What if I told you some things that might seem absurd, unbelievable, completely unrealistic? Things that Alex Jones couldn’t even have conceived beforehand?

What if I told you that the CIA was in cahoots with “researchers” at over 30 universities to illegally experiment with mind control on unsuspecting people using barbiturates, LSD and hypnosis?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real.

What if I told you a few years ago that the government would use X-radiation technology in 250 different public places around the nation to look at people’s genitals under the auspices of public security?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it happened at airports equipped with full-body scanners of that type.

What if I told you in 2009 that the military and universities were working on robotic technology the size of birds and bugs that could be used to spy on any person or group, outdoors or indoors?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real–such development was under way then and remains ongoing now.

What if I told you in early 2009 that the government bought nearly 2,000 guns from U.S. dealers and supplied many of them to Mexican narco-traffickers, who would use them for killings of both Mexican and U.S. citizens, with apparent knowledge of the U.S. Attorney General?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real as part of Operation Fast and Furious.

What if I told you that the military was going to invade a peaceful village in Colorado and kill 148 people there, mostly women and children?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real on 29 November 1864, for members of the Cheyenne tribe under Chief Black Kettle.

What if I told you that, for six years, the government secretly has been forcing major telephone companies to turn over their customers’ phone-call logs of all Americans to the National Security Agency, with knowledge of two presidents?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it is real and is ongoing, and until this year with the Edward Snowden scandal, was secret.

What if I told you that a worldwide information company that’s in almost every computer, that has been cooperating with the National Security Agency to supply the government with information on citizens, is warm to the notion of implanting chips in people’s heads?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it’s really under consideration.

What if I told you that the government, by executive order of a Democrat president, was going to round up over 60,000 U.S. citizens in this country and relocate them in involuntary interment camps?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real for Japanese-American U.S. citizens in World War II, and for many non-citizens as well.

What if I told you that the military was purposefully spraying a mixture of toxic and radioactive chemicals into the air in your neighborhood without your prior knowledge, and planting false media stories as part of an official cover-up?

“Lunacy”, you’d say. “Unfounded conspiracy theory!”

Well, guess what: it was real for folks in St. Louis in the 1950s and ’60s.

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To the point, if you haven’t figured it out already: all of these wild ideas and more, until they actually happened, would have seemed like insane conspiracy theories or even delusions of the severely psychotic! Put yourself in the shoes of a rational and reasonably well-educated citizen contemporary to each of those events, hearing someone mention them for the first time–then try to deny this. And yet, they were true. True!

Yes, there are plenty of ridiculous and baseless theories out there. I hear many of them regarding weather, specifically weather control. Not all involve the usual HAARP or “chemtrails” stupidity either. The level and number of ridiculous suppositions out there about weather control is amazing, and all completely without merit. For now, anyway…

That said, can you be absolutely sure, given the insights above, that all of the “conspiracy theories” and “crackpot claims” you hear are going to turn out to be false? Next time you dismiss someone’s insane-sounding ramblings as a “conspiracy theory” or “crackpot”–stop and think twice, for each of the above events would have seemed absurd to the extreme upon your being first told.

Conspiracy theories are bad enough without some of them turning out to be real. Enough! By giving conspiracy theorists such fodder in real events, and by failing to adhere to the tenets of openness and full transparency, we as a society, and our corporations and governments, actively encourage and foster the very kind of thinking we dismiss and mock as the bane of rational thought, and give the actual crackpots a bully platform rooted in nuggets of legitimacy!

Then again, if a conspiracy theory turns out to be true, then it was rational–regardless of how baseless or ungrounded it may have seemed. Even if a suspicion was right for the wrong reasons, it still was correct. After all, the result ultimately is what matters, and nothing is more brutally rational than a hard, cold fact.