Conspiracy theories: the world's top ten secret plots

10. Obama’s birthplace

As far back as 2008, some Americans began to claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, but in Kenya. These claims have been promoted by fringe theorists, known as ‘birthers’, some of whom have sought court rulings to prove that Obama is ineligible to be the president. None of these attempts has been successful. Obama has released the full version of his birth certificate, which shows he was born in Hawaii. However, birthers claim it is a forgery. There has been what the Daily Telegraph describes as “a persistent campaign of misinformation on the subject”, led at one stage by Donald Trump, the property mogul now hoping to be the Republican presidential candidate. According to a recent poll by New York Daily News, 61 per cent of self-identified Trump supporters said they believed the president was not born in the US. Obama has nevertheless made light of the conspiracy and in 2011, during an address at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, even went so far as to release his “birth video”: a scene from Disney’s The Lion King.

9. MH370 and MH17 are the same plane

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 and has yet to be found despite an extensive search operation. Just over four months later, on 17 July 2014, another Malaysia Airlines flight, MH17, crashed in eastern Ukraine, near the Russian border after apparently having been shot down by a missile. To most people the two tragedies looked like a terrible coincidence, but to conspiracy theorists there are no coincidences – and MH370 and MH17 were in fact the same plane. Worldtruth.tv is one of the many sites that argues that MH370 was hijacked and flown to US military base Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The “US propaganda machine” then staged the shooting down of MH17 so that the Russians would lose credibility. The theory fails to explain why the same propaganda victory could not have been achieved, assuming it was desired, simply by shooting down any passenger aircraft over the Ukraine-Russia border. Read our in-depth article on MH370 conspiracies here. 

8. Project MKUltra: the CIA’s Mind ControlProgram

Although initially seen as another fanciful conspiracy theory, this one turned out to be true. The CIA really did run secret mind-control experiments on American citizens from the 1950s until 1973, using “electronics, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and verbal and sexual abuse”. In 1995, President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology for Project MKUltra, as it was known. It is believed that ‘Unabomber’ Theodore Kaczynski was part of these experiments, although that detail has yet to be confirmed.

7. Reptilian Elite

The ‘reptoid hypothesis’ is a conspiracy theory which advances the argument that reptilian humanoids live among us with the intention of enslaving the human race. It has been championed by former BBC sports presenter David Icke who believes that deceased American comedian Bob Hope, members of the Royal Family and former US Presidents George W Bush and Bill Clinton are part of the “Anunnaki” race who came to earth for “monatomic gold”. Some critics accused Icke of anti-Semitism, alleging that his talk of reptiles was code for Jews – but he clarified that the lizards to which he referred were literal, not metaphorical.  

6. Elvis Presley faked his death