THE TRUTH IS IN HERE

POPULAR MECHANICS has a long history of covering conspiracy theories. Some of our more notable work:

The initial thrill of a tropical vacation soon curdled into tension and distrust.

Maybe it was the claustrophobia of all those small, windowless rooms. Or the seasickness that seemed to claim more ConspiraSea participants by the day. I saw fewer of them relaxing by the pool or playing Texas Hold’em. At breakfast one morning, a woman whose father had survived the Holocaust told me that she broke down in tears when another cruiser claimed it never happened.

One bright spot: during a day trip to the Las Labradas petroglyphs – carvings etched into large boulders on a beach near Mazatlán – Larry Cook calmly mentioned that the reason few people were now talking to me was that I was “provaccine.” We had a civil conversation about the issue – me conceding I was swayed by scientific consensus and the mountain of rigorously controlled peer-reviewed studies that have proved vaccines to be safe and effective, Larry remaining sceptical. Neither of us changed our minds, but we didn’t get into a heated shouting match or assault each other’s motives. In the twodimensional world of the Internet, it is easy for people on the opposite sides of a controversy to become ciphers to be vanquished rather than human beings with legitimate questions and concerns. It’s much harder to dismiss someone right in front of you, a person whose story you know.

That night the ocean whipped itself into four-metre swells. that Lagardère must have orchestrated the attack with the help of Ari Emanuel.

When the film ended, Sherri grabbed the microphone. Her face had turned into a grim, ugly mask, the corners of her mouth pulled downward as if by strings.

“I don’t want anybody to leave the room right now,” she said. “I have a question.” She pointed at

with rage. “Look at this! This is why you’re here! You’re here in bad faith!”

Larry Cook, who had also been milling around in the hallway, stepped in front of Len to keep him from lunging at me.

“Get your hands off me!” Len shouted at him. “Get your f--king hands off me!”

Armed with a camera, Sherri darted out from behind Len and chased me around the hallway, demanding that I explain myself. As I tried to block my face from the camera, I got trapped against the wall between Len and Larry, who seemed seconds away from a full-on brawl.

“If you don’t stop this, I’m calling security,” Larry said. Len then challenged Larry to a fistfight in the ship’s gym.

That’s when I ducked out of the corridor, fled Fiesta Deck and dead-bolted myself in my cabin for the rest of the night. We had sailed far from the Mexican coast, over reason’s horizon. We were now bobbing around on the waters of pure insanity.

THE HALLWAY SHOWDOWN turned the rest of the trip into a blur. Wakefield chummily invited me and Dina to his third presentation, which we declined, only to learn from others who attended that he had planned to ambush us by reading aloud from Popular Mechanics. Dannion Brinkley “read my energies” by giving me a long hug. “You were flowing beautifully just then,” he said. “But you’re putting love out there to someone who isn’t giving it back. You’re giving this person too much power. You need someone who can appreciate you… like me!” Winston Shrout, in his farewell lecture, reasserted his position as the thirddimensional delegate to the Galactic Roundtable, noting that many of his clients were “fairies and elves”. I learnt from Laura Eisenhower that Hillary Clinton may have a supernatural agenda for world domination. “She’s not even human,” Eisenhower said. “You don’t want to know what she is.”

I also witnessed something called the Baked Alaska Parade. It was the final night of the cruise. I was eating dinner with Dina in the Da Vinci Dining Room, taking long pulls on overpriced beer. The lights dimmed. The waitstaff, holding Led-lit trays of meringue cakes over their heads, formed a conga line and began snaking around the tables to the song Hot Hot Hot. Someone with a microphone shouted, “Ladies and gentleman, get those napkins up!” And they did. Everybody in the dining room except Dina and I twirled their napkins in the air while singing along. Olé, o-lé, olé, o-lé. It was kind of silly, but I think the point was to make people feel they were a part of something bigger.

The conspiracy community does the same thing. Its emotional power is much stronger than facts. It offers a worldview in which chaos, randomness, happenstance – the messy, frightening qualities of life that science depends upon and our minds find so hard to accept – simply do not exist. For some, a sinister reason for life’s disappointments is more satisfying than no reason at all.

When we finally disembarked, after Dina and I had driven away, a team of special agents with the US Internal Revenue Service arrived at the port and arrested Sean David Morton and his wife, Melissa, on fifty-six counts of fraud, including filing a false tax return that sought a refund of $2 809 921 (about R38 million). If convicted, the two face more than six hundred years in prison. (Both have pleaded not guilty.) A couple of months later, Winston Shrout was indicted for allegedly printing more than R13 trillion in fake financial documents. (He has also pleaded not guilty.) Len and Sherri returned to their home in Hawaii and wrote a long, angry blog post charging me with war crimes and claiming I was part of a top-secret cell of “Pharma Trolls.” They also charged Larry, who tried to protect me, as being a double agent for Big Pharma.

Even then, I had a hard time feeling angry at Len.

“I had a brilliant mother who scrubbed the streets at Nazi gunpoint in Vienna,” he revealed during one of his last panels, which I attended only after Adele’s assurance that she would call security if the Horokane caused any more scenes. “By a miracle my mother made it on to one of the last ships out of Europe. By a miracle I am sitting here today. My mother used to say, ‘Lenny, you have no idea. Corporate fascism and neoNazism could arise at any time and anywhere, in any country.’ And I said, ‘Mom, I understand your pathology. You’re neurotic. Had I been through what you went through, I certainly would feel the same way. You see Nazis everywhere. But I’m sorry, I can’t go along with that agenda. I would recommend some good therapy.’ ”

Then Len’s mother received the 1976 swine flu vaccine. After that, she developed Guillain-barré syndrome, a disease that attacks the peripheral nervous system. She also developed uterine cancer. When she died, Len became convinced that the vaccine – which was linked to a small uptick in Guillain-barré, according to the CDC – was responsible for her illness and subsequent death.

Len Horowitz saw something troubling in the world. When bad things happen without cause, some people turn to religion for comfort. Some look for a scientific reason. Some conclude that bad things happen and there’s nothing we can do. Not Len. Len wanted a direct explanation. There had to be one. You just had to know where to look.