What Lies Below: Part 49
Exploring the Depths of the Conspiracy Iceberg
After a brief hiatus, What Lies Below is back on track. If you’re joining for the first time: the “Conspiracy Iceberg” is an enormous list of increasingly odd conspiracies, cryptids, and other odd things. I’m running through it in chunks of thirteen. We’re just about wrapped up with the ninth tier of the Iceberg now, and it gives us a pretty good mix. Let’s get to it!
ARETOLOGISTS — I’m not sure if this is referring to a theological practice of chronicling and retelling stories about divine figures, or a more philosophical way of looking at virtue and how we go about chasing it. It’s probably the former, in this context. This isn’t the most exhaustive definition I could give, but neither option is anything particularly bizarre or connected to any conspiracies I’m aware of.
THE PLEIADIANS ARE MALEVOLENT — First, a bit of background: Pleiadians are one of the more popular types of aliens in the segment of the UFO community focused specifically on actual extraterrestrials. They come from the Pleiades cluster of stars and are often also called “Nordic” aliens(though some people consider these distinct and separate, it’s not like there’s any official rules here!). They’re often depicted as very human looking: tall, pale, long blonde hair, etc. They’re “good guys” in most takes, helping us ascend or defending us from the Reptilians or the Grays or other villainous aliens. Much(but not all) of the ‘starseed’ stuff you see online winds up leading to them. They’re also interesting because, as you can guess by their appearance and story, they attract a certain ideologically far-right flavor of theorist. BUT a lot of people really into them aren’t into any of that stuff and are just very into all the vibes and inter-dimensional crystal space woo.
However, not EVERYONE is convinced of the noble intentions of this alien race. The Pleiadians tick a lot of “too good to be true” boxes and, despite being so powerful and rad and into helping us, they don’t seem to ever actually…you know, DO anything that helps. It’s all speculation, of course, but there are plenty who think the Pleiadians are just using us as anything from fodder to food(much like the Reptilians allegedly do). Some think their whole pale-skinned blonde haired gimmick is an illusion of some sort, too.
HECTORS ICHTYOSAUR(TRUE ORGANISM SIZE PARAMETERS) — Hector’s Ichtyosaur was discovered in 1874 but has been lost in the time since, leaving this all open to debate. While a regular ichtyosaur was more or less dolphin-sized, Hectors Ichtyosaur appears to have been whale-sized or bigger. It’s possible it was the biggest animal ever, but we just don’t know. Things like this often pop up in fringe conspiracy circles focused around historical giants, alternate histories, and so on.
SEMANTIC WEB HAS EXISTED SINCE 2008 — The semantic web is the same web we use, more or less, but with hidden layers that make it readable and usable by machines and AIs. While this is a somewhat new phenomenon, it doesn’t seem that unlikely that some level of it has existed since 2008. While you often hear it in terms of companies data-harvesting and refining various algorithms, I think the context here is that it is being used by Artificial Intelligences that are training themselves and scouring these websites for information. This was probably written well before the explosion of A.I. use online, as now it’s pretty open knowledge that all the big companies(and surely government agencies, too) are training all sorts of A.I.s on everything that winds up online.
CEPHALOPHORE — Usually, but not always, found in Christianity. Cephalophore is art, generally statues or painting of figures, usually Saints, carrying their own head. This isn’t always just symbolism for someone who got beheaded, though. There are stories of Saints who genuinely did survive decapitation and walked around holding their heads for a while.
SYNOMEX FETUS FARMING — Synomex is a big biotech corporation that does food additives. That sounds pretty ho-hum until you hear that they have, allegedly, “reverse engineered” human receptors for taste and smell. So the story goes, they do this to test their products. Kind of sketchy and creepy sounding, right? They used fetus cells to generate this research, and so I bet you can guess where this is going. The story quickly became “synomex puts fetus cells in their additives”, which then became accusations of the companies who use those additives “putting dead babies in their food”. Synomex was accused of, in order to generate all these cells, farming fetuses like those pods in the matrix.
