One thing that research has taught us is that belief in conspiracy theories is largely

a tribal issue. We all think our tribe, our political party, our cultural heritage, our

nationality, is the one that's immune to conspiratorial ideation, and that it's always the other

tribe who believe the false stories. To show just how wrong that notion is, today we're

featuring conspiracy theories from all around the world, many from people who thought

themselves immune. Foreign conspiracy theories are today unskeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Parts unknown. Foreign

conspiracy theories. We talk about conspiracy theories a lot here on Skeptoid. Their history,

whatever truths may underlie them, the reasons people believe them, and the way they are shaped by

popular culture. But with apologies to more than a third of my listeners, these conspiracy theories

are nearly always US-centric. As an American, it's easy for me to grasp the cultural context of

such stories that originate and propagate domestically, and it would be correspondingly much harder for

me to have a very useful perspective on a foreign conspiracy theory that was born among the influences

of a very different environment. So with the proviso that I won't attempt to give the full

Skeptoid treatment to each of these, I hereby present a roundup of conspiracy theories from outside

the US sphere of influence. This episode will almost certainly have some sequels as I fully

expect listeners from every country I mentioned to say, hey, you missed the most important one.

And the same from listeners from the many countries I don't have anything for today. We're

going to begin at the Atlantic Ocean and circumnavigate from West to East, more or less since many

countries overlap. Stopping to survey the most outrageous and popular conspiracy theories in every

country we visit. Beginning with...

The United Kingdom. We've talked about the death of Princess Diana in Skeptoid 414,

...