INSANE Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be TRUE

The inside job that helped Hitler rise to power.  A huge coverup of the most horrifying moment of the Vietnam War. And a secret CIA weapon that  could kill you without ever leaving a trace.

They sound crazy, but these are just some  of the most insane conspiracy theories that turned out to be completely true! And  we’re going to let you in on all the secrets. My Lai Massacre Cover Up.

Sadly, there is no shortage of atrocities committed during the Vietnam  War, but there is one so awful and so damning to the United States that the truth about it was  intentionally hidden from the public. The My Lai Massacre took place in the small Vietnam hamlet  of My Lai, on March 16th, 1968. That morning, US soldiers entered the village on a search and  destroy mission.

While the region where My Lai was situated was controlled by Viet Cong guerilla  fighters, the American troops found no sign of enemy combatants in the area, only civilians. That didn’t stop the United States own soldiers from setting huts on fire, murdering between 347  to 504 innocent Vietnamese people – including as many as fifty children under the age of four  – and committing acts of assault so deplorable against the women of My Lai that we can’t actually  describe them here on YouTube. Even worse, the barbaric actions of these troops were initially  praised by the US as fabricated reports claimed that over a hundred and twenty of these needlessly  murdered civilians had actually been Viet Cong.

The truth about the My Lai Massacre wouldn’t emerge  until a year later, and became emblematic of the US’ war efforts in Vietnam. The conflict had  already been widely criticised and protested, and now it looked like America had lost any  sense of morality when it came to the actions of its troops in Southeast Asia. Military secrecy  around the killings ultimately made it all the more shocking when the revelations were made  public when former soldiers spoke out about it.

These weren’t just crimes against humanity  perpetrated against innocent women and children by American troops, but acts that the US Army  leadership had conspired to sweep under the rug. Among the slew of court martials that followed,  Lieutenant William Calley was accused of directing the My Lai Massacre, and as a result was convicted  of premeditated murder and sentenced to life behind bars. Sickeningly, he only served  three and a half years of house arrest, before having his sentence commuted… at  the behest of then-President Richard Nixon.

But if you think that’s crazy, it’s nothing  compared to the true conspiratorial weirdness that came out in the Church Committee Findings. Named for the US Senator at the helm, Frank Church was the chair of the Senate Select Committee to  Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. This was a 1975 Senate  investigation into alleged illegal activity carried out by the US’ own intelligence agencies,  including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency,  and the National Security Agency.

Church Committee findings included multiple  attempted assassinations of other countries’ political figureheads, including President Fidel  Castro of Cuba, as well as the presidents of the Dominican Republic and the Democratic Republic  of the Congo. There was COINTELPRO, a covert operation conducted by the FBI to infiltrate  specific domestic organizations like civil rights activists, feminists, environmentalists,  people protesting the Vietnam War, and communists. It considered these groups ‘subversive’,  and sought to discredit them.

The Church Committee also brought to light Project  Mockingbird, an effort by the CIA to leverage its relationships with journalists to control the  flow of information in the news. Project MINARET, wherein the NSA was working with telecommunication  companies to monitor individuals on a watch list – a list that included Senator Church  and other members of the Church Committee. And, were it not for the work of the Church  Committee, the world might never have learned about the horrendous CIA experiments that took  place as part of Projects MKULTRA and MKNAOMI.

But these weren’t even the strangest  findings of the committee… stay tuned to hear about the CIA’s secret weapon. The findings made by the Church Committee, as horrifying as they were, led to important  reforms when it came to how US intelligence agencies operate. Congressional committees were  to oversee the future activities of the FBI, CIA and NSA, and famously President Gerald Ford  issued Executive Order 11905, which banned the carrying out of political assassinations.

Let’s head back to Europe, though, and peer into the dark plot that helped install  one of history’s greatest monsters: This is the Reichstag Fire and the Nazi Power Grab. There’s no denying that the Nazi Party went about assuming power over Germany in the most  brutal way possible during the early thirties. On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag, which  was used as the home of Germany’s Parliament, was burned to the ground.

