Stumbled upon yet another really interesting article that might arouse your suspicions, and the title says it all really! People always like a good conspiracy theory, and rightfully so! They show possible hidden dirt beneath the clean white sheets, try to show transparency in the worlds most secretive governments, and rumors have always spread since we were kids, so why the hell not! Some famous conspiracy theories that you may have heard of or have your own versions of, include the JFK assassination, aliens at Roswell, government surveillance such as the Echelon program, mind control, and of course, 9/11.
So, here's the list you've been wanting:
7. The Business Plot
The Plan:
In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we're talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.
How did that work out?
Smedley Butler was both a patriot and a vocal FDR supporter. Apparently none of these criminal masterminds noticed that their prospective point man had actively stumped for FDR in 1932. Smedley spilled the beans to a congressional committee in 1934. Everyone he accused of being a conspirator vehemently denied it, and none of them were brought up on criminal charges. Still, the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee did at least acknowledge the existence of the conspiracy, which ended up never getting past the initial planning stages.
6. The July 20 Plot
The Plan:
Near the end of WWII, things were rapidly going south for Germany and the time seemed ripe for guilt-ridden Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Colonel Henning von Tresckow recruited Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to join the conspiracy in 1944.
The plot to take out Hitler and then all of his loyal officers was called Operation Valkyrie, based on the belief that no plan can fail if it has a cool enough name.
How did that work out?
In July 1944, Stauffenberg was promoted so that he could now start attending military strategy meetings with Hitler himself. On more than one occasion Stauffenberg planned to kill Hitler at such a meeting with a briefcase bomb, but he always held off because he also wanted to take out Hitler's two right-hand men, Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler. On July 20, he went for it anyway and exploded a bomb inside Hitler's conference room with a remote detonator.
Hitler, who as a level-20 dark wizard had extraordinary damage absorption abilities, survived with only minor injuries. Stauffenberg fled when he found out his assassination attempt had failed and that the Fuhrer was explosion-proof. When the other conspirators found out that Hitler was still alive, they lost their nerve and Operation Valkyrie never went into effect.
5. Operation Ajax
The Plan:
For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic. When Britain tried to regain control of the AIOC, he gave them the finger. Tea was spilled, crumpets were dropped and monocles everywhere popped out in shock.
I'm British, so this must be me.
Together the CIA and British intelligence services funneled guerrilla troops, anti-Mossadegh propaganda and tons of bribes into Iran.
How did that work out?
In the short term? Great! The mostly ceremonial position of Shah (king) of Iran was restored to its former imperial glory, but this time as a puppet of the West. One messy hostage crisis later, and Iran and the US were no longer BFFs. But hey, at least the US learned a very important lesson about overthrowing the governments of unfriendly Middle Eastern countries.
4. The Gunpowder Plot
The Plan:
A group of conspirators (including Guy Fawkes, Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving) decided to blow the fuck out of the British House of Parliament, thus killing pretty much all of the aristocracy, as well as King James I.
The conspirators were taking up residence across the street from The House of Lords, the building the upper house of parliament met in. Their original plan was to burrow their way to the underground foundation of The House of Lords, and lay their explosives there. When that proved to be more difficult than they had originally planned, they decided to just rent a room in the cellar of building. The explosives were quickly moved into place, and all that was left was to wait for the annual Opening of Parliament.
How did that work out?
While they were waiting, one of the conspirators sent a letter to Lord Monteagle, a high ranking Catholic, which basically said, "Hypothetically, we could blow up Parliament on the day it opens this year. So don't go, hypothetically speaking." This proved to be their undoing, as Lord Monteagle immediately passed the news on to the Secretary of State. The House of Lords was searched, and Guy Fawkes, the man left in charge of watching the explosives, was found and arrested.
3. The Tuskegee Experiment
The Plan:
Sometimes referred to as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the idea was that the United States government was going to monitor the effects of syphilis and perform experiments on those who had a developed form of the disease. That doesn't sound so bad, right? Well you're a terrible person for thinking that, because the experiments were exclusively performed without consent, and on the very poor, mostly illiterate black males.
How did that work out?
The study (started in 1932 in Tuskegee, Alabama) eventually rounded up 400 black men in a move that would inspire Rage Against the Machine-esque lyrics for years to come. But, contrary to conspiracy enthusiasts, they did not actually give people syphilis, they just examined the symptoms of people who already had the disease.
When there was a national campaign to use penicillin to stamp out the disease, those in the study were denied access. If they complained loudly enough, they were given a placebo and then sent back home to die. But not before scientists poked and prodded them for the remaining years of their life.
It took until 1972 for someone to blow the whistle on all of this. That's 40 years. And that's after Peter Buxtun, the whistle blower, went to the Center for Disease Control, which told him that they would absolutely end this barbaric experiment, just as soon as they completed the last stage of the study. That stage involved studying the corpses of the subjects, and of course they couldn't do that quite yet because some were stubbornly still alive.
As a result, in 1974 they passed the National Research Act, which finally closed the apparent loophole in American law that said it was OK for mad scientists to kill people in their experiments.
2. Operation Snow White
The Plan:
Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they'd had enough. Their religion about magic space aliens in a volcano wasn't getting the same respect as the religion about the magic bearded man whose dad made us all out of mud 6,000 years ago. Instead of converting to a slightly less silly religion, they did what any of us would have done and decided to destroy every single document that made their religion look bad, presumably including a trip into the future to destroy every copy of Battlefield Earth.
How did that work out?
Disturbingly well, at least for a little while. Apparently, the Church of Scientology managed to perform the largest infiltration of the United States government in history. Ever. Anyway, somewhere around 5,000 of Scientology's crack commandos wiretapped and burglarized various agencies. They stole hundreds of documents, mainly from the IRS. No critic was spared, and in the end, 136 organizations, agencies and foreign embassies were infiltrated.
When all of this hit the fan, the Church naturally denied it. Then they kidnapped one of the operatives arrested for stealing documents and prevented him from testifying.
1. Project MKULTRA
The Plan:
Project MKULTRA was actually a series of CIA experiments in which they tried to figure out how to control your mind. Over a hundred sub-projects were authorized under the MKULTRA heading, though the documents on many of those have been destroyed.
How did that work out?
If you listen to late night talk radio, then you've probably already heard of Project MKULTRA. Paranoid schizophrenics from coast to coast like to call in to recount their harrowing tales of psychic violation at the hands of the CIA.
The project started out as a response to rumors of Communist mind control being used on American prisoners from the Korean War. Afraid of being left in the enemy's pseudo-scientific dust, the CIA quickly jumped on the mind control bandwagon. However, they got their procedures wrong in one crucial aspect; instead of experimenting on enemy prisoners that the national media wouldn't miss, they decided to go ahead and start jamming probes and shooting drugs into unwitting United States citizens.
The project was eventually found out, and the CIA was given a stern talking to.
I hope you enjoyed that list as much as I did!
