Unbelievable Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be TRUE

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We've talked about the strange  ritualistic goings-on at Bohemian Grove, mass government surveillance, and  secret CIA mind control experiments, but guess what? We're back with even more strange  conspiracy theories, notions that once seemed too ridiculous to be possible. But truth is often  stranger than fiction, and these theories are not just theories anymore!
At some point,  they were revealed to be (at least partially) fact. From companies hiding deadly secrets to  animal spies to the UFO sighting at Roswell, these are the Insane Conspiracy Theories  That Turned Out to be True- Part Three! The opioid crisis has ruined countless lives and  caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Even those who didn't lose their lives  in a literal sense have lost years to addiction, all because of the overprescription of highly  addictive painkillers that were not regulated in time to curb the disaster. But surely the  pharmaceutical companies responsible for the manufacturing, marketing, and sale of these drugs  wouldn't have let them spread so far if they had known just how addictive they would be. No one  could possibly be that morally bankrupt.
. . right?
Well, as it turns out, some people could, in  fact, be that morally bankrupt. Everyone who theorized that the pharmaceutical companies knew  what they were getting patients into was right. The opioid crisis was built on a foundation of  lies and conspiracy.
When OxyContin was first launched in 1996, physicians who purchased the  drug were told that it was weaker than morphine and that its slow-release properties made it  non-addictive, contrary to other painkillers of similar strengths. That would have been great  news if any of it had been true. OxyContin was, in fact, twice as strong as morphine and  was absolutely addictive.
And Purdue Pharma, along with the Sackler family, who founded  the company, knew this the entire time. According to previously sealed documents  obtained by ProPublica in 2019, the head of sales and marketing at Purdue, Michael  Friedman, emailed Dr Richard Sackler in 1997 about the difference between OxyContin's perceived  strength and its actual strength. Friedman wrote, "It would be extremely dangerous at this  early stage in the life of the product to make physicians think the drug is stronger or  equal to morphine….
We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone is weaker  than morphine. I do not plan to do anything about that. ” Oxycodone was the active ingredient in  OxyContin.
Sackler responded, "I agree with you. " A few days after that email conversation,  Sackler exchanged emails with Michael Cullen, another employee of the Purdue  Pharma company. Cullen wrote, "Since oxycodone is perceived as being a  weaker opioid than morphine, it has resulted in OxyContin being used much earlier for  non-cancer pain.
Physicians are positioning this product where Percocet, hydrocodone, and  Tylenol with codeine have been traditionally used. It is important that we be careful  not to change the perception of physicians toward oxycodone when developing promotional  pieces, symposia, review articles, studies, et cetera. ” In response, Sackler said, "I  think that you have this issue well in hand.
" Purdue was sued many times over the years for its  blatantly deceptive marketing of OxyContin, but it always settled these suits out of court in order  to avoid attracting too much negative attention. But then, in November 2020, Purdue finally  admitted responsibility on a public stage. Purdue pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the United  States, violating the Food, Drg, and Cosmetic Act and violating the Federal Anti-Kickback  Statute.
Attorney for the United States Rachael A. Honig said, “Purdue admitted that it  marketed and sold its dangerous opioid products to healthcare providers, even though it had reason  to believe those providers were diverting them to abusers. The company lied to the Drg Enforcement  Administration about steps it had taken to prevent such diversion, fraudulently increasing the amount  of its products it was permitted to sell.
Purdue also paid kickbacks to providers to encourage  them to prescribe even more of its products. ” We now go from one instance of corporate greed to  another, albeit with a much smaller body count. But first, we have a question for you.
Have you  ever done a google search on your own name? Were you surprised by just how many results there were?  And how many had your REAL address, phone number, and even things like health records  available for literally anyone to find?
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In response, they recommended everyone to use stronger passwords, monitor account activity,  and consider credit freezes or fraud alerts from credit bureaus. But I didn’t have to,  because Aura already does all this for me! And best of all, I didn’t have to download  a bunch of different apps just because a company couldn’t keep my data secure.
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com/infographics or use the link in the description to start your two week free trial!  Thanks to Aura, and now, back to the video. A few years ago, the more eccentric corners of  the internet were overrun with a conspiracy theory regarding the furniture company Wayfair.
