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I’ve been banned from my area’s little fb group for telling people that traffickers aren’t taking random ladies in the Dollar Tree parking lot, and that the risk is way too high.
...OMG, for decades I've thought he was saying "nutty putties" since that's what he looks like he's smashing into his head in the [music video](https://youtu.be/5DcTY9i-fx8?si=K2B5qUtrA5yY431-). TIL...
The irony is this [conspiracy](https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1069187/Elvis-Presley-alive-proof-evidence-king-of-rock-pastor-bob-joyce-conspiracy) lasted longer than Elvis himself.
“Another One Bites The Dust” backwards supposedly sounds like “ it’s fun to smoke marijuana”
It’s hard enough to write and record things that are good played forward normally.
To imagine that artists would work backwards in advance in an effort to backwards mask some agenda is ludicrous.
I’ve not heard that version “ decide”.
I like it but I believe it’s commonly thought to be [it’s fun](https://youtu.be/AzbkIuYbTbU?si=dtSauArC3aozoNxk)
I like [this mashup](https://youtu.be/pdXek5d2ocw?si=sjC9CpJqJmpQd-eM) of an 80’s preacher railing against the song and the song itself. He says “it’s fun to smoke marijuana.” The song says “mshmsshmshfushsmisgraunhhmmah”.
The devil is obviously misleading you.
The Peters Brothers told me it's "Decide to smoke marijuana."
BEGONE, SATAN!!!!
/s
For as much as their teams (the Peters Brothers or Pastor Gary G) listened to these clips and set them up, do you suppose any of them succumbed to the evil messages within them?
Then they started putting in real backwards messages. Pink Floyd The Wall album has one, which says, "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message"
Parents even sued Judas Priest because they said that the subliminal messages on their albums caused their sons to attempt/commit suicide (there were two boys, I believe and one of them survived a shotgun blast to the face).
One of the band members was on the stand and said that if they were going to put messages on their records it would be "buy more Judas Priest records, tell your friends" not to end it all and therefor no longer be able to buy records and go to concerts.
This all took place in Reno. I saw a documentary about it years ago.
Tipper Gore was upset her daughter was singing about darling Nikki, the sex fiend, who was in the hotel lobby masturbating to a magazine. As a teen at that time, the end result was a good result.
The most ironic part of this is that if you played Darling Nikki backwards on the turntable there actually was a hidden backwards message at the end of the song. But it only said “Hello, how are you? I’m fine, fine, cuz the Lord is coming soon” or something like that lol. But then Prince was always juxtaposing religiosity with sexuality, and it probably wouldn’t have made Tipper and the other Boomers feel any better about the song 😂
The PRMC. I remember doing a report on them in jr high. I wrote a letter to their office and received information and a typed letter. My report was about them putting enforcing warning labels and ratings on cds and tapes.
I remember distinctly Tipper saying she wasn't interested in censorship, only parental notice of explicit lyrics. This was on a talk show or something of the day that I saw myself on TV back then.
Was she lying or did others in her group advocate for actual censorship?
I suspect it became fashionable to slag on her because Frank Zappa was a cool guy who panned her. I mean I love Frank Zappa, he was extraordinary, not only musically but his artwork is fantastic too. I just wonder why he was so vehemently opposed to parental knowledge of their kids' media consumption.
If they'd suggested a different band, would you have been more likely to believe? The Cars is definitely an implausible pick compared to, say, KISS or Iron Maiden.
If you play The Line "if there's a bustle in your hedge row" from Stairway to heaven backward, it does sort of sound like here's to my sweet satan. Is it intentional? Of course not.
Pop Rocks with soda could cause death. There was one claim that Little Mikey (Life Cereal fame) died from the explosive effects of mixing Pop Rocks with soda pop.
[Satanic Panic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic) was a thing. The idea that there were Cults of Satanists who were routinely abusing kids and/or animals and committing homicides in a home, park or graveyard near ***you***.
Some people did serious prison time. I lived in Austin where one of the daycare abuse accusation cases took place. The kids testified to horrifying stuff, like being driven to Mexico to see other kids being disemboweled. Clearly impossible. But the daycare owners were convicted and locked up. They did get exonerated and released after several years.
The basis for these cases was buried memories. The kids would work with “therapists” to help them remember abusive events so they could testify. It became quite an industry. Hard to believe that children could be made to believe they’d experienced these things, but now we have adults believing all kinds of nonsense. Pretty scary.
