Feb 26, 2021
What Lies Below, Day One
Exploring the Depths of the infamous “Conspiracy Iceberg”
Hello! I’m Rob; a fan of all things strange. I’ve been digging into conspiracy theories, occult lore, cryptids, UFOs, and all the rest for my entire life. A while back, I bumped into something cruising around the odd corners of the internet. It was an image, usually called the ‘Conspiracy Iceberg. The idea is that the deeper you go, the more obscure and weird the topics get. These icebergs are made for everything from music genres to television show trivia, but the conspiracy iceberg is notoriously dense. There’s over 1,100 items, and to my knowledge no one has tackled the whole damn thing.
I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it day by day, breaking it down by a dozen or so items every day until it’s done. This isn’t your place for expansive, detailed coverage — but I’ll try to give everything due justice. Be cautioned that while I’m not going to go into gruesome details, all sorts of sensitive topics are going to be occasionally touched on. Some of this will come from my own knowledge, some from some cursory digging around. If I get something wrong, reach out and yell at me. If there’s something I can’t find anything about, reach out and share.
Alright, that’s enough of that. Let’s GOOOOOOOOOOO!
MOMO — We start off with an item that could refer to two things: a lesser known cryptid or a more modern bit of internet folklore. I’m guessing they probably mean the latter. The ‘Momo Challenge’ was a sort of urban legend in which an anonymous person would contact someone and have them do various tasks, up to and including suicide. It was often paired with a telltale image of a weird birdlike human with huge eyes. While there’s no evidence the challenge was ever ‘completed’, it managed to get some mainstream attention.
The cryptid version of Momo, meanwhile, is the ‘Missouri Monster’: a local flavor of Bigfoot without much else to be said.
VAMPIRES — As will sometimes be the case here, a topic will be so broad as to defy any real specific run-down. I’m going to guess that its placement on the conspiracy iceberg means we’re talking about “Real Vampires”, though, of which there are a few varieties.
-Some conspiracy theorists tend to think high level elites subsist off either blood or flesh(or other things) from victims, often children. These alleged elites aren’t really what we imagine when we think ‘vampires’, but you’ll still see the word tossed around — it’s very popular in contemporary Qanon-aligned circles.
-There are also the ‘Sanguinarians’ and ‘Psychic/Pranic’ Vampires, or people who consider themselves actual vampires while generally also fairly normal human beings. You don’t see much of this subculture now, but they had quite a presence in the earlier days of the Internet. ‘Sanguinarians’ needed blood(which they were careful to say always came from willing donors!) to stay healthy, whereas Psychic Vampires had a more vague diet of energy/life force/whatever. Goth was enjoying a bit of a resurgence in the late 90s/early 2000s, and the ‘Real Life Vampire’ subculture rode that wave very successfully. There was even a large, now-defunct, organization called the ‘Sanguinarium’ that operated as a sort of International hierarchy with all sorts of special rules and titles(mostly copped directly from the Vampire:The Masquerade rulebook). As you might expect, it was a scene rife with what we’d now call LARPers. There are still a scattering of splinter ‘households’ and ‘clans’ here and there that trace back to or duplicate the old Sanguinarium style.
-There are various ‘serious’ organizations who consider themselves, to some extent, to be Vampires. The ‘Temple of the Vampire’ is one such group, as are the ‘Asetian Vampires’. Usually these groups have a sort of pseudo-religious format, including their own special texts or membership you “get” to purchase if you show interest.
-Every once in a while, a ‘Real Vampire’ appears on some corner of the internet claiming to be the real deal, immortal and all. To date, none have accepted my standing invitation to meet for drinks. But if one is reading this: I’m not getting any younger. Hurry.
BIG PHARMA — I’m guessing this is on the very tip of the iceberg because it can hardly be called a conspiracy. ‘Big Pharma’ is a term for the collective pool of pharmaceutical companies. There is no specific members list, though obviously the big names like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Novartis, Merck, etc are always considered part of it. ‘Big Pharma’ is less a conspiracy unto itself and more a support character in other conspiracies large and small. Sometimes big pharma is purposefully withholding cures because treatment makes more money, sometimes big pharma is purposefully making us ill in the first place, sometimes big pharma is involved in chemtrails and vaccine-microchipping, and so on. They’re almost always in cahoots with other corporations and governments(or the parts of the government a given conspiracy theorist doesn’t like, at least). You will see a lot of these items wind up being a roundabout way of people figuring out “how capitalism works”.
SLENDERMAN — Slenderman, like a startlingly high amount of other modern phenomenon, traces its origins back to the Something Awful forums. Born of a thread in which users were creating supernatural photoshops, the character took off almost immediately. Slenderman is generally depicted as a tall, thin humanoid figure with a blank white face. Usually it is wearing some kind of black suit and sometimes is sprouting shadowy black tendrils. What began as creepy photomanipulations soon ballooned into a popular YouTube series called ‘Marble Hornets’, into video games, and into all sorts of other internet lore. It all was very decentralized, leading to all sorts of variations on the theme that helped maintain a nebulous origin. Slenderman is arguably the biggest of the internet urban legends, and almost assuredly the one most embraced by the mainstream. The phenomenon also led to a grisly stabbing incident in which two preteen girls stabbed a friend 19 times to become ‘proxies’ of Slenderman, something one could do in some of the stories shared online.
