10 Insane Reasons People Faked Their Own Death

5. As Performance Art

Alexander "Ace" Baker had already lived quite a life, owing to his former career as a touring keyboardist for The Supremes, Iron Butterfly and REO Speedwagon. Apparently that wasn't quite enough excitement for him, however as he later delved into the murky world of 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Who call themselves "truthers" because they're not totally devoid of a sense of irony, we suppose.

Baker's own particular brand of lunacy focuses on the Hutchison effect, which...well, it's a widely discredited bunch of scientific theories by a guy crazier than Baker. He also thinks that the planes in all the videos of the attacks aren't real, either, and the whole thing was a government cover-up. Of something.

Anyway, as these people often do, Baker often made regular appearances on a radio show full of crackpots going on about how the CIA were beaming messages into their iron fillings and the NSA was secretly recording all of their correspondence. Huh, maybe that had a point. Except about the lizard people who run the world.

Baker was a regular guest on Jim Feltzer's The Real Deal, where he extolled his non-traditional views on what happened on September 11th 2001. On the July 11th, 2009 edition of the radio show Baker topped himself, following an impassioned and emotional plea to the US government to reveal the truth about the 9/11 attacks.

After a long and rambling suicide note, Baker pulled the trigger. Or pretend to, anyway. For a few weeks it wasn't clear what actually happened following the sound of gunfire, before Baker revealed it was all just "performance art" to draw attention to his conspiracy theories. Because a good way to make your arguments more legitimate is to fake your death.