What Lies Below, Day Thirty Seven
Welcome back! We’re working our way through the 1,100+ strange topics that make up the ‘Conspiracy Iceberg’ meme. Today has a pretty good mix, if not a bit silly at times. I see people online sometimes dismiss a lot of the iceberg as trolling, but I don’t think it’s intended that way. Some of the stuff can be a little goofy or less-serious, but even the duds are generally real topics that are weird(especially to people not into this stuff).
MARS IS ON EARTH — This is less exciting than you’d hoped and just based on what you probably expected: everything we ‘see’ on Mars is just shot somewhere on Earth. I’ve heard it’s all CGI, or that the landers and whatnot are real but kept in sealed off areas to carry out the hoax. Seems like an incredibly elaborate and expensive conspiracy to carry out for no conceivable purpose, but this kind of thing is always just chalked up to some vague plan that is going to reveal itself any day now. It’s not as big as “we’ve never been to the moon”, but runs in the same circles and the various videos and writeups cover all the same points.
LOST BOY LARRY — This one gets a lot of contemporary internet chatter because it’s a fun ‘unsolved mystery’, but it’s not too complicated. In the 70s, a CB radio call went out that appeared to be a young boy calling for help. He said he was with his father in a truck, which had gone off-road and flipped. The calls continued for days and were heard far and wide(which makes some people doubt the veracity of it) but was tracked to Albuquerque eventually. No one ever found the truck, no one ever came forward to say they made the call, the end. Most people believe it was a hoax but there are some believers, and it is POSSIBLE a truck got lost and wound up buried or something and never found.
‘ANIMA TELLURIS’ — The idea that the Earth has a soul and is to some extent a living entity. This is reproduced in all sorts of theories (and fiction stories) in a lot of different ways, but Anima Telluris was originated by a German mathematician/astrologer named Kepler in the 17th century. The Earth, as a living thing, then generated everything from precious stones to living creatures as sort of…expressions of itself. You sometimes see this theory writ large in terms of the universe as well.
THE ‘M.A.S.H.’ PROPHECIES — So this could be two things I GUESS but is probably just the one. The TV show M.A.S.H. allegedly has predicted events, kind of like The Simpsons. I haven’t heard this one very often, though, so it’s not what I expected to see here. People also play a ‘MASH’ fortune-telling game that involves drawing a spiral and picking various words and things; kind of like those folded-up finger things kids would do in school.
DOGBOY ARKANSAS — The story goes that the Bettis family moved into the old town of Quitman Arkansas in the 50s, and soon had a notoriously ill-tempered son. The son, Gerald, didn’t get along well with other kids, acted out a lot, and allegedly killed neighborhood cats and dogs(hence his nickname). He was a big fellow when grown, and intimidated townspeople while allegedly abusing his parents(or even killing, depending on who you ask). He wound up in jail and died in his thirties; but that’s not the end of the story! The Bettis home is said to be haunted, with reports of every sort of spooky phenomenon commonly associated with that thing. One of those ‘official paranormal investigation’ teams checked it out and “confirmed” some of this, but take that with a grain of salt. These hauntings continue on to current day, though nothing gruesome has happened.
‘BROWN NOTE’ — Come on, man. Tier Seven? Alright, fine. Everyone knows this one because of South Park though, right? Well, if you don’t: the brown note is a hypothetical low frequency that if played ‘loud’ enough, could make people lose bowel control. You wouldn’t be able to hear the ‘brown note’, but your body would feel it. I think they even did this one on Mythbusters.
ROUTE 666 MAD TRUCKER — There is a real Route 666 in the US, and you can probably guess how many urban legends revolve around it. When you have something like a mostly empty highway through a desert and you name it something like that, it’s going to attract enough weird stuff that it doesn’t matter if it started off haunted or not — it will be eventually. It did have a higher rate of fatal accidents, for what it’s worth, and of course stories running the paranormal gamut: ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, you name it.
The ‘Mad Trucker’ is just one of these tales, and I’m not sure why it specifically stuck out. It seems based mostly on just one account of some guy seeing a phantom 18-wheeler streaking down the middle of the highway one night, seemingly on fire and going extremely fast. Who knows! Weird stuff happens out on desert roads, man.
Oh and they renamed it ‘491’ because it having a cool name was making otherwise useless states like Utah and Arizona too cool, apparently. BOOOO! BOOOOOOOOOOOO!
