Andy Thomas 5 May 2026
Conspiracy theories are rubbish, right? And conspiracy theorists are nutters.
Hold on a minute, says Andy Thomas (our speaker at the May 5th u3a meeting) there’s a bit more to it than that.
Andy reminded us that conspiracy theories have been around for a very long time. They were rife in the Roman Empire. We all know that ‘Nero fiddled while Rome burned’ but many people, then and now, believe that Nero himself started the fire to clear Rome for his redevelopment plans. Anyway, he turned it to his advantage by blaming the early Christians.
On other occasions, the Romans disguised some of their war ships with enemy flags and used them to attack their own fleet. This was the origin of the expression ‘false flag’, much used today.
In the days of Queen Elizabeth I and her spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, conspiracy theories were common. In Stuart times, the Gunpowder Plot – blamed on the Catholics – was believed by many to be a false flag. Catholics were the scapegoats of choice, and many blamed them for the Great Fire of London. In 1678, ex-Jesuit Titus Oates (by then he had been expelled from the Jesuits twice), persuaded people of a ‘Popish Plot’ which led to 130 people being wrongly executed.
In 1776 a rumour spread that a society called the Illuminati (founded on 1 May 1776, in Ingolstadt, Bavaria) was secretly ruling the world. The society was disbanded after ten years but that didn’t stop people, particularly in America, from continuing to believe in its existence and influence.
During World War I, with enemy submarines prowling the seas, civilian ships were usually escorted by warships but, on one notorious occasion, these escorts disappeared for no apparent reason and, sure enough, the Lusitania was torpedoed on 7 May 1915, by a German U-boat. She quickly sank with the loss of 1,198 lives. Some claim Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, deliberately exposed the ship to provoke a German strike and draw America into the war, but this theory is widely dismissed. Experts note there is no proof Churchill plotted to sacrifice the ship.
In Germany, the Reichstag fire in Berlin on 27 February 1933 was an arson attack on the German parliament. The Nazis blamed Communist agitators and used the incident to justify actions against them, making the fire a key event in establishing Nazi rule. Four weeks afterwards Hitler became Chancellor.
The official story that the attack on Pearl Harbour was unexpected turns out to be untrue. So, did Roosevelt ‘allow’ it in order to bring the American public round to the idea of joining in the war? Or, was it a failure of intelligence analysis, overconfidence, and missed clues?
Prior to the Vietnam War, in August 1964, two American warships in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Korea thought that they heard a gunshot and fired off randomly into the fog. Apparently in fog radar on ships can give a false reflection of themselves. President Lyndon B. Johnson utilized the distorted reports that the US navy had been attacked to argue for retaliation … and the rest is history.
One of the most plausible conspiracy theories concerns the assassination of President Kennedy. The trajectory of the bullets makes it likely that more than one marksman was involved. Lee Harvey Oswald claimed that he had been set up but was never able to speak out in court because he was shot by Jack Ruby, who himself died in a prison cell. All the potential witnesses died under unexplained circumstances.
And then there were the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy … Martin Luther King … Marylin Monroe …
How about the theory that we never made it to the Moon? Just look at the photograph supposedly showing one of the astronauts on the Moon’s surface. He’s lit by a single light coming from … where? He’s standing on a surface that looks nothing like moon dust and so on. Most damning: there is a controversial photograph of lunar astronaut Michael Collins on a spacewalk which looks strikingly similar to one taken on a training flight. If NASA altered one photograph how many others?
Then there’s the death of Princess Diana. Many people want to believe that she was murdered. What about the mysterious white car? The swapping of hospital teams from French to English? The non-functioning CCTV? All very suspicious.
Conspiracy theories swirl around the twin towers and almost any other newsworthy event.
The cumulative effect of all these conspiracy theories is to stop people believing in authority and suspecting, for instance, that ‘they’ are trying to control us through digital ID and AI. And that is worrying.
Andy Thomas is a leading researcher into unexplained mysteries and author of many books, including the acclaimed ‘Conspiracies’, ‘Strange’, ‘The New Heretics’ and ‘The Truth Agenda’. Andy widely writes and lectures and has made numerous radio and TV appearances.
You can learn more by visiting Andy Thomas’s truth agenda website.
5 May 2026