The first moment I can remember thinking like a conspiracist, I was seven years old. I was watching The X-Files.
The show's premise — that strange things are happening and the government is covering them up — didn't seem far-fetched to me. Aliens exist? Why not? The government knows about it? Sure. And they're hiding it from everyone? Makes perfect sense.
My story with conspiracy theories is not about debunking specific claims. Instead, it's a personal exploration of belief itself: what drew me to it, why my skepticism eventually took a different path, and how I've come to understand the deeply human reasons people fall into these rabbit holes.
Looking back, it's clear my young mind was primed for the ideas in The X-Files. I had watched VHS documentaries about UFO sightings and seen the grainy, hoax footage of the Roswell alien autopsy. I was aware of the Y2K bug and the impending "digital apocalypse." I was also spending my early days on the internet, surfing alien abduction message boards. My favourite was a site, still online today, run by a man who invented a leather-bound tin-foil hat to protect against alien mind control.
And yet, none of it unhinged me.
Even as a child, I had a strong sense of the difference between fiction and reality. The stories the priest told in church about talking bushes on fire felt the same as stories about Wookiees and Jedi mind tricks: fun to think about, but not real. To me, aliens and government cover-ups lived in that same part of my brain. I found the website for the thought-screen helmet hilarious because, in my mind, these were people who couldn't tell the difference between a good story and the real world.
But there was a darker reason that government conspiracies didn't seem so implausible. In my own daily life, my trust in authority had already been shattered.
I grew up in a religious community in Sydney where child abuse was rampant. It was an open secret. We kids all knew, and we spoke about it in the way that children do — through jokes. We had very specific jokes about what was happening at an elite private school across town called Knox Grammar.
Years later, in 2015, that school became the subject of a Royal Commission into institutional child abuse. What emerged was a decades-long picture of horror: teachers abusing students, older students abusing younger ones, and a headmaster who covered it all up, protecting the perpetrators. The specific, horrifying things we had joked about as children, suburbs away, turned out to be true.
When you grow up knowing that adults in authority prey on children — that your safety depends on obeying them but never, ever trusting them — it fundamentally shapes how you see the world.
So, no. The idea of a government cover-up about aliens didn't feel particularly far-fetched. The most powerful institutions in my own life were already engaged in conspiracies of the most depraved kind.
As a teenager, my approach to conspiracy theories was this: they're fun, probably not real, but worth investigating. I believed in mistrust. Skepticism felt like a vital tool for media literacy.
After 9/11, I devoured the conspiracy content that flooded the internet. Not because I believed it, but because the official stories felt so obviously thin. The case for the invasion of Iraq was built on demonstrable lies, yet to question it was considered unpatriotic. Closer to home, the Australian Prime Minister was winning elections by stoking a xenophobic moral panic. The blind trust I saw in the people around me was deeply disturbing.
To me, conspiracy theories, however clumsy, encouraged people to ask questions and challenge the dominant narrative. There was a virtue in that.
The older I got, the more I realised that conspiracy thinking was rarely driven by reason, but by something else entirely: grifters, fantasists, and manipulators. After studying humanities at university and learning how argumentation and logic work, it became easy to see that these theories were based not on evidence, but on an emotional attachment to disbelief.
When figures like Alex Jones went mainstream, I became worried. And when Donald Trump was elected, I realised that conspiracy theories were no longer a fringe hobby; they had become policy. It was the logic of InfoWars, laundered through Fox News, shaping world history.
The pandemic made this all terrifyingly real. Friends I loved and respected started repeating stories about George Soros and vaccines. It was maddening and concerning. But I couldn't fully judge them, because I understood the path that had led them there.
Conspiracy theories are so seductive because our world is full of broken promises.
The people I knew who fell down these rabbit holes had been let down — politically, medically, and economically. They were veterans who fought in wars based on lies, people who sought help for minor ailments and got addicted to opiates. They had been so burned by the system that their mistrust was the most well-earned thing they owned.
I believe one of the only reasons I didn't go down that path myself is that I was fortunate enough to have an education that taught me how to think critically. Had a few basic things in my life been different, I could be a very different person today.
This is the heart of it. Authority has failed many of us. The media does spin. People are traumatized. And when people are left without hope, kindness, and opportunity, mistrust will always fill the vacuum. While we cannot ignore the profound damage these theories do, we ignore the context from which they grow at our own peril.
For a deep, empathetic, and often hilarious look at the world of Alex Jones, I highly recommend the podcast Knowledge Fight.
To understand the modern conspiracy grifter, the podcast On Brand offers a brilliant analysis of Russell Brand.
What happens when we step outside the culture we were raised in? Between Worlds: Reflections on Culture, Identity, and Living Abroad is a five-part series exploring how life abroad reshapes our sense of self, belonging, and how we relate to others.
If you've just returned from studying abroad, how are you? No, really. How are you doing?
What happens when we step outside the culture we were raised in? Between Worlds: Reflections on Culture, Identity, and Living Abroad is a five-part series exploring how life abroad reshapes our sense of self, belonging, and how we relate to others.