By that standard there are definitely alien spacecraft in Area 51.
I like this approach better:
https://phys.org/news/2016-01-equation-large-scale-conspiracies-quickly-reveal.html.
It takes the number of involved people and time into consideration.
Interesting article. A few points come to mind:
Dr Grimes then looked at four alleged plots, estimating the maximum number of people required to be in on the conspiracy, in order to see how viable these conspiracies could be. These include: the theory that the US moon landings were a hoax (411,000 people); that Climate Change is a fraud (405,000 people); that unsafe vaccinations are being covered up (22,000 people assuming that only the World Health Organisation and the US Centers for Disease Control are conspirators and that others involved in advocating, producing, distributing and using vaccines are dupes. 736,000 people if, as would be more likely, pharmaceutical companies were included); that the cure for Cancer is being supressed by the world's leading pharmaceutical firms (714,000 people).
I note that he is estimating the
maximum number of people rather than the minimum. I would also consider that not every one of the hundreds of thousands noted here would all have the same amount of knowledge.
There were (I don't know how many) thousands of people on the Manhattan Project, and that somehow remained a secret until the bomb was dropped. And if someone did go on and on about how the government was building a secret weapon that can blow up an entire city, few people at the time would have believed it.
Moreover, the government would have pulled out all the stops to mock, ridicule, and discredit any such individual as some kind of loon or nutjob, which is pretty much the MO of most who criticize and ridicule conspiracy theories.
Using the equation, Dr Grimes calculated that hoax moon landings would have been revealed in 3 years 8 months, a climate change fraud in 3 years 9 months, a vaccination conspiracy in 3 years 2 months, and a suppressed Cancer cure in 3 years 3 months. In simple terms, any one of the four conspiracies would have been exposed long before now.
Just a point of order - all of these alleged conspiracies
were exposed, since they obviously came out and have been widely disseminated. What still may be missing would be absolute incontrovertible proof that can be brought to court or other formal hearing where it can be heard. That's the thing. It's not that people don't know about these things or that they haven't already been exposed to the idea, but being able to produce sufficient evidence to convince the naysayers - that's the tricky part.
Another complication revolves around how much evidence is needed to prove a claim, and how does one deal with conflicting opinions regarding what constitutes credible evidence? I've encountered this a lot in studying the conflicting arguments about the JFK assassination.
He then looked at the maximum number of people who could take part in an intrigue in order to maintain it. For a plot to last five years, the maximum was 2521 people. To keep a scheme operating undetected for more than a decade, fewer than 1000 people can be involved. A century-long deception should ideally include fewer than 125 collaborators. Even a straightforward cover-up of a single event, requiring no more complex machinations than everyone keeping their mouth shut, is likely to be blown if more than 650 people are accomplices.
How is one defining "keeping their mouth shut"? It's one thing to blab about things to close friends and family - and if they tell anyone else, it's the realm of rumor and gossip. But it's another thing to take the step of whistleblower and obtain evidence to bring to the press or to report to the authorities. They may not "keep their mouths shut," but few, if any, would really want to go "on the record," so to speak.
Woodward and Bernstein had a lot of doors slammed in their faces before they found someone who would talk, but they still wanted to remain anonymous. It just goes to show that a lot of people can be made to remain silent.
