The beauty of social media and the information age is that you can find anything you want. The bad part of social media and the information age is that it can expose you to some… odd things.

Like, apparently, the fact that some people think Thierry Sabine’s fatal helicopter crash in the 1986 Paris–Dakar Rally was actually because his flight got shot down and covered up by the government.

That’s the claim put forth by Jean Pernin in his 2025 book Daniel Balavoine, meurtre déguisé.

Pernin explains that Balavoine, an acclaimed singer and songwriter, had discovered an arms trafficking operation within the Dakar convoy. Sabine was supposedly aware of this too and wanted to shut it down, but knew it was dangerous so he wrote his will in advance. From there, he claims, their Eurocopter Ecureuil was actually shot down on January 13, 1986, as opposed to the the chopper crashing on the 14th.

From there, the theory goes that the Ecureuil was riddled with bullet holes, so French president François Mitterrand shipped it back to France and staged a second crash on the 14th for everyone to find.

Here’s the kicker, though: Pernin’s source? His son, who died in 1995, speaking telepathically to him from the afterlife in 2004. Pernin eventually became a spiritual author, and much of the Balavoine book goes on about spiritualism as a result.

Why did he wait two decades to say something? We don’t know. Absurd? Well, yeah.

But then again, have you seen the batshit theories that folks come up with these days? We don’t mean flat Earthers or those who don’t believe in the Moon landing either, those are pretty milquetoast by this point. We’re talking Twitter bluechecks who legitimately believe the Russian invasion of Ukraine is fake, that the late Dolly Parton is a raging Zionist who donated books to Israel, X or Y person is actually trans, or that literally any sort of celebrity death no matter their age and health is somehow connected to Mossad or COVID.

Like, really? This is how low we’re stooping for conspiracies? Can’t we just have something more reasonable or harmlessly entertaining? How about we do one right now?

The ASO is so insistent on running next January’s Dakar Rally in Saudi Arabia and will juice up Cristina Gutiérrez’s Santana 400 T1+ to ensure she wins, because 2027 will be the 30th anniversary of when Jutta Kleinschmidt became the first woman to win a Dakar stage in 1997.

1997 is also the year that Hong Kong 97 takes place. Deng Xiaoping, or an “ultimate weapon” version of his corpse anyway, is the antagonist of that game. Funny thing is, that game came out in 1995 yet the Chinese leader actually died for real in 1997. The game… predicted the future?

In fact, 1997 was the year the United Kingdom returned the rule of Hong Kong back to China. The movie from ’94 forecasts this in the tagline: “99 years of British rule are about to come to an end… Hong Kong will never be the same.” The movie stars Robert Patrick, the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and Judgment Day takes place… in 1997.

Part of Deng’s ear in the game is sort of cut off, like when Mike Tyson bit off a piece of Evander Holyfield’s ear in 1997. The car you see in HK 97 could be a Mercedes-Benz, in which Princess Diana died in ’97! What was the year Coca-Cola launched Surge? ’97! And it’s no coincidence all my surge protectors were made in China! Rebooting the entire game after you die? Just like Symphony of the Night, came out in ’97!

Jackie Chan stars in Rumble in the Bronx, which is in New York City, also known as the Big Apple… the year Steve Jobs returned to Apple in ’97! The unstoppable, unrelenting song in HK 97 is called “I Love Beijing Tiananmen”, also known as “I Love Peking Tiananmen”. Peking duck is a famous duck dish from Beijing… and Scrooge McDuck had his 50th anniversary in ’97!

The game was such a titanic failure…. Titanic, the movie from ’97! Why was this game’s sole purpose to direct us to the number 97? Like the NGC 97 galaxy in the constellation of Andromeda—the princess Andromeda, who was chained naked to a rock to be sacrificed to a monster! Like Princess Leia and Jabba in Return of the Jedi… the Special Edition of Star Wars in ’97! Oh fuck, we’re back again.

Man, I was just trying to get a final answer here, but I went full circle… like the song that keeps looping. A game that keeps repeating. Maybe it’s all about… a cycle. An endless cycle! Old, shitty games that become new again! The past becomes the future! Birth and death, on and on, it’s a cycle of life! The game is the meaning of life! And the thing that keeps life going: reproduction and food, which become, shit.

This is fucking shit. There.

(Saudi Arabia 27 comes out on New Year’s Day! And with fewer Bosnian War corpses)

It’s easy to write off as another symptom of the dead Internet theory or bots, but when actual government officials and major figures start leaning into conspiracies, we have a problem. How exactly are we supposed to just ignore the schizos when they get platforms like this? All it does is make the world a much scarier place as we inch toward a post-truth world filled with alternative facts funneled by a firehose of falsehood. Yep, this includes the Sabine one; French far-right personality Mike Borowski, who peddles conspiracy theories (yes, including pro-Russian propaganda) on his shows, recently invited Pernin to speak on said program.

For what it’s worth, some 1986 Dakarians did push back. We wish we could say they’re simply taking the bait on a troll, but alas.

“The flight conditions that night were appalling, even for us competitors due to a sandstorm that severely restricted visibility,” Pierre-Claude Gillier explained. He was the navigator of a Toyota Land Cruiser BJ45 driven by his brother Christophe. “Add in the fact that night had fallen, and the result could only be catastrophic! We’re not overly surprised by what happened.”

Marc Joineau, who did the Africa Eco Race in January, was making his seventh Dakar start in 1986. For added context, Joineau is very outspoken publicly about French politics and is neither a fan of Mitterrand nor current president Emmanuel Macron.

He gave the following testimony:

The accident really did happen on January 14, in the early evening. I was the first witness at the accident scene.

That afternoon, I was riding my motorcycle when I crashed into a large crevice alongside the Niger River. My bike was pretty badly damaged, but we continued on the road to Gourma-Rharous in Mali, where that stage was supposed to finish.

During the day, I even stopped near Thierry Sabine and the rest of the group, who had landed alongside the track. I set off again and rode off-piste because the track itself had been completely wrecked by the cars and trucks.

The crash happened on a plateau. The track was below it. The helicopter decided to take off again; it had been parked about 15 kilometers from the finish line. It wasn’t equipped for night flying, but they took off anyway.

The helicopter followed some of the competing cars with their headlights on. The problem was that those vehicles were down below, and the helicopter must have hit the ground.

When I arrived, there was debris scattered over for about 300 meters along with the main wreckage of the helicopter, which had been smashed to pieces. On the ground, I clearly recognized Daniel.

Because my bike’s headlight shone through the darkness, the cars belonging to the rally organizers came over to me. I stayed there for a few moments. I had a small camera, but I didn’t use it out of respect. I left and continued to the finish line.

The next day, I was the only motorcycle rider who didn’t take the start. I was a factory Suzuki rider.

I’m telling you all this to make it clear that it wasn’t an assassination. Imagine shooting at a helicopter at night when it’s barely illuminated. Just imagine the scene.

Sure, Mitterrand had certain people eliminated. But these people? Certainly not.

Featured image credit: Yelles C.M.A.