In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. 

When I was eleven, we lived in an English Tudor on Bluff Road in Glencoe, Illinois. One day, three strange men (two young, one old) knocked on the door. Their last name was Frank. They said they’d lived in this house before us, not for weeks but decades. For twenty years, this had been their house. They’d grown up here. Though I knew the house was old, it never occurred to me until then that someone else had lived in these rooms, that even my own room was not entirely my own. The youngest of the men, whose room would become mine, showed me the place on a brick wall hidden by ivy where he’d carved his name. “Bobby Frank, 1972.” It had been there all along. And I never even knew it.

That is the condition of the human race: we have woken to life with no idea how we got here, where that is or what happened before. Nor do we think much about it. Not because we are incurious, but because we do not know how much we don’t know.

What is a conspiracy?

It’s a truth that’s been kept from us. It can be a secret but it can also be the answer to a question we’ve not yet asked.

Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, but life has existed on this planet for 3.5 billion. That leaves 3,495,888,000 pre-human years unaccounted for—more than enough time for the rise and fall of not one but several pre-human industrial civilizations. Same screen, different show. Same field, different team. An alien race with alien technology, alien vehicles, alien folklore, and alien fears, beneath the familiar sky. There’d be no evidence of such bygone civilizations, built objects and industry lasting no more than a few hundred thousand years. After a few million, with plate tectonics at work, what is on the surface, including the earth itself, will be at the bottom of the sea and the bottom will have become the mountain peaks. The oldest place on the earth’s surface—a stretch of Israel’s Negev Desert—is just over a million years old, nothing on a geological clock.

The result of this is one of my favorite conspiracy theories, though it’s not a conspiracy in the conventional sense, a conspiracy usually being a secret kept by a nefarious elite. In this case, the secret, which belongs to the earth itself, has been kept from all of humanity, which believes it has done the only real thinking and the only real building on this planet, as it once believed the earth was at the center of the universe.

Called the Silurian Hypothesis, the theory was written in 2018 by Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard Institute, and Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester. Schmidt had been studying distant planets for hints of climate change, “hyperthermals,” the sort of quick temperature rises that might indicate the moment a civilization industrialized. It would suggest the presence of a species advanced enough to turn on the lights. Such a jump, perhaps resulting from a release of carbon, might be the only evidence that any race, including our own, will leave behind. Not the pyramids, not the skyscrapers, not Styrofoam, not Shakespeare—in the end, we will be known only by a change in the rock that marked the start of the Anthropocene.

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In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. 

There is a movie that came out decades ago. I saw it in a theater in Paris as part of a Robert Mitchum festival, which, as luck had it, was playing in a small theater across the street from my small hotel at the end of a small street during a small, lonely season of my life. Instead of going to museums, I passed the days in the dark watching Cape Fear, The Night of the Hunter, Out of the Past, and Pursued, an obscure movie directed by Raoul Walsh. Martin Scorsese once described it to me as the only Freudian Western. It deals with repressed memory, signs and symbols, dreams and fantasies of uncovering the hidden origins of your existence. It’s about a cowboy. He lives in New Mexico with his mother, whom he loves; with his sister, whom he loves in a different way; and with his brother, whom he hates, though he doesn’t understand why. At night, he is haunted by a strange dream—in it, he sees dancing boots and spurs, and there is always laughter. In the last act, we learn the meaning of the boots and the laughter, a secret that explains the cowboy’s fear and distrust. The dream is more than a dream. It’s a memory of the day the man who’d been posing as Mitchum’s uncle killed Mitchum’s father, then danced over the body in spurred boots laughing as the woman Mitchum would accept as his mother scooped up the terrified child to be raised as her own.

That movie has haunted me ever since. Its dancing spurs have become my dancing spurs, its story less a plot than a parable. It’s mankind reduced to symbols. It’s a secret encoded. It’s telling us that the truth about our past—as a species—has been hidden. It’s about the effort to keep it hidden, which constitutes a conspiracy. It’s a secret that remains just out of reach, though the existence of the secret is hinted at in all the ancient books. It’s in the Bible (Old Testament) and in its sequel (New Testament). It’s in Exodus when Moses climbs the trail to the peak of Sinai, the holy mountain, the Lord’s abode in the upside-down. God gives Moses the Ten Commandments, then something else, a secret teaching, whispered in the left ear. Moses shared it with his nephews, who either passed it on or were not listening. Some of it may have been recorded in Jubilees, a noncanonical book of the Bible. It’s in the Gospels, too, most clearly in Mark, when Jesus, explaining why much of his teaching is given in the form of parables (in ancient Israel, a parable was like a riddle) says he does it to obscure as much as to reveal:

You are permitted to understand the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but others are not. To those who listen to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge. But for those who are not listening, even what little understanding they have will be taken away from them. That is why I use these parables, for they look, but they don’t really see. They hear, but they don’t really listen or understand.

