Whenever there’s a big national news event, a national news event that affects Sedona and the Verde Valley or a news item that’s hard to explain in simple terms, conspiracy theories are bound to follow. These theories are compounded in Sedona with our often “unique” type of residents who seem to pride themselves on “alternative” thinking to explain these things.

We can look through our past editions going back years to find hyper-local and more general conspiracy theories that have popped up over the years.

In Sedona, the introduction of smart meters around 2017 and 2018 lead to massive local pushback from conspiracy theorists who claimed that the transmis­sion of radio frequencies caused all sorts of health ailments. Most residents, however, didn’t buy into the conspiracy and didn’t want to pay for the additional costs for human meter readers that smartmeters would have saved on their monthly bill. Still, many residents illogically opted out of having them and took on the additional monthly costs.

The opposition was predicated on residents not understanding the science of radio waves, the math of the inverse-square law and what the word “radiation” means.

Ionizing radiation from X-rays, gamma rays and radioactive materials that bump electrons out of their orbits and can lead to health effects at high levels, but most radiation isn’t ionizing; it’s merely photonic energy that travels through space as particles or elec­tromagnetic waves, like light, radio waves, infrared light, microwave transmissions and thermal radiation from the sun that warms our skin. Smart meter oppo­nents equated the two, very different, types — to their own financial loss on their electric bills.

Another perennial conspiracy theory that rises and falls about every five years in the Verde Valley is the belief that condensation trails in the sky by high-flying aircraft are actually “chemtrails” made up of chemical or biological substances sprayed for nefarious purposes. This is rooted in many people not understanding atmo­spheric science.

So too, it was with opponents of the “No Kings” march this weekend, with conspiracy theorists alleging the 7 million people nationwide and 2,000 or so in the Sedona area were bused in and paid.

But the theory falls apart on closer inspection. Where would all these buses have parked and waited? Why would these paid people travel long distances when they could have just marched in their own communities? Why are all the photos of the participants people who are our neighbors we see daily? If protestors could maintain such a tight conspiracy from any leakers, why did they not organize at the same level to win the November 2024 election and avoid all the things that they are now protesting? Why have no bus drivers or vast swaths of people come forward to show they were paid?

Americans can’t keep secrets thanks to social media where everyone brags about everything from yesterday’s lunch to new car purchases to juvenile acts of vandalism.

Or, could it be Occam’s razor: About 2% of residents in the Verde Valley — made of up of lots of retirees and people who don’t work on Saturday morning — drove less than 20 minutes to march in an event about which there local organizing starting weeks ago that was over in just a few hours and go back to their weekend? Seems the more plausible explanation.

According to the 2023 study “Why some people are willing to believe conspiracy theories” in the journal “The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates” published by the American Psychological Association, researchers analyzed data from 170 studies involving over 158,000 participants found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories “by a need to understand and feel safe in their environ­ment … Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships.”

Conspiracy theories are so prevalent because they seem to explain confusing or ambiguous events that are hard for many to understand without looking at the science, math, politics or social structures that produce them. They provide easy narratives reinforcing how people process or understand information, defend the ego by creating a sense of understanding of hard-to-comprehend material, rationalize existing beliefs, rely on innate intuition rather than outside research, provide instant gratification and add the excitement of “discovery” of a “conspiracy.”