Article about conspiracies at Denver International Airport

Denver International Airport is in the middle of nowhere. It's been dubbed "America's Most Inconvenient Airport." It's also the airport of choice for conspiracies theorists, who say that deep beneath the airport exists a massive complex of buildings six stories underground designed to house a cultish shadow government and the super-rich elite in case of natural or man-made disaster. The airport's colorful and undeniably creepy diptych murals depicting things such as a gas-mask wearing Gestapo officer impaling a dove with his saber, and three dead women in coffins, don't help quell the rumors that DIA is some kind of grand mystic lodge for the reptilian overlords who secretly run everything.

The latest issue of Westword has a long article about DIA and the many competing conspiracies surrounding it.

And not all these theorists are Unabomber-like crackpots uploading their hallucinations from basement lairs. Former BBC media personality David Icke, for example, has written twenty books in his quest to prove that the world is controlled by an elite group of reptilian aliens known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, whose ranks include George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, the Jews and Kris Kristofferson. In various writings, lectures and interviews, he has long argued that DIA is one of many home bases for the otherworldly creatures, a fact revealed in the lizard/alien-faced military figure shown in Tanguma's murals.
"Denver is scheduled to be the Western headquarters of the US New World Order during martial law take over," Icke wrote in his 1999 book, The Biggest Secret. "Other contacts who have been underground at the Denver Airport claim that there are large numbers of human slaves, many of them children, working there under the control of the reptilians."

Link (Thanks, Vann!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Dr. Atomic

…and an unsubstantiated belief in reptilian aliens makes David Icke not a crackpot in what way?
Anonymous

I wonder whether DIA got picked as a centre of evil because it invokes a feeling of dread in many people like me who have flown into it. Denver is in a bowl, surrounded by mountains, so the air above it is, well, seriously disturbed. Worst turbulence I ever experienced. It felt like the plane was going to break apart â€¦ before I lost my lunch. I vowed never, ever again to book a flight through Denver.
Draconum

“it’s like my mom trying to sell me her conspiracy stories of the great reptilian city under Lake Michigan.”

Ooh, something a little more close to home!

Something in me WANTS conspiracy theories to be true just because they sound so friggin’ cool. Honestly, who WOULDN’T want to find out that there’s a great reptilian city under Lake Michigan?!? (Do they accept tourists?)
Anonymous

Hey BoingBoing! The article you link to on the inconvenience of DIA is from March of 1993, almost two years before the airport even opened. If you wanted to quote a source written about our fine airport in the last fourteen years you might have used the the one where it was voted Best Airport in North America by readers of Business Traveler Magazine in 2005, or the one where it was named America’s best run Airport by Time Magazine in 2002.
wolfrider

i can put you in contact with some people if you really want to discuss that ;)
mujadaddy

#6 posted by Mark Frauenfelder Author Profile Page, August 31, 2007 10:35 AM:

#4 — that’s an unusual way to describe the size of the gargoyles (Photo of the cool0looking beasts here: http://filmer.blogspot.com/2005/05/dia-luggage-gargoyles.html), but what do do you think it means? I’m too dense to draw any conclusions from it.

Well, I wanted people to draw their own conclusions, but the most basic one involves a 5th-grade boy traveling via DIA in a suitcase. With John Mark Karr?
Anonymous

more here: http://www.citynoise.org/article/4367
Anonymous

In his defense, David Icke, while he seems to be mentally ill, is not anti-semitic. He doesn’t believe that Jews are evil aliens, but rather that some evil aliens are disguised as Jews and acting as part of a conspiracy.
Anonymous

People who still work for the BBC are, largely, not crackpots. Icke, an ex-BBC employee, is a fully paid up loon, a serious fruitcake, absolutely baking, sadly misguided, three tracksuits short of a netball team, whichever euphemism you need. So citing him as a source who changes the nature of the story is, to be honest, wide of the mark. In fact, if Icke says DIA is the centre of evil, you can now rest easy. Phew.

