Conspiracy Kitchen Sink

Cognito, Inc. has declassified the following conspiracy theories for your perusal.^{Clockwise from top left} Reptilian Conspiracy, Elvis and JFK Live, The Mothman, Crop Circles

"In the mid 1980s, I was asked to compile a comic book detailing the murky history of the CIA. What I learned during the frankly horrifying research was that, yes: there is a conspiracy. In fact, there are a great number of conspiracies, all tripping each other up."

— Alan Moore

Everything you've heard is true: The Illuminati rule the world, the moon landings were faked, JFK was assassinated by a bunch of gray aliens, and you surely don't think the Cuban Missile Crisis was about Cuban Missiles, do you?

Yes, that's right: In this setting, every conspiracy theory you've ever heard of is true. And some you haven't. A closely related subtrope to Fantasy Kitchen Sink, but conspiracy-minded, rather than fantastic; like its parent, there is a certain tendency towards self-contradiction, but given the source of the trope (paranoid conspiracy theories), not that surprising, and sometimes not even that damaging.

Following things are a must-have for any Conspiracy Kitchen Sink worth its salt (for required tropes, see The Index Is Watching You):

• A Secret War between The Illuminati, The Knights Templar, The Hashshashin, the Vampire Courts, The Fair Folk, Freemasons, Nazi holdouts (the Thule Society, Argentinian Nazis), the Girl Scouts, Opus Dei, The Mafia, CIA and KGB, Rogue AIs, Lovecraftian and Satanic cults, The Pentagon, The Men in Black, Bilderberg Group, Majestic-12, The Greys, and the Reptilians. Yes, all at once in one merry free-for-all that no Gullible Lemming ever notices.
• Precursors of any origin (extraterrestrial or ultraterrestrial) and disposition (benevolent, abusive, and/or simply neglectful).
• Prominent involvement of Area 51, The Bermuda Triangle, Mysterious Antarctica, Hollow Earth, and Atlantis, as well as the respective headquarters of the factions listed above. And New York.
• Nonchalant revelations of the real allegiances and agendas of Jesus Christ, Leonardo da Vinci, Jack the Ripper, Nikola Tesla, Rasputin, Adolf Hitler, and Elvis Presley.
• The sinister purpose of Ley Lines, The Pyramids, the Holy Grail, the Philosopher's Stone, Numbers Stations, aglets, and any number of other Public Domain Artifacts.
• The Truth behind the K–T extinction, The Tunguska Event, Roswell Incident, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Operation Paperclip, Project MKULTRA, Monarch Mind Control program, Kennedy and Palme assassinations, Crop Circles, the moon landings, the disappearance of the Roanoke Colony, the Lost Roman Legions, the 25th frame, the Watergate scandal, the first Gulf War (well, the real truth, anyway), The End of the World as We Know It as predicted by the Mayans / Nostradamus / John of Patmos, the Eye of Providence on the dollar bill and any number of other Stock Unsolved Mysteries you can think of.

Compare Crossover Cosmology, the mythological version of this trope. Very often overlaps with World of Mysteries.

Occasionally leads to a Gambit Pileup, but not nearly as often as it should. Naturally, in all of these conspiracies, there are No Delays for the Wicked.

This trope covers settings and entire series/works. For the characters who believe they live in a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink, see Conspiracy Theorist.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Billy Bat: The manga is a historical fiction series in which a cartoon bat and the artists that become obsessed with it become entangled in several strange historical events and conspiracy theories. Among the events that happen in the series, the moon landing was faked in 1961 and Lee Harvey Oswald was the fall guy, not the actual killer of JFK.
• Dandadan: All urban legends are true, whether they be ghost stories or alien conspiracy theories. Ironically, the two main characters start out with one believing in ghosts and the other in aliens, but refusing to believe the other one was true. They quickly find out how wrong they were.

Comic Books

• Black Dynamite: Discussed. Illuminati leader The Man confirms that all the different rumors about shadowy cabals controlling world events are true, to which Black Dynamite simply replies, "I knew it."
• A lot of Grant Morrison's other work, features loads and loads of conspiracies. The Invisibles deserves special mention though, since it takes place in a world where pretty much every single piece of conspiracy literature scrawled out in the last 60 years was all true. Simultaneously.
• The main protagonist of Hunter-killer (written by Mark Waid) has been home-schooled, and what he's been taught (as far as recent history is concerned) is all conspiracy theories. And not surprisingly, all he's been taught is true, except the part about the week having six days. One major turning point, as it turns out, was indeed the Cuban missile crisis.
• In The Question's spotlight issue of the Justice League Unlimited tie-in comic, he spends a week solving every major conspiracy in western civilization's history. Stuff like "Jack the Ripper was cloned from the Chupacabras that landed in Area 51". It turns out a lot of it was faked, but that's the kind of stuff he makes a living investigating.
• S.H.I.E.L.D. dips its toes into this. For starters, both it and HYDRA are a lot older than the governments they currently serve as in, back to Egypt. And SHIELD has had Tesla and da Vinci amongst its ranks. There's also a throwaway line about how the Skrulls (shapeshifing reptilians, by the way) were involved with JFK's death.
• DC Comics did release two books, The Big Book of Conspiracies and The Big Book of the Unexplained, and yes, not only did all of the conspiracies get inextricably jumbled together through references, but the two books managed to get intertwined as well.
• A particularly hilarious one appears in Hellblazer: John explains to an increasingly terrified journalist that the British royal family are in fact reptiles born of matings between humans and snake-gods, in service to The Greys, Princess Diana was killed so the public wouldn't find out about the Body Horror needed to make her a breeder for reptile babies, and JFK arranged to commit suicide because he woke up to see his wife having sex with one of the snake-men and showing every sign of enjoyment. As John goes to the bathroom before beginning part 2, a gunshot is heard, and blood flows from a stall, scaring the journalist witless. John was asked to get the journalist away from the palace before he could uncover a much more mundane drugs and prostitution ring, which he did by baiting the guy with high-grade BS and faking his execution.
• The Hellboy and especially B.P.R.D. comics are a combination of this and Fantasy Kitchen Sink / All Myths Are True, with vampires, ghosts, Humanoid Aliens, Ghostapo and Stupid Jetpack Hitler in South America, The Fair Folk, Advanced Ancient Humans, the Hollow World, Soviet Superscience, EldritchAbominations, Angels, Devils and Squid all being real and covered up by the BPRD.
• In a world where collective belief warps reality, conspiracy theories in The Department of Truth manifest as real-life monsters, selective memories, and other anomalous activity, things that only grown more and more dangerous the more sense they make to people. One of the Department of Truth's jobs is to decentralize conspiracies so that not too many people can latch onto the same idea. Oswald gives an example of various inane theories — citing theories like Obama being from Kenya, that 9/11 was an inside job, and everything QAnon ever says — and asks Cole to put them all together. Cole is able to weave a linear, ongoing narrative based around these facts where the world is being controlled by a globalist Shadow Government, Obama is the Antichrist and the War on Terror was all a plot to destroy America, a "big picture" that the Department is trying to prevent.