For Jews, this method—teaching via seemingly pointless stories—will be familiar. All our old-timers prefer anecdotes to instructions, questions to answers. Think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “I can tell you fancy, I can tell you plain.” Or think of my pop who, when asked why he answered every question with another question, responded, “Why do you ask?”

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In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. 

The best conspiracy theories make sense of what has always seemed senseless. They let you believe you are finally connecting the dots, finding the missing pieces, experiencing the world as it really is. The most powerful theories—the mind blowers—name something you’ve always known, even if you hadn’t known it consciously, or did not believe it could be named. There is no invention, just discovery. The best explain why you feel like you’re being watched, have lived all this before, knew what would happen before the film even started. That’s the case with what’s become my favorite conspiracy theory: the notion, argued by futurists and tech visionaries, that we live not in the real world but in a simulation, an intricately detailed game cooked up by a demigod, hacker, or AI mastermind, which, if true, explains the uncanny sense that this is not my real life, that these are not my real memories. Or, as my friend Mark, standing on Oak Street Beach at 2 A.M. with Chicago aglow behind us, said, “None of this shit’s real, man. We’re all just figments in a crazy dream.”

This idea that this is not the real world is way older than Pink Floyd (“We’re just two lost souls / swimming in a fish bowl”)  and way older than the defining movie, The Matrix. You hear it in the Hasidic wisdom of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”: “No doubt the world is an entirely imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.” You hear it in the writing of the nineteenth-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, whose book Omphalos argued that the fossils that proved the world is older than the six thousand years of Genesis had been put in the ground by God to test man’s faith. You hear it in the Buddhist folk tales, most famously the “butterfly dream” of Zhuangzi, in which the author is uncertain if he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he’s a man. It’s the uncanniness you experience not when you are drunk and not when are you are high, but when you are drunk and high, the insight you stumble across the way you stumble across certain bars only when it’s very late and you are very lost and absolutely need them to exist. It’s not that the stimulant creates the dream, but that it opens your eyes to the big truth you’ve been trained not to see.

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In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. This month, he explores the sudden rise in UFO sightings after World War II. 

America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions. Visions of global power, infinite markets, ideological struggle, and exotic flying machines. It’s not clear if the number of UFO sightings actually spiked in the years that followed or if it was just our imagination, but something changed. What had been a trickle of encounters dating back to the pioneering days of aviation became a torrent. Often described as saucers, these noiseless, shimmery machines were seen above highways and wheat fields and supermarkets in Forth Worth, Texas; Great Falls, Montana; Monmouth County, New Jersey; Salem, Massachusetts; Carson Sink, Nevada; Washington, D.C.; Miami, Florida; Norfolk, Virginia—the list goes on and on—in the late forties and early fifties. The timing makes it impossible to consider such phenomena without also considering the cataclysm that, more than any set of founding documents, gave birth to our colossal, unknowable, world-striding modern nation. In other words, before you can grapple with UFOs, you have to ask yourself: what the hell did that war do to America?

Dreamers have seen things in the heavens since time out of mind. You can go back to 228 B.C., when the Roman historian Livy recognized portents of doom in the “phantom ships” he saw “gleaming in the sky.” Or when Pliny the Elder, an ancient scribe, recorded something that sounds like a Steven Spielberg UFO: a spark that “fell from a star and grew as it descended until it appeared to be the size of the Moon.” Such visions, which usually came in times of stress, were taken as a sign from God. Ezekiel’s fiery wheel, witnessed on the road to Babylon, was possibly a flying saucer. People have always had visions, but the language changed. In the religious age, it was angels and demons. In the scientific age, it’s intergalactic dream machines, hot rods cooked up by gearheads from across the inky vacuum. As the holy book says, “We see things not as they are, but as we are.”

The Germans put the first jet plane in the air in 1939. The first rocket that could touch space went up in 1942. Called the V2, its target was not space but London. Chuck Yeager, flying the bullet-shaped Bell X-1, broke the speed of sound (767 mph) in October 1947. Ten years later, the Soviet’s launched the first artificial satellite. That was followed by the first man in space, the first man in orbit, the first man on the moon. One result of the aerospace boom was UFO mania. If we could do it, it was only logical to think aliens could do it, too. Roswell, New Mexico, where the air force was said to have recovered a flying saucer and a crew of dead aliens in 1946, was just the most famous encounter—there were hundreds of others during the Cold War. In 1949, government officials were said to have captured the crew of an alien craft that set down, in the cool of a desert evening, on a plateau in Aztec, New Mexico.

What explains this sudden intergalactic traffic?

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