This was originally posted as an article on Explore.com before the site decided to expand it into a mini-feature, with six sections instead of three. Because of the time difference, I wasn’t immediately available to do the update, so they had another contributor do a rewrite instead. It’s now marketed as “The Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories Fully Explained,” whereas the version that follows here maintains the original angle of a brief skeptic’s guide to enjoyment.
We have a personal connection to this airport in that it’s the first place Azusa ever touched down in America, back in 2019. At the time, we were more concerned with getting her through immigration and getting ourselves both across the airport to catch our connecting flight to Florida. I was also limping around on a broken toe, since right before we left, I had missed the last step coming down the ladder from the loft in our apartment in Tokyo.
Needless to say, we didn’t have much time for conspiracy theories that day, though I suppose you could read the broken toe as the work of a gremlin, some sort of pre-Denver curse. The following year, on Halloween, our airline, United, posted a short video to its YouTube channel about the Denver International Airport conspiracy theories. If we had a longer layover and if I had known more about the airport then, I would have liked to spend some time doing a public art walk (or limp) through DIA.
For travelers, the old movie title, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, might better be reframed as a bucket list of things to do in Colorado while you’re alive. Two possibilities are, “Visit Rocky Mountain National Park,” and, “Stay at the nearby Stanley Hotel.” The latter, located in Estes Park, is the hotel that inspired Stephen King’s bestselling horror novel, The Shining. It later served as the filming location for the TV miniseries adaptation of his book.
What’s weird is that a guy named Stanley Kubrick directed the original film adaptation of that same book inspired by The Stanley Hotel. And the hotel has a ballroom called the MacGregor Room, and Ewan McGregor later starred in Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. Coincidence or conspiracy?
If you answered, “Conspiracy,” without missing a breath, then congratulations: you’re immediately qualified to investigate the Denver International Airport (DIA). Since before it even opened in 1995, the airport has attracted conspiracy theories, which finally gained enough momentum this year that The New York Times reported on them. It was *checks notes* in an article published on the four-year anniversary of the day this writer passed through the airport. Clearly, another conspiracy.
Or not. Part of what fuels theories about DIA is the airport’s network of underground tunnels (used for baggage handling), not to mention its far-flung location in the plains outside Denver proper. By its own admission, the airport has “chosen to lean into the theories” as a tongue-in-cheek marketing gag, per a 2019 press release. It and Roswell International Air Center jokingly announced themselves as “supernatural sister airports” with plans for “extraterrestrial-combat.” If you’ve got a long layover in DIA, you might as well see what all the hubbub is about by tracking down some of the unique public art that’s spurred on these theories.
Dual Meridian and Mustang (AKA Blucifer)
“Dual Meridian” by David Griggs. Photograph provided courtesy of Denver International Airport.
As your plane lands at Denver International Airport, pay special attention to the earth’s curvature outside your window. From the sky, you should be able to confirm with your own eyes that the earth is not, in fact, flat. In 2023, however, claims began making the rounds on TikTok that a new piece of public art, featuring a global map on raised tiles in the airport, somehow vindicated the flat-Earth conspiracy theory.
The only problem? Artist David Griggs created this installation, called “Dual Meridian,” in 1994. According to Denverite, it’s been in the airport since it first opened. So, like the idea of a spherical earth (which philosophers and mathematicians accepted long before the time of Christopher Columbus, as The Washington Post notes), it’s not at all new.
Outside the airport, the 32-foot-tall Mustang — a cobalt blue horse with glowing red eyes — has earned the nickname “Blucifer.” The horse was sculpted by artist Luis Jimenez, who admittedly did suffer some irrevocable bad luck when he was completing it in his home and a piece of it came loose and fell on him. (This accident was fatal, unfortunately.) Yet despite Mustang’s sinister resemblance to a horse of the apocalypse, reports that he will shoot you with his laser-beam eyes appear to be greatly exaggerated. We could find no evidence of their veracity other than an unnamed man who told The New York Times that he used to spook his kids with such stories.
The LED eyes were really meant to be a tribute to Jimenez’s father and his neon sign shop. That’s the reason they’re red, though they did once spook Jimenez himself when he was home alone at night and his real horse, Black Jack, broke into the house. Susan Jimenez, his widow, told Colorado Public Radio: “You're afraid of something but then it’s OK [because you realize] it is familiar. I don’t know. But the eyes do not have any evil intent whatsoever.”
Gargoyles, Freemasons, and ‘Children of the World Dream of Peace’
In DIA, astronaut statues and suspended planes create a visual impression of the history of flight. However, there also used to be a hammy animatronic gargoyle nicknamed Greg who would say things like, “Welcome to Illuminati Headquarters.” That was Greg’s glib allusion to a 1994 dedication capstone with Masonic symbols by the airport’s south entrance (via Denver.org). There’s a time capsule sealed under it, to be opened in 2094. As evidenced by the inscription, local Masons do appear to have formed a “New World Airport Commission” (as opposed to a New World Order) to install the capstone.
You have to wonder if they weren’t already in on the joke. As for the gargoyle, he and his riffs on passing people were like something you’d see in an interactive comedy show at Disney World. (Think: Monsters Inc. Laugh Floor.) You’d have to be operating without a sense of humor to take anything he said seriously. While the original Greg is gone (some thought he was evil, and this is why we can't have nice things), you can still see two gargoyles perched near DIA’s baggage claim area even today.
Leo Tanguma's mural, “Children of the World Dream of Peace,” is currently in storage as the airport’s Great Hall undergoes restoration. Yet it, too, inspired end-of-the-world theories, based on the image of a gas-masked soldier, among other things. That’s only the short side of the mural, though, and if you step to the left when the mural eventually returns, you’ll see that the long side of it shows children and doves, triumphing over war, violence, and hate, under a rainbow.
“Children of the World Dream of Peace” by Leo Tanguma. Photograph provided courtesy of Denver International Airport.
Speaking of rainbows, it’s worth mentioning that, unlike Blucifer, Denver’s International Church of Cannabis employs real laser lights in its amazing technicolor dream show. The Denver area also holds other interesting landmarks, like Union Station, the historic Brown Palace Hotel, and the scenic Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater.
Ultimately, by turning itself into a living work of public art, the Denver International Airport invites interpretation and leaves itself open to any number of off-the-wall theories. Yet the deeper down the rabbit hole you go with conspiracy theories related to DIA, the more they start to sound like dorm-room ideas. The kind that might originate from spending too much time online, after partaking of the sacrament of wacky tobacky. It’s all in good fun ... as long as your investigation of Denver art and the accompanying urban folklore stays on the rainbow side.