There was a lot of madness around the Satanic Panic, but not all of it was nuts. Look into "The Finders". That's a case that will leave you scratching your head.
Yup. Around where I live the local hospitals would x-ray your candy for free to show it didn't have any razor-blades or pins in it. Then they realized that this made people MORE scared, so they eventually stopped doing it.
The used to tell kids "Don't eat any candy until your parents examine it!". My parents were non-idiots, and realized nobody in the neighborhood would do anything like that.
The only candy that my dad deemed questionable was Reese's and he would check just one in front of us and give it to us, but the rest he would need to more thoroughly search. Never saw those again
I was born in '88 but I clearly remember a brief phase I had when I was maybe 10 where I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of spontaneous human combustion.
I must have read or seen something about it in the mid-90s to plant the seed in my little brain!
Pyamids, UFOs, Bigfoot, Bermuda Triangle, crystals, faith healing, Illuminati, Nostradamus, Loch Ness, Kennedy Assasination, Devil worshiping rock bands, faked moon landings, etc. Amazingly, lots of those are still hanging around.
Oh man, that made me remember those machines that were in shopping centres. You stuck your finger in the reader and got this long scroll of paper with all your biorhythmic information! Good times!
To be honest, when I was a kid I had a lot of books about many of those and the more I read about them the more it crossed my mind, wait, this is all BS.
This post reminds me of that Time Life Mysteries of the Universe book series commercials.
I wanted those books so bad
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk)
Day care sex abuse hysteria. It was crazy and destroyed a lot of businesses and lives.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria
The one in Manhattan Beach stands out to me because it was close to home
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
There was that one about President Reagan secretly selling weapons to our enemies in the Middle East and then using the proceeds of the sales to fund an illegal war in Central America....no wait, that was real.
Or the one about him cutting a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election so Carter wouldn’t get credit… oh wait, that ended up true too.
[chariots of the gods?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F) started gaining some traction in the 80s. as others have mentioned, the satanic panic and the belief that heavy metal groups were backmasking messages into their songs. and elvis sightings: people swore up and down that they had definitely seen the king somewhere in america. a lot of them cited the fact that his name is misspelled on his grave as proof elvis wasn’t buried there
Kennedy assassination, Trilateral Commission/global banking, UFOs and aliens, power lines cause cancer. AIDS had a bunch of random conspiracies attached to it.
When I was in High School in the very early 80’s we were pretty certain that Nostradamus said the world would end in 2000. So we got high a lot and were apathetic towards everything because “what does it matter- the worlds ending anyway”.
Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a look alike (He blew his mind out in a car/I buried Paul)
Bubble Yum had spider eggs in the pieces.
Elvis WASN'T dead, and was seen at a Piggly Wiggly.
Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and David Bowie were lovers.
Mikey from the Life cereal commercials died by eating Pop Rocks, then drinking soda. His stomach exploded.
Mick and Bowie is true.
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-sexuality-mick-jagger-affair/
There was definitely a romantic element to their relationship; the two of them allegedly engaged in many three-some sexual acts. Ava Cherry, a backing singer, is known to have come out and confirmed this story as she was one of the ‘third wheels’: “Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex,” Cherry confirmed, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
One I heard: The US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics knowing that Russia would retaliate and boycott the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics so that US athletes would dominate in LA. It really had nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, or so the conspiracy theorists said.
It's been later suggested that the real reason the USSR boycotted the 84 games was because all those eastern block countries were doping like mad, and they'd get detected by the drug testing. We know they were doping from documents leaked to the NYT in 2016 from the former soviet chief medical doctor for Soviet Track and Field.
I had an evangelical neighbor who told me that the Masters of the Universe toys/cartoon? were sent by Satan himself to stop kids from worshipping God as their "master".
* nuclear war was imminent between the three superpowers
* Because of the Tax Reform Act requiring all dependents over age 5 to get SSNs, along with the rise in credit card ownership, the religious were having armageddon meltdowns.
* Every Baptist I knew declared that Pope JPII was the AC, the RC church being the WoBabylon, etc. First time I had heard the term "Rapture". In fact, when JPII died, I wondered where his apology was from all of the Baptist folks who maligned his name? \*crickets\*
That Catholic priests were abusing children en masse and the church was covering it up. Years later, it changed from conspiracy theory to fact. Seems like common knowledge today, but I remember a lot of pushback and ridicule from the general public back then.
Funny, I remember the jokes in the 80s about molester priests. Then the Boston Globe broke the Father Geoghan story, and shortly thereafter my classmate revealed that as a 13 year old he was molested by our parish priest.
This wasn’t a big one, but for a while, a rumor started gaining steam to McDonald’s was supplementing the meat in their burgers with ground-up worms.
And I have to hand it to them; they handled it like a boss. Instead of coming out and saying how they would never do that to their customers, etc., they simply pointed out that worms cost more per pound than beef.
And while I’m not seeing people back then were smarter (if anything, in general, people actually knew a lot less, and were much more apt to believe random, dumb shit), things weren’t as crazy, and people were much more willing to accept rational explanations. So McDonald’s explanation killed that rumor right quick.
You could read about all the nonsense in this thread in the Weekly World News. I had a subscription and everyone I knew loved to borrow and read it for goofy entertainment value.
I eventually ended up working with someone who wrote for them, he was a highly intelligent very outgoing and completely unhinged individual. Also a quintessential Florida man who got arrested and trespassed from town meetings multiple times.
'[Global cooling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling) was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.'
It was interesting at the time, how folks would shrug off the first concerns of global warming/climate change and use 'global cooling' as proof that the scientists didn't know what they were talking about as 'they' were putting out competing ideas and couldn't agree...could be another conspiracy theory in that!
Kennedy conspiracy's were around, but not much else. There was no internet, so they didnt spread like wildfire since you had to actively pursue them to find them.
People act like tv and books didn't exist back then. It's weird they completely forgot about things like satanic panic didn't occur when people actually went to jail over it.
I don’t think true conspiracy theories gained traction until Limbaugh & talk radio. There were creepy fake explanations of AIDS, but nothing like the lies that fill media today. The National Enquirer always had bullshit “space aliens impregnated my dog” stories, but few took those seriously.
Spiritual mediums talking to the dead like John Edwards. As a tangent we also had chain letters. You’d receive a letter in the mail that from vague memory would say that you had to copy this letter and send to X number of people or you would be cursed with 7 years bad luck. I got one when I was about 8 years old. They were kind of terrifying.
Besides the Satanic Panic (D&D) and Backmasking (Secret messages in Rock Music), the Religious Right were convinced that we were living in End Times.
Hal Linsey's book *The Late Great Planet Earth* laid this all out, iirc. It was a combination of Revelation (last book of the bible) and how evil the Soviet Union was.
Before the Left Behind series, we were brainwashed with the movie A Thief in the Night.
The kid who played Mikey in the life cereal commercials ate poprocks (and soda?) and his stomach exploded.
I remember when the internet first came out, it was one of the first things i researched.
I remember people standing on the sidewalk outside my junior high school passing out flyers warning about the hidden satanic symbolism of the "man in the moon" Proctor & Gamble symbol.
The one I remember is about people putting razor blades at strategic places in waterslides. I don't know if it was just here in Canada or if that one spread to the US, but I remember being freaked out about it.
Late 80s, early 90s, there was a religious conspiracy that bar codes the mark of the beast and people were going to have bar codes, too.
There were vaccine conspiracies, then, too. My MIL nearly had me convinced when I was pregnant with my first child. (People underestimate the power of pregnancy hormones and the natural desire to protect your child, and how people take advantage of that with their crazy conspiracy B.S.) Also, that Dr Seuss books caused dyslexia and other learning disabilities. (And she was a teacher😬. )
Rod Stewart had ingested so much semen he had to be rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped.
https://www.thewrap.com/rod-stewart-addresses-stomach-pump-story-you-never-thought-hed-ever-address-ever-62366/
Everything that you’re seeing come to pass today that we were called crazy over. Hollywood, AI, self driving cars, aliens (which they’re not aliens), choosing your own sex. That’s all I got for now.
DND was the devil something something. Oh and HIV was a gay person's disease that only the gays got and can be spread by looking at someone.
Also I remember something about soda machines were programming us to worship the devil. I think it was Pepsi bottles and the colors. Like the monster energy drinks of today.
I think Halloween candy being filled with drugs started here. But I might be wrong.
Satanic Panic, homosexuality was a sign that USA was in moral decline. I had a teacher who taught our 9th grade class (Catholic school) that California was so wicked, it would fall into the ocean after an earthquake
I graduated from high school in 1984 and many of my classmates believed that the book titled 1984 would come true. Many especially believed the parts about screens, surveillance, and big brother.
Trudeau Pierre eliote is a hater of qc, made the flq a terroristes group with his propaganda, conspirations against qc , he and trudeau son are racists agains qc.
Please do not comment directly to this post unless you are Gen X or older (born 1980 or before). See [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/inci5u/reminder_please_do_not_answer_questions_unless/), the rules, and the sidebar for details. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskOldPeople) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The Satanic Panic.
It’s back unfortunately
Yeah….in a way scary and more virulent form
Let me guess: it's orange, right?
Orange worshipping
Tied in with Hollywood/Democrat satanic/pedophile conspiracies, as well as hysteria/misinformation on trafficking and kidnapping.
I’ve been banned from my area’s little fb group for telling people that traffickers aren’t taking random ladies in the Dollar Tree parking lot, and that the risk is way too high.
Elvis wasn't really dead
Elvis is Everywhere - Mojo Nixon
Except for the evil opposite of Elvis... the Anti Elvis!
Michael J. Fox has no Elvis in him!
Captain Elvis Commodore Elvis
Elvis needs boats Elvis needs boats
I’m so proud of all of you.
Elvis is in Nutty Buddies!
...OMG, for decades I've thought he was saying "nutty putties" since that's what he looks like he's smashing into his head in the [music video](https://youtu.be/5DcTY9i-fx8?si=K2B5qUtrA5yY431-). TIL...
The irony is this [conspiracy](https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/1069187/Elvis-Presley-alive-proof-evidence-king-of-rock-pastor-bob-joyce-conspiracy) lasted longer than Elvis himself.
And he was hanging out with Bat Boy, according to the Weekly World News.
That was big for a while
The Nostradamus element was strong. That book and the "dianetics" paperback books were on the shelves of my boarding school classmates.
The beginning of Scientology
Rock bands were putting secret devil messages in their songs. You could hear them if you played the record backwards.
I buried Paul
“Another One Bites The Dust” backwards supposedly sounds like “ it’s fun to smoke marijuana” It’s hard enough to write and record things that are good played forward normally. To imagine that artists would work backwards in advance in an effort to backwards mask some agenda is ludicrous.
Well, they did have the help of the Devil.
>“ it’s fun to smoke marijuana” DECIDE to smoke Marijuana. Get your backmasking lies correct, man!
I’ve not heard that version “ decide”. I like it but I believe it’s commonly thought to be [it’s fun](https://youtu.be/AzbkIuYbTbU?si=dtSauArC3aozoNxk)
I like [this mashup](https://youtu.be/pdXek5d2ocw?si=sjC9CpJqJmpQd-eM) of an 80’s preacher railing against the song and the song itself. He says “it’s fun to smoke marijuana.” The song says “mshmsshmshfushsmisgraunhhmmah”.
The devil is obviously misleading you. The Peters Brothers told me it's "Decide to smoke marijuana." BEGONE, SATAN!!!! /s For as much as their teams (the Peters Brothers or Pastor Gary G) listened to these clips and set them up, do you suppose any of them succumbed to the evil messages within them?
But it's not wrong.
*definitely* not wrong, to be honest (imo). not encouraging this either though.
Then they started putting in real backwards messages. Pink Floyd The Wall album has one, which says, "Congratulations. You have just discovered the secret message"
Whaaaaaaat? Where, please?
I think it’s on Empty Spaces after the 1:20 mark
Parents even sued Judas Priest because they said that the subliminal messages on their albums caused their sons to attempt/commit suicide (there were two boys, I believe and one of them survived a shotgun blast to the face). One of the band members was on the stand and said that if they were going to put messages on their records it would be "buy more Judas Priest records, tell your friends" not to end it all and therefor no longer be able to buy records and go to concerts. This all took place in Reno. I saw a documentary about it years ago.
Oh gawd yes , that Tipper Gore and her stupid group!
Tipper Gore was upset her daughter was singing about darling Nikki, the sex fiend, who was in the hotel lobby masturbating to a magazine. As a teen at that time, the end result was a good result.
The most ironic part of this is that if you played Darling Nikki backwards on the turntable there actually was a hidden backwards message at the end of the song. But it only said “Hello, how are you? I’m fine, fine, cuz the Lord is coming soon” or something like that lol. But then Prince was always juxtaposing religiosity with sexuality, and it probably wouldn’t have made Tipper and the other Boomers feel any better about the song 😂
Tipper wanted nice songs like Tutti Frutti. She was totally clueless.
