When Wenlock and Mandeville, the official mascots of the London Olympic Games, were unveiled to the world in May, the general reaction was one of bemusement. These stumpy, one-eyed, metallic-skinned creatures, the organisers explained, had formed out of stray drops of molten steel during the construction of the Olympic stadium, but most of the public and media simply interpreted them as aliens. What do monocular extraterrestrials have to do with the Olympics? A year earlier, the 2012 Olympic logo was greeted with a similar mix of derision and puzzlement. Jaded observers passed off these designs as sorry reflections of the state of British creativity, but a small minority had a very different answer: we were being primed for the establishment of the New World Order, by means of the greatest hoax in history.
Even in conspiracy-theory terms, the London Olympics plot is a difficult one to swallow, but that hasn't stopped a credulous minority from gulping it down. You'll find them on cult conspiracy blogs such as Red Ice Creations, Godlike Productions and Above Top Secret, or even making their own video presentations on YouTube. The basic scenario goes something like this: while the world's eyes are on London in 2012, a spectacular alien invasion will take place at the Olympic stadium. Or so the public will think; it will actually be a hoax invasion, orchestrated by the New World Order as an excuse to stage a global coup d'état. Terrified by the appearance of aliens, the world's populace will surrender their civil liberties, and "they" – a vague array of elite cliques such as the Bilderberg group, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, and dynasties such as the English royal family, the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds – will have smoothly achieved their goal of a single world government, economy and religion. It sounds like a cross between Dan Brown, the X-Files and Watchmen, but believers insist this stuff is real.