GMOs — “Genetically Modified Organisms”. This is usually referring to plants but can refer to animals as well, and in conspiracy circles is almost always considered a bad thing. Much like Big Pharma above, GMOs are less a specific conspiracy these days and more just an ingredient of others. Corporations like Monsanto are using GMOs to dumb us down, or to make us infertile, or to infuse us with alien DNA, or to make men less masculine, or any other thing they should need to do. There are also less nebulous things, like the way GMO crops will end up in the fields of other farmers who didn’t plant them there — then be ‘discovered’ by the megacorporations who created the GMO. This will often lead to lawsuits that the corporation inevitably wins, either outright or by slowly bankrupting their much weaker opposition.
CLIMATE DENIAL — Some people don’t think climate change is real at all, or think it is only changing in natural ways that have nothing to do with people. This isn’t as much a conspiracy as the sort of science-denial conjecture that orbits other conspiracies. Some climate deniers believe Climate Change itself is the conspiracy, meant to usher in the usual range of things from one world government to depopulation. In my experience, climate-denial is less the core conspiracy and more the product of other core conspiracies: you can’t really believe in most of the juicy theories out there if you have real faith in scientists, and so you necessarily have to dismiss the sorts of things that most scientists agree on like climate change.
THE SECRET — This seems to just be referring to the book, written by Rhonda Byrne in 2006(and also a film, same year). It’s a bland metaphysical self-help guide that isn’t particularly different from a great many others, but managed to catch on at the time. It’s essentially a flowery text on techniques like visualization and manifestation via the laws of attraction. Byrne focused on a ‘ask, believe, receive’ tactic that people could easily dovetail into whatever their pre-existing philosophies or beliefs were. It’s still fairly popular in the fluffier realms of New Age thinking and spawned about a billion sequels and knock-offs. You can achieve the same effect by stapling one thousand fortune cookie fortunes together like a giant flip-book.
FAKE NEWS — Popularized heavily by Donald Trump and his campaign, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Media outlets create Fake News either through outright lies, obfuscation, or misrepresentation. This is generally perpetrated by the MSM/MainStream Media but is often applied to basically anyone with any audience. While it’s not much of a conspiracy theory to suggest that media has a habit of being iffy on their facts, the ‘Fake News!’ label tends to be a more highly politicized phrase aimed at any media company that is or appears to be ideologically opposed to your own political standpoints. It was overused to such an extent that it became a meme, but has correlated with a continuing dip in how people view the credibility of news organizations.
VACCINES — A staple of contemporary conspiracy theories is that vaccines are in some way nefarious. Sometimes they’re a population control tactic, sometimes they’re implanting us with RFID chips, sometimes they’re meant to make us sicker, sometimes they’re meant to make us more docile, sometimes they’re simply a moneymaking scheme. Big Pharma is obviously always tied in here, as well as whatever government is enacting them. Figures like Bill Gates are also drawn into this, as figureheads of whatever scheme suits the specific conspiracy. As will sometimes be the case, this is one with a lot more meat to it than a quick paragraph here can detail. You know someone who is an anti-vaxxer and don’t need me to explain what they’re like. They come in all political flavors and are sometimes pretty reasonable or intelligent otherwise. This may be the most mainstream of conspiracy theories, and the mountain of articles and videos and books debunking their claims is probably worth at least glancing at sometime so you can try to talk that old high school friend back into reality.
LUCID DREAMING — Lucid Dreaming is a technique in which the dreamer can become aware they are dreaming and even control the dream. It is said to be achieved through a variety of means from drug use to meditation to just keeping a detailed dream journal, and can be used for anything from a fun dreamtime to a means of divination or religious experience. Some also claim it’s how best to contact spirits, aliens, otherdimensional beings, etc.
BIGFOOT — I doubt you need me to tell you what Bigfoot is. But, for the sake of completion: Bigfoot is among the most enduring cryptids, a large shaggy-furred humanoid generally occupying dense wooded areas in North America. There are a great number of variations of Bigfoot based on locale, though the general traits don’t vary much. Bigfoot has more ‘evidence’ than any other cryptid, including all sorts of photos and videos and alleged large footprints — all of varying veracity. Bigfoot has a massive following, and moreso than most cryptids enjoys a large number of true believers. While most seem to think these creatures are some sort of undiscovered animal species, you’ll occasionally hear it suggested that they’re tied to aliens or other things somehow.
DAJOOS — This is, as far as I am aware, just a ‘clever’ way for people to say “The Jews” when a great number of conspiracy theories wind up blaming them for something or other, sometimes less subtly than other times. It’s basically a meme, and has come around to often be used in a manner mocking the conspiracy theorists themselves. There is a lot of nazi crap in the conspiracy world; as you’ll see in days to come.
SACRED GEOMETRY — In essence, certain geometric patterns and shapes hold hidden or even sacred meanings. Sometimes these are attributed to an existing God or Gods, sometimes they are a manifestation of a more natural divinity, sometimes a sort of combo. Versions of this find their way into a lot of major religions and other belief systems. There’s a lot of Sacred Geometry in New Age thinking, but it does exist in the more spiritually-minded fringes of contemporary Conspiracy Theories. Sometimes the way things were designed(i.e. the streets of Washington D.C.) are suggested to be an attempt to create these powerful geometric patterns for various nefarious purposes.
And that’s it for today! Thirteen down, over a thousand to go! It’s gonna get weird, folks.
→ DAY TWO
