The Illuminati are taking over! Or is it the vaccine-peddling aliens?

Personally, I blame Hollywood. In its pursuit of profits it has blatantly ignored the reality that many people – and especially those of a certain age in South Africa – are not easily able to distinguish fact from fiction.

Many people think that Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Matrix, The Da Vinci Code and the sundry Mission Impossible and conspiracy theory movies are not entertainment, they’re documentaries.

That’s why so many people in this country – following the lead of their highly educated “redneck” counterparts in the States – believe that the “end of days” is upon us; Armageddon is about to ride into town… so we better be “prepared”.

If not that, then there is a global plan to control us – either by aliens or “The Illuminati”.

Lest you think I am kidding, let me recount one of the most bizarre encounters I’ve had in my life. On a plot just past Lanseria, a man held a small dinner audience of like-minded “thinkers” in the palm of his hand as he described witnessing the aftermath of a UFO crash in the Kalahari back in 1969. The bodies of strange creatures he referred to as “the Greys” (the same as “they” called the ones “they found” at Roswell in New Mexico after an “alien spacecraft “ supposedly crashed there) were placed on a massive transport plane and flown to the US from a South African base near Grootfontein in Namibia, escorted by Mirage fighters.

Everybody around the table nodded. Naturally, there had been a cover-up. What more could you expect of the “military-industrial complex” one man opined. The “New World Order” was but a step away, the participants concluded.

None of the storyteller’s “facts” made any sense from a historical or logical timeline… but I seemed to be the only person who noticed.

We left shortly afterwards, when the discussion moved to the subject of the imminent demise of Planet Earth in fulfilment of the Mayan prophecy that 2012 would be the end of the world… and that they would need to build a spaceship to “escape”.

Most of those people looked entirely normal… no foaming at the mouth or wide-eyed manic stares. Those who are still alive would, no doubt, be chugging ivermectin and refusing to get vaccinated because it is all part of the same plot… the conspiracy that the rest of us can’t see because we’ve had the wool pulled over our eyes by the “Mainstream Media”.

The standard lines are regurgitated over and over.

It’s just a flu. Less than 10 000 will die in SA (perhaps not, Nick Hudson); it’s a “casedemic”; the PCR tests are inaccurate; masks don’t work; the vaccines haven’t been approved or tested; the vaccine changes your DNA and you will die in a year or two; urging people to have a vaccination is like apartheid or the Holocaust; people should have freedom of choice.

The irony in the latter standpoints is that many people spouting them probably had no objection to apartheid and would have reported that, in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, the trains ran on time.

I am tired of trying to get through to people like this. Having a jab is an altruistic act – it’s how you make your community safe – as well as one which makes you personally less vulnerable.

If you can’t, or won’t, see that now perhaps you will later… in ICU.

And that really is a horror movie.