17 Things That Sound Like Conspiracy Theories But Aren't

1.

“In 2002 a cable technician named Mark Klein working for AT&T in San Francisco was sitting at his desk when he received an email from his bosses that a representative from the National Security Agency (NSA) would be coming to visit for some unspecified reason. He was to give this NSA technician access to a cable substation for him to perform some work. The tech did his thing and Mark moved on without thinking anything of it. A year later in 2003, Mark was transferred to that cable substation and by chance was assigned to monitor the “Internet Room”. This was the room where all the fiber optic ocean cables that carry the countries internet traffic terminate. While he was reviewing engineering drawings, he realized that the schematics revealed a secret room. More importantly, the plans showed cabinets filled with fiber optic splitters coming off every cable and feeding into the secret room. And to make it even crazier, neither he nor anyone on his team had access to the secret room. Through his investigation, he discovered that the NSA representative he had escorted the previous year had worked to install this system which was sending a copy of all the internet traffic that passed through the substation straight to the NSA. In other words, he had proof that the federal government had the capacity to tap into all internet traffic in the country. And I mean all of it. Every email, instant message, electronic sale, medical or criminal records, research databases. Everything. Complete unrestricted access. Like any sane person, he was extremely disturbed by this discovery. He went to his higher ups but was essentially told to just keep it quiet. After retiring in 2004, he linked up with a group called Electronic Frontier Foundation and essentially blew the whistle. He did interviews and handed over all his evidence to reporters. I watched one of these interviews in 2006 which is how I know about this story. I remember thinking it was so obvious once he explained it. Why wouldn’t the NSA tap into the internet traffic in the age of the war on terror? I’d watched Enemy of the State. But nothing happened. No one I spoke to seemed to believe it and Mark Klein’s story eventually seemed to just fade away. 7 years later, in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked documents essentially confirming EVERYTHING and then some. But to this day everyone looks at me like a crazy person when I talk about knowing about it as early as 2006.”

2.

“The UK government secretly tested biological weapons on its own coastal towns to see how far they could make it inland.”

3.

“The Greenbrier Bunker. People love conspiracies about huge underground complexes built for the rich and famous to survive nuclear fallouts (think Denver airport), and that's exactly what Greenbrier is. The bunker was built under the Greenbrier Resort for congresspeople to escape to, and was kept a secret for 30 years, even though people suspected ("why's there a 7,000 foot air strip for a town of 3,000 people?"). For the entire time it was functional, every congressperson was assigned a bunk. These days you can take tours, and I'm sure we'll hear about the next bunker once it's defunct.”

4.

“Operation Snow White Basically, during the 70s the Church of Scientology was concerned with all the bad press surrounding them and all the other dirt on them that could be released. So they used a huge number of contacts that they had in various US government agencies to destroy all negative information about the church of Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard. The crazy thing is, they succeeded with much of the plan before they were caught. There was a ton of negative info on Scientology in the 70s, possibly enough to destroy the church, and it'll never see the light of day because they used their huge influence to have it destroyed.”

5.

“The pentagon has an insane number of bathrooms because as they were building it, the segregation of bathrooms ended.”

6.

“Many prisons in the US are private, for-profit companies. They get paid by the head, and also employ the prisoners for pennies per hour to do work like telemarketing. You've probably talked to a prisoner on the phone without realizing.”

7.

“The CIA fed unreasonable amounts of drugs to people to document the effects and search for new weapons. I can't imagine taking heroic doses of LSD and then getting grilled by government scientists for days.”

8.

“The McDonalds PR machine tried to ruin Stella Liebeck’s life. That coffee was so hot it melted her clothing to her skin. People still believe she was at fault. I turn it around and ask how they’d feel if a parent accidentally spilled coffee on their child that was so hot it melted the child’s clothes to her/his body. Somehow it usually wakes people up.”

9.

“In the 60s and 70s, thousands of Native American women were sterilized without their consent as part of a practice to sterilize poor and minority women to "help their financial situation and their family's quality of life" by preventing unwanted pregnancies in poor communities. Some were not informed at all and had it done to them completely without their knowledge, others were threatened with having their healthcare taken away if they did not agree to have it done to them. Some studies estimate that as many as 25-50% of Native American women were sterilized in the 1970s, representing tens of thousands of victims. This is essentially a modern day genocide in the United States.”

10.

‘“A main ingredient in the flavor of Coca-cola still only comes from processing cocoa leaves into cocaine. The extract goes to the Coca-cola flavor profile, and the cocaine that is produced as a by-product gets sold to the health industry for medicinal use. There is only one company in the US authorized to do this that has had a special arrangement with the DEA for nearly 100 years.”

11.

In 2017, Apple admitted that they intentionally slowed older iPhones without informing customers. Though the company said this was to help preserve battery life, some speculated this was to encourage people to purchase newer models.

12.

“Government Surveillance: Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed in 2013 that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was conducting mass surveillance on citizens, collecting data from internet communications, phone calls, and other sources.”

13.

“That the Ministry of Information in the UK spread misinformation that eating lots of carrots could improve night vision during WWII. They made this up to confuse the Germans. They had a new radar tech that allowed them to pinpoint German bombers from greater distances than before, and the carrot story was a ruse. That said, I don't know what's true on the internet these days, so I'm half waiting for the comment that this story in itself was a ruse…”

14.

“The Stolen Generation in Australia. Up until the f—ing 19[70s] the Australian government, euthanized, sterilised and ripped children from their parents in order to try to "civilise" the native Aboriginal people by educating the black out of them.”

15.

“The United States has a 1.4 billion pound stockpile of cheese stored in caves in Missouri.”

16.

“The U.S. Public Hearth ‘Service’ chose not to treat 400 African-American with syphillis in Alabama so they could study the progress of the disease if untreated.”

17.

“Winston Churchill had a plan called "Operation Unthinkable" to invade the Soviet Union in a surprise attack immediately after the end of WWII. His plan was finally shot down when it was learned that the Soviet troops remaining outnumbered allied troops 3:1.”