ZENITH: SO, HOW DID THAT'S WHAT THEY WANT YOU TO THINK COME ABOUT?
SIMPSON: I’ve known Zenith editor Scott Pearson for some time, and we’ve been discussing projects that we could work on together. We realized that we’re both interested in conspiracy theories, and it grew from there.
I can remember reading David Yallop’s book In God’s Name, about the highly suspicious death of Pope John Paul I when it came out in the mid-1980s, and I’ve got very strong memories of the Alternative 3 pseudo-documentary that was aired in the UK in 1977. And of course, for the first few years of this century, you couldn’t go for more than a couple of days in Britain without one of the tabloid newspapers running a story about the murder/assassination of Princess Diana – the cynic in me says that it was a steady backstop for editors on a slow news day, but one thing that became very obvious to me when reading up on the events in Paris in 1997 was that Dodi Al-Fayed’s father was and is absolutely committed to the idea of getting the truth about the death of his son and Diana. He genuinely believes that the British Royal Family was involved in some way.
ZENITH: WHAT GOVERNED THE CHOICE OF MATERIAL FOR THE BOOK?
SIMPSON: We wanted this to be truly international in flavor, so as well as the incidents that are the regular fodder for conspiracy discussions – JFK, the Moon Landings, the Illuminati – we also looked at some conspiracies that are perhaps less well known. The death of the Russian leader Stalin, for example, is highly suspicious: if there wasn’t a conspiracy, then some very odd things happened.
And of course, as the subtitle suggests, we weren’t just looking at the way-out theories; we cover conspiracies that everyone accepts existed, such as the plot to kill Adolf Hitler, memorialized in the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie (which is surprisingly accurate!), or the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Even 9/11, a topic that I knew, as a non-American, needed sensitive handling, is a conspiracy of one sort of another – either by Al-Qaeda, or the American government, depending on your point of view.
ZENITH: IN THE BLURB, YOU MENTION THAT THERE MAY BE SOME SURPRISES FOR CONSPIRACY THEORY FANS...
SIMPSON: And of course, I’m not going to give them away. Buy the book! Reading all the original evidence, much of which is now available via the internet (and we give links so readers can go in and make their own minds up), gave a very different perspective on some of the incidents. I certainly had some preconceptions regarding two of the deaths in the 1960s that we cover, and these were swept aside when I read the primary material. I’m not saying that I solve cases that have been a mystery for 50 years, but it may give pause for thought.
ZENITH: ARE YOU A SKEPTIC OR A BELIEVER?
SIMPSON: Neither. I tend to apply both Occam’s Razor (don’t make more assumptions than necessary), and Sherlock Holmes’ dictum (When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth) to situations. Is it credible that literally hundreds of thousands of people could keep a secret? Probably not. Could a group of five or six? Probably yes. Examining the evidence in some of the cases has certainly changed my mind.
ZENITH: WHAT DO YOU HOPE PEOPLE WILL GET FROM READING THIS BOOK?
SIMPSON: What we’ve tried for is Conspiracy 101 to a large extent. The facts are there, and the reader is invited on the same journey that I’ve gone on, examining the evidence. Whether they come to the same conclusions is up to them – but hopefully I’ve whetted their appetite to find out more.
