NZ Skeptics Articles

Mulder would be QAnon: The deep roots of a modern conspiracy

James Kerr - 3rd March 2025

Astute reader that you are, it has probably not escaped your notice that politics has taken a turn for the conspiratorial in the last few years. We’ve recently seen a rise in anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens, and people convinced that They (whoever They are) made up a global disease in a bid for control over the populace.

While we certainly have plenty of homegrown conspiracists, the heart of political conspiracy right now is in the USA, and the most recent conspiracy zeitgeist there has undoubtedly been QAnon.

QAnon, like most conspiracy theories, absorbs a lot of other conspiracies into it, but the core premises of QAnon are that:

If this seems like a transparent falsehood, designed to gull credulous people into voting for Trump despite his extensive flaws as a leader, that’s because it is. But getting people to swallow all of the premises I outlined above is easier if they seem sort of plausible already, and one of the core premises of QAnon has been floating around our culture for decades. The name “deep state” is new, but the underlying idea, a shadow government running its own agenda without oversight or accountability, is well-established in the darker recesses of our culture, despite a lack of evidence for it.

To demonstrate my point, I will examine three conspiracy theories popular in the 1980s and 1990s: UFOs, the Moon Landing Hoax, and the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

What all three of these conspiracies have in common is that they involve governments lying to their people, and it’s common for conspiracists to respond to scepticism by claiming that sceptics naively believe that governments are always honest. But this is a false dichotomy; governments do lie, but not all the time, and not without reason. As is so often the case, the role of the sceptic is to find the happy (and evidence-based) medium between always accepting and always rejecting conventional wisdom, and something that can help with that is an understanding of how government decisions get made.

When governments (or political actors within a government) lie, it is (with rare exceptions) to serve some kind of policy or agenda. This is no different to why most people lie, but it is worth bearing in mind when thinking about conspiracies - what would the government be trying to achieve by telling this lie, and what are the chances it would work?

Exhibit A: UFOs

UFO conspiracy theories vary in their specifics, but the minimal version any UFOlogist believes in is that:

Ground zero for this conspiracy is an incident in 1947, where an unusual aircraft crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. The official story released by the US Army was that this was simply a weather balloon, but rumours spread that this was a lie and that the government was covering up a crashed alien spacecraft.

What I like about the Roswell incident is that the conspiracists were half-right. We now know, thanks to declassification, that the US government did lie about the Roswell Incident. It wasn’t a weather balloon, but rather a top secret surveillance balloon, designed to detect the characteristic sounds made by a nuclear test as part of Project Mogul.

Note the existence of a strong motivation here - to hide a top secret espionage programme from a hostile foreign power. This is exactly the sort of reason you might expect would help to maintain a decades-long deception:

A good motivation helps maintain the deception for a long time (everyone who knew the secret would be motivated to keep it).

A good motivation also limits the political fallout when the secret is inevitably discovered - almost no-one would be shocked or upset to hear the US was concealing an espionage project against the USSR, which is why there was no scandal in response to the declassification of Project Mogul.

This motivation also explains why the secret was maintained so long.

People sometimes think of governments as these immovable monoliths that just keep doing the same things forever, but in truth, governments do change policy direction, especially when there’s a change in leadership. Project Mogul was kept secret by 10 successive US Presidents, from Truman to Clinton (who ended up revealing it, but not right away). These men had very different views of policy, but it’s not hard to imagine that they all agreed that the US should win the Cold War, so it’s plausible that they would all agree that this secret should be kept, up until the end of the Cold War made keeping it unnecessary.

However, if the Roswell Incident were really an alien spacecraft, that secret would have to have been kept by 14 US Presidents (from Truman to Biden). And why would they do so? The most common explanation I have heard is to ‘avoid panicking people’. But governments do not always consider that a valid goal. After all, when George W Bush falsely claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, it certainly wasn’t out of a desire to avoid panic. Equally, Senator Joseph McCarthy deliberately tried to panic the public about communist infiltration during the Red Scare. How likely is it that every one of those 14 presidents, with all their different ideologies and agendas, saw an advantage in keeping aliens secret?

If you believe the US government has hidden something as profound as aliens through so many changes in government, it’s not difficult to understand why those same people might come to believe that the Presidents weren’t the ones calling the shots. But the rabbit hole would have to go deeper than that, as the next example will show.