The attacks were  initially blamed on communists, with Dutchman Marinus van der Lubbe playing the role of pasty. Thanks to van der Lubbe being a communist, Adolf Hitler – already Chancellor at this time – used  the fire as justification for forcibly expelling any left leaning or communist politicians out  of Parliament, and had them imprisoned so they couldn’t oppose the Nazi Party in the elections  that took place a month later in March 1933. Hitler successfully turned Germany against  communists by declaring that they were threatening to take over, thus allowing the Nazis  to win more seats in the elections and helping them to assume power over the country.

It's hardly a stretch to conclude that the Nazis were responsible, especially  given how partial they were for burning books and attacking other institutions  that challenged their fascist ideology. Operation Gladio… Would you believe us if we told you that,  following the end of the Second World War, armed resistance operatives were carrying out  clandestine missions in European countries? No it wasn’t remnants of the Nazi party  or the USSR… it was the United States.

Codenamed Operation Gladio, these covert  missions were a direct collaboration between the personnel of what would become the Central  Intelligence Agency, NATO, and the Western Union. Operation Gladio consisted mainly of ‘stay behind’  operations - This involved countries embedding sleeper agents in their own territories,  who would lie in wait to be deployed in the event of an enemy invasion from nations like the  Soviet Union, which was steadily amassing power. These stay-behind operatives would  establish resistance movements within their home countries, then, should a  Soviet onslaught roll in, they’d stay put, and work as spies from behind enemy lines.

So, what did Operation Gladio actually entail? Operatives were used to carry out political  assassinations, psychological warfare, and false flag operations, essentially,  a smorgasbord of nefarious deeds, against left wing parties in Western Europe. This  often meant aligning with anti-communist militias and right wing terrorists as Gladio’s network of  secret operatives captured, tortured, and killed anyone suspected of having communist leanings.

To this day though, the US Department of State denies the truth that their own operatives were  backing terrorist groups, and that Gladio was only a way to aid Western European countries  from resisting a potential Soviet invasion. But the CIA messing with Europe is one  thing - what about the FBI killing dozens of Americans back in the good old US of A? During the Prohibition Era, the FBI was involved in trying to develop ways to prevent bootleggers  from brewing illegal alcohol.

In order to do that, they increased the amount of methanol, a poisonous  substance found in the same industrial alcohol that bootleggers would use to make liquor. While  intended to discourage people from drinking, this increase led to thousands of deaths. For over a decade, the United States banned both the sale and production of drinking  alcohol, and federal law enforcement devoted significant resources to tackling the illegal  attempts people made to circumvent these laws.

Speakeasies and smuggling networks were primary  targets for law enforcement, as was bootlegging, which had itself become a lucrative business  for organized crime syndicates. But the moment one operation was busted, another  quickly appeared to take its place. To limit the publicly available supply of alcohol,  law enforcement and federal regulators devised a new strategy.

As bootleg alcohol was typically  produced by distilling industrial alcohols, US officials figured that, if it became  legally mandated that toxic additives had to be included in these products, then they  could cut off the supply before consumption. So, the US Treasury Department  ordered companies to add quinine, methyl alcohol and additional toxic chemicals  to industrial alcohol as a deterrent. A deterrent that didn’t work.

On Christmas Eve of 1926, 60 people were admitted to the Bellevue Hospital in New York  as a result of poisoned alcohol - 31 of which died in the next few days. Many had inadvertently  consumed methanol, industrial strength alcohol that was legal under federal law, but extremely  poisonous. And that’s just a snapshot of the staggering number of deaths that occurred as a  result of alcohol poisoned by these chemicals.

While it’s often misinterpreted that the  FBI deliberately poisoned drinking alcohol, it can’t be understated the unethical lengths  that the United States’ federal government went to in order to curb public consumption  of alcohol and illegal bootlegging. They might not have been dropping  mercury into bottles of whiskey, but the US government did increase the level of  toxic chemicals present in industrial alcohols, knowing full well that these were being used  distilled in order to be sold and drunk. Speaking of incredibly dangerous things to put  into your body… Ever heard of Project MKNAOMI?

