Welcome back! The “Conspiracy Iceberg” is a list of 1,100+ increasingly odd and obscure cryptids, legends, theories, and other odd things. I may be in a bit over my head, but I’m going to do a baker’s dozen at a time until we’ve finished the whole damn thing. As a blanket content warning: I avoid grisly details, but some of the topics on the iceberg deal with sensitive matters. As always, reach out to me if I get something wrong or you have something new to share — from time to time these things are so obscure that I haven’t heard of them and can’t pick up any meaningful trail.
CREATIONISM — Specific details may vary from person to person, but the idea that the Earth was created more or less as-is a relatively short time ago(usually about 6,000 years). This is virtually always attached to a corresponding religious belief, usually some flavor of Christianity or a sort of Gnosticism with heavy Christian overtones.
As with many of the topics at the tip of the iceberg, Creationism rarely comes alone. It’s generally an umbrella under which many other “smaller” conspiracies rest, like saying fossils are all fake and planted by Satan and/or the Illuminati. In this way, it’s convenient for the variety of conspiracy theorist who is largely just in it out of desire to simplify the world into clear Good and Bad forces struggling over what is ultimately a single key matter. Unsurprisingly, Flat Earthers are often Creationists. A significant amount of people who are in charge of nuclear weapons and government budgets also believe this, or are at least willing to pretend to for votes.
MANDELA EFFECT — This is a false memory writ large, a phenomenon in which a lot of people share a specific memory that isn’t accurate. While the term was coined due to widespread erroneous belief that Nelson Mandela had died in the 1980’s, the Mandela Effect example that tends to be most frequently shared is the spelling of either Berenstain Bears or Berenstein Bears. Bears is a series of children’s books lots of people remember as being spelled ‘Berenstein’ despite it being ‘Berenstain’. While this could just be because ‘-stein’ is a much more common thing and a lot of young brains made the mistake before forgetting about it, lots of people decided it was actually proof there was a merging of universes or split timelines or, my personal choice, simulation theory. Another well known case is people remembering Shaq starring in a movie called “Shazaam”, when the title was actually “Kazaam”.
Mandela Effect believers tend to think there’s a specific moment when things changed. This sometimes means major historical events, but is more often linked to things like CERN using the Large Hadron Collider. As the theory gains popularity online, it is finding itself used as an explanation for why promised prophecies or predictions didn’t materialize on given dates.
The Mandela Effect is more popular than you might think. It’s pretty close to reaching mainstream-level fame and there are whole online communities dedicated to “discovering” and analyzing examples of this. It can be interesting to poke around, even if you’re a skeptic, because it turns out there are a lot of little bits of history and pop culture that huge swaths of people really do misremember in the same way.
SINGULARITY — The Singularity is hard to define because what actually happens when we reach it is mostly just speculation. This is also another example of a fairly common issue at the tip of the iceberg: the topic isn’t so much a conspiracy itself as it is a structural support beam for various theories.
The gist of the Singularity is that technology is continuing to advance at an exponential rate, and at some point it will be so advanced and improving so fast that…well, SOMETHING happens. There are a lot of directions theorists take it from here, but two are the most popular. First, many think the Singularity will involve some sort of ascension of humanity into a higher form of life. This usually involves a significant amount of cybernetics or quantifying our minds and spirits in such a way that they can be put in machinery or computers. The other leading theory is, unsurprisingly, based around Artificial Intelligence. Recent developments in AI have really fueled this theory, but theorists are largely divided on if the AI will be benevolent or malicious toward us.
The Singularity is both a well of optimism and a source of great dread, depending on the believer. Often both groups of people believe more or less the same thing will happen, but then become sharply divided on what it means for our souls to be put on a computer, or if we’re mature enough to create true Artificial Intelligence responsibly(we are not). In terms of timeline, The Singularity is a bit of a moving goalpost, generally always about ~25 years away.
MH370 — Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was a passenger plane that went down on March 8, 2014 with about 250 people on board. The resulting search was a huge media circus, but the plane was never found aside from a very little bit of debris that washed up on the shores of the Indian Ocean.
