Horse art is alive and well in many airports: Seattle and San Francisco have bronze horses shaped like driftwood, Central Illinois has wire horses hanging from the ceiling, Tucson has a winged horse, and Barcelona has a hefty horse.
None of them have a horse like Blucifer.
Rising 32 feet into a median strip outside Denver International Airport, the cobalt-colored, demon-eyed, vein-streaked steed has terrified travelers and mobilized conspiracy theorists since it arrived 15 years ago. But first it killed its creator.
The artist Luis Jimenez designed the statue, known officially as “Mustang,” to reference Mexican murals and the energy of the Southwest, with glowing red eyes meant to pay homage to his father’s neon studio. The horse came in for something darker: In 2006, as Mr. Jimenez was finishing the 9,000-pound molded fiberglass sculpture, a piece came loose and fatally severed an artery in his leg.
A giant, murderous stallion makes sense as a mascot for a high-profile airport, where a nearby art installation could be misinterpreted as a depiction of the Covid-19 virus and the rumor — that a humanoid race of reptiles live beneath the facility — could crop up in the popular sitcom ‘Abbott Elementary’. The actor Macaulay Culkin, famous for navigating the horror of Manhattan during the holiday season, tweeted that “Denver’s airport is the scariest place I’ve ever been in my life.”
In recent American history, massive delusions about electoral fraud and unfounded rumors about the Covid-19 pandemic and environmental catastrophes have entrenched themselves in mainstream discourse and the highest echelons of government. Technology continues to distort reality. Conspiracy theories about nefarious political and racist plots have been cited by US Capitol rioters and mass shooting perpetrators.
The Denver airport is much less terrifying – less a society-shattering assault on the truth, more an ongoing experiment to explore whether institutional fabulism can sometimes be just plain fun.
An official statement was attributed to a “Sr. Illuminati spokesperson.” An employee appeared in a goofy video to explain a suspicious inscription in the Great Hall: “AU AG,” she said, did not represent the Australian antigen, which is associated with viral hepatitis and has been linked by conspiracy theorists to genocidal black Death. Rather, it nodded to gold and silver, metals central to Colorado’s mining history.
The Denver airport tall tales tend not to be particularly dangerous or politically glaring, but stem from a lingering fascination with aliens, the paranormal, “all sorts of nonsense,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political science professor and a conspiracy theory expert at the University of Miami.
“If I were trying to rid people of their conspiracy theories or misinformation, would alien beliefs or Illuminati be at the top of my list? No, I would probably be more concerned about things more closely related to political extremism or poor health decisions,” he said.
In addition, the airport case study shows that it is often difficult to change people’s opinions.
“Often our beliefs are a reflection of our underlying ideologies and dispositions,” he said. “So you’re not just fighting a belief about aliens or the Illuminati, you’re fighting an entire worldview.”
At the Denver airport, the tackiness of the site’s mythology means that any news — such as the airport’s top manager losing a key federal appointment this year, or the temporary closure of 2,000 parking lots — can become fodder for online claims of secret conspiracies and ominous motives.
Earlier this year, TikTok got a claim that a “new” art installation in Concourse A legitimized the flat-Earth conspiracy theory. Videos attempting to assign conspiratorial meaning to the tiled world map, set beneath curved train tracks and titanium poles, have been viewed more than 1.5 million times. Airport officials pointed out that the piece is nearly 30 years old and represents the past and future of transportation.
When Stacey Stegman, who leads the airport’s communications effort, came into her role a decade ago, her colleagues were tired of local lore. For Ms. Stegman, the airport’s reputation as the shrewd uncle of international aviation was part of its charm, an opportunity to raise awareness of Denver among travelers who may not have given much thought to the city and airlines seeking new destinations to expand.
In 2019, she championed a plan to install a temporary animatronic gargoyle named Greg (short for Gregoride) in one of the hallways with quips like “welcome to Illuminati headquarters”. There was an agreement with the airport in Roswell, NM, a hot spot for alleged alien sightings, to become “supernatural sister airports.” Ms. Stegman even wanted to decorate the sprawling airport grounds with crop circles for her 20th birthday (too expensive in the end).
“We leaned pretty hard for a few years,” she said. “And we learned some lessons along the way.”
One marketing campaign, linked to a renovation campaign that started in 2018, included posters of aliens joking about the facility’s “secrets” – suggesting that construction crews were building “gargoyle breeding grounds” or hiding Masonic gatherings. The publicity generated by the campaign was worth more than $8 million, according to the airport.
True believers hated it.