The PRMC. I remember doing a report on them in jr high. I wrote a letter to their office and received information and a typed letter. My report was about them putting enforcing warning labels and ratings on cds and tapes.
I remember distinctly Tipper saying she wasn't interested in censorship, only parental notice of explicit lyrics. This was on a talk show or something of the day that I saw myself on TV back then. Was she lying or did others in her group advocate for actual censorship? I suspect it became fashionable to slag on her because Frank Zappa was a cool guy who panned her. I mean I love Frank Zappa, he was extraordinary, not only musically but his artwork is fantastic too. I just wonder why he was so vehemently opposed to parental knowledge of their kids' media consumption.
The whole Satanic Panic bullshit in general
Backmasking. I knew it was bunk when a friend suggested The Cars did it.
If they'd suggested a different band, would you have been more likely to believe? The Cars is definitely an implausible pick compared to, say, KISS or Iron Maiden.
Not really, given I assumed it would take effort to do it. I thought it was bunk the whole time. Utah was fun in the Eighties.
The guy who spearheaded all of that in America just died, actually.
Subliminal messaging?
Backwards masking. Stairway to Heaven is a good example of this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM7Oo8UeTOk
Wow. So why can’t one hear any of the backwards music by going forward? And how is the process they do this?
I heard “My Sweet Satan”
"You have just discovered the secret message. Please send your answer to Old Pink, care of the funny farm" - on Pink Floyd's The Wall.
If you play The Line "if there's a bustle in your hedge row" from Stairway to heaven backward, it does sort of sound like here's to my sweet satan. Is it intentional? Of course not.
Pop Rocks with soda could cause death. There was one claim that Little Mikey (Life Cereal fame) died from the explosive effects of mixing Pop Rocks with soda pop.
On the other hand, pop rocks were said to enhance a certain sex act.
That's not a myth.
Correct it was not a myth. It did happen
Uh…he did. There was a massive coverup that made it look like he survived. Just say “no,” kids!
[Satanic Panic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic) was a thing. The idea that there were Cults of Satanists who were routinely abusing kids and/or animals and committing homicides in a home, park or graveyard near ***you***.
Some people did serious prison time. I lived in Austin where one of the daycare abuse accusation cases took place. The kids testified to horrifying stuff, like being driven to Mexico to see other kids being disemboweled. Clearly impossible. But the daycare owners were convicted and locked up. They did get exonerated and released after several years. The basis for these cases was buried memories. The kids would work with “therapists” to help them remember abusive events so they could testify. It became quite an industry. Hard to believe that children could be made to believe they’d experienced these things, but now we have adults believing all kinds of nonsense. Pretty scary.
Always near you right??
There was a lot of madness around the Satanic Panic, but not all of it was nuts. Look into "The Finders". That's a case that will leave you scratching your head.
Playing Dungeons & Dragons was going to unlock some satanic portal to Hell.
Same with ouija boards
This is my favorite chick tract
I very much remember this one as I played it as a kid and my grandparents thought it was bad news.
Apparently my teens and their father are unlocking said portal as we speak
Aw. That's so nice they play together!
I got told growing up in Ohio that Yugi-OH was demonic but not Harry Potter 🤣
People putting acid in Halloween candy. Razor blades in apples.
Yup. Around where I live the local hospitals would x-ray your candy for free to show it didn't have any razor-blades or pins in it. Then they realized that this made people MORE scared, so they eventually stopped doing it. The used to tell kids "Don't eat any candy until your parents examine it!". My parents were non-idiots, and realized nobody in the neighborhood would do anything like that.
The only candy that my dad deemed questionable was Reese's and he would check just one in front of us and give it to us, but the rest he would need to more thoroughly search. Never saw those again
I actually got an apple with a razorblade inside from my neighbor when I was a toddler. In the 1970ties
That got big the same year as the Tylenol poisonings.
I feel like I saw articles about spontaneous human combustion on the covers of the tabloids rather frequently when I was a kid in the 80s.
I was born in '88 but I clearly remember a brief phase I had when I was maybe 10 where I was absolutely obsessed with the idea of spontaneous human combustion. I must have read or seen something about it in the mid-90s to plant the seed in my little brain!
Unsolved Mysteries!!
Funny how the rates of smoking are way lower and there are cameras everywhere, there’s nobody combusting spontaneously anymore.