This has led to so many conspiracy theories that it would need a whole article to break them down. The leading ones are: it was hijacked by virtually everyone from ISIS to North Korea; it was captured by the US and landed at Diego Garcia; it was shot down by the US near Diego Garcia; it vanished because some organization or government needed to acquire of valuable technology/passengers on-board; it was brought down purposefully by the crew; it was shot down by Iran; it was actually the plane shot down over Ukraine later that year; it was a temporal/spacial anomaly; it was, of course, aliens.
MH370 gets more attention in the conspiracy world than a lot of downed or missing vessels because the big media companies, particularly CNN, went really wild for it. There were endless special segments and very expensive, expansive 3D renderings and analyses and special guests of every possible tenuous connection. While the main-stream media failing to give much coverage to an event is a guarantee that the event is being “covered up” and “hidden” from us, the main-stream media biting too hard on a story is conversely a guarantee that a manufactured narrative is being used to…you guessed it, “cover up” and “hide” something from us.
HYPNOSIS SELF HELP — Not really a conspiracy. Self Hypnosis is a popular self-help tactic used for things like weight loss or quitting bad habits. Think meditation but with a purpose in mind, so basically energy-work/magic for people who don’t want to sound weird at parties. A lot of people swear by it and it’s become pretty common.
UFOs- I mean, what do you want from me here? Unidentified Flying Objects, usually thought of as alien ships but sometimes referring to experimental human aircraft, time-travelers, inter-dimensional vessels, or even sometimes as distinct life forms. There’s reports of UFOs stretching back as far as you want, with plenty of people believing that even holy texts like the Bible refer to UFOs.
UFO sightings and “evidence” are becoming hard to pick through, of late. People were already falling for fake photos decades ago, and professional-quality photo-manipulation software hasn’t helped. The onset of rapidly improving AI art is starting to generate a lot of “UFO” footage. Perhaps more difficult for UFO-hunters: the proliferation of drones has made things more difficult. A telltale UFO-identifier was once the unusual ways lights in the sky would move, something not even the most advanced experimental aircraft could duplicate. Drones, though, do this sort of thing very easily.
UFO sightings still happen a lot, though they only very rarely break through to mainstream news. Sightings often happen in clusters, tend toward rural as opposed to urban settings, and can come paired with other unusual things like power disturbances(even in vehicles) and odd smells. We’ll eventually be doing a weekly or monthly UFO sighting round-up on Chasing Shadows.
SUCCUBI — It bodes well for the Iceberg that this list jumps from something as plain and mainstream as UFOs to something as out-there as Succubi. This is only the first tier! Succubi are either demons or spirits depending on your preference, but are always female and usually use sex to gain power, feed, kill, or some combination of the three.
The reason Succubi are on this list, I’m guessing, is that trying to figure out how to summon a succubus is a very popular pastime in some paranormal/occult spaces. It’s often presented with a veneer of trolling or shitposting, but the would-be summoners will nonetheless throw together some rituals, sigils, and even research into specific variations of succubus folklore and myth. It’s not uncommon to find an anonymously penned confession of some fledgling occultist who claims to have caught the attention of a succubus and is now suffering the consequences. So if you ever think a fictional work is too silly for having someone summon something they know will try to kill them, I assure you it’s more accurate than you’d think.
As with virtually any type of entity with a demon-flavor to it, there’s also a requisite accompanying theory that the Vatican and other religious institutions secretly do battle with them all the time. That this sort of thing is done with a sort of self-deprecatory joke is an evolution that I honestly prefer over the self-serious grim-faced occultist who was ultimately conducting the same ritual for the same reason.
ORBS — There are two main types of “Orb” referred to in paranormal circles. One, the most common, are little round marks that often turn up in photographs. Skeptics furiously debunk this all the time, but a massive amount of people think Orbs in a picture are concrete evidence of spiritual activity. An Orb isn’t necessarily an actual ghost or entity, though it sometimes can be, but instead a sort of trace or footprint.
