INSANE Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be TRUE

The Nazi scientists that helped NASA put a man on the moon. The CIA's top-secret heart attack gun. The weather machine that the US Army tried to use against the Vietcong. These might sound like wild conspiracies straight out of a tinfoil-hat convention, but they're all real, and they're just the beginning. Get ready to shout, "I knew it." Because we're uncovering a whole lot more on today's episode of the Infographic Show. Crazy USA conspiracy theories that turned out to be true.

Number 16, the men who stare at goats. One of the most common things you'll hear from military conspiracy heads is that the army is secretly working on a super-soldier project. And in the 1970s, Vietnam veteran Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon wanted to do just that. But he didn't just want to make super soldiers; he wanted to make hippie super soldiers. After getting involved in the New Age Movement in California, Lieutenant Colonel Shannon wondered whether those principles could be weaponized. He wanted to create an army of so-called warrior monks dubbed the First Earth Battalion. No, we're not making this up; it was really his plan. This racially diverse group of soldiers would harness rainbow power and utilize the heightened perception of new-age belief systems to get the edge over their enemies. However, these would be peaceful warriors who would always seek non-violent conflict resolution first and foremost. Their loyalty would be to the planet itself above all nations. As you can imagine, Channon's ideas didn't get much traction within the military, but we might be living in a nicer world if they did. Anyway, how about an evil plot that almost changed the course of American history forever?

Number 15, the business plot. Back in the 1930s, America was almost taken over by a group of fascists. And we're not even talking about the Nazis; their plan for world domination was still in its infancy. Also known as the Wall Street push, the business plot involved a group of industry leaders attempting to overthrow the new president, FDR, with the help of a US Army general in 1933. The US was in real trouble at the time, with the Great Depression leaving over 16 million people unemployed and without all the economic and social safety nets we have today. FDR's solution was the New Deal, which didn't win many friends among the country's ruling class after he retired the gold standard. The wealthy conspirators, involving everyone from J.P. Morgan to allegedly George W. Bush's grandpa, Prescott Bush, had had enough. They tried to recruit former US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to lead their coup against FDR. The plan fell flat right there. Butler took the knowledge of the plot straight to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and all the conspirators gave up. That won't be the last time you hear about Hoover in this video. By the way, everyone involved was given a pass, with many theorizing that a deal was struck in exchange for their support in implementing the New Deal. Certainly a better option than getting the death penalty for treason.

Let's hop from a crazy happening inside of America to America doing some crazy things across the globe.

Number 14, the CIA paid off the Dalai Lama. Here's a hot take: The US didn't have a great relationship with Russia and China during the Cold War. Shocking, we know. And keeping that cold war cold meant belligerent on all sides needed to employ all kinds of bizarre tactics, like funding the Dalai Lama. The US saw Tibetan sovereignty as a good wall against Chinese expansion, fearing that if they took Tibet, they could use India as a launching point for further invasions. So they did everything they could to promote the Tibetan independence movement from around 1957 to 1969. This included providing supplies and training Tibetan fighters; they even offered a yearly stipend to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, a deal that was brokered by the Dalai Lama's brothers. In case you were wondering, the 14th Dalai Lama wasn't actually happy about how the CIA was using him as a pawn in their wider plans. He thought of their support as shallow and criticized them for supporting the Tibetan independence movement only as an effort to destabilize communist governments rather than because they actually cared about the movement. Talk about ungrateful, right? But the Dalai Lama isn't anywhere near the most shocking person the US has formed a conspiratorial relationship with.

Number 13, Operation Paperclip. Infographics fans will already be aware of the thousands of German and Austrian scientists and engineers who were performing strange and sometimes disturbing experiments for the Nazis in World War II. After the war, some were killed or imprisoned. Others, like the angel of death, Joseph Mengele, fled to South America. But what about the rest? Well, they all found new lives in the US. This program was designed to recruit rare minds from among Germany's top scientists, whose expertise could give the United States an edge over the Soviets, whether in weapons development or in the space race. In exchange for their knowledge, these scientists were offered green cards and a new life in America, their pasts conveniently swept under the rug. The most famous of those repatriated German scientists was Wernher von Braun, who developed the infamous V2 rocket for his former employers. Seeing as this rocket had laid waste to many allied cities, it was a controversial get. But without von Braun, we might never have even seen the formation of NASA. Thanks to his expertise in rocketry, the United States took a leap forward in the space race and created a gap that the Soviets just never closed. A medical scientist, Hubertus Strughold, made vital strides in revolutionizing space medicine. Arthur Rudolph, a coworker of von Braun, was one of the chief engineers on the Saturn 5 shuttle, and former Nazi rocket engineer Kurt Debus became NASA's first director of the Kennedy Space Center, literally overseeing the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. Though plenty of Jewish Americans who found out about the project later weren't exactly happy to know that their government was cozying up with former Nazis, some of the scientists brought over were essentially apolitical and had no loyalty to the Nazi ideology. But others had actively taken advantage of forced labor in concentration camps for their earlier research. But sometimes the conspiracies aren't imported; they come from within.

