Then came the radio. People heard ghosts in its crackles and echoes. Enigmatic “number stations” have fascinated conspiracy theorists since World War I. (There’s a station called the Buzzer that’s been broadcasting a continuous pulse since the 1970s—conspiracy fans think it might be part of an automated Soviet doomsday project, and that the world will end when it goes off the air.) Television was subjected to the same kind of scrutiny and symbol hunting: In the 1940s, some thought Tom and Jerry was Nazi propaganda; footage of the moon landing has been checked and rechecked for evidence of fakery for decades.

Classic Internet Conspiracy Theories The Berenstain Bears

You remember reading the classic children’s books The Berenstein Bears, right? Wrong. Those bears weren’t Berensteins at all, but rather Berenstains. Some Berenstein truthers are so sure of their childhood memories they’ve become convinced they hail from an alternate universe—and photoshopped that pesky “ai” out of many an old snapshot to prove it.

Immortal Vampire Celebrities

A number of old paintings and high-contrast, low-resolution daguerreotypes kinda sorta look like Nicolas Cage. And John Travolta, Michael Cera, Peter Dinklage, Eddie Murphy, and, most of all, Keanu Reeves. So obviously: Jack Black is really Paul Revere! Travolta can time travel, or he’s a vampire doomed to fight Cage forever! Reeves’ graceful aging is evidence of his immortality!

Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

It’s often hard to tell where online conspiracy theory ends and meme begins, and that’s especially true of the 9/11 truther adage “Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.” For the record the statement is technically correct—but beams don’t have to liquefy for a building to collapse. The phrase became such a popular comeback among conspiracy theorists (likely because it contains a kernel of truth, and refuting requires knowledge of the finer points of the structural integrity of steel) that it eventually morphed into a shorthand for the whole conspiracy theory mindset.

Modern Flat Earthers

We are all victims of a vast “globularist” conspiracy spread by elites who don’t want you to know the truth: The planet is flat, gravity doesn’t exist, the moon and sun are the same size and orbit the north pole, and every single astronaut is a gosh darn liar. Why? Because the US faked the moon landing, duh. Why is Earth the only flat planet? It’s just unique! Why do objects fall if there’s no gravity? Listen, things just fall, OK?

Finland and Australia Don’t Exist

Forget the existence of 30-some million Finnish and Australian citizens. The internet knows the real truth: Those people are actors and bots, and their countries don’t even exist. Finland, the theory goes, was invented by Japan and Russia after the Cold War to secure additional fishing rights for sushi-loving Japan. And as for Australia? The UK actually just offed those convicts rather than ship them halfway around the world.

The Very Bad No Good Large Hadron Collider

We’ll admit it: Smacking subatomic particles together in an underground complex does seem like supervillain behavior. In the years leading up to the collider being turned on, many became convinced its experiments would open an Earth-gobbling black hole—and that the many delays in its construction weren’t due to its expensiveness, size, or mechanical complexity, but rather to time-traveling saboteurs trying to stop that black hole from destroying us all.

Seth Rich

Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered in July 2016. The murder is unsolved, but law enforcement suspect Rich was the victim of a robbery gone wrong. Right-wing conspiracy theorists have a different idea: Rich was responsible for the DNC email leak, and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta had him assassinated.

With new technology comes new gaps in the public’s understanding of their world, and, for conspiracy theorists, new ways to manipulate those gaps. So the thing that makes the internet wonderful—that it is a near-endless, low-cost repository of information accessible by billions—is also what makes its so fertile for conspiracy. Early internet users were a generation trained on in-person and over-the-phone communication. Digital slang was in its infancy, the emoji that give context to chats didn’t exist, and users were faced with more information than they’d ever been exposed to before. Not only did you often confuse your peers with your ambiguous late-night typing, it was easy to wade into the web and emerge confused and overstimulated yourself.

Which brought forth communities united by laser-focused citizen sleuthing. In 1996, a spate of anonymous word-salad gibberish posts, all entitled Markovian Parallax Denigrate, flooded Usenet groups. Internet sleuths noticed that one of these messages seemed to come from controversial (and conspiracy-minded) antiwar activist Susan Lindauer, who claimed to be a CIA asset and to have reliable intel that 9/11 was an inside job. The conspiracy engines started turning and suddenly phrases like “refrigerate morphine napkin inland Janeiro nameable yearbook hark” were seen as the CIA’s digital-age take on the number station. At the same time, usenets devoted to Whitewater (a corruption probe focusing on Clinton real estate investments) sprang up and connected dots like Bill Clinton’s alleged cocaine habit, handwriting samples, and plane crashes to claim that White House deputy counsel Vince Foster’s suicide was actually a murder.

