Conspiracy Mania

I will admit that while I don't necessarily believe in political conspiracies, I love reading about political conspiracies. It takes an imaginative mind to come up with oddball stuff that is supported by the slimmest of available public evidence. I have searched the web far and wide for my favorite political conspiracies, and here they are in abridged format (you can click on each link to go to the "source" material for each conspiracy). So put your phasers on stun, and let's get to it:

1) The Majestic 12 Alien Conspiracy: No list of political conspiracies would be complete without inclusion of that old chestnut about the U.S. government making a secret alliance with aliens in space saucers during the 1940s and 1950s (during the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations). As if Truman and Eisenhower didn't have enough on their hands with the Cold War and the Russians! Now, they were making inter-galactic treaties with advanced races of weirdo gray aliens (some good, some bad). All of this business started in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 and the rest is conspiracy history. But in the annals of the Roswell/Alien saga, the Majestic 12 angle is by far the most lucrative payoff in terms of investing your time researching conspiracies. It has all of the best angles: secret alliances, top-secret government organizations, alien autopsies presidential involvement, and secret bases in places like Nevada and Utah. Conspiracies don't get any better than this!

2)I know Area 51 by itself can't compete with the larger conspiracy of Majestic 12: But who hasn't heard about this weird military installation in Groom Lake, Nevada? Any casual observer of "The X-Files" knows that Area 51 is ground zero for the conspiracy movement.

3)The Face on Mars: Back in 1976, when the United States still had a growing and robust space progam, NASA sent probes to Mars to photograph the surface. On July 25, 1976, the Viking I probe photographed an area on Mars that some conspiracy theorists claim is an artificial "city" and "face" on the surface of the Red Planet. The “Face” at Cydonia on Mars is shown supposedly shown in the 1976 medium resolution Viking spacecraft images 70a13 and in the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft strip-image SP1-22003. The conspiracy theorist Richard Hoagland expanded these photos into a full book claiming that the "face" on Mars is part of a long-lost civilization on the Red Planet. The "Face on Mars" theory was the basis of the 2000 film "Mission to Mars", starring Don Cheadle and Gary Sinise.

4)Who Shot JFK?: Alright, enough has been published about the Kennedy assassination to fill the libraries of all the Jesuit university libraries. This is rich conspiracy fodder.

5)The Apollo Moon Landings Were Fake: There is only so much mileage one can milk out of this conspiracy without getting an advanced degree in physics.