What Lies Below, Day Three
Hello, my friends! I’m Rob, I’m going down a list of over 1,000 increasingly weird theories and events and people, and I’m probably on a lot of lists as a result! We’re still in the First Tier(out of Twenty), so there’s still a lot of very obvious and mainstream things popping up. You already know what most of it is, but I’m in this for the long haul! Still, we’re starting to dip into a couple more obscure things, and I assure you that the Tiers get real weird soon enough. As always: I avoid grisly details but some of these things can touch on sensitive topics. Feel free to reach out and yell at me if I get something wrong or you’re an alien, fae, vampire, or other supernatural being.
NIBIRU — Nibiru is a big celestial object, usually a planet(‘Planet X’) that is either out in space somewhere or in a specific orbit that precludes us from seeing it. There was a popular Cataclysm Doomsday theory suggesting we’d smash into it, though this isn’t as popular anymore because it hasn’t happened(yet). Nibiru appears in some Ancient Aliens theories, being on a very very very wide orbit that only brings it near Earth every many thousands of years — at which point its inhabitants come visit. NASA is in on covering it up, usually, for various reasons. Nibiru is one of those conspiracies that has endured long enough to transmogrify into a thing that can fit into just about anything else and mean whatever it needs to mean.
CICADA — Or ‘Cicada 3301’. This was the name of a person or group who would post puzzles online in ARG(Alternate Reality Game) format. These were based on 4chan but gained wide interest, and got much deeper and more complex than such things usually do. Cicada focused a lot on codebreaking and presented a veneer of being a Real Thing and not just a game — perhaps a means of recruiting particularly talented people to do some sort of secret work. While it doesn’t appear to have ever been officially ‘outed’ as an ARG, some internet sleuths have broken it down in detail and the general consensus is that it was just a game or passion project that just winded down— a search on youtube will fill you in. Someone will occasionally still suggest it’s all real, but it is more or less defunct these days.
ATHEISM — I don’t know what this is doing here? We all know what atheism is. I’m not aware of it being a conspiracy, aside from the occasional disjointed ‘atheism is a conspiracy by [Insert Villain] to drive people away from God’ rhetoric. Not that such rhetoric isn’t popular; most Qanons believe some variant of this. Next!
AURA-READING — Self-explanatory: being able to see a ‘aura’ around people and sometimes other living things, and being able to determine things based on the type and color of that aura. Sometimes I hear things about the CIA researching thing, but that seems to just be a confused take regarding their Remote Viewing project.
NOSTRADUMUS — A French ‘seer’ from the 16th century who has been credited with predicting virtually every major world event. Thanks to the poor translations of his original writings and their vague wording, you can make them fit almost anything if you squint and tilt your head. You don’t really hear about him once you scratch past the most surface-level conspiracy/paranormal communities.
ATLANTIS — The most famous of the ‘Lost Cities’, generally believed to currently be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean. Atlantis is usually in the Atlantic, but sometimes not. Sometimes it’s in the Bermuda Triangle and sometimes it’s near the Straits of Gibraltar. Sometimes it’s actually Antarctica. As far as what Atlantis was — the more boring ideas are that it was just a normal group of people and the legend is a result of millennia of retelling a disaster story. The more fun ideas are that it was an advanced society, sometimes being the place from which many human advances in technology first appeared(either by our own invention or given to us via Ancient Aliens). Atlantis either sank, or was destroyed, or blinked into another dimension, or is time-displaced, and so on. This is one of those that you already know and I can’t do credit with a paragraph here. Also it may have just been all made up by Plato; whoops!
ASTRAL PROJECTION — A technique by which you project an ‘astral body’ of yourself to another place, sometimes physical and sometimes in the ‘astral plane’ or beyond. Some use it as part of magical or religious practice, some believe it’s a way to access vast stores of knowledge like the Akashic Records, etc. But you already knew this and it isn’t a conspiracy! BORING! NEXT!
DYATLOV — The Dyatlov Pass Incident is a fairly well known ‘unsolved mystery’. In the late 50s, nine hikers in Russia disappeared and were eventually found to be dead. The mystery lies in some of the bodies having been found to have suffered blunt force trauma or be missing things like eyes and tongues. They were also spread out, with some being found in a creek and their tents being shredded as if the hikers had cut their way out. . Some had seemingly undressed along the way, too. It’s been officially declared the result of an avalanche that killed some and left the others roaming until they died of hypothermia. Needless to say, a lot of people don’t buy this. Most theorists believe a military experiment was responsible, but it’s wide-open. There are standing theories that some or all of the hikers were KGB agents, that a strange natural wind event drove them insane, that local indigenous people may have got to them, and occasionally someone says they fell prey of a Wendigo.
23 ENIGMA — The 23 Enigma in specific is an obscure thing to be so high on the list, but it’s part of a larger way of thinking that is incredibly common. It’s just the belief that the number 23 holds potency and has a way of turning up in important matters. Of course, most of this originates from Robert Anton Wilson and Discordian Texts so it may well just be a prank or purposeful nonsense. The whole ‘I see X number all the time, it’s a sign’ thing isn’t exactly exclusive to the number 23; I bet you have one person on social media who reminds you every single time it’s 11:11.
MISSING 411 — The title of a book series about people who’ve gone missing in North America. The rub is that the author, David Paulides, thinks there is a coverup at work and at least a fair number of the disappearances have some sort of sinister connection to one another. The books generally just list cases of people who went missing and give a brief description, then sometimes the author will editorialize a bit about it. Paulides doesn’t really ever give a specific unifying theory for everything, though, and so leaves it open to interpretation to his considerable audience. Paulides is also very big in the Bigfoot scene, for what it’s worth.
FLORIDIZATION — I double-checked this one to make sure there wasn’t some secondary meaning I’m unaware of, but came up short. This means, in any place I’ve seen it, the aging of people in a given area. Florida has a lot of older retirees, get it? Am I missing something? Have I been stumped already?
MOON LANDING FAKED — It’s obligatory to put this on the list but you don’t need me for it. We faked it — it was shot on a sound stage, Kubrik helped, etc. We faked it because we couldn’t do it or because we did but wanted to misrepresent what it’s like up there. The Moon Landing conspiracy has been around so long that it would need a whole book to deep-dive it all. It is usually baked into most other larger conspiracy theories, especially any kind of “flat earth” variant. You’re not here for these common ones. NEXT!
AREA 51 — You already know what AREA 51 is. A large Air Force base in Southern Nevada which is connected to the most famous UFO story of all time. Most people who believe an alien craft crashed in Roswell believe it, and any survivors or bodies, wound up at Area 51 to be studied. Most of that crowd think these things have been moved elsewhere by now, though. A big thing about the conspiracy theorist community is that they’ll spend a lot of time trying to “wake people up”, but on the rare occasion that it works, a large portion of the community will grimace and change the conspiracy or say it was all actually part of a plot or something. How else can you feel smarter than everyone?
ANYWAY, Area 51 is real and is known to be a site for a lot of testing for aircraft. Sightings of this only furthered to enhance the theory that they’re testing alien ships or, at the very least, technology adapted from alien ships. The government doesn’t just deny all of this, but literally didn’t even officially acknowledge Area 51 even EXISTS until 2013. Everything that goes on there is still super duper classified and the area is very well guarded. While it has lost a lot of pizazz since going so mainstream that no one takes it seriously, it’s still kind of a weird situation and we still don’t know a lot about it! Not long ago there was a strangely viral online “movement” gathering people to storm Area 51 because “they can’t stop us all”. Like, it started as a random Facebook page and absolutely blew up at an almost unnatural rate. And then it obviously fizzled into nothing and we all forgot about it. Kind of weird.
Also, I had somehow forgotten to even write an entry for this one. I was going back and filling out today’s entry and realized something was missing. This is literally the only item I’ve somehow skipped on the whole iceberg. I’m not saying it’s PROOF Area 51 has beams aimed at me, but it’s not NOT proof.
That’s Day Three in the books! Long way to go. I know some of these will be less flashy than others, but I think doing it bite-sized like this is the best way to go forward.