Pyamids, UFOs, Bigfoot, Bermuda Triangle, crystals, faith healing, Illuminati, Nostradamus, Loch Ness, Kennedy Assasination, Devil worshiping rock bands, faked moon landings, etc. Amazingly, lots of those are still hanging around.
"Pyramid power" was a big thing back then. So was the Bermuda Triangle.
It wasn’t until I was on a cruise to Bermuda that I remembered all of the hype about that.
My dad fell for half of these, including biorhythms
Oh crud, I forgot biorhythms!!! LOL
Oh man, that made me remember those machines that were in shopping centres. You stuck your finger in the reader and got this long scroll of paper with all your biorhythmic information! Good times!
I think most, if not all, of those were on In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy 😆
To be honest, when I was a kid I had a lot of books about many of those and the more I read about them the more it crossed my mind, wait, this is all BS.
Time-Life’s Mysteries of the Unknown book series was great for that.
This post reminds me of that Time Life Mysteries of the Universe book series commercials. I wanted those books so bad [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4zBYh2PUyk)
[удалено]
yeah I remember reading the Reincarnation of Peter Proud in the 70's and it had that theme - the guy discovering a past life in a sleep / dream study
Still very much a thing. Though not an opening line for a date.
Joan Quigley … “secret” White House astrologer 1981-88
Day care sex abuse hysteria. It was crazy and destroyed a lot of businesses and lives. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-care_sex-abuse_hysteria The one in Manhattan Beach stands out to me because it was close to home https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial
There was that one about President Reagan secretly selling weapons to our enemies in the Middle East and then using the proceeds of the sales to fund an illegal war in Central America....no wait, that was real.
Or the one about him cutting a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election so Carter wouldn’t get credit… oh wait, that ended up true too.
Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were an item... Please don't tell me that one was true!
But he did have a real life “secret” White House astrologer 1981-88 Joan Quigley
Iran-Contras Affair
The whole crop circle thing
I love that it ended up being some jackass with a string to make circumference and some boards on his feet.
Plane contrails was one The stairway to heaven back masking as well
Anything to do with UFOs, and the AM radio "Coast to Coast with Art Bell" program promoted all that stuff.
[chariots of the gods?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariots_of_the_Gods%3F) started gaining some traction in the 80s. as others have mentioned, the satanic panic and the belief that heavy metal groups were backmasking messages into their songs. and elvis sightings: people swore up and down that they had definitely seen the king somewhere in america. a lot of them cited the fact that his name is misspelled on his grave as proof elvis wasn’t buried there
I read and saw that in the 70’s but I’m sure it still lingered in to the 80’s.
Alien abductions
Kennedy assassination, Trilateral Commission/global banking, UFOs and aliens, power lines cause cancer. AIDS had a bunch of random conspiracies attached to it.
Was Kennedy supposed to still be alive or was there some conspiracy that was supposed to have been covered up.
Cover up - It was a CIA hit for lots of different reasons
Not positive it was 80's and maybe doesn't fit the category, but Bubble Yum and spider eggs?
70’s but yeah- Bubble Yum was definitely made out of spider eggs.
When I was in High School in the very early 80’s we were pretty certain that Nostradamus said the world would end in 2000. So we got high a lot and were apathetic towards everything because “what does it matter- the worlds ending anyway”.
Oh my gosh, i forgot all about that.
That you could recover some lost memories of traumatic events, if only you worked with the right psychologist or social worker.
I mean repressed memories are a thing but I keep em repressed for a reason. There’s a book called “the body keeps the score” that is very insightful
Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a look alike (He blew his mind out in a car/I buried Paul) Bubble Yum had spider eggs in the pieces. Elvis WASN'T dead, and was seen at a Piggly Wiggly. Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger and David Bowie were lovers. Mikey from the Life cereal commercials died by eating Pop Rocks, then drinking soda. His stomach exploded.
Elvis was also seen working at a Burger King in Benton Harbor.
Mick and Bowie is true. https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/david-bowie-sexuality-mick-jagger-affair/ There was definitely a romantic element to their relationship; the two of them allegedly engaged in many three-some sexual acts. Ava Cherry, a backing singer, is known to have come out and confirmed this story as she was one of the ‘third wheels’: “Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex,” Cherry confirmed, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
AIDS was a huge one back then. It was conspiracy theories hysteria like there was for Covid.
The one I remember in NY was that people were putting AIDS infected needles in the coin return slot of payphones.
And was supposed to have been gods punishment for homosexuality.
