What Lies Below: Part 43
Exploring the Depths of the Conspiracy Iceberg
Welcome back! We’re still trucking along through Tier Eight of the Conspiracy Iceberg. While everything here is kept purposefully bite-size, if you see a topic you want a deeper dive in, reach out! I’m always looking for ideas for other articles. The same goes for any cultists, vampires, aliens, time-travelers, or other strange folk reading this - if you want an anonymous interview, let’s chat.
MURPHY’S LAW(STRUCTURE OF THE UNIVERSE) — I’ve rarely heard of this idea phrased this way, and it feels sort of like a secular way of reaching similar conclusions a lot of Gnostics do. It’s Murphy’s “anything that can go wrong will go wrong” Law writ large, but with the added suggestion that the universe is specifically set up to be an infinite suffering generation machine. Just why it’s set up this way is open to debate, with simulation theory or the aforementioned Gnosticism being popular choices.
PRO-WAR BUDDHISM — Just with any religion that is ostensibly pro-peace, you’re going to have factions or followers who are warlike. The distinction is a bit more pronounced given how peaceful Buddhism is meant to be in theory, but it’s not that strange. On one hand, you’ll always have people who are ostensibly part of some religion they grew up with, and either largely ignore it as adults or pretend to adhere to it for support. Like Republicans in the United States. On the other hand, it’s not that hard to twist and contort something like Buddhist teachings into suggesting the way to eliminate suffering is to eliminate those who you’ve decided cause suffering.
KUBRICK WAS KILLED FOR EYES WIDE SHUT — If you’re unfamiliar, “Eyes Wide Shut” was director Stanley Kubrick’s last film. It released shortly after his death in the late 1990s, and is most famously known for the main character stumbling into a masked orgy being held by some sort of secret society. It’s not a popular belief, but some people think this revealed a bit too much of real life and he was killed for it — meaning his heart attack was either a cover story for something else, or induced somehow. This usually goes along with people reading very deeply into the film and finding all sorts of references and suggestions that may or may not have been intended. Most of the write-ups I read about this leave me feeling like the theorists are leaning a bit harder into confirmation bias than usual. It’s not that Kubrick wasn’t a brilliant directory who layered a lot of things into his films, but the story doesn’t exactly hang together. Exactly WHO killed him, according to the theories, seems to vary. Anything from a loose configuration of powerful figures to the Illuminati themselves. Why these incredibly powerful groups allowed the film to be made, released, and continuously aired and sold even today is not explained.
ANIMISM — A little low on the Iceberg, in my opinion, but I suppose this is a bit more obscure than most spiritual beliefs. In short: everything is alive. There are varying levels of animists in terms of exactly how far they take this, i.e. some limit it to anything organic having a type of attached spirit or soul, while others extend this to inorganic things like rocks, and others even attach it to less tangible things like a storm or music. There’s a lot of variation in animism, and it is rarely something devoted to alone but instead a part of someone’s larger spiritual(usually Pagan) belief systems.
UFOS=ATMOSPHERIC LIFE FORMS — This is an old one that exists on the periphery of the UFOlogy world, but it’s persistent. It’s what it sounds like: adherents believe that sometimes UFOs aren’t artificial vessels, but instead living animals(sometimes sentient, sometimes not) that usually hang out in the upper atmosphere and occasionally dip lower. Sometimes they’re usually all but invisible, but atmospheric conditions light them up. Sometimes they’re less a cryptid and more some sort of inter-dimensional traveler.
CONNIE CONVERSE — A stage name for “Elizabeth”, Connie was a musician in NYC active in the 1950s. She toiled in relative obscurity. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that her work was rediscovered and she started to get some notice. The rub is that in 1974, she vanished. She’d been dealing with depression and other issues and eventually used letters to inform family and friends that she was leaving. She did indeed leave and that’s that, no one ever found her. The family looked for a while, but nothing tangible turned up. I guess it’s weird but it seems a little deep on the Iceberg. I feel like I’m missing some larger conspiracy about her disappearance, but I took a look and nothing turned up.
LANE BRYANT SHOOTING — In 2008, someone opened at a Lane Bryant clothing store in Illinois. Five people were killed when the shooter pulled them into a room and apparently executed them. Descriptions of the killer were given, sketches released, and his voice is even audible on the 911 call recording. Still, he remains at large — and as a result, the case has become a pet project for a lot of online sleuths and crime-solvers.
I’m not aware of any big conspiracies about this one, to be honest. I guess it stands out a bit because the regular mass shootings in the US are generally solved immediately or soon thereafter, and generally aren’t part of a retail chain robbery. There is a lot of overlap in the “Weird Stuff” and “True Crime” areas of the Internet, so a particularly hot unsolved True Crime topic can often start to attract various conspiracy theorists.
TOMMYKNOCKERS — Not the Steven King story. Tommyknockers, in this context, are either cryptids or spirits who live in mines. They seem to be largely attached to American folklore but may have been imported from Europe during America’s gold-rush and subsequent boom of immigrants seeking mining work. The Tommyknockers are small green dwarf-type beings, sometimes helpful and sometimes malevolent without much rhyme or reason. Sometimes they’d appear in homes near mines, as well. They’re around if you hear tapping or knocking on walls.
AQUA TOFANA MANIA — ‘Aqua Tofana’ was a poison popular in the mid 1600s, named after a woman named Tofana who sold it under the guise of harmless cosmetics. Allegedly, it was really being used by women with abusive husbands to solve their problems(and possibly making its way into less moral uses as well, some people even thought it was used on Mozart).
The “mania” could be referring to how widespread its use became, or how much panic there was once she got busted. After a customer confessed and the authorities came for Tofana, she was tortured into all sorts of confessions which led to a witch-hunt phenomenon. Not only was Tofana killed, but lots of her alleged customers and allies were as well.
VLADIMIR PETROVICH’S DOG EXPERIMENTS — A Soviet scientist named Petrovich conducted grisly, unusual medical experiments in the 1940s and 50s. He was talented, and offered great contributions in the field of organ transplant — but continued pushing the limits of the research. This culminated with him transplanting the heads of dogs, creating two-headed animals that apparently did survive for several days after. While people recognized his other medical contributions, this was widely considered far too unethical by most people and peers alike.
SENTIENT CLOUDS — This isn’t too different from the “UFOs are life forms” thing a few items back, in my experience. It’s not one specific theory, just the general idea that maybe clouds are a living thing unlike anything we consider life. This isn’t particularly widespread and is mostly born of the *hits bowl* “bro what if like-” brand of theory. A more recent use of the term also has been applied to Clouds as in the online storage method, suggesting these databases are becoming some sort of artificial intelligences. Again, more a speculative idea than a concrete theory.
LELAND MELVIN SIGHTING — Melvin is an astronaut who started a small conspiracy via answering a few questions on Twitter. At one point, he mentioned having seen something “organic looking” through a window. He said ground control cleared up that it was just ice, with the curved transparent appearance seeming alien. People were a little iffy, and Melvin gave a “hey you never know” response.
That’s really it, unfortunately. There’s no images of what he saw or much else to work with!
DUGWAY PROVING GROUND — This is a huge US military base in Utah. All kinds of military maneuvers go on there, as well as “defense” tests regarding chemical and biological weapons. There have been a few odd incidents in or around the place: a NASA ship landed there, the base went into sudden lockdown due to an alleged misplacement of a chemical nerve agent, anthrax was shipped out of it to random locations in the US as some sort of “accident”, and thousands of nearby sheep were found dead due to exposure to a nerve agent — to name a few.
On top of all that, it is surrounded by a fog of UFO rumors and speculation. It’s not terribly far from Area 51, and there’s conjecture that it’s the “real” site of all the sketchy experimentation and whatnot, or where the stuff from Area 51 wound up. It’s a massive tract of land that is highly restricted and has been forever, so you’re always going to wind up knee-deep in conspiracies. Whether or not the UFO stuff has merit, the base is wrapped up in extremely dangerous research of biochemical weapons that they manage to have “accidents” with a little too often for comfort.
Not many pictures today, sorry! Sometimes there just aren’t many! If I ever make this whole thing into a book I think I’ll probably have to just draw them all anyway. That is my way of softly announcing I’ll look into compiling this into a book someday with lots more MSPaint pictures. See you next time!