It was both a good year and a bad one for conspiracy theories and theorists. For one thing, Neil Armstrong died. That was sad for many reasons; included among them is that now he’ll never be able to reveal the secret about the moon landing. On the other hand, it was a Presidential-election year, a particularly fertile time for conspiracy theorizing. People are fixated on an enemy, and they just need to take the next step and imagine all of the diabolical things that enemy could be up to. They certainly did plenty of that in 2012. Here are twelve of the highlights of the year's conspiracy theories. For the record, none of them are true.

[#image: /photos/590953f92179605b11ad3c26]

Barack Obama was born in Kenya.

You’re probably familiar with this one already—after all, it’s been around since at least 2008. But with the President up for reëlection, it came back in a big way in 2012. Even Mitt Romney was joking about it on the campaign trail.

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist.

There’s a Web site, WorldNetDaily, now known as W.N.D., that is the “birther” headquarters. (It’s also the new home of the former Senator Rick Santorum’s column.) They’ve spent a few years pushing the idea that Obama was really born in Kenya, not in Hawaii—and, as a failsafe, arguing that it doesn’t matter where Obama was born, because he himself admits that his father wasn’t an American citizen when he was born, and thus he isn’t a “natural-born citizen,” as the Constitution requires. (The birthers like this legal theory more than the courts do.)

But then W.N.D. started promoting (and selling) a direct-to-DVD documentary entitled “Dreams from My Real Father,” made by Joel Gilbert, whose œuvre includes such films as “Paul McCartney Really Is Dead: The Last Testament of George Harrison.” The basic idea is that Obama’s real father is in fact not Barack Obama, Sr., but Frank Marshall Davis, an American Communist who was friendly with Obama’s grandfather Stanley.

There’s no credible evidence for this. But that hasn’t stopped the birthers before, so forget about that for a second. Instead, consider this: if Barack Obama were actually Barack Marshall Davis, the years of work that W.N.D. put into proving that Obama was born in Kenya—and/or ineligible for the Presidency on account of his Kenyan father—would be instantly moot. And still they happily promoted “Dreams From My Real Father”—and took it seriously. In the weeks before the election, Gilbert apparently found someone to fund his sending of millions of free copies of “Dreams from My Real Father” to people living in swing states.

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he’s gay.

This one’s been around for some time—a few years ago, a man named Larry Sinclair got some attention in certain corners for claiming a coke-fuelled tryst with Obama in a limo—but it had faded away for a while before springing back to life this year. One of the new allegations: Obama frequented bathhouses in Chicago, and was part of a “Down Low Club” at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church, because of course Wright is involved somehow. (Strangely, no one found a way to work in Bill Ayers.)

Before jumping on this particular theory, you might want to note that one of its chief proponents/sources was also absolutely convinced that the Obamas, knowing that they would lose to Mitt Romney, had made serious moves towards purchasing a post-White House home in Hawaii.

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he’s gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate.

W.N.D.’s Jerome Corsi—the man behind the Swift Boat Vets book and a lot of birther reporting—never quite came out and said that he thought Obama was married to his college roommate Hasan Chandoo. But he did run one article asserting that the two were lovers, as well as a series of articles about a ring that Obama has worn on his ring finger since well before he was married to the former Michelle Robinson. In at least one instance, Corsi connected the two theories.

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he’s gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he’s a Muslim.

O.K., we admit it: we have a little bit to do with this one, as it stems from a number of previously unpublished photos from Obama’s time at Occidental College that we ran, including a couple that showed him wearing the ring. In our defense, we could have put up a picture of Obama wearing a ring he got from a Cracker Jack box, and someone, somewhere, would have used it to prove that he’s a secret Muslim.

Needless to say, squiggly lines do not a Muslim make.

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or maybe not, because his father is actually an American Communist. Also, he’s gay, and maybe he was married to his roommate, and his wedding ring proves that he’s a Muslim. And there’s something suspicious in his college records.

Donald Trump wasn’t obsessed with the records from Obama’s time at Occidental and Columbia because he thought that the President had gotten bad grades back in the day. No, it’s because some of the birthers suspect that Obama’s applications and financial-aid records would prove that he was registered as a foreign student, or maybe that his tuition was being paid for by secret Muslim Manchurian Candidate trainers.