9/11 Scholars Forum

Exposing Falsehoods and Revealing Truths

"The Conspiracy Theory Detector" by Michael Shermer (on scientificamerican.com)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-conspiracy-the...

CHECK OUT THE COMMENTS, WHICH ARE NOW A DEBATE ABOUT 9/11

The Conspiracy Theory Detector

How to tell the difference between true and false conspiracy theories

Image: Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi


This past September 23 a Canadian 9/11 "truther" confronted me after a talk I gave at the University of Lethbridge. He turned out to be a professor there who had one of his students filming the “confrontation.” By early the next morning the video was online, complete with music, graphics, cutaways and edits apparently intended to make me appear deceptive (search YouTube for “Michael Shermer, Anthony J. Hall”). “You, sir, are not skeptical on that subject—you are gullible,” Hall raged. "We can see that the official conspiracy theory is discredited....It is very clear that the official story is a disgrace, and people who go along with it like you and who mix it in with this whole Martian/alien thing is discrediting and a shame and a disgrace to the economy and to the university." [sic]* Hall teaches globalization studies and believes that 9/11 is just one in a long line of conspiratorial actions by those in power to suppress liberties and control the world.

Conspiracy theories are a dollar a dozen. While in Calgary on that same trip, I met a politician who told me that he believes the fluoridation of water is the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the public. Others have regaled me for hours with their breathless tales of who really killed JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr., Jimmy Hoffa and Princess Diana, along with the nefarious goings on of the Federal Reserve, the New World Order, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Yale University’s secret society Skull and Bones, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Bilderberg Group, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the Learned Elders of Zion. It would take Madison Square Garden to hold them all for a world-domination meeting.

Nevertheless, we cannot just dismiss all such theories out of hand, because real conspiracies do sometimes happen. Instead we should look for signs that indicate a conspiracy theory is likely to be untrue. The more that it manifests the following characteristics, the less probable that the theory is grounded in reality: CHECK OUT THE COMMENTS

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