Terrifying Conspiracy Theories That Could Actually Be True

35 Terrifying Conspiracy Theories That Could Actually Be True

These conspiracy theories from Ask Reddit will keep you awake tonight, so read with caution.

1. That AskReddit questions about conspiracy theories are periodically posted by the government to measure how close the general public is to uncovering the truth.

2. That aliens are already here on planet earth, and they aren’t extraterrestrial beings but extra-dimensional beings.

This conspiracy is not mine. It actually comes from a guy who called in at a radio show some years ago claiming to be a former employee at Area 51. The guy sounds very distressed and sounds like he is speaking some truth. A fellow Reddit user by the name inpursuitofknowledge pointed this out in the comments with a with a link to a video of the radio show. Which is were this conspiracy comes from. I should also point out that a guy called the radio show weeks later claiming to be the Area 51 caller saying it was all a hoax but apparently his voice didn’t sound like the original caller at all.

3. That Planet X is real, orbits like a comet and so enters the solar system at infrequent intervals, and is home to intelligent life that’s affected past human civilizations.

4. We are all just code in a simulation being run by a far more intelligent species who is trying to determine why humans died out long ago.

They run the simulation to cover millions of years to pinpoint the moments where we went wrong and to learn why civilization crumbled to prevent the same fate from taking them.

When we die, our code is either terminated entirely or is repurposed into another life in a form of digital reincarnation.

5. It’s quiet in space because something incredibly evil and horrific is snuffing out advanced life once it starts colonizing other worlds.

6. That social media information gathering gathers so much data on your personality that it allows effective social engineering, changing how you think, how you shop, how you vote… which has a chain effect of you teaching the same things to your kids, family, friends etc

7. Based on the idea of the fermi paradox and The Great Filter, it’s that there is a lot of alien life out there but we don’t hear or see any of it because the ones that still exist know to keep quiet as there is some greater alien force or technology that hunts and destroys civilizations.

8. That every UFO that has been reported is actually a part of one of the Government’s “Black Budget” secret programs (which get over $60B in funding each year) and that the government has created such a stigma around UFOs and Aliens that it would be entirely feasible for them to create the Ultimate False Flag event (think 9/11 x 1,000,000) to make the populace believe there is an actual alien invasion happening so they can either A) create a situation that would help pull the world together or B) give them an excuse to pour hundreds of billions of dollars more into the military program without the people questioning it.

9. That JFK was killed by our government because he didn’t want to just be their puppet.

10. That Atlantis is real, humans are a species with amnesia and we had civilizations arise before us that fell hard enough to send us back to the stone age. Pretty terrifying. Remnants of modern civilization would like only last about 10000 years, and that’s only for our largest structures, like the Hoover dam. We can’t learn from our old mistakes if there isn’t a history to study.

11. The reason that we have not made contact with “aliens” is not because they aren’t out there but because they are purposefully being quiet because they are aware of some other large threat.

12. Not that we are living in a simulation, but that you are living in a simulation. You are the only thing that is real. Everyone else IS the simulation. Users commenting in this thread, all other users on reddit, users on youtube, instagram, the internet itself? All your classmates, coworkers, teachers? Even your friends and family? All highly advanced NPCs. They act like people, and are 100% perfect at seeming real. The scariest part is, try to prove this false.

13. Gnosticism. That a evil energy called the demiurge created the universe and created humans to act as ‘ batteries’ and that fear is energy they need, and when we die they fool us to go into the light by revealing loved ones to us that call our names and that if we go into the light it’s a con to get us to re-incarnate to supply their energy over and over.

14. “Don’t go to the light; it’s a trap!”

The light at the end of the tunnel that people report seeing when they have near death experiences is to be avoided because that’s how “they” get ya. “They” are some unscrupulous aliens who installed a soul collecting machine on the moon or something. The scary thing for me is the idea that you can be tricked into enslaving yourself in the afterlife as soon as you die.

15. So the collapse of civilization is often labeled as a conspiracy theory – case in point r/collapse is a “conspiracy” sub. I think the basis for this is that the sub feels all public estimates of the rate of climate change and general environmental collapse and the eventual consequences have been downplayed by world governments (to avoid panic), scientists (due to reticence and the high standards of scientific evidence) and business interests (because negativity is bad for business).

If true, I don’t think anything could be scarier than the hard road ahead of us toward the destination of human extinction.

16. The past never existed. The future will never exist.

Only the present is real.

17. That time is a giant loop and we actually build the Pyramids in the future

18. Some people believe that Earth is an enslaved planet that serves as a feeding ground for a superior alien race – except not feeding in the sense of meat, but that they apparently feed off our negative emotions, fear and anger specifically.

