I’m Colin Dickey, an author who’s made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories from all over the country. My latest book, Land of Delusion, a Scribd Original, digs into the dangerous world of conspiracy theorists. AMA!

If you were to make a recipe for the perfect conspiracy theory (widest adoption) what 'ingredients' would you use?

Oh man, I feel like that's asking someone the best way to rob a bank or something... But it's not a bad question--I think there are different kinds of believers in conspiracy theories, but all theories are satisfying some basic psychological need, something that makes the believers feel good about themselves or lets them feel safe or comforted about their worldview, or lets them indulge in problematic views that are otherwise not acceptable in mainstream culture. So I'd work backwards from that? Like what psychological need do you want to tap into? From there, you'd want something that could easily accommodate conflicting evidence, so even things that "disproved" your theory could in fact be made to "prove" it. Lastly, you need something that holds out vague promises but never actually needs to deliver on those promises... like a Nostradamus prediction or an astrology reading or a Q drop, something that allows people to believe it's true even if you don't ever actually prove anything....

Thanks for the reply. There seems to be a good deal of overlap in the psychology of conspiracy theories and cults.

Yeah, absolutely--I always think that the way we normally think of combating conspiracy theories ("just beat people over the head with facts and truth") doesn't work that well because what conspiracy theories are doing is solving a psychological need first and foremost. So the better way to combat them, I think, is to figure out what that psychological need is, and address that--it's sort of like a methadone treatment, where you kill the need for the drug, and then they abandon the drug and the conspiracy theory on their own.

the world was originally dominated by blond, blue-eyed Slavs.

Why this group in particular?

This is a great question--because The New Chronology is popular in Russia particularly, and appeals to a specific set of nationalist ideas about the Russian empire, it maybe makes sense that the conspiracy theory would highlight a belief that ethnic Russians--blond, blue-eyed Slavs--were at the heart of all civilization. The Russian Empire is a bit different, historically, from others that we may be more familiar with (say, the British or American empires), because the idea of a Russian empire is inherently multi-ethnic in a way that those in the west aren't. While the British conceived of their empire as one where they were ethnically and racially superior to those they colonized and subjugated, the Russian Empire was always deliberately multi-ethnic, with ethnic Russians just a kind of "first among equals," so to speak (assume that a lot of what I'm saying here is in scare quotes--I'm doing my best to relay what I believe others think and obviously am not endorsing any particular racist or colonial logic myself!). The New Chronology, which is more explicitly racist in its positing that ethnic Russians are at the heart of all culture and civilization, is thus a break from the traditional ways that the Russian Empire has been conceived, and is what happens when you have an empire (in this case, the Soviet Union) fall apart and leave behind only wreckage, with people clinging to increasingly extreme and problematic theories to make sense of what's happening.

What fringe beliefs used to be commonplace in America but are no longer believed?

A lot! For one, during the colonial period and the American Revolution, there were plenty of conspiracy theories that the British and/or the French (depending on who you talked to) were secretly infiltrating American politics and perverting events. But probably the most commonly held conspiracy theory that has more or less (but not entirely) fallen by the wayside is the fear of Catholics... This was widespread by American Protestants, who felt that Catholics were taking orders directly from the Pope or their priests and that they were infiltrating American culture with an eye towards domination. This persisted well into the twentieth century (JFK had to give a speech saying he wouldn't listen to the Pope if elected president!), though within the last 50 years Protestants on the American right have aligned with Catholics over social issues (abortion, school prayer, etc.) and have largely abandoned that conspiracy theory. (This is something I follow a great deal in my forthcoming book, Under the Eye of Power, that follows the history of American conspiracy theories surrounding secret societies.)

What is the most convincing material you've ever come across that proves the existence of ETs?

Oh, that's a tricky one! In general, my feeling is that the bigger a conspiracy theory is, the harder it is to prove and thus the less likely it is to be true. So, re: Area 51, etc., I have a hard time with that because it seems like there has to be a whole lot of people--janitorial staff, busboys, cooks, administrative assistants--keeping that place running who have no incentive to keep their mouths shut. The bigger the thing is, the more people it takes, the more likely there is to be leaks. So, personally, I find the most convincing stories are the ones that are the most nebulous, the most vague, the ones that don't really posit a whole worked out theory so much as just some unexplained thing. In The Unidentified, my last book, I tried to do as much of a survey of postwar UFO and alien sightings as I could, and the one that I came back to time and time again without a clear explanation is the Socorro, NM sighting by Lonnie Zamora. Precisely because it was weird and inexplicable....