It's a conspiracy, I tells ya!

 Recently I was looking for some good scary stories to
listen to while at work.
It's Halloween, so I was in the mood for some spookiness.

Though, to be fair, I'm usually in the mood for spookiness.

And that's how I found a conspiracy podcast on Spotify.

I've been listening to this particular podcast for a couple weeks now.

And the more I listen to it, the more skeptical I become.

Oh, boy, I've got something to say about this and the best way to

approach it, I think, is with a numbered list.

I'm sorry this is so long. I have a lot to say.

1.     First, the host agrees with almost everything the guest says. I can't tell if it's by design, or she's being sincere, but the constant "I agree completely", even when what she's agreeing to is different to what she agreed to on another episode, sticks out to me like a wrong note in a scale. Maybe her not arguing much with the guests just makes for better radio, but it's also makes for an incredibly inconsistent world-view. By contrast, I've also listened to a few available episodes of the Art Bell Coast to Coast radio stations. He featured conspiracy people but wasn't afraid to gently argue with them if it was an issue he had differing views on. Listening to those episodes is also a nostalgia trip for me. I miss the 90s.

2.     Which brings me to my next point: None of these beliefs mesh with each other. And very few of the guests, who all claim to be speaking the TRUTH™, ever actually line up completely with each other's theories. For example, one guy says that aliens are really demons from a Biblical dimension, while another guest is absolutely certain those same aliens are from far-flung star systems 13 galaxies away from us. Another guest insists that details of our lives have changed (Mandela Effect) and is thereby proof that we are living in an alternate reality than we were ten years ago, but still another guest rejected the Mandela Effect as just another instance of people having bad memories. 

        A particularly funny example of this that I remember is the guest who claims that our Sun is now white, but it used to be yellow. I think the Sun has always been the same color, but when we are children, it is really hard to use a white crayon on white paper to represent the sun in the sky. And, the Sun shows itself in different colors in different atmospheric conditions. It isn't yellow or white when you see a red sunset.

        But, apparently, the newly white Sun due to aluminum particles in the atmosphere deposited there by chemtrails.  Oh, boy, chemtrails. These really irk me, for some reason. It takes a lot of money and planning to get planes into the air, is it really worthwhile for someone to take up manifest and cargo space for chemtrail chemicals? It also ignores the fact that releasing anything from the height that most planes fly at is a really poor way of targeting particular places. Wind, turbulence, cloud cover, the motion of the plane itself, all would heavily dilute any ingredient a chemtrail would release. Have you ever seen a crop duster plane? They have to fly super low to the field for the chemical to reach its target. 

This picture is taken from the Sep/Oct 2021 issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine

3.    Returning to nit-pick the host, who maddeningly seems ignorant of nearly everything, features misspellings on episode titles and mispronounces words all over the place. It's just sloppy work. It's about credibility. How can I be expected to take you seriously, when you won't do the work to begin with. This is, admittedly, a personal complaint and really doesn't impact the conspiracies themselves.

4.    Related to the credibility factor, many of the guests are either unable to produce concrete evidence or have only the bare minimum of evidence. Some of the evidence is only available for viewing if you buy their book (they all have a book they're trying to sell) or visit their website or YouTube channel. On the subjects that have intrigued me enough to fact-check, it only took a few easy Google searches to poke holes in all of their views. 

        For example, a Flat Earther mentioned that the Earth must be flat and space isn't real because all rocket launches go up then curve in their trajectories, as if striking an invisible dome and returning to (Flat) Earth. I looked into it, because it was an interesting observation, and learned that rockets don't shoot straight up because the goal isn't usually to go straight out into space. 

        Most launches have the desired result of getting into orbit, which means they need to eventually curve to "fall" into the orbit. It's a stunning feat of physics and engineering to get objects to continuously fall towards Earth, only to keep missing it because the Earth moves through space, thereby maintaining an orbit around the planet. I don't think I explained that particularly well, but other sources can do a better job.

        Conspiracies are full of confirmation bias, half-truths, after the fact "evidence", and personal anecdotes that do very little to drive home their points. Ghost, UFO, and cryptid photos are always out of focus, blurry, and of grainy or degraded quality. Cameras and equipment are always conveniently non-functional or forgotten. The only guest I found even remotely believable was a man who produced X-rays of  unusual objects in his leg. The pictures were easily found with an Interwebs search and were exactly as described by the guest. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to have the objects removed and examined, so I'm still on the fence.

