The 6 Craziest Shane Dawson Conspiracy Theories

Take out your pink pig hand mirror and blend in some Illuminatea eye shadow over your scaly reptilian skin as we tip our tinfoil hats to the King of Conspiracies himself!

Years of watching Shane Dawson has found us questioning absolutely everything. We love his style as an investigative documentarian, for he’s found the perfect way to present alternative theories and urban myths in a fun format, without spreading misinformation. We’re not fully sure whether fearing our bottled water or believing we’re helping the planet through recycling by eating takeaway pizza is particularly beneficial, but we can’t deny they’re hair fascicles falling into our Conspiracy palettes level of fascinating!

Here are just six of the craziest conspiracy theories Shane has presented!

Chuck E. Cheese pizza controversy

Our favourite Shane Dawson conspiracies sometimes have a Doctor Who-style horror element! He takes an ordinary item and, within an hour, we run away in terror upon first sight! A particularly stomach-churning example of this was when Shane revealed a hidden horror behind the American pizza chain, Chuck E. Cheese.

He noticed a peculiar proclivity of Chuck E. Cheese that he’s never seen outside of this particular restaurant chain and it had to do with the way the pieces of the pizza fit together. Studying a pepperoni pizza, he alerts us to the edges where the knife would have sliced the pizza and the round slices of pepperoni not lining up with one another. It looks odd, as if they come from multiple different pizzas! How could this be? He theorises that employees must collect half-eaten pizzas, combing the odd slices together into a complete circle before heating them up and serving them to unsuspecting customers. We are a fan of recycling, but maybe this is taking things a bit too far.

The restaurant chain has since made an official statement refuting Shane’s theory, suggesting the misaligned look is the result of fresh, handmade pizza bases. However, this unsatisfactory answer doesn’t explain the pepperoni pieces or the misaligned crusts. We’ve never been able to look at pizzas in the same way.

Water makes you thirstier?

If we’re being brutally honest, Dasani water doesn’t have the best reputation in the UK. In 2004, they launched with the unfortunate reputation of being overpriced tap water. That reputation was arguably only made worse after a nationwide recall involving certain carcinogenic contaminates. Unbelievably, it appears their reputation in America isn’t much better. Dasani is openly mocked within internet memes, and YouTube reactors apparently love convulsing their mouths to the infamous artificial fizz and famous acidic taste! Despite this, it continues to be one of the leading bottled waters in the country. That is certainly very suspicious, right?

Shane clearly had to investigate, and through much research uncovered an inauspicious ingredient: potassium chloride. What is that, you might ask? Salt! Yes, it appears that it may be one of America’s most popular drinks because you get thirstier the more you drink! While we’re not sure if it’s true, we’re not sorry to have a Dasani-free country!

Tanacon was designed to fail on purpose?

Even two years on, it’s impossible to forget the chaotic calamity that was Tana Mongeau’s TanaCon. Initially a promising VidCon competitor, TanaCon saw itself as more egalitarian, open to people of all income brackets by providing free tickets to the majority of attendees and $65 VIP bags to those who could afford them. With large names like Shane, Casey Neistat and Ricky Dillon attending, who could have possibly foreseen its failure?

Thousands of people queuing outside in an open carpark. A sweltering summer’s day in LA. There’s no shade, no security, no water, nor any direction. How was this allowed to happen? Just days after the event, Shane pondered in an Instagram live stream, “Why was the hotel lobby so f*****g small. If even 1,000 people were coming, why was it the size of a bathroom… Me with my conspiracy theories, I was thinking a lot of things.”

Shane also questioned why Tana and Good Times (the company behind TanaCon) were claiming the disaster was the result to the number of tickets given out, when he knows almost everybody in the line had paid for the VIP package. Was the whole event a scam to generate publicity? Shane revisited it in his TanaCon series!

Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?

Everyone knows Avril Lavigne, right? She’s the punk rock queen who burst onto the stage in 2002 with anthems like Sk8ter Boi and Complicated. She proudly proclaimed herself to be a “rock chic” and was an icon to a whole generation of emo kids. So how did she go from slamming on her guitar to singing “Mina sako arigato, k-k-k-kawaii” within just years?

Undoubtably one of the crazier conspiracies Shane’s illuminated, it’s one that’s been floating around the internet since 2005. It goes that after the passing of her grandfather in 2003, Avril would soon follow him, but her record label didn’t want to lose the profits from their largest earning artist. Being obviously shady and full of malice, they decided the best course of action was to secretly replace her with a body double called Melissa.

Even causal fans are unlikely to miss Avril’s drastically altered vocals in newer albums. Her distinctive grungey rasp is replaced by a more polished pop sound. The theory also claims Avril 2.0 has a tattoo with the name “Mellissa” on her arm. Despite the evidence, Shane was unconvinced by this conspiracy. Also, Avril herself dismissed these claims in 2019, claiming it was “a dumb internet rumour”, but, of course, Melissa would say that, right?

Big Brother is watching

Scopophobia refers to the anxiety disorder experienced by those with the fear of being seen or stalked by others. Forget misaligned pizza pieces or slightly salty bottled water, this latest conspiracy from Shane is undoubtably the one that’s seen us looking in every nook and cranny.

With the proliferation of readily available and inexpensive spy cameras, there’s been a concerning climb in news stories about unsuspecting people secretly being filmed in Airbnbs and hotel rooms. This invasion of privacy is petrifying, but how widespread is it? Shane tells us in a menacing tone, “If you go on Amazon right now, you’ll find cameras of all kinds of shapes, sizes and disguises.” Unfortunately he’s not wrong. To demonstrate the power of these cameras, Shane hired a hotel room and opened our eyes to everywhere they could be concealed: hidden within power points, inside photo frames, clocks, the tissue box in the bathroom. They can be everywhere and, perhaps most sinisterly, inside something nobody would ever want to tamper with: smoke alarms.

Can you ever sleep soundly in an Airbnb? We’re not sure if we could anymore.

The Tide PODS challenge was a marketing stunt?

We’ve seen a fair few YouTube challenges in our time. Who could forget the calamitous and coughing-filled cinnamon challenge, or the controversy behind the sponsored Krave Challenge? When 2018 arrived, few batted an eyelid at the arrival of The Tide PODS challenge, for it was another silly, yet ultimately harmless internet trend, right?

Wrong! It proved to be extremely dangerous. News outlets were Tide crazy, mocking the rapacious fame hungry generation of falling to such desperate measures. Pressured by all the negative publicity, Tide even made a PSA advising against the consumption of their PODS product.

You would imagine that thousands of young people ingesting these poisonous pockets would seriously damage the Tide PODS brand. However, that assumption might be unfounded. Shane uncovered that, during this period, emergency calls in response to Tide PODS poisonings actually decreased and, more interestingly, sales of Tide products as a whole increased dramatically! Was this an accidental side effect of the publicity or was the entire challenge a nefarious attempt at increasing brand recognition?

So there you have it…

Six times our minds were expanded by Shane’s crazy conspiracy theories! We like to image ourselves as diehard fans, but we know we’ve missed perhaps hundreds of others. Is it already time to write a followup? Let us know by sending a tweet to @TenEightyUK!

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