Having watched plenty of news coverage of Hurricane Katrina as it blasted the Gulf Coast, you may feel confident that you know what caused the storm and the devastation that followed. You’d be wrong. You only think you know.

The real truth, the truth your government doesn't want you to know, can be found on the web, and it's a far more intriguing story than great gusts of crashing winds.

You see, the creation of the category 5 hurricane didn’t have much to do with nature after all, never mind that it was in the middle of hurricane season. Nor did the subsequent flooding in New Orleans have anything to do with the levees being in a bad state of repair after years of budget-cutting.

No. The conspiracy theories out there tell us of other darker, more sinister causes. 

You could, for instance, blame the Japanese Yakuza mafia. This theory, espoused by such experts as Idaho weatherman Scott Stevens, says that the Japanese mafia is set on getting revenge for the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and has at its disposal powerful Soviet technology developed during the Cold War.

The technology, called giant scalar interferometers, can control weather, cause volcanic eruptions and trigger earthquakes using electromagnetic waves. (Stevens figures a huge earthquake in the western U.S. is next.) The Japanese gangster groups, so goes the theory, are controlling weather over the U.S. under direct KGB supervision. They were the evil force that directed Katrina in the direction of New Orleans.

Another theory, put forth by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and many other activists, argues that the levees were not breached by the storm. No, they were blown up purposely to flood the low-lying areas populated largely by African Americans, thereby saving the mainly white areas from flooding. Or maybe it was to eradicate the homes in the poor areas of the city, allowing real estate moguls to come in and build fancy condos to sell for premium prices.

Who is alleged to have planted the bombs depends on who's touting the theory. Farrakhan, who believes the aim was to get the blacks out of New Orleans, hasn’t said who he thought planted the bombs. But he did quote a web posting by one conspiracy theorist, Hal Turner, who contends the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers found chemical traces of “military grade” high explosives at the New Orleans levees. Some purveyors of the bomb-blast theory cite reports of explosions heard by evacuees shortly before the levees were breached.

Needless to say many experts have torn down this array of conspiracy theories. Weather experts contend that the hurricane was brought about entirely by nature without any help from giant scalar interferometers. It hit the Gulf Coast because of the location of a high pressure ridge.

Levee experts deny finding evidence of explosives at the levees and restate their original explanation: the sheer power of the storm beating against levees already weakened by poor maintenance caused the failure. Whatever loud noises were heard by evacuees were not explosions, they say, but rather the sounds of the hurricane sweeping across the land. Hurricanes are very noisy.

The various Katrina theories began emerging shortly after New Orleans was swamped, and rather than fade they appear to be gaining momentum, despite repeated officials denials, or perhaps because of them.

Where do such conspiracy theories come from? Anthropologist Phillips Stevens Jr. of the University of Buffalo believes they arise out of a human need to find answers for the unanswerable that wrap them in a neat bundle.

“We love conspiracy theories; they are almost always spun by one group about another, or about some network of cosmic forces,” he explains in a statement. “Somehow the suspicion of others is rooted in our evolutionary biology, and it may have a positive function because suspicion of others keeps a group together.”