The Conspiracy Tourist: Travels Through a Strange World

Dom Joly enters the strange land of conspiracies as a wide-eyed tourist, eager to investigate the origins of some of the most pervasive conspiracy theories and meet the people who believe them.

Conspiracy theories are starting to become so much more than the obsession of fringe individuals. A survey by New Science magazine found that the percentage of people believing in one or more conspiracies had risen from 15% twenty years ago to 35% per cent last year. They are shaping politics, media, the way we view life itself.

In The Conspiracy Tourist Dom Joly sets out to find out where these ideas come from and learn about the people who create and believe them. His travels take him underground with followers of QAnon, to Roswell and the sites of mass shootings, and to the ends of the earth as he tests out Flat Earth theory. Along the way he talks to psychologists and specialists who analyse indoctrination, and considers what harm these movements might do to our increasingly uncertain future.

But what if these people Joly has long dismissed as crazed loonies actually have a point? What if we are the sheeple and they do have some special insight into the great issues of our time?