The Watergate break-ins were a "conspiracy theory" for over a year before they turned out to be verified and resulted in Nixon's downfall. Until the mainstream press picked up the story anyone who was aware of the details was labled a whacko conspiracy nut.

Congress attempted to put to rest the conspiracy theories regarding the assasination of President Kennedy. The result of their very public investigation was that there actually WAS a conspiracy. They just never took the next step to try to find out who was involved. No 'official' investigation into who killed Kennedy has ever been done, but, according to the US Congress, it was indeed a conspiracy and the conclusions of the Warren Commission were wrong.

"National Security" has been used to conceal many things that are merely abuses of position, misuse of funds, or personal agenda political manuevering that would never be tolerated by the public if they knew the truth. The abuse of "Classified" status of documents has been argued for decades.

If you just allow the judicial and legislative branches of the government to be the check and balance system it was intended to be, overseeing the administrative branch, you'll find there is no lack of conspiracies to manipulate world events, murder innocent victims, traffic in drugs, incite wars and riots, etc. There are innumerable cases played out in the House, the Senate and the Courts. Until a case is resolved in one of these institutions, it is considered a "conspiracy theory."

Dilligence and curiosity should not open someone to ridicule. America is only a free country because there are people willing to challenge the abuses of power and hidden agendas that pollute the political process. It's called being a good citizen - not a whacko.

Who's to say that Watergate wasn't just a 'convenient' excuse to remove an idiot...and, if so, why was it necessarily 'authentic' when fake or real, the result would be the same?...

Conspiracy theories are cooked up by the impotent public in an attempt to undermine the Almighty Government's Powers, to show that they are 'in the loop'....'haha, guys, you didn't really get away with that one....we found you out...you aren't as all-powerful as you thought'.

Of course, the Govt could care less...while the neurotic are wetting themselves about 'reds under the bed' or whatever, they can get on with REAL subterfuge...

I believe there are crooks in the governement, I believe Nixon was indeed one, as there has been and will continue to be more crooks in the goverment. But to say that the Governement, that abstract entity that has no name other than that vague label "Governement", conspires to kill Presidents, have secret meetings with the little green guys, or make up a machavelic plan in order to fool the American public is a little too much.

Sometimes I think that when people are too well, they make up bad things to feel better. Maybe its human nature. Dunno. When I was a teenager, I had the best parents in the World. I could go out as late as I wanted, go wherever I wanted, they never checked on me, they trusted me. Now, what fun is that? I used to make up things about my parents to my friends, cause it's just what a teen is supposed to do: complain about the old folks.

My mom and sister thinks it was fake. I personally feel that would have to be allot of work to make something like that up. If they did then why? Just to beat the Russians?? Well as cold as the cold war was I do not think this is something that is made up. If they did.. well who does it hurt anyway?

I wonder...
Does time have any meaning? Time...It has no meaning.

The landings would be real, otherwise, they'd have to really be desperate only for attention to spend billions of dollars and getting nothing but a lot of people cheering.

I think if they think it's fake, then they might think the shuttle blew up in the atmoshpere just below the stratos.

I see...

In the 50's there was an incedent that has always made me wonder. In Michigan's U.P. an Air Force radar operator noticed an oddly behaving object on his screen. A jet was scrambled to check it out. The pilot described an odd silvery object. He said he was going to get closer to get a better look. On the operator's radar screen both objects merged on his screen. Shortly afterwards the object disappeared.

At first that is how base officials told the story. After this started to cause a stir the official story became that it was a private plane that had collided with the Air Force jet. The jet and dead pilot were recovered. No private plane, pilot or passengers were ever found or reported as missing.

But that was just a crack-pot story from a retired Air Force Col.

ET....phone home....

