The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

Philip Willan, The Last Supper: The Mafia, the Masons and the Killing of Roberto Calvi, 2007

David Yallop, In God’s Name, 1984

REPTILIAN HUMANOIDS

Long, long ago, David Icke (rhymes with bike) was a soccer player for Coventry City in England. Thereafter, it was all downhill in a handcart. He played for Hereford United, became a BBC sports commentator, became a Green Party activist, before dressing entirely in turquoise and informing the world that he, Dave Icke, was the Son of God. Could one go lower?

David Icke answered that himself with his book The Biggest Secret (1999), in which he claimed that a race of 12-foot lizards known as the Babylonian Brotherhood from planet Draco have colonized Earth. If you think that 12-foot lizards might be easy to spot, more fool you; the critters can shape-shift by day to look like humans.

Got a feeling of deja vu? Yes, that’s right: the TV SF series V had much the same premise.

Icke’s twist is to put a little Marx into the mix. The reptilians are the ruling class to the human proles, and the scaly-skinned ones make up all the past and present royal families, the presidents of the USA and entire crew of leading financiers. Just so that the poor proles don’t catch on to what is going on, the reptilian humanoids rule through various front organizations, such as the Bilderberg Group, the Trilaterial Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Knights Templar. Naturally, the conspiratorial goal of the repto-humans is the New World Order (although their weakness for drinking human juice means that sometimes they have to have a blood-break from the great work).

In one mad moment Icke syntheses science fiction, New Age spiritualism and all popular conspiracy theories.

To be fair to Icke, he dislikes some lizards more than others. He has a particular downer on the British Royal Family, but then they did murder Princess Diana (who blurted out her in-laws’ lizard nature to Icke) and they do control the gateway to the great underground reptilian city, which is situated on one of their Scottish estates. Scotland. A bit cold, surely, for lizards?

David Icke’s books sell by the barn load and his meetings are well attended. Which only goes to prove that you can fool a lot of people a lot of the time.

Further Reading

David Icke, The Biggest Secret, 1999

David Icke, Children of the Matrix, 2001

SARS

February 2003. A Chinese-American businessman flying from China to Singapore became severely ill with what appeared to be pneumonia, obliging his flight to land in Vietnam for his hospitalization. Despite the best efforts of the staff at the French Hospital of Hanoi, the 48-year-old businessman died. Realizing that they were dealing with a mysterious and highly infectious virus, the hospital contacted the World Health Organization (WHO), which issued an alert warning the world of the arrival of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Panic—and face masks—spread across the world. The outbreak lasted until the summer of 2003 by which time over 8,000 cases had been confirmed, and 800 deaths reported.

Midway through the epidemic, Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow’s epidemiological services, stepped forward to inform reporters he thought SARS was not a natural occurrence, but man-made because “there is no vaccine for the virus, its makeup is unclear, it has not been very widespread, and the population is not immune to it”.

His views were echoed by Sergei Kolesnikov, a member of Russia’s Academy of Medicine, who asserted that the virus was a cocktail of mumps and measles. “We can only get that in a laboratory,” he added.

Tests by Dutch and US scientists confirmed that the disease could be man-made.

If SARS was man-made, who could be behind such a dastardly plot? In China, at least, the baddies were identified as the USA in liaison with Taiwan, with the virus having been manufactured in Fort Detrick or Plum Island as a biological weapon to kibosh its Sino rival. According to financial giant J. P. Morgan, SARS did more damage to the Pacific Rim economies than the Indian Ocean tsunami because of the disruption it caused. Theorists maintain that the virus was specifically tailored to the Chinese race, pointing out that of the SARS cases just twenty-seven occurred in the US (with no fatalities), while China had the most reported cases by far. In The Last Defense Line: Concerns About the Loss of Chinese Genes, a Chinese businessman by the name of Tong Zheng claimed to have witnesses to American researchers collecting mainland Chinese people’s blood and DNA in the 1990s from twenty-two provinces—the same twenty-two provinces mainly affected by SARS.

Then again, some point the finger of blame at China itself. A Chinese army doctor Jian Yanyong whistle-blew to the press that his unit had known about the disease since November 2002, and the authorities had suppressed the information. Although the scandal caused the heads of government ministers to roll, Yanyong himself was whisked away for “political re-education”. Inevitably, the proven desperation of the Chinese to hide knowledge about SARS fed the belief that they themselves had concocted the virus. WHO’s investigation was interesting in this respect: WHO concluded that the first cases of SARS were soldiers in Guangdong Province—the location of China’s main biowarfare establishment.

Officially, WHO considers SARS to be a coronavirus which has jumped species. As with Ebola, the animal host may well be the bat. Civets—which are commonly eaten in Guangdong —are also in the frame. The explanation for the non-incidence of SARS deaths in the USA is the superiority of Stateside medical services.

Further Reading

Angela McLean (ed.), SARS, 2005

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

It was not Shakespeare as many liked it.

In 2011, Hollywood director Roland Emmerich released Anonymous, a movie about the Bard, the author of England’s classic theatre pieces, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, The Tempest, etc. Controversy was Anonymous’s trailer, because Emmerich rehashed the theory that “William Shakespeare” of Stratford-upon-Avon was not author of said works but rather Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, was the man with the talented quill pen. Since writing plays was beneath an aristocratic personage, and politically dangerous in turbulent times (those associated with Richard II were all interrogated, because Elizabeth perceived it as a personal attack), de Vere allowed Shakespeare, a humble theatre producer to stage his masterpieces and take the credit.

Emmerich is not the first, neither will he be the last, to suggest that de Vere was Shakespeare. And de Vere is only one of seventy-seven contenders put forward for the title of “real” Shakespeare. Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Rutland and the Earl of Derby all have strong supporters