William Cooper’s New World Order conspiracy spanned centuries and crossed cultures, even taking in U.F.O.’s and space travel. Sometimes it got a bit tedious, especially when Cooper would go into the minutiae of his evidence, but you couldn’t turn away. If you did, you’d miss pure, crystalline moments of conspiracist poetry like this:

I read while in Naval Intelligence that at least once a year, maybe more, two nuclear submarines meet beneath the polar icecap and mate together at an airlock. Representatives of the Soviet Union meet with the Policy Committee of the Bilderberg Group. The Russians are given the script for their next performance. Items on the agenda include the combined efforts in the secret space program governing Alternative 3. I now have in my possession official NASA photographs of a moonbase in the crater Copernicus.

Alternative 3 refers to a BBC TV movie about secret space colonies on the moon and Mars. It was science fiction presented as documentary fact, much like War of the Worlds (which Cooper claimed was a "psychological warfare experiment") or The Office (which he did not). The film’s origins are well established, but plenty of conspiracy theorists still claim it’s an example of real-life investigative journalism, and its status as "fiction" is part of the cover-up.

As a teenager living in the land without cable television, in a time before the internet, I ate this stuff up.

What’s true about Cooper’s work — and what makes it fascinating — is largely true of conspiracy theories as a whole. All conspiracists draw from a common pool of sources, whether they be JFK assassination theories, "proof" that 9-11 was an inside job, outright hoaxes like Alternative 3 and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, or old yarns about subterranean societies (extraterrestrials, Nazis, and the deranged robots of Richard Sharpe Shaver have all been found living underground at one time or another). This applies to the conspiracy subculture as a whole, no matter where the individual lands on the political spectrum. Distrust of the official narrative is stronger than political affiliation.

Of course, your beliefs are both logical and reasonable. It’s those other guys I’m talking about.