There's been hundreds of UFO incidents involving pilots, air traffic controlers, police, military, etc. There are about 400 extremely credible eyewitnesses (mostly military, NASA and FAA)asking Congress to hold hearings where they can testify under oath as to what they know or have seen. Why would it be hard to believe there is intelligent life in the universe besides us? The simple fact is we have an awful lot of incidents that need to be explained. http://www.disclosureproject.org/access.htm

I had a sighting of my own in 1966. I was in North Ontario on the Ottowa River with a couple friends. We watched a craft of some sort that was glowing bright white flying around the mountain ridge across the river. It would fly along the ridge like it was looking for something and then suddenly shoot over and up about two miles in about one second, and stop (!), then do the same thing again. We watched it do that for about twenty minutes and then it dropped down behind the mountains... I have no idea what it was but I don't know of any airfcraft that can instantly accelerate to a thousand MPH and then just stop on a dime.

The last few years there's been hundreds of sightings of huge (300 feet long) black triangular craft that "float" silently and can accelerate and stop like the little one I saw. These have been seen, filmed, photographed and documented by police departments all over the world. In Belgium about 300 people watched one of these, icluding the police and military. In Indiana several towns' police departments chased one around for hours. Wish I could see one of those, sounds pretty cool...

When I flew to Oz, we had to shutdown the windowsblinds. There must have been an UFO for it was an order by the crew...Now I think personally this plane had to bay at Stardock. Because suddenly the colours were changing in liquid2 and Luna and rainbowy effects just swooped through the corridors...TV's turned into laserguided object desktops and with a flick of the remote control you could customize the lasercolours too...I heard strange voices, almost whale like sounds telling me to eat the cheese from Luna and drink the juice from Liquid2...When I woke up I was back home in bed staring at the ceiling and 100% sure I was abducted. By the way Frogboy: "WE" went to the moon...

Little men in white coats alight from the black helicopters and whisk Lecrayon away...never to be seen again...

I have dreamt that too, but the people had green coats....

I am an alien sent to Earth to spy on you humans. What I see amuses me...

Interesting note... The whole UFO thing will be in the mainstream news next week. There's a guy known as "the Amazing Kreskin" that does a psychic show in Las Vegas. He's made a prediction that the world's largest and most visible UFO sighting in history will occur in the desert near Las Vegas in June. Tonight he modified his prediction to say it will happen next week, he's planning to announce the date and time (and location) at a press conference on Monday. The sighting will be covered live by the major news media so you'll be able to watch it on your TV's (if it's on TV it must be real eh?). Very interesting...

The "inside" rumors in the UFO community for the last couple years has been that 2002 will be the year of disclosure. This incident is interesting because it coincides with that insider info from the military and also because Kreskin has an amazing track record. He has made some very high profile accurate predictions which all were related to politics in some way. I think he has friends in the intelligence business that leak these upcoming events to him. I actually expect his prediction to come true, the only thing I wonder about is the source of the UFO's and the intention. I think it's happening outside Las Vegas because the craft that will be showing up are currently at area 51 right nearby.

Stay tuned... it should be interesting...

but you have a laserinstallation my dear DavidK...And with your skinning abilities...No wonder it is in area 51........

yikes.. i start the thread and then never come back.. sorry..

anyway, yeah it seems as far as the moon landing stuff that people are just really desperate to 'expose' something. they don't even understand the basics of photography or anything.

on the larger conspiracy front, i didn't realize, david, that the gov't had actually said the warren commission findings were wrong and there was actually a conspiracy.. did they say anything else? i mean, the warren commission findings will be released in what.. 10 years? i always kind of thought the reason they kept it all secret was because some secret service guy screwed up and missed finding oswald, or didn't catch him going into the building, and they just didn't want the american public to lynch the guy.

as far as aliens go, i don't know..
1- it would be almost statistically impossible for there -not- to be other intelligent life out there.
2- it's incredibly unlikely that any such life would happen to pick our little planet to visit.
3- however, there really are a lot of pretty credible sightings and stories that would seem unlikely to result from anything other than alien visitation.
so, who knows...

The recent discovery of oceans of water on Mars (currently frozen beneath the surface) brings up the very real possibility that there was not only life, but intelligent life on Mars in the distant past. We know that a catastrophic event stripped away the atmosphere and much of the surface of Mars (estimates are around 5 million years ago). We also have found many indications of life there like the photo with 'trees' and what seem to be foundations of structures showing intelligent design. Some of the latest imaging techniques point out differences in materials that aren't visible to optical cameras.

