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Conspiracy theories involving single actions might be true. One of the most famous conspiracies, the Roswell incident, has in fact been admitted to be a government conspiracy, although one involving Project Mogul, a secret weather balloon project. People together often try to redirect the truth when they are involved in something they don't want out, and often it works. Aka, a conspiracy.

So conspiracies about people covering up specific actions might, indeed, be true. Most actually existing conspiracies are because people are attempting something criminal, and there's no underlying motive other than the crime. Someone who fakes, with the help of a neighbor and a family member, a break-in of their house to collect insurance money is in a conspiracy, but is not part of a vast cult stretching back to 15th century Dutch traders trying to destroy the insurance industry.

But all too often such conspiracies slip into 'truth' or 'group' conspiracies or both.


Conspiracy theories that involve groups of people working for decades, centuries, or even millennium, for some purpose, are usually ignoring the people doing that supposed purpose right out in the open.

And if such groups don't openly exist, they're ignoring the fact that such secret groups could not recruit new members as what they like is amazingly unsupported. Conspiracies usually involve small groups, which is fine for small theories, but globe- and century-spanning theories...um, no.

'Group' conspiracies are absurd, we know who controls the world, it's the people who can buy the politicians, and they aren't secretly Satanists or communists or in a vast war between the Vatican and Satanic Freemasons or whatever. Because there aren't that many Satanists. If there were enough to operate a vast-history-spanning conspiracy, there would be 10 times as many who weren't in the conspiracy and went to Black Mass every Sunday morning at their local Satanic Church.


As for ones involving 'truth' that only they know, like the alien people, they're what happens when you put up a mental sieve and only let in information that you want, resulting in absurdly complex things. It is the canonical example of 'If you take one factually incorrect premise, and extend it to the logical conclusion, you have a remarkably realistic simulation of insanity.'. To quote Terry Pratchett: The truth is out there, but the lies are in your head.

Most ones that postulate a vastly different view of the world are almost self-evidently incorrect, for the simple matter that keeping up such a conspiracy would be incredibly complicated and serve almost no purpose. If people had that much control, there are much simpler ways to do what they want.


A good sanity check is: Does the conspiracy require a lot more things than would make sense?

For example, with the 9/11 truthers people, wouldn't the simplest way for the government to do 9/11 be to...um...actually fly the airplanes into the buildings? (Possibly with filling both the airplanes and towers with explosives beforehand, if you think the collapse was implausible.) Wouldn't it be stupid to replace them with missiles or smaller planes, which also requires getting rid of the old plane and all the people on it? Wouldn't it be mindbogglingly-stupid to simply repaint one of the planes and keep using it, when planes are a) so few it's easy to track them, and b) not actually that expensive when compared to the government budget?

Wouldn't it also be immensely stupid to use steal the identity of terrorists that actually exist, and can be found alive later, instead of just making up new people? (Like the American people had any idea of the names of possible terrorists before 9/11. Take ten minutes to stick new guys in the system.) Moreover, wouldn't it be stupid to use terrorists from Saudi Arabia if the whole point was to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran?

I mean, I'm the last person to sing praise of the intelligence of the current Administration. But, seriously, the idea that no one said 'Hey, let's fake terrorists from the countries we want to invade instead of these real guys from the wrong country that might pop up later, and let's use the actual real planes instead of this complicated plane swap we've invented...'

Well, that just doesn't make any sense.