        If UFOs are indeed legitimate, why aren't we flooded with well-lit, reliably reproducible photos or videos? If Bigfoot is really out there and is seen so often by so many witnesses, why don't we have hundreds of good photos? Everyone has a camera in their pockets now. Fifty years ago that wasn't the case, but now there isn't much reason that we don't have gads of great shots of Bigfoot or demons or ghosts or crafts from outer space. Eye-witness accounts can only go so far, as proven by the fact that our human brains are not flawless and our memories are easily suggestible. (See again, Mandela Effect.)

        Incidentally, there are people who look at the sky for a living and very seldom do we get a credible claim from any of them of all of these supposedly thousands of alien encounters everyone seems to believe exists. The big alien space craft has to enter our atmosphere somehow, right? But, again conveniently, some conspirasts (conspirers?) insist that they aren't seen because aliens pop in and out of our dimension. How convenient for them. 

5.        Fallacies. These are faults in logic and reasoning. As an example, nearly all the guests featured seem to maintain that all societies throughout our history and in all places on the planet function under the same societal rules. If they feel that an action is immoral, then the long-lost civilization they are referencing must have felt that way too. If this were true, then we wouldn't have so many conflicting opinions in just our country alone. We are a singular American society, so why don't we all think the same? It's difficult to find 2 people to completely agree on everything, much less civilizations and societies separated by huge spans of time. A fallacious appeal to ignorance.

        Another common fallacy is the appeal to authority. The Bible is brought up on more occasions than I care to count, and is often used as to somehow prove a point. Half the time the host or guest say the Bible was "written" in such a way, which flies in the face of what we know about how the Bible was created. For the first chunk of its existence, it wasn't originally written down at all; it was a series of oral traditions and stories, handed down through the generations, in Hebrew or Greek or Aramaic, then written down on scrolls, then copied (typos and all) through the hands of hundreds of scribes and clerks, before being put together in what is now the Bible. It was a long process. Knowing this makes the appeal to authority of the Bible less credible. Plus, there are multiple versions and editions of the Bible. I personally own two different versions of the Bible. King James had a heavy hand on the scale, to say the least.

        Slippery slopes and red herrings come in everywhere. As the host usually just lets the guest talk and talk, only occasionally asking a question or leading the conversation, the guest is left to rattle on and on about anything even remotely related to their subject. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a popular target when speculating on how demons are "let in" and portals are being "created". 

        Most of these guests like to throw around science-y words, but they very seldom take a moment to explain what the words mean in context of their arguments. Quantum mechanics to them is a wild card that solves any objection. Their world views are, ironically, so extremely simple that instead of accepting that many things on Earth have complex explanations, they choose the most bonkers, but easiest, explanation. If you don't understand something, I guess no one else does, right? (that's sarcasm, by the way)

6.        Finally, the most irritating thing about listening to these folks proclaim to know the TRUTH™ is the fact that so few of them are self-aware in the slightest. Only perhaps two of them I recall were able to admit they didn't know something or were willing to state that they hadn't considered a particular idea when putting together their hypothesis. I say Hypothesis, because in Real Science a Theory is something that has been tested repeatedly and has had consistent and reproducible results. The average person's usage of the word theory is wildly different from a scientist's usage of that term. Gravity and Evolution are Theories. Flat Earth is an easily disprovable Hypothesis.

        I want to wrap this up soon, as it has become a wall of text (kudos if you've made it this far), but simply telling someone to "do your research" is meaningless when most people don't know how to properly research something to begin with. 

        A few targeted web searches or self-selecting witnesses isn't research. If you believe the guy who says he saw the Bigfoot, but ignore the four other guys who say they didn't see the Bigfoot, you aren't doing a very good job in your investigation. Blindly buying into political ads without looking into them isn't research. Facebook posts are not research. Believing only what you want to believe and cherry-picking evidence to support your belief isn't research. If an observable fact wrecks your idea, you must abandon the idea and start over. 

        If it's all so TRUE why hasn't someone come up with a Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory? Why can't it be tested or proven? I want the evidence! Show me the Yeti!

        I actually like listening to the stories and watching the movies and seeing the wacky videos, but none of them are compelling enough for me to really put any stock into them and so many of them are so easy to debunk. They are entertainment to me, something to chew on and flex my reasoning muscles. But the craziness doesn't align with even itself, and so I will remain your friendly neighborhood skeptical jerk.