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As barmy conspiracies go, Fogvid 24 made a late play for the title of most baseless and far-fetched of 2024. Let’s get into the details still spreading throughout the tendrils of Facebook.
Last year was a great year for conspiracy theories, creatively speaking – in terms of plausibility, perhaps not.
In April, Elon Musk apparently replaced pigeons with AI-powered drones to gather data for Space X, Taylor Swift was outed for being a time traveller sent from the future in May, and King Charles III had been replaced by a hologram for television appearances by Autumn.
This is but a few favourites taken from a lengthy scroll’s worth, but easily our favourite arrived on the eve – quite literally – of 2025. Sounding unerringly like something pulled straight from a Stephen King novella, we present to you ‘Fogvid 2024’.
The crux of the conspiracy
Have you ever seen that naff disaster film starring Gerard Butler called Geostorm? In it, humanity’s attempt to control the weather through innovative ‘climate satellites’ leads to extreme weather chaos of biblical proportions.
Fogvid 24 resides in the same ballpark, in that folk genuinely believe governments were deliberately doctoring, or in some cases engineering, weather for malevolent purposes.
The eponymous villain, if you hadn’t gathered by now, is fog. Descending on parts of the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK over the festive period, suspicions of foul play were aroused by two main factors.
One, lots of people were getting flu-like symptoms – in winter, imagine that – and two, the fog looked peculiarly thick in some places. I’m being a little facetious, granted, but that’s your entry level analysis.
Grab a brew, whack on a reliable VPN, and lets go through the mounds of evidence. All of this (yes all) may be anecdotal, but don’t be a sheep. Make up your own mind.
@ufo_area51_x“I know that looks like rain – That is not rain, its particles in the air” 12/31/2024. Users this week have taken to posting clips of this strange thick fog, this is being seen all over the world. Probably not a coincidence though.♬ ominous – insensible
The unequivocal evidence
Videos and eyewitness accounts online describe the fog as ‘too thick to be natural’, while others were shocked at the phenomenon lingering for consecutive days.
Scientists and meteorologists assert that the fog’s behaviour was attributable to natural environmental factors like pollution and temperature changes between urban islands and rural regions. They would say that, though.
That does little to reassure people who spotted unusual hues in the vapour, felt cold spots, or saw strange particles illuminated by street lights. And don’t even get me started on the… oh no wait, that’s it.
Anyway, a logical person can only deduce from these giant breadcrumbs that our governments are hiding something sinister. Popular theories include ingestible nano agents linked to 5G towers, blankets of smart dust experiments to reflect sunlight, or a bioweapon that would boost the economy through a mass scramble for Cleanex and Paracetamol.
If you’ve encountered anyone that was within the vicinity of fog in December, we recommend putting on a copper bracelet to scramble any nano technology they may be corrupted with. A tinfoil hat achieves a similar effect, in that bystanders tend to avoid entering your immediate space for reasons we’ve not yet uncovered.
Whether the motive was to disguise a mass dump of pollution, test a self-sabotage bioweapon, or to cloak extraterrestrial activity in low air space – as a few genuinely posited – we can’t simply accept weather as an answer. Our gut feelings have completely eliminated that argument.
@holikela Are the drones and the fog advisories connected? #fog #drone #theory ♬ original sound – Kela
All smoke and no fire
In all seriousness, it’s both amusing and alarming in equal measure to witness just how quickly outlandish conspiracy theories can spread these days.
A grainy filter, text overlay, and that eerie choir audio is a sufficient-enough cocktail to get campfire stories gaining traction and pricking viewers’ paranoia on TikTok.
Our social media algorithms regurgitate anything that engages audiences, and nothing elicits an emotional reaction quite like an outlandish conspiracy theory – especially if it involves betrayal at the hands of authority figures or organisations.
Humans are naturally inquisitive creatures wired to spot connections in things as part of our survival instincts, and these cognitive biases paired with distrust in our faltering governments are enough to create fertile ground for conspiracy to sprout and grow.
Then you’ve got the sarcastic, self-gratifying folk like myself who needlessly spend time taking the piss and inadvertently feeding the conspiracy echo chamber. I guess you could call it satire.
No matter what you choose to believe, do us a favour and wrap up warm this winter. It’s foggy out there.