“Some got very upset by it because they thought, ‘Oh, now they’re kidding us, they’re hiding in plain sight, they’re covering up the evil,'” Ms Stegman said. “Ninety-nine percent of people see this for what it is, but to the others, we try to say, ‘Look, this can’t be hurtful, know we’re teasing, this isn’t serious. ‘”
Two gargoyles still remain in the baggage claim area to protect baggage, including a more muted animatronic Greg; the original had “triggered” some people who viewed it as overtly satanic, Ms. Stegman said. Airport managers have also stopped making light of conspiracy theories that turned out to have racist or otherwise offensive origins, such as the “lizard people” story, which is rooted in anti-Semitic tropes.
“You learn and you grow – we’ve slowed down a bit,” Ms. Stegman said. “Now we’re going back to a little more traditional advertising.”
According to Dylan Thuras, co-founder of Atlas Obscura, a travel media company that focuses on unusual destinations, the airport straddles two traditions of American fibbing. Over the past decade, the airport has become a space occupied by online conspiracy theories that may focus on physical places and urban planning concepts, such as the 15-minute city, without translating into actual tourism.
Then there’s the kind of kitsch folklore that has inspired multiple Washington state groups to offer Bigfoot hunting expeditions; one has a $245 full-day tour with lessons in “techniques proven to lure in Sasquatch.”
“It’s hard to compete, if you’re a tourism agency, on your wineries or your beaches, because every place has wineries and a lot of places have beaches,” said Mr. Thuras. “People are attracted to mythical stories.”
In Denver – a city with a park on top of thousands of corpses and near radium-contaminated streets, a psychedelic art installation disguised as a multi-dimensional gate and restaurant housed in a morgue that allegedly once held the remains of Buffalo Bill Cody – it can seem like everyone you meet has an opinion about the airport.
Restaurant clerks say the runways are swastika-shaped (something airport representatives vehemently deny, explaining that the design allows for multiple simultaneous takeoffs and landings). Aviation officials report glimpses of ghosts and claim that Native American music is played at night to appease the spirits of the dead buried below (Ms. Stegman said there are no graves and that the music is part of an art installation that, if not for a finicky sound system, would be on all the time). Uber drivers believe the dirt left over from the airport’s construction was used to create artificial mountains to store food for the apocalypse (Ms. Stegman just laughed and said she hadn’t heard that one).
When Denver Airport opened in 1995, it was 16 months behind schedule and $2 billion over budget. The problems sparked legal complaints and government investigations, as well as rumours, circulated online and locally, that the extra time and expense had been spent on sinister design tweaks — including more than a hundred miles of tunnels leading to subterranean meeting facilities, survival bunkers, deep underground military bases and even the North American Aerospace Defense Command near Colorado Springs.
The airport’s isolated location and disorienting size – the country it owns makes it the second-largest airport in the world, after Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd International Airport, and larger than actual US cities, such as San Francisco – lends murmurs online that it will one day be used as a prison or concentration camp by a mysterious totalitarian world government known as the New World Order.
But the airport’s massive layout, according to Ms. Stegman, was actually a visionary attempt to account for future growth and efficiency. In any case, the design should have been more ambitious – it was intended to support 50 million travelers per year, but almost 70 million people passed through last year and by 2030 almost 100 million per year are expected.
To deal with the pressure, the airport recently embarked on a $1.3 billion project to upgrade and expand the Great Hall. The work has pushed some of his most peculiar points of interest out of sight.
That includes a pair of 8-foot murals by Leo Tanguma, intended to depict humanity peacefully coexisting with the environment in post-war harmony. But over the decades, a much more alarming interpretation developed: that the artwork’s depictions of a gas-masked soldier wielding a rifle and sword, ruined buildings, and weeping mothers cradling lifeless children were a prophetic vision of the end of the world.
Unlike pieces in a museum or gallery, airport art is often perceived as a surprise, says Sarah Magnatta, an assistant professor of global contemporary art at the University of Denver. Murals or installations in a terminal can raise awareness of local artists and add dimension to an otherwise utilitarian space, she said.
“I actually think that’s the best way to look at art — if it kind of happens to you,” said Dr. Magnatta. “It’s art that’s part of everyday life, and you’re forced to interact with it whether you like it or not, which can be very powerful and a starting point for conversation.”
The removal of the Denver airport murals sparked rumors in Telegram channels and Reddit forums that construction was a cover to bury the truth. Ms Stegman said the airport will always embrace “the conspiracy part” of its identity, but is not trying to hide anything.
As for the mysterious disappearance of the murals? They have been temporarily stored to prevent damage and will return.
