The complete index
Sorted by the year each began. Start with the verdict filter — the fastest way to see the shape of this subject is to look at what survived scrutiny and what did not.
1692–2024 · Global
The idea that the Earth contains a habitable interior reached by polar openings was a respectable hypothesis in 1692 and an expedition proposal in 1818. Seismic tomography settled it. We have, in effect, an X-ray of the planet.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1716–2024 · England
Reference works have long named Mary Hicks and her nine-year-old daughter as the last people hanged for witchcraft in England, in 1716. Historians who went looking for the trial found no trial.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1741–1742 · United States
A series of fires in Manhattan in 1741 became a plot to burn the city. Thirty-four people were executed, thirteen burned at the stake, on evidence produced by a court that paid for accusations.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1762–1763 · United Kingdom
A London ghost that knocked out answers and accused a man of murdering her by poison. A committee went down to the crypt to ask her to knock on her own coffin. She did not.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1770–1857 · Austria / Europe / United States
A chess-playing automaton that toured Europe and America for eighty-five years, beat Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin, and provoked the first serious public argument about whether a machine could think. There was a man inside the whole time.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1780–2024 · Global
The claim that Jesus was taken from the cross alive and revived, with the resurrection either a misunderstanding or a staged deception. It is one of the few fringe historical claims that non-believing scholars reject as firmly as believing ones.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1820–1894 · United States
A carved stone dug up in upstate New York in 1820, read for seventy years as evidence that Europeans had reached the region by 1520. Two relatives of a local engineer had cut it and put it in the ground as a joke.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1835 · United States
In 1835 the New York Sun published six articles describing bison, bipedal beavers and winged humanoids observed on the Moon through a new telescope. Circulation soared. The astronomer credited with the discoveries knew nothing about it.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1838–2024 · Global
The Earth's shape was measured to within a few percent in the third century BC and has been confirmed by every method since. Modern flat-Earth belief is not a survival of ancient cosmology; it is a twenty-first-century community built on distrust of institutions.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1843–1980 · United States
Six engraved brass plates were dug from an Illinois mound in 1843 and shown to Joseph Smith. Three local men had made them to see what he would do. A laboratory settled it 137 years later.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1856–2024 · United Kingdom
The claim that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays began in the mid-1800s, more than two centuries after his death. The documentary record from his lifetime is ordinary and consistent, and the favoured alternative candidate died in 1604.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1860–2024 · United States
Hebrew-inscribed stones found in Ohio's ancient earthworks in 1860, offered as proof that the mound builders were Israelites. The lettering is nineteenth-century. The argument they were made to settle was about slavery.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1861–1932 · United States / United Kingdom
For seventy years photographers sold portraits with the sitter's dead relatives standing behind them. The medium was new enough that its failure modes looked like the afterlife. It was double exposure, and the market for it was grief.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1866–2026 · United States
The account of the American Civil War in which the South fought for states' rights, slavery was benign and incidental, and defeat came only from numbers. It was assembled deliberately after 1865 and taught from textbooks vetted for it.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1868–1870 · United States
A ten-foot stone man was dug up on a New York farm in 1869 and exhibited as a petrified biblical giant. It had been carved in Chicago the year before, on the instructions of a man who had lost an argument about Genesis.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1880–2024 · United States
A claim that the Smithsonian destroyed thousands of giant human skeletons to protect orthodox history. Its key evidence is an invented court ruling from a fake-news site, and its supporting evidence is nineteenth-century newspapers that were selling copies.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1885–1982 · United States
