Pop Culture's Weirdest 'Cover-Ups'

Vulture compiles 70 biggest celebrity conspiracy theories—including that Katy Perry is JonBenet Ramsey
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 26, 2016 8:47 AM CDT
Best Conspiracy Theories Ever in Pop Culture
Sing it, JonBenet.   (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Take a timeout from Election 2016 conspiracy theories and do a deep dive instead into tinfoil-hat whispers on the pop culture front. Vulture has spent the past few months performing what it calls an "exhaustive cataloguing" of the biggest cover-ups in music, literature, film, TV, and "anything else a celebrity might touch." It's come up with 70 of the best, broken down by genre, that show "the phenomenon in its purest form—paranoia without ideology, or anyway without partisanship." Here, a few of the categories to get lost in and the stars and institutions caught up in each:

  • Celebrities who aren't who (or what) they claim to be: Filed under "Um, OK," this niche includes fervent insistence that Stevie Wonder isn't really blind, Katy Perry is a grown-up JonBenet Ramsey, and Lorde isn't telling the truth about how old she is (actually, this one isn't so out there).
  • Stars who've faked their own deaths: According to the truthers, Elvis is still among the living, Michael Jackson has been popping up in different places since his "alleged" passing (even showing up on Larry King's former CNN show in disguise as a guy named Dave Dave), and Andy Kaufman has pulled off the greatest hoax of all time—which, knowing Kaufman, may be the only truly believable conspiracy theory of the bunch.
  • Celebrity murders: Did you know John Lennon was really killed by Stephen King, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon? Or maybe it was the CIA that offed him because he blabbed that the agency invented LSD. Theories abound about the unfortunate demise of the former Beatle and others, including Bob Marley, Tupac, and Michael Jackson, who was apparently either killed by the Iranian government or by the US government on behalf of Israel for being pro-Palestinian. But wait—isn't he still alive? So confusing.
  • The government's pawns: Because of course Britney Spears was "an instrument" of Dubya's administration (a role Miley Cyrus has now taken on for Obama's regime), NASA faked the moon landing with the help of Stanley Kubrick, and Pokemon Go is really a CIA surveillance tool. Get with the program.
Dig in to each of Vulture's juicy theories here. (More conspiracy theories stories.)

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