Conspiracy Theories: A Guide to the World's Most Intriguing Mysteries

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Political activist Thierry Meyssan and filmmaker Dylan Avery claim that American Airlines Flight 77 did not crash into the Pentagon. Some members of Scholars for 9/11 Truth believe that the man in this videotape is not Osama bin Laden at all, citing differences in weight and facial features, along with his wearing of a gold ring, which is forbidden by Muslim law, and writing with his right hand although bin Laden was left-handed.

Van Jones said he was a victim of a smear campaign, adding that he does not currently, nor ever has agreed with that theory. One explanation is that the rise in popularity stemmed more from growing criticism of the Iraq War and the newly re-elected President George W. The initial options were bought through at least two brokerage firms, including NFS, a subsidiary of Fidelity Investments, and TD Waterhouse.Al-Qaeda has repeatedly claimed responsibility for the attacks, with chief deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri accusing Shia Iran and Hezbollah of denigrating Sunni successes in hurting America by intentionally starting rumors that Israel carried out the attacks. Williams’s trilogy of fantasy novels from the 1970s is both incredibly dated in its retrograde sexual politics and prescient in its depiction of a world gone mad with paranoia and bizarre conspiracies.

In 2008, 9/11 conspiracy theories topped a "greatest conspiracy theory" list compiled by The Daily Telegraph. In Saudi Arabia, says Bradley, the names of two of the allegedly surviving attackers, Said al-Ghamdi and Walid al-Shari, are "as common as John Smith in the United States or Great Britain.

Hynes, an airline accident expert who investigated the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, says that, at very high velocities of 500mph or more, it would only take a few seconds to move or tumble across the ground for 300yards. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. His experiments spread LSD across the United States, making him a hidden godfather of the 1960s counterculture, and he was also the chief supplier of spy tools used by CIA officers around the world.

Griffin's book The New Pearl Harbor Revisited was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a "Pick of the Week" in November 2008. Conspiracy theory critic Jonathan Kay asserts that for the most part proponents are not out for financial gain and in some cases have left lucrative careers to become activists. They set up hotlines between command centers while NORAD increased its fighter coverage and installed radar to watch airspace over the continent. James Borne, a journalist for The New York Times who covered the September 11 attacks, described his assignment covering a 9/11 truth meeting as "[p]erhaps the most intellectually scary assignment I have had in recent years". Doug MacEachern in a May 2008 column for The Arizona Republic wrote that while many "9/11 truthers" are not crackpots that espouse "crackpot conspiracy theories", supporters of the theories fail to take into account both human nature and that nobody has come forward claiming they were participants in the alleged conspiracies.

appear calculated to alienate victims' survivors and the larger public from the 9/11 truth movement". The 9/11 conspiracy theories started out mostly in the political left but have broadened into what New York magazine describes as " terra incognita where left and right meet, fusing sixties countercultural distrust with the don't-tread-on-me variety".

Jones, architect Richard Gage, software engineer Jim Hoffman, and theologian David Ray Griffin, argue that the aircraft impacts and resulting fires could not have weakened the buildings sufficiently to initiate a catastrophic collapse, and that the buildings would not have collapsed completely, nor at the speeds that they did, without additional factors weakening the structures.The most prominent conspiracy theory is that the collapse of the Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center were the result of controlled demolitions rather than structural failure due to impact and fire. Its publication in English (as 9/11: The Big Lie) received little attention, but it remains one of the principal sources for "trutherism". Conspiracy theorists have questioned whether The Oil Factor and 9/11 provided the United States and the United Kingdom with a reason to launch a war they had wanted for some time, and suggest that this gives them a strong motive for either carrying out the attacks, or allowing them to take place. The distortions keep alive grievances and filter out facts that would challenge popular prejudices and self-serving propaganda. My book helps us understand conspiracy theory’s longstanding place at America’s cultural and political core.