The news that a Chicago city councillor has been forced to deny that there is a man trapped inside the “Chicago Bean”, one of the city’s best known tourist attractions, follows in a long tradition of well-known sites becoming shrouded in conspiracy theories.
Earlier this month protestors gathered at Millennium Park demanding the release of the so-called “man in the bean” while claiming that artist Anish Kapoor kidnapped a baby in 2004 and sealed him inside Cloud Gate (the sculpture’s official name).
The theory quickly moved from obscure Reddit threads to an Instagram account with more than 35,000 followers.
When it comes to the planet’s tourism hotspots, peculiar theories abound, from Parisian landmarks secretly exerting mind control over the local population to hidden rooms housing some of America’s biggest secrets.
The Statue of Liberty is a UFO pick-up point
A slew of dystopic movies has trained us to expect alien motherships hovering over New York, so it’s hardly surprising that Lady Liberty has ended up tangled in her fair share of intergalactic rumours.
Grainy footage regularly resurfaces online showing a mysterious flying object buzzing around her crown. Non-conspiracists label it a weather balloon, a drone or even a wayward military aircraft.
However in 2018, artist Joseph Reginella added his own twist. Known for planting fictitious public memorials across New York, Reginella erected a plaque at Battery Park commemorating a supposed 1977 “harbour tragedy” in which all six crew members of a tugboat vanished while investigating “what appeared to be a private aircraft crash” in New York Harbour. It was, of course, completely fabricated.
The Eiffel Tower is a secret Tesla antenna
The most prominent theory that surrounds Gustav Eiffel’s iron-clad behemoth originates from the tower’s own origins. It was supposed to be temporary, but instead of dismantling it after the Exposition Universelle of 1889, better known in English as the 1889 Paris Exposition, the city gave its new landmark over to science and by 1903, it was doubling as a military radio antenna.
Legend has it that Nikola Tesla met Gustave Eiffel at the 1889 Paris Exposition, sharing his vision for wireless energy. The tower’s height, steel frame and later role in long-distance communication fits neatly into the theory that it was secretly part of Tesla’s abandoned Wardenclyffe network – a planned global system of 30 towers transmitting free energy.
The official line? Eiffel never worked with Tesla, and the tower’s radio use was purely military. The conspiracy line? Powerful interests killed Tesla’s free-energy dream before it could threaten the business of selling electricity.
There is a mysterious room behind Mount Rushmore
When sculptor Gutzon Borglum envisioned Mount Rushmore in the 1920s, it wasn’t intended just to be four presidential heads staring out over the South Dakota plains.
His original plan included an 800ft staircase leading to a grand “Hall of Records”, a cavern lined with bronze and glass cabinets, historic artefacts and inscriptions explaining America’s story. Sadly cuts to his government funding meant he had to stick to the faces. The unfinished chamber was sealed behind a 1,200-lb granite slab, and officials insist there’s nothing in there.
Of course, for conspiracy theorists, that’s exactly what you’d say if you were hiding something. Depending on who you choose to believe, the room in fact contains lost Civil War cannons, almost a billion dollars of gold coins rescued from an early 1910s shipwreck, the original atomic bomb plans or (the old conspiracy classic) a direct tunnel to the Hollow Earth.
Stonehenge was built by aliens (or giants)
It’s a ring of enormous stones in the middle of an English field and nobody quite knows why it’s there. Archaeologists say it was built around 5,000 years ago as some kind of ceremonial or astronomical site. However, other theorists disagree.
Apparently Stonehenge was either a giant healing machine, a landing pad for extraterrestrials or an ancient portal used by druids to zip between dimensions. The perfect alignment of the stones with the summer and winter solstice only fuels the “alien tech” crowd, who insist no Bronze Age human could drag 25-ton slabs without some help from space. English Heritage maintains it was all good old-fashioned Neolithic muscle.
The pyramids of Giza are high-energy transmitters
If you wanted to hide evidence of alien contact, you probably wouldn’t put it in the middle of the Sahara in a structure taller than a 40-story building. Yet here we are.
The pyramids of Giza have spent 4,500 years inspiring awe, tourism and theories that insist they’re actually high-voltage energy transmitters left behind by extraterrestrial contractors.
Their perfect geometry, astronomical alignments and the mystery of how millions of stone blocks were hauled into place have spawned theories ranging from “time machines” to “GPS markers for starships”. Some believers say the blocks were moulded, not quarried – ancient 3D printing, if you will. Egypt’s official story is less cinematic: human sweat, copper tools and a lot of rope did the job.
