Drunken Pumpkin

These summarial descriptions, as well as summaries of the outcomes of these conspiracies, can be found at Cracked.com.

#7 - In 1933, group of wealthy businessmen that allegedly included the heads of Chase Bank, GM, Goodyear, Standard Oil, the DuPont family and Senator Prescott Bush tried to recruit Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler to lead a military coup against President FDR and install a fascist dictatorship in the United States. And yes, we’re talking about the same Prescott Bush who fathered one US President and grandfathered another one.

#6 - Near the end of WWII, things were rapidly going south for Germany and the time seemed ripe for guilt-ridden Nazi officers to assassinate Hitler and overthrow his government. Colonel Henning von Tresckow recruited Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg to join the conspiracy in 1944.
The plot to take out Hitler and then all of his loyal officers was called Operation Valkyrie, based on the belief that no plan can fail if it has a cool enough name.

#5 - For years, Britain had a spiffy trade deal with Iran regarding their prodigious oil fields. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was basically a giant money machine for the Anglo half, while the Iranian half got shafted. That all changed in 1951 when Iran nationalized the AIOC and the Iranian parliament elected Mohammed Mossadegh as Prime Minister. Mossadegh was relatively secular, something that pissed of Iranian clerics, but he was also very nationalistic. When Britain tried to regain control of the AIOC, he gave them the finger. Tea was spilled, crumpets were dropped and monocles everywhere popped out in shock.

#4 - A group of conspirators (including Guy Fawkes, Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving) decided to blow the fuck out of the British House of Parliament, thus killing pretty much all of the aristocracy, as well as King James I.

In May of 1604, a group of Britons who were fed up with King James’s rule met with Robert Catesby. As Catholics, they were tired of the Protestant government. In accordance with the teachings of their faith, they apparently decided that the best way to solve their problems was to kill everyone.

The conspirators were taking up residence across the street from The House of Lords, the building the upper house of parliament met in. Their original plan was to burrow their way to the underground foundation of The House of Lords, and lay their explosives there. When that proved to be more difficult than they had originally planned, they decided to just rent a room in the cellar of building. The explosives were quickly moved into place, and all that was left was to wait for the annual Opening of Parliament.

#3 - Sometimes referred to as the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, the idea was that the United States government was going to monitor the effects of syphilis and perform experiments on those who had a developed form of the disease. That doesn’t sound so bad, right? Well you’re a terrible person for thinking that, because the experiments were exclusively performed without consent, and on the very poor, mostly illiterate black males.

These men weren’t told that they had syphilis and were denied proper treatment for their disease. Because that would have skewed the results, you see. But hey, at least the government promised free burials to those who died.

#2 - Some time during the 1970s, the Church of Scientology decided that they’d had enough. Their religion about magic space aliens in a volcano wasn’t getting the same respect as the religion about the magic bearded man whose dad made us all out of mud 6,000 years ago. Instead of converting to a slightly less silly religion, they did what any of us would have done and decided to destroy every single document that made their religion look bad, presumably including a trip into the future to destroy every copy of Battlefield Earth.

#1 - Don’t be fooled. Project MKULTRA isn’t the misspelled secret recipe to McDonald’s newest hamburger. It was actually a series of CIA experiments in which they tried to figure out how to control your mind. Over a hundred sub-projects were authorized under the MKULTRA heading, though the documents on many of those have been destroyed.