SADDAM HUSSEIN REMOTE VIEWING PROJECT — In the early 2000s, there was a weird window in which we’d invaded Iraq but public opinion hadn’t gone entirely against it. Post-9/11 America was a really weird fucking place. My younger readers will, hopefully, never live through an entire country permanently losing its mind in the span of 6 hours or so. Anyway, it took a while to find Saddam Hussein and so a group of would-be pychics and the like took it upon themselves to help out. They organized a group remote-viewing with the specific intention of locating Saddam. This was conducted before Hussein was found and before the government knew where he was(or so they say). Allegedly, government officials attended this meeting. Some of the results of the viewings were reasonably accurate descriptions of where Hussein was found to be hiding, but you know how it goes when it comes to these predictions.
LIFETIDE — It seems this is just referring to a book put out in the late 70s by noted author and researched Lyall Watson. It was mostly just a biological explainer, but touched on certain things at the borders of science like ESP and the like. The Lifetide it references is just uhhh basically us, life. Not like the thing in final fantasy seven that people go to when they die.
WEAPONIZED SMALLPOX — This is a real thing. I don’t know if it’s more pointed at past usage(like when it was used in the 1700s by giving infected blankets to Native Americans) or the sort of always-at-the-periphery fear that it’ll be utilized as a bio-weapon in some future attack. Smallpox is “eradicated” and has been since the 1980s, but it still exists in about a zillion labs and who knows where else. Vaccinations for it really aren’t a thing anymore, which could present a real problem! Anyway yes Smallpox has been weaponized in the past as part of a genocidal campaign against indigenous americans and everything on the North American continent is built on atrocities. Next!
BLOBSQUATCHERY — ‘Blobsquatch’ is sort of meta-commentary for the cryptid set. It started appearing in the early 2000s in various online nooks and crannies, and I think still exists in those remaining wholesome spaces where people are into UFOs and Cryptids but not the more politicized conspiracy stuff. A ‘blobsquatch’ is not quite a sasquatch, but is the non-distinct blurry image that might be a sasquatch or bigfoot or yeti or whatever else.
CASSIOPAEAN — Cassiopaea is a constellation that sometimes but, in my experience, not often appears in talks about various alien races that interact with Earth. There’s a book series called ‘Cassiopaea Experiment Transcripts’ about channeling and various other psychic and supernatural phenomenon. I haven’t read them so I can’t give you too much in detail. There’s an old forum about various conspiracy/UFO topics that uses this name and is home of the ‘Fellowship of Cosmic Mind’ that is uhhh…all over the place. Every supernatural or metaphysical or far-out topic is to some extent represented there, all woven together in that weird way these groups always manage to do. Surprisingly still active! I also found another site seemingly claiming that the author of the ‘Cassiopaea Experiments’ is a fraud and cult-leader and that the ‘Cassiopaeans’ are her cult. It all sort of loosely knits together but who even knows. I can tell you from experience that any A) online forum that lasts 10+ years, and B) group of people highly interested in a niche paranormal field will be so rife with internal drama and weird mini-grudges and unspoken hierarchy that there’s rarely any telling what the hell is going on.
STEPHEN KING KILLED LENNON — This all stems from one guy, Steve Lightfoot, who made it his life’s work to prove this theory. He got started in the 90s and drew attention with a van he’d covered in writing and newspaper articles related to this point. Conspiracy Cars are really good stuff; and this guy is proof that a good Conspiracy Car with a single focal message can get you noticed! Modern conspiracy cars tend to be too cluttered; too many messages at once. It’s the Qanon Effect: trying to be a big tent conspiracy that houses all other conspiracies. You have to be a laser pointer folks, not a floodlight.
ANYWAY, Steve Lightfoot was all-in on this. It’s very convoluted, suggesting Chapman(the man who confessed to the murder) was a government cover-up, that hidden codes are everywhere, that people like Nixon and Reagan were behind it, etc. Now, to be fair, so far Lightfoot is far from alone in this — a lot of people believed(and still believe) that outside forces played a role in clipping Lennon. But Lightfoot took the bold extra step of saying it was Stephen King(yes, THAT one) who pulled the trigger. Exactly why he was picked is, uh, kind of murky. But there you have it. Lightfoot is still going as far as I know, and his website is still up!
And there we have it! I like Tier Seven so far, it’s got some silly stuff and duds but most of it is definitely below the mainstream. See you tomorrow!
