Bielefeld Verschwörung

A running-gag among german internet users, especially in the german usenet claims that there is a Bielefeld-Verschwörung (german for Bielefeld conspiracy). THEY try to influcence people to believe there would be a city called Bielefeld in Germany all authorities have conspired to create wrong hints of its existence. The reason for this conspiracy is unknown, the most common theory claims that Bielefeld hides an alien base.

The conspiracy theory was started in late 1993 by Achim Held, a student of computer science at the University of Kiel. When driving to Essen he saw a highway exit to Bielefeld was closed due to road construction, and the striked out city name was then interpreted as a sign that there is no such city. He expanded this into the full theory, and after he posted his text to the newsgroup de.talk.bizarre in May 16, 1994 it quickly grew into german Internet folklore.

The actual source of this conspiracy theory was the dispute between the Bielefeld based Z-Netz and the Usenet, which used incompatible ways to encode the newsgroup postings. Amoung the serious flame wars the Bielefeld conspiracy marked the funny side of the dispute.

External links Google archived version of first newgroup posting (http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2r570dINNahh%40snofru.informatik.uni-kiel.de) (german)