Thanks to the mass sharing
allowed by social media sites, we’re currently living in the golden era of the
conspiracy theory. The truth may be out there, but there are millions of lies out there,
too - We’re sorry to burst your bubble, folks, but Michael Jackson, Elvis, and Tupac
are definitely dead, Wayfair Furniture isn’t involved in human trafficking, and we’d advise you
to leave any lizard people theories at the door. But that doesn’t mean every
conspiracy is false - In fact, some of the ones that turned out to
be true are often the craziest of all. First, we’ll open with a classic: MKUltra -
The CIA’s Secret Mind Control Plot. When LSD, a hallucinogenic chemical compound, became
a popular drug in the mid-20th century, hippies were using it to touch the face of
God at music festivals, and the CIA - Who, spoilers, will come up a lot in this
video - were trying to weaponize it. The concept of the CIA developing a secret
mind control program sounds like something you might hear being discussed extensively at
your local psyche ward, but believe it or not, this really did happen during the covert MKUltra
project. They tricked heroin addicts into taking LSD doses and recruited unsuspecting men at fake
brothels, followed by electroshock and hypnotism experiments. As far as we’re aware, no useful
results ever came out of this project - Despite the experiments destroying the lives of
many of their subjects. When a Freedom of Information Act request spilled the beans
on this project in 1977, it gave the American public yet another reason in an already
turbulent decade to distrust the government. But the US Government isn’t the only one who was
up to some crazy, conspiracy-inspiring science experiments. This may seem like a lowbrow joke,
but in the 1960s, the Canadian government funded the creation of a real-life Gaydar. Before
you all start snickering like high schoolers, you should know that despite seeming pretty silly
on the surface, this had horrible consequences for the lives of around 400 people. Frank Robert
Wake, a Professor at Canada’s Carleton University, designed the machine to measure pupil dilation
in response to images of a homosexual nature. This incredibly unscientific device
was then tested on a huge number of government employees, 400 of whom were
fired after testing positive for gay. The cruelest insult on top of all of this
financial injury? The real-life gaydar was internally nicknamed “The Fruit Machine”, a nod
towards a common homophobic phrase at the time. Stay classy, Canada. Let’s hop away from North America and over to
North Korea, one of the weirdest countries in the world. There are very few countries
that are actively friendly with the DPRK, but one country that has a particularly
strained relationship with them is Japan, so much so that there was a long-running
conspiracy theory of the North Korean government disappearing Japanese Citizens. And
as you’ve probably guessed from the title of this video, this conspiracy theory
turned out to be completely true. In 2002, the now-deceased former Supreme
Leader Kim Jong-il straight-up admitted that the country had kidnapped at least thirteen
Japanese citizens. To their credit, they did give five of them back after this. The location
of the other eight is still an open question. Okay, back to the United States now. Though
this conspiracy was performed against the US Government rather than by it: The assassination
of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth. Even our framing there suggests that
John Wilkes Booth was a lone-wolf triggerman, a deranged, racist, out-of-work actor willing to
bet his life to take down Honest Abe. Naturally, conspiracies popped up that Wilkes
Booth wasn’t working alone - And yep, that conspiracy turned out to be true.
Wilkes Booth worked with at least nine other Confederate co-conspirators, most of
whom were would-be assassins themselves. These include George Azterodt, who tried and
failed to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson; Lewis Powell, who tried and failed to
assassinate Secretary of State William Seward; and Mary Surratt, who would become
the first woman to ever be hanged by the new United States government.
