Conspiracy theories were big in the 1990s. When the Wind Blows, James Patterson's prototype for the Maximum Ride series, came out just a few months after the X-Files movie in 1998. (The television series ran from 1993 to 2002 before being resurrected in 2008 for another movie, and then in 2016 and 2018 for two new seasons.) In April 2005, the same month that The Angel Experiment came out, the first version of influential 9/11 truther film Loose Change hit the Internet.
Maximum Ride as a series is split between young adult fiction and adult technothriller, and it takes a great deal from the latter, though it's never not young adult in tone. Part of that inheritance from the technothriller is what I want to highlight here: the technothriller revolves around a protagonist decoding a mystery involving secret technology. This dovetails neatly with the general conspiracy theory mindset.
The nature of conspiracy theories is that they claim to explain everything. So it's not strange to find a number of conspiracy theory topics in this series. It's a technothriller, weird fringe science is going to pop up.
MKULTRA
Secret government experiments. The existence of MKULTRA was revealed in 1975 by the Church Committee -- the first allegations of human experimentation had come in a New York Times article late in 1974. Some documents had already been destroyed by then.
Area 51 & Dulce Base
The location of the School in the Mojave Desert echoes the alleged location of secret US government bases dedicated to researching alien technology -- Area 51 in Nevada and Dulce Base in [New Mexico???].
Mole people
In The Angel Experiment, the flock briefly encounter [Mike], a young man living in the subway tunnels under NYC. (Those same subway tunnels house a secret entrance to the Institute.) This plays on then-relatively-recent coverage of "mole people" living beneath the city, though most of that came from the now-discredited book The Mole People by Jennifer Toth. The idea was used by other technothriller authors around this time, most notably in Reliquary by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.
The New World Order
Itex's big plans for world domination (and killing off half the population) echo common NWO conspiracy theories. This is a really deep rabbit hole. "Toward a New World Order" 1990 speech by George H. W. Bush -- The New World Order 1991 book by evangelist Pat Robertson.
Microchips
Microchips were first used in animal ID in the 1980s -- their first use in humans was probably in the early 2000s; FDA approval came in 2004.
Men in black
This is a bit more of a stretch, but descriptions of Erasers in the first book are in this neighborhood: they are more or less human in appearance, speak in an unusual manner (traditional men in black often speak in a stilted way, but the Erasers are unusually persuasive)... and their encounter with Dr. Martinez matches the expected encounter. They show up after strange things happen nearby and interview witnesses.
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Last edit: 16 September 2021.