New book says USSR was behind Roswell UFO

Is truth stranger than conspiracy-theory fiction? A new book on Area 51 that's already generating a ton of buzz says there was no alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Instead, Stalin did it--maybe.

According to Annie Jacobsen, the reporter who authored "Area 51," the spaceship was actually a Soviet spy plane that came down during a storm. Jacobsen claims it was filled with bizarre, genetically engineered child-sized pilots. Then-Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was hoping, Jacobsen alleges, that the new cause widespread panic in the U.S.

The story gets even stranger: The leader of the USSR had apparently been inspired by the 1938 radio adaptation radio broadcast of the HG Wells story "War of the Worlds," produced by Orson Welles. The broadcast triggered panic in some listeners who tuned in and mistook it for a real-life alien invasion. (Though later students of the episode claim that the media of Welles' day vastly exaggerated the scale of public alarm over the broadcast.)

And those ET-looking aviators? They were scientific experiments created by the "Angel of Death," Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, for the USSR after the war. The flight was piloted remotely, according to accounts in the book, and was filled with a crew of "alien-like children."

According to Jacobsen's source, a retired engineer who was put on the project in 1978, the look of the human experiments could explain the alien conspiracy theories: "They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes."

Is any of this true? There's no way to prove it. Documents surrounding the Roswell incident are still classified--as is virtually all information related to the mystery spot.

Still, lack of proof hasn't exactly stopped the book from sparking speculation on the media circuit and on the Web. In the last day, Yahoo! searches skyrocketed 3,000 percent for "area 51 book." And the tome is penned not by a crackpot conspirator, but a respected journalist.

Even the New York Times gives her credence, writing in its review: "Although this connect-the-dots UFO thesis is only a hasty-sounding addendum to an otherwise straightforward investigative book about aviation and military history, it makes an indelible impression. 'Area 51' is liable to become best known for sci-fi provocation."

But sci-fi provocation may be all the book generates. After all, without the government coming out and saying what happened back in 1947, even if there was no conspiracy, the stories of the "Roswell Incident" will remain just that.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot/20110518/od_yblog_upshot/new-book-says-ussr-behind-roswell-ufo

Kaewong Boy: This is the funniest so far. "Genetically engineered child-sized pilots & they were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes." I mean, come on.... who is she kidding. And by the way, if there is really nothing to hide over the what happened at Roswell then why do they keep the documents as classified until now, why keep it a secret in the first place.

What's 96 Percent of the Universe Made Of? Astronomers Don't Know

NEW YORK — All the stars, planets and galaxies that can be seen today make up just 4 percent of the universe. The other 96 percent is made of stuff astronomers can't see, detect or even comprehend.

These mysterious substances are called dark energy and dark matter. Astronomers infer their existence based on their gravitational influence on what little bits of the universe can be seen, but dark matter and energy themselves continue to elude all detection.

"The overwhelming majority of the universe is: who knows?" explains science writer Richard Panek, who spoke about these oddities of our universe on Monday (May 9) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) here in Manhattan. "It's unknown for now, and possibly forever."

In Panek's new book, "The 4 Percent Universe" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), Panek recounts the story of how dark matter and dark energy were discovered. It's a history filled with mind-boggling scientific surprises and fierce competition between the researchers racing to find answers. [Strangest Things in Space]

Dark Matter

Some of the first inklings astronomers had that there might be more mass in the universe than just the stuff we can see came in the 1960s and 1970s. Vera Rubin, a young astronomer at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, observed the speeds of stars at various locations in galaxies.

Simple Newtonian physics predicted that stars on the outskirts of a galaxy would orbit more slowly than stars at the center. Yet Rubin's observations found no drop-off at all in the stars' velocities further out in a galaxy. Instead, she found that all stars in a galaxy seem to circle the center at roughly the same speed.

"It means that galaxies should be flying apart, should be completely unstable," Panek said. "Something's missing here."

But research by other astronomers confirmed the odd finding. Ultimately, based on observations and computer models, scientists concluded that there must be much more matter in galaxies than what's obvious to us. If the stars and gas that we can see inside galaxies are only a small portion of their total mass, then the velocities make sense.

Astronomers nicknamed this unseen mass dark matter.

Where is it?

Yet, in the nearly 40 years that followed, researchers still haven't been able to figure out what dark matter is made of.

