Conspiracy Theories About US Presidents You Never Knew About

There’s a growing belief among journalists, academics, and average people that conspiracy theories are more common and widespread than at any other point in time in history, thanks to the speed at which the internet can disseminate information or misinformation. Besides, how could people have believed in tinfoil hat conspiracy theories before tinfoil was even invented?

However, while there is certainly a public perception that conspiracies are more prevalent than ever, there isn’t really evidence to back this up. A 2022 research paper looked into the topic and found that there was no notable increase in the number of conspiracies or the percentage of people believing them, though it was possible that the conspiracies had become more visible because of the internet. That didn’t mean that people believed or interacted with the conspiracies, just they had seen them and were at least vaguely aware of them.

That said, the researchers admitted the limitations of their own study, as they had to rely on public surveys for the majority of their data. And since this topic didn’t become the subject of serious research until relatively recently, that data is often hard to find.

But even if they’re more visible now, conspiracy theories have existed since time immemorial. In fact, they were arguably more popular back when information traveled much slower, as the average person’s baseline knowledge wasn’t as high as it is now and it took a lot longer for conspiracy theories to be disproven. Assuming they weren’t actually true.

Admittedly most of the presidential conspiracy theories we’ll be talking about today are from the last century or so, but that’s just because they’re better documented and are about things that our readers are more likely to care about.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that conspiracies are a real thing that exist sometimes. Most of the theories we’ll be discussing today are clearly nonsensical bullshit, but at least one of these theories was actually proven to be true. But before we get to conspiracy theories related to specific presidents, I want to address a theory that has been applied to nearly every president over the past 100 years.

Presidential Assassination Insurance

The founding fathers meant well, but they made some really big mistakes. Among them was the way that the Constitution stipulated that the president would be elected. And I’m not just talking about the Electoral College and the resulting Three-Fifths Compromise, though the number of people who have won the presidency despite losing the popular vote by millions is certainly concerning.

But the bigger problem was that there was a single ballot for president, and whoever came in second place would become the vice president. And look, if you’re an optimistic idealist, I can totally see why this would have seemed like a reasonable solution. However, it didn’t take long for America to realize their epic blunder.

John Adams won the 1796 presidential election as the candidate for the Federalist Party. Ideally another Federalist would have been vice president, but the electors split their votes among multiple possible contenders. As a result, Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republican Party got the second most votes for president, thus becoming the vice president.

While the drafters of the Constitution likely believed that the two men would put their differences aside and work together to do what was best for the American people, they absolutely did not. It became immediately clear that having a president and vice president who refused to work together was a disaster, and that such a situation needed to be avoided in the future. So the Constitution only was able to survive a single president before people realized they fucked up, and the only reason it lasted that long was because George Washington was unanimously elected both times and was absolutely opposed to partisan politics.

Anyway, to fix this for the presidential election of 1800, the parties decided to put forth tickets of a presidential and vice presidential candidate. Problem solved, right? Not so much. Even though the parties had done this, it wasn’t codified into law.

Electors still each cast two votes for president, and the votes were not distinguished in any way. But the parties had a workaround for this. They would all vote for who they wanted to be president, and every elector except for one would vote for who they wanted to be vice president.

The Democratic-Republican Party ran Thomas Jefferson as their presidential candidate and Aaron Burr as the vice presidential candidate, but it was expected to be a close race. It was such a close race that all of the electors were afraid of being the person to abstain from voting for Burr, as they feared multiple people might do so and there would wind up being a Federalist vice president. It didn’t help that information traveled so slowly back then that everybody assumed an elector in a different state must have had the responsibility of being the abstaining vote.

Since not a single person broke rank, the result was a tie. Jefferson and Burr received the same number of votes for president, so the tie had to be broken by Congress. But on the plus side, this clusterfuck resulted in Congress and the states pretty much speedrunning the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, which had electors vote for president and vice president separately.

That solved the problem of having parties split the presidency and vice presidency, but it created a new problem: the vice president wasn’t really important anymore. Thanks to the creation of presidential tickets, people were really only voting for the president with the VP being more of an afterthought. This was reflected not only by public perception but by the diminishing role the VP played in governance. Running mates were increasingly chosen to balance out factors like the relative age of candidates, or candidates from small states picking a VP from a big state (because the candidates pretty much always win their home state, so it was free electoral college votes).

In fact, the VP became such a seemingly meaningless job that Woodrow Wilson’s vice president Thomas Marshall famously said, “Once there were two brothers. One ran away to sea, the other was elected Vice President, [and] nothing was ever heard from either of them again.” And with the vice presidency becoming such a meaningless position, this created an opportunity.

Why choose a running mate that you trusted to follow through with your agenda when you could instead choose someone so incompetent, unqualified, or in the case of Dick Cheney so purely evil that nobody in their right mind would dare assassinate you for fear of who would take over instead?

While it may have started even earlier than I can find, the earliest definitive evidence of this conspiracy theory I can find ironically surrounds JFK, who people argue would have been assassinated much sooner were it not for the fact that Lyndon Johnson would become president. The same has been said about Bush Senior running with Dan Quayle, Bush Junior running with Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton running with a lifeless mannequin.

Although this idea is typically considered a conspiracy theory, it’s not necessarily wrong. Richard Nixon is quoted as explicitly referring to Spiro Agnew as his “assassination insurance”, going on to say “No assassin in his right mind would kill me. They know that if they did they would end up with Agnew.”

Admittedly, while this does highlight public distrust of elected officials and manipulative tactics they might be employing, I recognize that this isn’t what most people think of when they think of conspiracies. Well don’t worry, there will be plenty of conspiracy theories about aliens in this article. But for now, let’s move onto something much more salacious.

John Quincy Adams Was a Literal Pimp

Ever since it was the parenthetical title of a 1987 single off Ice-T’s album Rhyme Pays, the phrase “pimpin’ ain’t easy” has been uttered untold millions of times. While it’s true that any sort of illicit enterprise brings with it certain risks and pitfalls, pimpin’ is probably a Hell of a lot easier when you’re protected by diplomatic immunity. And that is precisely what the sixth President of the United States, John Quincy Adams, was accused of.

