Who exactly are the Freemasons?
For many they are a perfectly harmless group.
Little more than a working men's club, they hold meetings, swap silly handshakes, have a few drinks and go back to their day jobs.
But for some conspiracy theorists, they are a bizarre cabal of dastardly occultists banded together to control the world.
Of all the conspiracy theories explored in this blog, none can match the Masonic theory for sheer scale.
With a hand in everything from global warming to Iraq, 9/11 to devil worship, the Freemasons have become the conspiracy community's bogeyman, responsible for all the ills that affect our world.
The most popular theory is that the Masons are the modern branch of an ancient sect who aim to shape global events and ensure that their interests are furthered in the New World Order they seek to create.
With their use of occult symbols, their highly secretive meetings and their notable members, the Masons are to conspiracy theorists what a candle is to a moth; irresistible.
But how much truth lies behind the myths?
How powerful are this group, and what happens behind the closed doors of their "grand lodge" get togethers?
Could these men really organise a global powerplay to control our lives, or are they just a bunch of drunken, aging frat boys?
With more than six million members worldwide, they are certainly a force to be reckoned with.
If they were to turn their hand to world domination, it could be tough to stop them.

It is widely accepted that the modern world's unquenchable thirst for oil has left mankind facing a dilemma.
We are told that global oil production is nearing its peak, and that soon this most precious of resources will have run out.
As governments scramble to find alternative fuel sources, oil rich nations are enjoying a "black gold" rush.
The future scarcity of oil has handed the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a blank cheque and left the oil markets in turmoil.
With the cost of oil soaring past the $100-a-barrell mark, the producers are recording record profits, while the public is facing unprecedented price hikes at the petrol pumps.
We are told that all of this is necessary, a market adjustment, an inconvenience born of the natural clash between decades of excess and a slowdown in oil production.
But there is another theory.
What if this oil peak is a myth, a spook story created by the multi-trillion dollar petrol companies and the oil rich nations that control the supply lines?
What if instead of a scientific, evolutionary fact, the idea of a peak in production is a tool to control the markets and keep pump prices high?
Surely such a conspiracy is unthinkable, who could orchestrate such a complex and dastardly plot?
If it was going to be done, it would require a group with massive sway over global financial markets, influence over the leading governments of the world, a huge amount of cash and a ruthless desire to exploit human suffering and poverty in order to make a profit.
Conspiracy theorists are torn as to who this group may be. The famed "illuminati", a shadowy cabal of New World Order devotees and the oil companies themselves are among the main candidates.
Whoever the conspirators are, the idea that peak oil is nothing more than a money-making myth drives right to the heart of the global economic meltdown we are currently experiencing.
If this is a conspiracy, then everything from politics to finance, from industry to the military is being manipulated, and that is a very worrying thought indeed.

AT the height of the cold war the US government was pouring billions of dollars into highly classified biological weaponry projects.
The plan, as early as the 1950s, was to develop a disease so deadly, so potent, that it could wipe out whole communities, even paralyse an entire nation.
Most of this research remains buried in top secret files, and we may never know just how far these experiments went, and how close the US came to perfecting the deadly biotechnology they craved.
But what if we are already witnessing the devastating results of their tampering?
What if one of those experiments got out of the lab?
What if AIDS, a disease that has claimed almost 40 million lives since the early 1980s, was created by the American scientists who dedicated their lives to creating a weaponised virus?
The origins of the deadly disease are still shrouded in mystery.
The official story about monkeys in deepest Africa transmitting the infection to humans is scoffed at by conspiracy theorists, who are sure that AIDS began as part of a dastardly government plan to eradicate those groups hit hardest by the disease - homosexuals, drug users and black people.
Many leaders in the African American community, including the Black Panthers and the new Nation of Islam, have leant their support to the conspiracy theories, making them widely accepted.
Could it be that the worst epidemic of modern times is a man-made nightmare?
Or are theorists simply turning a tragedy into a conspiracy?

The tragic death of Jade Goody at just 27-years-old has left the nation in mourning.
But for conspiracy buffs is raises once more one of the most morbid, yet interesting, theories out there.
Club 27, as it has become known, is a group of notable stars who have all died at just 27.
The membership list reads like a who's who of celebrities, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, all lost their lives at the dreaded age.
In the case of some of these legendary figures, their deaths have been shrouded in mystery.
Cobain's final hours, depressed, drugged and alone, will remain a riddle, but conspiracy theories abound as to whether he would have been able to pull the trigger on the shotgun that claimed his young life.
Hendrix's end was also drug-linked, while Joplin lost her life to the same heroin addiction that had so consumed Cobain.
Guitarist Jones died in very suspicious circumstances. The former Rolling Stone was found at the bottom of his swimming pool by his Swedish girlfriend, who later wrote a book about how her lover had been murdered.
As for The Doors' frontman Morrison, his demise is particularly mysterious. He was found dead in a bathtub at his Paris apartment, but no autopsy was ever performed, allowing theorists to speculate on everything from murder to a faked death.
Jade's sad end may not have been a mystery, but the mere fact that she died at 27 will start tongues wagging again about the curse that stalks young celebrities at that tender age.

Germany 1945.
The Third Reich is crumbling, and the military victory of the allies is assured.
With the world only just learning the true horrors that lay behind the barbed wire of Auschwitz and Dachau, the US army is uncovering a rich treasure trove of military and scientific knowledge.
Under Hitler, the German army had invested more money in research and development than any military unit in human history.
The results were staggering.
Not only had the Nazis mastered previously unknown methods in the field of rocket science and munitions, they had used gruesome experiments in the death camps of Eastern Europe to learn the secrets of chemical warfare and medical manipulation.
But the scientists who had so callously and cruelly exploited the suffering of the holocaust victims were now freelance, no longer shackled by the constraints of the Nazi regime.
Their knowledge and expertise were going to prove crucial over the coming years, but their distasteful views and their appalling actions meant the Allies would baulk at accepting them as refugees.
So where did these brilliant, brutal men end up?
More to the point, what did they end up doing, and did some of their inhuman experiments outlive the Nazi regime that spawned them and cross the Atlantic to the US?

George W Bush left office with the lowest approval rating of any US president in living memory.
So great was the impact of his catastrophic leadership that it handed the White House, Congress and the Senate to the Democrats, and left the Republican party so desperate for leadership that they turned to Sarah Palin.
But what if it was all a con?
Could Bush really have stolen not one but two elections to grab hold of and keep the most powerful office in the world?
Conspiracy theorists believe the former President and his party did just that, exerting influence over election officials, using the position of his brother Jeb as Governor of Florida and blocking hundreds of thousands of democrats from having their votes counted.
The potential ramifications of such a conspiracy are almost too extreme to comprehend.
How different would history have been if Al Gore had been sitting in the Oval Office on 9/11, or had John Kerry been commander-in-chief in Iraq?
If Bush did steal the elections then where does that leave the most proudly democratic nation on earth, and how easily could it happen again?
Both the 2000 and 2004 elections saw Bush beat the pundits and confound the opinion polls to claim the White House.
The big question is, did he do this through skillful politics and well-planned campaigning, or did he use Machiavellian cunning to dupe a nation into handing him power?

No murder case before or since has captured the public imagination in quite the same way as the Jack The Ripper killings.
Brutal, ritualistic, depraved, the murder spree enthralled Victorian London with the sheer scale of its cruelty and disregard for human suffering.
In 1888 the capital was in a state of morbid fascination as a vicious killer stalked the streets of East London's poorest areas, seizing prostitutes and subjecting them to inhuman acts of torture.
This was the first serial killing to take place in the age of readily available newspapers, whose editors revelled in the sordid details of the Ripper murders, whipping the public into a frenzy.
The more vice girls that went missing, the more the Ripper's legacy grew, and the harder Scotland Yard found it to track their man.
Newspapers took a perverse pleasure in the failure of detectives, who turned up at several of the grisly crime scenes just moments after "Jack" had fled.
Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the string of killings stopped.
With no arrests, no real suspects and a total lack of evidence, the police were forced to admit they had no solution to the case, leaving one of the most notorious murder sprees of all time unsolved.
As the years have drawn on, conspiracy theorists have speculated on the true identity of the killer. Clearly this was not the work of a member of the vast economic underclass that had developed in East London.
The Ripper was smart, ruthless and cunning.
While a number of suspects have been put forward over the past century, it is the possibility of a Royal connection that has truly excited the conspiracy community. If a Royal was involved, many say that a vast network of freemasons and members of the so-called "Illuminati" could have protected his identity.
So could the Ripper really have been Prince Eddy, the heir to the British throne?
Historians claim it is impossible, but the dark side of the ill-fated Prince's character is well documented, leading some theorists to maintain that he was the man behind one of the most heinous crimes in British history.

