to one-up the Russians. Others believe it was part of a NASA plot to conceal the existence of a large planet that someday will destroy Earth.

There’s a common misconception that Columbus believed the Earth was flat when he sailed from Europe on his famous New World voyage. He didn't. No educated person of his era in Western Europe did. Scientists and mathematicians knew the world was spherical as early as 600 B.C., yet in 2020, scores of people still insisted that our planet is a flat disk or perhaps an infinite plane. Many conspiracies involve international deceit by NASA. There’s even a Flat Earth Society that follows in the footsteps of a 19th-century conspiracy theory that started it all.

Less than two weeks after a powerful submarine earthquake triggered a massive tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004 that killed more than 200,000 people, conspiracy theorists were already lining up to educate the masses about the government’s involvement. Some theories, though completely unfounded, were at least plausible — the U.S. government knew the quake was coming but failed to act for any number of strategic and/or military reasons. Others were far-fetched to the point of being comical, like the one that says the government triggered the quake with a mysterious tectonic weapon to realign the Earth's wobbly rotation.

The deep state theory isn’t new, but it gained steady traction in the United States with the ascent of former President Trump. Its existence is often cited as fact by both the president and his allies in the right-wing media. The theory suggests there exists a shadowy network of high-ranking elected officials, military leaders, media moguls, financiers, and other powerful and well-connected elites who are secretly conspiring to overthrow — or at least manipulate and commandeer — the U.S. government and social structure. Conveniently, anyone who disagrees with the people who propagate the theory of its existence can be deemed a member of the deep state — no evidence required.

The deep state and QAnon are both intertwined with the concept of globalism, another right-wing conspiracy theory that former President Trump has also publicly and repeatedly endorsed as a fact-based threat to the country. Similarly, the globalist theory commonly cites the Clintons, the Obamas, and Soros as villains. Distinctly unique from the very real concept of globalization, globalism is based on the idea that high-ranking left-wing elites and their co-conspirators in easy-to-blame but hard-to-quantify entities like the media, banks, and government are conspiring to end America’s status as a sovereign power. The goal is to subjugate the country and the world under a singular autocratic ruling entity controlled by the deep state.

A frighteningly high percentage of Americans believe that a secret society called the Illuminati — similar to the deep state — is conspiring at the highest levels of government to overthrow America's capitalist society and create a new world order similar to globalism. Many of the conspiracy theory’s villains are the same. Interestingly, a real organization called the Illuminati existed during the 18th century in Europe. It was secretive, pursued radical changes in the social and political structures of the day, and, briefly, wielded real power. Where reality breaks from paranoia is in the idea that it continues to exist today and continues to pull the levers of power through everything from music and video games to labor unions and religious organizations.

So-called false-flag operations — the act of a nation deliberately fabricating an attack against itself as a justification for war or internal repression — are as old as the hills and are real. It's now known that the second Gulf of Tonkin incident, which the United States used as a pretext for the Vietnam War, was a false-flag operation. False-flag operations are by definition conspiracies, which gives fuel to conspiracy theorists who repeatedly find false flags where none exist. Many 9/11 truthers, for example, believe that Sept. 11 was a false-flag operation to justify the U.S. attack on Iraq and Afghanistan and other actions, but the vast majority of false-flag conspiracy theories come in the wake of mass shootings like Sandy Hook. Nearly every major mass shooting in the last two decades was followed by a conspiracy theory claiming that the act was staged. The logic is typically the same — the government wants a reason to confiscate guns, abolish the Second Amendment, and disarm the U.S. population.

The hit Netflix series "Stranger Things" was inspired by a decommissioned military base at the far eastern end of Long Island, New York, known as Camp Hero. Today it's a state park, but there are still a few derelict radar towers and spooky sealed structures with do not enter signs. Local legends and folklore surrounding the place were common way before 1992, but that year, Preston Nichols' and Peter Moon's book, "The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time," put Camp Hero on the conspiracy theory map. Theories about government activities there range from horrible experiments conducted on kidnapped children in subterranean bunkers — a la "Stranger Things" — to electromagnetic mind-control and time travel.

Almost immediately after the Patriot's Day bombings at the Boston Marathon in 2013, wild conspiracy theories began to fly across the internet, with many hatched or at least propagated by Alex Jones' Infowars organization. Some said that U.S. military operators were seen in the area with large backpacks and that the photos of the actual backpack-carrying terrorists were photoshopped. Some said that the suspects' uncle worked with the CIA or that the suspects themselves were FBI informants. Others pointed to news organizations that tweeted about the attack before it happened — that was debunked by the simple fact of time zone differences. Many of the conspiracy theories drew from the familiar well of false-flag operations by the U.S. government to justify things like police militarization or domestic martial law.

Seven years after TWA Flight 800 exploded in midair after leaving Kennedy International Airport in 1996 killing 230 people, investigators released the most detailed investigation in the history of aviation. It concluded that a fuel tank ignited, but that the cause of that ignition was a mystery — and that observation was more than enough to propel the conspiracies that emerged. Amateur sleuths nitpicked the report and, without presenting a shred of evidence, concluded that it was a cover story. The real truth, they insisted, was that a bomb or a missile took down the plane either by a terrorist act that the government didn’t want to acknowledge or a military operation gone wrong.

Before TWA Flight 800, there was Pan Am 103, which was destroyed by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people in 1988. A massive multiorganizational investigation quickly led to Libyan intelligence agent Abdel Basset al-Megrahi as the primary and only suspect. He was convicted and imprisoned, and when he was released on compassionate grounds in 2009, he received a hero’s welcome in Libya. For the many conspiracy theorists who continue to insist that the bombing was a false-flag operation — the bomb was planted by the American government, they believe — al-Megrahi was a fall guy whom the U.S. set up to justify its growing military presence in the Middle East.

