What Lies Below, Day Seventeen
Hello again and welcome back to What Lies Below, where we are chipping 13 more items off the enormous Conspiracy Iceberg until we run the whole damn thing. We’re about halfway through the third tier now and have quite a mix today. Really all over the place, in a good way.
THE GREAT MCDONALDS SOFT SERVE ICE CREAM CONSPIRACY THEORY OF 2016 — lmao sure why not. Okay so you’ve surely seen the “McDonald’s ice cream machines don’t work” memes that occasionally bounce around online, right? Well, WHAT IF those were actually planted and spread by McDonald’s employees as part of a guerilla propaganda campaign to simply make you THINK the machines never work, when they in fact DO WORK? If successful in this, those McDonald’s employees wouldn’t have to clean and maintain the machines as much — which is apparently a particularly unpleasant task. Amazing. I’ve always hoped this one is true. This is my Fox Mulder “I want to Believe” poster.
D.U.M.B.S — Deep Underground Military Bases. These things are all over the place, which isn’t exactly a big secret. The obvious varieties are bunkers, missile installations, and so on. But these things can be used for just about anything, and are a hot topic for urban explorers, military buffs, and conspiracy theorists. DUMBs can suit whatever you need them to suit, be they the place where Reptilians live, or where the UFO from Area 51 currently rests, or where the cabal grow body double clone, or whatever else. There’s a host of books and articles and videos on them, including people checking out abandoned ones.
EPSTEIN LINKS — Epstein helped a lot of very rich and powerful people engage in sexual activity with children. This isn’t really a conspiracy, it’s true. Then someone had him iced in prison(or faked his death or whatever) and beyond the ‘Epstein Didnt Kill Himself’ meme, we barely even talk about it anymore! Is that not completely bonkers? We’ve just accepted it and moved on! That’s doubly bad because by abandoning it, you let Qanons run with this stuff and control the narrative — taking the already-horrible-but-based-in-reality facts and injecting a bunch of interdimensional time traveling adrenachrome alien nonsense that discredits the whole thing! Not great! Also way deeper on the iceberg than what is, at the moment, probably the most well-known conspiracy in the world.
COUNT SAINT GERMAINE — A philosopher-type guy of unknown origins who was a big deal in the 1700s. He wrote some music and some mystic-themed texts, but the main thing is that he was either a fantastic bullshitter or maybe immortal. He made claims ranging from being Transylvanian royalty to being 500+ years old, and over the years a whole mythos sprung up around him. That era was full of these guys. It’s way harder to craft this sort of persona for yourself now.
OCCULUMENCY — I was wondering why this didn’t ring any bells because it sounded like some sort of occult scrying thing, right? But it’s from HARRY POTTER! Iceberg, what is you doing baby? I guess maybe as with anything ‘real’ that gets popular enough, some people have probably put a spin on the term and said it’s based in reality or whatever but I don’t care. JK Rowling sucks. If I’m wrong and Rowling stole this idea from somewhere else like she stole the idea for Harry Potter himself, please correct me!
BIN LADEN DIED EARLY 2000S — The way in which Bin Laden was allegedly killed and disposed of doesn’t really satisfy a lot of people and I’m surprised it took this long to get one of the related theories. The ‘he died earlier’ theories vary from him having died of natural causes due to his illnesses to him having been killed early in the fighting. In any of the cases, the fiction of him still being alive is then orchestrated in order to keep a convenient supervillain around to justify military actions, budgets, etc. The ‘films’ he’d occasionally release are just considered to be using actors or something. There isn’t a lot of hard evidence but it’s also hard to completely dismiss if you’ve ever paid attention to the US government and military.
AUTOGANZFELD — A way of testing your ESP dating back a few decades. Now I see it sometimes also explained as a way of training/fostering these abilities. It mostly involves sensory-deprivation and trying to pick up on things being thought by a ‘sender’. People are constantly rigging ways to do this themselves or team up online to carry it out.
DISNEY FROZEN — I know this one looks close to the other one like it’s “DISNEY FROZEN DARE STONES” as one thing, but I am very sure that this is just a spacing issue and they’re separate items. Walt Disney died in the 60s and the ‘he froze himself/his head’ rumor is one of the most well-known urban legends in the world. The origin seems to be a tabloid reporting that one of its agents had snuck into the medical facility and seen the frozen body, but it’s hard to be exactly sure where and how the rumor started. It did blossom quickly though, repeated and speculated on so much that it hit the mainstream and never left. He was supposedly stored beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, if you’re interested.
DARE STONES — This refers to around 50 stones with messages scrawled on them, allegedly from members of the lost Roanoke colony. They’re mostly written diary-style, by a girl leaving messages for her father. They’re widely considered fakes or mostly fakes, as only 1 was initially found but then a whole bunch of differently-styled ones were brought forward in exchange for a reward later on. Still, some people think there’s something to them and that there may be more out there. The Roanoke thing doesn’t have the horsepower these days that it once did, though. Flashier newer mysteries have sort of elbowed it out.
LEVEL 8B GEOMETRY — If you trip balls hard enough, or maybe meditate right, you can see your entire consciousness(and perhaps all knowledge everywhere) represented visually as fractal-style geometry. If that makes no sense, don’t worry about it! I have not experienced anything like this and don’t plan to, but there’s no shortage of online trip reports out there.
FANTASMA COLORADO — This is a really really obscure cryptid but it rules. It’s a ghost camel! In Colorado! That’s uh, that’s basically it. Sometimes linked to local indigenous culture, not really many modern sightings. Ghost camel!
‘BLACK BIRD’ AT CHERNOBYL — This is a sort of cryptid/urban legend that seems to be wholly based on online storytelling. The ‘Black Bird’ is birdlike but may or may not also have some human features, depending on source. It always has the obligatory glowing red eyes, though. It was allegedly spotted hanging out around Chernobyl in the days leading up to the disaster there, but also has been seen since and ~spooky bad things~ happen to people who see it. Russian mothman.
KUBRICK DID MOON LANDING — Just a small slice of the ‘fake moon landing’ cake. If the moon footage was fake, it had to be shot and directed like a film would be, right? And who better than Stanley Kubrick?! Wouldn’t you pick him to direct your secret plot footage? They think Kubrick hid hints about it in his films, too. The evidence is uhhh not strong but it’s certainly one of the most enduring conspiracies around, even if sometimes kept afloat artificially.
That’s it for today! From McDonalds to Epstein is quite a range, huh? Kind of shows you how wide and wild this stuff can be. It’s easy to pigeonhole all conspiracists as one archetype but they’re more diverse than you think!