BARACK Obama's sensational run to the Oval Office has left the world stunned.
The rapid pace of this seismic shift in US history, the destruction of centuries old racial divisions with seeming ease and the establishment of a totally new political philosophy in the world's most powerful nation created a whiplash reaction across the globe.
How did a man of such humble origins rise through sheer willpower, determination and ability to the role of commander in chief?
How did a black man, with a Kenyan father, schooled overseas, and brought up in Hawaii, trump the combined might of the Clinton dynasty and the Republican party?
How did an inexperienced one-term senator triumph in an electoral system that revolves around money, influence, lobbying and dirty tricks?
For most people who watched this amazing journey the answer was simple. Obama is a man of destiny, a symbol of renewed hope and restored purpose, the man chosen by a huge majority to lead America out of the desperation of the Bush years towards prosperity and global respect.
However, with an event that promises such dramatic change, an election so touched by history, conspiracy theorists are having their say about what really happened.
With the mud slinging of the campaign over, theorists are left to levy charges of links to domestic "terrorist" Bill Ayers, raise questions over Obama's birth certificate and add to a growing clamour over the fumbled oath of office.
Could Obama be a shadowy figure, handed power as part of a dastardly conspiracy?
Or is he simply an honest, decent politician, keen to remodel his beleaguered nation and restore it to its former glory?

The Illuminati conspiracy is the focus for global secret society theorists everywhere.
When President George Bush Senior delivered his now infamous New World Order speech on 11 September 1990 the conspiracy community went into overdrive.
Bush's turn of phrase opened the floodgates for a deluge of conspiracy theories about who really runs the world around us, and what role secret societies play in our lives.
The prospect of an Illuminati or "enlightened" group ruling the armies, banks and governments of the world is a terrifying one.
Reports of their powers are staggering, with a handful of Illuminati elders able to send nations to war, bring down economies and rule countries through their secret links with one another. With sinister motives and satanic beliefs, the Illuminati are the conspiracy community's equivalent of the bogeyman.
According to theorists they possess a quasi-religious presence, able to dictate events and overseeing almost every aspect of the world around us.
Signs of their presence are supposedly dotted around modern culture, with everything from the all-seeing eye on a $1 bill to snatched photos of secret ceremonies offering proof of their existence.
The Illuminati are depicted as the controlling force that holds together the shadowy collection of secret societies that make up the power elite behind the New World Order conspiracy.
The Skull and Bones Society, the Council on Foreign Relations and even the Masons are said to be part of this band of privileged leaders who control our destiny.
To many the Illuminati are the multipurpose, one-size-fits-all conspiracy.
Planes have been flown into the Twin Towers? Must be the Illuminati. The global banking system has imploded? Clearly the work of the Illuminati. Reptilian Humanoids are taking over the world? Surely they are part of the Illuminati.
Many of these arguments have damaged the reputation of the original theory, which is that the men who really control our fate are part of a secret gang bent on world domination and the preservation of their own power.
But how much of this can we really believe, and how much is paranoia and hearsay?

In celebration of the festive period and the inevitable journalistic silly season, I thought I would share my ten favourite crackpot theories in order of stupidity. Enjoy!

Surely the strangest conspiracy theory of all time.
Colonel Sanders, the face and founder of the fast-food giant, was rumoured to have left 10 per cent of his earnings to the Ku Klux Klan in his will.
This sparked scurrilous rumours that the chain was being run by the KKK after his death, and that a drug was being used in the Colonel's "secret blend of herbs and spices" to render African American men sterile.
This most bizarre of theories even has a wonderfully ironic twist.
KFC is now owned by a black man.