What Lies Below: Part 3
Exploring the Depths of the Infamous Conspiracy Iceberg
Hello and welcome back, fellow wanderers of weird. That’s a pretty annoying way to start articles, isn’t it? I have to do something like a hundred of these, so get used to it. “What Lies Below” is a journey down a list of over 1,000 increasingly weird theories and events and people. We’re still in the First Tier(out of Twenty), so there’s still a lot of very obvious and mainstream things popping up. You already know what most of it is, but brushing up on basics will help when more obscure things further on start calling back on these “base” theories Still, we’re starting to dip into a couple more obscure things, and I assure you that the Tiers get real weird soon enough. As always: I avoid grisly details but some of these things can touch on sensitive topics. Feel free to reach out and yell at me if I get something wrong or if you’re an alien, fae, vampire, or other supernatural being.
NIBIRU — Nibiru is a big celestial object, usually a planet that is either out in space somewhere or in a specific orbit that precludes us from seeing it. It can sometimes also be referred to as “Planet X”, but sometimes the two exist independently of one another. There is constant Doomsday Theory suggesting we’ll smash into it at some future date, with the timing usually left vague but sometimes pinpointed with walls of dense equations.
Nibiru appears in some Ancient Aliens theories, being on a very very very wide orbit that only brings it near Earth every many thousands of years — at which point its inhabitants come visit. The last time it came around would be when some of the residents paid us a visit and inspired all the various carvings and sculptures and writing that identify them. If they’ll be friendly or unpleasant when they come back is sort of a dealer’s choice situation.
NASA is in on covering it up, usually, for various reasons. Nibiru is one of those conspiracies that has endured long enough to transmogrify into a thing that can fit into just about anything else and mean whatever it needs to mean. Just like the wayward planet itself, the theory will pop up in the outer orbit of any big conspiracy movement.
CICADA — In full, “Cicada 3301”. This was the name of a person or group who would post puzzles online in ARG(Alternate Reality Game) format. Cicada first appeared on the 4chan imageboards but quickly gained wide interest, proving to be far deeper and more complex than puzzles usually were. Cicada focused a lot on code-breaking and presented a thick veneer of being a Real Thing and not just a game; theories about the true nature often hovered around it being a means of recruiting particularly talented people to do some sort of secret work.
People have taken credit for it from time to time, groups have adopted pieces of it, and there were even rumors that some or all of those behind it were keystones in the beginnings of Qanon. Most agree the last official Cicada communication landed in 2016. Small pockets of the Cicada community still exist, but it seems very unlikely any new progress will come unless the person/people behind Cicada re-activate.
While it was never been officially ‘outed’ as an ARG as opposed to a real cryptic puzzle, some internet sleuths have broken it down in detail and the general consensus is that it was just a game or passion project that just winded down— a search on youtube will fill you in. Regardless, it managed to carve itself more of a niche that anything else like it before it fell defunct.
ATHEISM — I don’t know what this is doing here? We all know what Atheism is. I’m not aware of it being a conspiracy, aside from the occasional ‘Atheism is a conspiracy by [Insert Villain] to drive people away from God’ rhetoric. I guess it may be on this Iceberg because that rhetoric is pretty popular in many circles. To use a contemporary example, most Qanons believe some variant of this. Next!
AURA-READING — Self-explanatory: being able to see an ‘aura’ around people and sometimes other living things, as well as being able to determine things based on the type and color of that aura. This is usually a talent claimed by people involved in metaphysics or Pagan belief systems, but there are reports about the CIA researching it as well. As far as the CIA piece goes, that seems to be people confusing this for the Agencies’ Remote Viewing project. Not very weird or exciting! Two bad ones in a row; next!
NOSTRADUMUS — A French ‘seer’ from the 16th century who has been credited with predicting virtually every major world event. Thanks to the poor translations of his original writings and their vague wording, you can make them fit almost anything if you squint and tilt your head. You don’t really hear about him once you scratch past the most surface-level conspiracy/paranormal communities. I know it seems odd for such a major name to get such a short write-up, but that’s going to be a common theme with this Iceberg. There’s no new ground to break here and nothing really as juicy or interesting as secret government experiments and internet-based cults.
ATLANTIS — This would need a very long article of its own if I’m going to do any more than scratch the surface, as you could probably guess. Atlantis is the most famous of the ‘Lost Cities’(or sometimes whole nation), generally believed to currently be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Atlantis is usually in the Atlantic, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s in the Bermuda Triangle and sometimes it’s near the Straits of Gibraltar. Sometimes what we know as Antarctica is actually Atlantis, or at least where Atlantis was/is.
As far as what Atlantis was/is goes: the more boring ideas are that it was just a normal group of people and the legend is a result of millennia of retelling a disaster story. The more fun ideas are that it was an advanced society, sometimes being the place from which many human advances in technology first appeared(either by our own invention or given to us via Ancient Aliens). Atlantis either sank, or was destroyed, or blinked into another dimension, or is time-displaced, etc. It may even still be thriving and intact, hidden in some secret corner of the Earth or deep inside the Hollow Earth.