The presidential election of 1824 was sort of a shit show. There were four major candidates, but nobody won the majority. Andrew Jackson came closest with 41% of the popular vote and 99 out of 261 electoral votes, but a president is required to win a majority to become elected; a plurality won’t cut it.

According to the Twelfth Amendment we discussed a bit earlier, in the event that no presidential candidate won a majority, the president would be voted on by the House of Representatives. This had the possibility to result in one of the most epically corrupt moments in American history, as Speaker of the House Henry Clay had been one of the presidential candidates. Unfortunately for Clay he came in fourth in the running, and the House was only allowed to vote among the top three candidates.

However, although Jackson had won a plurality of the vote and expected to be elected by Congress, Clay used his considerable influence as Speaker of the House to instead get John Quincy Adams elected. This led to the conspiracy among Jackson and his voters that Adams and Clay had engaged in a “corrupt bargain”, a secret backroom deal to make Adams the president instead of Jackson. Though never proven, this conspiracy gained a lot of traction following Adams’ inauguration when he made Clay his Secretary of State.

Things only escalated from there, and the 1828 election was one of the most scandalous in American history. There was mud being slung from both sides at incredible rates, much of it conspiratorial in nature. Adams accused Jackson of immoral conduct and accused his wife Rachel of adultery, accusations that were technically true. When Jackson and Rachel got married, they were under the assumption that Rachel’s first husband had filed for divorce.

He hadn’t, so the first few years of their marriage were technically in violation of bigamy laws.

This was a really sensitive topic for Jackson. He had killed a man in a duel for talking about it, and his hot-headed nature and irrational responses to objective fact made it a favourite topic among his political rivals as a way to piss Jackson off. That wasn’t a good idea though, because rather than fighting back using facts about Adams, Jackson instead spread a bunch of wild conspiracies about him instead.

Not only were there the allegations of a corrupt backroom deal with Clay (which very much might have been true), but Jackson and his supporters accused Adams of using taxpayer money to install poker tables in the White House so he could engage in illegal gambling. They also accused him of outright theft of taxpayer money, claiming he was overstating his expenses and pocketing the difference.

But the most scandalous conspiracy surrounding Adams was that, when he was stationed in Russia as the United States ambassador back in the early 1800s, he had been working as a pimp for Tsar Alexander I. Specifically, Adams had hired a young American maid for his wife, and he was accused of renting the woman out to the Tsar for other activities.

Even though there was no evidence to support any of these claims, it was enough to swing the 1828 election in Jackson’s favour. The United States simply wasn’t ready to have a pimp as their president.

Teddy Roosevelt Orchestrated the Panamanian Revolution

In the late 1800s, President William McKinley was looking for the best place to build a canal to cut across Central America. There were talks of building a canal in Nicaragua, but when the search was expanded it was determined that Panama was the best possible location for such a canal. And despite McKinley ordering two separate commissions to find a location for a canal, the answer they decided on was nothing new.

People had theorized about the possibility of building a canal through the Columbian owned Department of Panama for centuries (though the area had different names over the years), and at the time the French were currently in the process of trying to construct a canal. Oh yeah, and “department” is basically just the Columbian word for its states, in case there was any confusion.

Anyway, the French gave it a good effort for over a decade, but they eventually gave up and were just keeping enough workers there to fulfill their contractual obligations. The French no longer had any interest in building a canal, but they wanted to sell the contract for the land and all their equipment off for $109 million, or just over $4 billion today.

After McKinley was assassinated, Teddy Roosevelt took over. And really, having Teddy Roosevelt as your vice president is the opposite of assassination insurance. That was pretty much begging somebody to murder him. Anyway, Roosevelt looked through all of the information regarding possible routes through Central America, and he agreed that Panama was the way to go. But $109 million was entirely too much to pay for it.

Fortunately, that wasn’t an official offer made by Compagnie Nouvelle, the company in charge of the project. Details of the report Roosevelt received were leaked to the company’s general manager, Philippe Bunau-Varilla. Philippe had essentially been stranded in Panama for years and wanted to get out, so he spoke with the shareholders and got them to agree to make a formal offer of $40 million instead of the $109 million they had been looking for.

That was a really good deal, but the United States was able to negotiate an even better one. Instead of $40 million all at once, they would pay $10 million upfront and lease the land from Columbia in perpetuity for $250,000 per year. As long as they kept paying they would control the land, and after 100 years that would still only have been $35 million in total.

It was a really good deal, and the United States Congress was quick to ratify the treaty. However, the Columbian Senate refused to ratify it. The idea of the United States taking control of the land currently being leased by the French was wildly unpopular in Columbia, and they also felt like they were being severely underpaid compared to the value of the land. To be fair, they absolutely were.

This left Teddy in a bind. He wanted the Panama Canal, but Columbia didn’t want to give it to him. What was a man to do? Well according to conspiracy theorists, Teddy and the United States made a bunch of secret deals with the Panamanian separatists to incite them to revolt with the promise of aid from the US military. And as official documents would later reveal, the conspiracy theorists were 100% correct about this.

Teddy Roosevelt absolutely incited the Panamanian Revolution because he was pissed off Columbia wouldn’t ratify their treaty, and he sent the US navy to blockade Panama’s shores, preventing Columbia from sending reinforcements to fight off the rebellion. The result was a relatively quick battle for independence with minimal bloodshed, with Panama obviously emerging victorious.

And now that Panama was its own nation, their new ambassador to the US, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, was happy to negotiate a deal for the Panama Canal. In fact, he negotiated the exact same deal they had previously agreed to: $10 million up front and $250,000 per year in perpetuity for as long as the US wanted to continue leasing the land from Panama.

