Are all conspiracy theories an attempt to graft an outlandish explanation on to a historical crime? Maybe, or maybe there's a glimmer of truth to them. You decide.

There's no hiding from the fact; conspiracy theories are a part of human nature. Being part of a governed society pretty much guarantees that some groups within that society will distrust what they are told by other groups.
Often with good reason.
The oxygen a conspiracy theory needs to survive and grow is possibility. If there is the chance that a specific event or state of affairs can be connected to an unlikely source, then the theory will flourish and grow. After all, should we accept all that we are told, all that happens, at face value? Probably not.
Add to that the fact that, today, digital communication has given us all a truly open-access global platform to articulate and share every possible type of conspiracy theory, and you have the perfect storm.
Ranging from the highly unlikely to the manifestly plausible, they weave compelling narratives around actual events, situations and possible, although unproven, societal connections. Let’s take a look at some of the most enduring. This is a list of the top seven (an apparently significant number to conspiracy theorists) most popular or recurring, based on the collation of the results of multiple searches.
Listed in reverse order based on how well-known they are, how frequently they come up in searches and their international resonance, there’s a short outline of what each is about and, finally, a credibility rating. If you want to find out more about any of them, put the headline into any search engine and just watch the results come tumbling in!
* Paul McCartney died in 1966 at the height of The Beatles’ fame and was replaced by a lookalike
In the late sixties this story gained huge traction for a while and all sorts of theories abounded to support it such as the lookalike was called ‘Billy Shears’ as mentioned in the lyrics of ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonley Hearts Club Band and, if you played ‘Strawberry Fields...’ backwards you could could hear John Lennon saying ‘I bury Paul’. But would Lennon have written such a coruscating condemnation of Paul in ‘How Do You Sleep’ if he had dies years earlier? Credibility rating: 1 (out of 10)
* Adolph Hitler escaped from his bunker in Berlin at the end of the 2nd World War
The fact that Hitler’s body was never recovered from the Berlin bunker allied to a post-war Russian campaign of disinformation helped to perpetuate the idea that the Fuhrer and his squeeze, Eva Braun, did not commit suicide and escaped through a sophisticated network of Nazi sympathisers to Argentina. However, in 2017 jawbone fragments from the bunker were confirmed by a forensic pathologist to match an X-Ray of Hitler from 1945. Credibility rating: 2
* Pope John Paul l who died in 1978 after one month as Pontiff was, in fact murdered
To die suddenly and in mysterious circumstances 33 days into a new job is unfortunate in the extreme. Contradictory reports about the cause of death and anomalies surrounding the death certificate as well as the secrecy and autonomous nature of the Vatican don’t help and the fact that the Vatican was mired in a financial scandal at the time muddies the water even further. The death being portrayed unequivocally as a murder in the movie ‘Godfather 3’ hasn’t helped either. Credibility rating: 5
* Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered by British Intelligence service, MI6
When the most famous woman in the world dies suddenly and tragically in a violent car crash, conspiracy theories are not going to be far behind the chasing pack of paparazzi. The most popular revolves around the idea that it was an assassination plotted by the British establishment and carried out by UK security services. But if you were planning to knock off such a prominent person, even allowing for the desire to make it look like an accident, is getting a pack of tabloid photographers the most sure-fire method? Credibility rating: 3
* A secret group called the Illuminati control the world
Based on an actual movement that lasted a mere nine years in the late 1700’s in Bavaria, there remains an overwhelmingly popular belief that a secret society controls the destiny of the world. It does beg the question that, if this is true , then why are they making such a mess of it? In a way, though, it is true ; people in positions of great power hook up with other people of great power in order to consolidate and grow said power. Is this a conspiracy...or government? Perhaps both. There is reference to highly likely covert collusion between governments and the media in ‘The Shape of Rain’ - check it out. Credibility rating: 4
* The assassination of JFK was not carried out by Lee Harvey Oswald.
President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 sent shockwaves around the world. It seemed impossible that someone so famous and so representative of what the West was trying to achieve in facing down the Soviet Union in the Cold War, could have been so brutally, and publicly, taken out. The fact that it was carried out by a mentally unstable loner who, himself, was gunned down 48 hours later, has prompted multiple theories of a conspiratorial nature. A plethora of contradictory evidence has only served to stoke the fires. Was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone or was there another shooter on ‘the grassy knoll’? We’ll probably never know for sure. Credibility rating: 6
* The moon landing was faked
Staying in America (so many conspiracy theories centre on the USA – is it something in the water?) we finish with the perennial...did Man actually set foot on the Moon in 1969? Was ‘one small step of man, one giant leap for mankind’ actually just one small step for man – in a secret film studio? There seems to be a huge amount of evidence to support this theory, or is it just that conspiracy theorists are very good at getting existing facts to fit their theories? Whatever, this one will run and run – forever, probably. You can read how is could have come about in ‘The Shape of Rain’...and two thirds of the events and machinations in that book have actually happened and been witnessed – is the moon landing conspiracy so unlikely? Credibility rating: 7
And there you have it, seven plot-lines that keep writing and rewriting themselves. There are, of course, many, many more. Whether they’re true or not, we love for there to exist the possibility that all is not what it seems.
But they don’t want you to know that!