What Lies Below, Day Seven
Day seven! One week! We’re nearly done with the First Tier and we’ve got a nice mixed bag to sort through today. As we progress, you’ll probably notice one unfortunate truth: for as weird and wonderful as many are, plenty of conspiracies are decidedly similar. Most serial killers are secretly a whole group or demon-possession, most military bases contain UFO parts, most famous events were fake or inside-jobs, etc. Now and then they’ll twist or mutate a bit, but it’s why I’ll sometimes not write a whole lot about some of these — particularly the more famous ones that anyone reading this is already familiar with.
GENOCIDE DENIALS — Any atrocity you can imagine has a host of people who are willing to say it didn’t happen. There’s a whole cottage industry around books and videos and other content disputing things like the Holocaust, and you can probably imagine the sort of people who gravitate toward it. You can also probably imagine exactly what conspiracy theories it inevitably attaches itself to. Not interested! Next!
DENVER AIRPORT — Denver Airport is neat because like, it’s just an airport but it has a ton of weird conspiracy stuff swirling around it. Big airports have this weird aura about them already, so I dig this one.
I guess it is easy to believe something’s up in this place when you see their giant horse statue with glowing red eyes, which, fair play that’s sure something. It is affectionately called “Bluecifer” and part of it fell on the sculptor and killed him while it was being made. The airport itself is allegedly built by and/or a headquarters for the Illuminati based on…honestly not really a lot? But sure, fine. It also has some seriously strange artwork in it that are supposed to be about world peace or something but sure look like an evil soldier ending the world. There’s some obligatory secret tunnels and bunkers(and yes there are definitely tunnels), and some odd symbology scattered around including Freemasonry. Denver Airport was, in some 9/11 Truth conspiracies, a place where one of the planes landed and either offloaded the civilians or was replaced altogether. Airports attract all sorts of weird characters and energy so occult types sometimes point at it as being a nexus of this or that.
Of course, the people in charge of the airport are aware of all this and seem to actively acknowledge it as a sort of marketing ploy — so grains of salt all around. But if you’re ever there, wander around a bit!
SMILEY FACE KILLER — Okay so there’s a couple different Smiley Face Killer things that I believe are separate and just similarly named. There’s one idea that a whole bunch of people found dead in fairly recent history who were thought to have drowned were in fact serial killer victims. A smiley face was found near most of them, so there’s the name. But there’s also two different men sometimes called the Smiley Face Killer: Robert Yates, who murdered around a dozen people and would leave bags on their heads with smiley faces. Or Keith Jesperson, who killed 8 people and would always put smiley faces on the letters he liked to send. There isn’t much conspiracy to the latter two beyond the usual arguments about specifics in the serial killer research subculture.
The first thing, the drowned people, is probably what this is about. If the theory is right, dozens of people across at least ten U.S. states were victims of a serial killer(or perhaps multiple killers) who may well still be active. There was a tv show about it that drew attention and a lot of folks online really love digging into it — nothing lights up an imageboard or subreddit like discovering stuff like this that is still potentially unsolved or active. This theory has received mainstream attention and a lot of people take it seriously.
NICK LAND — Reactionary author who is kind of into transhumanism as a vessel for accelerationism. He’s a racist dipshit, which doesn’t necessarily preclude him from being involved in any interesting conspiracies, but I don’t know of any he’s attached to. He stands out from other far-right goofs because he’s into cyberpunk stuff and weaves some sci-fi and occult elements into his nonsense. NEXT!
NUMBER STATIONS — Number Stations are a fun conspiracy. Like, entry-level strange stuff that you can go see(or hear, in this case) for yourself. There’s a bunch you can go listen to right now! They’re 100% real and as they are generally tied to military or intelligence branches in governments around the world, there’s a built in secrecy since we generally don’t know exactly what they’re broadcasting. They are often just various buzzing and static, but will at varying intervals send out messages. Sometimes it’s Morse code or a synthesized voice or a real person. It’s usually a series of numbers, but sometimes letters or other codes are used too. While their purpose is probably pretty mundane in most cases, who knows what kind of stuff is being transmitted! A lot of people spend a lot of time digging into these, and some are stranger than others. A search on Youtube or Reddit will uncover as many as you could ever want.
REPTILIANS — Reptilians are either aliens, interdimensional creatures, time travelers, indigenous to the Earth but subterranean, or a mix of all three. Reptilians are a hugely influential conspiracy theory that have left permanent fingerprints all over popular fiction and culture. Just where they began as a theory instead of just sci-fi fanfic is hard to say, but author David Icke is probably the biggest source of mainstreaming them. He has written quite a few very long books on the subject and more or less crafted the current idea that Reptilian outsiders are shapeshifters and many powerful figures in the world are actually these creatures instead. David Icke has long sworn up and down that this isn’t a big metaphor for Jewish People, but in recent years he’s becoming less and less vigorous about maintaining that distinction. What a surprise!