Many  users insisted that Wayfair was secretly smuggling children and selling them via online listings.  Don't worry; we're not about to tell you that nonsense was true. It was, of course, widely  debunked and did not happen.
But that doesn't mean corporate smudging is entirely the stuff of  myth. In fact, craft store giant “Hobby Lobby” was exposed at the center of a massive smuggling  scandal. But they weren't smuggling people; they were smuggling artifacts, including one of the  oldest known works of literature in human history.
This scrapped Indiana Jones B-plot turned  reality began in 2009 when Hobby Lobby began collecting items to display in its new pet  project: The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D. C. In December of 2010, Hobby Lobby spent 1.
6  million dollars on various artifacts from Iraq, including cuneiform tablets, clay bullae, clay  envelope seals, and stone cylinder seals. Some of these items came with forged provenance  statements that the company did not bother to verify, while others had nothing to suggest  their previous ownership or history of sale, indicating that they had likely been  stolen or purchased on the black market. An expert hired by the company to appraise the  items warned that they appeared to have been acquired through less than savory means, but Hobby  Lobby ignored the warnings and proceeded to ship the items in multiple packages from Israel  to three different Hobby Lobby addresses.
The shipping labels lied about the contents of  these packages, describing them as ceramic tiles manufactured in Turkey, which were worth between  250 and 300 dollars. According to officials at U. S.
Customs, buying items for less than they  are worth, lying about provenance and value, and shipping to multiple addresses from another  country are all red flags that indicate smuggling. Five out of the eight packages were seized  by customs and never made it to Hobby Lobby. In 2017, the United States Department of  Justice filed a complaint against Hobby Lobby, ordering them to forfeit the objects that had made  it into the United States.
The reasoning for the complaint was twofold: first, the smuggling of  the items was a customs violation, and second, it was a violation of Iraq's patrimony laws,  making the smuggling operation also a violation of the US National Stolen Property Act. The  artifacts smuggled by Hobby Lobby for their Bible Museum were, according to archaeological  experts, likely stolen from the National Museum of Iraq as well as from archaeological sites. On July  5, 2017, Hobby Lobby agreed to a settlement: they would return the artifacts and pay a fine of $3  million.
All in all, they were required to forfeit over 5000 artifacts, which were returned to  Iraq. The company claimed that this was all a big misunderstanding and that they would avoid making  the same mistakes in the future. By mistakes, we mean "committing various crimes.
" As it turns out,  they did make the same supposed "mistake" again. In May 2020, the Department of Justice filed  another complaint against the company. This time, they were being ordered to forfeit a cuneiform  tablet from Iraq.
The tablet was none other than The Gilgamesh Dram Tablet, a Babylonian tablet  from 1600 BCE that contained a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Again, Hobby Lobby failed to  confirm the item's provenance, which was later revealed to have been faked. Hobby Lobby was  once again ordered to relinquish the artifact, and the authorities seized it.
Now, we're no  experts in the museum and antiquities business, but it seems like maybe Hobby Lobby  should just stick to crafts going forward. There are many conspiracy theories out there  that revolve around connections between those in political power and the forces of  the occult. Whether that concerns links to mysterious secret organizations  or supposed deals with the devil, it seems to be pretty popular to link politicians  to the supernatural.
That link was more than just a theory for one significant American political  figure. Like many other Southern California women before and after her, former First Lady  Nancy Reagan was very interested in astrology. In his 1965 book "Where's the Rest of Me?
" former  President Reagan described his and Nancy's daily routine of reading their astrological charts. In  an LA Times article, the spokesman for astrologer Carroll Righter mentioned that Reagan never  revealed his exact birth time publicly out of concern that people might read his birth chart  using this information and use it to control him. Of the two, Nancy was far more interested in the  stars and planets and their potential impact on all of our lives.
Though she and Ronald had both  long been interested in it, Nancy's fascination with astrology deepened following the trauma  of the 1981 attempt on Ronald Reagan's life. Wanting to have someone around who could have  predicted the assassination attempt, Nancy got back in touch with an old contact: a San Francisco  astrologer named Joan Quigley. This marked the start of a close relationship that would span  both of her husband's terms in the White House.