Exhibit B: The moon hoax

The core of the moon hoax conspiracy theory is quite simple:

What makes this one complicated is the implications of such a lie. First, let’s evaluate this conspiracy using the motivation criteria from above. The moon landing was part of the Space Race - a contest of science and engineering between the USA and the USSR to show which was the preeminent scientific power. Up until the moon landing, the USSR was generally considered to be winning the Space Race.

So, would a government lie to inflate its accomplishments? Yes, in fact this is fairly common, though more common with authoritarian countries that don’t need to worry about a free press. So, while there’s still the problem that there’s no evidence to support this conspiracy theory, it’s at least more plausible than an alien coverup.

Or is it? Because the USA is not the only government that would need to lie. Not only did the Soviet Union have its own space programme, giving it lots of opportunity to observe what was happening in space, but it took 2 days for Apollo 11 to reach the Moon from Earth, and there is nowhere a rocket can be obscured between the Earth and the Moon. Anyone looking in the right direction would be able to see the rocket, or the lack of one. Add to this the fact that Cuba is only about 500 km from Cape Canaveral, and it would have been very easy for the Cuban government (an ally of the USSR) to observe the rocket launch, and report if no such launch happened. I see no plausible way the US could have faked the moon landing without the USSR, and several other countries, knowing.

Does it make sense that every leader of the USSR, from Kruschev to Gorbachev (not to mention the modern leaders of Russia), kept a secret that was directly detrimental to their geopolitical interests? That seems very unlikely. To imagine that the USA and USSR collaborated on such a lie, you have to start imagining shadowy elements, not just in control of the US, but also the Soviet Union. At this point the whole of post-World War 2 geopolitics is a lie. And we’re not done yet.

Exhibit C: The JFK assassination conspiracy

What is not in dispute is that on 22 November 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, was shot in the head and killed in Dallas while driving through the streets. While all available evidence suggests the killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, many conspiracy theorists believe otherwise:

The usual reason believers in this conspiracy offer as to why the US government would hide this information, is to conceal the complicity of elements of the government in JFK’s death. But how would that work? Killing a sitting President is clearly highly illegal, and it’s very unlikely that Lyndon Johnson (who was JFK’s Vice President) would be willing to protect anyone who killed his predecessor. And this is why I think this conspiracy is so important to understanding where QAnon came from - when I hear conspiracy theorists speak of JFK, they like to suggest that JFK was killed because he wouldn’t toe the line (Conspiracy Theorist Vinnie Eastwood intimated this at a Skeptics’ Society conference). If we take this seriously for a moment, it essentially means that politics as we understand it is a lie.

This line of thinking posits that our elected leaders are not truly in charge of our governments, but are merely a facade behind which is concealed some hidden power, with seemingly global reach and unknown, but presumably sinister, agenda. Any politicians who refuse to cooperate are eliminated to ensure control.

In other words, for these three conspiracies to make logical sense, you have to believe in the Deep State, or something very much like it.

How we think about our government matters

It’s easy to see a government as this single, unified entity. It has names, and symbols, and so much of what it does persists from one set of politicians to the next that it’s easy to think of it as a “being” in its own right. For those of a mystical or conspiratorial nature, this being can become an ominous or even demonic entity - The Deep State, The Man or simply Them.

But governments, like all institutions, are made of people; some good, some bad, but none of them are cartoon villains, nor are they a hive mind. Governments make decisions by the people in them making decisions, and when you think of a government choosing to do something, imagine a group of people in a room, ordinary human beings, making that decision. Every one of those people will have their own ideas, biases and goals. The idea of a single mind behind the whole thing is easier to write for TV, but it is dangerous to let a scriptwriter’s crutch leak into your view of the real world.

If you’re reading this, you almost certainly live in a democracy, the ability to shape your government is in your hands, at least in some small part. If you dislike what your government is doing, it is possible to take some action to try and change it. But if a shadowy Them controls the whole world, then your vote doesn’t matter, and that means there’s no reason to spend any time on considering who you should support, or why. That may be the most pernicious part of this kind of conspiracy; it undermines the duties that citizens of a democracy need to fulfil for their government to work. The system cannot function if people aren’t thinking about their political decisions critically, and at that point the whole system can collapse into chaos or tyranny.