Grumio.
Anonymous

#5:
Meet the new reptilian overlords, same as the old reptilian overlords?

:)
Anonymous

Don’t forget,a few years ago everyone that questioned the invasion of Iraq,was a conspiracy theorist. Forget about “lizard people” that’s just a ploy to throw everyone off guard… DIA should be renamed DOA,its a creepy place and that artwork is VERY dodgy!
Anonymous

I ran across some weird site about this a while ago. Here’s a link if you are open to it : http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Denver_Airport.html
Anonymous

Icke was a soccer reporter – hardly gives him the sheen of BBC credibility in views on anything else. He also once declared himself Jesus on live tv, equally unlikely to make him a good source. The audience laughed by the way.
Jennifer Emick

Exactly- and sports reporters aren’t necessarily bastions of level-headed sanity to begin with. (Rael is another ex-sports reporter cum Jesus in the flesh, come to think of it…)
Anonymous

Conspiracy theorists appeal to me because they’re basically hopeless optimists. They _want_ there to be some hidden plan behind everything, for world affairs to be in the control of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, whether it be the Moravian Illuminati or Majestic 12 or the New World Order. And why? Because they can’t face the mind-croggling truth that our fates are in fact in the unsteady hands of a gaggle of power-drunk incompetents who couldn’t organize an orgy in a brothel.
Anonymous

I was going to say that Icke is totally a Unabomber-like crackpot uploading his hallucinations from his basement lair. But a bunch of people beat me to it.
Anonymous

I can’t help but think that these ridiculous stories of lizard men and child slaves are to distract from some sort of actual international drugs and arms smuggling business next door.

Who cares about conspiracies of heroin and AK-47s when you can have conspiracies of aliens and psychics?
Anonymous

I just graduated from the University of Denver. The first time I heard about these conspiracies was in trickle-down from the Board of Trustees through another student that was involved at school, with a bit of a wink wink. We always joked that that was the beginning of an invitation for my friend, an up and coming young man, to join the ultra wealthy masonic society based in DIA. I wonder where he is nowadays…

It was odd that none of the kids from Denver knew about these conspiracies either.
Flying Squid

I was in Denver airport a couple of weeks ago. The only conspiracy I saw was the one where the fast food companies got together and decided to charge twice as much for food in the airport as they would in any of their other franchises.
Flying Squid

Oh, and I should point out that: “in fact, he sees Icke’s Jewish alien lizards as a Masonic plot to divert observers from the true earthly enemies: remnants of the Third Reich” is most likely a phrase never before used in print and I thank them for that.
Anonymous

I’ve heard lots about this and it’s interesting. But are you seriously suggesting David Icke is not a crackpot:

“In 1999, Icke wrote and published The Biggest Secret: The Book that Will Change the World, in which he identified the extraterrestrial Prison Warders as reptilians from the constellation Draco. [24]They walk erect and appear to be human, living not only on the planets they come from, but also in caverns and tunnels under the earth. They have cross-bred with humans, which has created “hybrids” who are “possessed” by the full-blooded reptilians. [25] The reptiles’ hybrid reptilian-human DNA allows them to change from reptilian to human form if they consume human blood. Icke has drawn parallels with the 1980s science-fiction series V, in which the earth is taken over by reptiloid aliens disguised as humans.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke#Reptilian_humanoids

btw, he certainly no longer works at the BBC
Anonymous

i must admit i feel that this sort of conspiracy being true would liven things up, a bit, were it to be exposed (even if only to me. of course, i’m due for a psychotic break, anyway…). as for icke, though i generally think he’s a nutter, he did sort of get me with the chapter title in one of his LONG-ASS books (skimmed it… some): “i know this is going to sound crazy, but…”, or something to that effect (sold the book; got a good price, too!). he remains oddly lucid while professing the sorts of things that would make blavatsky blush. somehow that touches me.

altgrave
noen

Is there a flickr stream of Leo Tanguma’s art? The pis at WestWord were too small. And… we do have a shadow government and they of course hold great power with no oversight and are completely pure and uncorrupted and have only our very best interests in mind.
mujadaddy

There are two (Bronze?) gargoyles at DIA, sitting in open suitcases, overlooking the main reception terminal.