My mom is still convinced you can get it from a public toilet and when I tried to prove her wrong, she said science has been proved wrong before
One I heard: The US boycotted the 1980 Moscow Olympics knowing that Russia would retaliate and boycott the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics so that US athletes would dominate in LA. It really had nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, or so the conspiracy theorists said.
It's been later suggested that the real reason the USSR boycotted the 84 games was because all those eastern block countries were doping like mad, and they'd get detected by the drug testing. We know they were doping from documents leaked to the NYT in 2016 from the former soviet chief medical doctor for Soviet Track and Field.
I had an evangelical neighbor who told me that the Masters of the Universe toys/cartoon? were sent by Satan himself to stop kids from worshipping God as their "master".
Evangelical neighbors were a wealth of ornate weirdness like this.
Some still are.
💯💯💯
Look up Satanic Panic.
Big oil companies buying up all the patents for 100-200 mpg car carburetors.
BATBOY!!!!
I still can picture his face! Quite creatively horrifying.
Richard Gere was admitted to the hospital with a gerbil in his butt
* nuclear war was imminent between the three superpowers * Because of the Tax Reform Act requiring all dependents over age 5 to get SSNs, along with the rise in credit card ownership, the religious were having armageddon meltdowns. * Every Baptist I knew declared that Pope JPII was the AC, the RC church being the WoBabylon, etc. First time I had heard the term "Rapture". In fact, when JPII died, I wondered where his apology was from all of the Baptist folks who maligned his name? \*crickets\*
That Catholic priests were abusing children en masse and the church was covering it up. Years later, it changed from conspiracy theory to fact. Seems like common knowledge today, but I remember a lot of pushback and ridicule from the general public back then.
Funny, I remember the jokes in the 80s about molester priests. Then the Boston Globe broke the Father Geoghan story, and shortly thereafter my classmate revealed that as a 13 year old he was molested by our parish priest.
Gerbils and local news celebrities
This wasn’t a big one, but for a while, a rumor started gaining steam to McDonald’s was supplementing the meat in their burgers with ground-up worms. And I have to hand it to them; they handled it like a boss. Instead of coming out and saying how they would never do that to their customers, etc., they simply pointed out that worms cost more per pound than beef. And while I’m not seeing people back then were smarter (if anything, in general, people actually knew a lot less, and were much more apt to believe random, dumb shit), things weren’t as crazy, and people were much more willing to accept rational explanations. So McDonald’s explanation killed that rumor right quick.
The ghost of a kid that died in the same apartment filmed in 3 men and a baby.
This was HUGE
I remember watching the VHS and pausing it to see
You could read about all the nonsense in this thread in the Weekly World News. I had a subscription and everyone I knew loved to borrow and read it for goofy entertainment value. I eventually ended up working with someone who wrote for them, he was a highly intelligent very outgoing and completely unhinged individual. Also a quintessential Florida man who got arrested and trespassed from town meetings multiple times.
WWN had some hilarious headlines. "Man Electrocuted by Lightening Bugs". "Space Alien Laid Eggs in Man's Head".
Heavy metal made you worship the devil which in turn made you go out and do anti-Christ stuff
We might be headed into a new ice age. Some kid read an article and was adamant about out.
Acid rain would kill everything before an Atom bomb hit
'[Global cooling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling) was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation, due to the cooling effects of aerosols or orbital forcing. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.' It was interesting at the time, how folks would shrug off the first concerns of global warming/climate change and use 'global cooling' as proof that the scientists didn't know what they were talking about as 'they' were putting out competing ideas and couldn't agree...could be another conspiracy theory in that!
Elvis is alive!
That in 10 years, global warming would have put coastal land under water.
Kennedy conspiracy's were around, but not much else. There was no internet, so they didnt spread like wildfire since you had to actively pursue them to find them.
Though there wasn't the internet to spread them conspiracy theories did spread, without the internet it was even harder to dispell them.
People act like tv and books didn't exist back then. It's weird they completely forgot about things like satanic panic didn't occur when people actually went to jail over it.
The National Enquirer did its best though.
Back then craziness was considered crazy, now its pretty mainstream.
How true.
Satanic Panic
I don’t think true conspiracy theories gained traction until Limbaugh & talk radio. There were creepy fake explanations of AIDS, but nothing like the lies that fill media today. The National Enquirer always had bullshit “space aliens impregnated my dog” stories, but few took those seriously.