A popular hypothesis is that dark matter is formed by exotic particles that don't interact with regular matter, or even light, and so are invisible. Yet their mass exerts a gravitational pull, just like normal matter, which is why they affect the velocities of stars and other phenomena in the universe. [Video: Dark Matter in 3D]

However, try as hard as they might, scientists have yet to detect any of these particles, even with tests designed specifically to target their predicted properties.

"I think on the dark matter side there is some discouragement among the people who are kind of mid-career," Panek said. "They went into this field thinking, 'OK, we're going to solve this problem and then we'll build from there.' But 15, 20 years later, they're saying, 'I've invested my career in this and I don’t know if I'm going to find anything in my lifetime.'"

Still, many hold out hope that we're getting close and that experiments such as the newly built Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator in Geneva may finally solve the puzzle.

Dark Energy

Dark energy is possibly even more baffling than dark matter. It's a relatively more recent discovery, and it's one that scientists have even less of a chance of understanding anytime soon.

It all started in the mid-1990s, when two teams of researchers were trying to figure out how fast the universe was expanding, in order to predict whether it would keep spreading out forever, or if it would eventually crumple back in on itself in a "Big Crunch."

To do this, scientists used special tricks to determine the distances of many exploded stars, called supernovas, throughout the universe. They then measured their velocities to determine how fast they were moving away from us.

When we view very distant stars, we are viewing an earlier time in the history of the universe, because those stars' light has taken millions and billions of light-years to travel to us. Thus, looking at the speeds of stars at various distances tells us how fast the universe was expanding at various points in its lifetime.

Astronomers predicted two possibilities: either the universe has been expanding at roughly the same rate throughout time, or that the universe has been slowing in its expansion as it gets older.

Shockingly, the researchers observed neither possibility. Instead, the universe appeared to be accelerating in its expansion.

That fact could not be explained based on what we knew of the universe at that time. All the gravity of all the mass in the cosmos should have been pulling the universe back inward, just as gravity pulls a ball back down to Earth after it's been thrown into the air.

"There's some other force out there or something on a cosmic scale that is counteracting the force of gravity," Panek explained. "People didn't believe this at first because it's such a weird result."

Fierce Competition

Scientists named this mysterious force dark energy. Though no one has a good idea of what dark energy is, or why it exists, it is the force that appears to be counteracting gravity and causing the universe to accelerate in its expansion.

The lack of a good explanation for dark energy hasn't seemed to dampen scientists' enthusiasm for it.

"What I hear again and again is how excited people are to be working in this field right now, when this revolution is going on," Panek told SPACE.com. "The problems are so great and profound, they're actually rather thrilled with it."

Overall, dark energy is thought to contribute 73 percent of all the mass and energy in the universe. Another 23 percent is dark matter, which leaves only 4 percent of the universe composed of regular matter, such as stars, planets and people.

This bizarre, but apparently true, conclusion was reached at about the same time by the two groups working to measure the expansion of the universe. The competition between the groups became very contentious, Panek said, and they grew to dislike each other quite a lot.

Ultimately, though, members of both teams should reap the rewards of finding one of the biggest surprises in the history of science.

"I think that it's kind of assumed the dark energy will win the discoverers the Nobel," Panek said. "There certainly is that assumption that it's just a matter of years."

Read more: http://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percent-universe-panek.html

Kaewong Boy: Want to learn more about 'Dark Energy'? Ask Darth Vader.

How Passenger Jet Survived Direct Lightning Strike

When an Airbus 380 from Dubai came in for landing at Heathrow Airport on a recent stormy night in London, it was struck by a giant bolt of lightning. The event was caught on camera, giving the world a rare glimpse of what's actually a common occurrence.

The average commercial airliner gets struck by lightning a little more than once a year. By analyzing the few videos that exist of such incidents — it's not often that people happen to record airplanes right at the moment they are struck — atmospheric scientists have figured out how and why it happens.

According to Vlad Mazur, a leading lightning expert with the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA), the majority of lightning strikes to planes are actually triggered by the planes themselves. The metal bodies of the planes intensify the electric field of storm clouds as the aircraft pass through them; this can sometimes lead to an electrical breakdown.

Artificial Trigger

"In the video, this is without a doubt a triggered flash," Mazur told Life's Little Mysteries. "You can see it's a dark sky, so you have rain and other evidence of a recent thunderstorm. Natural lightning had most likely ended already, but in decaying storms you have a very high electric field. It's enough to support the development of lightning, but there is no natural mechanism for initiating lightning discharge. When an airplane comes in, it acts as an artificial trigger."

