Global Sixties: 1960's Culture on Conspiracy Theories

The 1960s culture was built upon conspiracy theories, it was an obsession for people to be in the known. With the US immersed in the height of the cold war, new and bizarre information was coming to light whether it was a project run by the government, or the speculation of something that may not have happened. Secrets being kept from the public which kicked off the idea of conspiracy theories.

November 22^nd 1963 John F Kennedy (JFK) was shot dead in Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald. Since then a surge of conspiracy theories surrounding JFKS assassination had begun. Conspiracy theories ¹“served different political and cultural function” with an increasing number of people pointing the finger at powerful intelligence agencies.

Theories of the JFK assassination range from stories that Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t act alone in this assassination too theories that the driver did it, the amount of possibilities is endless.

Either way it was up to the public to speculate.

Picture from https://www.thetimes.co.uk/

These theories however are still speculated today, from a poll taken in 2013, it had shown that only 30% of Americans believed that only one person was responsible for the death of JFK.
On the 26^th of October 2017 some of the classified JFK files were opened up to the public, but they were not exactly what everyone had hoped for, with Lee Harvey Oswald not being connected to the CIA this can eliminate multiple theories. There can however still be speculation as to what happened, this is due to Trump still not having released all the JFK files just yet. So, there can still be some hope for the possibility of the world finding out what actually happened.

Another example of a supposed conspiracy theory was the speculation of human experiments carried out by the CIA, project ‘MKUltra’, secretly carrying out experiments on unaware subjects. Intended to develop new drugs to force confessions through mind control. This however came to light and ended up being true.

LSD was tested and studied, one of the human subjects went on to promote this drug, hosting parties fuelled with LSD, kick starting the hippie culture and hallucinogenic drug scene.

Later on in 1969 Apollo 11 was the first mission to land on the moon. Desperate for the US to get there first, many believe that the whole mission was a hoax, filmed within the depths of Area 51. The theories range from the waving of the American flag which has been said that this cannot be scientifically possible. From photographs of the astronauts shadow and how it is positioned, and that it wouldn’t have been possible for the astronauts to have left footprints on the moon due to their being no moisture on the ground. All of these theories have built up speculation globally which goes on today. This has been proved with a poll which was taken, that only 52% of people in the UK don’t believe that this actually happened. But until we visit the moon again, we won’t ever know what actually happened.