PS: it may have just been all made up by Plato; whoops!
ASTRAL PROJECTION — A technique by which you project an ‘astral body’ of yourself to another place, sometimes physical or sometimes to the ‘astral plane’ or beyond. Some use it as part of magical or religious practice, some believe it’s a way to access vast stores of knowledge like the Akashic Records, etc. Like most things of this nature, it is achieved via meditation, ritual, drugs, and so on. But you already knew this and it isn’t a conspiracy! BORING! NEXT!
DYATLOV — The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a fairly well known ‘unsolved mystery’. In the late 1950s, nine hikers in Russia disappeared and were eventually found to be dead. The mystery really boiled up when it was learned that the bodies were found to have suffered blunt force trauma or be missing things like eyes and tongues. These bodies were also spread out, with some being found in a creek. The tents were shredded as if the hikers had cut their way out. Some of the hikers had seemingly undressed at some point before perishing, too.
It’s been officially declared the result of an avalanche that killed some and left the others roaming until they died of hypothermia. Needless to say, a lot of people don’t buy this. Most theorists believe a military experiment was responsible, but it’s wide-open. There are standing theories that some or all of the hikers were KGB agents, that a strange natural wind event drove them mad, that local indigenous people are somehow responsible, and occasionally someone says they fell prey of a Wendigo.
23 ENIGMA — The 23 Enigma in particular is an obscure thing to be so high on the list, but it’s a specific example of an incredibly common phenomenon. It alone is just the belief that the number “23” holds potency and has a way of turning up in important matters. Most of this originates from Robert Anton Wilson and Discordian Texts, so it may well just be a prank or purposeful nonsense.
The whole ‘I see X number all the time, it’s a sign’ thing is far from exclusive to the number 23. Seeing portents in recurring numbers has become so mainstream as to be almost not even noticed anymore. People think 11:11 is an auspicious time of day, they get jittery about the number 13, and a retail customer who somehow ends up getting $6.66 of change will sometimes all but have a panic attack. This is all largely harmless but does get cranked up to astronomical levels for things like Qanon.
MISSING 411 — This is the title of a book series about people who’ve gone missing in North America. The rub is that the author, David Paulides, thinks there is a coverup at work and at least a fair number of the disappearances have some sort of sinister connection to one another.
The books generally just list cases of people who went missing and give a brief description, then sometimes the author will editorialize a bit about it. Paulides doesn’t really give a specific unifying theory for everything, though, and so leaves it open to interpretation to his considerable audience. Paulides is also very big in the Bigfoot scene, for what it’s worth.
FLORIDIZATION — I double-checked this one to make sure there wasn’t some secondary meaning I’m unaware of, but came up short. This means, in any place I’ve seen it, the aging of people in a given area. Florida has a lot of older retirees, get it? Am I missing something? Have I been stumped already?
MOON LANDING FAKED — It’s obligatory to put this on the list but you don’t need me for it. There’s plenty of little details within it: it was shot on a sound stage, director Stanley Kubrik helped, etc. Sometimes it was faked because we couldn’t do it and just needed to show up the USSR and sometimes it was because we did actually land there and then needed to misrepresent what it’s like up there.
The Moon Landing conspiracy has been around so long that it would need a whole book to deep-dive it all, and there are no shortage of books and videos of the sort if you’re interested. It’s usually baked into most other larger conspiracy theories, especially any kind of “Flat Earth” variant. You’re not here for these common topics. NEXT!
AREA 51 — You already know what Area 51 is. It’s a large Air Force base in southern Nevada which is connected to the most famous UFO story of all time. Most people who believe an alien craft crashed in Roswell believe the craft, and any survivors or bodies, wound up at Area 51 to be studied. Most of that crowd think these things have been moved elsewhere by now, though. A big thing about the conspiracy theorist community is that they’ll spend a lot of time trying to “wake people up”, but on the rare occasion that it works, a large portion of the community will grimace and change the conspiracy or say it was all actually part of a larger plot. How else can you feel smarter than everyone?
ANYWAY, Area 51 is real and is known to be a site for a lot of testing for aircraft. Sightings of this only serve to enhance the theory that they’re testing alien ships or, at the very least, technology adapted from alien ships. The government doesn’t just deny all of this, but literally didn’t even officially acknowledge Area 51 even EXISTS until 2013. Everything that goes on there is still super duper classified and the area is very well guarded. While it has lost a lot of pizazz since going so mainstream that no one takes it seriously, it’s still kind of a weird situation and we still don’t know a lot about it!
Not long ago there was a strangely viral online “movement” gathering people to storm Area 51 because “they can’t stop us all”. It started as a random Facebook page and absolutely blew up at an almost unnatural rate. Then it sadly fizzled into nothing and we all forgot about it. A weird story unlikely to have anything more sinister to it than “random internet people don’t plan well”, but still the biggest happening regarding Area 51 in some time.
That’s Day Three in the books! Long way to go. I know some of these will be less flashy than others, but I think doing it bite-sized like this is the best way to go forward.