The Maui wildfires have drawn bizarre conspiracy theories that elites — such as President Biden and Oprah — may have used lasers to intentionally set the deadly blaze for their own nefarious ends.
Photos claiming to show space lasers raining destruction down on the Hawaiian city have gained millions of views across social media, while images of trees still standing amid the inferno’s aftermath have been cited as evidence that the fires were not natural.
“Everything is burnt but the trees, but don’t point that out or ur a conspiracy theorist,” wrote one user on X, the platform formerly called Twitter, alongside footage of people driving through the cindered remains of a neighborhood.
But the unlikely internet sleuths’ hypotheses were easily debunked.
That post, along with others like it, was flagged by readers who linked to a Britannica article concisely explaining why the trees were still standing.
“Some plants are able to survive wildfires due to a layer of thermal insulation provided by their bark, dead leaves, or moist tissues,” the article read.
“That’s not unusual,” Oregon State University assistant professor of wildfire risk science Christopher Dunn told the Associated Press when shown the photos, explaining that trees and plants often survive urban fires unscathed due to their water content.
Numerous other experts weighed in and confirmed those conclusions.
As for the photos of space lasers, people posted images of what appeared to be beams of light coming down from on high and exploding in balls of fire on Maui.
“This was a direct energy weapon assault on the people,” a man said alongside one such photo in an Instagram video. “And I say that because my friend in Hawaii, which I’m going to show this picture here, showed a laser beam coming out of the sky directly targeting the city.”
That photo turned out to have nothing to do with sci-fi weaponry, Hawaii, or even the year 2023 but instead showed a 2018 controlled burn at an Ohio refinery.
A local Ohio man confirmed that he took the photo in response to a request from his local paper asking residents to send in shots of the burn.
The purported laser beam shooting down from space appeared to be little more than a lens flare that was visible in different patterns on other shots sent to the paper.
Another dramatic laser photo shows a sharp beam of light dropping through a clear blue sky and apparently setting an oceanfront countryside ablaze in a cloud of white smoke.
That shot, however, was definitively a time-lapsed photo of a SpaceX rocket launch in 2018 and appeared to be lifted directly off the company’s Instagram.
A third image circulating in the supposed space laser circles shows the May explosion of a transformer in a Chilean city, according to the BBC, complete with another lens flare.
Several of those theories have been used to push a narrative that the fires were intentionally set to drive indigenous residents out of Maui, allowing the government to transform the area into an artificial intelligence-run smart city.
That story focuses on a science conference held in Maui in January that lightly touched on smart cities — also known as “15-minute cities,” an urban planning idea that places basic needs within walking distance of residents — along with an upcoming summit in Honolulu to discuss governing in the digital age.
“The governor did say this is climate change doing this,” the same man from the space laser video explained in another post. “What they don’t talk about is in January how they had in Maui a smart city conference to turn Maui into an entire smart island, changing everything to electric, renewables, solar panels and pushing everybody into electric vehicles — 15-minute smart cities.”
Attendees at that conference, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, denied the event had anything to do with laying shady plans to level an entire city, and said smart cities were merely a passing talking point in its many discussions and lectures.
“The concept of smart cities has been a subject of inquiry for at least three decades,” conference chair Tung Bui told PolitiFact. “We did not have any specific discussion to turn Maui into a smart city.”
“The idea of resorting to destructive measures, causing harm to a historic landmark and resulting in numerous fatalities, all in an attempt to transform Maui into a smart island, stretches the boundaries of my imagination,” Bui said.
Other theories about coordinated destruction have claimed everybody from BlackRock Investment Management to Jeff Bezos, Oprah and real estate companies in general committed an act of mass arson to drive out residents and snap up the real estate for themselves.
Officials have still not said what sparked the flames, but lawyers investigating the blaze told Bloomberg all signs point to electrical infrastructure damaged by heavy hurricane winds blowing across the island.
At least 99 people have been confirmed dead and 1,300 are still unaccounted for since the fires broke out on August 8.
About 2,200 buildings were destroyed, with almost the entirety of historic downtown Lahaina being leveled.