Number 12, the Watergate scandal. US President Richard Nixon wasn't nicknamed Tricky Dick for nothing. As US presidents go, he is one of the rare ones who wasn't assassinated, but still managed to attract his fair share of conspiracies. None more infamous than the Watergate scandal. To put it simply, Nixon had his goons, mainly members of the Committee to Re-elect the President, or CREEP, break into the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel to steal important intel from his competition. On June 17th, 1972, five of the burglars were arrested, and one of the biggest political messes in United States history started to unfold. As the now-famous journalistic duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein pursued the case in the media, the burglars went to trial, with all but two of them pleading guilty. Two years after the incident, when the scandal became impossible to ignore and other accusations of the administration's unethical practices came to light, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency, becoming the first and the last president to ever do so. But at least the Watergate plumbers only tried to steal documents. The villains of our next crazy true conspiracy stole corpses.

Number 11, Project Sunshine. Back in the 1950s, the US was eager to learn more about this nuclear radiation stuff that they used to wipe two Japanese cities off the map during World War II. This resulted in the United States Atomic Energy Commission and the United States Air Force Rand Corporation putting together the adorably named Project Sunshine, a study to look into the effects of radioactive fallout. We're sad to say the reality of Project Sunshine was anything but adorable; it was in fact downright horrifying. One of the studies involved the researchers of the project wanting to know how the radioactive isotope strontium 90 was absorbed into human bones. In order to do this, they needed to get their hands on around 1,500 corpses, including dead babies, as test subjects. They obtained these from a huge number of countries, from Europe all the way to Australia. And the worst part: none of the family members of those people had any idea their loved ones' corpses were being used in radiation experiments. Despite the experiments taking place in the 1950s, information about them was only released to the public by the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in 1995. Needless to say, the people whose families had been affected weren't exactly happy about the fate of all of those dead bodies. But at least the CIA didn't use the next item on this list to turn them into dead bodies.

Number 10, the heart attack gun. Back in the 1970s, the Church Committee, led by Senator Frank Church, fought for greater accountability of the CIA. And they did this the only way they knew how: sharing the utterly insane things that they'd been using government money to make and do. These included some things so insane that even the wildest conspiracy theorists couldn't have dreamt them up, like a special handgun that causes heart attacks. Sounds like a high-tech gadget more fitting for a James Bond movie than for real life. But Frank Church put all doubts aside when he actually revealed one at the committee's hearings. How did it work? Well, the gun was designed to fire out frozen projectiles containing highly potent shellfish neurotoxin. This would induce a heart attack in the victim as the projectile melted away without a trace. It really makes you wonder how many people who seemingly died of heart attacks were actually assassinated by the CIA on the US government's orders. Hey, speaking of people that the US government wanted dead.

Number 9, the FBI versus Martin Luther King. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a man who really needs no introduction. As one of the foundational figures of the American civil rights movement, he devoted his life to campaigning for more rights and equitable treatment for black Americans. But he also championed radical policies on economic equality for all, too. He continued to fight for what he believed in no matter what, even when he faced threats, intimidation, and physical violence, like brutal police beatings during protests. So, naturally, the FBI, who you're going to see getting up to even more shady tricks later in this video, wanted him out of the picture as quickly as possible. And seeing as the FBI didn't have a heart attack gun at their disposal, they instead decided to outsource the work of murdering King to an unlikely candidate: King himself. In 1964, they sent a threatening letter to King, claiming to be a black man incensed by his conduct, specifically King's extramarital affairs. The letter opening with the shockingly dramatic sentiment, quote, "In view of your low-grade abnormal personal behavior, I will not dignify your name with either a mister or irreverent or a doctor, and your last name calls to mind only the type of king, such as King Henry VIII, and his countless acts of adultery and immoral conduct lower than that of a beast." The letter claimed that it would release the information and destroy King's marriage and public standing unless he died first. This brazen act of government blackmail was thankfully ineffective. But fun fact: it was actually later discovered as part of the same Church Committee that debuted the heart attack gun. Sadly, there's nothing fun about our next horrifying true USA conspiracy.

