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a handful is still a lot)—​they are, I submit, nonetheless subscribing to or at least aligning themselves with this underlying framework.

So in our effort to make sense of the conspiracy theories, let’s not get lost in the theories themselves—​it isn’t worth the immense amount of time and effort it would take to understand, say, how the US-Soviet space race was in fact an orchestrated charade. What would be the point, beyond us having a good time gawking? The much more pressing question is, what do we do with all this? What intellectual, historical, even moral stance do we assume toward it? Can we understand the appeal? The purpose, so to speak? Let’s get sociological?

Let’s get sociological. Richard Hofstadter, in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” diagnoses conspiracy theories as a form of collective psychosis, a group’s implicit or not so implicit rejection and reorganization of reality. And World War II, Hofstadter says, was a psychic rupture; it reset the baseline of plausibility, it loosened the imagination’s constraints. (The only adjective not defeated by World War II and the Holocaust is, I submit, “unimaginable.”) The conspiracy theories are, then, a kind of traumatic response. “Certain social structures and national inheritances, certain historical catastrophes or frustrations may be conducive to the release of such psychic energies,” Hofstadter writes, and the war has given a “vast theatre for [the paranoid’s] imagination, full of rich and proliferating detail, replete with realistic cues and undeniable proofs of the validity of his suspicions.” It’s a confronting of the incomprehensible via invocation of the impossible. If you wanted to give this a psychoanalytic tweak you could say that the conspiracy theories are a means of aversion, an avoidance of the horror, that the overemphasis on technology and mystery is in fact a looking-away from the death and inhumanity. It’s a swapping out of one kind of “unimaginable” for another, more palpable one. World War II is psychically a lot easier when it’s about antigravity and time travel than when it’s about gas chambers and stacks of corpses.

It’s the war in general and the Nazis in particular. It is as if the Nazis were so dementedly evil that some threshold was exceeded, a barrier was broken, and now anything goes, any act, no matter how nefarious or absurd, can be attributed to them: their perceived ambitions and capabilities seem to have limitless stretch. Even within more mainstream circles the Nazis are talked about as if they were supernaturally evil, not quite of this world, something irrational and incomprehensible, something that should have been impossible had the laws of nature held. And though most of us have not fully surrendered our skepticism—​most of us are not ready to believe that the Nazis had a time machine—​we have still surrendered quite a bit. It’s important to recognize that our historical conceptions are to some extent informed by myth, especially when it comes to something as imagination-taxing as the Nazis. Which helps explains why those explorers who claimed they’d found the Golden Train were taken as seriously as they were. Or the bottomless obsession over various Nazi mysteries. Or the enduring trope of Nazis in science fiction (not to mention science fiction masquerading as history). The Nazis already feel surreal. This is fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

Riese is interesting because it actually is extremely mysterious. Which doesn’t make the theory of antigravity any more credible, of course, but it does introduce an epistemological gap, a wedge, a vacuum—​conspiracy theory, which is at heart a solution or set of solutions, feeds off mystery. Riese has mystery in spades. From Riese you don’t have to do nearly as much conceptual heavy lifting to get to antigravity as you would if you were starting from scratch. Your imagination is stretched to the point where it can just about fit a Nazi UFO.

And the explorers’ general attitude toward history and knowledge is already very conspiracy theory-ish; you might say the cognitive prerequisites are already in place:

The adamant, quasi-dogmatic belief that there is a great deal about the war, about Riese, about Nazi secrets, whatever, that is still unknown, or known to extremely few people.

The reason why what is unknown has remained unknown is that it was intentionally and often ingeniously hidden, covered up, obscured. The corollary is that uncovering the unknown requires great effort, courage, perseverance, and insight.

The fact that something is widely believed or even universally believed means bubkes. The attitude toward mainstream sources and so-called experts is somewhere between bemused and disdainful; much of what is “known” is wrong or incomplete. Hand in hand with this goes exceptional self-confidence.

Given (1), (2), and (3), the truth is never obvious, never apparent, is revealed only extremely incrementally. Any shard of truth—​such as addled testimony or ambiguous documentation—​thus assumes an oversized significance, is understood as a peek behind the curtain.

Given (1), (2), (3), and (4), there is tremendous suspicion toward everything and everyone.

You might say that the treasure hunters are primed for conspiracy theories, or even that they already possess the underlying misconceptions, the conceptual scaffolding.

If you wanted you could be a lot more generous. Since Hofstadter’s essay, which was first published in 1964, there has been a marked trend, within the admittedly small world of conspiracy theory research (though it mirrors the trend in any number of disciplines), of depathologization. Don’t judge, these researchers exhort: these beliefs, no matter how preposterous and irrational, should not be diagnosed, condemned, mocked, or even thought of as “preposterous” or “irrational”; whether or not the beliefs map onto the quote-unquote actual world is not the point. Rather the conspiracy theories should be thought of as a set of beliefs whose meanings and causes are obscure, and the only way to responsibly de-obscure is by considering the beliefs on their own terms, from the inside, generously, nonjudgmentally, ethnosociologically. Conspiracy theories are thus framed as something like religious convictions: not assertions about reality but beliefs that have meaning and purpose. You could be even more generous. You could argue,