The metallic (mostly aluminum) body of the plane acts as a conductor, he said. Amid the electric field of the storm cloud, positive charge builds up on one side of the conductor and negative charge on the other side. "The charge accumulates at places where the curvature [of the plane] is very sharp, like the nose and the tips of the tail and wings," Mazur explained. "These charged extremities intensify the ambient electric field. Then you have a leader (a spark), which initiates the development of a plasma channel." Voila: lightning.

According to Bill Rison, an electrical engineer and lightning physicist at New Mexico Tech, two plasma channels, which are the paths electric charge moves along during a lightning strike, can clearly be seen in the video traveling out from opposite points on the airplane.

"A negative leader leaves one tip and a positive leader leaves a different tip, usually at opposing ends of the plane. In the [video] you can see two channels, one from the nose of the plane going upward, and the other from the tail of the plane going downward. I expect that the upward leader from the nose is positive (going up into the negative charge in the cloud), and the downward leader from the tail is negative," Rison said.

Most often, planes weather lightning just fine. Electricity passes around it, not through. Of the 140,000 aviation accidents on record in the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) database, only 24 were lightning-related. Most of those involved small private planes or helicopters, and only five incidents involved fatalities. By far the worst plane crash ever caused by lightning happened in 1963,when a strike ignited the fuel tank of a plane over Elkton, Md. Though passengers were shielded from the electricity in the strike, the fuel tank explosion forced the plane to crash, killing all 81 passengers and crew members.

Smooth Curves

State-of-the-art engineering like that of the Airbus 380 prevents such disasters today. How do the planes handle a 30-million volt bolt of electricity?

The fuselage of the plane shown in the video, like that of most planes, is made mostly of aluminum. When lightning strikes the wingtip, nose or tail of a plane, electricity courses over its smooth aluminum shell without building up on any edges or penetrating inside. "In this case it sweeps above the top of the fuselage," Mazur said.

Furthermore, fuel tanks are tested to ensure they can withstand a lightning strike without producing dangerous sparks, and all on-board electronics and navigation equipment are grounded and protected from electrical surges. [How Are Plane Electronics Grounded?]

However, all that engineering doesn't mean pilots are nonchalant about flying into thunderstorms: NTSB reports are littered with accidents caused by severe turbulence, icy conditions and nasty crosswinds. The lightning strike didn't endanger passengers in this Airbus, but they're lucky to have landed safely, nonetheless.

Read more: http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/video-passenger-jet-plane-survived-direct-lightning-strike-1676/

Kaewong Boy: Maybe one day we will be able to  harvest the lightning energy from the air.

Report of Bin Laden’s Death Spurs Questions From Conspiracy Theorists

While much of America celebrated the dramatic killing of Osama bin Laden, the Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists still had questions. For them and a growing number of skeptics, the plot only thickened.

Could the public trust bin Laden’s DNA samples? Where was bin Laden’s body? Why was the most wanted mujaheddin on Earth buried in an undisclosed location in the northern Arabian Sea? Why was the news announced mere weeks after President Obama’s campaign kickoff and just days after his birth certificate was released? Why so late on a Sunday night?

Within minutes of the news of bin Laden’s funeral at sea, Facebook, Twitter and e-mail lighted up with conspiracy theories from around the globe, asking questions, pointing out discrepancies, motives, counter-motives, coverups and counter-coverups, comparing photos and videos, voice recordings and FBI most-wanted pinup posters.

“This has not put a single of the 9/11 questions to bed,” said Steven Jones, a retired Brigham Young University physics professor and contributor to the 9/11 Truth Movement. Jones, along with other members of the movement, a loose coalition of people who distrust Washington’s version of the attacks, say the collapse of the twin towers is best explained as controlled demolition.

“As a scientist, I try to look at the evidence I can get,” Jones said.

It started with the “9/11 truthers,” who, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, wondered why 110-story towers crashed and military jets failed to intercept even one airliner. They formed organizations. They held rallies. They filed many Freedom of Information Act requests.

They wrote books and studied the physics of the towers crumbling.

“I don’t know how you can have closure, when there are hundreds of contradictions to the stories that you were told. The story doesn’t end here because we are told bin Laden is dead,” said Mike Berger, who works with 911Truth.org, an organization founded to examine facts around the attack. “We are living in an endless war of trillions of dollars being spent without any responsibility.’’

Alex Jones, a radio personality out of Austin, who gives voice to the 9/11 Truth Movement and runs the Web site Infowars.com, sent out a Web headline that screamed, “Red Alert. Inside Sources: Bin Laden Corpse Has Been on Ice for Nearly a Decade.”

The “king of conspiracy,” as he is known by the media, pointed out discrepancies that went instantly viral. He lists FBI officials and counterintelligence leaders from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan who have said for years that bin Laden was dead. Former Council on Foreign Relations member Steve R. Pieczenik even told Jones on the air in 2002 that bin Laden had been dead for months.

“Obama just relaunched his election bid, and nabbing bin Laden is the main kickoff campaign rally. Things aren’t going well. So they are bringing back an old staple. They need a hero. It’s the Orwellian archtypical bearded scary bad guy who is going to get us, so don’t worry, the government got the bad guy,’’ said Jones in a telephone interview after his syndicated self-titled afternoon radio show. “This isn’t Elvis, man. The government lied to us about WMDs.”

But Elvis didn’t die during the Facebook era, when Web pages such as “Osama bin Laden NOT DEAD” go up instantly. “There’s something fishy in the waters where they supposedly dropped him. A picture of him dead wouldn’t have hurt,” reads an entry by one contributor.

“They saved Che Guevara’s fingertips to prove it was him,” said Ted Goertzel, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University at Camden, N.J., who has written extensively on psychology and terrorism. “But Muslim tradition says you bury the body right away. The issue is, our society goes through a traumatic event of 9/11, and this comes 10 years later, so it’s not timed very well for our national mourning or anger. But the conspiracy reaction is a way of thinking that’s much more common today, and people are accustomed to it because of the Internet. There’s no screening process. People may also be going into an automatic response.”

At different moments in American history, such as after the deaths of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy, the country becomes more prone to conspiracy theories because there’s so much hurt and anger, Goertzel said.

Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, who became a symbol of the opposition to the war, went on her Facebook page today to broadcast her theory.

“I am sorry, but if you believe the newest death of OBL, you’re stupid,” Sheehan writes. “Just think to yourself — they paraded Saddam’s dead sons around to prove they were dead — why do you suppose they hastily buried this version of OBL at sea? This lying, murderous Empire can only exist with your brainwashed consent — just put your flags away and THINK!”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/report-of-bin-ladens-death-spurs-questions-from-conspiracy-theorists

Kaewong Boy: Osama bin Laden not dead.

Top 10 Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy. Just saying the word in conversation can make people politely edge away, looking for someone who won’t corner them with wild theories about how Elvis, John F. Kennedy, and Bigfoot are cryogenically frozen in an underground bunker.

Yet conspiracies do exist. In the corporate world, major companies we buy products from everyday have been found guilty of conspiring to fix prices and reduce competition. Just about any planned criminal act committed by more than one person could be considered a conspiracy, from simple murder-for-hire to the Watergate break-in.

Many conspiracy theorists go much further, though, and see a hidden hand behind the world’s major events. While some of the theories have a grain of truth to them, conspiracy theories are impossible to disprove, because the hardcore believers will find some way to rationalize away evidence that contradicts their beliefs. Eyewitnesses who dispute their conclusions are mistaken—or part of the conspiracy.

At least that's what they want you to think ...

The 9/11 Conspiracies

The evidence is overwhelming that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were indeed the result of a conspiracy. There's no doubt about it: A close (or even cursory) look at the evidence makes it clear that it was carefully planned and executed by conspirators. The question, of course, is who those conspirators were. Osama bin Laden and the crew of (mostly Saudi) hijackers were part of the conspiracy, but what about President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney? Did top Bush advisors, including Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, either collaborate with bin Laden, or intentionally allow the attacks to happen? Put another way, was it an inside job? Conspiracy theorists believe so, and point to a catalog of supposed inconsistencies in the "official version" of the attacks. Many of the technical conspiracy claims were debunked by Popular Mechanics magazine in March 2005, while other claims are refuted by simple logic: If a hijacked airplane did not crash into the Pentagon, as is often claimed, then where is Flight 77 and its passengers? Are they with the Roswell aliens at Hangar 18? In many conspiracy theories, bureaucratic incompetence is often mistaken for conspiracy. Our government is so efficient, knowledgeable, and capable—so the reasoning goes—that it could not possibly have botched the job so badly in detecting the plot ahead of time or responding to the attacks. I find that hard to believe.