Given that he was killed on the Las Vegas strip in full public view in one of the most crowded and heavily policed areas in America, it is indeed unbelievable that Tupac Shakur's murder has still not been solved. For countless conspiracy theorists, that can only mean that the famous rapper was never really killed at all. Tupac himself wrote some cryptic lyrics that surfaced on posthumously released material that could imply he faked his own death, particularly for those who wanted to believe it. There has been no shortage of alleged Tupac sightings, and several photos of lookalikes have emerged. The most common theories allege Shakur is alive, well, and living in Cuba or Belize, or that he’s right here in the U.S. hiding in plain sight.

Before Tupac terrified naive parents and rankled mainstream society with socially conscious lyrics, Elvis did the same thing, only he used his hips. When he died of heart failure in 1977, fans were shocked. Legions of them simply refused — and continue to refuse — to believe it. Tired of the relentless spotlight, the King faked his death to live out his life in peace, the conspiracy theory goes. Almost immediately after his death was announced, Elvis sightings became commonplace. The Elvis Sighting Society emerged in 1989, and it's rumored that he did a cameo appearance the following year in 1990's blockbuster Christmas movie "Home Alone."

Experts have raised legitimate concerns about potential health hazards related to 5G wireless towers in residential neighborhoods and near schools. Those concerns, however, were co-opted and twisted early on by conspiracy theorists. They insisted the next generation of wireless technology, which is being rolled out across the country, causes cancer or, more ominously, is part of a government data collection or monitoring plot. When COVID-19 hit, things got really weird. Conspiracy theorists insisted that 5G technology itself triggered the virus, and as the virus spread so, too, did the crackpot information. Several 5G towers were burned or otherwise attacked by true believers.

5G cellphone towers aren't the only technology associated with coronavirus conspiracy theories. A scary percentage of Americans believe that Microsoft founder Bill Gates created COVID-19 as a pretext for mandatory mass vaccinations. It's all part of a massive plan, the theory goes, for Gates to use the vaccines as cover to secretly implant microchips in every American.

In 1998, former BBC sports reporter David Icke published a book called "The Biggest Secret," which launched one of history’s most bizarre conspiracy theories — and it still exists today. The movement believes that shape-shifting reptilian extraterrestrials have overtaken global society at the highest levels, from prime ministers and presidents to Olympic athletes and Oscar-winning actors. Responsible for events like 9/11 and the Holocaust, the goal of these reptilian rulers is to enslave the human race.

It's hard to imagine that any organization plays a central role in more conspiracy theories than the CIA. The nature of its mission — not to mention its very real history of doing some incredibly shady stuff — lends itself well to villain status for crackpots of every stripe. But crackpots are not the only ones who believed and continue to believe that the CIA created the AIDS virus to annihilate the homosexual and African-American populations. The theory emerged almost as soon as the disease was discovered in the early 1980s. A Nobel Prize winner, as well as the former president of South Africa, came out publicly in support of the theory.

Like Long Island's Camp Hero, Denver International Airport has long been at the center of several wild conspiracy theories, and it doesn’t help that the airport's CEO has fueled speculation with clever marketing campaigns. One theory is that it was built by the new world order and that it sits above the underground headquarters of the global Illuminati. Others insist its underground tunnels contain passages to secret bunkers. Still others have provided "evidence" that Nazi secret societies remain intact there, or that the airport's artwork are predictors of the end of the world.

Most airplanes leave visible plumes of white vapor in the wake of their path of travel. Even those with basic aviation knowledge can explain their presence, but a persisting conspiracy theory insists those puffy white plumes are actually chemtrails, secret chemicals that the government uses in a wide-ranging clandestine plot to control the weather.

In 1985, Coca-Cola introduced New Coke, an even sweeter version of its trademark carbonated beverage. It remains one of the greatest disasters in marketing history. The massive New Coke flop has been widely documented and is still taught in marketing and business courses today, but a conspiracy theory persists that says Coca-Cola crashed and burned New Coke on purpose to put all eyes on Coke at the height of the cola wars and remind the world how great the original Coke actually was.

In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon disaster poisoned the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and almost immediately the conspiracies began flowing as fast as the oil. Symbolic dates have been central to conspiracy theories for time immemorial. The oil rig exploded on April 20, which was Hitler’s birthday and the day after Israel's independence celebrations. The rig sank two days later on Earth Day. There are only 365 days in a year and every one of them is the anniversary of something, but this kind of flimsy evidence is all that's required to buoy a conspiracy theory. Prominent right-wing commentators like Rush Limbaugh immediately spread the word — without doing the heavy lifting of providing evidence — that "eco-terrorists" caused the explosion to vilify the oil industry and bolster President Obama’s energy policies.

In the annals of conspiracy theories, one stands head and shoulders above all the rest in terms of widespread belief, emotional commitment, and sheer endurance over the generations. When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Chief Justice Earl Warren’s presidential commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed him with a rifle on his own. The fact that nightclub owner Jack Ruby killed Oswald before he could talk, for reasons that belied common sense — along with other variables that leave room for doubt — JFK’s murder sparked some of the greatest and most enduring conspiracy theories of all time. The vast majority of Americans continue to believe his killing was part of a wider plot, with possible conspirators including the mafia, Cuban radicals, the Russians, the CIA, and the American military.