The now infamous Project MKULTRA is often  cited when talking about crazy conspiracies, but its successor often flies under the  radar. Project MKNAOMI was a joint operation between the CIA and the US Department of  Defense that ran for almost two decades, between the fifties and the late sixties. The goal of Project MKNAOMI was to conduct  research into chemical and biological warfare, specifically determining what substances  and chemicals could be used to either kill or incapacitate a target… and then developing  devices that could diffuse these materials.

While MKULTRA had a strong emphasis on mind  control experiments, MKNAOMI focused on ways to weaponize bacteria and viruses, knockout  gases, lethal poisons, and delivery systems that could be used to administer them. The CIA’s Technical Services Division was tasked with developing a whole arsenal  of lethal or incapacitating materials, with the US Army’s Special Operations Command  assigned to assist with the testing. Afterall, what are friends for?

Perhaps most notably,  MKNAOMI led to the creation of a number of guns that were modified to fire darts coated in  deadly biological agents. These were strong enough to incapacitate guard dogs, allowing covert agents  to infiltrate an area; then, a remedial chemical agent could be used to reawaken the dogs upon the  agents’ exit, covering their tracks as they left. While officially declassified information  about Project MKNAOMI is hard to come by, a CIA memo that proposed using biological  weapons to target crops was uncovered in 1967 by the Church Committee - and we’ve  got more about what else that committee revealed to the world coming up shortly.

After this memo was discovered, President Richard Nixon was forced to ban the military  use of biological weapons in November 1969, and Project MKNAOMI was dissolved. However,  despite the president’s orders, in 1970, one rogue CIA scientist stole approximately eleven grams  of a deadly shellfish toxin with help from SOC personnel at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This  dangerous toxin was then stashed in a CIA owned lab, going undetected for over five years.

But it’s not just the US that gets involved in sinister secret plots. Sometimes, it’s US  allies. Such was the case in The Lavon Affair.

While arguably not as infamous as the likes  of Gladio, or other US led covert operations, the Lavon Affair was no less deplorable. Planned  by the Israeli Military Intelligence in 1954, under the innocuous codename of Operation  Susannah, this was a false flag operation. During the summer of 1954, a group of Egyptian  Jewish people were recruited by Israel’s military intelligence to attack multiple civilian targets  in Egypt.

These included Egyptian, American and British owned businesses, cinemas, libraries and  US educational centers throughout the country. These recruits were instructed to plant bombs  in these establishments, and upon detonation, the attacks were to be pinned on communists, the  Muslim Brotherhood – a Sunni Islamist organization in Egypt – or unspecified local nationalists. The operation began when the sleeper cell, consisting of eight Egyptian Jews, bombed the  post office in Alexandria.

Within weeks, six other buildings were also targeted, with the Egyptian  government eventually being tipped off – allegedly by the person overseeing the operation – about  where the next bombing was planned to take place. With that information, they were able to swoop in  and arrest the bomber, then capturing the entire covert Israeli cell of eleven suspects. While the  bombings didn’t result in any civilian deaths, four of the operatives died, two of them after  being captured and another two being sentenced to execution by the Egyptian government. 

Two more were acquitted at their trial, and the remaining five received varying prison  sentences that ranged from seven years to life. But the lingering question in all this is why?  Well, the intent of this failed false flag was to pin the blame on organizations that opposed  Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

It was hoped that the subsequent chaos would convince Western  governments that Nasser’s regime over Egypt was unstable, and therefore prompting these nations  to withdraw any financial or military support. After the operation failed, Israeli defence  minister Pinhas Lavon was implicated in orchestrating the bombing attacks and was  consequently forced to resign, leading to the incident being referred to as the Lavon Affair.  Israel continued to publicly deny that they’d had any involvement in the Lavon Affair until  as recently as 2005; the surviving Egyptian agents who had been involved in the attacks were  awarded certificates of appreciation by the then President of Israel, Moshe Katsav - the covert  agent equivalent of a participation medal.

But that isn’t the last piece of military  subterfuge we’ve got on the docket today. Far from it, in fact. So let’s dive into  the infamous Gulf War Syndrome cover up.

