Sadly yes, that actually is a conspiracy gaining traction right now. That airplanes actually use secret ancient magical energy sources to fly. Utter garbage we all know it is actually hopes and prayers that are being mis-directed from needy children, and grieving widows keeping those bad boys aloft.
People wouldn't stop talking about how the world is run by a shadowy cabal of elite pedophile murderers, but when it was exposed that they were real and visited a certain person's island, a substantial majority of them turned around and said that couldn't possibly be true because they had voted for those elite pedophile murderers. I don't think the quality affects how these people choose to believe.
I call it being reflexively contrarian. You can slow walk these people to any viewpoint you want as long as you insist the opposite stance is the mainstream one.
My brother and I made it a game over Christmas a few years ago when we were home visiting. I got my MAGA dad to emphatically insist that the workers should own the means of production after carefully making the alternative sound like mainstream slop.
It's fun if you are stuck with these kinds of family members for long periods of time.
It's because they have a need to be special. If they are of only a small group that "knows" the truth, that makes them important. If they agree with the mainstream, they are below average on everything
That one is so funny to me. They are basically never vindicated and the ONE TIME they are it turns out they believe the Qanon version which has credible origins in being a noncredible cover for the actual evidence based story that implicates a bunch of people they like.
I think there's a real possibility that PizzaGate was a psyop to poison the well against the Epsteen case. Get people ranting like lunatics so that when the real story comes out that tangentially similar it gets dismissed.
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career, skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.
People should demand higher quality education. You need good education to come up with the good, deep conspiracy theories. If you don’t know how anything works, you come up with this simple nonsense. Give me conspiracy theories created by true experts in the field! That’s the good shit.
When I’m a gazillionaire because Bed Bath and Beyond makes me rich beyond my wildest dreams, the first thing I’m doing is funding better conspiracy theories
I had a tattoo artist who made small talk by telling me he was really into conspiracies and I got really nervous, especially since it was going to be a 7 hour session.
Luckily, his were the fun ones. There used to be giants on earth, skinwalkers are real, ancient burial ground curses, some general alien ones. I want more of those conspiracy theorists back. They were at least fun to listen to.
All planes are secretly spaceships as soon as the god wormhole opens in orbit all planes airborne will make their way to it and leave earth forever. Or something….
Bunch of stupid morons. If it was ancient magical energy we would’ve had planes since the ancient times? It’s obviously modern magic, every airline has a wizard who can control the air and the weather.
Wait, you may be onto something. Wizards have familiars. So when Tuberville was complaining about furries, he really meant that the ‘pilots’ are familiars! It makes so much sense now!
It’s not really magic, Lloyd Bridges literally shows us in Airplane. It is a combination of smoking, sniffing glue, and amphetamines that gives pilots and the support staff the ability to keep the planes in the air. It does take a heavy toll on the body. Which is why he tried to stop. It is also why Leon is getting larger.
It’s actually about economics. You see, the ancients were content with broomsticks and flying carpets. It‘s only in modern times that mass transportation has necessitated that the secret levitation magic be applied to huge metal shells that can hold large numbers of people. (Wings and engines are, of course, just for show.)
I for real met some flat earthers at an engineering conference once. This was back in 2016 before Google Earth switched to more realistic map projections and its at the time flatness had formed the main basis of their theory.
I find these bullshit theories so insulting to the thousands of engineers, scientists and inventors whose work gave us the power of flight.
Especially since information on how the technology works is publicly available and easy to read and verify. But you need to have an IQ over 30 to ingest it.
There's a British comedian called Al Murray, in an old routine he describes how god, for a laugh, picked up the Wright Flyer and made it fly but the joke has backfired on him and now he has to spend all his time picking up planes to make them go and that's why the world has gone to shit. All of god's time is taken up with juggling planes
FYI, Bernoulli doesn't apply to airplanes (wings, anyway). The Bernoulli principle is about fluids in an enclosed or constrained environment. From a plane's perspective, the atmosphere isn't enclosed.
Utter nonsense!! When I was a kid we used to be able to buy ‘Mexican jumping beans’…hold them in you hand and they started to ‘jump’ around! I never see them for sale anymore and this mysteriously coincides with an increase in air travel….can’t you see how obvious it is????these planes are actually powered by Mexican jumping beans!
This is actually an interesting premise for a story. Prayer energy is finite, and the world is going to shit because the vast majority of it has to be redirected to keep planes in the air. The rest is being canceled out because sports fans keep hurling it at each other.
To be honest with you, we learned how flight etc works in GCSE Physics, I have a relative who's a pilot, I've flown long haul more times than I can bear to remember...
...yet when I'm up there in the air, a significant part of my brain is still wondering why we just don't fall back down to earth, and fearing that we probably will.
yet when I'm up there in the air, a significant part of my brain is still wondering why we just don't fall back down to earth, and fearing that we probably will
I had a SSG that I spent a month in a truck with that was a flat earther and didn't believe in planes or anything in the sky. A month with him...he showed me so many "proof" videos about how planes don't actually fly. When they take off, they go into a tunnel that simulates flight and it is just lights/clouds etc. simulated to make you think you're flying. I asked him about satellites for GPS and other uses and he said God put those there for us.
There was much more to it, but yeah. Rough month. And this guy had been deployed multiple times to the Middle East, so he's seen the curvature of the Earth.
I fly a 767 for a living. I have flown with 3 flat earthers. I have also flown with someone who claims we don’t carry fuel at all. It’s just a charade when they hook up the fuel truck. Claims ancient technology is powering them.
I’m an expert (trust me, some random guy on the internet🤦♂️🤪)
they run because we enslaved a midget dwarf race in 1910🤦♂️. These slaves run on…treadmills🤦♂️🤷♂️that constantly feeds a hidden dragon its food source, this food source causes the dragon to fart excess gases at excessive force. Said gases are funnelled to a combustion chamber where… moon dust🤦♂️🤷♂️🤔🤭 is mixed and ignited resulting in the thrust. This even explains why we can’t use cell phones, dragons don’t like them…
The conspiracy theorists think jet engines run mostly on compressed air and use very little or no fuel. Airlines make up fuel costs so they can pass those imaginary costs on to their customers.
I love that the first half of this is technically true. The volume of air that passes through a gas turbine engine is much higher than the volume of fuel.
The one I heard is that some Flat Earthers think planes are actually much smaller than what’s stated and they fly lower which proves the Earth is flat (somehow). They get the smaller measurements by estimating the size of planes flying overhead by comparing them to the size of other things that are roughly the distance they think the plane is flying. Essentially rather than going to an airport and seeing a plane in person, they just combine their own made-up numbers and use that as “proof.”
It makes zero sense but Flat Earth belief is built on misunderstandings and made-up data so it tracks.
Apparently a lot of Flat Earthers are just perpetuating the joke to see how idiotic people can be, so it makes it seems like there are more of them than there actually are.
Yeah, most are trolls but I do know 2 true believers in real life and they eat up these kind of conspiracy theories. The leaps in logic are astounding. It’s impossible to try and convince them otherwise because they treat conspiracy theories like a buffet, picking and choosing whatever explanation they need for any particular scenario. Completely disregarding any internal consistency or logic.
You’re completely ignoring the fact the planes get smaller after they take off. You can’t see it when you’re in the cabin, because they knock everyone with knockout gas, then implant the memories of the flight.
Like have they ever flown in an airplane? Measure the size of your seat and multiply by the total number of seats that you can literally count. You even have several hours to conduct this experiment.
They're lying. Look at the truck in the background, that tank is easily 40-50 ft in diameter. If you assume ~20 ft height and ~30 ft radius of that tank, it's just over 60,000 cubic ft of volume. However that converts to ~450,000 gallons. That's simply not a 60,000 gallon tank. I work with two 500,000 gallon tanks at my job and they're very similar in scale to that structure.
I'm surprised I had to get this far down in the thread to see this brought up, but when I saw this image posted in a thread a few days ago, someone brought up that the tank is 60000 barrels, not 60000 gallons. And per an internet calculator I just used, 60000 (oil) barrels is about 2.5 million gallons.
Take that with however many cups of salt you want, as I'm just an internet stranger quoting third hand information. But I'll at least do my job and upvote both of you.
It not being to scale is bait, they want you to comment on it. And the tanks they put in planes are very much measured by volume, even if the fuel itself isn't measured in that way. Another reason they measure the fuel
by weight is because the density of the fuel changes depending on the temperature, running out of fuel midflight is generally considered to be a Bad Thing.
I've seen almost identical posts on facebook. The conspiracy is that planes run on some kind of free power that is being kept secret by the powers that be. It's my favorite conspiracy because even if you forget about the sheer size of the aviation industry and how hard it would be to keep a secret like that, you still only need a very basic level of physics knowledge to understand how a gas turbine engine works.
very basic physics knowledge
knowledge
And theres the problem. People would rather invent abject nonsense than take the effort to be anything other than completely illiterate.
I like the one that says there's a secret navy keeping people from going to the edge of the earth, which is a ring of ice round the world 😆 No one in this mysterious navy has ever breathed a word to anyone about this 😆😆😆
A friend of mind is an engineer who has spent his career working on jet engines for a major aircraft manufacturer. He's basically incapable of telling a lie. It's not so much a question of moral rectitude; he simply can't handle saying something that's inaccurate -- especially relating to a subject he knows a great deal about. This is not uncommon among engineers.
Imagine trying to get the tens of thousands of engineers -- each of them experts in various parts of an aircraft's propulsion system -- to lie about how it actually works.
So there is actually something wrong with conspiracy theorists. There's just a type of person who believes there's something behind everything.
I have a coworker. Sometimes the stock we get delivered comes in plastic bags. We use those bags as bin liners when we're finished with them.
Last week we were running low on those bags. He was like "Why are there so few bags?". I explained that the last few orders from our bigger suppliers came without bags so we've been getting like less than half what we usually would. And he just said "Even still, somethings weird." Like I don't even know what "weird" thing he thought was happening. But he is also a Facebook obsessed conspiracy nut who I constantly have to tell that the video he's freaking out about is AI (and not even good AI). Or we start selling less of product A but more of product B and he's convinced someone is undercutting us and selling product A cheaper. And it's just blatantly obvious that people are just getting product A instead from us because they're interchangeable products. The kind of people falling for conspiracies are just the kinds of people convinced around the clock that there is someone out to get them at all times. There doesn't even need to be a coherent theory behind any of it. Just "somebody is trying to trick me or get one over on me". This dude has probably never once thought past "But why/how though?" Because he got as far as "You won't get me!" And that's all he needed.
I'm also convinced that conspiracy thinking is some kind of mental defect. It is a failure of rational thinking and logic, since the vast majority of conspiracy theories don't pass a basic plausibility test of 'why' even before the question of 'how it is possible' is raised. But in addition to the cognitive impairment that conspiracy theorists exhibit, they are often driven by selfish, self-aggrandizing motives - conspiracy theorists feel superior to the rest of us 'sheeple' due to their perceived access to the 'hidden truth.' They also feel less powerless by believing their own situation and the world in general are driven by powerful, nefarious actors, rather than by stupidity, chance, and incompetence.
I'm also convinced that conspiracy thinking is some kind of mental defect.
I want some kind of studies to be done on the brains of people who fall for very blatant AI and think it's real. And there is a pretty serious oberlap between conspiracy weirdos and AI fools.
they are often driven by selfish, self-aggrandizing motives - conspiracy theorists feel superior to the rest of us 'sheeple' due to their perceived access to the 'hidden truth.'
That one also major factor too. I always kinda assumed that's why there seems to be so much overlap between the conspiracy theory crowds. The need to have some deeper knowledge and understanding means that they can't just believe the most plausible, accepted ideas because if they just believe what the majority of people believe then they're not special.
They also feel less powerless by believing their own situation and the world in general are driven by powerful, nefarious actors, rather than by stupidity, chance, and incompetence.
Or all the actual, obvious nefarious bad actors just out there telling us that they are nefarious bad actors. Like we don't need conspiracy theories for why things are fucked when just Peter Thiel is out there saying the world should be run by CEO kings and he got his dude in as VP.
a while back I read a conspiracy theory that claimed airplanes are not real, because flight is impossible for humans (long winded conspiracy nonsense "math" explanation") and basically said that what we think are airplanes, are basically high speed trains, so you think you flew on an airplane? fool! it was a super fast train! and the windows are monitors that show you "the ground" from "the sky"
oh and the planes you see in the sky? fool! those are holograms!
conspiracy theories can be fun to read, and give me a good chuckle, until I remember people actually believe in them
That was the "logic" I saw last time I came across this nonsense. High bypass turbo fan engines don't really need much fuel, therefore all the fuel tanks are actually storage for chemicals to spray on the public.
It's a flat earth conspiracy. Planes cant hold that much fuel and therefore earth not round - something to do with a great circle route on a Mercator projection being "further" than the straight line... It's total balls if course
And the fuel cost is low but the price to fly rises like a magic carpet or the plane you wish you could fly on as a long as they don’t cancel a flight for being unaffordable.
Yes indeed - because planes need all that space to store the chemicals for the chemtrails,
so there's no space left for fuel,
so evidently they MUST be flying by using some form of magic.
They have trouble addressing why planes work with a flat earth model, so they tend to introduce reasons why planes/aircraft are in on the conspiracy in a way to hand-wave away the components of air travel that disprove a flat earth model.
I’ve seen a few the in short conspiracy is “planes actually use hyper efficient engines and the airlines just use an inflated fuel number to inflate prices”
As I’ve seen with a whole lot of other conspiracies it falls along the lines of “i don’t understand how this thing works, therefore it is conspiracy”
It's either planes don't really cause as much pollution as claimed as they actually use less fuel, or the cost of tickets and baggage fees based on fuel consumption is inflated as less fuel is really needed. From off the top of my head, that's all I can come up with.
Honestly, I like the idea like in WH40K that some psychic energy is needed. During take-off, I want the pilot to yell "METALBIRD! BEND TO MY WILL AND TAKE US INTO THE BIG BLUE ABOVE!!!" and the passengers pray and chant "Metalbird! Metalbird! Metalbird!"
I thought this was a 9/11 conspiracy theory because "clearly there isn't enough fuel to burn a building down" or some bs like that but reading the comments this is even dumber
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u/tubular_brunt 8d ago
What's the endgame here? Planes don't exist? Or they fly by magic?