10 Outlandish Conspiracies That Were Actually True
1. Scientology Tried To Take Over The US Government
Phew. How about we set our football on some good old American soil, and reminiscence about the time that the US government was almost overtaken by an insane cult who believe they are descended from the souls of aliens who crashed their spaceship into a volcano during caveman times?
Yes, let's do that. And possibly inspire the ire of the Church of Scientology, who are infamously prickly when it comes to unfavourable mentions of themselves in the media and official records. Which is why, during the 1970s, they engaged in a huge criminal conspiracy to infiltrate government agencies in order to dispel all the bad stuff people had been saying about them and their founder, L Ron Hubbard, who wrote crappy sci-fi books.
Operation Snow White, as they called it, was the single largest infiltration of United States government in history, involving 5000 covert agents going undercover in 136 agencies, foreign embassies and consulates. Not only that, but the Church snuck into private companies who had been critical of Scientology, and other entities in more than 30 countries. The Church members stole documents, bugged government offices, and did lots of other totally illegal stuff.
At first, the plan was just to wipe out details of things like the massive backdated tax the Church owed to the IRS, but in the end took in governments across the world and even Interpol. They intended not only to seize documents relating to Scientology and their illegal activities, but also to plant false information to discredit the US government. It was basically COINTELPRO, only enacted by a scary cult that's still trying to control things to this day.
Once Operation Snow White was compromised, dozens of those involved were convicted of crimes and sentenced to prison terms. Since then Scientologists have been reluctant to talk about the whole mess, when really they should be kind of proud. With the amount of agents they had, and the sort of places they were infiltrating, they could very well have taken over not just the United States by the world. And then we'd all have to watch Mission: Impossible 2 and say we liked it.