The plaques under the gargoyles talk about the artist and the sculptures, but the phrase used to describe the gargoyles’ size is “about the size of a fifth-grade boy” …

…Draw your own conclusions…
Anonymous

I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overlords.

Sorry, couldn’t resist. But it’s hard to imagine that new reptilian overlords would screw things up for us any worse than Bush, Cheney, and company have.
Mark Frauenfelder

#4 — that’s an unusual way to describe the size of the gargoyles (Photo of the cool0looking beasts here: http://filmer.blogspot.com/2005/05/dia-luggage-gargoyles.html), but what do do you think it means? I’m too dense to draw any conclusions from it.
The Lizardman

One of the unexpected joys of my life has been tripping out Icke fans. Doing so at the Denver airport is just that much easier. The artwork is great, IMO, but a slightly odd choice for an airport still.
Anonymous

I think it’s pretty foolish to bash Icke like this. Although he certainly has his faults in terms of dualistic logic (“we are all one, but ‘they’ over there are trying to keep us from realizing it”), he is one of the best writers and presenters out there dealing with the issue of secret societies.

And bend it any way you want to, we all know that this is the period in history when all the secret social engineering tricks are coming to light, in all their multi-dimensional splendor.

But, good to see that Boingboing is at least mentioning stuff like this now :-)
Eris Siva

Another good summary of DIA oddities:
http://www.anomalies-unlimited.com/Denver_Airport.html

Topics of interest on this subject:
Positioning of the runways
Amount of cabling/etc used in construction
(Actually, pretty much anything related to the construction)
Who owns the land that it’s on? ;-)
Anonymous

I always thought those murals were of Broncos fans.
Jennifer Emick

In what way is Icke not a crackpot? Yikes. Of course, I’ve been accused of being a space lizard myself…
Anonymous

Yes the murals are creepy. So what?
Anonymous

Poor guy. He sounds schizophrenic.
Anonymous

David Icke was a professional goalkeeper before becoming a sports reporter; it’s probable that he wouldn’t have got the reporter gig otherwise. He is a credible reporter on football (or soccer), even after he went wacko, as his stint as a columnist on Football365 shows. On anything else, well, “he’s not the messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”…

I wonder if he might have got kicked in the head a few times too many in his sports career?
Clay

You know, if I were a baron of industry with the means to engage in these dark, labyrinthine conspiracies that weird folks suggest, I’d probably be tempted to give it a try.

After building the first underground base, though, I’d probably get kind of bored with it all and inevitably go back to my island retreat while the hoipolloi guessed about the lizard men inside.
Dan B.

I always knew there was something suspicious about Kris Kristofferson.
Giovanni

Course you have Jennifer, I mean, who hasn’t!?
Tranquilo Traveler

>>”Denver is scheduled to be the Western headquarters of the US New World Order during martial law take over.”

Must be referring to the DNC next summer.
Anonymous

The article cited is years old. The problems cited have been corrected, and airfares are low with healthy competition.

I live in downtown Denver and it takes me 40 minutes from my house to park. Sure it’s in a vast space, but the runways are far apart, allowing for many landings and takeoffs. I’d certainly prefer DEN over LAX or Chicago.
wolfrider

wow! it’s like my mom trying to sell me her conspiracy stories of the great reptilian city under Lake Michigan. Or the UFO city under Mt. Shasta.

Seriously. Do you think some plain citizen somehow made their way into a secret government installation, saw otherworldly creatures and children being used as slaves, and didn’t plan ahead to bring a camera?
Chuck

Sure, it’s a lovely airport, once you get there. It’s impossibly far away and there’s no parking ever. Anybody who voted for this joint in a “best of” survey didn’t have to drive there and park.
Anonymous

Please note referencing David Icke is never going to add credibility to your theory.