This post has been greatly expanded and revised under the title “Denver International Airport: Where Public Art Meets Conspiracy Theories,” based on a more recent layover in January 2026. What follows is my intro to the 2023 version, which explains how the post evolved from a draft that was more of a quick sketch (though it did go live on another travel site for a while before being taken down).
An earlier draft of this posted as an Explore.com article before the site decided to expand it into a mini-feature, with six sections instead of three. Because of the time difference, I wasn’t immediately available to do the update, so they had the editor who first worked up the idea do a rewrite instead. My original marching orders were to write a brief “skeptic’s guide to enjoying the Denver Airport conspiracy theories,” though the powers that be in audience development abandoned that angle and headline after-the-fact in favor of “The Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories Fully Explained.”
We have a personal connection to this airport in that it’s the first place Azusa ever touched down in America, back in 2019. At the time, we were more concerned with getting her through immigration and getting ourselves both across the airport to catch our connecting flight to Florida. I was limping around on a broken toe, since right before we left, I had missed the last step coming down the ladder from the loft in our apartment in Tokyo.
Needless to say, we didn’t have much time for conspiracy theories that day, though I suppose you could read the broken toe as the work of a gremlin, some sort of pre-Denver curse. The following year, on Halloween, our airline, United, posted a short video to its YouTube channel about the Denver International Airport conspiracy theories. If we had a longer layover and if I had known more about the airport then, I would have liked to spend some time doing a public art walk (or limp) through DIA.