In the skeptic/rationalist community, we generally make the distinction between “conspiracy” and “grand conspiracy”. The former do really happen, of course, but it’s the latter ones that are never true. The distinction is essentially “how many people would have to keep this secret for it to succeed” and if the answer is more than, say, five for more than a few weeks, then safe to say it’s not true. Things like Q, flat earth, and moon hoaxing would require tens of thousands of people to keep this giant secret for decades. That’s impossible, of course. We know from actual attempts at grand conspiracies in tobacco companies, pharma companies, Watergate, etc, that someone always talks. Often some clerk expected to get coffee or copy files for the people trying to ruin the world. Big secrets are basically impossible to keep for long.
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