5 Absurd (But Mind Blowing) Pop Culture Conspiracy Theories

It's hard enough to make a good movie or TV show, but apparently some of the stuff you watch or listen to also contains secret hidden messages that only close examination will reveal. Or, at least, that's what countless conspiracy theorists around the internet would have us believe.

The strange thing is, sometimes they'll produce a piece of evidence so eerily convincing, it's like they've waved their hands and made your sanity disappear. Here are five of pop culture conspiracy theorist's most convincing nuggets, and a look behind the curtain at how they get you ...

We have previously mentioned that the Fox X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen had become an obsession with conspiracy theorists ever since 9/11. The reason is the pilot episode--which aired a year before the attacks--featured a plot to hijack a 747 and fly it into the World Trade Center.

We're guessing this screen capture is the most any of you have ever seen of it.

But if you Google "Simpsons predict 9/11" you find that in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons did the same, in a much more obscure yet creepy manner. In the episode, the family goes to New York. And, while it's not that weird that the Twin Towers would be featured in the episode (Homer's car gets stuck there due to parking tickets)...

...this is pretty freaking creepy:

Holy shit! They're totally using the towers to make the "11" in 9/11! That's not Photoshop, either. The clip is all over YouTube, go look.

Why it's Bullshit:

It's fun to imagine that the world's strings are secretly being pulled by an underground group of powerful men, and that Rupert Murdoch, the founder and CEO of the Fox networks' parent corporation, is a member. But the reality has a lot more to do with statistics. It turns out a show that hits on as many real world subjects as The Simpsons will accidentally "predict" a number of events if it's on the air for 20 years, four presidential administrations and approximately 60 million episodes. For instance it "predicted" that the universe would turn out to be doughnut shaped, and that Roy of Siegfried and Roy would be mauled by one of his own tigers.

That tiger's been on the Bilderberg Group's payroll for years.

It's also a matter of statistics if you look at the source. If you let a crazy person rant long enough, they're bound to hit on a strange coincidence that makes you cock your head to the side. In this case, the epicenter of the conspiracy seems to be the remarkably crazy radio talk show host Alex Jones, who's other hobbies include blaming the Jews for, well, everything. Of course, Jones has little to say about the Illuminati anti-Roy, pro-tiger mauling policy.

The fact is, if you look hard enough, you can find plenty of other movies, TV shows and books "foreshadowing" the attacks. Go get your DVD of The Big Lebowski and watch the beginning: The Dude's check is dated September 11th. And, playing on the television while he fills it out, is President Bush, Sr. giving his famous "This will not stand" speech from 1990... a speech about the need to go to war in Iraq. The Coen Brothers were in on it, too!

As for The Lone Gunmen, they came up with the idea of using an airliner as a weapon for the same reason the terrorists did: It just seemed like a good way to carry out a terror attack. Years earlier, it happened in a Tom Clancy novel (1994's Debt of Honor) and a decade before that, in a Stephen King novella (The Running Man--yes, the one that would become a Schwarzenegger movie, they just took out the airliner-into-the-skyscraper climax).

But just for fun, let's say that Rupert Murdoch knew about the attacks ahead of time thanks to his Illuminati connections. Why insert that fact into your freaking prime time TV shows? How would subliminal hints about what's coming be helpful to a plot allegedly intended to shock the public into submission to the New World Order and martial law?

Let's let Alex Jones explain it. Quote:

"They believe because of what they're into, you call it Kabbalah or whatever, it's all the same junk that, you know, these groups are into, it's called lesser magic, they believe if you show what you're going to do before, in a riddle--it's like the legend of the vampire, they've got to trick their way into your house."

Sounds crazy now, right? Well that man's show gets approximately one million listeners each and every day.

Open up Microsoft Word. Or any word processor with Wingdings font. Type "NYC."

This is what you get:

Somewhere right now, Mel Gibson's ears are burning.

The Wingdings controversy experienced a resurgence shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when somebody found out that typing "Q-3-3-N-Y" displayed an image eerily similar to an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center.

