How Solar Eclipse Conspiracy Theories Came to Be And Why They'll Always Exist
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By the time you read this — unless you wait an extremely long while — the world will not have ended. The United States will not have declared martial law, people will not be imprisoned in their homes by the government, the CERN Large Hadron Collider will not have opened a portal to another dimension, and, tragically, the aliens will not yet have landed. In the weeks leading up to a total eclipse on April 8, professional conspiracy theorists have been extremely busy making a number of increasingly apocalyptic predictions, which they will stop mentioning very soon after the sun reappears. It’s worth paying close attention to the dire predictions those conspiracy peddlers have made — and what they’ll do when they fail to come true.
For conspiracy peddlers, any major event — a bridge collapse, a natural disaster, an unusual weather event — is a chance to surf the wave of public engagement, looking for extra attention and public relevance, not to mention a chance to scare people in profitable ways.
“People post opportunistically to jump on the bandwagon,” says Renee DiResta. who is the technical research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory and studies how disinformation and what are referred to as “malign narratives” spread on the internet. “Especially if it’s a topic people are searching for. Novelty and sensationalism always sell. Some percentage of views and shares on these things are serious, though when they break out of the conspiracy community it often pivots to ‘hate shares.’ That is still engagement."
The eclipse has been no different. As Wired wryly noted, it was the Super Bowl for many conspiracy theorists, with a huge chorus joining in to claim that the event would be used to impose totalitarian control over the population. Because the eclipse was expected to be viewable in much of the United States, state and local agencies across the country responded accordingly. In states where large numbers of people were expected to travel to see the eclipse, governments declared states of emergency ahead of time, a tool that allowed them to access resources to help deal with a huge influx of visitors, including extra police, help with crowd and traffic control, and, in many cases, access to federal funds if a disaster occurred and help was needed from FEMA, the government agency that deals with disaster relief.
Because conspiracy theories often focus on false predictions that the government or an international body like the United Nations will use a major event to try to seize unlawful control, the state of emergency declarations were immediately put to use by conspiracy peddlers.
“Anything can be done,” tweeted the author Naomi Wolf, whose conspiratorial claims have gotten increasingly absurd over the past few years, referring to the emergency declarations. “You may never get your democracy back.” Infowars, the conspiracy-addled outlet run by Alex Jones, claimed that the federal government would use the eclipse to “test” martial law, a claim Jones makes about a lot of things, and that “Masonic rituals” would also be performed to usher in the “New World Order.” While that does sound like a full day at the office for the elites that Jones claims secretly run the world, neither of those things happened. But the Masonic rituals clip got nearly two million views on X alone. Each eclipse segment posted on social media ended with an ad for the network’s store, which sells supplements and various health products that make grandiose claims and it's how Jones and Infowars make money.
Other conspiracy theories were even more far-fetched: One that circulated widely claimed the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, would somehow “open a portal” during the eclipse at its Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, located on the Switzerland-France border. (Besides that being both impossible and nonsensical, conspiracy theories about CERN are very common, with claims circulating more or less constantly that CERN’s research opens black holes, causes earthquakes, or participates in human sacrifice.) USA Today gathered a host of the weirder false eclipse claims: that NASA would fire rockets at the moon during the eclipse as part of an occult ritual, that a “Birdman” had been seen circling the skies in the days leading up to the eclipse, and that the entire planet would go dark for days on end. And, of course, there was the Second Coming, with some Christians claiming the eclipse would herald the return of Jesus, an event that also did not — as far as we know — occur.
With the eclipse, conspiracy peddlers are also relying heavily on coincidence, stringing together a bunch of unrelated world events to try to create the impression that the planet is spiraling toward frightening chaos and destruction. Jason Shurka, who has described himself as a “spiritual teacher” and runs an alternative media company, posted a video claiming that a series of world events, including the recent collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, a cyberattack on AT&T, and Airbnb changing some of its terms of service, were all somehow related and sinister in a way that he did not spell out.
“All of these things are connected,” Shurka claimed. “The question is how and why and only time will tell us that.” The video’s caption encouraged viewers to “follow me as we approach April 8,” the date of the eclipse, “and so many other big days.”
Shurka has done this before, and quite recently: Last fall, two government agencies, FEMA and the FCC, conducted a nationwide test of the emergency broadcast system. In the leadup to the event, Shurka claimed that the test would be used to “activate” particles in human beings that he heavily implied had been placed there through vaccination and encouraged his followers to turn off their phones to avoid whatever dangers the emergency broadcast represented. When nothing happened, except an emergency alert, of course, Shurka broadened his claim and made it a lot more vague, stating in a now-deleted Instagram post that “the event today is a long-term game. Sickness over time, whether emotionally or physically.” Teen Vogue reached out to Shurka for comment.
A certain rhetorical pattern is common for people who promote conspiracy theories for a living: Large and frightening claims about an upcoming event are replaced with vaguer ones or they're quietly deleted and never mentioned again. Alex Jones has claimed that countless mass shootings are “false flag” attacks designed to serve as a pretext to take away Americans’ guns or otherwise imprison us. When that doesn't happen, he simply moves on and makes similar claims about the next event. (Jones was ordered to pay the families of the children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting more than a billion dollars for defamation. During that trial, he admitted the shooting was “100% real.”).
In the case of the eclipse, when the conspiracy peddlers’ most dire predictions fail to come true, they’ll likely claim something invisible happened, maybe a harmful shift in the spiritual realm that only they are attuned to, and that they’ll promise will conveniently take time to make itself known.
In the end, the eclipse was an extraordinary, rare, and awesome — in the original sense of the word — natural event, and sadly one that the conspiracy peddlers encouraged people to view through a prism of fear and dread. Now that it’s over, Renee DiResta says, they’re very much hoping that — as has happened countless times in the past — their audiences will simply move on.
“There have been many moments in history in which a doomsday prophecy fails to materialize and one of two things happens,” she says. “The deeply committed make some excuse about getting the math wrong and claim that the portal to the other universe, or whatever, will just open up on a different day. Or they talk about something else and hope no one notices.”
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Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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