What Lies Below: Part 47
Exploring the Depths of the Conspiracy Iceberg
Welcome back to What Lies Below, friends of the fringe. After a short break, we’re back to continuing running through the entire Conspiracy Iceberg, 13 items at a time. Today is a wild mix, so I won’t waste time.
WINDOW AREAS — This term is so vague as to invite a lot of definitions, but I’m pretty sure this is just referring to specific areas where more weird stuff (UFOs, cryptids, hauntings, etc) happen. Some believe it’s due to specific geography, or historical events, or that that’s a place where dimensional or mystical barriers are just natural thinner.
RED ROOMS — Red Rooms are a constant and enduring urban legend surrounding the “Dark Net”. The Dark Net, if you somehow haven’t seen a breathless half-accurate media report on it by now, is a sort of sub-layer of the internet you need special software to access. It’s not indexed by the “surface” layer sites like Google, it tends to be absolutely anonymous, and is a place where a lot of genuine, confirmed crimes and strange things happen. A place like this is obviously going to spawn endless rumors, and the Red Rooms may be the most persistent.
These are alleged sites where particularly violent or depraved actions(murder, sexual assault, torture) are streamed live at appointed times for an audience that is often able to interact with and influence what is happening. There’s lots of secondhand stories of people who know a guy who saw a screenshot of something, and you’ll see alleged ads for these things circulated sometimes. Harder evidence than this is a little low, but it’s also not something many people are going digging for.
That doesn’t mean they’re not real, of course. This sort of thing may simply only be accessible to the super-elite, or to extremely carefully vetted insiders. It’s not impossible.
JACKO INCIDENT — No not THAT Jacko. This Jacko is a cryptid allegedly captured in Canada roughly 150 years ago. Jacko was a small (perhaps young?) hairy apelike creature who was kept in a jail for an indeterminate amount of time, with his ultimate fate unknown. There’s not a lot of strong evidence for or against this — interviews exist of people who remember when the incident happened, but no one who actually had contact with Jacko. Skeptics think it was just a hoax or prank, believers think Jacko was a young Sasquatch.
FRACTALIZATION — So, you’ve seen fractals and you’ve seen those gifs of a weird shape that sort of perpetually zoom in on themselves and become infinitely complicated? They also exists in mathematics and philosophy. I guess this term belongs on the Iceberg but it isn’t a super specific thing in terms of how it is applied. Sometimes you’ll see people say that the universe works in fractals, where you could “zoom out” into space infinitely or zoom down into quantum particles infinitely. Sometimes it is applied to how other dimensions might work, or how time works, or how the afterlife works, etc.
AETHERIANS — I’m guessing we’re talking about members of the Aetherius Society, a sort of new-age religion built around UFOs that started in the 1950s. It was founded by George King, who claims “cosmic masters”(aliens) contacted him. The religion is about working with/for these aliens to help guide Earth forward; pretty much what you’d expect. While the group doesn’t appear to be very cult-like, at least not in the way a lot of these UFO-religions are, King sometimes gets criticized as being a bit of a goof. Nonetheless, they’re still going to this day. Their religion incorporates most other religious figures as having been representatives of various alien races, works in a lot of metaphysical energy work stuff, likes yoga, and so on. There’s a fair amount of books and articles by/about the society and their whole deal is fairly dense and complicated. Might be a good article someday.
MOON BUILT BY NASA — I almost feel like the Iceberg cheated a little with all these different moon theories. They’re mostly all the same, just with new coats of paint. Hollow moon, multiple moon, aliens built the moon, bla bla bla. Whereas I’ve heard all the others be genuinely argued for by people, I’ve never heard anyone seriously support this theory outside of “it’s a small model in a sound stage somewhere”. But I guess the “theory” is that the whole ass moon is something NASA managed to build, that past records of it are fraudulent/plants, and that it serves as some sort of base. Conspiracy Theories often justify the incredible cost of certain aspects of the conspiracy as redirected government dark money, but I’m pretty sure the Pentagon overcharging tax payers for office chairs didn’t earn them enough to build the Moon.
ISIS DOESN’T EXIST — Nothing too complicated or hidden here. Whereas most theorists feel confident in some level of the belief that ISIS was funded/guided by the US or other governments, some people think it was all a show. The footage was largely faked or carried out by plants, the attacks were carried out by government agents/troops in disguise, the web presence and so forth was all faked, etc. This was in order to create a new boogeyman for us after Bin Laden, to justify more military industrial complex spending, to do new world order stuff, and all the usual conspiracy reasons. This one doesn’t have much juice, even inside the Conspiracy world.
BOOYA STONES — Indigenous people on the Murray Islands(near Australia) allegedly had these glowing stones whose light could kill people. These stones were supposedly hidden away when European colonizers showed up, and that’s that. There’s conjecture about what they may have been(if they were real at all) but there isn’t much else to be said!
YOGTZE — In the 1980s, a German guy named Gunther was living in fear. He was out of work and he’d been acting increasingly odd, talking about people out to get him. One night he got real worked up, wrote ‘YOG’TZE’(or maybe YO6’TZE) on a piece of paper, went to a bar and passed out, then drove to his hometown to talk to an old acquaintance. Eventually he drove away and, some time later, was found dying in his crashed car. Witness testimony doesn’t add up — mentioning perhaps having seen someone else near the car, though he was in no condition to be up and about. It also seems like he may have been hurt elsewhere and then put in the car. He was naked when found, and talked about other people who’d been with him — though none were ever found. No one knows what happened, there isn’t a lot to go on, and no one knows what the heck ‘YOGTZE’ was.
BASHIR KOUCHACJI CALLS — An immigrant to the United States, Bashir was a a successful business owner who was doing fine. Then, in the 1980s while expanding his businesses, he started getting phone calls. They were nonstop and went on for years. Everything from silence to laughing to threats to the apparent sound of gunfire. The caller was called “L’Enfant” and was never identified. This harassment went on for ages and seemed to escalate, with Bashir eventually finding his vehicles tampered with. When he traveled to other places, the calls followed. When the FBI got involved, they confirmed the calls and that they were coming from payphones in Washington DC — at such a rate that it appeared multiple people were involved.
It got worse, Bashir’s family was assaulted, and he even went into a mental health facility(where the calls followed him). Then the story went on Unsolved Mysteries and the calls stopped; L’Enfant having been possibly scared off.
Now, Bashir DID have a history. Before coming to the US, he’d been kidnapped once by militants and suffered some abuse. He believed this was connected to the calls, and in later years he got very very political and ran a website with a lot of, ah, strong feelings about Israel. There probably is some connection to what happened to him and the calls, but the details are still unknown.
DRIVER KILLED JFK — A classic. Just what it sounds like. This one comes from people’s analysis of the bullet trajectories and video. The driver was working for (insert alphabet agency name here) and was part of the plot. The variation I hear the most is that Oswald or someone else fired a shot that was mostly distraction, with the driver serving as a plan B to do the coup de grace. I’ve also heard a less-popular version that he did it by accident, either intending to hit someone else or misfiring his weapon. Even most JFK theorists aren’t really into the driver theory, but like all JFK theories it has been exhaustively written about.
MAGDALENA SOLIS — She deserves a longer writeup than I can do, and rest assured plenty is out there elsewhere. Cultist and serial killer! There was a sort of “cult” built around two men, the Hernandez brothers, who’d come to a small Mexican village in the 60s with all sorts of claims of being prophets. Somehow, they convinced the villagers, and this allowed them to basically do whatever they wanted(mostly drugs and sex stuff). Most people agree it was a bit of a con job. Anyway, they kept promising good things that didn’t come, so they had to find a ‘goddess’ and so they recruited a teenage Magdalena.
The thing is, though, that Magdalena wasn’t conning people. She started to believe she was the reincarnation of a Goddess and she demanded dark rituals of the villagers. This eventually came to include sacrifices, blood drinking, you name it. It got very grisly. Eventually, the ‘cult’ was rounded up and she went to jail. Probably. The thing is, records on this seem a little fuzzy? No one seems entirely sure on if she’s still in jail or not, or if she’s still alive or not, or what she got up to if and when she was released. Makes you think.
SAMSARA HACKS — Samsara is the Buddhist term for the cycle of life and death we’re all stuck on. As far as ‘hacking’ it goes, honestly all I’ve ever seen are the equivalent of self-help books for Buddhists. How to better escape and help others escape suffering via special ‘tricks’ that, in almost all places you see this term, are hidden just behind the doors of monetized seminar or class. It can be shorthand for esoteric types talking about breaking out of the cycle, or even used somewhat erroneously in the same way people talk about breaking out of the Matrix, or being enlightened.
One thing you find with conspiracy stuff is that with any popular theory, a sort of arms race appears of people who escalate it to another level. All too often, this is just to make it sexier and flashier so your conspiracy website can sell more grainy DVDs and survival food buckets than the next one. Social media monetization has sent this phenomenon through the roof. “Isis is largely inflated by outside forces seeking to use them as justification for X and Y” is a pretty coherent and realistic theory, but a little clout chasing and monetization can transform it being entirely crisis actors on a soundstage, and if it’s just outrageous or weird enough, now everyone has to talk about that. Ironically, all this sounds like the sort of thing an alphabet agency would do to discredit the original, more valid, theory! Just a thought! See you next time!