Flyover cities look for any excuse for props

Denver uses any excuse for publicity. I think most Denverites are proud of the conspiracy theories and now terror plots that swirl around the city.

If I tell someone I’m from Denver, I get the polite “I hear Colorado is beautiful.” It’s never “Denver’s such a cool city.” Maybe flyover cities can cultivate coolness by publicizing all the crap that would embarrass New York or L.A. or other “real cities.” Like alien world domination conspiracies.

This is a fairly widespread theory among the tinfoil hat crowd. It seems that Reptilian aliens are living under Denver International Airport (I don’t know why they are reptilian — maybe the specificity lends more supposed credibility). They have some Illuminati, New World Order connection, and are going to take over the world.

The whole thing, as you can see in the video above, hinges around some very large, very public (both visible and publicly commissioned) DIA murals. The theory assumes that the New World Order is the most secretive, evil institution ever conceived, but it gave away all its plans with some airport art.

Here is a good, thorough Westword newspaper article debunking all this garbage.

Denver officials don’t try nearly as hard as this Westword writer to debunk the conspiracies in any way. In fact, they seem to encourage the nutty publicity. They commissioned more wacky, mysterious art — the red-eyed demon horse rearing over the entrance to the main terminal. It’s kind of goofy if you’re 35, annoyingly awful public art if you’re 65 and really scary if you’re 5. The city also put other crappy art inside the terminal, like the demon coming out of a suitcase near the Frontier check-in gates.

The new excuse for publicity is the one-man Denver Al Qaeda cell. Of course, it is pretty major national news, but it’s also really being played up in Denver.

There’s a lot of chatter about the Aurora shuttle bus driver who may be plotting a major terrorist attack. And there’s kind of a strange underlying tone of city pride — like “we’re as cool as New York, we can breed terror cells.” So far, I don’t really see how he can be that much of a threat. If the FBI is letting him go back to his Aurora home every day, he can’t be actively plotting to blow up Disneyland.

Of course, maybe Zazi the alleged terrorist is a reptilian alien who is plotting to take over the world from underneath the swastika-shaped runways at DIA.

By the way, the reptilian aliens are on my mind because I flew out of DIA to Anchorage. I will be driving back to Denver with a DIA employee. We have about two weeks of drive time to get to the bottom of all the craziness out there at the airport.