George Kittle isn’t afraid to put the tin foil hat on.
If you ask any NFL fan what the most injured team in the league is, they’d likely tell you that title belongs to the San Francisco 49ers. That’s because year after year, the pro football team in California racks up an unreal amount of injuries, and this past season was much of the same.
And it doesn’t just seem like the 49ers are the most injured team in the NFL. There’s actually a study that found they are statistically the most injured squad in the past decade. Many have tried to figure out why that’s the case, or if the team’s trainer is to blame. That would be too easy of an explanation, eh?
One idea that people are now really paying attention to is posed by a self-described scientist and EMF (electromagnetic field) researcher named Peter Cowan, who recently shared his theory about all of the 49ers’ injuries. He strongly believes that it can all be explained by the fact that the team’s practice facility and stadium sit beside a large electrical substation.
According to Cowan, consistent exposure to extremely low frequency electromagnetic fields is “degrading the collagen integrity in the players tendons, ligaments, and muscle-tendon junctions. The damage is subtle, until a routine cut or block ends in catastrophic rupture.”
The theory has been largely dismissed by doctors, but NFL players both on the 49ers and throughout the league have expressed concern. Some have even gone as far to tell their agents that they don’t want to play in San Francisco. But George Kittle, one of the 49ers stars (who is currently recovering from an injury), says that pro football players should be lining up to play for San Fran.
In a recent interview on the Bussin’ With The Boys podcast, Kittle was discussing the culture of the Northern California NFL franchise, and how well the team graded out on the team report cards that were released earlier in 2026. The tight end had nothing but good things to say about his team, and described everything that the San Francisco 49ers do as “top class.”
But talking about all of the great things did bring up the big time question mark about the San Francisco 49ers… the electrical substation that sits next to their practice facility.
The hosts of the Bussin’ With The Boys podcast asked if players were talking about the electrical substation at all, or had ever in the past, and Kittle simply said not as much as the media has been:
“I mean, it wasn’t… it’s a fun thing for media to blow up because it’s like, ‘Oh, conspiracy, is this a real thing?’ Then you can point to, ‘Oh, the 49ers do have a bunch of injuries.’ And I love tin foil hats and I love conspiracy theories, but I don’t have the knowledge to talk about it really because I don’t really know.”
But Kittle did apparently have the knowledge to throw out another conspiracy that could be connected.
The 49ers star revealed that, early on in his career, a veteran teammate that he had told him about injuries that may or may not have been caused by 5G networks:
“Someone told me this when it was my third year in the league. I think it was a vet. And you can fact check me on this. I don’t know if this is true. But when 5G towers first came out, the five cities that they were first out in, those five NFL teams were top 10 in injuries like immediately. I was like, ‘That’s interesting.’ I don’t know if that’s true…
But the only thing is, when I was young, there were trees in between our practice facility and the power plant. All the trees that were over the fence, there were no leaves on any of the trees. I didn’t notice that until my second year. That is interesting. And now the trees are gone, because I think the NFL cut them down for the Super Bowl.”
Kittle has mentioned the trees being leafless before, and those trees that used to sit in between the facility and the substation were actually cut down last April.
The electrical substation conspiracy is one that’s really gained a whole lot of traction in the past couple of months. And in reality, there’s only going to be one way to put the concerns to bed. In a previous interview with Complex, Kittle actually said this about trying to get the bottom of the theory for the sake of the 49ers:
“As a professional athlete, you’re always trying to get 1% better… If something’s affecting you like negatively, 0.25%, you’d want to know about it. … So I think all we’re saying is as players is like, we would just like to look into it to make sure it’s not something. And then if they come out and they do some research, it’s like, ‘No, you guys are good.’ Then I don’t think we’ll think about it.”
Until then… tin foil hats will remain on.
You can hear George Kittle talk more about the conspiracy theory in the interview below:
