Conspiracy Research (Part 1)

Conspiracy Research (Part 1)

When researching for a book like The Skeptic’s Guide to Conspiracies, you learn some strange rules, and perhaps a few truths. Amid all the crazy clutter.

A good researcher knows the "official story" as well as the alternate theories, so that means usually starting with standard history texts. It can involve also finding books on criminology and police procedure, science, and sometimes even mythology or the occult. But when you’re done with standard research, you can find thousands of conspiracy theorists who have come before you who have written their own books.

In most bookstores, conspiracy books are shelved with books on the paranormal. So not only is the latest book on the JFK assassination next to the most recent treatise on bigfoot, but they’re both right there by some book on making love potions. It’s as though some straight-laced bookstore manager just created a section of "stuff we’re going to sell, but we’d really rather not have to think too much about." And perhaps that’s understandable. All these books are about ideas that are pretty out there, beyond the accepted norm, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with one another. The people interested in one strange idea, though, are probably all the more likely to believe in another. Once you’re outside the box, it’s just easier, I guess. So someone suspicious of what really happened on 9-11 might find it easier to believe in El Chupacabra than someone else. I suppose some things–JFK or Roswell, perhaps–are "gateway fringe ideas" that eventually lead you to all kinds of strange stuff, and the next thing you know you’re reading about aliens from another dimension following sacred geometry lines to find Templar crypts. Thus, conspiracy theorists are often interested in the paranormal and vice versa. Fringe concepts just get all jumbled together in people’s minds. Plus, sometimes the supernatural becomes a part of a conspiracy theory, like the idea that the government conducts a huge cover-up of the existence of UFOs.

Conspiracy books always have an agenda, and basically never attempt to document "both sides of the story." They’re sales pitches. Each theorist has his own version of the truth, and he wants to convince you of it. While virtually every conspiracy writer sees "accepted history" and "common beliefs" as the enemy, its funny to see that they hate each other as much as they hate the establishment that spreads the lies they’re trying to reveal. It’s not hard to imagine the guys who think JFK was killed by the CIA getting into a fistfight with the guys who think he was killed by Castro right there in the bookstore. And the believers of a right wing New World Order? I wouldn’t want to be in the same room with them and the guys who tout a left wing New World Order. Well, OK, actually I would, but only if I was behind some protective glass or something.

The best of these diatribes are footnoted and referenced, the worst are a mishmash of supposition and leaps in logic. Both can be fun reading, however, and they’re a step or three well above a lot of the conspiracy theorists’ websites out there in terms of readability and, well, human comprehension. But I’ll get to that in Part 2.