A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
msn.com
msn.com
How very sad. The monkey chimera was fluent in English, but got subdued in India.
If you look up that film stabilized [1], it becomes really apparent that it's just a guy in a ape costume. The shaky camera is the only thing that makes it harder to determine what's going on.
For example if one doctor says I have cancer but 100 electricians say I don't I'm cancer free
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
> What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine.
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
- ask really annoying and interesting questions
- etc.
One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races.
The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the time.
Today Wakefield is on the anti-vax circuit giving talks and continuing to lie.
Measles is a Solved Problem. Polio is a Solved Problem.
But the toons are running the Fed now, canceling science and telling lies. So we'll have to wait until 2028 to get a final death count, assuming anyone is still tracking it.
There are also multiple ways to solve problems. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuitively bad and conjures images of 19th century quacks. So all you have to do is use a different preservative. Then you have a one-line killshot any time anyone brings it up -- there's no mercury anymore -- and you don't have to try to explain statistical sample sizes to people who failed high school math.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
Flying is safe, but I think it is not because some rules/regulations or due to "science".
A plane falling out of sky is a pretty big event and cannot be suppressed or silenced. It affects a large number of people at once. If planes starts to fall out of sky often, then the commercial aviation will come to a halt in a month. Given this eventuality, if you want to make money by flying people, it in imperative that there is no other way than to * do everything possible to make sure* planes don't fall from the sky.
If planes could fall out of sky without everyone knowing about it (For example, imagine that when a plane crashes, instead of killing the passengers right away, they only get hit after a month or so, and it is hard to link the deaths with the flight they took a month before), and affecting their business, then I bet that flying will no longer be very safe as companies will start cutting expenses with maintenance etc and paying off regulators/inspectors..
I don't see the connection. Are you implying that it will stop people from investing?
Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible.
(I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there)
Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinical trials only monitor outcomes for a few days to a couple weeks. 2) Most vaccine clinical trials have no placebo control. If they have do have a control group in most cases the control group gets a different vaccine. 3) Most kids in vaccine clinical trials are also getting 10-30 other vaccine injections during their first two years of life during the period that they're being monitored for the one vaccine in their trial. So the only way this could even produce a signal would be if the one vaccine under trial was the only one that caused harm and all other vaccines did not.
I am not saying that vaccines do cause chronic disease in 1% of kids - just that it seems to me we don't have a good way to know.
Furthermore, even if it was proved that vaccines caused harm, vaccine manufacturers are not liable for harms from vaccines on the childhood vaccine schedule.
It's a very different situation from flying.
I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.
Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.
Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.
It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.
With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.
I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.
There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.
For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).
So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.
Why?
The term you are looking for is 'an argument to popularity'. It's one of many such logical fallacies.
Most people find that it's more complicated to work with, since it requires a vastly more complicated set of initial conditions. But if you find that it works for you it isn't actually wrong.
A good self-test is asking yourself how you know the Earth isn't flat. Don't do any research, just try to work it out from what you've already observed and think what makes you believe that conclusion.
But then perhaps over time, they somehow attracted people who genuinely are that stupid, and uncritically believe? That demographic is obviously going to be too stupid to critically assess any new evidence either.
or just the “obviously stupid” ones?
We are barely sentient shit slinging apes.
As a schoolkid, our physics teacher was a flat earther. He drove us kids mad arguing with him that the earth is spherical.
Canny bloke.
Sounds like this doc might have a real bombshell though -
> “Capturing Bigfoot,” premiering this week at the South By Southwest film festival, builds to a big reveal: freshly surfaced film that appears to show a woodsy dress rehearsal for one of the world’s most enduring hoaxes. In the new footage—from a Kodak reel dating to 1966—Patterson’s camera tracks a man in costume, his brother-in-law, moving in a similar fashion to the figure in the 1967 shoot
This would be a pretty nice conclusion, to be honest.
I wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
"visitor safety" indeed!