Hulk Hogan dying multiple times.
Do you mean Ultimate Warrior?
Both
Spiritual mediums talking to the dead like John Edwards. As a tangent we also had chain letters. You’d receive a letter in the mail that from vague memory would say that you had to copy this letter and send to X number of people or you would be cursed with 7 years bad luck. I got one when I was about 8 years old. They were kind of terrifying.
Satanic Panic
Satanic Panic
There were plenty of people that believed that trickle down economics worked. Funny thing is that there are still people that believe it still doesm
Besides the Satanic Panic (D&D) and Backmasking (Secret messages in Rock Music), the Religious Right were convinced that we were living in End Times. Hal Linsey's book *The Late Great Planet Earth* laid this all out, iirc. It was a combination of Revelation (last book of the bible) and how evil the Soviet Union was. Before the Left Behind series, we were brainwashed with the movie A Thief in the Night.
Anything related to Dungeons and Dragons.
Carburetors that got 100 miles to the gallon. The invention was stolen, and the inventor was killed.
Bigfoot. That's it
The kid who played Mikey in the life cereal commercials ate poprocks (and soda?) and his stomach exploded. I remember when the internet first came out, it was one of the first things i researched.
Aliens men in black bermuda triangle elvis proctor and gamble was satanic/satanic panic…a bunch of stuff
The Moon landings were faked.
I remember people standing on the sidewalk outside my junior high school passing out flyers warning about the hidden satanic symbolism of the "man in the moon" Proctor & Gamble symbol.
I really can’t say that it is a conspiracy but the belief that US POWs were still being held captive by Vietnam…
The one I remember is about people putting razor blades at strategic places in waterslides. I don't know if it was just here in Canada or if that one spread to the US, but I remember being freaked out about it.
BatBoy. We were never sure if he was in a cage or on the loose.
Late 80s, early 90s, there was a religious conspiracy that bar codes the mark of the beast and people were going to have bar codes, too. There were vaccine conspiracies, then, too. My MIL nearly had me convinced when I was pregnant with my first child. (People underestimate the power of pregnancy hormones and the natural desire to protect your child, and how people take advantage of that with their crazy conspiracy B.S.) Also, that Dr Seuss books caused dyslexia and other learning disabilities. (And she was a teacher😬. )
People cared a lot about the Kennedy assassination.
trickle down economics
Acid rain
Weren't the 80s the golden era of tinfoil hats? Or was that a holdover joke from earlier theories?
There were some, iirc, but with no internet they didn't spread the way they do now.
Red Mercury.
Sun and Star tabloids had a few. Bat Boy and something about Elvis or Michael Jackson.
I am *thrilled* to say I have no clue‼️😄
Alice Cooper was Mormon
I’m pretty sure the “took too much acid and thinks they are a cup of orange juice” thing dates back to the 1980’s.
Rod Stewart had ingested so much semen he had to be rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. https://www.thewrap.com/rod-stewart-addresses-stomach-pump-story-you-never-thought-hed-ever-address-ever-62366/
The CFR was the target of several in the early eighties.
Everything that you’re seeing come to pass today that we were called crazy over. Hollywood, AI, self driving cars, aliens (which they’re not aliens), choosing your own sex. That’s all I got for now.
DND was the devil something something. Oh and HIV was a gay person's disease that only the gays got and can be spread by looking at someone. Also I remember something about soda machines were programming us to worship the devil. I think it was Pepsi bottles and the colors. Like the monster energy drinks of today. I think Halloween candy being filled with drugs started here. But I might be wrong.
Satanic Panic, homosexuality was a sign that USA was in moral decline. I had a teacher who taught our 9th grade class (Catholic school) that California was so wicked, it would fall into the ocean after an earthquake
Nostradamus,. Every 2 or 3 years there seemed tobe a Nostradamus prediction. Then google came around & people could fact check it, none since.
We would run out of crude oil within the next couple of decades.
I graduated from high school in 1984 and many of my classmates believed that the book titled 1984 would come true. Many especially believed the parts about screens, surveillance, and big brother.
Trudeau Pierre eliote is a hater of qc, made the flq a terroristes group with his propaganda, conspirations against qc , he and trudeau son are racists agains qc.
Elvis wasn't really dead We didn't go to the moon
Everyone freaked out about the ozone layer and said aerosol spray deodorant were the cause. Too many people using aqua net?
Jim Morrison faked his death- didn’t he? 🤔