In his memoir "For the Record," former Reagan  Administration Chief of Staff Don Regan wrote that "Virtually every major move and decision  the Reagans made during my time as White House Chief of Staff was cleared in advance with this  woman in San Francisco who drew up horoscopes to make certain that the planets were in a favorable  alignment for the enterprise. According to Regan, President Reagan kept a color-coded  calendar based on Joan's advice, with each day corresponding to a color  based on how auspicious it would be. Good days were highlighted in green,  and red days were highlighted in red.
Nancy spoke with Joan almost every weekend,  though she kept their involvement a secret from the American public. After Don Regan's memoir  was published, complete with his vague complaints about the over-involvement of an astrologer in  Reagan's schedule, Quigley's name was leaked to the press by a member of the administration.  Nancy placed a frantic call to Joan's home, where Joan's sister Ruth picked up.
Nancy  insisted that "this must never come out! " Ruth asked if the Reagan administration would  perhaps acknowledge Joan's years of dedicated service after their time in office was  up. Nancy refused, and said, "Never.
" In 1990, Joan took the chance to tell her side of  the story in her memoir 'What Does Joan Say? . " In it, she made some bold claims about the extent  of her involvement in the Reagan presidency.
She described assisting with trade negotiations,  helping to prepare for public addresses, and keeping the President safe. She even claimed  to have read the horoscope of Gorbachev himself and took credit for affecting the relationship  between The United States and the Soviet Union. Have you ever noticed that your iPhone  seems to slow down every time a new model is released?
Or maybe you could swear  that your laptop hasn't run the same lately, no matter how many updates you  install? Well, as it turns out, that may not be your imagination. You can thank  the nasty little concept of Planned Obsolescence or the deliberate production of consumer  goods intended to become obsolete quickly, thus forcing customers to keep buying new products  rather than repairing the ones they already have.
In 2017, Apple was hit with a class action  lawsuit after admitting that, as many users had theorized for years, they deliberately slowed  down older iPhones. This is not the only example of Apple incentivizing people to throw out their  old phones and buy new ones, rather than keeping and maintaining the phones they already have.  The Halt Planned Obsolescence Association (or HOP) filed a complaint against the tech company  in 2023, prompting an investigation into the way that Apple handles its product repairs.
HOP hoped  that the investigation, led by a Paris prosecutor, would show Apple was "associating the serial  numbers of spare parts to those of a smartphone, including via microchips, giving the manufacturer  the possibility of restricting repairs by non-approved repairers or to remotely degrade  a smartphone repaired with generic parts. " Wired spoke with Elizabeth Chamberlain,  sustainability director at iFixit, about the investigation and an aspect of  Apple's alleged planned obsolescence known as "parts pairing. " This refers to the  linking of serial numbers mentioned by HOP.
Chamberlain elaborated on the practice,  stating, “In the iPhone, the way it shows up most perniciously is that if you try to swap two  screens from two working iPhones. " In these cases, the swapped screens either won't work or  will generate error messages stating that the screen is not verified. This lack of spare  parts leaves iPhone owners whose phone screens break with limited options.
They either have  to pay a specially branded Apple technician for an expensive repair or just throw in  the towel and buy a new phone altogether. Of course, Apple and other tech companies are  not the only culprits when it comes to Planned Obsolescence. Children's toys are frequently  made from low-durability plastics or soft metals, which will break quickly.
The fast fashion  industry uses a combination of cheap materials and rapidly changing trends to ensure that  their clothes have little staying power in any sense of the word. If it rips after  one wear or is out of style after a month, you'll have to buy something else! In summary,  many companies stand to benefit from making products that are not built to last.
The  shorter the product's lifespan, the more they can convince you to buy and the more profit  they stand to make. Corporate greed strikes again! Every time a new protest movement is born,  naysayers wait in the wings to claim that the protesters are not earnest advocates  for their cause.
The notion of the "paid protester" is a pervasive one, the idea  that anyone protesting the status quo is doing it not out of principles, but because  some shadowy figure is paying them. Often, this notion goes hand in hand with other  conspiracy theories, frequently antisemitic in nature, such as claims that George Soros was  funding anti-police brutality protests in 2020. But paid protesters do exist- they just don't  look like most vocal proponents of the theory, such as former incendiary talk  radio host Rush Limbaugh, imagine.
The FBI has a history of sending its  employees to infiltrate protests while undercover in civilian clothes. For example,  it was recently uncovered that approximately ten FBI informants were embedded in the  anti-Dakota Access pipeline protest camps near the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation  in 2016. In 2020, the FBI paid a convicted felon to act as an informant and infiltrator in the  protests against the killing of George Floyd by police.