Three ciphertexts said to give the location of a buried fortune in Bedford County, Virginia. One decodes with the Declaration of Independence. The other two have resisted 140 years of attack — most likely because there is nothing in them.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1889–2004 · United States
An inscribed tablet from a Tennessee burial mound, promoted since the 1970s as proof that Hebrew speakers reached America before Columbus. The letters were copied out of a Freemasonry dictionary.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1889–2024 · United States
A small clay figure said to have come up from 320 feet down an Idaho well shaft in 1889, offered as proof of humans in the Pliocene. The depth is the whole claim, and the depth is unverified.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1890–2004 · India / United States / United Kingdom
A rope thrown into the air that stands rigid, a boy who climbs it and vanishes. It was invented by a Chicago newspaperman in 1890 for a story he made up, and the Tribune said so the same year.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1898–2024 · United States
A stone found in a Minnesota field in 1898 records a Norse expedition in 1362. Its language is the Swedish of the people who found it, not of the century it names.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1910 · United Kingdom
In 1910 six people in false beards and blackface were received aboard HMS Dreadnought as an Abyssinian delegation, with a guard of honour. They told a newspaper afterwards. The Navy had no procedure for it.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1912–1953 · United Kingdom
For forty years the missing link between ape and man was an English gravel pit. The jaw was an orangutan's, stained and filed. One man almost certainly did all of it alone.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1917–1983 · United Kingdom
Five photographs taken by two girls in a Yorkshire village in 1917. Arthur Conan Doyle published them as evidence that fairies exist. The figures were traced from a gift book they had at home.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1918–2008 · Russia / Soviet Union
The Bolsheviks killed the Tsar, his wife, their five children and four servants in a cellar in 1918, announced only the Tsar's death, and hid the bodies. The gap that left in the record was filled for eighty years by women claiming to be Anastasia.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1919–1925 · United States
White Arkansans killed somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred Black people in 1919 and explained it as the suppression of an insurrection. The insurrection was a meeting of sharecroppers about cotton prices, and a lawyer.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1920–1930 · Germany / France / United Kingdom / United States
A campaign of the 1920s alleging that African soldiers in the French occupation force were raping and mutilating German women on a mass scale. Investigators found the crimes did not exist. The campaign ran for a decade anyway, in four countries.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1921–1975 · United Kingdom / Europe
The theory that the people executed as witches in early modern Europe were members of a real pagan religion that had survived underground since antiquity. It held the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for forty years. It was made by selective quotation.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1924–1930 · United States
Lead crosses and swords dug out of a caliche bank near Tucson in 1924, inscribed in Latin and Hebrew with the history of a Roman colony in Arizona. There was nothing else in the ground. One of the swords has a dinosaur on it.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1924–1999 · United Kingdom
Four days before the 1924 general election, a letter purporting to instruct British communists to prepare for insurrection appeared in the Daily Mail. It was a forgery, and the intelligence service's own official history says its officers helped put it there.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1929–1980 · Global
Asbestos manufacturers knew by the 1930s that their product killed the people who worked with it. They edited the medical literature, kept diagnoses from workers, and kept selling for another forty years.
Medicine & Public Health · 2 min
1931–1939 · Isle of Man
A farming family on the Isle of Man reported in 1931 that a talking mongoose lived in their walls. Two well-known psychical researchers investigated. The hair sample came from the family dog.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1932–1972 · United States
For forty years the US Public Health Service followed 399 Black men with syphilis in Macon County, Alabama, without treating them — and, once penicillin became standard, worked to keep them from getting it. The study was not secret. It was published in medical journals for decades before anyone stopped it.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1933–1934 · United States
In 1933 a decorated Marine general testified that wealthy financiers had asked him to lead half a million veterans on Washington and install himself beside a compliant President Roosevelt. A House committee found his account credible. Nothing further happened to anyone.
Finance & Economics · 3 min
1936–2003 · United States
A brass plate claiming California for Elizabeth I, found in 1936 and treated for forty years as the oldest English artefact in the American West. It was a practical joke by a fraternity of history enthusiasts, aimed at one professor, that got away from them.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1936–1945 · China / Japan
A Japanese army unit in occupied Manchuria conducted lethal human experimentation and biological warfare on a mass scale. After the war the United States granted its senior officers immunity from prosecution in exchange for their data.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1937–2026 · United States
Stones inscribed with messages from the Lost Colony of Roanoke, found across the South in the late 1930s. A reward offer produced forty-seven forgeries. The one that came first, before any reward existed, is still argued over.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1940–1992 · Soviet Union / Poland
The NKVD shot some 22,000 Polish officers and professionals in 1940 and blamed the Germans. Two governments knew otherwise and said nothing for decades. The signed order is now public.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1942–1983 · United States
Anti-aircraft batteries fired more than 1,400 shells over Los Angeles one night in 1942. Nothing was shot down and no aircraft was ever found. The photograph everyone knows was retouched by a newspaper, as was standard practice.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1943–2001 · United States
A 1998 self-published book alleged that 1,200 Black soldiers were machine-gunned by white troops at a Mississippi camp in 1943 and buried in a mass grave. The regiment's men were subsequently found alive, in Army records and in person.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1943–1984 · United States
A destroyer escort was supposedly made invisible and teleported in 1943, with crewmen fused into the hull. The ship's own logs show it was not in Philadelphia. The single source for the story wrote letters in green ink under a false name.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1945–2024 · United States
The claim that fluoride was added to water to pacify populations dates to 1950s anti-communist pamphleteering. The dental benefit is real and measured. The dosing question has been revised downward on evidence, which is what a health policy is supposed to do.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1945–1959 · United States
The United States brought more than 1,600 German scientists and engineers to America after 1945, including men who had used slave labour and conducted lethal human experiments. Their files were rewritten to make them admissible. Several went on to run American space and chemical weapons programmes.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1946–2024 · Global
Weather modification exists, is licensed, and produces effects at the edge of detectability. The gap between that and directing a hurricane is roughly the gap between a garden hose and a river — and every major flood now produces a wave of claims that someone did it deliberately.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1947–1997 · United States
Something secret did crash near Roswell in 1947, and the military did cover it up. It was a balloon train carrying acoustic sensors designed to listen for Soviet atomic tests. The alien version was assembled thirty years later.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1948–1977 · Global
The CIA maintained working relationships with hundreds of journalists and owned or subsidised media outlets abroad during the Cold War. The Church Committee documented the practice; a 1977 Rolling Stone investigation named names. The popular version of the story is larger than the record.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1950–1969 · United States
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed bacteria over San Francisco from a ship offshore to model a biological attack. It was one of hundreds of open-air tests conducted over American cities for two decades. Residents were not told, then or for twenty-six years afterwards.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1950–2024 · Philippines / Brazil / Global
Practitioners appear to open a patient's body with their hands, remove diseased tissue and leave no wound. The tissue is chicken. The technique is sleight of hand, and it is sold to people with terminal diagnoses.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1950–2024 · North Atlantic
Lloyd's of London and the US Coast Guard both report no unusual loss rate in the area. The famous disappearances turn out to involve storms, fuel exhaustion, and in several cases ships that sank somewhere else entirely.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1950–2020 · Global
This entry is about the concealment, not the crime. Diocesan officials moved accused priests between parishes, settled claims under confidentiality, and withheld allegations from police — a pattern established from the dioceses' own records once courts could compel them.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1951–1998 · Korea / China / Soviet Union
China and North Korea alleged in 1952 that the United States was dropping plague-infected insects on Korea. Captured American airmen confessed. The Soviet files record the whole thing as a fabrication and describe how it was assembled.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953 · Iran
British and American intelligence services overthrew Iran's elected prime minister in August 1953, after he nationalised the country's oil. For sixty years the United States denied involvement. In 2013 the CIA released its internal history acknowledging the operation.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1973 · United States
For twenty years the CIA funded research into chemical and psychological control of human behaviour, including administering LSD to people who had not consented and did not know. Most of the files were destroyed on the director's order in 1973. What survived was enough.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1957 · Global
To measure how much fallout from nuclear testing was ending up in human bone, the Atomic Energy Commission collected thousands of tissue samples — many from dead infants — from around the world, without telling the families. The programme's own transcripts record officials discussing the difficulty of obtaining bodies.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1998 · United States
Tobacco companies knew their product caused cancer and was addictive, and spent four decades and enormous sums manufacturing public uncertainty about both. The internal documents are now searchable online because a court ordered them released.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1955–2013 · United States
Area 51 is real, was secret for decades, and the CIA has now published its history. It was built to test the U-2 and its successors. The alien reverse-engineering story rests almost entirely on one man whose academic record cannot be found.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1955–1968 · United States
The FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr., bugged his hotel rooms, and in 1964 mailed him an anonymous letter urging him to kill himself. The Attorney General had authorised the wiretaps. The Bureau kept the operation running until his death.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1956–1971 · United States
The FBI ran a fifteen-year covert programme to surveil, infiltrate, discredit and disrupt American political movements — civil rights groups, the anti-war left, Black nationalist organisations, and the far right. Its own memos describe the goal as neutralising targets, not prosecuting crimes.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1956–1990 · Western Europe
NATO countries maintained secret armed networks, hidden from their own parliaments, to be activated in the event of a Soviet invasion. Their existence was admitted in 1990. What some of them did in peacetime remains partly unresolved.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1956–2006 · France
The secret society said to guard a bloodline was registered as a small club in a French village in 1956 by a man who later admitted, under oath, to inventing its history and forging the parchments deposited in the national library.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1958–2017 · Northern Ireland
Boys were abused at a Belfast children's home and three staff were convicted in 1981. The enduring claim is that British intelligence knew and allowed it, to blackmail visitors. An inquiry with access to the files did not find that.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1958–2024 · North America
Every hair, bone and tissue sample ever submitted for testing has returned as a known animal or as human. The footprints that started the modern era were made with carved wooden feet, and the family that made them kept them.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1960–1990 · Soviet Union
The claim that cosmonauts died in orbit before Gagarin and were erased. The Soviet space programme did conceal deaths and did airbrush people out of pictures, which is why this took hold. The specific claim still fails.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1960–1989 · Soviet Union
A prototype missile exploded on its pad at Baikonur in 1960, killing the commander of the Strategic Rocket Forces and scores of engineers. The Soviet Union announced a plane crash. The truth arrived in 1989.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1961–2024 · Global
A category of objects said to be found in impossible strata, proving a lost advanced civilisation that orthodox archaeology refuses to acknowledge. Each object has been examined. None of them is what the claim needs it to be.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1961 · Zambia / Democratic Republic of the Congo
The UN Secretary-General died in a plane crash in Northern Rhodesia in 1961 while flying to negotiate a ceasefire in Katanga. Three inquiries at the time were inconclusive. The UN reopened the case in 2015 and has kept it open since, because member states will not hand over what they hold.
Assassinations · 3 min
1962 · United States
In 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a menu of manufactured provocations — staged attacks, faked casualties, a remotely destroyed aircraft — to justify invading Cuba. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and President Kennedy rejected it. The document was declassified in 1997.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1962–1996 · Soviet Union
Soviet workers struck over a simultaneous pay cut and food price rise. The army shot into the crowd, the bodies were buried in other cemeteries at night, and the survivors were made to sign silence pledges. The country did not learn of it until 1989.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1963–2026 · United States
A shape in a Polaroid taken at the instant John F. Kennedy was shot, identified in 1982 as a police officer firing from behind the fence on the grassy knoll. At that magnification the photograph contains no information at all.
Assassinations · 3 min
1963–1979 · United States
Two federal investigations reached different conclusions about whether there was a conspiracy, and the second was later undermined on the evidence that drove it. What remains genuinely open is not the ballistics but the conduct of the agencies that investigated.
Assassinations · 3 min
1964 · Vietnam / United States
A second North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in August 1964 became the basis for the resolution that authorised the Vietnam War. The attack did not happen. The NSA's own historians said so, in a study the agency kept classified for forty years.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1964–2002 · India / Himalayas
Twenty-five years and 458 papers on the geology of the Himalayas, built on fossils that came from other continents. The reconstruction of an entire mountain range's deep history had to be dismantled.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1965–1980 · United States
In the 1960s a sugar industry trade group paid Harvard nutrition researchers to write a review that shifted blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. The funding was not disclosed. The review shaped dietary guidance for decades.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1969–1970 · United Kingdom / United States
A rumour that Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced by a lookalike spread across American campus radio in 1969. McCartney is alive. The clues were found by people who had already decided to look.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1969–2024 · United States
The claim that Apollo was staged has been answered by evidence that does not depend on trusting NASA: lasers bounced off mirrors left on the Moon, rock samples that cannot be made on Earth, and photographs of the hardware taken by other countries' spacecraft.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1970–2021 · United Kingdom
In 2016 a former professional footballer described being abused by his youth coach. Within weeks hundreds of others came forward. An independent review found the clubs and the governing body had known for decades.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1970–2023 · Japan
Japan's most powerful talent agency was run for half a century by a man who abused the boys it recruited. A court accepted the allegations in 2004. Almost no broadcaster reported it until a foreign documentary in 2023.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1972–1974 · United States
A burglary at Democratic Party headquarters was traced to a covert unit operating from the White House, and the cover-up was recorded on tape by the president who ordered it. Watergate is the reference case: a conspiracy theory that was true and that was proved in public.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1973–1974 · United States
In August 1973 a child's voice came over citizens' band radio saying he was trapped in a crashed truck with his dead father. It was heard as far as California. One of the largest searches in American history found nothing.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1975–1976 · United States
For sixteen months in 1975–76 a Senate committee took testimony from intelligence officers under oath and published fourteen volumes of findings. It is the single document set that turned a category of American conspiracy theory into American history.