Princess Diana's Murder

Within hours of Princess Diana's death on Aug. 31, 1997, in a Paris highway tunnel, conspiracy theories swirled. As was the case with the death of John F. Kennedy, the idea that such a beloved and high-profile figure could be killed so suddenly was a shock. This was especially true of Princess Diana; royalty die of old age, political intrigue, or eating too much rich food; they don't get killed by a common drunk driver. Unlike many conspiracy theories, though, this one had a billionaire promoting it: Mohamed Al-Fayed, the father of Dodi Al-Fayed, who was killed along with Diana. Al-Fayed claims that the accident was in fact an assassination by British intelligence agencies, at the request of the Royal Family. Al-Fayed's claims were examined and dismissed as baseless by a 2006 inquiry; the following year, at Diana's inquest, the coroner stated that "The conspiracy theory advanced by Mohamed Al Fayed has been minutely examined and shown to be without any substance." On April 7 of this year, the coroner's jury concluded that Diana and Al-Fayed were unlawfully killed due to negligence by their drunken chauffer and pursuing paparazzi.

 Subliminal Advertising

Ever been watching a movie and suddenly get the munchies? Or sitting on your sofa watching TV and suddenly get the irresistible urge to buy a new car? If so, you may be the victim of a subliminal advertising conspiracy! Proponents include Wilson Bryan Key (author of "Subliminal Seduction") and Vance Packard (author of "The Hidden Persuaders"), both of whom claimed that subliminal (subconscious) messages in advertising were rampant and damaging. Though the books caused a public outcry and led to FCC hearings, much of both books have since been discredited, and several key "studies" of the effects of subliminal advertising were revealed to have been faked. In the 1980s, concern over subliminal messages spread to bands such as Styx and Judas Priest, with the latter band even being sued in 1990 for allegedly causing a teen's suicide with subliminal messages (the case was dismissed). Subliminal mental processing does exist, and can be tested. But just because a person perceives something (a message or advertisement, for example) subconsciously means very little by itself. There is no inherent benefit of subliminal advertising over regular advertising, any more than there would be in seeing a flash of a commercial instead of the full twenty seconds. Getting a person to see something for a split-second is easy; filmmakers do it all the time (watch the last few frames in Hitchcock's classic "Psycho"). Getting a person to buy or do something based on that split-second is another matter entirely. (The conspiracy was parodied in the 1980s television show Max Headroom, in which viewers were exploding after seeing subliminal messages called "blipverts.")

The Moon Landing Hoax

In the 1978 film Capricorn One, American astronauts and NASA faked a Mars landing. Though a mediocre film, it was an interesting idea, and one that would endure for decades. In 2001, Fox television aired the program "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?," which rehashed many discredited "discrepancies" between the official version of the moon landing and photographs of the landing. (Curiously, they never explain why NASA would distribute photographs that would "prove" that they had faked the moon landing.) Web sites such as BadAstronomy.com have pages and pages of point-by-point, detailed refutations of the Fox claims. Of course, even if there was some credible evidence showing that the 1969 Apollo moon landing was a hoax, conspiracy theorists must also account for later moon missions, involving a dozen astronauts. And there's the issue of the hundreds of pounds of moon rocks that have been studied around the world and verified as of extraterrestrial origin… how did NASA get the rocks if not during a moon landing? Many astronauts have been offended by the implication that they faked their accomplishments. In fact in 2002, when conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel confronted Buzz Aldrin and called him a "coward and a liar" for faking the moon landings, the 72-year-old punched Sibrel in the jaw.

Paul McCartney's Death

According to many stories and conspiracy theories that circulated in the late 1960s, Beatles guitarist Paul McCartney died in 1966. The remaining members of the Beatles—along with their manager and others—conspired to keep McCartney's death a secret, going so far as to hire a look-alike and sound-alike to take his place in the band. Well, kind of: In a case of seriously twisted logic (even by conspiracy theory standards) the conspirators in this case took great pains to keep the press and public from finding out about McCartney's demise—yet they also wanted fans to know about it, and placed clever clues in album covers and music giving details about McCartney's death. For example, on the cover of the Abbey Road album, all four Beatles are photographed striding across a zebra crossing, but only McCartney is barefoot, and out of step with the other three. This must mean something, right? Despite public denials by the band, fans couldn't just let it be, and came together to look for more clues.