Not only did the informant embed  himself in the protests, he is also alleged to have encouraged other protestors to become  increasingly violent in their activism while trying to entrap them. This practice is hardly  recent when it comes to the FBI. In the 1960s, Cointelpro saw the FBI place informants  in several activist movements including the Black Panthers with the same goal of sowing  dissent and increasing tensions within the ranks.
The FBI is not the only one behind these various  "paid protestors. " While Rahm Emanuel was serving as Mayor of Chicago, reporters at various  outlets including the Chicago Tribune broke the story that Chicago residents speaking out in  support of his school closures had actually been paid to be there. They weren't paid by Emanuel  himself, but rather Reverend Roosevelt Watkins, but they were still being paid to publicly  support Emanuel's policy decisions.
In 2009, the Guardian broke the story that  British police were using hundreds of paid informants to infiltrate protest groups and  feed information to the authorities. Some of the recordings provided to the Guardian as  evidence were made during meetings between Strathclyde Police and Matila Gifford, a member  of the environmental activist group Plane Stupid. In these recordings, Gifford was offered money  for information.
An exact amount was not named, but her student loans were brought up as  part of the bargain. During the recordings, the officers referred to the alleged network of  hundreds of informants at various organizations. In 2006, the Wall Street Journal revealed that  Kremlin-backed Russian emigres funded protests in the United States, paying protestors  to advocate for causes that benefitted the Russian government.
In 2012, in the wake  of anti-Putin demonstrations in Russia, massive crowds of Putin's admirers also turned  up to celebrate his inauguration. Or did they? Reporters at TIME determined that many of these  supposed supporters were being paid to show up.
They had been recruited through a website called  Massovki. ru. One man affiliated with the website, who asked that Time refer to him as Sergei  Vasilievich, described his experience paying rally attendants through the site.
"On a good day," he  said, about 40% of the demonstrators in attendance were paid. How much did one of these rallies  cost once everyone was paid out? About $137,000.
In 2011, a CNN article about  pro-Mubarak protesters in Cairo, Egypt, revealed that these counter-protestors  had been paid to be there by the government. These paid counter-protesters also  attacked anti-Mubarak demonstrators. So, there have been many documented cases of paid  protestors, but the person footing the bill tends to, more often than not, be a representative  of the status quo being protested.
Sometimes, they are on the same side as those raising  concerns about paid protesters in the first place. For example, Putin has previously claimed  that student demonstrators were being paid to protest him. When it comes to the paid protester's  panic, the call is coming from inside the house.
During the 2016 election, theories  began to circulate that deliberate misinformation and disinformation was being  spread by Russian operatives attempting to influence US politics. Oh, did you think we  were finished talking about Russia? Come on, the Russian government and conspiracies go  together like peanut butter and espionage.
In 2018, the US Senate released a report  claiming that Russian disinformation campaigns swept through YouTube, Tumblr,  Instagram, Paypal, Facebook, and Twitter in 2016 in an attempt to spread propaganda.  The report, compiled by the University of Oxford's Computational Propaganda Project, linked  these campaigns to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company alleged by the US Intelligence  Community as a "troll farm" with ties to the Russian government. The campaigns included a  spread of misinformation about the electoral process and messaging targeted at Conservatives,  encouraging them to support Trump in the election.
For a couple of years, the Russian disinformation  machine focused its attention on the war in Ukraine. Using claims about secret germ  warfare labs or Nazis embedded in Ukraine, the campaign attempted to reduce support  for Ukraine in the United States. But now, in 2024, the efforts to interfere in US  elections do not appear to have stopped.
They have just taken on new forms.  AP News reported on March 1, 2024, that Russian state media and "online accounts tied  to the Kremlin" had been spreading misinformation about immigration and immigrant crime with the  intent of stoking fears surrounding the Mexican border. These posts have been described  as misleading or even entirely fabricated.
One campaign known as Doppelganger has continued  to thrive on Facebook largely unchecked, even after being exposed in 2022 and sanctioned  by the EU. This campaign does not focus on US citizens but instead targets European voters,  attracting the attention of French and German authorities. French minister for European  affairs Jean-Noel Barrot spoke on the subject, saying, "In the past six weeks, there has  not been one week without a coordinated disinformation campaign affecting France.