> Bigfoot are omnivores, "They eat both plants and meat. I've seen accounts that they eat everything from berries, leaves, nuts, and fruit to salmon, rabbit, elk, and bear
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we didn't believe at all is the Comet Ping Pong one, which was appropriate.
If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
I’m not sure if “I’m just a cryptozoologist” is much of a vindication.
No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
Security state loyalists were not nearly as influential in online discourse back then, as they are now. Probably astroturfing, AI and algorithmic amplification plays a part in that.
You say that like it isn't what happened.
If anything there were more security state loyalists in the first years after 9/11 than there are now.
That not a philosophically supportable statement. "There's insufficient evidence to warrant belief in your claim" is more realistic.
If they had not trafficked minors as well I wonder whether it would ever have been exposed. It makes me wonder what else is going on.
Such things have existed for millennia. What's more surprising is that people claim to be surprised.
Except the proportion of paedophile priests is about the same as the proportion of paedophiles in the general population. There are more paedophiles in schools and social services than in religious organisations - and there have even been more convictions of teachers and social workers, at least tin the UK. The reason you think of the Catholic Church this way is BECAUSE it got more media attention earlier than elsewhere. A surprising number of people the UK do not know about the biggest big paedophile scandal in the country, the Islington one, that was huge, and at least one politician who was responsible for the failure to investigate went on to have a successful career in politics (the only time it set back her career at all was when Blair wanted to make her minister for children there was a backlash)
I doubt you have any reliable statistics about this, given how many victims keep silent out of fear.
But in any case, the moral failure of the church was not the existence of individual abusers (which indeed can exist anywhere in society), but how on an institutional level known abusers were protected by the curch. Everyone who was part of the cover-up (which went all the way to the top) is complicit.
I think what earned the Catholic Church their reputation was that the church was actively involved in protecting known pedophiles and repeatedly shuffling them around effectively giving them an endless supply of fresh victims while suppressing the voices of many of the children brave enough to come forward. The problem with the church isn't that pedos exist there, but that they've been very often supported and defended and their actions covered up in ways that don't (and often couldn't) happen in schools.
That being said, nowadays it seems that a difference between conspiracy theory and confirmed fact is 12-24 months
- Conspiracy theory view: Some buildings were demolished. Politics seizes the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
- Non-conspiracy view: Some terrorist attack event happened (but every actuary can give you estimates on how often such an event is to be expected, so nothing surprising here), so politics seized the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
The only difference between these perspectives is what happened the three towers and some part of the Pentagon building to collapse.
(Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
I might be totally mistaken but I think most of the times when a new "species" is found is either a) some different genus which a non trained eye would not be able to distinguish from an existing one, or b) some species that lives only in a very difficult to reach place with some very specific conditions (i.e. underwater near volcanoes).
Something so different with so many "sightings" as a Bigfoot? Almost impossible.
Wait, are you implying that Nessie used to surface in front of humans?
This MSN "article" seems oddly out of place on HN.
Maybe there's something sinister going on: I suspect the shoe sole industry what with these huge foots and all. It'd make sense since Covid people are walking less. Maybe the sole industry caused the lab leak?
I'm just asking questions.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?
What else has been covered up? Oh boy...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/incoherent-conspiracy-sugges...
The article above is from 2020, and later the FBI itself used the user maxwellhill as evidence in Ghislaine's investigation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1qsf6y6/reddit_pos...
no matter what the “we always believed and knew” crowd tries to say.
I don’t know if the claim is “absurd” but it appears to be essentially baseless.
That’s the real bread and butter of conspiracy theorizing: claims that don’t matter to anyone’s real lives whether they’re actually true or not.
Therefore they propagate primarily for entertainment value and face none of the friction that you’re imagining being generated by “doesn’t actually make useful predictions about the world.”
The government spent a lot of time and energy pumping up UFO conspiracy theories to hide sightings of classified aircraft, and they're getting pumped up again in the age of developing cheap weaponized drones.
