That scary horse in the photo above? It’s at the Denver International Airport (DIA), a place supposedly filled with all kinds of dastardly underground deeds. Personally? I’m not convinced. A scary horse does not a conspiracy make.

For the record, I have no idea what a secret Freemason plot is or would be. I’m vaguely familiar with the Masons as the impetus for the Simpson’s Stonecutters, but that’s pretty much where my Mason-education stops. My lovely mother, being the helpful lady that she is, sent me this article from Mental Floss (#momslovelinks) that basically outlines the outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding Denver International Airport, which I happen to be flying into tomorrow.

The theories range from the benign (the airport looks like a swastika!) to the tin-foil hat level of crazy (the airport is the headquarters for an alternate government that controls the world!). The biggest piece of evidence for the paranoid seems to be a dedication stone with the Freemason symbol on it. Zoinks! Why would that be on there, Scooby? Well, I don’t know for sure, but my guess is… that a member of the masonry union — aka the group of dudes and ladydudes that cut stone — cut the stone. After all, super secret conspiracy groups don’t usually put very visible symbols on things. This could, however, just be all part of their plan.

There IS a fairly weird thing at DIA and it’s the most concrete (pardon the pun) of these theories: the idea that there are secret tunnels underneath the airport. This hits, apparently, some sort of level of truth. The writer, Kate Erbland, feeds into the paranoia by writing:

But where do the tunnels go? Perhaps to some kind of underground bunker? Most of the people who believe in the various conspiracy theories regarding DIA seem to think that the airport is actually the headquarters for something far nastier than just an airport—like the New World Order or our own American government.

Um, shouldn’t you investigate that? Don’t you have a journalistic duty to, y’know, ask a Denver Airport official about it at least? There are no quotes in the story from anyone really. There’s just a link to this story in New York Magazine, which goes far more in-depth on the DIA conspiracy theories and confirms that there are whole buildings buried in the ground, which could explain the tunnel idea.

This is all to say that you’re now reading a story about a story about a story. That’s the Internet for you, I suppose. If you want to know more about the strange happenings at DIA, read the NY Mag story. If not, I hope this was a sufficient break from your TPS Reports.

Special Note: Just by the fact that I’m writing this may now mean that I’ve become an enemy of some state that I don’t even know exists. If that’s the case, then it’s been nice to know all of you and you can find my remains somewhere near Denver.

Photo: Some rights reserved by sirqitous