Pop culture is home to some of the greatest conspiracy theories of our time. What's Soylent Green really made of? Who is the Manchurian Candidate? What is SHIELD up to? What happened in the X-Files again? What was that film Conspiracy Theory about? Potent though the adventures of Mulder and Scully and the films of Alan J Pakula were, though, they're nothing compared to the tangled webs and shady powers-that-be that exist in the real world - and are controlling us through using the very pop culture we enjoy. That's what a bunch of wackos on the internet believe, anyway. The advent of the internet has been like the invention of the printing press for conspiracy theorists, only instead of Johannes Gutenberg allowing literacy, philosophy and religion to spread with ease, Tim Berners-Lee has instead made it simpler for people to make a website full of animated gifs, a YouTube video with pictures of pyramids on, or to construct an entire Wikipedia devoted to the secret rulers of the world. And, as our celebrity culture grows alongside the internet, so too does our mistrust of the people who appear in Closer. Is Cheryl Cole the anti-christ? Is Drake part of the mysterious Bilderberg group? Is Roger Moore secretly a blood-drinking alien reptile? Believe it or not, I only made one of those up. The rest are actual pop cultural conspiracy theories people believe. And the ten I'm about to share with you are somehow weirder than that.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