Still not convinced something's up? This one actually crossed over into the mainstream media even before 9/11. Back in the 90s somebody noticed the Wingdings thing and The New York Post went nuts with theories that somehow this was a hidden message urging death to the Jews. And if they believe it, well ...

Why it's Bullshit:

... it could very easily be sensational bullshit they made up on a slow news day.

Above: The New York Post.

Appropriately, a magician did a damn fine job of explaining how this particular trick works. As Penn Jillette put it in an essay on the subject:

"To me, [poison] [Star of David] [thumbs up] means 'Jewish people make really good pesticides'" and, "Once you're crazy and know nothing about numbers, the chances of finding something psychotic and hateful in a Scrabble factory explosion are hovering just around 100 percent."

And then he juggled for a while.

As for the coded reference to 9/11, well, remember that to get that, you have to type in Q33NY. How does Q33 link to 9/11? It doesn't. As Microsoft (shouldn't have had to have) noted, Wingdings is just random bullshit. When the letters you're typing to get your "coded message" don't have to correspond to anything coherent, you can make them say any crazy thing you want.

Or you could back up before Microsoft had to update their random jumble of coded images to protect themselves from the crazies. When you type NYC in the new Webdings font, you get this:

Dear Internet:
Maybe Vista would have worked better if we didn't have to spend so much time reverse engineering an obscure font around your crazy bullshit.
-Microsoft

On October 19, 2007, J. K. Rowling revealed a secret that the Muggle community is still reeling over: Hogwarts' headmaster Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was gay. From this, those on the fringes of the evangelical community decided that the entire Harry Potter series, and with it the entire wizarding world, is in fact a front for the single largest homosexual conspiracy since musical theater.

At first, it seems like the type of crazy knee-jerk homophobia we've come to expect from the lunatic religious fringe. But then you read the detailed decoding in this article:

"The story is about a boy who lives in a cupboard (i.e. "in the closet"). His Aunt and Uncle are ashamed of him because his parents were quite eccentric (i.e. "flaming") and they are deeply concerned and afraid that he will turn out just like them. On his 11th birthday (i.e. roughly at the onset of puberty), the boy discovers that he is actually a 'wizard,' different in both style and substance from normal people, or 'muggles' (i.e. 'breeders'). The boy is groomed into his new existence by a large, hairy bear of a man who shows Harry a hidden underground community of 'wizards' living right under the noses of the general population (i.e. the gay subculture). Harry's first trip to this subculture involves traveling through 'Diagon Alley,' a play on the word diagonally (i.e. not straight)."

And they weren't the only ones to notice the trend, and far from the most high profile.

So, stripping out all of the paranoia about the evil gay agenda, doesn't it seem possible Rowling wanted Harry Potter to symbolize the struggle of a young boy with "weird" feelings, trying to find his place in society?

Much like this film.

Why it's Bullshit:

If anybody has a right to be upset about Rowling's "Dumbledore is gay" announcement, it's the gay community. After all, the only gay character in the entire Harry Potter universe is so deeply in the closet that tens of millions of people were able to read seven long novels without figuring it out. That's how she "openly promoted homosexuality through her work"?

And for a supposed allegory for gay teens, Harry Potter himself is one hell of a man's man. The guy played hide the broomstick with his best friend's sister, gets to first base with a Scottish Asian, nearly banged a ghost, picked up a pair of twin Indian sisters with zero difficulty and would have probably whipped out his wand for that chick in the London Underground had that asshole Dumbledore not cockblocked him.

So what's the idea here? That Rowling is trying to reach out to closeted teens by telling a story of a confused young boy with similar feelings? That makes perfect sense if she believes part of the young gay experience is touching lots o' boobs. And that she decided to only out Dumbledore, but keep her brilliant hidden metaphor about the rest of the story a secret.

As for us, we're going to stick with the most straight forward interpretation. Harry Potter stood for nothing more nefarious than witchcraft and Satanism: