Truth is stranger than fiction, right?
And for every odd fact that was ever in doubt, someone had to believe it was true and work to prove it.
So maybe some of those conspiracy theories are true, too.
Or maybe not...
Reddit user StressedAfraid_ asked:
"What is something that was crazy at the time but proven to be correct?"
Just Because You’re Paranoid...
"Famous author Ernest Hemingway told his friends and family he believed the FBI was spying on him. They all told him he was paranoid or crazy."
"Years after his death his suspicions were confirmed when the FBI declassified their spying on him."
~ Southern_Dig_9460
...Doesn't Mean They Aren't Out To Get You
" Football player Paul Gascoigne had claimed for years that his phone was being hacked."
"People said he was nuts and his own therapist put it down to paranoia, he even contemplated suicide."
"Turns out he was absolutely right and it wasn't just him, it became a huge scandal and the fallout from it is still going on today."
~ all_die_laughing
Platypus? Platypi?
"That the platypus was a real animal."
"The researcher who received the first specimen back in Europe was certain he was being pranked and meticulously dissected it to try to find where it was sewn together."
~ BobRoberts01
"They secrete milk through their skin like sweat and also don’t have a stomach. They’re insane little critters."
~ Sothotheroth
"And it turns out they also glow under a blacklight."
~ OneGoodRib
"I almost don’t blame them, funny little egg-laying venomous duck beavers. Cute though."
~ mildly_enthused
Not Stress‽‽
"That stomach ulcers were caused by the Helicobacter Pylori bacteria."
"Conventional medical widom was that stomach ulcers were caused by lifestyle factors."
"The bacteria theory was met with great skepticism and criticism. One of the researchers, Barry J Marshall, resorted to proving it by ingesting the H. Pylori bacteria."
"Twenty two years later, Marshall and Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology for their discovery."
~ Sys32768
Cataclysmic Floods
"Missoula megafloods—cataclysmic glacial lake outburst floods that swept periodically across eastern Washington and down the Columbia River Gorge at the end of the last ice age as a result of periodic sudden ruptures of the ice dam on the Clark Fork River that created Glacial Lake Missoula—created the carved up the scablands of eastern Washington and Oregon."
"The geologist who proposed it—Harlen Bretz—was ignored when he proposed it, and then derided when he insisted. He lived long enough to see other geologists start to realize he was right, though, so there is some justice to be had."
~ Coygon
"Used to fish with my uncle at Moses Lake back in the 1960s. I recall looking around and thinking 'something isn't right here' but didn't understand why until I was middle aged and read some articles about it; very cool. Finally!"
"I had been across the US and Canada four times by car by then."
"Nothing looked like that area of Franklin County and the Columbia River gorge. That portion of Washington looked like a lunar landscape."
~ prpslydistracted
Who Killed Azaria Chamberlain
"A Dingo really did eat her baby."
~ zerbey
* Alice Lynne "Lindy" Chamberlain is a New Zealand–born Australian woman wrongfully convicted of killing her nine-week-old daughter, Azaria, while camping at Uluru in 1980. She served three years in prison before being acquitted.
In one of Australia's most publicised murder trials, Lindy maintained she saw a dingo leave the tent where Azaria was sleeping. Meryl Streep played Lindy in the 1989 film A Cry in the Dark.
Saturn's Spokes
"The 'spokes' in the rings of Saturn—originally reported by amateur astronomer Stephen J. O’Meara in 1976, but dismissed as an optical illusion by the scientific community. The Voyager probes confirmed their existence."
"In 1981, NASA's Voyager 2 first photographed the ring spokes."
"The experts thought the spokes couldn’t be real because they appeared to rotate at the speed of the planet, not the speed of the rings. Turns out they follow the magnetic field of the planet."
~ nautius_maximus1
There's Something To Gut Flora
"The scientists who proposed the gut brain connection—Nobuyuki Sudo and Yoichi Chida—used to get laughed out of conferences as kooks."
~ weluckyfew
"The Gut-Brain Axis (GBA) is the two-way biochemical signaling that takes place between the gastrointestinal tract (GI tract) and the nervous system."
"GBA consists of bidirectional communication between the central and the enteric nervous system, linking emotional and cognitive centers of the brain with peripheral intestinal functions. Recent advances in research have described the importance of gut microbiota in influencing these interactions."
"This interaction between microbiota and GBA appears to be bidirectional, namely through signaling from gut-microbiota to brain and from brain to gut-microbiota by means of neural, endocrine, immune, and humoral links."
"This bidirectional communication network includes the central nervous system (CNS), both brain and spinal cord, the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the enteric nervous system (ENS) and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal (HPA) axis."
~ Annals of Gastroenterology
U‐Boats On The Beach
"In 1942, conspiracy theories began to spread that Nazis had landed a submarine on a Florida beach and were now living in America. It turns out they actually had."
"In fact, they landed Nazi saboteurs from three submarines. Once in New York and once in Florida in 1942 and another group in Maine in 1944. All were apprehended by the FBI."
~ BurningUndercarriage
"One U-Boat was sunk by the Coast Guard and is a popular diving site in North Carolina. You wouldn’t hear that in US history class."
"In the grand scheme of things, U-Boats attacking our coast didn’t amount to much. But many folks don’t know that our waters, and even our mainland, were attacked by the Axis Powers during WWII."
~ GobbleGobbleSon
Did They Notice The Drains?
"Herodotus—Greek historian between 550 and 479 BCE—described those who sailed south along the African coast saw the sun rise in the North instead of the South."
"Many at the time thought this proved Herodotus was peddling absurd rumours. Even Herodotus himself expressed doubt about it in the text."
"But he was in fact correct, as the sun does that when you cross the equator."
~ DonQuigleone
You've Got Mail
"The Hawaii Mailbox Conspiracy."
"Honolulu, Hawaii's former chief of police Louis Kealoha and his wife Katherine, a deputy city procescutor, conspired in 2013 to have their relative, Gerard Puana, jailed for stealing their mailbox so they could avoid legal issues regarding a property that the relative owned."
"When the relative's claims of being framed were first reported, a lot of people scoffed at the idea. Why would two politically powerful and well off individuals attempt such an action?"
"Then as information slowly came out, the entire affair was laid bare and it turned out the relative was right. Fallout from the issue has worked its way up beyond the Chief of Police position to the former Prosecutor and other branches of government."
"A book was written on the subject by the Federal Public Defender assigned to the case, Alexander Silvert."
~ BMLortz
MKUltra
"MKUltra sounds like one the most insane, idiotic conspiracy theories ever, but it actually happenened."
~ def11879
* Project MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program designed and undertaken by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and intended to develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used to weaken people and force behaviors through brainwashing and psychological torture.
MKUltra used numerous methods to manipulate its subjects' mental states and brain functions, such as the covert administration of high doses of psychoactive drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals without the subjects' consent, electroshocks, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.
"The two things a lot of conspiracy theorists don't like to talk about are:"
"1) The idea came from the movie, The Manchurian Candidate. Much like how a lot of current-day conspiracies claim movies predict things (i.e. medbeds, Matrix pods, etc...), a film inspired this idiotic program."
"2) MKULTRA didn't work. The best they could do was scramble brains. They didn't get their programmed human assassins who would murder on command. None of that mind-control nonsense is true."
"We have some things that work to get people to do things really well without any drugs or brainwashing: money, sex, and threats of violence. They've done the job for a very long time and show no signs of being less effective."
~ HapticSloughton
Magnetic North Or South?
"That the Earth’s magnetic poles could switch—and have many times."
"It happens every few hundred thousand years. During the time of the shift, our electromagnetic grid could collapse."
"In the last 10 million years, there have been, on average, 4 or 5 reversals per million years."
~ charlie_meadows
"This can be tracked, magnetic seafloor spreading is the key. Look up Don Prothero, he's the guy who figured it out!"
~ macsharoniandcheese
Scrub Up
"If you wash your hands after handling corpses in the morgue, then when you go deliver a baby, the mother and infant probably won't die."
~ stolenfires
"The good old completely preventable 'Childbed Fever'. So horrible."
~ RareBeautyEtsy
"Doctors were straight up offended by the implication that they were 'dirty' and needed to take measures to clean themselves."
"They were 'gentlemen'....it was only those nasty poor folk who were unsanitary and sick."
~ MisterMarcus
They're Definitely Not Psychic
"On October 9, 1903, The New York Times published an editorial that predicted it would take between 1 million and 10 million years for humans to develop a working flying machine."
"On December 17, 1903—about two months later, the Wright Brothers completed the first flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine."
~ coombuyah26
Some of these started out as conspiracy theories, but most were scientific hypotheses.
When I was a teenager, a "crazy" paleontologist proposed birds were the closest descendants of dinosaurs, not lizards.
Now this theory is widely accepted.
What strange but true theory would you add to the list?
