December 2008 Archives

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.

Aloha conspiracy fans! You may have been lamenting the lack of new material on The Grassy Knoll over the past month. Sadly I was unable to compile any blog entries as I was on holiday in sunny Hawaii. So in celebration of my return I have examined a classic conspiracy theory centred on the paradise islands of the pacific. Enjoy!

On 7 December 1941 the tropical naval base of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was ripped apart by a brutal sneak attack.
The Japanese assault marked a turning point in the conventions of warfare, and dragged the US into World War II just as Nazi strength in Europe was reaching its peak.
US President Franklin D Roosevelt famously dubbed the assault, which killed more than 2,400 servicemen, "a date that will live in infamy".
But the question of how much advance knowledge the President had and whether or not those sailors could have been saved has lingered throughout the decades.
To many conspiracy theorists, Pearl Harbor is the ultimate betrayal, where thousands of men were left to die by their leaders in order to justify America's entry into the battle against Hitler in Europe.
The timing seemed too convenient, the base too badly prepared, for the attack to have been a genuine surprise.
Many conspiracies surrounding Pearl Harbor revolve around when the US was able to break the Japanese military code, and how much information they had.
The movement of the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers out of Hawaii, combined with recently released documents highlighting the amount of intelligence available to US military before Pearl Harbor, have prompted some theorists to conclude that Roosevelt and his commanders deliberately sacrificed their men.
Many historians reject this account of affairs, suggesting that incompetence, rather than ruthlessness, was the key to America's failure to prevent Pearl Harbor.
Yet doubts remain over what really happened that day, and why the US Navy was caught out so badly
How much did the US know in advance and could any government really be callous enough to sacrifice thousands of lives for its own strategic aims?