I absolutely think the government has deliberately spread various conspiracy theories at different points to cover up specific things they were doing.

“Chemtrails,” for example, became a thing with a bunch of wild accessory claims that were obviously wrong, at a time when people were discovering that the US government had done biological weapons testing by dropping viruses from airplanes over cities and in some cases hurt random people by doing it. If there’s a nutty conspiracy theory out there that sounds a lot like what actually happened, it makes it harder for people to talk about what actually happened without also sounding crazy.