Film — Live-Action

• Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie: Cooper believes in, among other things, the existence of the Eee Tee dumping site, Area 51, that a UFO crashed in Roswell, and an omnipotent being named "Death Mwauthzyx" that can destroy reality if ever released from Mount Fuji. Turns out, not only are these things true, but Tupac Shakur, Elvis Presley, and Michael Jackson are all still alive and kicking in Area 51. Also, the moon landing was filmed.
• Captain America (1990): The Red Skull, who went underground after World War II, is revealed to now be the head of a Nebulous Evil Organization which basically secretly runs the world, and was responsible for the assassinations of both the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, among other dastardly acts.
• Indiana Jones: Most Public Domain Artifacts exist and do indeed have magic powers. Some of them even have Ancient Traditions protecting them throughout the ages. And Indy's friends in the government take the things he finds to a military base out in the American Southwest. A very... crowded military base...
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: S.H.I.E.L.D. are the The Men in Black hiding weird phenomena and creatures from the general public (particularly in the television spinoffs), even once the events of the movies (particularly an alien horde attacking New York City) turn it into The Unmasqued World. And Captain America: The Winter Soldier reveals hidden within the agency is HYDRA, an offshoot of the Nazi army which managed to stay in the shadows for 70 years while orchestrating every war, evil government, and such.
• Hellboy (2004) and its sequel. The BPRD are clearly The Men in Black, and started out as a military attaché to a squad handling Hitler's occult plans.
• Iron Sky: The Coming Race features a race of Precursors who created humanity and are also reptilian shapeshifting aliens who live in the Hollow Earth in the mythical city of Agartha, where the Holy Grail is the main source of power. Dinosaurs also still live inside the Hollow Earth. Also, many historical figures (including Caligula, Margaret Thatcher, Osama bin Laden and... Mark Zuckerberg) are members of said reptilian race.
• The Matrix Reloaded. The Oracle tells Neo that the Matrix is full of programs controlling its individual elements, which are the source of myths and conspiracy theories about ghosts, angels, vampires, werewolves, aliens, and the like.
  Oracle: The ones doing their job, doing what they were meant to do, are invisible. You'd never even know they were here. But the other ones, well, we hear about them all the time.
  Neo: I've never heard of them.
  Oracle: Oh, of course you have. Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel. Every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves, or aliens, is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing.
• Men in Black is a peculiar version of this — every conspiracy theory you've ever heard is on to something big, but the truth behind all of them is the same, in this case aliens.
  • One example is a small ball that seems to be similar to rubber except that it gains energy with each bounce, making it incredibly destructive. Apparently it caused a massive New York blackout. The alien diplomat who did it thought it was funny as hell.
  • Elvis' death? He was an alien who just went home.
  • J's theory about that one grade school teacher of his being an alien, though? Spot on, except that he got the wrong planet.
• Parodied in Undercover Brother, as this spy comedy centers on a mysterious Caucasian Big Bad who plans on subliminally ruining the image of the black community, and once the protagonist joins the organization that fights against The Man's efforts, he learns that all the anti-black conspiracies are true, but it's for funny/mundane matters such as "The NBA really did institute the three-point shot to give white boys a chance" and "The entertainment industry really is out to get Spike Lee" because even Cher won an Oscar, but when it gets to a more serious topic:
  Undercover Brother: And O.J. really didn't do it.
  [awkward silence]
  Chief: We... we ain't got time for this!
• Parodied in Zoolander. Thousands of historical events can be traced back to elements within the fashion industry.