I would not be surprised that the whole human sex trafficking and Qanon related conspiracy theories are also psyops to hide what's actually going on in plain sight. Obviously, Hillary Clinton wasn't trafficking kids in the basement of a pizza parlor, but there is literally a cabal of elite sex trafficking pedophiles that own and run everything, and one of them is the president.
Well there you have it. That has nothing to do with truth, only an emotional inclination. For instance, you are strongly inclined to believe the claims in the comment you responded to, despite it being almost entirely BS.
It wasn't until usenet came along and I encountered debates between physicists and conspiracy cranks that I started to question it--the physicists would calmly present solid-seeming arguments and the cranks would accuse them of working for the CIA and post malarkey. But I still wasn't sure--a bad argument for something isn't a good argument against it. My biggest breakthrough was when I was dating a law professor whom I greatly respected, very liberal (as am I)--she was the cofounder of the Women's Studies program at UCLA--and she was bemused by my entertaining the conspiracy theories as at all likely (no one in her academic, legal, and feminist circles did), and she casually mentioned that one of the first things she learned in law school was that people are highly unreliable in judging the direction that a sound comes from, so people talking about shots coming from the grassy knoll didn't really mean anything. Her attitude drove me to dig deeper, and when the web came along I found https://www.jfk-assassination.net/ (it was located elsewhere back then). I started seeing all the counterarguments to the misrepresentations in those books and articles I had read, and this was before Bugliosi's 1600 page https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-History-Assassination-Pres...
I now know about as well as one can know any historical event that LHO, a man who had defected to the USSR, possibly planning on giving them information about the U-2 (for which he was denounced by U-2 pilot Gary Powers) and had been on TV representing the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" (of which he was the only member), was the lone gunman. That doesn't mean that his story was simple--it wasn't, and that's part of the fuel for appallingly ignorant and intellectually dishonest conspiracy theories.
It's sad to see on HN claims that no one believes what is believed to be actually true by rational informed people, along with questions like
> What do you believe? The news?
(I haven't had a TV for at least 20 years; what does he believe, YouTube? I know how to gather and weigh information; he doesn't) grossly dishonest assertions that
> pizza gate was corroborated by the epstein emails
and nonsensical ignorant claims about UFOs that are supported by terrible reporting by ignorant sensationalist journalists. It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.
No one is saying that, there is just a history of the government using UFO/"alien" conspiracy theories as disinformation to discredit sightings of classified aircraft, which themselves are mundane and nothing special: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf... - https://archive.ph/3bTMz
NASA already addressed UAPs[1], they're just misidentification of things like passenger aircraft
[1] NASA's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQcqOW39ksk
I'm fascinated by such absurd and intellectually dishonest comments. Of course there are people saying that ... just because it's not what you're saying doesn't mean there aren't. I've followed the UFO sightings arena on and off since the 1950s when my brother got heavily into tracking sightings, maintaining a file cabinet of them and subscribing to numerous journals ... there's a much broader range of beliefs and activity than you're acknowledging, and that's what I was talking about in my comment, if you would bother to actually read and understand it.
I'm not going to address your other claims, or comment further on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_reports_and_disinformation
Checkout this recently made documentary on the Phoenix lights https://youtu.be/7y1XhyTe4Zs
Note that ridicule as way to discredit sightings of classified craft was the purpose of project blue book. Don't let a good disaster go to waste etc.
No, this is not at all true. For example, the only "truth" of BigFoot is the hoax video that many people are emotionally inclined to think isn't a hoax. The only "truth" in Qanon is the messages that Q wrote. Pizzagate was believed by people emotionally inclined to believe that Hillary drinks children's blood. And on and on. Did the government fake the moon landing? Many people believe so, despite no "truth" to it. Is the Earth flat but NASA is conspiring to tell people it's a globe? Is evolution a hoax? There are reasons that these circulate widely despite having no truth to them.
LOL. That doesn't even warrant a response.