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- This week on BuzzFeed Unsolved we're covering the Illuminati. Is is a real thing? What the hell is it? - It's not a thing. - Alright, approach it with an open mind, let's get started. - Great. - [Ryan] Shockingly, the Illuminati actually has a very real historical foundation. In 1776, in Bavaria, Germany, Adam Weishaupt, a German professor, inspired the ideal of French philosophy. Mainly secularism and rational thought, decided to form an organization to protect those beliefs. Adam Weishaupt considered joining the freemasons to help propagate his views but unfortunately, could not afford the admission fee. (laughter) So instead, Weishaupt formed a secret group of his own. He called it, The Order of the Illuminati. I don't think they met by the train tracks it was probably a basement, kinda like this. It was probably something like this. - Yeah, well we'll bet yeah. - I don't know why I'm holding that, okay. The Illuminati had an anti-religious stance and focused on the goals of self-knowledge, self-improvement, social reform and free thought. Naturally, conservatives considered this a threat to the church and by the mid to late 1780s, the Illuminati was stopped and the active recruiting people into secret societies, was criminalized. However, Weishaupt and the Illuminati would go Kobe in the fourth quarter. And continue to push on, persisting with meetings and eventually spreading to France before disappearing into obscurity. But, some people believe, they survived. Here's part of an interview I had with an expert. - Well they believe that the core group was formed back then and has evolve and so back in the 1920s, there were some fascists who believed that the Illuminati were a group of Jews who controlled the world. Right after World War II, extremist anti-communists believed that the Illuminati were a group of communists who controlled the world and most recently the Illuminati conspiracy theorists believe that the Illuminati are part of the New World Order. - [Ryan] Many people believe the Illuminati seeked to make a dominant one world totalitarian government, referred to as the New World Order. In fact, in a 2013 national poll by public policy polling, 28 percent of voters poll believe in the possibility of a New World Order. Some people believe that the influence of the Illuminati and the New World Order, goes as high as the president of the United States. Here's an eerie clip from an old George H.W. Bush speech when he was in office. - We have before us, the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for future generations, a New World Order, a world with the rule of law, not the law of the jungles, governs the conduct of nations, when we are successful and we will be. We had a real chance at this New World Order. An order in which a credible United Nations can use its peacekeeping role to fulfill the promise and vision of the UN's founders. - [Ryan] All this begs the question,...