I agree with you. It's not harmless. When I was a kid, I'd tuck a small FM radio under my pillow and secretly listen to Coast-to-Coast with Art Bell when I was

I agree with you. It's not harmless. When I was a kid, I'd tuck a small FM radio under my pillow and secretly listen to Coast-to-Coast with Art Bell when I was supposed to be sleeping. The stories about aliens, immortals, bigfoot, the Philadelphia Experiment, and holes to hell were mysterious, intriguing, exciting. I grew out of that and looked back on it as "harmless fun", like telling ghost stories around a campfire. I've changed my tune in recent years, seeing how destructive these conspiracies can be to society as a whole. Any single one conspiracy or ghost story isn't so bad, but they compound and result in a dysfunctional society less capable of digesting fact and thinking critically about nuanced topics. (In retrospect, I now recognize Art Bell himself never took it seriously and considered it Entertainment, almost satire, like the World Weekly News. But many people didn't pick up on that and did take it seriously...)