Now, there’s no evidence of any of that extra stuff — but good luck ever dialing back the clock. The ethical issue at the heart of it and the sketchy position of a biotech is certainly something to look at, but it gets a lot harder to do that when it’s been completely obfuscated by politicized hysterics. Funny enough, those politicized hysterics wind up helping the company just blow it all off as nonsense and go relatively unchallenged on the core ethical issue. It works so much in their favor that you’d almost think companies might at times nudge along the politicized hysteria a little. Something to think about!
GOOGLE OWNS 23ANDME — Google pumped a lot of investment money into 23AndMe(a particularly popular ‘find out your DNA/Ancestry with this easy kit!’ companies), and one of 23AndMe’s founders is married to the founder of Google. So while there isn’t any “official proof” of this theory, it’s one of those things you can’t really blow off. A private company tied at the hip to Google having a searchable catalog of everyone’s DNA sets off all the warning bells you would think it might among conspiracy theorists of all stripes.
BILOCATION — Pretty deep on the iceberg for this one! Bilocation is the ability of someone(or I suppose something) to appear in two places at once. It pops up among Christian Saints and other religious figures, and was even attributed to Aleister Crowley. It also occasionally appears when people are talking about the odd way quarks and other things behave in quantum science.
RED MERCURY — Red Mercury is either a very secretive and powerful substance used to build nukes, or it’s a hoax often played by people looking to make a buck off conspiracy theorists and new-agers, or it’s a powerful alchemical substance tied to everything from vampires to mummies. It’s somewhat obscure, but there are plenty of videos and “sellers” out there; people have even been busted trying to buy it to use in terror attacks. There is a red type of the more mundane mercury you’re already familiar with, mercury sulfide, but it does not have any known special properties. So far, there’s very little substance behind any of the tales of Red Mercury. Please do not put anything you think is mercury in your mouth! Even if you think it is magic!
SPANISH CLOUDBUSTERS — We’ve already covered Cloudbusting, the idea that people can break up or disperse clouds like its a superpower, or use various devices to do it. I’m not sure if this is really a distinct thing from that or not. There doesn’t seem to be any specific “Spanish” variety of cloudbuster I can dig up. It may simply have a similar name but be some entirely different thing, but I’ve drawn a blank. If you know what this is, feel free to tell me!
AGRICULTURE DOOMED CIVILIZATION — This is an argument that can come from a variety of angles. Agriculture has devastated the environment, it wound up leading to class hierarchy and all the ills stemming therefrom, and made us “weaker” in either a physical or mental sense depending on who you ask. These arguments aren’t entirely hollow, but it’s less a conspiracy theory and more just a somewhat contrarian view of human development.
NEXUS7 — I don’t think this is regarding the Samsung device, but instead probably refers to a sketchy “Intelligence Program” from the Pentagon. It was meant to help track instability in Afghanistan, and did so via a vague but ominous-sounding process of culling the data from basically all US spy and intelligence apparatus. It catches, tracks, and analyzes all sorts of details about individuals and small communities, and people raised a lot of eyebrows at it. But that was ten years ago and everyone forgot about it, so I’m sure it was never used for nefarious purposes!
CHINESE FACIAL RECOGNITION BOOM — We’ve touched on it higher up the Iceberg, so not much more to say here. China(and private companies therein) has been putting a lot of oomph into facial recognition tech. This isn’t new or exclusive to China, but they seem to be the hot topic for now. The reasoning behind it is always some mix of ease for law enforcement or apps that can better do some function by seeing your face, but you don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to be seriously put off by this stuff.
That’s all for this time! I really like the “hostile Pleiadian” one. First, because UFO stuff is cool and underrepresented in modern conspiracy culture. Second, because it’s the sort of thing you’d hope a conspiracy community would conclude. “Oh hey these beautiful space elves have just showed up to totally help us out no questions asked, requesting nothing in return, and they’re totally the only good guys” is a little rich when coming from the same crowd who will write a ten page essay on the true meaning of a weird cloud, you know? Bravo, people who think the elf aliens are bad guys. You’re our last line of defense.
IIRC red mercury was invented as part of a sting operation to lure out people trying to buy WMDs.