What an illuminating entry, but for all the wrong reasons. I delight in bludgeoning your entry with my machete into a bloody pulp.
Governments sometimes are untruthful and scientists sometimes are frauds. BUT...
During the Cold War, when Russian fighter jets penetrated our airspace and flew up the Mississippi River, the government honestly denied it was their aircraft. It was better for the general public to whimsically imagine they were witnessing alien UFOs, so relatively innocuous and silly, than to panic. Going back in history, when Roswell occurred, the government initially truthfully reported a downed weather balloon but then retracted the story; it was better for the public imagination to run amock and think "UFOs! UFOs! UFOs!" than for the Russians to know we were testing nuclear detonation detection devices. Groom Lake was kept secret not because the government cared about the general public not knowing what aircraft were being developed, but to prevent other countries from knowing. When documents are declassified and released under the Freedom of Information Act, they often are heavily redacted which can very easily misleadingly stir suspicions of a grander government cover-up. The mundane explanation behind the redactions is the government cannot afford to tip off other countries as to our agents, sources, and methodologies of foreign espionage. These are examples of actual legitimate conspiracies. Of course, sometimes there are actual illegitimate conspiracies, either to cover-up mistakes and embarassments--e.g. the intergalactic waste of time, money, and resources of the CIA's
Stargate "remote viewing" project--or government misdeeds such as what was the syphillis experiment in Tuskegee, Alabama.
However, be all that as it may, those actual conspiracies leads people to falsely believe in imaginary conspiracies where none actually exists. The problem with conspiracy theories is there is a falsely placed burden of proof. The burden of proof is falsely placed upon the respondent (e.g. government officials) to prove there is
not a conspiracy rather than the claimant (the theorist) to prove the conspiracy. The problem is you cannot prove a negative. Regardless how forthcoming is the respondent, the claimant can always contort a
post hoc hypothesis and contend the denial is in continuation of the conspiracy. Thus, really, conspiracy theories have
no burden of proof and thus are
bad thinking. Conspiracy theories are better described as "conspiracy guesses." Notably, conspiracy theorists are characteristically full of questions but short on providing their own solid, accurate, reliable answers.
Science is the greatest invention in human history. One great tenant is a built-in bullsh*t detector to correct mistakes and eliminate snake oil frauds. When some scientists had claimed to accomplish cold fusion, the international scientific community exposed them as frauds by failing to reproduce the results under controlled conditions. Parapsychologists who "investigate" the paranormal love to denounce science as "limiting" and "political". In science, anyone is free to disagree but
the disagreement must be convincing, thus why the scientific establishment is the establishment and why the fringe is ignored. After countless centuries, parapsychology still miserably fails to obtain any convincing results which are repeatable under controlled conditions where the possibility of cheating is eliminated. Sometimes genuine scientists are tricked by con artists--as the morally irreprehensible magician Uri Geller did to scientists back in the 1970's--but the system inevitably catches frauds and invalidates the results. Thus, parapsychology always has and always will be plagued by starting over from scratch.
Just listen to Vladimir Kryuchkov, the retired chief of the KGB of 17 years...Finally...
Bullshiiiiiiiit...