Number 8, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Back in 1932, syphilis was one of the most dangerous and horrifying diseases ravaging the developing world. To combat the growing threat, the US Public Health Service performed one of the most unethical experiments in modern history on hundreds of unwilling and unknowing subjects, specifically, the black male population of Macon County, Alabama. A group of 600 men were told that they were being treated for a condition locally known as "bad blood," the catchall slang for a number of diseases, syphilis included. 399 of them were actually suffering from the condition, and 201 healthy subjects were used as a control group. The problem was nobody there was actually being treated; they were given ineffective placebos like aspirin and mineral supplements so the researchers could observe the symptoms in the bodies of the deceived patients as the disease progressed. This resulted in the people suffering from a number of debilitating conditions, from disfigurement to blindness. Fifteen years into the study, in 1947, penicillin had become a commonly accepted treatment for syphilis, but this treatment was never prescribed. The lives of hundreds of innocent black men were just ruined so the Public Health Service could learn more about a treatable disease. It's resulted in a lingering distrust around government healthcare across many African-American communities to this day. A rather upsetting lead we've buried here is that the experiment only officially ended in 1972. That's right; they kept up the study for 40 years. A small consolation came about in 1997 when then-President Bill Clinton released an official apology for the experiment; he also committed to making an investment to found the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Healthcare at Tuskegee University to help prevent anything like this from happening again. But not every American conspiracy comes from the government; the private sector has plenty of real diabolical plots going on, too.

Number 7, the sugar conspiracy. It doesn't take a genius to say that consuming large quantities of sugar probably isn't good for you. But if you're a rich and powerful sugar company, the solution is to pay a bunch of geniuses to say it's perfectly fine. It sounds far-fetched, we know, but this bizarre conspiracy actually happened in the 1960s. A cartel of sugar companies funded the bogus Sugar Research Foundation, an organization largely designed to downplay sugar's role in causing heart disease. Instead, they all shifted the blame onto fat. They sponsored a major Harvard study into the matter that ended up in the New England Journal of Medicine, all with Big Sugar's shady funding hidden behind the smoke screen. And it wasn't just scapegoating fat and foods; in fact, they intended to replace it. Their major review study seemed to draw conclusive links between fat consumption and coronary heart disease, pointing out that Americans needed to cut fatty food from their diet. Naturally, they should replace it with sweet, wholesome sugar. And if this seems like a thing of the past, we are sorry to inform you it is very much not. Coca-Cola was caught in the act using similar methods as late as 2015. But enough about sugar. Let's get back into the most fun conspiracies of all, the ones that involve murder.

Number 6, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. We know what you're thinking: What? Lincoln's murder wasn't a conspiracy; he was just shot in a theater by John Wilkes Booth. Well, you're half right there. But Booth gunning down the president while he was just enjoying the show was only one small part of the plan. A gang of ultraright-wing traitors who were still feeling sore about how the Civil War shook out wanted to topple the entire government. And just how many moving parts this whole plan had will astonish you. There was David Herold, a pharmacy clerk who had helped Booth escape to Virginia after murdering Honest Abe; he got caught and hanged for his trouble in 1865. Then there was the somehow even more pathetic George Atzerodt, a German boatman who secretly helped out the Confederates during the Civil War. It was his job to assassinate the vice president while Booth took on the head honcho, but Atzerodt got cold feet and instead decided to prop up the local bar and get drunk. He was hanged later, too. Of course, there was Lewis Powell, a former Confederate P and the muscle of the group. Being the most experienced fighter, his attempts to break into Secretary of State William Seward's house and murder the man resulted in several injuries and no deaths, well, except for Lewis Powell, who was also hanged for treason. Michael O'Laughlen, Booth's childhood friend, turned himself in for his role in the plot; surprisingly, he wasn't executed; he was just given life in prison, where he later died of yellow fever. A similar fate befell another Booth buddy, Samuel Arnold, who was sentenced to prison, later pardoned by President Andrew Johnson, and then died from tuberculosis. Another treasonous Samuel involved in the plot was Dr. Samuel Mudd, who would also be sentenced to prison and then die of pneumonia. Two other men, John Surratt and Edmund Spangler, also had roles in the plot; somehow, they managed to avoid both the noose and fatal diseases that seemed to keep striking down different members of the Booth Squad. And capping off the gang was Mary Surratt, who owned a boarding house where the treasonous gang met. She, surprise, surprise, got hanged, too, and was actually the first woman ever hanged in the United States. What a trailblazer. But blazing trails is nothing compared to literally altering the weather.

