It sounds unlikely doesn’t it. I mean, if I remember rightly the Nazis were comprehensively destroyed at the end of WW2. Did I miss something?

Of course I did.

Go to this website and you’ll learn, like I did, that “the Germans had advanced technologies in the early 1940’s (possibly from recovered crashed UFOs or through contact with an alien culture)”. An article by Vladimir Terziski, President of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences (that well-known and widely respected…. Er, have you heard of it?) studies the Germans’ involvement in the exploration of the Moon and Mars.

Mars is a bit of a stretchier stretch than the Moon, when you think about it. I mean if the Nazis went to the Moon in the early 40s, when could they have headed out to Mars? Go to ‘world of the strange’ and you’ll discover that “After the end of the war in May 1945, the Germans continued their space effort from their south polar colony of Neu Schwabenland.” Don’t try looking up Neu Schwabenland on Google Maps. In an awesome fit of negligence they have failed to include it anywhere.

You’ll also discover from this web site, that “In the sixties a massive Russian-American base was built on the Moon, that now has a population of 40,000 people” and a Starbucks for sure.

Now, not all wacky theories are equal, some are so wacky that they lead to intellectual despair. Note the wikipedia entry referring to Nazi Moon Bases, which asks quite reasonably: “Can anyone show any documents proving that the ridiculas(sic) theories mentioned in the articles are believed by anyone?” And by the way, can anyone show me any evidence that ridiculous can be spelt with an “a”?

There is, of course, a delicious irony in the Nazi Moon Base theory; there is an entirely different wacky theory, which takes quite the opposite tack. Not only are there no Nazis on the Moon, but the Americans didn’t get there either. Some people became so offended by this that they made a documentary in an effort to prove that America did indeed go to the moon. “The 60-minute documentary DID WE GO? attempts to prove Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and also investigates how NASA made the attempt.” The actual making of such a documentary just gives the conspiracy theory more ammunition.

This highlights a point that conspiracy theorists and their opponents often run into. It is actually very hard to prove to a convinced skeptic that something really happened. Maybe some conspiracy theories really are based on fact, but once the world gets skeptical about them, they become awesomely difficult to verify.

How about this, for example: “13,000,000 BC: The Ica stones of Peru show illustrations of advanced surgery (like heart and brain transplant, Caesarean section) and men riding dinosaurs: Dr. Javier Cabrera discovered about 40,000 stone tablets detailing advanced science in the Peruvian desert of Ocucaje.”

OK, so convince me that men were riding dinosaurs and doing brain transplants 13,000,000 years ago. Pictures on stones don’t hack it for me, by the way.