Skeptic Project

Tell your stories. What were your pet theories? What finally convinced you that the theories weren't true?

In the 1980s/1990s I was a dogmatic believer that JFK had been assassinated as part of a conspiracy. I fell for the egregiously bad but eerily seductive 1988 British TV miniseries "The Men Who Killed Kennedy," which was popular shortly before Oliver Stone's movie. Ironically it was this same movie, The Men Who Killed Kennedy, that convinced me. I viewed it again years later and noticed that at one point in the movie the narrator claims that a particular pathologist says that he saw the back quarter of Kennedy's head torn away. However, when the pathologist himself is interviewed, on-camera he holds up a diagram showing the top/side of Kennedy's head traumatized, NOT the lower back quarter. What the movie said he saw did not match what he actually claimed.

I also believed completely that the movie had "proved" that three Corsican hit-men had assassinated Kennedy. One of them was interviewed on-camera and it seemed conclusive. When I did a little research, I found that the makers of the film had totally obfuscated nearly everything, the "hit-men" all had alibis and the interview on-screen was extremely distorted.

Eventually as I looked into the facts I came to realize that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that conspiracy theories are garbage.

I was also once a believer that TWA 800 was shot down by the U.S. Navy (I believed the shootdown was accidental, not intentional), but that theory crumbled the more I looked into it. That seemed to be a pattern--the more I actually investigated the real facts, the less credible conspiracy theories became.

Please tell your own story.

I'm not sure I was ever a "conspiracy theorist" exactly. Even when I did listen to Alex Jonestown there was always a big entertainment factor to it. Alex was pretty thrilling back when Waco stuff was still pretty fresh but after I noticed how blatantly full of crap he was I sort of got turned off. Plus I got so tired of the GCN commercials.

I always liked Hollow Earth, Montauk, Atlantis/Lemurian science fiction type stuff. The Bible beaters always turned me off from ever really getting into the NWO nearly as much aside the truly wacky material like Cathy O'Brien. NWO stuff is really pretty boring if you're looking for sci fi unless people with microchips in their brains are having sex with Senators and dolphins.

I think the one that I was into the most was the Incunabula/Ong's Hat stuff. I went so far as to hunt Joseph Matheny down on AOL Instant Messanger and I printed out the conversation for this huge three ring binder I had full of stuff about it. I'm not sure I believed it was real, but I think I wished it would turn out to be. I think I did too much acid in those days.

What got me to start debunking was just how horribly offensive I find Trutherism. If it weren't for that I would probably not care if Alex Jones was making a buck off of crazy stories.

Zaroff brings up an interesting point.

I too was exposed to Bob Wilson and the SubGenius material pretty early on, and I loved it.

Could satire provide an immunity to CT?

Satire has long been humanity's weapon against ignorance.