Philippe was in such a hurry to get this deal done and get the fuck out of Panama that, in a single night, he drafted the nation’s constitution, designed their flag, created a structure for their military, and even offered to loan them money from his own personal account to help get them started. Panama didn’t take all of his ideas, but it was clear that Philippe was willing to do anything to make the sale go through so he could leave.

Events like these serve as a nice reminder that, while a lot of conspiracies sound ridiculous, the US government absolutely will incite revolutions and create entirely new nation states just to further their own interests.

Warren Harding was Murdered By His Wife for Cheating

The death of a president in office is always the cause of lots of speculation and discussion. Or so I’m told, anyway; the last president to die in office of natural causes was 80 years ago. Still, a seemingly healthy and well-liked president suddenly dying while in office is the stuff of wet dreams for conspiracy minded individuals, and President Warren Harding’s death did not disappoint.

It was the summer of 1923, and Harding was on a 15,000 mile speaking tour spanning the entire United States. He had even traveled to Alaska to speak, making him the first US President to ever visit the state. Things were going great, and there were big plans to exploit this trip as part of his reelection campaign the following year.

But on July 27, shortly after giving a speech at the University of Washington, Harding fell ill. He went to bed early and called for one of his personal doctors, Charles Sawyer. Charles was a homeopathic doctor who had served as Harding’s doctor for years before he became president. Harding brought Charles with him to the White House, though he was also given the much better Dr. Joel Boone to treat him as well.

Harding was complaining of upper abdominal pain that night, but Sawyer believed it was nothing serious, just some gastrointestinal issues. This was nothing new, as Harding had suffered from GI issues for some time, as well as dealing with a now defunct diagnosis of neurasthenia, a nerve condition which modern researchers believe may have been dysautonomia. For those unfamiliar with dysautonomia, that’s when your body just kinda forgets to do all of those things it’s supposed to do subconsciously, like regulate body temperature, heart rate, and whatnot.

He had also been diagnosed with an enlarged heart, though as far as I can tell this was just based on various symptoms he had like fatigue and shortness of breath, not from any sort of visual confirmation that his heart was enlarged. Either way, his doctors had advised him not to spend so much time vigorously fucking on account of his heart, advice that he was happy to ignore.

Over the next week Harding’s condition appeared to be going up and down. There was some improvement, but then it became clear his heart was the problem. There was even some pneumonia thrown in there for good measure. Charles prescribed things like caffeine, laxatives, and arsenic (which was commonly used as medicine at the time), despite Joel’s protestations. But it seemed to be helping, and Harding’s condition seemed to improve.

On the afternoon of August 2, the bedridden Harding appeared to have improved enough that he was allowed to sit up in bed. His wife, Florence, came in to read him an article from The Saturday Evening Post titled “A Calm Review of a Calm Man”. The entire article was just praising Harding, something he seemed to quite enjoy. As Florence read to him, Harding spoke his final words, “That’s good. Go on, read some more.” He then convulsed a bit before immediately dropping dead.

The cause of death was officially reported as being “a stroke of cerebral apoplexy”, what we’d now just call cerebral hemorrhaging. It is now believed that Harding died of a heart attack, but the symptoms of cardiac arrest were poorly understood at the time so it wasn’t given a lot of serious consideration. We can’t be certain how he died though, because for some reason Florence refused to allow an autopsy and demanded he be embalmed immediately.

At the time of his presidency, Harding had been extremely well liked. Not just in the United States, but around the world. However, following his death, an endless stream of scandals began to be uncovered.

First, there were all the extramarital affairs, at least one of which resulted in an illegitimate daughter. It was long speculated that he fathered an illegitimate child, but this was eventually confirmed in 2015 through DNA testing. Much worse than moral shortcomings, however, was the amount of corruption that existed during his presidency.

The homeopath Charles Sawyer wasn’t the only wholly unqualified person that Harding had brought with him to Washington. He filled important positions with his friends, many of whom he had met in Ohio while working as a state level politician. A few of them worked out well, a few were stated as doing “minimal damage”, but a number of them were wildly corrupt. It’s almost as if appointing your friends and large dollar campaign contributors to cabinet positions or as leaders of important government agencies is a terrible idea that severely damages the country.

The most corrupt of Harding’s appointees became known as The Ohio Gang, because of their connection to Ohio state politics. The years following Harding’s death contained a deluge of scandals related to his time as president, and his reputation was completely destroyed. But one of the most persistent stories from this time came from the 1930 book The Strange Death of President Harding, written by Gaston Means, a well known bootlegger, conman, and member of the Harding Administration.

There were a lot of scandalous accusations in the book, many of which were known to be true, such as the Teapot Dome affair. But the story that really grabbed people’s attention was the allegation that Harding had actually been poisoned to death by Florence, with the aid of the quack doctor. The motivation for this murder was of course his incessant cheating on her.

In terms of creating a conspiracy, Gaston really couldn’t have done a better job. He picked a person who was in the years long process of being publically disgraced, included a bunch of real scandals in his book, and then made up a story that seemed totally plausible rather than being an outlandish lie. However, if you want to pull something like this off, remember to pay your fucking ghost writer.

Gaston had been part of the Harding administration, so he knew a lot of dirt and it made sense to market the book as being written by him. But the actual author was May Dixon Thacker, and she eventually came out to say that the story about Florence murdering her husband was a total and complete fabrication. While she claimed to be upset that Gaston had made her write down lies about the former president, her real complaint was that he was stiffing her on the royalty checks.

Despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the conspiracy theory and the fact that the book’s writer explicitly said it was all a lie, this story has continued to persist for decades. It’s almost 100 years later, and there are still tons of people who believe that Florence assassinated the president for cheating on her. And hey, if she was so innocent, then why wouldn’t she let the doctors perform an autopsy?

FDR Allowed Pearl Harbor to Happen

Now we come up on slightly more modern times, which means these are the theories you’re more likely to have some experience with. And this particular conspiracy theory has been popular literally since the day it originally happened.