Not exactly a successful bunch. From a deified American leader
to a deified Tibetan leader, you may have heard a number of conspiracy
theories about the Dalai Lama - the spiritual figurehead of Tibet. Given that the
Dalai Lama is opposed to Chinese expansion, many have accused the United States of funding
the Dalai Lama as a form of proxy opposition… And they’re right. Reports extrapolated from US
Intelligence accounts have shown that the CIA has given His Holiness a $180,000 yearly
stipend for at least several years since 1960 as part of a wider project to fund the
Tibetan Exile Movement during the Cold War. Let’s take a little break from sinister
dealings performed by governments and look at some of the shady things that private
companies have been up to. It’s generally accepted that sugar isn’t exactly great for
you, but if the sugar industry had their way, you wouldn’t know that. In 1967,
the Sugar Research Foundation, a lobbying organization funded by companies
that deal heavily in sugar products, oversaw a study that downplayed the links between sugar
consumption and cardiac diseases. But corporate sugar conspiracies like this aren’t a thing of
the distant past. The Coca-Cola company paid millions to commission a study muddying the link
between sugary sodas and obesity back in 2015. But all of that seems like small potatoes
compared to a small group of companies getting together and planning a fascist
takeover of the United States of America. It feels almost like the textbook premise
of a conspiracy thriller, but it actually occurred in 1933 with the Business Plot. Senator
Prescott Bush, grandfather of George W. Bush, teamed up with business leaders from
Chase Bank, Goodyear, Standard Oil, GM, and the Du Pont family with the goal of
funding a military coup to take down FDR and install a fascist dictatorship. The one flaw in
their evil plan was reaching out to Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead the military
part of the military coup, despite the fact he was a vocal FDR supporter. He blew the whistle
and smothered the plan before it ever took off. Despite being involved in a literally treasonous
conspiracy, none of the Business Plotters were ever punished. We can at least thank Smedley
Butler for nipping the fascist takeover plan in the bud, but the fact that the son and
grandson of Prescott Bush would become the Presidents of the country he tried to
overthrow really just feels like a sick joke. But somehow, a diabolical fascist takeover
is nowhere near the most horrifying and disgusting corporate conspiracy in this
video. A real contender for that would be the Bayer Pharmaceutical Company, and one
of their very sinister-sounding subsidiaries, Cutter Biological. In the 1980s,
Cutter Biological moved into the business of selling blood-clotting medicine
to hemophiliacs manufactured from the blood of non-hemophiliacs. But for the medicine
they were selling to Latin America and Asia, they didn’t properly screen their donors. The
result? Cutter Biological sold products that infected 20,000 patients with HIV, a travesty
that they then spent years trying to cover up. What could possibly be worse than infecting
20,000 hemophiliacs with HIV? Probably being complicit in a coverup that could spark the end
of the world. While climate change has become a hot-button topic recently, due to the fact that
we’re currently living through its effects, the people behind the ExxonMobil fuel company
knew about it as early as the 1970s due to climate research they funded at the time - Then
spent millions suppressing. Their lobbying has muddied the waters and delayed action on climate
change because it would affect their bottom line, putting millions, if not billions,
of lives at risk in the process. Now that we’ve exposed the shadowy
horrors of the corporate world, let’s return to crazy governmental conspiracies
for the rest of the video. And believe it or not, these are literally all conspiracies
that the United States government is responsible for. USA! USA! We’re number
one, baby! That includes being number one to hire ex-Nazi scientists right
after the conclusion of World War II. Operation Paperclip was created as an effort to
give the US a technological and scientific edge during the Cold War, even if it meant making a
deal with the devil. Though that’s not entirely accurate - It was more like taking a deal
with 1,500 devils, all of which were given full clemency, having their slates wiped clean and
new, with Nazi-free backstories written for them by the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency. These
included the diabolical Nazi scientists Wernher von Braun, Hubertus Strughold, and Arthur Rudolph.
Some truly monstrous people were able to get away with their crimes scot-free, but hey, at least we
got the V2 rocket and the moon landing out of it. Let’s not move away from evil science just yet,
either. One of the most infamous stories of unethical medical testing is the Tuskegee
Syphilis Experiment. It was a conspiracy between the US Public Health Service and the
Tuskegee Institute to turn around 400 Black men into unknowing guinea pigs for Syphilis studies,
all while lying to them that they were, in fact, being treated for their painful and debilitating
conditions. The study was kept under wraps for 40 years before the shameful exploitation of
these men was revealed for all to see. In 1974, there was a ten million dollar payout
to the surviving victims of the program, but nothing could ever give them back the
years wasted in unnecessary suffering. But even death can’t necessarily save you
from being involved in a horrifying scientific conspiracy. As a general rule, if a government
project has a strangely innocent-sounding name, it’s probably trying to hide the fact that
it’s enough to give you nightmares. This was definitely the case with Project SUNSHINE,
a 1950s study on the effects of radiation on human bodies. It goes without saying that
this is extremely important research, but it doesn’t mean that it was conducted ethically.
