Black helicopters
From RationalWiki
Black helicopters are to the 1990s what snake oil was to the age of traveling salesmen pushing patent medicines, in that it is an example of a term that was seriously used by proponents but was so preposterous that the term took on a life of its own as a means of ridicule.
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[edit] Origins
Allegedly, the United States government and/or the United Nations were preparing fleets of unmarked black helicopters which were to become the means of military occupation of the United States in the name of the New World Order. This was first seriously proposed by Mark "from Michigan" Koernke and Linda Thompson circa 1993-1994 in their videos "America Under Siege" (Thompson) and "America In Peril" (Koernke). The book Black Helicopters Over America by Jim Keith followed shortly thereafter. Talk radio hosts picked up the term from there to ridicule the idea and it took on a life of its own, largely through talk radio and the internet.
[edit] Pop culture
The term has since been used almost exclusively in an ironic or sarcastic way to refer to any conspiracy theory which is particularly absurd and improbable. Black helicopters don't play much of a role in serious conspiracies much any more, as the idea of perfectly silent helicopters flying about at night for no particular reason is a bit superfluous. Even despite that, some Internet cranks who experiment with "Orgone energy" claim that they are being stalked by low-flying black helicopters.[1] Their hypothesis is that their Orgone accumulators are generating a frequency that the Government/New World Order is trying to track. The same frequency, they claim, stops HAARP, and cures cancer, and creates rain, blah blah blah...[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rUs6fjen14
- ↑ As with any quack device, why should it do just one thing when it could do anything?