If you’re familiar with the name Thomas Dewey, it is likely only as the butt of jokes. A month before the 1948 presidential election, polls predicted that Dewey would win in a landslide so severe that the incumbent Harry Truman may as well drop out of the race.

The Chicago Daily Tribune was using a rather unique sort of printing press at the time, one that required them to go to print hours before other major newspapers. Not all of the states had finished counting ballots and projected a winner yet, so the Tribune just went with all the polling and the advice of their veteran Washington political analyst. The result was a gleeful Harry Truman celebrating his successful reelection by holding up a copy of the Tribune that ran the headline “Dewey Defeats Truman”. That’s what most people know him for, but four years earlier in the lead up to the 1944 presidential election, Dewey had the power to singlehandedly change the course and potentially outcome of World War II.

When war broke out across Europe, it was incredibly unpopular in the United States. I mean, I’m sure it was unpopular amongst all the people the Nazis were invading and committing war crimes against as well, but the idea of stepping in to help was really unpopular over here. A lot of people thought that entering World War I was a mistake, and about 80-90% of US citizens supported neutrality in the face of what was considered somebody else’s problem.

In 1940, FDR even won his unprecedented third term on the back of his promise that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” It’s generally well accepted that FDR was being deceptive and manipulative to some degree, as he neglected to mention that if the US was attacked that it would no longer be considered a foreign war, even if the fighting was taking place on another continent.

We all know what happened next. On December 7, 1941, a day that will live in infamy, the Japanese launched a surprise attack on the US naval fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. This required an immediate response against Japan by the US military, and it provided a back door by which to enter the war at large. And right from the start, people were really suspicious of this.

FDR had moved the entire Pacific naval fleet from California to Pearl Harbor before the attack, which many people felt was an invitation for the Japanese to launch a strike on that location. It was such a juicy target, just begging to be bombed. Of course, the counter to this is that they believed the fleet being stationed in Hawaii would be a deterrent, and that they severely underestimated Japan’s capabilities, believing that an attack on the scale of what happened wouldn’t have been possible.

Not only did people think FDR was trying to invite the Japanese to attack, they thought he knew it was going to happen and allowed it to anyway. He understood how important it was to stop Nazi Germany, but to do so was going to require approval from the American people who were vehemently opposed to foreign wars. Man, those were the good old days, back when the US government actually wanted public support rather than engaging in a bunch of foreign “forever wars” regardless of how unpopular they were.

Anyway, among the people who believed that FDR knew about and allowed the attack to happen was Thomas Dewey. Not only did he believe this theory, he thought he could prove it. In the lead up to the 1944 election, Dewey prepared to give a speech blowing the lid off the entire conspiracy and revealing to the American people that FDR had lied to them so that he could draw the United States into a war. That’s when the men in black came to visit him.

Okay fine, it was Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, but the meetings still very much had a “men in black” vibe to them.

The US had been intercepting communications from the Japanese for years. In the week of November 17-25 alone back in 1941, the Navy had intercepted 83 Japanese messages. And allegedly one of the messages from November 25 made reference to the attack that would take place on Pearl Harbor just a couple weeks later. Dewey felt that the American people had the right to know, but Marshall and the military disagreed.

As it turned out, even in 1944, the Japanese were still using the same encryption method for their messages that they had been in 1941. Despite the fact that their ships kept getting mysteriously torpedoed by submarines whenever they were given specific instructions on when and where to go, the Japanese had no idea that the US had cracked their code. And fucked if Marshall was going to let Dewey give that secret away on national radio.

It’s unclear exactly what was said or what threats may or may not have been made, but Dewey relented and did not tell the American people about all of the cracked Japanese communications, even though doing so probably would have guaranteed his victory in the election.

But the question remains: did FDR know about the attack beforehand, and did he want it to happen? According to the conspiracy theory the answer to both of those is yes, but the reality is less clear. Well, realistically he did want something to happen because he really, really wanted to stop the fucking Nazis, but it’s unclear whether or not he let Americans die to achieve those goals.

From what I can tell, it’s agreed upon that FDR knew the Japanese planned to launch an attack on either December 6 or 7, but it’s said that he didn’t know where. Allegedly they believed that the attack was going to be on either the British or French fleets, not on Pearl Harbor.

There’s also the reasonable point that, if the goal was just to rile American support for the war, you probably don’t park the entire Pacific fleet in Hawaii. Let the Japanese blow up a destroyer and a few planes to minimize casualties, financial losses, and losses of military equipment, and hope that it still has the desired result on public opinion. On the other hand, I can also see a very minor attack being something that the American people might demand to be handed diplomatically rather than through full on involvement in another world war, so it’s hard to say.

A lot of information and memos have come out over the past few decades regarding the Pearl Harbor attack, but there hasn’t been a smoking gun. There’s a lot of information to suggest that FDR knew about the planned attack on Pearl Harbor and let it happen, but there are also plausible explanations for everything as well.

Honestly I kinda regret including this theory in this article instead of making it its own piece, because there’s way more to this theory than “somebody said something insane and people inexplicably believed it”. But since I can’t definitively prove or disprove either side of this one, at least not without doing a much deeper dive into the topic, I’ll have to leave it up to you whether or not FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen.

That said, I’m sorry for exposing you all to so much history and learning. Let me make it up to you by switching gears and bringing up something insane that somebody said and people inexplicably believed.

Eisenhower Signed a Treaty with Extraterrestrials

Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of the United States from 1953-1961. But on the evening of February 20, 1954, the Associated Press put out a bulletin that Eisenhower had died of a heart attack. Two minutes later they put out a new bulletin saying “Whoopsie, just kidding.” However, the events of that evening have been the topic of speculation and debate for decades.

At the time, Eisenhower was on vacation in Palm Springs to play some golf. Even though this was supposed to be a vacation, the president still had a very full schedule. There were a number of public appearances, and he even had to take part in some actual work meetings. Among the planned appearances was a dinner scheduled for the evening in question, but Ike never showed up. He had seemingly vanished, and didn’t reappear until the following morning.

This led to a lot of theories and speculation, among them that Ike had traveled to Edwards Air Force Base for a secret meeting he had telepathically arranged with extraterrestrials. Note that the theory is that the aliens were able to communicate telepathically, not that Ike had magic powers.

Anyway, according to the theory, Ike met with a group of aliens known as “Nordics”, because they were 6-7 feet tall with blue eyes, long blonde hair, and sleek, Nordic features. The purpose of the meeting was to arrange a treaty between the United States and the aliens. The Nordics were going to provide advanced scientific and spiritual knowledge, and all they wanted in return was for the United States to stop nuclear testing and disarm their nuclear weapons.

Why the aliens were only meeting with the United States instead of also engaging with the Russians and other nuclear powers of the world is unclear. I mean it’s unclear in terms of this theory making any sort of logical sense. Obviously the answer is because this theory was created by Americans, and we’re all self-centered narcissists who forget that other countries exist or matter.

Regardless, Ike decided that engaging in the Cold War was far more important than being gifted a bunch of cool future tech from an obviously superior alien race, so they parted ways. However, there were two more meetings between Ike and aliens that took place at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, just 120 miles away from Roswell. And because these meetings were taking place near Roswell, this time Ike was obviously meeting with the Greys rather than the Nordics.

Conspiracy theorists totally gloss over this point, but I think it’s worth addressing. Not only was there an alleged cover up of meetings between a US president and extraterrestrial diplomats, but there were two entirely different species of aliens. It’s one thing to suggest that aliens have made contact with humans, but suggesting that a multitude of alien species have all come to Earth seems like a bigger deal than who they happened to visit. If Earth was playing host to a variety of different types of aliens, that feels like the sort of thing that would be difficult to cover up.

Or maybe not, because both species of aliens were only interested in talking to the US president, not to any other world leaders or scientists or anything. Or maybe they did want to speak to scientists as well, because there was an alleged organization called the Majestic 12 (containing 12 elite scientists and military leaders) who were allegedly involved in investigations of alien spacecraft and who may have been privy to this meeting.

But regardless of how US-centric this entire conspiracy was, it is alleged that Ike and the Greys struck a deal. They also wanted us to stop building nuclear weapons, but that was off the table. Instead, the agreed upon treaty was that the Greys wouldn’t interfere with business on Earth and we wouldn’t interfere with them, as if humans had any way to interfere with technologically superior aliens.

The Greys were also allowed to abduct humans for experimentation and anal probing, so long as the president received a list of everybody abducted and all test subjects were returned home safely. I don’t think humanity got anything in exchange for this part of the deal, but maybe we were given some scientific knowledge or something. I don’t think the conspiracy theorists were overly concerned with whether or not the alleged contract had consideration for both sides, just that it provided “proof” that alien abductions were taking place.

So what was the administration’s official explanation for Ike’s Palm Beach disappearance? After all, that was what started this entire conspiracy. Well according to the official statement, Ike chipped a crown while eating some fried chicken and had to make an emergency dentist appointment that evening to get it repaired.

Seems like a simple and mundane enough explanation, and one that’s pretty believable. Ike had gotten a crown put in a couple years earlier, and it broke and needed to be repaired just a few months later. And just five months after Ike’s golfing vacation, the crown broke again and was finally replaced with one that didn’t suck so much. So again, the excuse for his disappearance makes perfect sense.

The only problem was that, for decades, there was absolutely no record of this happening. The Eisenhower library has tons of notes about this vacation, including every person that Ike even tangentially came into contact with. But there are no records of any late night dentist visits. Similarly, the office of the dentist Ike allegedly saw also had no records of treating the president, which seems like the sort of thing you’d probably make a note of.

Admittedly I don’t believe the dentist’s office was looked into until years later, at which point the records may have already been destroyed. You’re only legally required to keep records for so many years, and since everything was paper back then instead of digital, it made sense to discard things as soon as possible to free up space. Personally I would have kept the proof that I had done work for a sitting president, but these sort of administrative matters were probably handled by a bored secretary rather than the dentist himself.

The lack of documentation about this visit allowed this theory to run wild for decades, though files released from the Surgeon General’s office in 1991 did contain dental records pertaining to Ike’s crown repairs back in February of 1954. Not that evidence corroborating the official version of events did anything to stem the proliferation of this conspiracy.

JFK Was Killed for Attempting to Reveal Extraterrestrials

The JFK assassination has been the subject of countless conspiracies over the years. In fact, there definitely seems to have been something suspicious going on. That’s not to say that Lee Harvey Oswald was some sort of patsy, as there is a lot of strong evidence that he shot Kennedy, but that doesn’t mean he was the only person who did so.

Regardless, interest in the Kennedy assassination has increased in recent months with the release of tens of thousands of pages of documents earlier this year. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, there wasn’t anything new or interesting involved in those documents. It was the same documents that had already been released under Biden and Trump years ago, except this time they didn’t redact the names and social security numbers of CIA operatives, some of whom were still actively working for the organization. That’s probably fine though.

But while there wasn’t a smoking gun released (because such a document would have been destroyed decades ago, assuming it ever existed in the first place), I do still have a newer theory related to the Kennedy assassination that I didn’t cover previously. This theory was presented in the 2010 book A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier by author Dr. William Lester, PhD.

Don’t let the PhD in history from the University of Oxford confuse you though, assuming his listed credentials are real. William went on to found the Institute of Metaphysics, a “religious, non-secular, non-academic” institute that offered unaccredited PhDs in things like cryptozoology, ufology, paranormal science, and demonology. So even if his educational background is genuine and not fabricated, dude is still a crackpot. But it takes a crackpot to come up with a crackpot theory, so at least we’re in luck in that regard.

According to William’s book, JFK was murdered by the CIA because he wanted to share information about the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials. His book highlighted a memo written from JFK to the director of the CIA in which the president was requesting that they share all information they had regarding UFOs with NASA. This was meant to turn into a collaborative effort with the USSR, with James Webb coordinating with the Soviets for joint space exploration. The memo was also dated as having been written just ten days before the assassination, with the implication being that the timing of this was causal rather than coincidental.

Right from the start, the contents of this memo sound weird. The Americans and Soviets were famously trying to outdo one another and see who could conquer space first by putting a man on the moon. A sort of “space race” if you will. There were collaborative efforts, but those didn’t really start until the 1970s. The idea that Kennedy would have undermined the Apollo program’s mission of American supremacy is confounding to say the least.

Still, the memo looked official enough to the untrained eye. Plus, it was published in a book written by a guy whose name started with Dr. and ended with Ph.D. That was all the proof that was needed for most people, and this story spread like wildfire. There are tons of news articles and YouTube videos from 2010 talking about the connection between JFK and aliens, citing the memo from William’s book as proof.

In fact, new media is still being published, acting as if this was a breaking revelation from the recent release of the JFK files.

The only problem with that particular framing is that this memo doesn’t actually appear anywhere in those files. In fact, it doesn’t appear anywhere at all, other than in William’s book. Kennedy kept carbon copies of all of his correspondence, more so than any president before him, and all of that stuff is carefully catalogued and stored at the JFK library.

Yet workers at the library have been unable to find a copy of this memo, nor was a copy of this memo in the government’s official archives that were released to the public. It’s almost as if William made the entire thing up to sell his book, not that I would ever accuse the good doctor of such a thing.

That said, experts have noted that the memo looks off. There are issues with the formatting and the language, with it not sounding like it was written in Kennedy’s voice. And what even was that voice anyway? I’ve lived in and around Boston for almost my entire life, and I’ve never heard anybody that talked like a Kennedy unless they were doing a bit.

I don’t know where the Hell the Kennedys got their accent from, but it wasn’t Boston. At the very least it wasn’t the pleb parts of Boston, but maybe there was some secret, high society version of the Boston accent that only the Kennedys and their wealthy friends could afford.

Anyway, among all of the issues with the memo, the most notable was that the words “TOP SECRET” were printed opposite the header of the memo in tiny text. Traditionally, classified documents are marked using a giant, impossible to miss stamp so that there is no confusion about the classification level of a memo so that it doesn’t get handed to somebody who isn’t supposed to see it.

It’s fascinating that this theory became so widespread based on its appearance in a single book by a guy who was selling cryptozoology doctorates, but I guess it goes to show that people are going to believe what they want to believe.

Obama Was Born in Kenya

There have been multiple conspiracies referred to as “birther movements” over the years. These all stem from the Constitutional requirement that a president must be a natural born citizen of the United States. While these have largely been modern conspiracies, there are a few historical examples as well.

President Chester A. Arthur was born in the northernmost county of Vermont, so some people speculated that he had actually been born in Canada and was America’s first Canadian president. Another conspiracy surrounding Warren Harding was that his great-grandmother was black. That wouldn’t have been disqualifying on a Constitutional basis, but much of the public believed that someone who was an eighth black was unfit to serve as President of the United States.

Those conspiracies were much smaller in scope though, with the one about Arthur largely not surfacing until after his time as president. But in the 2000s, we saw a number of questions raised about whether or not presidential candidates qualified as natural born citizens. Ironically, the first two modern birther movements both happened in the presidential election of 2008, though the one surrounding Barrack Obama is much more famous.

Obama’s opponent, John McCain, had been born in the Panama Canal Zone because his father was in the navy. This was less of a conspiracy, since we know that statement about McCain to be fact, and was more a matter of whether or not it counted as being a natural born citizen. There was some debate among legal scholars, but ultimately the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution confirming that McCain was eligible.

Things were not so easily resolved for Obama though, despite being born firmly on American soil in Hawaii. There were two different claims surrounding his status as a natural born citizen: one was that he was actually born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, and the other was that he had given up his American citizenship and become a citizen of Indonesia when he was a child.

These claims weren’t entirely baseless, either. I mean, they were completely wrong, but at least there was a basis for the claims. A few years after Obama was born, his parents divorced and his mother married a man from Indonesia. The family moved to Indonesia where Obama attended school, and there was one school document where he was incorrectly listed as being an Indonesian citizen.

This was a simple clerical error that would have been meaningless for anyone else, but because Obama was running for president it was used to claim that he had given up his American citizenship to become an Indonesian citizen. For anyone who is curious, though, if that story was true then Obama would have indeed lost his status as a natural born citizen from a Constitutional standpoint, as he would have had to become a naturalized citizen again upon returning to the states. As a side note, the whole natural born citizen thing is such a dumb and arbitrary rule, especially considering all of the founding fathers were natural born citizens of the British Empire, not of the United States.

Regardless, the Indonesian conspiracy was definitely the minority opinion. The majority of birthers believed that Obama was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii because…well I mean look at him. The origin of this conspiracy actually has more to it than that, but that was definitely the argument put forth by most proponents of this conspiracy. That said, the origin is actually a bit interesting, if not completely confusing.

A lot of people don’t know this, but Obama wrote a memoir back in the 1990s called Dreams from My Father. It came out around the time he began getting involved in Illinois politics, so presumably the goal of the book was just to get Obama’s name out there. Theoretically it would be to let people know more about him as a person and a candidate, but this is America; nobody gives a shit about any of that, just name recognition.

Anyway, Obama had used a literary agency to help get his book published, a company called Acton & Dystel. The agency produced a promotional booklet in 1991 for Obama, and in it they said that he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”. Not only did the physical booklets exist, but this description remained on their website until 2007.

The weird part about this is that the booklet’s editor appears to have pulled this entirely out of her ass. That, or she only skimmed through Obama’s memoir to get the gist of it and remembered the details wrong. He had visited Kenya for the first time in the 1980s during his 20s, and he discussed the trip in the memoir. But at no point did the book or anything provided to the agency suggest that Obama had been born there.

Even weirder, though, is that members of the birther movement didn’t point to this alleged evidence of his Kenyan birth. In fact, the existence of this erroneous booklet wasn’t even widely known until 2012, long after Obama had won his first election. While the booklet likely provided the origin for the claim being that Obama was specifically born in Kenya, the people who wanted to believe this didn’t need any proof; his skin was proof enough.

And I may have ranted about this before, but this was honestly an insane theory. Before he could become the Democratic Party nominee for president, Obama had to get through Hilary Clinton first. That wasn’t a particularly difficult task since it’s not like Hilary was remotely popular, but she was still a Clinton. If there was any Constitutional basis by which Obama could have been disqualified from running, don’t you think the Clintons would have been able to dig that up during the primaries before he became the nominee?

But no, instead it fell on Donald Trump to promote the birther conspiracy, with Trump going on TV every chance he possibly could to demand the release of Obama’s birth certificate. And then once the document was released, Trump demanded the release of a more different version of the birth certificate. I think this behaviour might have been that “Trump derangement syndrome” people are always talking about.

Despite the clerical error in Indonesia and the…whatever the fuck happened with that literary agency, there is no evidence that Obama was born in Kenya. He has a Hawaiian birth certificate, and multiple newspapers in Hawaii published birth announcements for him, announcements which included his parents’ home address. That may seem weird, but this was standard operating procedure for the Hawaii Department of Health at the time, and publishing someone’s address wasn’t seen as creepy or intrusive back then because we were all listed in the phonebook anyway.

On the bright side, the public feud between Obama and an old man yelling at clouds did result in another conspiracy, one involving the death of Osama Bin-Laden. According to the theory, Bin-Laden was killed by US forces a full day before the announcement was made. But Obama chose to delay informing the American people about this victory so that his press conference would preempt the season premier of The Celebrity Apprentice. I don’t think there’s anything to back up this theory, other than the fact that Trump’s show was indeed preempted because of Obama’s press conference, but it’s still a funny theory.

The Trump Pee Tapes

Thanks to the 24 hour news cycle and stories only having a shelf life of a few hours thanks to the constant barrage of insanity the world is currently facing, the release of the Steele dossier feels like it happened about 50 years ago. But the report was released just 10 days before Trump’s first inauguration back in 2017.

The Steele dossier was compiled by Christopher Steele, a former intelligence officer for MI6 (specializing in Russian affairs) who co-founded the private sector intelligence group Orbis Business Intelligence. Orbis was contracted by a company with ties to Hilary Clinton’s campaign to compile information about Trump and his alleged links to Russia.

News of the dossier broke on January 10, 2017, and later that day BuzzFeed published a leaked 35 page draft of the report without Steele’s permission. The unfinished report contained a lot of claims, much of which pointed to heavy collusion between Trump and Russia, as well as alleged evidence that Trump had been heavily compromised by Putin.

That said, none of this was definitive evidence of anything. Steele had compiled a bunch of “unverified and potentially unverifiable” memos, and he stated that everything included was “raw intelligence, not established facts, but a starting point for further investigation”. That’s probably why the report was unfinished and why he was so upset that BuzzFeed published it in the first place, at least in the form that they did.

Still, there was a lot of interesting facts in there going all the way back to 2011, long before Trump was a candidate for president. But the piece of information that garnered the most attention, on account of it being the most salacious, was the allegations of the Trump pee tapes.

Based on the previous conspiracy, I think it’s safe to assume Trump hated Obama. He was pushing the birther conspiracy in a manner befitting a cartoon supervillain, and there really isn’t any possible explanation for that other than personal hatred or overt racism. So in 2013 when Trump took a trip to Moscow, it was allegedly time for him to act out some sort of bizarre revenge fantasy.

According to the information in the Steele dossier, which again is unverified and possibly unverifiable, Trump stayed at the Ritz-Carlton and booked the presidential suite. He didn’t actually stay in the presidential suite, he had a different room for himself, but he wanted to book the suite because Obama had slept in the bed in that room.

He then allegedly hired a gaggle of sex workers to piss all over the bed while he watched, to show his disdain for Obama. Come to think of it, I don’t have any idea what the collective noun for sex workers is. It’s probably not a gaggle though, at least not if they’re any good at their jobs. Maybe a gargle of sex workers.

Anyway, if these alleged events did take place, then they were also allegedly filmed in secret by the Federal Security Services of the Russian Federation, the spiritual successor to the KGB. If you’re wondering about the logistics of that and how that could happen without Trump noticing, hidden cameras are a thing, my dude. It was 2013, it’s not like this theory required a bunch of cameramen and some dude carrying a boom mic to be in the room filming it.

This was one of many alleged pieces of blackmail that the Steele dossier claimed Russia had on Trump. There was a bunch more stuff involving sex workers, and a lot of bribes and corrupt business deals as well. The report also stated that the Kremlin had promised not to use all of the incriminating stuff they had on him as blackmail, thanks to the “high levels of voluntary co-operation forthcoming from his team”.

I’d say we’ll never know whether or not this conspiracy is true, but if it’s true then we will definitely find out. I have no idea when it will happen, but if those tapes exist then they are 100% going to be leaked at some point within our lifetimes. And for that reason I’m genuinely hoping this conspiracy theory isn’t true, because nobody needs to see that shit. Or rather that piss.

Joe Biden Was Executed in 2020

We’ll end today with a theory that, while having existed for over four years, recently came to prominence just a few weeks ago at time of writing thanks to a social media post by President Trump.

Trump has a long history of posting and retweeting various conspiracy theories online. And before anyone tries to make the claim that “retweets do not equal endorsements”, which certainly can be true, Trump takes these conspiracy theories offline as well. He has repeated a ton of these conspiracies in interviews, press conferences, and during the presidential debate last year.

But the latest theory Trump has endorsed is perhaps the most outlandish one yet. He reposted the comment, “There is no Joe Biden, executed in 2020. Biden clones, doubles, and robotic engineered soulless, mindless entities are what you see. Democrats don’t know the difference.”

Those certainly are words that you are legally allowed to say and endorse, but why would you want to? This theory also raises a few questions, most importantly who executed Biden and why? And according to believers of QAnon, where this theory originated, the answer to that is Donald Trump. Why he would tweet about his own secret execution of a president elect is anybody’s guess, but none of this is supposed to make sense.

According to the theory, Trump worked with secret forces within the military to hold a military tribunal and execute Biden for treason. Or corruption. Or child trafficking. It isn’t really clear which.

We’ll ignore the rather glaring and concerning fact that this theory claims Trump secretly executed a political opponent while in office, because that’s not what the theory is about. The theory is that Biden was corrupt and senile and had to be taken out, but then he had to be replaced with clones and robots. Because reasons.

There’s plenty of alleged evidence of this conspiracy though, most notably how different Biden looks in a number of different pictures. In some pictures Biden appears to tower over his wife Jill, while in others she only looks like she’s an inch or two shorter than him. Almost as if sometimes she wears high heels and sometimes she doesn’t.

Perhaps more notable and more convincing is how different Biden’s face looked in a variety of different settings. Someone might argue that everybody looks different in different lighting, or that sometimes Biden was wearing makeup for the cameras and sometimes he was just going about his day. But those people are just sheep who refuse to unquestioningly accept statements made by an anonymous internet poster.

Also, if Biden was dead, why not just let him be dead and have Kamala be the president? Why create robots so advanced that they could learn all of Biden’s quirks and mannerisms, but no so advanced that they could string two fucking sentences together during a debate?

And also, clones? This is such a personal pet peeve of mine, but people clearly need to be better educated on how cloning works, even if human cloning is illegal and unethical. Ignoring that though, in order to have an 80 year old clone of Biden, you would need to have cloned him 80 years ago. Clones don’t just pop out of some magic tube in a lab as fully grown adults, they have to be grown as embryos inside a living host, ideally of the same species, and then they age at the normal rate.

The amount of foresight it would have taken to clone Biden 80 years ago and to keep the miraculous technological advancement secret from the entire world just on the off chance he became president and was executed by a political rival who wanted to keep that execution a secret is phenomenal. That is godlike levels of premonition and intelligence, and if anybody was capable of planning that then they should have been declared Supreme Emperor of Earth instead of working on stuff like this in the shadows.

But even though this theory is beyond insane even at just a cursory glance, there are people who believe this. There are people who believed, for the entirety of Biden’s presidency, that he had been executed and the person we all saw was an imposter. I’m not sure what’s scarier, that a meaningful amount of the voting population was capable of believing such a stupid conspiracy theory, or that one of those people is currently the President of the United States.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are conspiracy theories more common now than in the past?

There is no evidence to support the idea that conspiracy theories are more common now than in the past. A 2022 research paper found no notable increase in the number of conspiracies or the percentage of people believing them, though they may have become more visible due to the internet.

What is the ‘Presidential Assassination Insurance’ conspiracy theory?

The ‘Presidential Assassination Insurance’ conspiracy theory suggests that some presidents have chosen running mates who are so unqualified or unpopular that no one would want them to become president, thereby making the president less likely to be assassinated.

What is the conspiracy theory surrounding John Quincy Adams?

The conspiracy theory surrounding John Quincy Adams alleges that he was a pimp for Tsar Alexander I while serving as the U.S. ambassador to Russia. This theory emerged during the 1828 election and was used to discredit Adams.

What is the conspiracy theory about Teddy Roosevelt and the Panamanian Revolution?

The conspiracy theory about Teddy Roosevelt and the Panamanian Revolution suggests that Roosevelt incited the Panamanian Revolution to build the Panama Canal, which Colombia had refused to allow. This theory is supported by official documents revealing secret deals with Panamanian separatists.

What is the conspiracy theory about Warren Harding’s death?

The conspiracy theory about Warren Harding’s death suggests that his wife, Florence, poisoned him to death because of his extramarital affairs. This theory gained traction from a 1930 book by Gaston Means, but the book’s author later admitted it was a fabrication.

What is the conspiracy theory about FDR and Pearl Harbor?

The conspiracy theory about FDR and Pearl Harbor suggests that FDR knew about the impending Japanese attack and allowed it to happen to draw the U.S. into World War II. This theory was believed by Thomas Dewey, who prepared to reveal it but was dissuaded by military officials.

What is the conspiracy theory about Eisenhower’s meeting with extraterrestrials?

The conspiracy theory about Eisenhower’s meeting with extraterrestrials suggests that he met with aliens known as ‘Nordics’ and ‘Greys’ to negotiate treaties. This theory emerged from Eisenhower’s unexplained disappearance during a golfing vacation in 1954.

What is the conspiracy theory about JFK and extraterrestrials?

The conspiracy theory about JFK and extraterrestrials suggests that he was assassinated by the CIA because he wanted to reveal information about UFOs and extraterrestrials. This theory is based on a memo allegedly written by JFK, but the memo’s authenticity is disputed.

What is the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory about Barack Obama?

The ‘birther’ conspiracy theory about Barack Obama suggests that he was not born in the United States, specifically that he was born in Kenya. This theory was promoted by Donald Trump and others, despite evidence showing Obama was born in Hawaii.

What is the conspiracy theory about the Trump ‘pee tapes’?

The conspiracy theory about the Trump ‘pee tapes’ suggests that Trump hired sex workers to urinate on a bed in a Moscow hotel room where Obama had previously stayed, and that this was filmed by Russian intelligence as blackmail material. This theory is part of the Steele dossier, which contains unverified information.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: Conspiracy Theories About US Presidents You Never Knew About
• Hero image source by European People’s Party / openverse, by.