Literature

• James Ellroy's American Tabloid answers the question "Who killed JFK?", with a pretty resounding "Everybody". (If you want more specificity: the assassination was bankrolled half by reactionary billionaire Howard Hughes and half by various Mafia bosses, the shooters were CIA contractors borrowed from one of the Company's many anti-Castro black ops, and J. Edgar Hoover personally directed the cover-up in the hours after the shooting.)
• The world of Constance Verity has so many secret societies — both evil and benign — that it's a wonder that they aren't all busy going to war with each other instead of Constance. And that's not even going into Area 51, mind-controlling fungus, androids, the Loch Ness Monster (which Connie had to save four times), The Great Engine that regulates the universe, supervillains, etc.
• The Illuminatus! trilogy of novels by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson is arguably the Ur-Example.
  • FNORD
  • Why did someone put in a spoiler block with nothing in it?
  • That's what they WANT you to think.
• 1963 had several conflicting theories on the JFK murder, involving everything from aliens to the Illuminati to mind-controlling government officials.
• Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum has the main characters invent their own synarchic plot (for fun) to explain all of the various conspiracy theories in the world. You can guess what happens next.
• Pretty much everything written by Thomas Pynchon runs on this trope, especially Gravity's Rainbow.
• In Conspiracies, Repairman Jack attends a Conspiracy Theorist convention. Subverted in that there really is a conspiracy happening behind the scenes... but it's against Jack himself, not anything the convention's attendees dreamed up.
• I, Claudius is a hodgepodge of pretty much every half-baked conspiracy theory about the time of the Julio-Claudian Emperors, both then and since.
• The world of Good Omens ends up turning into something like this. Thanks to Adam Young's growing Reality Warper powers, all the crackpot theories he reads about in Anathema's New Age magazines (like Tibetan tunnels, alien visitations, Atlantis, and the hollow Earth) start becoming true. And it's absolutely hilarious.
• Anything written by Dan Brown. The Robert Langdon books have had a habit of subverting this trope, however. While conspiracy theories are often thrown around by the characters, there usually ends up being a logical, or at least somewhat realistic explanation for everything. In fact, Conspiracy Theorists have ended up being the villain more often than not because they believe that nothing is true and everything in permitted.
• The Onion published an article about the JFK assassination that made use of this trope. "Kennedy Slain By CIA, Mafia, Castro, LBJ, Teamsters, Freemasons: President Shot 129 Times From 43 Different Angles". And then every single shooter is gunned down by Jack Ruby.
• This is the entire purpose of Mr Blank and its sequel Get Blank, a detective story in which the hero works for literally every conspiracy there is, so when someone tries to murder him, there's no shortage of suspects. One of his most reliable tactics is playing off one conspiracy against another, such as pitting the Little Green Men against the Assassins and the Russian Mob in order to rescue his girlfriend.
• Reynard the Fox: The notorious Karmic Trickster Reynard thinks up a conspiracy against the royal court and accuses everybody who tried to arrest him of being accomplices in the crime. Nobody questions his tale that rather conveniently gets rid of everybody who stood in his way.
• In Stielauge Der Urkrebs, at least the Welteislehre and Atlantis are real. The author even provides a list of books about both topics at the end of the book, but none about paleontology, the main inspiration for the book.
• Area 51: The series manages to involve tons of popular conspiracy theories within its mythos (the author claims most are true), starting of course with Area 51. Yes, there is a secret base on the site, and the US government (or part of it anyway) is hiding alien craft they've been flying since the late '40s there. Also, they're behind alien abductions and crop circles (as disinformation confusing people). We later also learn most of what's believed about human history was wrong. The craft are from an alien species who colonized Earth millennia ago, and ruled ancient humans on Atlantis. Since it was destroyed, two different factions have been fighting each other behind the scenes, and numerous mythical figures were aliens in disguise or just influenced by them. Also, lots of mythical artifacts were real, but alien technology. There have also been many human (or part-human) stooges serving these aliens secretly, with them having infiltrated many world governments. Oh, and one faction was the force behind the Nazis. Plus, biggest of all: they created humans to begin with.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: HYDRA is revealed to be descended from a long, long line of one single conspiracy centered around an ancient Inhuman named Hive.
• Babylon 5 had a lot of government conspiracies. And not only EarthGov either. Especially the Centauri and to a lesser extent the Minbari, too. And then there is that whole Shadow/Vorlon-thing...
• The Chronicle: Everything they write about in tabloids is true.
• Star Trek: Enterprise: The Vulcan arc of season 4 had the Vulcan High Command justify their actions by claiming the Syrannites were terrorists who bombed Earth's embassy and then that Andoria was planning a strike against them using Xindi technology (with V'Las, the leader, hiding the fact that Archer destroyed the equipment Shran tried to steal). But then it turns out V'Las was the one with the conspiracy, planting false evidence after arranging the bombing himself so he had an excuse to fight Andoria and also wipe out the Syrannites so he could keep Surak's true teachings hidden... all so he could bring about the reunification of Vulcan and Romulus.

Music

• "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Chumbawamba, where the narrator claims responsibility of e.g. "taking scissors on the black vote down in Florida", "I was there when they landed on the moon, in a studio in Kentucky in June", "at the canteen down in Columbine, with the bags they never found", "and I hid those missing WMD's"...
• "Sympathy for the Devil". Seriously. Think about it.
• The Crucial Conspiracy, The Dingees' third album, had references to chemtrails, government mind-control experiments, and Majestic Twelve; and even has lyrics that could be interpreted to mean that Satan himself is involved in UFO activity.
• Tom Smith's "Illuminati Polka" plays it for laughs.
• As does Psychostick's "Political Bum".
• Nanowar of Steel: Parodied by "Protocols (of the Elders of Zion) of Love", a love song which tells how the singer immediately felt a connection to his Love Interest... through the computer chips implanted in them both by Bill Gates, which along with Stock Footage from InfoWars pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the song, which namedrops conspiracy theories from chemtrails to reptilians and is named after a rather infamous anti-Semitic hoax.