I’m guessing this meme is referring to the UFO-flavored Orbs, however. These UFOs appear, as you might expect, like glowing orbs of light or energy. They tend to fly in much more erratic patterns than their more tangible counterparts. They also tend to appear at ground level much more frequently. Orb-UFO believers will usually lean toward them being inter-dimensional things or even living entities, as opposed to traditional star-ships.
CHEMTRAILS — Those lines you see left behind planes are in fact a nefarious alchemical mix of any number of things. The chemtrails may or may not be meant to sterilize, feminize, or sicken us. A lot of conspiracy theories are really worried about us being “feminized”, by the way. Someone might think that’s kind of revealing about people who worry about it, but I’m no expert!
Chemtrails may also be part of experiments, may be meant to dumb us down, may be used to make us docile, you name it. Chemtrails are usually just one ingredient of a larger conspiracy; a tool operated by various shadowy Powers That Be in order to conduct whatever bad thing is happening. Chemtrail theories virtually always come paired with other conspiracies, with current popular choices being depopulation, climate change denial, and an ingredient in whatever sinister thing vaccines are doing to us.
This isn’t to say the US government is above spraying bacteria over a major city without informing the public, though, which is exactly what they did to San Francisco in the 50s. For real! Whoops!
‘THIS MAN’ — Better known as “Have You Ever Dreamed This Man?”, this is a meme attached to a police-sketch style drawing of a man’s face. The image first appeared via a website in the late 00’s(though there is alleged evidence stemming back to the 1980’s) and quickly became big on imageboards and forums.
The story goes that a psychologist drew a composite sketch of an anonymous man some of his patients had seen while dreaming, and the theories as to what he is and why he’s there spin out from there. In 2010, the author of the “thisman” website claimed it was a publicity stunt. This would seem to close the case, but there appear to be later interviews in which he continues acting as if it is legitimate. The website(www.thisman.org) remains operational to this day.
It still pops up in conspiracy/paranormal forums now and then, but usually as a meme or a way to troll newbies.
RIPPEROLOGY — This is just the term for people who study Jack The Ripper. Not to say there aren’t conspiracies about who he was, of course. People say he’s been everything from a demon to a royal(but I repeat myself, wakka wakka), though most of them have been pretty solidly debunked.
I’m not diving too far into Ripperology here because it would demand an explanation of all the various theories, and there are a lot. It’ll make a good proper article someday.
BIBLICAL ALIENS — No standard version of the bible specifically mentions aliens, but many people interpret stories of angels and demons and other supernatural phenomenon to really be talking about them. This often but not always ties into ‘Ancient Aliens’ theories. This is a big topic that there is no shortage of ink spilled on, but the two main camps are people who believe this is evidence that Christianity(and most other religions) are based on actual extraterrestrial presence; or the camp that think the religions are still valid but some of the stories are whisper-down-the-alley misinterpretations of UFO/alien sightings that ancient people saw in another light.
HOLLOW EARTH — The less popular sibling of Flat Earth, Hollow Earth has a lengthy history. Sometimes the hollow inside contains places like Atlantis or Shamballa, sometimes it is the inspiration for various religious underworlds, and sometimes aliens live there. Usually, the entrance is a giant hole in the North or South Pole, but sometimes specific cave systems lead to it and sometimes specific mountain ranges are hiding the way.
There is a lot of indigenous folklore suggesting subterranean origins of people, and Hollow Earth was often given a little more of a look by discerning types who blew off Flat Earth altogether. There are a lot of variations of Hollow Earth — everything from it being entirely hollow to being riddled with caverns and tunnels. Some say we actually live on the inner concave surface of the planet.
There’s been a surprising amount of papers and books and even ‘expeditions’ based around this theory. It’s way too much to do credit to here, but a few things later on in the Iceberg seem to deal with them individually and so I’ll let it wait.
That’s all for today! We’ve got a long way to go, but this should be fun. Later items will likely call back on these “base” conspiracies frequently, so this is kind of like you doing research. It just isn’t useful in any academic or social or financial sense!
Re, chemtrails “may be used to make us docile”
My grandpa would hear this from some coworkers back in the day (he might still hear it now, actually) and he’d usually respond with “Does society *seem* docile to you?”