For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events:
1. Person claims something happened.
2. Government denies it.
3. Thing revealed to have actually happened.
The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement?
The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?
A conspiracy does not need a conspiracy theorist to be a conspiracy.
However, when a conspiracy becomes public knowledge, my point is that it will contribute to that collective cultural thought that conspiracies happen, they're real, and so other conspiracies being claimed with less evidence could also be real.
My point is that real conspiracies - on being unearthed - fuels support for theories that have less evidence, because as the article we're discussing points out, the reason for conspiracy theories existing that have little evidence of existence has little to do with established facts, and more a sense of what "could" be true.
For me, an essential litmus test for whether a “conspiracy theory turned out to be true” is the timing between these three events:
1. Person claims something happened.
2. Government denies it.
3. Thing revealed to have actually happened.
The test is really whether #1 turned out to be valid reasoning, with the benefit of hindsight, i.e. were the claimants vindicated? And if the affair plays out over a matter of weeks, was there really a conspiracy movement?
The two examples you listed… I’m not expert in these, but they feel like controversies rather than conspiracies. Or was there an underground movement of suppressed believers telling us the truth and we just weren’t listening?