For decades there have been people in our societies who we’ve ridiculed and labeled paranoid due to their belief that the government is involved in various secret conspiracies. More often than not, these individuals or groups are depicted as crazy and the general public will often sneer at those who believe the government is made up of lizard people or that they’ve been abducted by aliens.

Although those two examples are a little unbelievable, what if the other conspiracy theories were real? What if the government really did hide things from the public and conduct experiments on their people? What if they planned terrorist attacks to start otherwise illegal wars? Time to put your tinfoil hats on because every single one of these ten conspiracy theories was proven to be true:

1. Project MK ULTRA

Conspiracy Theory: The CIA conducted experiments on US citizens.

Using drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and even sexual abuse, the CIA tortured numerous US citizens in an attempt to develop a Truth Serum that could be used on communist spies. These experiments apparently took place throughout the USA in over 80 institutions, including hospitals, prisons and universities.

Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, has stated that he became involved in MK ULTRA whilst he was a student at Standford University. Having never done drugs before, Kesey was given LSD and other psychedelic drugs as part of the experiment.

“[The testing] wasn’t being done to try to cure insane people, which is what we thought,” Kesey told reporters. “It was being done to try to make people insane—to weaken people, and to be able to put them under the control of interrogators.”

Infamous gangster Whitey Bulger, lyricist Robert Hunter, singer Ruth Kelley and various TSS agents were also experimented upon. It’s thought that at least one victim, biochemist Frank Olson, died due to the experiments.

Project MK ULTRA began in the 1950s and ended in the 1970s after the Freedom of Information Act revealed 20,000 classified documents. However, CIA Director Richard Helms destroyed the worst MK ULTRA files in 1973 so a lot of the information was lost. The conspiracy theory was seemingly confirmed when President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology on behalf of the US government in 1995, however some suggest that this apology was actually about human radiation testing.

2. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Conspiracy Theory: The Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which caused the US to become involved in the Vietnam War, never actually happened.

Otherwise known as the USS Maddox Incident(s), The Gulf of Tonkin Incident occurred when two American destroyers apparently engaged with three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats that successfully managed to sink one of the destroyers.

President Lyndon B. Johnson then drafted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the legal justification for the USA’s involvement in Vietnam. However, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident never occurred.

A declassified National Security Agency study was published in 2005 stating that there were absolutely no North Vietnamese ships present at the incident. In 1965, even President Johnson himself said: “For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”

3. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Conspiracy Theory: The US Public Health Service failed to treat African American men who had syphilis.

Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service conducted a clinical study on 400 African American men who were suffering with syphilis. The PHS failed to tell the men they had an STD and did not offer any form of treatment. Instead, many of the patients were told they had ‘bad blood’.

At the beginning of World War II, 250 of the men who had been studied registered to go to war, and only then were they told they had an STD. They were still denied treatment.

By the 1970s, 128 of the men had died due to syphilis, whilst 40 of their wives had the disease and 19 children had been born with congenital syphilis.

4. CIA Drug Trafficking in LA

Conspiracy Theory: The CIA enabled the sale of cocaine to street gangs in Los Angeles, then took million of dollars in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army.

According to Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb’s 20,000 word article Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, the CIA helped to deliver cocaine into the US so that it could be given to street gangs like the Crips and Bloods. They then took the profits and gave it to Nicaraguan Contras.

“This drug network,” Webb stated in the article, published in 1996 in San Jose Mercury News “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America . . . and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.’s gangs to buy automatic weapons.”

Webb was later found dead on December 10, 2004 having apparently committing suicide. We say ‘apparently’ because he used two bullets to shoot himself in the head.

5. Operation Northwoods

Conspiracy Theory: The Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US military drafted and approved acts of terrorism in the USA so the public would support a war with Cuba.

Throughout the early 1960s, American military officials concocted multiple acts of deception, aiming to sway the USA civilians to support a war to oust Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. The plans, which are available to read here, included acts of terrorism in Washington D.C and Miami, killing innocent civilians and soldiers, bombing U.S. naval vessels, assassinating Cuban émigrés, sinking Cuban refugee boats and hijacking planes. The documents also state that they planned to fabricate evidence implicating Fidel Castro and Cuban refugees.

Fortunately, President Kennedy rejected the plan and they were kept secret for forty years.

6. Operation Mockingbird

Conspiracy Theory: The CIA paid journalists to publish propaganda.

Towards the end of the 1940s, when the Cold War was just beginning, the CIA began to pay major media publications and journalists so that they would share CIA propaganda.

Frank Wisner, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms and Philip Graham of The Washington Post worked together to found Operation Mockingbird, and eventually managed to enlist journalists from ABS, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service and many more. The Church Committee finally exposed the operation in 1975, though many believe similar activities are occurring to this day.

7. Operation Snow White

Conspiracy Theory: The Church of Scientology infiltrated the US government and stole sensitive information.

Although every other verified conspiracy serves to prove the US government is a force to be reckoned with, it was infiltrated by the Church of Scientology throughout the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1977 that the FBI was able to prove that over 5,000 Scientology members had been stealing classified information from 136 agencies, organisations and foreign embassies.

Scientologist leaders said that the operation was meant to expose “all false and secret files of the nations of operating areas” and to enable Church seniors and L. Ron Hubbard himself to “frequent all Western nations without threat.”

8. COINTELPRO

Conspiracy Theory: The FBI deliberately discredited and smeared political activists.

COINTELPRO, which stands for Counter Intelligence Program, was a series of covert, illegal operations conducted by the FBI during the 1960s that aimed to disrupt and discredit activists in the USA. Between 1956 and 1971, 85% of COINTELPRO resources were used to infiltrate, disrupt, marginalize and subvert groups that threatened the existing social and political order. These groups included those involved in the women’s rights movement, militant Black Nationalist groups and non-violent civil rights movements such as those inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. The other 15% was used to marginalize white hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the National States’ Rights Party.

9. The US Government Spies On US Citizens

Conspiracy Theory: The US government taps into the population’s phones and hacks into their computers to collect data on them.

For years conspiracy theorists that believed the US government was spying on their every move were told they were paranoid and crazy. However, when the NSA and their Prism Project was revealed to be illegally listening into our phonecalls and collecting data for over a decade, the general public began to wise up.

The government was adamant that the data was being collected as a matter of national security, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the NSA hasn’t protected the American population from terrorists and may even be making life for them unsafe.

In June 2014, The Washington Post claimed that almost 90% of data that the NSA collected was from Internet users with absolutely no connection to terrorist activities, which is a clear violation of the constitution.

10. Governments Around The World Decide The Global Economic Policy In Secret

Conspiracy Theory: The world is governed by corporations.

In 2013, Wikileaks released secret documents that exposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) Intellectual Property Rights Chapter. The documents revealed a closed-door regional free trade agreement was being negotiated by Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and the USA.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation responded to this revelation stating that the TPP has “extensive negative ramifications for users’ freedom of speech, right to privacy and due process, and [will] hinder peoples’ abilities to innovate.”

Later, in June 2014, WikiLeaks also revealed the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA), which included fifty countries around the world that had agreed to promote privatization. The agreement prevented governments from placing public services back into the public hands and made it significantly harder to enforce environmental regulations.