Government & Intelligence · 2 min
1975–1996 · Canada
Police in Newfoundland interviewed twenty-four boys in December 1975 and obtained confessions from two staff. The chief of police closed the file, the report was rewritten to delete the sex offences, and the Brothers were transferred. It took fourteen years to reopen.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1976–1984 · France / Italy / Switzerland
An Italian television repairman and a Belgian count sold the French state oil company a device that found oil from an aeroplane. It worked by drawing the answer the operators had already been given. The state hid the loss for seven years.
Finance & Economics · 3 min
1977–2007 · Global
Exxon's scientists modelled global warming accurately from the late 1970s. Their projections have held up. The company spent the following decades funding public doubt about the thing its own researchers had correctly predicted.
Finance & Economics · 3 min
1977–2024 · Global
Elvis Presley, Tupac Shakur, Jim Morrison, Michael Jackson and dozens of others have all been claimed to be alive. Each claim is anchored in documents and rests on an argument that no evidence can disturb.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1977–1979 · United Kingdom
Eighteen months of knocking, moving furniture and a gruff voice in a London council house in 1977. The children admitted to pranking. The investigators told them to take it back.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1978–2024 · United Kingdom
Two Englishmen in a pub decided in 1978 to make a flying saucer landing site with a plank and a rope. Thirteen years later they demonstrated the method to journalists. Crop circles are now commissioned as advertising.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1979–2024 · Global
A substance said to allow briefcase-sized nuclear weapons, traded on black markets since the late 1980s at millions of dollars a kilogram. It does not exist. The trade in it is real, and has been used as bait by security services.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1980–2022 · United States
A granite monument in rural Georgia carried ten precepts in eight languages, the first of which mentioned maintaining humanity under 500 million. It was commissioned anonymously in 1979 by a private individual. It was bombed in 2022 and demolished the same day.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1980–1995 · United States / Canada / United Kingdom
For more than a decade, therapists, police and prosecutors across the English-speaking world pursued a conspiracy of satanic cults abusing children in daycare centres. More than twelve thousand accusations produced no corroborated case. People went to prison anyway.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1981–2023 · Global
A chain email circulated from the 1990s attributing multiple sclerosis, lupus and blindness to a sweetener, and a corrupt approval to Donald Rumsfeld. The disease list is fabricated. The regulatory history is real, contested in public, and more interesting than the conspiracy version.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1982–2019 · United Kingdom
A list naming prominent British men as abusers at a south London guest house, and a witness the police called credible and true. The list came from a convicted fraudster and the witness was fabricating. The Metropolitan Police apologised.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
1983 · United States / Switzerland / Greece
A ten-million-dollar archaic Greek statue whose ownership history was fabricated. Whether the sculpture is ancient or the work of an unidentified forger of extraordinary skill has never been established.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1983–2024 · United States
A decommissioned radar station on Long Island is said to have hosted experiments in mind control, teleportation and time travel. The account comes from one man's recovered memories, and the sequel to a story that was already admitted to be invented.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1984–1988 · United States
A letter that rewrote the founding story of the Latter-day Saint movement, sold to collectors and to the church itself. Its author had made it. When exposure came close he killed two people with pipe bombs.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1985–1987 · United States / Iran / Nicaragua
The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, then an embargoed state sponsor of terrorism, and diverted the proceeds to fund Nicaraguan rebels whom Congress had explicitly prohibited it from funding. Both halves were illegal. Both were confirmed on the record.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1987–1990 · United States
A Florida building contractor produced the most-published UFO photographs of the 1980s. A model matching them was found in the attic of the house he had just sold.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
1987–2020 · Taiwan
A boat of Vietnamese refugees came ashore on a Taiwanese frontline island in March 1987. The garrison killed them. Martial law kept it out of the record until democratic Taiwan went looking.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1988–2024 · Global
The claim that shapeshifting reptilian beings occupy positions of power has produced no evidence of any kind. Its most influential version substitutes lizards for the cast of an older antisemitic conspiracy narrative, which is the most important fact about it.