19. Reality is an illusion. You’re the only thing that actually exists.

When you die, you realize that and in your lonliness go insane and create another ficticious world to occupy your mind until you die. Repeat forever

20. There are multi-dimensional being existing on earth, and have the technology to view our plane, but rarely able to interact with it. When they do, we interpret them as ghosts.

21. That the rich elite have grown bored of mundane highs and delights and murder, rape, sacrifice and hunt humans for entertainment. They do it because they’re so rich, they can buy anything they want and it doesn’t satisfy them. They’re attracted to morbid, disgusting and crude art, music and hobbies.

22. The Large Hadron Collider damage and shutdown incident was actually due to the production of a micro black hole, which has sunk to the earth’s core and is eating the earth from the inside out.

23. The conspiracy theory that mk ultra is still happening. Mk ultra is pretty much what caused a lot of people to come up with conspiracy theories, because the government really was spiking people’s drinks with lsd and running a bunch of horrible tests involving sensory deprivation. Read up on it if you want, but it’s the stuff of nightmares.

24. That the government has a deal with Aliens that they are allowed to abduct and probe us in exchange for technology.

25. The Mandela effect means we’re in an alternate reality.

The Mandela effect is basically that a whole lot of people remember events happening differently than they are officially recorded in history. And it’s called that because a lot of people remember Mandela’s funeral happening years sooner than it actually did.

The theory ties into the cern hadron collider.
No one really knew what would happen when they turned it on. Worse case scenario, it might make a mini black hole and kill us all instantly.

The theory says that when they turned on the collider, it actually did kill us all. And that sudden event shifted our entire world into a parallel reality where we just kind of continued to exist like nothing really happened. The side effects are the Mandela effect and that some people still remember things how they happened in the old reality.

26. Pharmaceutical companies are withholding a cure for cancer because of how much money they make make from the current treatments such as chemo.

Now I know that there are tons of cancers, so there being a single, magical cure is something that just will never happen, but imagine how scary it would be if it were true. These companies are so greedy that they are not only willing to kill millions of people, but also put their family and friends through the terrible ordeal of watching them die slowly from cancer. It’s pretty fucked up.

27. That human life on earth has started and ended several times before. The human species has repeatedly begun, evolved, advanced, and then died off or was wiped out over and over. And so far, we have demonstrated that we can only last about 5000-10000 years. Ancient sites like Gobeckli Tepi and several other megalithic structures around the world seem to suggest humans may have once had even more advanced technology than we do today, but got wiped out and had to start over again. Some even think the Great Pyramid of Giza is much much older than mainstream scientists and achaeologists say and had a completely different purpose than the “tomb” theory that pervades mainstream beliefs today.

28. That the government curates “conspiracy theories” to suit its interests.

For example, 19 dudes with box cutters pull off a massive broadside attack on US soil. This threatens the very valuable narrative of the invincible USA. Conspiracy theories naturally emerge. The CIA etc work their influence into these, and help popularize the notion that the attack was an inside job. This lets people imagine a US government which is not impotent, but in fact omnipotent (if evil).

A model for this is proposed in the film Mirage Men, which accuses the AFOSI of planting alien/UFO conspiracy theories to discredit people who had observed top secret aircraft.

29. That Stanley Kubrick was killed for the making of Eyes Wide Shut. There are lots of conspiracies revolved around Kubrick, but this is definitely the creepiest one. He died something like 3 days after the films release.

30. Honestly the most terrifying would be flat earth.

Literally everything we know about modern science is totally out the window and there actually is some impossibly powerful cabal that can keep that tight a lid over the truth.

31. Viruses evolve quickly but not fast enough to produce a new strain of flu every year. The flu is actually carefully created, reviewed and distributed by the government to steer human evolution forward through ‘mandatory windows updates’ to our genetic software.

32. Allbert Pike’s prophecy of three world wars that will eventually lead to the creation of a New World Order. 2/3 are very eerie in theory due to the fact of accuracy; moreover, the third, and final prediction, seems to be right around the corner in regards to ongoing political tension.

33. Well there is the theory that the Yellowstone supervolcano is actually going to erupt very soon and it’s just being kept quiet by the US government not to cause panic.

34. The Franklin Cover Up. Basically politicians being involved in child abuse/prostitution and slew of other horrifying things.

35. That humans have existed for millions and millions of years instead just 200,000 or so like they say, and we keep reaching some sort of societal peak and then we destroy our civilization and have to restart. Over and over and over. And we are currently very close to another “reset” maybe just a few hundred years away. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

January Nelson is a writer, editor, and dreamer. She writes about astrology, games, love, relationships, and entertainment. January graduated with an English and Literature degree from Columbia University.