" The  campaign has largely consisted of political ads being bought and pushed by doppelgangers  on Facebook, using thousands of fake pages. Meta promised to review these pages, but  the misinformation is popping up more quickly than it can be removed. Belgian Prime Minister  Alexander de Croo weighed in on the problem as well, " According to our intelligence  services, Moscow’s objectives are clear: help elect more pro-Russian candidates to  the European Parliament and reinforce the pro-Russian narrative in that institution.
" Only  time will tell if these efforts are successful and if social media companies will be able  to put a stop to these widespread campaigns. Now for something completely different and much  less stressful. One of the funniest conspiracy theories is one that pretty much no  one actually believes: Birds aren't real.
Popularized by a Vine video that later  ballooned into a grassroots parody movement, "Birds aren't real" insists that all birds in  the United States were killed by the Reagan administration and replaced with spies that  now monitor our every move. Don't freak out; we're not about to tell you that the pigeon  outside your window is actually a spy drone. But the US government using animals as  spies is not actually so farfetched.
In the 1960s, the CIA was determined to find a  new, innovative way to spy on Soviet embassies. So, did they use birds? Of course not!
Don't  be ridiculous! They used cats. "Operation Acoustic Kitty" was a plan concocted by the CIA  to turn cats into spying devices.
This would be accomplished by implanting a microphone in the  cat's ear and a transmitter at the base of its skull. Once the cat was sufficiently bugged (and  probably pretty annoyed, too), it would be trained to sit near foreign officials and record their  conversations. You know how cats are universally known for being easy to train?
What's that? It's  the opposite? Well, that would explain why the first (and only) official test went so poorly.
The  CIA prepared an Acoustic Kitty and drove it to a park, leaving it to record the conversation  between two men sitting on a bench. Rather than sitting still, the cat wandered into the  street, where it was unfortunately hit by a taxi. The Acoustic Kitty project was swiftly abandoned,  but the CIA did not give up hope when it came to turning animals into spies.
We lied to you  before. Conspiracies are everywhere, even here at The Infographics Show. There were, in fact, bird  spies during the Cold War.
Pigeons, to be exact. The CIA's Office of Research and Development  came up with a camera small and light enough for a pigeon to carry it. The camera was attached to  the pigeon with a harness and then deployed over an area the CIA wanted to collect more information  on.
When the pigeon returned, the pictures would be ready for review. The CIA also trained a raven  to drop bugging devices on window sills around the same time, but no usable audio was picked up  from the devices the Agency managed to place. The CIA didn't just use real animals as  spies- they also created fake animals too!
While looking for a way to collect water  samples without being detected in certain areas, the Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs  developed a pair of unmanned underwater vehicles shaped like catfish, dubbed Charlie and  Charlene. These remote-controlled fish would collect water samples that the CIA could inspect  for nuclear runoff or other suspicious substances. Birds may be real, but what if we told you bugs  aren't real?
We'd be lying, mostly, but still. It's more like "one bug in particular isn't  real. " In the 1970s, the CIA Office of Research and Development created the "Insectothopter," an  unmanned aerial vehicle disguised as a dragonfly.
Originally, the plan was to disguise the UAV  as a bumblebee, but the department worried it would be unable to replicate the unpredictable  flight patterns of bees. Additionally, anyone who spotted the fake bee might have tried to swat  it out of fear of being stung. So, a dragonfly it was.
The Insectothopter was a listening device,  or a "bug," with a small engine making its wings flap up and down. It was fast enough to pass  as the real thing, able to fly 200 meters in 60 seconds But there was one unexpected obstacle  to the little spy bug: the wind. In crosswinds over five miles per hour, the Insectothopter  would be blown away.
There is not much use for a spy who can be defeated by a light breeze. In 1947, something strange fell from the sky over Roswell, New Mexico. This unidentified  flying object attracted national attention, especially from those who believed in  extraterrestrial life.
The US Air Force announced that the object was not a flying saucer  but a weather balloon. Still, theories swirled that the whole thing was a government coverup  intended to keep people from learning the truth: that aliens had crash-landed on Earth. Well,  they were right.
Not about the aliens part (probably). But those who doubted the official  story from the Air Force were onto something. What fell from the sky over Roswell was  not a weather balloon or a flying saucer but the property of Project Mogul.