Following the end of the Gulf War – which took  place between 1990 and 1991 – a concerning number of veterans who had fought in the conflict  reported developing unusual symptoms after returning home. Reports came in from Gulf  War veterans in the United States, Canada, Austria and Denmark. But for those returning  home to the UK and suffering from this strange Gulf War Syndrome, the health issues they  reported would be suspiciously silenced… In every reported case, soldiers who  had been previously fit and healthy seemed to suddenly develop a litany of  unusual illnesses and symptoms.

These ranged from experiencing chronic fatigue,  hypertension, muscle pain, cognitive issues, a lack of coordination, outbreaks of  rashes and other skin conditions, diarrhea, as well as symptoms related to  Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. What made this so unusual though, compared to the  illnesses suffered by veterans of previous wars, was that there seemed to be a much higher rate  of symptoms and at much greater intensity among those who’d fought in the Gulf War. The primary  cause that’s been attributed to this is exposure to sub-lethal amounts of chemical warfare  agents, particularly nerve gas, as well as the inhalation of smoke from oil well fires,  and exposure to pesticides and depleted uranium.

In the United Kingdom, several assessments  of the affected veterans were carried out to determine if there was any link between those  experiencing these symptoms. But Kings College London was unable to determine any common  causality among sufferers. Meanwhile, other countries like the United States were quicker to  recognize the existence of this Gulf War Syndrome.

The UK’s Ministry of Defence vehemently denied  that such a condition existed, despite the overwhelming evidence among veterans from the  Gulf War. They would eventually relent in 2005, and subsequent research was conducted in 2009  that further confirmed Gulf War veterans were more likely to report symptoms compared to other  veterans. They were also twice as likely to have suffered from PTSD and reported a poorer  quality of life following their service.

However, as recently as 2010, an overwhelming  majority of the UK’s Gulf War veterans hadn’t received any form of compensation from their  government and claims for war pensions have been denied to those who served in the Gulf War and  reported to be suffering with Gulf War Syndrome. Sometimes, governments conspire to shaft large  groups of people. Sometimes, it’s just one very unfortunate dude.

Welcome to The Dryfus Affair The Dryfus Affair took place in France between the late nineteenth and early twentieth  centuries. It surrounded one Alfred Dryfus, an artillery captain within the French army.  In 1894, after a seemingly damning letter of evidence was discovered, Dryfus was accused of  selling French military secrets to Germany and was convicted of treason… Wrongly convicted.

Working in the German Embassy in Paris, a French spy named Major Hubert-Joseph Henry  uncovered a partially ripped up letter in a waste basket. The handwriting that had been used  to pen the letter resembled that of Dryfus, leading to what would become a controversial  arrest and accusation levied against the man. The public were quick to believe the charges slammed  against Dryfus owed purely to the fact that he was Jewish.

Antisemitic groups in France at the  time amplified the notion of his guilt, especially the newspaper La Libre Parole, which claimed that  Dryfus exemplified the disloyalty of French Jews. Dryfus was court-martialed and sentenced to life  in prison on Devil’s Island, located off the coast of French Guiana. In a harrowing public ceremony  following his conviction, he had the French army’s insignia torn off his uniform and his sword  broken before being paraded in front of a crowd who hurled antisemitic insults at him and even  called for Dryfus to be executed for treason.

However, in 1896, evidence would come to light  that implicated a different French officer, named Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, as the true traitor.  This started swaying public support for Dryfus, but after Esterhazy’s subsequent court martial, he  was quickly found not guilty and fled the country. Dryfus was court-martialed a second  time in 1899, and found guilty again, yet France was still deeply divided over the case. 

Days later, Dryfus received a full pardon from the French president, and then in 1906 he would  be fully exonerated and reinstated into the army. Antisemitism is undeniably a horrible  blight on the planet. Just like nuclear war.

And what do we have to thank for  that? The Manhattan Project, of course! In a post Oppenheimer world, almost  everyone’s heard of the Manhattan Project, the infamous World War Two collaborative  research and development program between the United States, United Kingdom and Canada  that produced the very first nuclear weapons, irreversibly altering the course of history.

Between 1942 and 1946, the project resulted in two distinct types of bombs; the Thin Man, a fission  based nuclear weapon, and the Little Boy, the more complex, implosion type nuclear weapon, both  designed by nuclear physicist and the destroyer of worlds himself, J. Robert Oppenheimer. But at the time, public knowledge about the Manhattan Project was severely limited.

