These Things Never Happened

Most historical events circled by skeptics took place in the past: the sinking of the Titanic, which was an insurance scam; the Holocaust, a Zionist fraud; the Port Chicago munitions disaster, actually a nuclear-weapons test. But there are also contemporary “hoaxes”: Woodstock, possibly a post-facto propaganda job by the antiwar movement (“If you can remember it, you weren’t there”); the death of Elvis Presley, still living as “John Burrows”; the death of Tupac Shakur, in Nevada, said to be the one state where the law permits faking death to obtain a new identity (he’s now helping the FBI investigate Death Row Records, and how is he wearing those Air Jordans in his posthumous “Live and Die in L.A.” video when they weren’t released until after he’d “died”?). Then there’s the death of River Phoenix, said to be living now as conspiracy theorist Mark Dice; the death of comedian Bill Hicks, thought to be living now as conspiracy-theorist radio host Alex Jones; climate change; the formation of Al ­Qaeda and the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden (a U.S. agent who is, of course, still alive).

These Things Never Happened