Roger Launius, former curator of space history at the  Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, spoke with Smithsonian Magazine about  the whole saga, stating, "Apparently, it was better from the Air Force's perspective  that there was a crashed ‘alien’ spacecraft out there than to tell the truth. " So what exactly was  Project Mogul, and why be so secretive about it? Project Mogul was a classified government  program in which high-altitude balloons were launched into the ionosphere, intended  to monitor Russian nuclear testing.
The Project Mogul balloons were sent up  to an altitude of 10-20 kilometers, where they would ride the upper jet stream toward  Russia. "But, obviously," Launius said, "something happened to this one balloon. It came back to  Earth and probably was spread across a wide area.
" The true story of Roswell came out in the '90s  when a New Mexico representative asked the General Accounting Office to apply pressure to  the Pentagon regarding the declassification of Roswell-related documents. An Air Force report  was released in 1994, concluding that Roswell was "most likely from one of the Mogul balloons  that had not been previously recovered. " This seems to line up with reports that one of the  balloons launched in New Mexico in June of 1947 was never recovered after its mission.
Of course,  by the time the Air Force admitted the true story, it was too late to put the proverbial alien  genie back in its bottle. America had a raging case of UFO fever, and the only cure was  more UFOs - more theorizing, speculating, and searching for proof of life beyond our galaxy.  Many still believe that the cover-up never ended and that the Project Mogul explanation  is just another layer of government lies.
Have you ever heard the expression, "Just because  you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you? " While that's not productive advice  for most people, especially private citizens, it seems it may have applied to one of  America's most famous writers. A.
E. Hotchner, author of the books "Papa Hemingway" and  "Hemingway and His World," wrote in the New York Times that he believed Hemingway's  tragic death may have been linked to his long-held belief that the FBI was spying on him.  Hotchner described an encounter with Hemingway in November 1960, where Hemingway said, "It's the  worst hell.
The goddamnedest hell. They've bugged everything. That's why we're using Duke's car. 
Mine's bugged. Everything's bugged. Can't use the phone.
Mail intercepted. " At the time,  this was regarded as a paranoid delusion, but history has revealed that Hemingway was  right about the FBI's interest in spying on him. In the 1980s, Hemingway's FBI file was  declassified after a Freedom of Information request by Jeffrey Myers at the University  of Colorado.
The file cataloged Hemingway's ties to antifacist work and included a  report from the special agent who had been ordered to follow Hemingway and spy on him  in person. The file was over 120 pages long, suggesting that Hoover and the Bureau  were much more interested in monitoring Hemingway than anyone realized  while the writer was still alive. We started this video with corporate  greed, and we're ending it with—you guessed it!
Even more corporate greed! Lead  gasoline used to be completely normalized, standard to find at any gas station. Of  course, lead is highly dangerous and has been linked to an incredible number of health  problems.
So, how could the gas companies not know the potential consequences? You  know this next part by now. They did.
In 1921, a General Motors engineer named  Thomas Midgely Jr. realized a new additive that could be used to eliminate the knocking  (or uneven burn of fuel) in car engines: tetraethyl lead, also known as TEL! Sure, they  could have used ethanol for the same purpose, but that couldn't be patented or controlled  by GM, so why do that?
So TEL was selected, in spite of the fact that in 1922, a Du Pont  executive described it as "very poisonous if absorbed through the skin, resulting in lead  poisoning almost immediately. " But it went to market anyway, and in February of 1923, the  first tank of leaded gasoline was sold. Meanwhile, Midgely was at home in bed, sick with  severe lead poisoning.
Imagine that. The following year, five workers died from  TEL exposure at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, but the leaded gasoline  continued to be sold. There was even a public health service report in 1926 that  claimed there was "no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline" as long as there  was a way to protect the workers while they made it.
Leaded gasoline was finally banned in  1996, but by then, the damage was already done to entire generations of children exposed to  the poison. Lead exposure in children has been linked to neurological injuries, hyperactivity,  behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and even an increase in violent crime. Even  without leaded gasoline being sold anymore, the lead lingers in the environment, left behind  by gasoline fumes from decades past.
But hey, at least the engines weren't knocking  anymore. That's worth it, right? Now check out “Insane Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to be True.
”  Or watch this video instead!
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The Beast That Devoured an Entire Japanese...
The Infographics Show
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