Radio

• The "Conspiracy Theories" episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage says that most conspiracy theorists end up like this; after all, if the government/media/scientists are lying about this, it makes sense they'd be prepared to lie about that as well, doesn't it? Apparently, research also shows that people who are prone to believing conspiracy theories don't even care if they contradict each other, and are quite happy to believe (in the example given) that the Royal Family assassinated Princess Diana, and that Diana faked her own death at the same time.

Tabletop Games

• Conspiracy X is an RPG (by Eden Studios) based around the concept of some or all of the conspiracy theorists being onto something.
• Delta Green is a modern-time setting for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Not only is every possible conspiracy staged by either Nyarlatotep, Mi-Go, or some other Eldritch Abomination, but the playable organization, Delta Green, is an illegal conspiracy. Why? Because official paranormal investigators are working hand-in-hand with the aliens, of course. What's even funnier is that, in the official setting, Delta Green doesn't believe in aliens, only monsters, magic, and ghosts. Of course, anyone who's up on the source material knows that all the monsters, aliens, and magic reside at the same address. (It's also worth mentioning that the aliens who are manipulating the official MIB aren't actually aliens, but artificial constructs created by the real aliens who wanted a weird but still recognizably human appearance.)
• Steve Jackson Games has at least three products set here:
  • The various Illuminati card games (inspired by the above Illuminatus! trilogy).
  • GURPS Illuminati (inspired by the success of the card games).
  • GURPS Warehouse 23 (inspired by playful Internet speculation on what else might be found in the government storage facility seen at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark).
  • Depending on how you look at it, In Nomine (and its offshoot, GURPS In Nomine) also qualifies. In Nomine Anime, a small and obscure supplement, definitely has one foot in this territory.
  • Also GURPS Illuminati University. The "I" does stand for "Illuminati" after all. (The "U" stands for "University", and the "O" stands for YOU'RE NOT CLEARED FOR THAT INFORMATION! ...seriously speaking, it's never explained.)
• Paranoia, though it's set in a futuristic dystopia and not the present day, definitely falls under this trope: the setting mandates that everyone is a member of some conspiracy group and probably multiple.
• The Old World of Darkness. Everything is being manipulated by and has always been manipulated by the Vampire Elders, the Technocracy, Pentex, and various evil spirits. At the same time. With the organizations never interacting, conflicting, or sometimes even being aware of each other. The Technocracy, in particular, seemed to have a handle on vampires and werewolves better than anyone else... then it turned out the Technocracy contained several competing conspiracies.
• The New World of Darkness is getting there, except none of the conspiracies control everything, just a specialized area. The Seers of the Throne make sure that magic stays out of the Fallen World so they get it all to themselves. They have their own phony Men in Black, Division Six... and we say "phony" because the real Men in Black, Task Force: VALKYRIE, operate out of the US Treasury. Then you have the medical corporation that performs experiments on supernatural creatures to find out how useful their parts are, the Catholic Church's crack monster-hunting squad, and the FBI bureau staffed with psychics who hunt down supernatural serial killers and stick them in a Midwestern Guantanamo. And so on. (It's worth noting that all of the listed examples, excluding the Seers of the Throne but including Division Six, come from Hunter: The Vigil.)
• In the Fanmade Gameline Genius: The Transgression, Lemuria used to be in charge of this, but now only thinks they're in charge of it. (Bizarrely, the Lemurians and the Seers of the Throne are unable to detect each other, and no one knows why.)
• This is one of the founding premises of Over the Edge. Seriously, there are hundreds of them, all interfering with each other's plans...
• Warhammer 40,000: The following example has been deemed classification level Viridian Gamma by the Holy Inquisition of the Imperium of Man: You know too much. *BLAM*
• Dark•Matter (1999) includes dimension-traveling lizard people, Atlantis, the Illuminati, Post-Modern Magik, alien bigfoot, and of course government conspiracies.