The goal  of security officials linked to the Manhattan Project was to keep word about the development of  atomic bombs from reaching Nazi Germany and their Axis power allies, in particular Japan, who would  suffer the first ever nuclear attacks in history as a direct result of the Manhattan Project. Details of the program were also kept a secret from the Soviet Union; despite the USSR being  aligned with the USA, UK and other Allied Forces, the United States regarded them as a potential  future enemy. However, some Soviet spies were successful in infiltrating the Manhattan  Project headquarters in Los Alamos, and disseminated information about the program back  to Russia, which helped speed up the development of the Soviets’ very own nuclear bombs.

There were also a surprising amount of leaks during the 1940s from American journalists,  some of them small and inconsequential, but others far more damning. Around the time of the Second  World War, the United States operated a program of voluntary press censorship that allowed its Office  of Censorship to… sternly rebuke journalists that reported on a list of prohibited topics. Essentially, any censorship that took place usually went into effect after important  information had already been published.

One of the worst violations in relation  to the Manhattan Project occurred in 1944, when a reporter for the Cleveland Press, the  unfortunately named John Raper, discovered that a military operation was occurring in Los Alamos  while he had been on vacation in New Mexico. Raper had no idea that atomic bombs were being developed  there, but he erroneously reported the location and approximate size of a classified military  science facility, n provided local witness accounts of explosives being tested on the site,  and worst of all, he named Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project. At the behest of Major General Leslie Groves, the US Army’s director of the Manhattan Project,  the Office of Censorship was able to prevent any follow up articles being published.

This  included one being planned by Time magazine, to ensure further information about the project  couldn’t be spread any further. Groves also considered drafting John Raper in retaliation for  his article, only relenting when he learned that the journalist was in his sixties, and hardly at  a prime age to be forced into military service. Next up is a scientific study  that breached moral and ethical boundaries on a truly unprecedented scale.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment was a study that ran from 1932 until 1972. Funded by the  United States government and carried out by the US Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease  Control and Prevention, the goal of the research project was to examine the effects and symptoms  of syphilis when left untreated. And at the time, there was no known cure for the disease.

In order to make their observations, the Public Health Service enrolled around six hundred  impoverished African American sharecroppers - 399 with syphilis and 201 without - many of whom had  never even visited a doctor before. They were enticed by an offer of free medical care, however  the people behind the study intentionally refused to explain exactly what they were examining in the  men that would unwittingly become test subjects. Those participating in the Tuskegee  Experiment were falsely told they were being treated for ‘bad blood’, a colloquial,  non-specific term used in the area to describe a number of different ailments.

The participants were given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, and told  that this would treat their condition. However, some fifteen years into the study, in 1947,  a treatment for syphilis was discovered in the form of penicillin. The Public Health  Service neglected to tell these men the truth at any point, nor did they offer the  widely available antibiotic which had since become the standard treatment for syphilis.

In fact, the researchers offered no medical care to these men as their condition progressed,  even as some of them started to go blind, suffered other severe health problems or even went insane  due to syphilis. Over the course of the study, 28 participants passed away due to syphilis, and  a further one hundred died from complications linked to the disease. Forty of the participants’  spouses were also diagnosed with it, and it had been passed on to almost twenty children.

A year after the story broke and sparked public outrage, Congress held multiple hearings  looking into the Tuskegee Experiment. In 1974, the surviving participants of the unethical  study, along with the families of those who had died, received a ten million dollar  settlement, and new guidelines were put in place in order to protect human subjects. And that would be the last time the US was ever involved in a sinister cover up… Okay, we lied,  that sentence was, in itself, a cover up.

Gotta earn those secretive US government checks somehow! Adding yet another US political scandal to this list, the Iran Contra Affair saw the United  States’ National Security Council becoming involved in several secret arms deals without the  knowledge or approval of Congress. As a matter of fact, these transactions were outright banned  by congress, and violated the government’s own policies.

