There have been so many weird and mysterious projects and conspiracy events that have been talked about over the years. One of the strangest was the Philadelphia Experiment. I am not going to go into this in depth, because we have done that before, but it amazes me how a man with a obvious mental illness, that liked to make notations in books, books about unusual topics, could spark a controversy that has lasted all theses years. By the way, the Philadelphia Experiment was called operation ghost by the Navy. The way this all began was that a book on ufos was published by Morris K. Jessup, it was called, "The Case for the UFO". It was read by a disturbed person named Miguel Allende aka Carl M. Allen. He contacted the author and told him the story of a disappearing ship. The author wanted more proof and when Allende couldn't provide it, the author broke off contact. The next thing that happened was that Allende had sent a copy of "The Case for the UFO" to the U.S. Navy. He had made all sorts of notations in the columns and around the pages. These notes disturbed the Office of naval Research for some reason and they sent the book to it's author and asked him if he knew who did this. Can you imagine that? You would have thought that they would have tossed this into the trash. Because of their action, many have assumed that some of the notations in the book must have been true or the navy would not have cared about what was written and some of those notations referred to the Philadelphia Experiment and claimed that the ship disappeared and reappeared some distance away.

Another persistent rumor concerns German UFOs from World War II. This rumor has a strange twist and that is, that not only did the Nazis develop a flying saucer, but some of the scientists escaped to a base in the North Pole, where they continued to perfect these craft. According to some sources, the first claim of a Nazi flying saucer came from someone named Giuseppe Belluzzo and only one week after that a claim was made by a German scientist named Rudolph Schriever that he had developed such craft. In 1956, Captain Edward J Ruppelt stated, "When WWII ended, the Germans had several radical types of aircraft and guided missiles under development. The majority were in the most preliminary stages, but they were the only known craft that could even approach the performance of objects reported to UFO observers." Some books began to pick up on this theme and they talked about Nazi saucers and emphasized the fact that some Nazis had made it to a base in the North Pole with their saucer machines. It certainly didn't take any more than this to launch a conspiracy theory that we are hiding the fact that the Nazis had these things, because we captured some and back engineered them and the ufos that are being reported today are really from the U.S.

I would be remiss if I didn't talk about one theory that is believed by a lot of people. Before I get into it, let me make it clear that I do not believe it to be true. That theory has to do with us landing on the moon. To put it in a simple way, some people believe that we didn't. I don't think I can make it any clearer than that. Why would people believe this and how would they explain the tv images and such? First of all, the reason for this is quite simple. It has to be blamed on the photos that we were allowed to see from NASA. It is quite obvious to many people, that many of them have been altered. In the process of altering these photos, they became erroneous. Some had the same backgrounds even though they were taken far away from each other. Some had objects in the background that had been airbrushed, but there were other photos were you could see hazy background behind the astronauts and they were of the same view. This led some people to believe that we never really landed on the moon and some sort of stage was used, like the type used in movies. The truth is that we did land on the moon and there was a lot there that NASA didn't want us to know about. Anyway this rumor has persisted and will no doubt be with us forever.

Roswell and the famous ufo crash of 1947 convinced many that space aliens were visiting the earth. Actually this event was not that famous at the time. It wasn't until 1978, when Stanton Friedman brought it to light again, that it achieved legendary status. Many witnesses claimed that they had been threatened by the government not to talk about what they had seen. Some even claimed that they saw tiny bodies of humanoid creatures and that the military had put them in little coffins. As time went by, some people claimed that not all the alien crew had died when their ufo had crashed and that the government had managed to keep at least one of them alive for some time. To make matters worse, it was obvious that the U.S. Air Force was hiding something. They came out with several improbable stories over the years to try and explain the crash and the bodies, but none of them were plausible. One of the last stories was that they had dropped dummies out of planes for testing and these dummies were only three or four feet tall and that was what was found. The problem with this story is that even though they did use test dummies, that was not until years after the crash and to make matters worse, the dummies had a huge hook in their heads. It is no wonder that this case has remained on the forefront of ufo research. Could it be that the government wanted it to be that way for some unknown reason, maybe to distract us from other research they were doing into space craft?

Then there are the Men In Black. These are supposedly men that work for the government that dress in black suits. They are also said to drive black SUVs and sometimes fly in black helicopters. They are commonly called MIB. Many people claim that they have been threatened by these people, after a ufo sighting, or some extraterrestrial event. One of the first times an encounter with MIBs was said to have happened was in 1953 when a publisher claimed that he had uncovered the secret behind the flying saucers. It is said that he claimed to have been threatened by government agents that were men in black suits and wore black hats. It wasn't long before tv shows and movies began to pick up on the theme of the Men In Black and they soon became the stuff of folk lore. Some people said that they didn't always wear black and others claimed that they weren't government agents at all, but beings that looked like us, but were from another planet. I don't doubt that people have been threatened from time to time. The idea of a special force that is organized to just threaten people, or abduct them, or even kill them to keep info about ufos quiet has become quite popular.It is reinforced every time a witness tells how he or she was threatened. Is there a special force of people known as the Men In Black? Probably not. Have people been threatened to keep their mouths shut? It certainly seems so.

One conspiracy that keeps popping up is the one where it is said that President Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed Pearl Harbor to be bombed by the Japanese to get us into World War II. There are several reasons cited. One is the fact that a newly developed radar station is said to have picked up the flight of Japanese planes, but nothing was done about that. Another reason is that none of our aircraft carriers were at Pearl Harbor at the time and Roosevelt knew this. The last reason is that Churchill said that Roosevelt really wanted to get into the war against the Germans, but couldn't figure out how to get the Americans to go along with this. In order to buy this theory you would have to accept what I told you above as being the motive got getting into the war. First of all, it was thought that the battleship was the weapon of choice when the war started, not the carrier. We lost almost all of them in the bombing. The radar station was new and nobody knew much about it and the two man crew didn't even have a communications hookup to the command post and didn't run the radar on a regular basis. Even when a sighting was made, they were not quite sure what they were seeing. As for Roosevelt wanting to fight the Germans, what did this have to do with the Japanese? I really don't think that he wanted to have a war on two fronts. No I don't think that this theory holds much water.

Marilyn Monroe
Photo Source: Celebrity-Gallery.com

The last conspiracy theory that I would like to talk about is the death of Norma Jeane Mortenson, commonly know as Marilyn Monroe. She was found dead in her home on August 5, 1962. Death was listed from barbiturate poisoning. If Marilyn was just an ordinary actress, this might have been the end of it, but she was far from ordinary. Not only was she probably one of the most famous actresses that ever lived, but she was rumored to have been the president's mistress. I am talking about President John F. Kennedy. The story goes that after he had his fun with her, he passed her off to his brother, Robert. Many people tie the assignations of both John and Robert into the death of Marilyn. It is said that there were people in the government and others, who were very powerful and were not happy with plans that Kennedy had made to join forces with the Russians in space. To hide this, they first killed Marilyn who they felt knew to much and then John. Later they finished the job by killing Robert. This is one conspiracy theory that can not be disproved, but that doesn't mean it is correct, just that it could be.