Probably not. Although reported by respected papers like The Guardian and The Scotsman, the poll was conducted online as part of a viral marketing campaign for the new X Files movie I Want To Believe. Although one might argue that fans of X Files are more inclined to be conspiracy minded, thus skewing the results of the poll, one wonders if perhaps this poll inadvertenly gives a metric of the top conspiracy theories amongst the credulous.

Of course, one wonders if the recent spate of news stories promoting Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s beliefs in a U.S. government coverup of alien contact aren’t also part of the viral marketing campaign for the new X Files movie. Now that’s a conspiracy theory I could buy into.

Here’s the top 10 conspiracy theories as identified by the poll…

• Area 51 exists to investigate aliens (48%)
• 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government (38%)
• Apollo landing was a hoax (35%)
• Diana and Dodi were murdered (32%)
• The Illuminati secret society and masons are trying to take over the world (25%)
• Scientologists rule Hollywood (17% )
• Barcodes are really intended to control people (7%)
• Microsoft sends messages via Wingdings (6%)
• US let Pearl Harbour happen (5%)
• The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles (3%)

Tip o’ th’ hat to Liberal England for the links.

In particular, Tim sees the primary goal of the skeptic as battling misinformation, and the internet is an important front in that war. As wonderful a tool as the internet is for disseminating information, misinformation is everywhere on the net. And the sad truth is that those who wish to spread misinformation tend to be far more numerous and much better funded than those who wish to combat misinformation. Like Tim says, “we are outmanned and outgunned.”

So what do we do? Tim argues that we need to be more systematic than we’ve been in the past. While blog posts and google bombs are all well and good, they are both primarily reactionary and often preaching to the choir. We need to find ways of getting the message out to people who won’t seek it out for themselves. And to that end, he believes that Web 2.0 technologies have a key role to play because they offer community, specialization, programmability and the ability to build a new site out of data provided by other sites (this is called a mashup). He also believes that we must tailor our message to those who are neither skeptics or believers and that specialization is crucial.

Tim goes on to give very specific examples of how skeptics can employ Web 2.0 in the service of contradicting misinformation. In particular he champions the use of RSS, Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, Google Custom Searches, iCalendar, microformats (particularly hReview), geo-coding, mashups and open data.

I won’t bother to summarize Tim’s excellent post any further because it really should be read by every skeptic seeking to use the net to get the message out. Ideally these techniques should be adopted by regional skeptical organizations as a way of both amplifying their own efforts and as a way of furthering skeptical community.

Tim Farley created and writes the web site What’s The Harm? dedicated to highlighting the plight of those who have suffered because of their, or others’, beliefs in misinformation.

But it’s easy to think of instances where the opposite is the case. Perhaps the most famous instance in popular culture where supernatural beliefs led to great atrocity are the Early Modern European witch trials where tens of thousands of victims were executed and tortured. However, less remembered are the everyday tragedies arising from unexamined belief such as the credulous senior citized bilked out of their life savings by a crooked clairvoyant preying on their desire to reconnect with lost loved ones.

Most recently there’s the case of Colleen Leduc. Colleen is the mother of an autistic child in Barrie, Ontario, about 60 miles north of Toronto. Her daughter attends a public school because Colleen is unable to afford private therapy. On the morning of May 30th, Colleen received a frantic phone call from the school telling her that she was urgently needed back at the school. She wasn’t prepared for what awaited her.

At the school, Colleen was confronted by the principal, vice-principal and her daughter’s teacher with the disturbing news that they believed her daughter had been sexually abused based on a report from her daughter’s educational assistant and that the Children’s Aid Society had been notified. What was even more shocking was the basis for their accusations — a psychic!

“The teacher looked and me and said: ‘We have to tell you something. The educational assistant who works with Victoria went to see a psychic last night, and the psychic asked the educational assistant at that particular time if she works with a little girl by the name of “V.” And she said ‘yes, I do.’ And she said, ‘well, you need to know that that child is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.’”

Later Colleen was visited by a representative of the Children’s Aid Society but the questions of her daughter being sexually abused were quickly put to rest because Colleen had equipped her daughter with a GPS tracking unit that continuously recorded both her movements and the audio around her. While it might seem odd that Colleen had equipped her daughter with a tracking device, it’s understandable after one learns that this same school had allegedly lost Colleen’s daughter several times. The geographic and audio data handily contradicted the psychic’s claims and thus the CAS case was closed, although an investigation into the school and how a psychic’s word came to be accepted as proof of sexual abuse is ongoing.

While it might be reassuring to think that cases such as Colleen Leduc’s are abberational, neither are they unheard of. While in the Western world we may no longer have witch trials, people are harmed by their credulous beliefs, or the beliefs of others, everyday. Often times instances of harm arising from beliefs in the paranormal and supernatural never come to public attention. Furthermore, we have a short memory for the fraudulent, thus people like Uri Geller are able to continue their careers despite having been repeatedly exposed.