Ancient texts are full of references to visitors from elsewhere. Ancient Vedic books talk of aircraft and even nuclear war. Technology provided by the gods who were deeply involved in local events. A recent archeological find in India, in what is believed to be the scene of one the Vedic wars, revealed skeletons of people struck down suddenly while walking down a street which have a radioactivity that matches skeletons found at Hiroshima. They found large black globs of glass all over the place that were discovered to be pottery that had been melted. The accounts of the war talk of the air being incinerated and surviving soldiers leaping into rivers to wash the poison dust from their equipment and their bodies.

The Dogon tribe in Africa was a stoneage type culture that had a perfect and accurate understanding of the star system around Sirius, the Dog star they said was a binary star with three components which they described perfectly and depicted in primitive maps and drawings. Sirius B was not accurately described by western science until the 1950's and Sirius C (the third one) was only discovered in the last few years. How did they know?

We are given a very limited version of history which excludes as impossible many things for which there is compelling evidence. People tend to allow severe limitations (imposed by academics and religious doctrine) on the interpretation of historical data. The Egyptian Pyramid Texts is a great example, as are the Vedas, the Viramana, the small amount of surviving Olmec and Maya cultural beliefs and even much of the Torah and the Bible.

It's ridiculous to think that our scientific knowledge has achieved some omniscient state of perfection. Science should be about inquiry and be open to adjusting itself to discovery. Instead, any evidence that confounds our accepted conclusions, or that our models need to be changed, seems to be hidden away and supressed.

Is there intelligent life other than the humans on planet earth? Certainly. Have we been visited or maybe even manipulated somewhere in our past by an extraterrestial race? Probably. Are the conclusions of the Warren Commission false and an intentional cover-up of a greater conspiracy? Absolutely. [The Congressional hearing regarding the results of the Warren Commission decided there was a conspiracy but stopped short of any further investigation.]

It's certainly possible that mankind had evolved a technological culture in the past that could explain a lot of the strange referrences in ancient texts. The only thing that makes it seem unlikely that there was nothing more to it than that, is all the stories that specifically talk about visitors or gods that came here from the stars. And the Dogon's map showing our solar system as it would appear if viewed from the constellation of Orion. What would be the simpler explanation?

ok - the Amusing Kreskin has had his press conference and he's announced the date, time and place of the world's biggest UFO sighting! hehe - trust me... it's bound to happen...

Thursday, June 6th, 2002 — between 9:50pm - 12:00am PST (GMT-8)
The location: the best viewing spot will be just behind the Casino in Las Vegas that Kreskin does his show at yikes... what a coincidence...

don't miss it! CNN will have their cameras there...

Hey, that's my mom's birthday. Looks like my cousin from outer space is there to visit me.

I wonder though, if there is alien life out there observing us, would they ever make contact? Say I were an alien, hten I'd think again after picking up terrestial tv-signals...

Not that I completely agree with Dave, but people and certainly science are way too herdish for their own good. If someone says something that goes against the tide, it's instantly rejected _because_ it goes against the tide.

Simple example: my science teacher. "You can't go faster than light, because that would break the scientific model"...

Mmkay, replace "tide" with "flow" if that makes no sense.

It's not that long ago that people were burned at the stake for saying the world was not flat. Or that the earth orbited around the Sun...

Yeah, but we can't burn 'em anymore, so now we opt to ridicule them. Then again, the world (or should I say "the west") has only started to really evolve since the fifties/sixties.

Okay, enough sociology for today.

They say Einstein was an alien...no wonder he wasn't burnt (or is it burned?) Although he had an electric haircut,

Does anyone remember the Illuminati? (sic?) That was the best conspiracy theory I've ever heard. I still wonder about that one. I don't see why it wouldn't be possible for a small group of super industrialists, or whatever they are supposed to be, to be running things from behind the scenes.

Yeah, and there is also the infamous Trilateral Commission myth. But that's more like a corporate conspiracy thing...