Through the NSC, the US traded missiles  and other weapons to free American hostages in Lebanon, as well as channeling funds to support  an armed conflict that was occurring in Nicaragua. The Iran Contra Affair was so controversial  that it even threatened to topple the President of the US at the time, Ronald Reagan. After Reagan – a Republican – took office, his political reach was limited by a Democrat majority  in the House of Representatives, and the US Senate.

But one of his major political platforms  had been to back the numerous anti-Communist insurgencies that were operating around the globe,  something that the Democrats wouldn’t support. In fact, they actively brought in legislation to  limit the influence the CIA and the Department of Defence had on foreign conflicts. At the time, both Iran and Nicaragua had undergone significant changes to their  regimes, with the former toppling their pro Western government, replacing it with an  anti-US Islamic fundamentalist one.

Meanwhile, the latter was now under the control  of the leftist Sandinista government, who Reagan and his administration feared would  allow communism to spread into Central America. So, without the approval of Congress,  financial and military support was offered by the US to the Contras, the counter  revolutionary forces that were attempting to overthrow Nicaragua’s left wing government. They attempted to pull off a similar strategy in Iran, however things were complicated when  the Iran Hostage Crisis took place.

During which, Iranian backed Shi’ite terrorists took a number  of American diplomats and private contractors hostage. In order to secure the release of the  hostages, the NSC engaged in an arms deal with Iran, with plans to also channel the funds from  that deal to the Contras insurgents in Nicaragua. These illegal arms trading activities were  discovered in November of 1986, when a plane that was carrying supplies to the Contras was  shot down by the Sandinistas, and the pilot was taken prisoner.

Naturally, a public uproar quickly  followed in the US once this was brought to light. But that’s nowhere near as freaky as what  went on… In Operation Midnight Climax. While MKULTRA’s name lives in infamy, the  codename of Operation Midnight Climax is often forgotten about.

This was a sub project of  MKULTRA, specifically its mind control research program that started in the fifties. The  man in charge was one Sidney Gottleib, a CIA chemist and spymaster who was permitted to  test Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD on civilians… without their consent. Gottlieb was also that rogue CIA scientist we mentioned who stole all the shellfish poison  earlier.

Yes, this will be relevant later. Anyway, back to Midnight Climax. The CIA paid escorts to lure their clients into safehouses, where they were  administered with a wide and dangerous array of substances without their knowledge,  and observed from behind one-way-glass.

The unwilling participants were  pressed to reveal personal secrets, fed subliminal messages to make them carry  out actions involuntarily, including seeing whether under the influence of LSD they could be  convinced to carry out assaults, robberies and even assassinations. The goal was for the CIA to  determine if brainwashing was possible, and how to gain control over the minds of enemy spies. They also wanted to test whether LSD could be used during interrogations, and combined the drug  with intense isolation, dosing subjects and then keeping them confined and alone for months at  a time, with hardly any food or water.

Hundreds of federal agents and scientists took part  in these unethical experiments on innocent people before Operation Midnight Climax, and the  rest of MKULTRA, was shut down in the sixties. But we know what you’ve all been waiting  for… The deranged CIA secret weapon. Arguably the most infamous and unusual finding  of the Church Committee was the CIA’s very own ‘Heart Attack Gun’.

This secret weapon wasn’t  just a concept either, it was very real, and used in multiple assassinations. It worked  by firing a small poison dart filled with frozen shellfish toxin - hmm, wonder where they got that  - that would then trigger a heart attack in its target. The darts could easily pierce clothing,  and would be hardly felt by the target, leaving little more than a small red dot on the skin.

The darts would completely disintegrate when entering the target’s body, leaving little trace,  and allowing the poison to rapidly entire their bloodstream, causing a fatal heart attack.  After death, the poison denatures quickly, meaning detecting it in an autopsy is next  to impossible, causing the death to be chalked up to completely natural causes. The existence of this almost fictitious sounding weapon was revealed during the Church  Committee’s investigations and was verified by Congressional testimony on the CIA’s many  rogue espionage activities.

You can even find photos of Senator Church himself  holding the infamous Heart Attack Gun. Now check out “Inside the CIA’s Terrifying  ‘Sleep Room’. ” Or watch this video instead!