Video Games

• Deus Ex is essentially a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink in a Cyberpunk setting.
  • Let's see... Area 51, Majestic-12, The Illuminati, a lab-designed plague to cull the lower classes, The Greys, Black Helicopters, The Men in Black (much closer to the original concept than the ones in the above movie), Chupacabras (called "greasels" in the game), cattle mutilations, FEMA as a black organization, United Nations as a black organization, New World Order, The Knights Templar, corporate takeover of the government, Artificial Intelligence secretly ruling the world, engineered gang wars, fake terrorist attacks, and even secret bases hidden under well-known American landmarks.
  • To elaborate on the above: Majestic-12, an offshoot of the Illuminati that overthrew their parent organization (themselves a cabal of elite high-minded thinkers and wealthy investors ideologically descended from the Knights Templar and seeking to govern the world), is spreading a man-made virus via black helicopters both to kill off the surplus population and to control the government via their puppet-organization FEMA. They have engineered the Greasels and the Greys (using genes from animals, including bovines) as a distraction for the public and have created augmented Men in Black to act as their enforcers. Their ultimate plan is to reroute global communications through Area 51 and usher in a New World Order with themselves as the all-seeing "gods" of this world.
  • One character claims that the maintenance men at his workplace are plotting against him when he gets a lemon-lime soda from a vending machine when he is almost certain that he pressed the orange button. His partner is skeptical, to say the least.
    Anna: Are you sure you pressed the right button?
    Gunther: I do not make mistakes of that kind!
    Anna: Your hand might have slipped.
    Gunther: No, I wanted orange. It gave me lemon-lime.
    Anna: The machine would not make a mistake.
    Gunther: It's the maintenance man. He knows I like orange!
    Anna: So you think the staff has some kind of plot?
    Gunther: Yes! They do it on purpose!
  • Entertainingly, this is confirmed in Deus Ex: Invisible War by a NPC.

    Bum: Someone here must have really liked lemon-lime soda.

• Metal Gear has sentient AI, top-secret government black projects, the FBI and CIA, clones, zombie cyborgs, UMAs, psychics, ghosts, Communists, coverups around every corner, and also references sillier content like aliens building the pyramids and the fate of a man who went into a cave and emerged a decade later not having aged. Metal Gear Solid 2 parodied itself at one point by having one of the on-disc supplementary story recaps being a book written by the most hilariously deranged conspiracy theorist you could possibly imagine. (To give you an idea; we don't get to read it, but the title of his previous book was Rays From The Loch Ness Monster — The True Power Source Of UFOs.) To his credit, he was extremely good at identifying conspiracies — unfortunately, he never blamed the events on the right conspiracies, attributing The Omniscient Council of Vagueness-caused disaster of the previous game to the island it was on being "an Ellis Island for the Greys". The whole farce ends with him being rescued by an invisible man whom he proudly, loudly declares is a noble Sufficiently Advanced Alien who had taken pity on him, when it's clear to the reader that it's Solid Snake in active camo.
• Assassin's Creed rapidly became an amalgamation of all sorts of conspiracy theories, incorporating everything from the Tunguska Event to JFK's assassination to the entirety of World War II and tracing them all back to the Templars, the Assassins, or both trying to cover up or seize something or other. It's not exactly necessary to understand how it all fits together to make any sense of the plot, fortunately, because any attempt to do so is doomed to failure, particularly when time-travelling god aliens get involved. Generally it's best to simply accept that the Assassins and Templars have been at each other's throats for a really long time and move on. Gets especially crazy and paranoia-inducing in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Alan Turing? Murdered to prevent him from inventing too powerful computers. Cable TV? A method for transmitting brainwave-altering signals and monitoring citizens. Cell tower surveillance? Tracking all communication. These conspiracy tropes are largely used as metaphor and window dressing, and the crux of the games are mostly a skewed retelling of historical facts. Indeed the point of these games is to show how difficult and damn near impossible behind-the-scenes control over history actually is. At times the Assassins and the Templars don't have a lot to do with why certain things happened (in Brotherhood. the two fight a proxy war that gets out of both of their control and tears Italy apart; in III, they both back the same side in the American Revolution and mostly just fight each other as the war rages in the background so their influence over the new nation pretty much cancels out).
• Though it's not essential to play the game, the hidden messages in The Conduit mesh together just about every conspiracy theory under the sun. Especially the sequel.
• The Secret World positions its setting as a world where "Everything is true"... which includes both every conspiracy theory and every fairy tale. Except aliens.
• Perfect Dark presents a variety of alien conspiracies as being true as the basis for its plot, including The Greys, Lizard Folk, Area 51, aliens replacing the president of the United States, E.T. Gave Us Wi-Fi, and a flying saucer at the bottom of the ocean.