So harm does demonstrably follow from paranormal and supernatural beliefs, and that is reason enough to challenge those beliefs where we might find them while the fact that harm does not always follow is insufficient cause to leave believers to their blissful ignorance. And since it is impossible to predict which anomalous beliefs will result in harm (leaving aside some radical religious beliefs for the moment) it becomes necessary to critically examine all beliefs in the extraordinary. I doubt this sort of belief can ever be eradicated since humans are quick to believe, and slow to doubt, but increased skepticism can only help further reduce the harm from irrational belief.

Originally written for Freethought Fort Wayne blog.

Now while this Google Maps/Earth location had been floating around the internet for some time before I used it in my post, since then I’ve been seeing it all over the place. I think the image is so popular because the swastika, though having been used in folk art for centuries across many cultures, has acquired all the negative feelings associated with Nazi Germany. To see a group of buildings on a U.S. naval base that (at least from an aerial perspective) resemble the symbol of the Third Reich arouses deeply contradictory emotions.

And so in the past two months I’ve encountered this image time and again. And everywhere there is rampant speculation and rumor. Why would the Navy build it this way? Was it some kind of secret message? Was the government actually in cahoots with the Nazis? When viewed with the two buildings immediately to the left which looked sort of like airplanes, was it meant to tell a story of the importance of Naval air superiority in World War II?

It was surprising to see that no one thought to do what seemed to me to be the logical thing to do though. Ask someone who knows. Which is what I did.

On August 15 I e-mailed Steve Fiebing, Public Affairs Officer for Naval Base Coronado inquiring about the history of the buildings. Within a few short hours I received a courteous and informative reply from Mr. Fiebing via GM2 Sean Conneely. The answer as to how the U.S. Navy had come to have a Nazi swastika on one of its’ bases was quite simple and humorously stereotypical for a government organization — SNAFU!

What from the air looks like 4 L-shaped buildings arranged to look like a Nazi swastika is in fact 6 buildings. The 4 L-shaped buildings and two central buildings (seen in the 3D rendering here by NG member greyleonard) were constructed between 1969 and 1970, but the Navy never planned for the complex to look as it does. In the reply to my e-mail inquiry, Mr. Fiebing explains what happened:

The original plans submitted to the Navy for the project included the two central buildings which were intended to contain a boiler plant and a recreation room; and a single “L”-shaped 3-story barracks. The plan called for the “L” shaped building to be repeated three times and placed at 90-degree angles to the central buildings. It wasn’t until after the groundbreaking began that Navy officials realized how the buildings would appear when seen from above.

So once again Occam’s razor triumphs over conspiracy and elaborate stories.

But surely the Navy once they realized the error would have halted construction and reworked the design right? Wouldn’t that have been the right thing to do rather than have a symbol of hate on a U.S. Navy base? Well, I suspect that the ‘oversight’ (as described, complete with quotes, by Mr. Fiebing) would have been costly both in terms of money and time to fix. Anyone who has every worked with or for the U.S. government knows that it doesn’t exactly stop and turn on a dime — and you have to fill out requisition forms in triplicate to get the dime in the first place. So they probably figured that from the ground, with all the landscaping, few people would ever realize what the overall shape of the complex resembled and aside from the Navy pilots no one would ever see it from the air for long enough to notice.

But then Google Maps and Google Earth came along and with it came the legions of fans who relentlessly scour every square foot of the Earth looking for anything remotely anomalous. Should we really require the Navy to perform costly and time consuming demolition and construction just so some peoples’ sensibilities won’t be offended by the perceived shape of a complex of buildings as seen from the air?

Apparently the town of Maasmechelen in Belgium feels the need to do just that with a swastika shaped fountain that has been in the town since 1979. While I can appreciate that people in Europe are still sensitive to the symbols of Nazi Germany 60 years on, the 6 building complex at NBC is not a swastika but merely a cluster of buildings resembling a swastika when seen from the air and was never even intended to resemble a swastika. Furthermore the complex, which is currently being used as barracks by Sailors assigned to Amphibious Construction Battalion 1 (and a few administrative offices on the bottom floor of one building), has been in use for over 35 years and would likely require millions to demolish and reconstruct. So I really see no reason why the Navy should be concerned over how this complex is perceived by a few conspiracy minded individuals. And hopefully the facts surrounding this complex will spread as widely as the rumors and speculation have though I doubt it. Why let the facts get in the way of a good story?

Many thanks to Steve Fiebing and GM2 Conneely for their assistance and patience in answering my questions on this topic.

Note: This post appeared on the original Neural Gourmet and has been copied here. It is one of Neural Gourmet’s top ten posts of all time.