Cults & Movements · 3 min
1989–2007 · United Kingdom
Bolton Museum paid £440,000 in 2003 for a 3,300-year-old Egyptian statue. It had been carved in a garden shed three weeks earlier. The family behind it had been selling forgeries since the 1980s.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1989–2021 · United Kingdom
Ninety-seven people were crushed to death at a football match in 1989. The force responsible rewrote its own officers' statements and briefed the press that drunken fans had caused it. It took twenty-three years to prove.
Historical Cover-ups · 4 min
1990–2024 · Global
The phrase describes something real when applied to states like Turkey, where a documented clandestine network operated inside the security services. Applied to the United States as a unified hidden authority, it fails: what exists is a large, slow, internally hostile bureaucracy that leaks constantly.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1991–2024 · Europe
A German writer proposed in 1991 that the years 614 to 911 were fabricated and never happened. Tree rings, eclipse records from three civilisations and Halley's Comet all disagree.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1992–2008 · Democratic Republic of the Congo / Global
The claim that HIV entered humans through a polio vaccine trialled in the Congo in the late 1950s. The vaccine was tested and was clean, and the virus is older than the trial.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1993–2024 · United States
HAARP is a real ionospheric research array in Alaska, once military-funded, now run by a university and open to visitors. The claim that it steers hurricanes and triggers earthquakes fails on the numbers by many orders of magnitude.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1993–2024 · United States
A circulating list attributes dozens of deaths to the Clintons. It is built by counting anyone who ever met them, over forty years, and treating each death as suspicious. Applied to any long career, the method produces the same result.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
1994–2015 · United States / United Kingdom
A drug trial in adolescents that failed on every one of its eight pre-specified measures was published as showing the drug was effective and well tolerated. Two million prescriptions a year followed.
Medicine & Public Health · 4 min
1994–2023 · Baltic Sea
852 people died when a Baltic ferry sank in 1994. Claims of a deliberate sinking to hide military cargo have circulated since. A concealment did occur, and it was not that one — which is why this entry is worth reading carefully.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1995–2024 · United States
An airport that opened sixteen months late and $2 billion over budget, decorated with strange murals and a demonic-looking horse, in the middle of the plains. Every element of the mythology has a mundane and checkable origin, most of them documented by the airport's own archives.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
1995–2024 · Global
A large planet supposedly on a collision course with Earth has had its arrival date moved at least a dozen times since 2003. If it existed at the distances claimed, it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1995–2024 · Latin America / United States
A blood-draining creature reported in Puerto Rico in 1995 and later across the Americas, sometimes attributed to secret government genetic experiments. The bodies keep turning out to be mangy coyotes. The first description came from a film.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1995–2024 · North Atlantic
The claim that White Star swapped a damaged sister ship for the Titanic and sank her for insurance is answered by the wreck. The yard number stamped on the parts is Titanic's. The insurance would also have lost the company money.
Historical Cover-ups · 2 min
1996–2024 · Global
Aircraft exhaust contains water vapour. At altitude, in humid enough air, it forms ice clouds that persist and spread. The variation people notice tracks humidity, not policy — and the atmospheric chemists best placed to detect a covert programme report finding none.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1996–1998 · United States
A physicist submitted a paper arguing that quantum gravity is a social construct. A leading cultural-studies journal published it. He announced the same day that every scientific claim in it was invented.
