Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction. Unless you're reading some William Burroughs crazy trippy book or watching Legend Of The Overfiend, in which case fiction is definitely trumping truth in the strangeness stakes, and we're all the more glad for it.

Let's put giant naked bug orgies and tentacles aside for now, though, and place our feet firmly in reality. Or at least, reality as exists for an increasingly scary proportion of the population. Conspiracy theories, once the preserve of paranoid tinfoil hatters on a cloistered corner of the web have, in the post-truth era, become a mainstream tool of coercion. You're more likely than ever to find that the average bloke on the street believes shadowy conglomerates are pulling the strings behind everything from 9/11 to the SuperBowl success of the New England Patriots. And that phone masts are evil.

Perhaps scarier still, is that some of those frenzied, fever dream ramblings about the Illuminati and secret government activities are totally right. For decades, the idea that the US government was spying on its own people - and plenty of other countries' citizens too - was dismissed as crazy talk, a Big Brother-style conspiracy that couldn't possibly be true. And then Edward Snowden served us all up a sizable helping of humble pie which we're still struggling to force down our gullets.

Throughout human history there's been dozens, if not hundreds, of crackpots cooking up their own conspiracies about events at every level of government and culture, and for the most part they don't have anything on all the dodgy stuff that's really been going on, right beneath our noses, without our knowledge.

Here are just ten of the craziest conspiracies that happened to be true.