Are Airport Conspiracies Denver's Greatest Work of Public Art?

A mutant swarm of conspiracy theories has circled around Denver International Airport since before it even opened in 1995. Hatched in the pre-Internet age of ham radio and self-published pamphlets, nurtured by the first wave of crackpot bloggers and post-9/11 forum-board prophets, DIA conspiracy theories have continued to grow and thrive in the social media era

After all, DIA is the stuff that memes are made of. A hive of online sources point to secret underground tunnels, swastika-shaped runways, occult-inspired sculpture, Illuminati-engineered concourses, end-of-times artwork and ancient alien symbology hidden in plain sight! When Westword first probed the phenomenon almost two decades ago in "DIA Conspiracy Theories Take Off," scary speculations about the airport were still largely relegated to conspiracy connoisseurs on the far fringes of public consciousness.

Since then, the theories have been exposed to the mainstream mind via dozens of media outlets ranging from local TV news to CNN, Smithsonian magazine, a wacky recent TikTok and now the New York Times, all encouraging their audiences to gawk at the freak show. The dark digital postulations have persisted for so long, with such viral tenacity, that they’ve nested permanently within the airport’s narrative and brand.

After being tortured for years by the ceaseless, incredulous questioning, airport officials assumed a new stance on the subject, even embracing the conspiracy theories. And embracing might be an understatement: In 2016, the airport hosted a month of conspiracy-related events.

"For many years the airport tried to fight against the conspiracies, and we constantly had to explain and disprove them,” says Stacy Stegman, the airport's senior vice president of communications. “Over time we've kind of learned to love that there's a certain amount of strangeness associated with the airport, and it's kind of fun."

The airport's public art originally filled the melting pot of the paranoids who see so many secrets in plain sight, particularly the murals "Children of the World Dream of Peace" and ”In Peace and Harmony With Nature," by Colorado artist Leo Tanguma. (Both are currently in storage while the Great Hall is renovated.) "Mustang,” the 32-foot-tall, blue demon-horse statue outside the airport that killed its creator, artist Luis Jiménez, and Terry Allen’s gargoyle-in-a-suitcase statue, “Notre Denver,” are also mainstays of the conspiracy-art showcase.

When describing the effort to demystify the myths, Stegman and other airport officials frequently use words like “hilarious,” “wacky” and “fun” — clues to the underlying strategy to frame the conspiracies more as a silly roadside attraction than a disturbing myth.

Still, these events bring full circle an extraordinary relationship between public art and design, and the fantastical world of conspiracy truth-seekers.

In many ways, the conspiracy theorist and the artist are very similar. Both work in symbolism and metaphor, and seek to convey concepts that are not obvious in common thinking. An artist wants to break through the rational brain to evoke abstract concepts that play on beliefs and perceptions. The conspiracy theorist seeks to assemble myriad disassociated ideas, facts and symbols into wholly new patterns of thought and logic that all lead back to a preconceived belief. Both are trying to get at something that feels deeper and truer to their experience of the world.

"I think most artists embrace the idea that you're going to get diverse interpretations about their art. If you ask ten people, you're going to get ten answers, especially when it comes to abstract art or something similar,” says Heather Kaufman, director of arts and public events at the airport. “I think that the difference in my mind is that with conspiracy theorists, they're more trying to convince someone of what they believe, whereas the artist is putting things out there and saying art is in the eye of the beholder."

Fair enough. But in this time of Trump, when the dizzying style of conspiracy-theorist logic has become infused into political discourse, the most notable thing about the DIA conspiracy theories may be their role as a public expression of the deepest fears and anxieties within the culture at any given point in time.
Government secrecy, relentless globalization, creeping environmental catastrophe, elitist political manipulation, shifting cultural norms, perilously fast technological change — which is your thread to pull?

Like oral traditions of the digital age being passed from screen to screen, perhaps Denver's greatest collective art masterpiece is the DIA conspiracy collection. And there's more to come, since the 1 percent for art policy that brought the airport its incredible original collection will also be applied to the $1.3 billion makeover of the Great Hall. So there's yet more mysterious art on the way!

Believe it. Or not.
Our seven favorite conspiracy theories about Denver International Airport:

It houses a shadowy cabal of global elites has plans for brutal incarceration and genocide.

It offers prophetic warnings from otherworldly, celestial beings about an impending environmental catastrophe and mass extinction. 

It's a place where global elitists with occult knowledge honor Satan and the apocalypse with a statue nicknamed "Blucifer" (whose creation killed artist Luis Jiménez).

It's a haven for secretive, medieval societies like the Freemasons and Illuminati see the airport as Satanic cathedral.

There are secret bunkers five to seven levels deep beneath the airport used either as an underground network of fallout shelters for the global elite or a FEMA concentration camp to exterminate the commoners.

The capstone commemorating the “New World Airport Commission” shows that the New World Order build the airport as a command center in its quest to establish a single, all-powerful global government.

And finally, airport runways are shaped like a swastika (or a cobra or a penis).

This story has been updated from the original published in September 2016.