The nature and purpose of conspiracy theories are obviously on our minds

[Effete Snob]

6. Huge grifting opportunity

Remember that dumb son of bitch "Bo Gritz"?

He made a career out of raising money for his expeditions to free non-existent MIAs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Gritz#Attempts_to_locate_prisoners_of_war

During the 1980s, as part of the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue, Gritz undertook a series of private trips into Southeast Asia, in attempts to locate United States prisoners of war that some Americans believed had been detained since the Vietnam War, by the communist governments of Laos and Vietnam, e.g., at Nhommarath. Those missions were heavily publicized, controversial and widely decried as haphazard, for instance, as some commentators stated, few successful secret missions involve bringing to the border towns women openly selling commemorative POW-rescue T-shirts.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1998/patriot-leader-bo-gritz-shoots-himself-under-troubling-circumstances

For years, Gritz has traveled the country offering a series of well-attended paramilitary training sessions under the acronym SPIKE — Specially Prepared Individuals for Key Events. In them, and in the pricey, 12-part SPIKE video series he also hawks, he sells the skills he learned in Vietnam and elsewhere, from close-quarters combat to field interrogation techniques.

Thousands of men and women have emerged from these elaborate training seminars with the know-how to fight a war. And indeed, many have gone on to join the violence-prone wing of the extremist antigovernment movement.