When video and easily manipulable images became more common, the landscape got loopier. Admit it, you were fooled by a Photoshopped image or two back in the day. (Remember Helicopter Shark?) But you don’t need to start ’shopping to fall down a photographic rabbit hole. Love (or hate) a celebrity? With a few keystrokes, you can comb through just about every paparazzi photo ever taken of them and watch videos of their interviews and public appearances for hours on end until you’re positive there’s some funny business going on. An alleged aversion to pens and emoji-heavy Instagram captions convinced some that Glee star Lea Michele can’t read. A monomaniacal focus on Katy Perry’s eye and eyebrow shape has led some YouTubers to believe the singer is actually murdered child-pageant star JonBenét Ramsey all grown up.

As internet access expanded, the massive scale of web conversation contributed to some weird delusions. Large groups innocently chatting about their childhoods have spawned some of the most enduring internet conspiracy theories. So many people are positive that they saw a nonexistent movie called Shazaam, in which comedian Sinbad supposedly played a genie. He has repeatedly denied ever starring in such a film. This collective misremembering is called the Mandela Effect because apparently heaps of people also remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison. (It’s also responsible for frequently misquoted movie lines like “Play it again, Sam” and “Luke, I am your father.”)

The same forces are at work on today’s internet, too. We may have GIFs and emoji to bring affect to our text-based messages, but, partly due to the internet’s irony-soaked culture, it’s still almost impossible to tell who is being serious. (This phenomenon is so prevalent that it’s entered the internet rule book and is now known as Poe’s Law, after a poster named Nathan Poe who was baffled by creationists and those parodizing them.) Poe’s Law is how jokes and memes jump the fence to become full-blown conspiracy theories on today’s internet. A decade ago, a satirical post citing some seemingly missing arm freckles and angsty lyrics, pronounced Avril Lavigne—like so many celebs before her—dead, and replaced by a dopplegänger named Melissa. In 2016, a quip about US senator Ted Cruz being the Zodiac Killer has blossomed into a mythology of its own, even though he was an infant during most of the killings. (Clues: Cruz sort of/not really looks like an old police sketch and has a slightly unsettling—perhaps serial-killer-esque, apparently—obsession with having a pantry well-stocked with cans of soup.)

Citizen sleuths—or, as some call themselves these days, citizen journalists—have only become more prevalent as access to information continues to increase. And sometimes these conspiracies do turn out to be true, like the Pixar connected universe theory, which links together dozens of Easter eggs, like recurring brand names, and split-second cameos to conclude that all Pixar films take place in the same world. Disney finally confirmed the theory in 2017.

At the most bizarre and all-encompassing, you get the internet edition of the now centuries-old obsession with the Illuminati: a secret cabal of (sometimes alien, sometimes reptilian, sometimes alien-reptile) elites who control the world to suit their own ends by meeting in underground bunkers and operating a celebrity-murder and -cloning station headed by Queen Elizabeth II. Almost every major celebrity has been accused of being a member. Some have dealt with it skillfully by ignoring it. Others, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who some believe to be an extraterrestrial lizard person because of his round eyes and awkward mannerisms, have played directly into conspiracy theorists hands by saying things like “I am not a lizard.” Which, of course, is what a lizard would say.

Q Who? Tracing the rise of the baroque criminal-political conspiracy theory known as QAnon.

October 5, 2017: President Trump makes an ambiguous comment about a military dinner being “the calm before the storm,” sparking conspiracist speculation.

October 28, 2017: An anonymous user who later claimed to be a high-level government informant writes a cryptic post bursting with far-right conspiracy bait about Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, and George Soros on 4chan’s infamous /pol/ board. The user is nicknamed Q, after the Department of Energy’s top-secret security-clearance level.

October 31, 2017: A post titled “Bread Crumbs–Q Clearance Patriot” asks rhetorical questions about POTUS, Michael Flynn, Antifa, and others.

November 2017: Calling themselves QAnon or the Storm, Q's followers spread a grab bag of Trump-era conspiracy tropes—part Pizzagate, part Seth Rich—on 4chan and 8chan.

November 1, 2017: A screenshot of “Bread Crumbs” is posted to the r/conspiracy subreddit, where it racks up nearly 600 votes and more than 500 comments over the next two months.

November 20, 2017: Q posts are compiled and released on Google Drive as “The Book of Q.”

December 19, 2017: New York magazine publishes an explainer on the conspiracy, noting that the QAnon hashtag had been tweeted so many times it had become untrackable.