Proposal with Annotated Bibliography

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Hayden Thompson Professor McKinney English 1020 19 March 2023 Proposal with Annotated Bibliography Proposal: Conspiracy Theories Ever since I was only a young child, roughly the age of 8 or 9 years old, I have been fascinated by conspiracy theories. The root of my interest in these theories comes from when I noticed an extremely popular TV show that my dad watched frequently, called The Big Bang Theory. I eventually had asked him what the meaning of “The Big Bang Theory” was, and he explained to me what a conspiracy theory was, as well as what that specific theory was about. He explained to me that the theory of the “Big Bang” was a physical theory that what we know as “the universe” originally expanded from an initial state of infinite density and temperature. Now, as many people may agree, almost every child is amazed by the stars in the sky that you can see during the nighttime. So, being someone who was interested in space as a kid, I was immediately intrigued by how our universe might have come to be. After reading all about this theory of The Big Bang, that led me to other conspiracy theories that are popular around the world. I have been researching them for many years, and what interests me so much is the fact that you can’t help but wonder about the possibilities. The thing about these conspiracy theories is that, sadly, they are considered “conspiracy theories” because there is no viable evidence to prove them to be true, and in most cases, there probably never will be. The audience for this topic would be people who are also fascinated by conspiracy theories, like me. I think that one cause for people falling for conspiracy theories is because of how easy it is to believe them, even without proof. People are very quick to jump to conclusions, and I am also guilty of this myself. Someone may see one thing that supports a conspiracy theory and immediately fly to the conclusion that it must be true. In a lot of cases, I believe that conspiracy theories are completely harmless, but it depends on the situation in order to determine if it has a negative effect on people and society in general. For example, during the global pandemic beginning in 2020, known as the “Corona Virus” or “COVID-19”, people were quarantined nationwide and required to wear masks out in public. Almost instantly, there were many theories flying around about the pandemic. “Was COVID-19 created in a lab in China?” Personally, I heard this specific theory on several different occasions. Eventually, when a vaccine was passed, theories began to rise about how the vaccines were bad for you, making everyone sick, and killing people (they were not). Therefore, in this particular situation, I do believe that conspiracy theories were harmful to society, because these speculations kept a lot of people from being vaccinated. However, there are many conspiracy theories that are completely harmless and normal to observe and speculate about. These include, The Big Bang mentioned above, whether the moon landing was real or not, and many more that you might know about. These theories are

just simply interesting to imagine about and think about how crazy it would be if they were true (they are not). Something that people can do to prevent falling for conspiracy theories is look more into the facts and things that can be proven, rather than falling for one piece of evidence in support of the theory when there are already several scientific facts that debunk the theory. As far as the theory of the moon landing being fake, if you investigate the scientific facts regarding the whole situation, the theory has been debunked. One of the denier's main pieces of “proof” is that the flag looks as if it is flapping in the wind, which technically wouldn’t make sense because the moon has no atmosphere. The fact is that if you look closely, there is a horizontal part of the flagpole at the top that is holding the flag up, which makes it look like it's flapping in the wind. This does not even require scientific research, but only requires paying attention to details. Another thing that a denier uses as “evidence” is that the landing was fake because you cannot see the stars in the background. The truth is that the astronaut’s camera was too short to capture the astronauts and their spacesuits, while also capturing the stars in the background. You can test this yourself by going out to your back porch at night and turning on the lights. Although you can see the stars from where you are standing, your camera will not pick up on the stars. “The moon landing was fake because you can’t see Armstrong’s camera” is yet another claim by people who do not believe in the moon landing. The reality is that he could not have just walked around on the moon with a regular hand-held camera. Therefore, Armstrong’s camera was mounted on the front of his suit, which is where his hair appears to be in the picture he took of Aldrin. Rick Fienberg states that belief in these myths is more of an ideological and political thing rather than scientific. I used to be one of the people that would fall for conspiracy theories without actually looking at all of the evidence that has been conducted debunking the theory itself. The Big Bang is probably my biggest interest as far as conspiracy theories go as of right now. The craziest thing to me is that it has not been debunked yet. Scientists have tried to debunk the theory and the James Webb Space Telescope was thought to have been something that finally debunked the theory, but it did not. Scientists claim that the telescope did not prove anything to be wrong as far as the Big Bang goes and that cosmologists were not panicking like a lot of social media are claiming. I think my fascination and knowledge of conspiracy theories makes this a great topic for me to pursue. I will need to conduct more research, but it will also help because I have been reading about these theories for most of my life. I could sit down and talk for hours about the moon landing, the Big Bang, the pyramids, UFOs, aliens, etc. Bob Lazar is someone that I have actually learned a lot from, by watching his documentary on Netflix about his time spent in Area 51. He spent his time reverse engineering a UFO spaceship, and he says that he discovered something that no one there had ever seen before, now known as Element 115. It allows flying saucers to fly in the way that they do, rather than the way we fly airplanes and helicopters. Lazar worked in a secret site called “S4” in Area 51, and he claims that there were 9 spacecrafts in the site that were not of this world. The documentary was very fascinating to me, but the only thing you can wonder about is if he is just a big hoaxer trying to gain fame or is he trying to get the information out to the public for the sake of scientists and humanity in general to make

everybody aware of the fact that we may not be alone in this universe. Personally, I think that there is not a chance that we are the only life in this universe, or even in this galaxy. That’s why this documentary in particular caught my interest so easily, and it is something that I have watched multiple times because of how intriguing it is to me.

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