Last October’s FBI raid on top magician David Copperfield’s Las Vegas warehouse – during which ‘certain items’ were seized – has raised fears that the world’s terrorists may have gained access to what are being dubbed ‘weapons of magical destruction’. “Forget semtex and dirty bombs – can you imagine the havoc those crazy bastards could wreak if they were to get their hands on the magicians’ greatest secrets?” asks top conspiracy disc jockey Luke Limprest on his internet radio show, broadcast weekly from the basement of his house in San Antonio, Texas. “They wouldn’t be blowing stuff up, they’d be making it vanish without trace – airliners, buildings, even leading politicians! Even worse, they’d be virtually indestructible themselves – catching bullets fired at them, and impervious to swords! When they wanted to escape, they’d just disappear in a puff of smoke! Totally untraceable! Jesus Christ, just the thought of it terrifies me!” Whilst some reports claim that the FBI’s activity relates to a complaint from an unidentified woman that the illusionist had ‘forced himself upon her’, Limprest believes this is simply disinformation. “Hell, as if someone as obviously talented and handsome, not to mention modest and unbecoming, as Mr Copperfield would need to do such a thing – he could surely pull any woman he wanted using his natural charm and oiliness,” he snorts derisively, between Bryan Adams’ ‘(Everything I Do) I Do it For You’ and Bon Jovi’s ‘Never Say Goodbye’. “The establishment are trying to put the media onto the wrong scent, afraid of the panic which would ensue if the public were to find that Al Qeada had broken the magician’s code.” The DJ strongly suspects that the illusionist was involved in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. “Could it be that the FBI have finally realised what everybody in the conspiracy community has known for ages – 9/11 was a huge illusion and Copperfield was the mastermind behind it?” he asks, pausing only play Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’. “Let’s not forget that this was the man who once made the Statue of Liberty vanish live on TV – making people think that the Twin Towers had been destroyed would surely be child’s play for him. Mark my words, it was all mass hypnosis. Nothing at all happened that day. No airliners flew into anything, no buildings were destroyed. In fact, nobody was killed – all those grieving ‘relatives’ were actually hypnotised into believing that they had lost someone. In reality, all those ‘victims’ never existed!”

Limprest, who has been broadcasting Texas’ most popular mix of conspiracy and power ballads on line since 1999, is less clear as to what Copperfield’s motives for such sleight-of-hand might be. “It could simply be that Copperfield was in the pay of Al Qaeda – those Vegas casino gigs were beginning to dry up, after all – and the whole bizarre affair was designed to spread panic amongst the US public,” he muses in response to a caller who has requested he play Avril Lavigne’s ‘I’m With You’. “But that’s just too obvious to be true! It seems far more likely that Copperfield was working for an ultra top secret US government black ops unit. The plan was to fake a terror attack so as to justify the suspension of civil liberties and the introduction of repressive ‘security’ measures domestically – it’s the first steps toward the establishment of a New World Order!” Best of all, according to Limprest, no US citizens were really killed in the ‘terror attack’. The Twin Trade towers (which are still standing – we’ve just been hypnotised into seeing ‘Ground Zero’ there instead) are now the secret, undetectable, headquarters of the ‘New World Order’ which is hell-bent of the subjugation of the globe’s democracies into a repressive world government. All of which raises the question of why, if Copperfield was working for the secret government, is the FBI are now harassing him? “Well, he’s obviously become a security risk,” says Limprest. “Maybe he’s threatening to reveal the ‘truth’ about 9/11 via his magic act – perhaps he was planning a show in New York where he makes the Twin Towers reappear!” However, rival conspiracist MC (“I’m the Master of Conspiracy”) Dizz Klozure disagrees, offering an alternative explanation. “Man, everybody knows the man Copperfield was competin’ with his homie David Blaine to be number one or some shit. He thought the boy Blaine was disrepectin’ him so he disappeared the Twin Towers – he was saying ‘Like, let’s see if your shit an’ stuff is better’n that, dawg’,” says the man behind Detroit’s top twice-weekly rap and paranoia podcast. “But that bitch, he knows that when you’re runnin’ with the big dog, you gotta dig the bigger bone, so he comes back an’ fakes all that WMD in Iraq – gets us to invade the place just by the power of his mind! Man, its like Biggie an’ Tupac all over again – soon those two dogs’ll be poppin’ caps at each other in the street!”

The ranting rapper believes that Al Qaeda has no need of the type of conjuring tricks purveyed by the likes of David Copperfield. “Why do you think that Osama dude went on the lam in Afghanistan, bro?” he asks between Fiddy’s ‘In the Club’ and Eminiem’s ‘Stan’. “He was learnin’ all the heavy magical shit from the tribal shamans up in those hills. When he done with them, he’s meditatin’ with those fakirs down in the caves.” According to Dizz Klozure the terrorist leader intends harnessing his newly acquired Shamanistic powers to invoke the earth spirits and destroy the western infidels with a series of natural catastrophes. “He be bringing all kinds of heavy shit down on us – floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, even rains of fire to crush our cities an’ plagues of locusts to waste our crops,” he explains to the strains of Dr Dre. “If we don’t die in the rubble, we all be starvin’ to death!” In order to evade any attempts at retribution, Osama will apparently employ his fakir powers. “If he captured, all that torture and shit won’t work – those fakirs have taught him to withstand extreme pain like lyin’ on beds of nails and walkin’ on hot coals,” says the rapper. “Man, he can even fake his own death, lowerin’ his heart rate an’ stuff, an’ escape when they put him in a body bag, or some shit.” Thankfully, a note of sanity has been sounded across the Atlantic. “All this talk of magic is completely irrational, the events of September 11th can be explained in purely scientific terms,” declares conspiracy theorist and techno DJ Derek ‘Electro Anomaly’ Fork, as he prepares to perform his ‘Twin Towers Enigma (2008 Remix)’ set live set at ‘Illuminati’ nightclub in Bracknell. “Every right thinking person knows that it has been scientifically proven that the World Trade Centre was actually hit by missiles using holograms to disguise them as airliners. Al Qeada had nothing to do with it – the whole thing was part of a plot by the British Royal family to precipitate the invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of its opium fields, in an attempt to corner the global market in narcotics. All this mumbo jumbo about sorcery is precisely the sort of thing which brings conspiracy theories into disrepute.”