Number 5, Operation Popeye. The Vietnam War remains one of the biggest national embarrassments in US history. It was a costly, unsuccessful conflict that led to the loss of thousands of lives, drained billions of dollars, and shattered America's global reputation. In many ways, it was more of an ideological proxy war than a typical war for land gains or resources, and the US had a lot riding on it as part of the wider Cold War. And with such high stakes, they were willing to try some pretty insane things in order to win; they even tried out a plan that would later inspire the Geneva Convention law against weather modification machines as weapons of war. This was Operation Popeye. One of the many advantages that the Viet Cong forces had against the larger and better-funded forces of the United States was their knowledge of the environment. The jungles of Vietnam provided the perfect backdrop for guerrilla warfare, and a complex network of underground tunnels made it difficult to track them. In response, the US figured that maybe they could turn the Viet Cong's environment against them in the most sinister way possible: by changing the weather, the US could reshape the terrain of the battlefield itself. This involved creating a revolutionary geoengineering system, a cloud-seeding machine that would extend the country's natural monsoon season. The jungle would be flooded and make it much harder for the Cong to do their stealthy work. The Nixon administration tried to hide the project for years, but as interest in commercial geoengineering projects increased, the playing-god cat was eventually let out of the bag. And this sadly won't even be the last sinister operation you'll be hearing about today. In fact, as a little treat, we got two more for you right now.

Number 4, Operation Mockingbird. You ever feel like the media can't be trusted? Like every time you turn on the news, you pick up a newspaper, or you sign into your favorite news websites, they're just pushing some kind of agenda at you? Well, you might have a good reason to think that, and that reason is called Operation Mockingbird. Not to be confused with Project Mockingbird, which was a wiretapping operation, because it turns out that the folks naming these things really aren't that creative. Operation Mockingbird was a massive CIA program launched in the early years of the Cold War. The goal was to transform American news media into a propaganda machine for the US government. The operation was the pet project of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination. Under Mockingbird, they recruited journalists and publishing entities on the sly in hopes of getting them to tow the CIA line. Journalists and reporters were embedded at the New York Times, Time magazine, and even the National Student Organization. You have to remember that during the ultra-paranoid Cold War years, the CIA had extremely deep pockets; they were eager to spread the wealth around in order to gain that tasty, tasty media influence. Those connections were revealed once again by the fine folks in the Church Committee in 1975, who exposed the ties between the CIA and a number of journalistic groups. It's a miracle that none of those people died of mysterious heart attacks after this. But influencing the media feels positively peachy compared to our next nightmarish operation.

Number 3, Operation Sea-Spray. It's a name that sounds almost chill: Operation Sea-Spray. It's what you might call a weekend getaway with cocktails on the beach. But in reality, it was the US armed forces secretly spraying the Bay Area with infectious bacteria just to see what would happen. But in their defense, they at least did it for a nice reason before everything went horribly wrong. We've got to give them some bonus points for that at least. The bacteria in question was Serratia marcescens, which produces a distinctive red pigment, making it easier to track. It also wasn't linked to any clinical diseases at the time; it seemed like an extremely safe option when it came to testing the US's susceptibility to a bioweapons attack without causing a massive disaster on US soil. Or so they thought. Starting on September 26th, the US Navy minesweeper stepped outside of its usual duties to spread clouds of Serratia marcescens all over the Bay Area for six solid days. Then Mother Nature would do the rest; winds would carry the pathogen inland. The test immediately began delivering valuable data about just how quickly a pathogen could spread in a civilian area. The distinctive red calling card of the bacteria was detected at 43 different sites. Seems like a great success, right? But distribution wasn't the only thing they discovered; the experiment also revealed that the bacteria could actually cause real medical conditions, including painful urinary tract infections. In fact, 11 confirmed infectees experienced a bizarre and terrifying symptom: red-colored pee. That would certainly give any of us a panic attack while going to the bathroom. Thankfully, experiments like this came to an end in 1969.

