Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy theories are often thought to be a matter for geeks, teenagers and the mentally unwell.

Even if this were true, does it really make conspiracy theories less relevant or less credible?

Goertzel identified three traits as being correlated with a belief in conspiracy theories:

anomia, the respondent stated a belief that he/she felt alienated or disaffection relative to “the system;”a tendency to distrust other people; and a feeling of insecurity regarding continued employment.

People with these traits are said to employ conspiracy theories so as to focus their dissatisfaction and anger at society. By having an "enemy" these individuals feel safe due to their thoughts and feelings being validated. It can give a person a reason to live, to exist.

Such theories include 9/11, when the World Trade Centre (Twin Towers) in New York were demolished by planes. The pentagon in Washington did not escape tragedy either.

Some theorists believe that the US government had prior warning of the attacks but did not do enough to stop them. Others believe that the Bush administration deliberately turned a blind eye to those warnings because it wanted a pretext to launch wars in the Middle East to usher in another century of American hegemony.

The 9/11 Truth Movement cite evidence that an airliner did not hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Centre could not have been brought down by airliner impacts and burning aviation fuel alone. This final group points to video evidence which they claim shows puffs of smoke - so-called demolition squibs - emerging from the Twin Towers at levels far below the aircraft impact zones and prior to the collapses.

They also believe that, on the day itself, the US air force was deliberately stood down or sent on exercises to prevent intervention that could have saved the lives of nearly 3,000 people.

The owners of the Twin Towers are said to have amended their insurance policy to cover terrorist attacks, only a few weeks before the terrible incident took place.

Many witnesses - including firemen, policemen and people who were inside the towers at the time - claim to have heard explosions below the aircraft impacts (including in basement levels) and before both the collapses and the attacks themselves.

As with the assassination of JFK, the official inquiry into the events - the 9/11 Commission Report - is widely derided by the conspiracy community and held up as further evidence that 9/11 was an "inside job". Scientific journals have consistently rejected these hypotheses.