That said, there are a lot of conspiracy theorists for whom Reptilians aren’t just a way of camouflaging antisemitism. YouTube and other places are full of videos supposedly catching a moment when some celebrity or politician ‘shifts’ and you can see scales or their real eyes or something. There’s a variation of Satanic Ritual Abuse in which the rituals are guided by Reptilians who live in various tunnels and compounds around the world, and feed on the many people(or sometimes only children) who go missing every year. Sometimes Reptilians are tied to Ancient Astronaut theory and either were the ancient astronauts, or more commonly, are the enemies of the original Ancient Astronauts. Reptilians are almost always cast as the villain in serious UFO conspiracy beliefs, with them constantly at war with the more noble alien races(who strangely happen to always look like hot blonde blue-eyed white people! Coincidence!). People with a more New Age bent think Reptilians are maybe not necessarily aliens but maybe something more like demons. Qanon, as it evolved to essentially be a Big Tent conspiracy that could house all other theories, even includes a lot of people who think Reptilians are the ones in charge of the evil ‘cabal’(their version of the illuminati).
EIDETIC IMAGERY — Eidetic Imagery is, more or less, visually photographic memory. It’s not quite the same as eidetic memory itself. They’re not even sure if it really exists but it might exist to some extent. I don’t know what the conspiracy is here? I’ve seen like, forum threads where people said they teach this to spies and sure, why not. Likewise I’ve seen the occasional occultist say they call upon this to draw or describe things they’ve seen on other planes of existence but your mileage may vary with taking their word.
PLASTIGOMERATES — These are neat but not a conspiracy? And by ‘neat’ I mean horrible but interesting! They’re rocks that are actually a composite of various natural stuff(wood,sand,etc) all held together by melted plastic. They’ll probably outlast humans! We’re causing them mostly with bonfires and stuff where idiots burn trash! Also it’s spelled “PlastigLomerates”! The thought behind including it here, I’m guessing, is that you might be able to interpret them as evidence of things like plastic being among deposits much older than plastic is — suggesting there are things we do not know about history.
THE SMOKY GOD — The Smoky God is a book from around 1900 tied to Hollow Earth theory. It’s written like a true account of the author sailing to a big hole in the north pole and going deep inside the Earth to live with the civilizations down there for a while. Their version of the sun is a sort of ‘smoky’ light, so there’s your title. The conspiracy here, as you might guess, is that it’s REAL! Hollow Earth is a surprisingly popular theory that has held on for a long time. Other Hollow Earth theorists have said the ‘hole’ is in the North Pole, and this is written as if it’s a true account. You can read it for free online if you ever want to; it’s pretty good and not long!
PIRI RE’IS MAP — The map as we know it is only a piece of the larger whole, but it was made in 1513 and shows Europe, Africa, South America, and other areas with more accuracy than it should have at the time. It seems to show Antarctica as well. Now, that’s the thing: Antarctica wasn’t formally ‘discovered’ until some time after, and this map seems to show it without ice — but instead as a ‘normal’ place. A LOT of ancient alien/lost civilization theories include Antarctica as a big part, and there are plenty of contemporary theories about weird stuff happening down there as well. This map comes up often as a result. As for whether or not it’s legit: some say the thing represented as Antarctica is just a different land mass they wound up on and misidentified, but there’s no real confirming/refuting it at this point.
CLOWN SIGHTINGS — People dressing up like clowns and goofing other people isn’t new or a single point in time, but this proooobably means the 2016 phenomenon where it seemed like clowns were jumping out of bushes every 50 feet. This may or may not have been set off by a bit of viral marketing, but then the internet did the rest. It got big and was easy to reproduce, so it self-perpetuated. The net was flooded with videos of people in clown costumes creeping out of the woods, appearing at the side of the road, etc. Social media was full of rumors about alleged impending clown attacks, sightings, etc. Because this managed to spread to Facebook, a lot of unaware normal people(especially boomers) went into a panic and helped perpetuate it even more. There are a LOT of these on record, and you can spend a long time reading about or watching them online. Good luck parsing which ones were purposeful stunts, which ones were just pranks, and which ones were genuine clown cults. It all more or less faded away shortly thereafter, though stray creepy clowns still appear from time to time. But if you want to see a whole bunch of clowns, just look IN CONGRESS! BAZINGA BABY! These articles are very healthy for my brain!!!
CANDLE J- — “Candlej-” is the result of a purely fictional character being memed and referenced by ‘creepypasta’(online scary stories cut n’ pasted over and over again to different places) so much that it rebirths as internet urban legend. This becomes a sort of in-joke among the people who spread it, but part of the joke includes insisting it’s all super real. Eventually, people unfamiliar with the original cartoon or whatever will come along and bite. Candlejack is the name of a minor character from the short lived but excellent “Freakazoid” cartoon, who appears and abducts people if they say his name. So saying ‘Candlej-’ online is like, saying he came and took you halfway, get it? There’s a lot of this type of stuff based on popular video game or television fran-
NPC’S — A few years ago, far-right people used the standard fascist “dehumanize your opponent” tactic and started calling everyone they don’t like “NPCs”, as in Non-Player Characters in a video game. The idea is that everyone they didn’t like is a shallow, unintelligent creature only capable of repeating the same handful of dialogue options nomatter what. The irony of the far-right universally adopting terms like this and then all using them the same way in lockstep was not lost on anyone. This does occasionally appear in actual conspiracies, though, at least in concept. Sometimes in Simulation Theory, it’s suggested that a lot of the people we see are just NPCs. It shouldn’t surprise you that most conspiracy theorists have big cases of Protagonist Syndrome.
And there we have it. One week in the bag. That’s almost 100 items, which leaves us with over 1,000 to go! See you tomorrow when we crack into Tier Two.
