50 years of conspiracy theories and their effect on a nation’s psyche

New York magazine is celebrating 50 years of alleged conspiracies with a series of articles about the US’ most pervasive theories. It covers all forms of theory, from the widely believed — John F. Kennedy was not killed by an angry Lee Harvey Oswald, or if he was, he certainly wasn’t acting alone — to the wacky: Nazis were mole people and communists have been (very ineffectively) poisoning the US water supply for fifty years. The articles give a deep background to a half-century full of mystery, intrigue, and shadowy cabals of possible lizard people, and go some way to explaining why the mystique of a good conspiracy theory is so intoxicating to so many.