Web Original

• The eponymous town in Welcome to Night Vale has this trope as a basic premise, except there is no masquerade; all of it is just accepted as the normal state of things. It's implied that the world outside the town isn't quite as weird: Carlos the scientist was originally sent to investigate all the bizarre things that seem to go on there.
• CollegeHumor does a marvelous parody of the trope in 'Deceptive Deceptions'. Among the things "uncovered" as part of a massive conspiracy embracing all of humanity in this "truthumentary" are events that include: the shooting of Tupac Shakur being arranged by the government, Dan Akroyd's role in Caddyshack 2 and Nothing but Trouble being the obvious link, the late John Candy also being in on it, Paul McCartney's replacement by a doppelgänger so he could compose "Helter Skelter" and possess Charles Manson with the spirit of the Anti-Christ: Adolf Hitler, who is actually a cyberganic demon created by Nazi scientists, who then created a faux-space agency called NASA to fake the moon landings on a special stage, the John F. Kennedy assassination (which is described as "Tupac-esque") was because he boasted about putting a man on the moon in 10 years, which is actually a prehistoric hologram hiding a gigantic spaceship, Close Encounters of the Third Kind being made to cover this up by Dick Cheney and a pentagram of corporations that control our world (comprised of Nabisco, AOL, CITGO, Atkins, Adidas, and the New York Knicks), who are in turn controlled by the dual monopoly of Hooters and Google. And the identity of the secret cabal that is more powerful than the American government, the Freemasons, and The Illuminati: The College Humor staff.
• The "artwork" of David Dees, hilariously surreal composites of edited stock photos which often feature more than one conspiracy at a time. The farther you go, the more contradictions you notice, and then it becomes clear that he probably believes them all.
• The SCP Foundation features articles based on a wide range of conspiracies, as well as an abundance of hidden conspiracies, secret societies, and mysterious cults, with the titular Foundation trying to keep it all covered up. For just one example, according to letters associated with SCP-281-FR, all societies that have been accused of ruling in the shadows ^Including Majestic 12, The Illuminati and the Freemasons are members of the Global Occult Coalition (the paranormal counterpart to the United Nations, one of the Foundation's many rivals).

Western Animation

• Codename: Kids Next Door has no end of conspiracies, many of them orchestrated by the KND themselves to keep their organization secret from the average adult. "Operation: M.O.O.N." revolves around the fact that one of these is the moon landing (in order to keep their moonbase from being discovered) and that they now have to fake it again after learning the American government is sending a family there to begin colonizing it.
• Dilbert has quite a few conspiracies shown over its run, many of which have Dogbert involved in some way.
• Inside Job (2021):
  • The main characters are part of a company that helps run and keep track of all of them through morally questionable means. This includes everything from chemtrails to cryptids to cloning celebrities to assassinations to subliminal messaging to the reptilians to Atlantis.
  • One of the few conspiracies that isn't true is Flat Earth theory, although the Hollow Earth is; Reagan's retired father Rand created it when he was still employed by the company, as part of a bet that there was no idea too dumb that he couldn't make people believe. Turns out it worked too well, but Rand continues to perpetuate it to annoy his former boss.
  • Other conspiracies are true, but in different ways than you'd expect. For instance, the moon landing was indeed filmed on a soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, but this was a coverup for the fact that humanity did indeed land on the moon—and far more successfully than they should have, as the astronauts were somehow able to found a self-sustaining colony (initially a free-love commune) and secede from Earth.

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