“DEATH IS NOT REAL,” HE SAID.“THAT’S THE BIGGEST BUNCHOFCRAP ON EARTH.”

a wholesale rejection of scientific method. I didn’t know what I’d find on this cruise. One of the great blessings of the Internet is that it helps us find people who are like us, or who seem to be like us. For example, there are casual baseball fans and then there are the kind of baseball fans who spend endless hours on baseball fan websites e-conversing with the equally obsessed. Likewise, there are people who kind of wonder, fleetingly, whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone before their

Somewhere in the middle was me, deadbolted in my room. Paranoid.

On a brighter, happier afternoon five days earlier, I boarded the Ruby Princess in San Pedro, California. Flanked by the port’s grimy regiment of industrial smokestacks, the ship gleamed majestic white and soared sixty metres into the air. She could accommodate more than three thousand passengers, occupying them with four swimming pools, twelve dining rooms and restaurants, an outdoor movie screen, two nightclubs, a full-service spa and enough rococo baubles to satisfy Liberace. The ship’s central atrium and its giant spiral staircase glittered like a pageant crown. Every corridor stretched into eternity, with identical stairwells crosshatching all nineteen decks.

“Generally I do speak from a little bit of a higher level,” Shrout drawled in a thick Kentucky accent. “Because to understand commercial redemption, you have to go into the fifth, and even sixth, dimensions.”

The attendees scribbled in their notebooks and eagerly circled items on the schedule. There were pitches for wishing machines, astrological charts and dowsing rods, followed by screeds against Big Pharma and Monsanto. Sean David Morton, whom AM radio host Art Bell called America’s Prophet, vowed to help us get out of debt while sticking it to the American court system. (He did not mention that in 2010 he had been sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for telling a group of investors that he could psychically predict the stock market or that he tried to escape fraud charges by declaring himself the ambassador of a non-existent country called the Republic of New Lemuria.)

The biggest name on the programme was Andrew Wakefield, the discredited former British gastroenterologist who wrote a highly controversial (and since retracted) 1998 paper that claimed to find an association between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism in twelve children. After the UK’S General Medical Council stripped Wakefield of his licence, he moved to the US, where he has assumed rock-star status among the growing American antivaccine movement.

Wakefield was superficially charming, if a bit weary. “The story of my life is basically how to take a perfectly good career and flush it down the toilet,” he said.

LATER THAT NIGHT, in the Michelangelo Dining Room, Dannion Brinkley was sitting under an airbrushed painting of Poseidon. He stands 1,9 metres tall and the flowing scarf under his sports jacket gave him the appearance of an ageing linebacker who had just re-turned from an ashram. Several fans were gathered around him. He motioned me over warmly and I sat down.

“What is your motive for being here,” he asked, “and what is your intention?”

Puzzled, I looked to the young man on my left, who said he was an orthodontist from Calgary named Leo. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Dannion can immediately tell if people are on the right frequency, like tuning a radio. He’s trying to figure out what frequency you’re on.”

“I’m a reporter for Popular Mechanics,” I told Dannion, “and I’m here to learn about the conspiracy community.”

He beamed and started telling me about his lightning strike. “Whether or not you believe me doesn’t matter,” Dannion said. “Because ultimately I’m going to win the argument. You are not going to die and some of us can get up from the dead.”

Before he could elaborate, a pair of presenters, Leonard “Len” Horowitz and his girlfriend, Sherri Kane, breezed into the room and sat down at our table. Online, they call themselves “The Horokane”. Len bore a strong resemblance to the Count from Sesame Street, if you had frozen the Count in 1974 and dressed him in Hawaiian shirts. A former dentist from New Jersey with a degree in public health from Other than Andrew Wakefield (pictured on page 50), a few of the biggest draws on the Conspira-sea Cruise. Harvard, he is most well known for writing a 1996 book that theorised the Aids and Ebola viruses are genocidal weapons engineered by the US Government to depopulate the planet through vaccination programmes. On the cruise, however, he would be lecturing on the key to lifelong health and world peace: the “miracle frequency” of 528 hertz.

According to Len, everything in the universe emits vibrations and all the positive, life-affirming forces (including the green/yellow light in rainbows) “resonate” at a frequency of 528 hertz. Therefore, all music should be tuned in 528 hertz, rather than the 440 hertz of standard tuning, which he asserted was an evil plot imposed by the Rockefeller Foundation to militarise the world’s populace. Len believes that standard tuning aggravates the pineal gland, making all of us emotionally distressed, sicker and more destructive. He called this “musical cult control”.

“You,” he said to me and then paused. “Are… a … digital, bio-holograph-ic, precipitation, crystallisation… mi- rac- ulous manifestation! Of divine frequency vibrations, forming harmonically in hydrospace.” “Okay,” I said. “That’s the frequency that monks used to chant in while making brandy,” Dannion added.

Len’s face lit up. “When was that?”

THE ROCK STARS OF CONSPIRACY THEORY