Last week, following the deadly fires that ripped through Maui, a blurry photo circulated on social media showing a massive explosion lighting up a horizon at dusk. From the flames, a beam of light ascends into the sky. Or, according to conspiracy theorists, it descends from the sky.
In an Aug. 11 Instagram video, a man who claimed that his friend in Hawaii had sent him the photo makes clear what he thinks is going on here. “This was a direct energy weapon assault,” he says, “coming out of the sky, directly targeting the city.”
In other words: The space laser conspiracy theory is back.
Made famous outside the tinfoil hat world by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in 2018, when she speculated that the devastating Camp Fire in California was caused by a “space solar generator” possibly backed by the Rothschilds, the space laser conspiracy theory holds, in various iterations, that some of the deadliest fires in recent history were ignited by a villainous shadow entity—sometimes it’s the government; sometimes it’s elites. “Direct energy weapons,” or focused beams of intense energy that are fired—in the conspiracy theory version of events—from satellites, are usually cited as the means of attack.
Direct energy weapons, as a category, are not entirely science fiction; governments are currently looking into ways to potentially use this kind of technology in combat. But the types of attacks depicted in viral videos that have circulated after devastating fires are pure fantasy. As PolitiFact found in its fact-check of this particular image, the photo is 5 years old. Back in 2018, Snopes reported that it came from a controlled burn at an oil refinery in Ohio in which the cold weather led to a phenomenon known as a “light pillar.”
It doesn’t matter to internet detectives that the video is old. Or that another popular piece of evidence for the existence and use of direct energy weapons in Maui—a video of beams of eerie green lights floating over the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Kea—was captured in January and likely came from a satellite. Or that a third video cited by space laser conspiracy theorists is actually a time-lapse image of a 2019 SpaceX launch. They’re connecting the dots anyway.
It may seem fringe, but the myth of space lasers—and other related conspiracy theories—has found real traction in this case, dominating online discussions of the tragedy. Popular YouTube hosts, like right-winger Tim Pool, are pushing it, as is NewsMax’s Greg Kelly, who said: “This was a forest fire? I’m sorry—it doesn’t look like one to me. … There are a lot of strange patterns that people are noticing. I don’t think we have the full story yet.” Some of the videos and posts showing “evidence” for the conspiracy theories have racked up tens of millions of views. (Authorities still don’t know exactly how the Maui fire started, but it seems likely that it was caused by a downed power line.)
In the various iterations of space laser conspiracy theories, motives and villains vary. Some conspiracy theorists have fixated on the trees that didn’t burn and the boats that did, ignoring the very normal science that explains this phenomenon. (Wet trees have more protection than dry wood; winds carry embers to boats that also have flammable fuel.) A few of the theories posit, baselessly, that a space laser was used for depopulation efforts—as in, indiscriminate murder—and that it specifically targeted native Hawaiians. But two very specific angles eventually rose to dominate the discourse last week.
First, there’s the Oprah theory. This one posits that Oprah Winfrey’s recent purchase of land in Maui seems to indicate that she had someone start the fires for some sort of real estate benefit. A tweet to this effect (“Oprah Winfrey Has Been Buying Up Land in Maui Like Crazy … WAKE UP!!!!!!”) has netted more than 12 million views. More generically, this theory can be expanded to include the idea that celebrities and elites conspired to raze Lahaina for their own investment and vacation home interests.
Then there’s the smart city theory. This one argues that someone—tech investors or Hawaii government officials, perhaps—wanted to burn Lahaina down to rebuild it as a “smart city.” As the conspiracy theorists imagine it, it would be rebuilt as a high-tech metropolis in which everyone is tracked and monitored and movement is restricted. One popular video stated, incorrectly, that the island had recently held a “smart city conference to turn Maui into an entire smart island, changing everything to electric, renewables, solar panels, and pushing everybody into electric vehicles.” (In reality, an information technology conference held in Hawaii in January dealt with general IT issues; a planned September digital government summit, which will be in Oahu, will not have any panels related to making smart cities in Maui.)
Both of these theories tap into real anxieties largely related to the understandable fear of outside investors and developers preying on tragedy. Hawaii is a profoundly expensive state for real estate, and many locals are being priced out of their homes. It’s already being reported that developers are approaching residents about buying their burned properties. So when Hawaii Gov. Josh Green said in an interview that the state could buy land in Lahaina to protect it from outside developers, and people on social media spread an out-of-context clip implying the opposite, it fueled rage and panic.
In a rant on YouTube that went viral, the comedian and conspiracy theorist Russell Brand actually articulated well why those who subscribe to the space laser theory in regards to Maui might believe it. (He bordered on condoning the misinformation, though he did not fully endorse the conspiracy theory.) If major outside investors end up financially benefiting from the disaster, he argued, “then the conspiracy theory is almost a redundant detail.”
“Did they start it? Didn’t they start it? Is it inevitable that the suffering of ordinary people leads to the benefit of rich elites and massive organizations?” he asked (while also dropping hints of separate conspiracy theories about the financial institution BlackRock and the billionaire Bill Gates). “Doesn’t it all feel like a kind of macro-conspiracy that’s so diffuse, institutional, oddly abstracted, and bureaucratically opaque that sometimes you just want to simplify it into ‘They started this fire—they started it with a laser from space’?
“Whether it’s true or not, it feels true, and in terms of results, it is kind of true,” he added. “There is a conspiracy to keep you poor and benefit rich elites.”
Brand, while dismissing the very serious harms of misinformation, is incidentally pointing at a deeper reason these conspiracy theories have taken root. He is ignoring the antisemitism of conspiracy theories about Jewish elites, the political dangers of conspiracy theories such as QAnon, and the harm that can be effected at an immediate and practical level if victims lose trust in the institutions that supply aid. (In Maui, authorities have been desperately fighting the spread of theories about federal assistance and FEMA.) But his articulation that there is widespread desire among many to make sense of an unfair world by pinning it on a simple human villainy is not wrong.
During the deadly Camp Fire in 2018, when the space laser theory first took hold, the West Coast was facing a wave of dangerous fires, all fed by a changing climate. The Camp Fire was the deadliest fire in the U.S. in a century—a record setter eclipsed only by the recent blaze in Lahaina. The conditions that allowed the fire to spread included dry vegetation and drought conditions (Hawaii has microclimates, including dry ones) and powerful winds. Climate change likely made things worse.
But there are other real, human-caused problems in Hawaii that could breed distrust of an official narrative without a clear-cut, singular villain. As the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports, Maui is very susceptible to “climate gentrification,” a process in which locals are driven out after climate-related natural disasters. Wildfires have grown not only more frequent but also significantly larger in recent years, the Star-Advertiser notes. It may “feel true” that there is a conspiracy against people without power, as Brand put it, even if the details are fictional.
And with something as massive and existentially threatening—but diffuse—as climate change, we can expect to see more and more efforts to blame a human face or evil intent for disasters, a way to make them make sense. (It’s not incidental that the man in the Aug. 11 Instagram video about space lasers warned: “The mainstream media is going to say that this is climate change and that we need to do better.”) As one firefighter based in Oahu said in a TikTok video, conspiracy theories about wildfires used to be unheard of; in the past five years, they’ve become commonplace.