In order to have a varied collection of data, the scientists involved in this project had
their personnel steal parts of corpses like Victorian graverobbers - including
those of children and even infants. This would be macabre but ultimately ethical
if the families had consented to donate their relatives’ bodies to science, but
when these tests were performed, the families had no idea. Burke and Hare
would be proud that their legacy lives on. Racially-motivated testing and graverobbing
are one kind of horrible, but indiscriminately releasing a bioweapon on an entire area is
another. If you enjoy spending time near large bodies of water, the name “Operation
Seaspray” might evoke pleasant and relaxing vibes. Nothing at all like the US Navy releasing
two different types of dangerous and infectious bacteria from a boat on the San Francisco Bay
in 1950, infecting eleven different people with aggressive urinary tract infections that killed
one of them. Why? Because they wanted to know how the city’s population would react to the
release of that kind of pathogen. The details were all kept under wraps, until being revealed
to the world almost three decades later in 1977. But the US Government wasn’t quite done
playing God just yet. During the Vietnam War, the CIA engaged in a secret project called
Operation Sober Popeye. This was a plot to control the very weather in Vietnam, and use
it as a weapon in the war against the Viet Cong. For years, the CIA attempted to seed
rain clouds in Vietnam that would extend the country’s natural monsoon season, bogging
down their forest-dwelling commando enemies. Thankfully, they didn’t fully succeed,
and in 1978, military applications of weather-manipulating technology was
classified as a War Crime. The CIA, at least theoretically, would be forced to take
their combat weather aspirations off the table. How about another CIA weapon that sounded like an insane conspiracy theory before being
revealed to be terrifyingly real? Every year, 805,000 Americans suffer from heart
attacks - Many of them fatal. It’s a terrible consequence of the cardiac illness epidemic in
the country… But could it also be the result of elite CIA assassins taking out targets?
And how would a CIA assassin induce a heart attack without a trace? A specially designed
Heart Attack Gun, of course! One that fires a frozen dart carrying deadly blowfish
poison, which then melts after transfer, inducing a heart attack and leaving a small, red
dot on the body as the only evidence of foul play. While this may seem like a bizarre fantasy
cooked up by someone who’d watched a few too many James Bond movies, Senator Frank Church
revealed the very real Heart Attack Pistol during a public hearing in congress about
some of the seedier activities of the CIA. So let’s give the CIA a bit of a break -
Before the Infographics Show HQ undergoes a mysterious series of simultaneous
heart attacks - and look at the shady, conspiratorial antics of the US’
domestic intelligence agency: The FBI. There are plenty of conspiracy theories about
celebrities - Ironically, they normally consist of theories that a dead celebrity is actually
alive, like Tupac, or that a living celebrity is actually dead, like Paul McCartney - but
we’re interested in a different Beatle today: The band’s frontman, John Lennon. It was theorized
for years that the FBI had it in for Lennon, and those theories were actually completely
correct. The FBI didn’t take kindly to Lennon’s Anti-War Songs, so rather than giving peace a
chance, they decided to take a peak at Lennon’s dirty laundry in hopes of finding something
juicy as a basis to blackmail or even deport him. But Lennon is hardly the only celebrity
who’s had the FBI on their back. Singer Aretha Franklin was frequently stalked and
hassled by the FBI for her leftist political stances. The Bureau kept background check
files on a shocking number of famous people, including Steve Jobs, Whitney Houston,
Helen Keller, Marilyn Monroe, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, Rock Hudson, Truman Capote,
and even sitcom superstar Lucille Ball. But their stalking of celebrities is
nothing compared to how they destroyed American activist groups under J.
Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO plan, where they engaged in everything from blackmail
to gaslighting to even straight-up assassination, taking on everything from Unions to hippy peace
groups to the Black Panther movement. By the time COINTELPRO was through, activism in the
United States was a shadow of its former self. Okay, we have one more CIA story for you, because
those guys create conspiracies like Willy Wonka makes Chocolate. Anyone who watches a lot of
news might start to get the sense there’s some spin going on - That the seemingly impartial
reporting of information might actually be a Trojan Horse for an agenda. While these
days, that agenda comes from the various corporations that own all major news stations,
for several decades in the mid-20th century, it was coming from the CIA, courtesy of an
initiative known as Operation Mockingbird. Frank Wisner, head of the CIA’s Office of
Special Projects, spearheaded a far-reaching media influence campaign that gave him control
of key figures from The New York Times, CBS, and members of the Washington Press Corps. At
the height of this program, 3000 CIA employees were tasked with maintaining Wisner’s complex
propaganda machine, as they spied on journalists who worked with whistleblowers and paid other
journalists to disseminate false information that served the CIA’s narrative. It was a conspiracy
theorist’s dream and nightmare come true. Now check out “What Actually ARE the
Illuminati?” Or check out this video instead!
