#1668: Simon Gray(?)

Simon Gray is the guy who registered the domain for Above Top Secret back in 1997. As most of you know, ATS is an internet dump for conspiracies, UFOs, paranormal rubbish and anything that smells of crankery and pseudoscience. It’s currently rather slick – by conspiracy website standards – and even a touch self-aware, as befitting what is probably the most popular conspiracy pit on the Internet. It’s all bullshit, of course – so much so that if ATS is ever a source for a particular claim, that is pretty good evidence that the claim is bullshit.

But who is Simon Gray? Ah, now that’s a tricky one. Apparently Gray is a conspiracy theorist who is particularly fond of UFO and Roswell-style conspiracies, but it is hard to find much information apart from a few interviews he has done for his own site. He doesn’t seem to be particularly prone to making public appearances.

Of course, given the intended audience for ATS, Gray and his website have therefore – entirely predictably –become common targets for conspiracy theories themselves. Here is a complaint about how ATS censors Sandy Hook truther material, presumably because they are agents for the government – one John Lear, for instance, thinks ATS is a “CIA front” for the purpose of collecting UFO information from the public (since UFO loons are generally unwilling to volunteer that information to anyone and everyone, right?). Meanwhile, a former member has exposed ATS’s Zionist connections (but of course), and this guy claims that ATS broke into his house and tampered with his computer because of the information he was posting; these ones think ATS is in a conspiracy with google to push pages exposing the ATS conspiracy as far back as possible. And so on, and so forth.

Diagnosis: Yeah, that is the predictably result of venturing into the epistemic abyss of conspiracy theories. We don’t really know the extent to which Gray himself believes any (or all) of the shit posted on ATS, but he deserves an entry nonetheless for the Internet pollution he’s partially responsible for spawning.