When Nixon put the kaibos on all this germ warfare testing. And when Tricky Dick is telling you to rein it in, you know that you were doing something really unethical. And yet, still somehow more ethical than the absolute nightmare that makes up our next entry.

Number two, the MK Ultra experiments. When the CIA started getting worried that the Soviets had mastered the dark art of mind control, they hadn't, by the way, they decided to get in on the act. Enter MK Ultra, a series of disturbing experiments led by the infamous Sydney Gotautle, better known as the poisoner chief. In secret tests conducted in American detention centers worldwide, people were subjected to LSD dosing, extreme sleep deprivation, electric shocks, and psychological torture. The hope was to completely erase the personalities of the subjects, which would then, in theory, allow them to program new personalities in for the purposes of espionage. In the words of journalist Steven Kinszer, God wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds and he realized it was a two-part process. First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into the resulting void. Of course, this was never actually effective, but you probably already guessed that.

Countless people fell victim to the CIA's secret LSD experiments under MK Ultra. From innocent civilians to notorious criminals, one tragic case involved a tennis player who later died as a result of the tests. Even infamous mob boss Whitey Bulier, who thought he was helping to find a cure for schizophrenia. Much like Operation Paperclip earlier, the CIA under MK Ultra also recruited the services of Japanese World War II torturers and Nazi scientists to help replicate some of their brutal methods. And one of the most bizarre, horrifying, and downright creepy arms of the whole MK Ultra mission was Operation Midnight Climax. Yes, that means what you think it means. Carried out by CIA consultant George Hunter White and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in Boston, Massachusetts, along with a whole bunch of sex workers that were on the CIA payroll, they would lure clients back to their pre-approved safe houses where they would be secretly drugged with LSD in order to measure the effects of LSD on non-conenting individuals. This also made an apt testing ground for LSD's effectiveness as an interrogation aid. The victims were liable to give up privileged information once they were under the influence. Sometimes they were even fed subliminal messages while on LSD to perform illegal actions like robbery or assault. They also tried to get victims to act outside of their morals and principles when the right encouragement was provided. Thankfully, the CIA's diabolical LSD experiments were brought to an end in 1963, and their declassification would become one of the CIA's greatest embarrassments. And still, it is somehow a less harmful and less cruel true USA conspiracy than the next item on our diabolical list.

Number one, COINTELPRO. No list of crazy conspiracies that turned out to be true would be complete without COINTELPRO, the FBI's darkest strategy employed under J. Edgar Hoover. See, we told you he'd be back by the end of the video. Short for counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO was the FBI's collection of methods to undermine and collapse their opposition from within. That opposition, in this case, being the civil rights movement, the labor movement, communists, and hippies. And they used just about every dirty trick in the book to see that their goals were met. They planted stories, dug up dirt, and used false information to discredit targets. The FBI infiltrated groups to sew division and infighting, causing them to collapse from within. They used surveillance techniques like cameras, spies, and wiretaps to invade the privacy of their victims. Targets would be threatened with arrests and investigations, destroying morale. Physical violence would be used to intimidate and terrify. They even occasionally assassinated their enemies or induced them to kill each other through deception and manipulation. In all likelihood, the Martin Luther King Jr. letter from earlier was also likely a part of the COINTELPRO initiative.

The Black Panther Party, a self-described Marxist-Leninist black power group that often marched with weapons, found themselves high up on COINTELPRO's hit list. Over the course of a year's long campaign of decimation, the group collapsed entirely. Some of the group's leaders had been assassinated or had been sent to prison. Others had been driven to the point of mental breakdown or public humiliation by consistent harassment and psychological warfare from COINTELPRO agents. It's entirely consistent with the directive that J. Edgar Hoover gave his men when talking about the organizations they were targeting: Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize. A group of activists called Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI building in 1971 and discovered the dirty truth. If it wasn't for them, we would likely have never even known about all this.

Everything's a little bigger in the United States. And if we learned anything today, folks, it's that the killer conspiracies are no exception. Which of these conspiracy theories shocked you the most? Do you think there are even more secrets waiting to be uncovered? Let us know in the comments. Now go check out why was everybody connected to JFK suddenly mysteriously killed and more assassination or watch this instead.