Elvis Lives
On 16 August 1977 Elvis Aon Presley was still ht eking of Rock and Roll, but he was a king whose crown was slipping. He was 42 years old, had not had a major hit in years and was grossly overweight. his recent Las Vegas shows had frequently been embarrassing, with Elvis incoherent and visibly confused. so when he was found dead, lying on his bathroom floor, it was a simple story of a young man who had the world t his feet but ended up self-indulgently throwing his life away.
very soon rumours began to spread that Elvis was alive, and that he faked his own death. So were these simply the delusions of the devoted, or could there be any substances to the stories?
the wax dummy
Before long fans were reporting sightings of Elvis. One man took a photograph of the pool-house months after Elvis's funeral. On looking at it closely it became clear that a person looking a lot like Elvis was sitting inside the pool house. A record emerged by one Sivle Nora (Elvis Aron backwards) which sounded uncannily like Elvis. even Elvis's middle name was mis-spelled Aaron on his gravestone. But if it was not Elvis, who was in the coffin? it might be a wax model. since a lot of fans who came up to funeral had commented on the waxy figure of elvis's body.
So perhaps Elvis is alive and well and living somewhere vey far as others have claimed. but why? some say he he could not simply take the stress of his celebrity any longer. while others say that he was an honorary drugs agent for Richrad Nixon and he was now working as an undercover, infiltrating the mafia. however, got too close to his targets and was discovered and as a result, the FBI faked his death as a piece of old-fashioned witness protection.
hmmmm.... so.. what do you think? dead? alive?
Mind Control : MKULTRA
One of the most bizarre and disturbing conspiracies of all time was Project MKULTRA. A secret namefor a series of of CIA experiments that took place from the 1950s to the 1970s, which were designed to explore the possibilities of mind control through the use of drugs such as LSD and mescaline. subjects were given mind-altering drugs, often without their prior knowledge, and their subsequent behaviour was then studied. OMFG!
the experiments resulted in the death of one or another of the participants and there were many instances of severe,permanently damaging mentak illness. However, the CIA continued to conduct the trials until the prject was finally exposed. MKULTRA was set up by Allen Dulles, head of CIA, in 1953, in order to look into the use of mind control techniques. it was led by Dr Sidney Gottleib. Patients were recrutied outside the army and the CIA. An undeniable element of torture crept into the experiment, as Gottleib began to tie his victims up in straitjackets after administering the drugs. They were often locked in rooms where they could hear or see anything or tape loops were played to them in an attempt to drive them mad. they were also given enormous amount of LSD, and over a period of two months, they suffer permanent mental damage. It was not until 1974 that the project under press scrutiny, when a n article in The New York Times reported on the CIA's history of experimentation on human beings for the purpose of "mind control" research. Several committees were set up to look into what happened, but they found that much of the evidence had gone missing. records were destroyed in order to prevent the truth from ever coming out. tsk tsk tsk.....
The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiment
it was run between 1932 and 1972. one of the most shocking scientific studies ever to take place. in it, 399 black men, most of whom were poor Alabaman sharecroppers, took part in a supposed treatment for "bad blood" which would cure them for illness. They were never tolf that their illness was syphilis and that - except at the beginning of the study - they were receiving no treatment at all. What was in fact happening was that doctors were studying the ravages of the untreated disease and waiting for them to die so that they could perform autopsies on the corpses. The supposed aim of the experiment was to find out more about the disease and to determine whether it affected black people differently to whites.
It was not until 1966 that the story broke in the national press. The experiment was brought to a halt as a result of the adverse publicity and the surviving subjects and their families compensated and promised free medical treatment in the future.
The Moon Landings
One of the iconic images of the past century : Neil Armstrong emerging from Apollo 11 and uttering the immortal words "A small step for man, a giant step for mankind' - words so apt that they seemed to have been scripted. But what if the whole thing actually was scripted? What if the moon landings never really happened, but were mocked up in a film studio as a prpaganda exercise?
That is precisely the belief of an increasing number of Americans.
So when the 1978 film Capricorn One portrayed a NASA attempt to fake a landing on Mars, many were promted to suspect that the film was actually based on inside information.
Perhaps the best known questions posed by the conspiracy theorists are to do with the photographs of the landings. Why does does the American flag appear to be waving in the wind when the moon has no wind? and why are there no stars visible in the sky? not only that, why do photographs that purport to be taken miles apart appear to have identical backgrounds?
So what explanations can NASA, or anyone else, offer to explain these apparent anomalies? Well, quite a few. Taking them in order :
the flag is apparently waving because it had just been unwrapped and then twisted as the flagpole was screwed into the ground. the reason no stars are visible is because the cameras that were used were set for quick shutter speeds, in order not to over-sxpose the film in hte very bright light. the dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to show up on the film. this same effect can easily be observed on Earth. if you take a camera set for a bright sunny day the the stars will be invisible. The allegations that the backgrounds are identical in different photographs does not stand up to detailed analysis either. a careful comparison of the backgrounds that are claimed to be indentical in fact shows signifficant changes in the relative positions of the hills.
for every point raised by the conspiracy theorists there seems to be a rational scientific explanation. so is there any likelihood that America faked the moon landings? Not really, given the amount of work it would have taken to fool the world on such epic scale it would have been easier to just go to the moon, right? hahaha