John F. Kennedy’s Assassination

John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963 in a Dallas motorcade. Who killed Kennedy? Most (though not all) conspiracy theorists acknowledge that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy from a book depository. Beyond this fact lies a vast area of conspiracy theory that has spawned endless speculation and hundreds of books, articles, and films. Was there a second assassin, perhaps one at a nearby "grassy knoll"? And if Oswald did act alone, who gave him the orders? Activists against Fidel Castro? Organized crime bosses? A jealous husband upset with Kennedy's philandering? Though the Warren Commission report concluded that Oswald acted alone, a 1979 report by The House Select Committee on Assassinations suggested that there was in fact a conspiracy, and likely more than one shooter. In such a complex and sensational case, the conspiracy theories will live on.

The Roswell Crash Cover-Up

There is one fact that almost all skeptics and believers agree on: Something crashed on a remote ranch outside of Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The government at first claimed it was some sort of saucer, then retracted the statement and claimed it was really a weather balloon. Yet the best evidence suggests that it was neither a flying saucer nor a weather balloon, but instead a high-altitude, top-secret military balloon dubbed Project Mogul. As it turns out, descriptions of the wreckage first reported by the original eyewitnesses very closely match photos of the Project Mogul balloons, down to the silvery finish and strange symbols on its side. The stories about crashed alien bodies did not surface until decades later and in fact no one considered the Roswell crash as anything extraterrestrial or unusual until thirty years later, when a book on the topic was published. There was indeed a cover-up, but it did not hide a crashed saucer, instead it hid a Cold War-era spying program.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

"The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is a hoaxed book that purported to reveal a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination. It first appeared in Russia in 1905, and described how Christians' morality, finances, and health would be targeted by a small group of powerful Jews. The idea that there is a Jewish conspiracy is nothing new, of course, and has been repeated by many prominent people including Henry Ford and Mel Gibson. In 1920, Henry Ford paid to have half a million copies of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" published, and in the 1930s, the book was used by the Nazis as justification for its genocide against Jews (in fact, Adolph Hitler referred to the "Protocols" in his book "Mein Kampf"). Though the book has been completely discredited as a hoax and forgery, it is still in print and remains widely circulated around the world.

Satanic Cults

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, a rash of child abuse cases horrified America. Children accused adults of ritual rapes, torture, and abuse, and the news media reported the sensational stories. Often the accusations included charges of Satanism. The pinnacle was Geraldo Rivera's infamous NBC special "Devil Worship: Exposing Satan's Underground," which aired on Oct. 28, 1988. Rivera relied on self-proclaimed "Satanism experts," misleading and inaccurate statistics, crimes with only tenuous links to Satanism, and sensationalized media reports. In what was the largest viewership for a documentary in television history, Rivera claimed that an organized, Satanic conspiracy was at work killing babies, murdering innocents, and conducting ghastly rituals. "There are over one million Satanists in this country," Rivera said, adding that "The odds are, [they] are in your town." Rivera presented no proof; the lack of evidence was seen as proof of how well organized and shrewd the Satanic conspiracy really was. Yet little evidence supports claims about Satanic cults or conspiracies. In a 1992 report on ritual crime, FBI agent Kenneth Lanning concluded that the rampant rumors of ritual murders, cannibalism, and kidnapping were unfounded. Phillips Stevens, Jr., associate professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said that the widespread allegations of crimes by Satanists "constitute the greatest hoax perpetrated upon the American people in the twentieth century."

Big Pharma

Almost everybody (except investors) loves to hate the drug companies. Drugs cost too much, drug company profits are obscene, and it seems that every few months some drug once claimed to be safe is yanked off the shelf after patients die. It's little wonder that the drug industry ("Big Pharma") is looked upon with suspicion. But some proponents of "alternative medicine" believe that drug companies actually conspire to keep people sick to reap profits. For example, Kevin Trudeau (bestselling author of “Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About”) claims that important medical information is being kept hidden by a conspiracy between the medical establishment and big drug companies. According to Trudeau, "There are certain groups, including... the drug industry... that don’t want people to know about cures for diseases..." Actress and model Jenny McCarthy appeared recently on "Larry King Live," accusing doctors and the pharmaceutical industry of conspiring to suppress evidence of a link between childhood vaccines and autism. 

Read more: http://www.livescience.com/11375-top-ten-conspiracy-theories-570.html

Kaewong Boy: 'Big Pharma' really are not interested to cure sickness & diseases. That is not where the money is. Think about it. If they cure all the sickness & all the diseases in the world, what will be left for them in the end? Nothing! And that is exactly what they are doing, one part of the business is to keep on creating new kind of bacteria & viruses while the other part is to invent & introduce the drugs to fight it to the market. It is an ongoing process with the main objective of accumulating wealth, it is never about helping us, it is never for humanity.