At some point "conspiracy theory" just ends up meaning "wild claim, and also you turned out to be wrong". If I said that: - The US Navy tested bioweapons on S

At some point "conspiracy theory" just ends up meaning "wild claim, and also you turned out to be wrong". If I said that: - The US Navy tested bioweapons on San Francisco without notice, causing hospitalizations - The US Army sprayed a cadmium compound on the city of Winnipeg, Canada without notice - The CIA attempted to develop a mind control formula, which they preferentially tested on gay men and racial minorities - The US government built a secret bunker hidden in a mountain, designed for the US Congress to hide out there while broadcasting to the nation as though nothing was wrong - The CIA recruited mafia support in an attempt to assassinate a foreign leader Well... all of that might sound a little kooky. If you said any of those things at the times they happened, you would almost certainly have been dismissed as an insane conspiracy theorist. And yet everything on that list is a matter of public record, openly acknowledged by the US government - after the fact. So... when I hear someone say "the CIA used the mafia to kill Kennedy!", I can't judge them as a fool. I can disbelieve them, I can say they have no decent evidence, but given that "the CIA uses the mafia for an assassination attempt" is a matter of public record, do I really get to say it fails the laugh test? There are theories far more absurd than that - lizard people or hollow Earth theories, for instance. But when things like Project Echelon were called conspiracies theories well after hard evidence for them emerged, I start to wonder if the reason we can't change people's minds is that too many people cried wolf for too long. (My examples,respectively: Operation Sea-Spray, Chemical Corps project, Projects Mkultra/Bluebird, Project Greek Island, CIA Family Jewels.)