The private jet carrying Barack Obama arrives in Auckland. But surely he's here for more than a few rounds of golf? Don't you think?

Such a short visit, yet so much to report: His plane landed on Wednesday at 12.13am, and it was a Gulfstream. A man waved at the motorcade. Some children in South Auckland would have liked to have met him, but the silly old mayor of Tauranga didn't even take up an invitation to do just that.

Golf was played, helicopters were flown and a memo about hongi-ing was passed along the chain of command. There was speculation about just how many squillions of dollars richer New Zealand would get if the visitor ever got round to tweeting about our golf courses. There was a photo-montage of men talking on telephones.

JASON DORDAY / STUFF Obama with the PM Jacinda Ardern. No journalist was willing to reveal whether or not the pair were discussing weaponry options for managing zombie invasions.

Yet despite all this fine work from New Zealand's finest Famous-Person-From-Overseas-Is-In-Town correspondents, local media somehow managed to overlook what could be the most important angle about this visit by a former American President.

While my journalistic peers were out baking in the Northland sun while holding zoom lenses, lurking near chopper pads or stalking everyone who might have been invited to the Thursday-night event hosted by Sam Neill and MCed by poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh, I went online in search of the truth.

Most reporters, focussed on "facts" and "information", and obsessed with rational analysis, had stuck to a familiar script: the former president was following in the footsteps of his ex-presidential predecessors by taking a fat fee for an evening of glad-handing backed by a consortium of corporate sponsors. And while in the country he'd be fitting in some golf with his bromantic old flame John Key, a chat with the current PM, and a few other private meet-and-greets.

But once online I was freed from the tedious constraints of fact-gathering and sanity. One click led to another, and quite soon I'd found the answer to the question everyone else was too afraid to ask: what was the real reason for Barack Obama's visit to New Zealand?

JASON DORDAY/STUFF A helicopter that may or may not have something to do with Barack Obama approaches a golf course somewhere up north.

The answer was there on infowars.com, home of Alex Jones, the alpha-idiot of American conspiracy theorists, best known for his claim that the 9/11 terrorist attacks and other unpleasant events have been "false flag" operations run by the US government. He's also the guy that current president Donald Trump described as having an "amazing" reputation.

In a Youtube video entitled "Former President Obama Sneaks Into The Globalists' Main Escape Base: New Zealand", Jones devotes 13 minutes to a startling analysis of the Obama trip.

He starts with a quick rundown of the basic itinerary culled from an Associated Press news story, which mentions that Obama will do some work with the Obama Foundation while here (like most ex-Presidents, he has his own charity).

Youtube/Infowars Alex Jones presents a carefully researched and utterly baseless theory about Obama's plans for a post-apocalyptic bunker downunder.

And here is the fragment of data which allows Jones to suck this a rather boring press release about a famous guy on holiday in the Pacific into the phantasmagoric fever-dream that is Jones's world-view.

You see, says Jones matter-of-factly, that final line from the AP report actually means that the Obama Foundation in New Zealand is busy building Obama "an armoured fortress as an escape".

Well of course.

One might argue Jones is just making stuff up. After all, he's the guy who says Sandy Hook school shooting of 2012, where 20 children and six adults died, was an event staged for TV cameras and all the victims and grieving relatives were paid actors.

But look! He has the facts to back it up.

JASON DORDAY/STUFF Barack Obama is welcomed with a powhiri in Auckland at Government House.

He pulls up screen-grabs of mainstream news articles. See, he says, here are the reports – from the New Yorker, Gizmodo, the London Observer – showing how rich paranoid Americans have bought land here as a post-apocalyptic refuge. Obama is clearly joining the stampede south.

Then, done with teetering on the fence between real and crazy, Jones simply leaps off.

Did you know, he barks, that billionaires like the film director James Cameron and others are setting up an alternative government in New Zealand? And that "elites" are building long runways all over the world so they can move around after society collapses? And that the US army has been doing training for a zombie apocalypse? And that Elon Musk has publicly stated that the master plan is to "end humanity as we know it; bring in a world government and exterminate you and your family on the altar of AI gods"?!?!

DAVID WHITE/STUFF Barack Obama arrives at the helicopter pad before choppering north to play golf with John Key.

I got a little lost at zombies and Elon Musk, but one of those articles Jones was pulling up about New Zealand's billionaire preppers had caught my eye. The Observer piece was titled "Silicon Valley super-rich head south to escape from a global apocalypse", and its author was Hayden Donnell, an Auckland freelance reporter who I kind of vaguely know.

I rang Donnell, partly in the hope that he'd seen the architects' drawings of Obama's bunker, but mostly to ask how he felt about being cited as a "source" by the infamous Alex Jones.

Donnell confessed that his first reaction was excitement at being "at the real heart of the American moment right now, where a country is descending into fetid swamp dreams – and I'm part of that".

But on reflection, excitement was replaced with something closer to horror.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Barack Obama and John Key, members of the global elite, chat during a game of golf. It's simply impossible to know whether they're discussing dinner plans or planning a global government run by lizards.

Donnell's piece drew heavily on reports by the likes of the New Zealand Herald's Matt Nippert, who'd uncovered the murky story of how Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel became a New Zealand citizen, as well as the work of some US-based journalists.

It's horrifying, says Donnell, "that Alex Jones is quoting a piece that I essentially did as a write-off of other journalists who did much better work than me. And that piece is now being incorporated into the deranged imaginations of thousands of Americans."

There's a strange new risk to being a journalist, says Donnell, which none of us used to have to think about: "That your words will be twisted to support the wild conspiracy theories of an obvious madman."

So does Donnell have his own theory, conspiratorial or otherwise, about why Barack Obama decided to grace New Zealand with his tight-lipped presence for three days?

"I think – and hear me out here – it might be because he got paid a lot of money. Now follow that trail to where it leads …"

I hung up the phone and went back for a last look at the Infowars video. The view-counter was sitting at 32,000 views.