Media & Technology · 3 min
1997–2024 · Germany / Poland
A secret Nazi device said to have produced anti-gravity or time-distortion effects. Every account traces to one 1997 book, whose evidence is a transcript its author says he was allowed to read but not keep.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
1998–2017 · United States
Penn State officials knew of a 2001 report about Jerry Sandusky and decided among themselves not to tell anyone outside the university. Their emails describing that decision are why this is a confirmed cover-up rather than a failure of memory.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
1998–2005 · United States
A leaked internal document set out a twenty-year plan to replace scientific materialism with theistic science. A federal judge, examining the drafts of the movement's textbook, found creationism with the word swapped out.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1998–2024 · Global
The claim originates in a twelve-child study that was retracted, whose author was found to have manipulated the data and to have been paid by litigants. Cohort studies since have followed millions of children and found nothing. Measles came back anyway.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1999–2001 · United States
For two years an online community followed a teenager's illness and grieved her death. She had never existed. The people who worked it out did so by asking for an address to send flowers.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
1999 · Canada / United Kingdom / Australia / New Zealand / Ireland
The belief that statute law binds you only if you consent, and that a secret second legal person created at your birth is the thing the state actually taxes and prosecutes. The arguments are sold by seminar. They have never once worked.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2000–2009 · United States
An anonymous poster claimed in 2000 to be a soldier sent back from 2036 for an IBM 5100. He made dated, checkable predictions. They were wrong, and a single author was later identified.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2001–2008 · United States
The towers fell because fire weakened steel that was already carrying loads redistributed by the impacts. The specific claims — molten steel, free-fall, symmetrical collapse, thermite — have each been examined by structural engineers and answered. The unanswered questions about 11 September 2001 are political, not structural.
Government & Intelligence · 4 min
2001–2015 · Global
In 2013 a contractor removed and published documents showing the NSA was collecting the telephone records of essentially every American, tapping the private links between Google and Yahoo data centres, and running a global content-collection system. The government confirmed the programmes rather than denying them.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2001 · Saudi Arabia / United States
Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. Two men connected to the Saudi state met the first two to arrive and helped them settle in San Diego. Whether that was hospitality or tasking has never been established.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2001–2006 · Czech Republic / Iraq / United States
The claim that the lead 9/11 hijacker met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001 — the single most-cited link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks. It came from one informant, and it does not survive Atta's paper trail.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2001–2005 · United States / Iraq
Aluminium tubes intercepted en route to Iraq were presented as evidence of a reconstituted nuclear programme. The government's own nuclear laboratories said they were for artillery rockets. The public case did not mention that.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2002–2024 · United States
People report fibres emerging from their skin, along with crawling sensations and lesions, and are told by doctors that no infection is present. The distress is genuine and the condition is recognised clinically. What is not supported is the claim that a pathogen is being covered up.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2004–2024 · United States
The Pentagon confirmed in 2017 that it had been studying unidentified objects encountered by military aircraft, and released the videos. A minority of cases remain genuinely unexplained. The separate claim that the US holds crashed alien vehicles has been investigated and found unsupported.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
2004–2005 · United States
Six memos said to be from George W. Bush's National Guard commander, aired by CBS two months before the 2004 election. Within hours the typography was being taken apart online. Within two weeks CBS had abandoned them.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2004–2016 · United States
A claim that Barack Obama concealed being Muslim ran through two presidential campaigns and, at its peak, was believed by nearly a fifth of Americans. The record was never in doubt. The claim's function was never really about religion.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2005–2016 · United States
Six days after Katrina, police shot six unarmed people on a New Orleans bridge, killing two. Then they built a false narrative to justify it — a planted gun, a fictitious witness, a report written to fit.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2005–2024 · Bosnia and Herzegovina
A businessman announced in 2005 that hills near Visoko were the world's oldest and largest pyramids. Geologists identified them as natural flatirons. The excavation has damaged a genuine medieval royal town on the same hill.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
2005–2006 · United States
For 132 days a Wikipedia biography stated that John Seigenthaler had been suspected of involvement in both Kennedy assassinations. He had been Robert Kennedy's assistant and a pallbearer at his funeral. One man wrote it to amuse a colleague.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2006–2023 · Global
A solution that becomes chlorine dioxide when mixed as instructed, sold as a cure for HIV, cancer, malaria, autism and COVID-19, with the claim that regulators suppress it because it is cheap. People have died. Its distributors were convicted.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2006–2015 · Global
Volkswagen installed software in eleven million diesel cars that detected when a vehicle was being emissions-tested and turned on pollution controls only for the test. On the road the same cars emitted up to forty times the legal limit. It ran for seven years.
Finance & Economics · 3 min
2007–2024 · Global
A proposal that a comet struck the northern hemisphere 12,900 years ago, ending the Clovis culture. The key evidence has not replicated. The claim that archaeology suppresses it is refuted by the literature arguing about it.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
2009–2020 · United States
A homemade balloon drifted across Colorado in 2009 while news channels reported a six-year-old was aboard. He was in the attic. Both parents pleaded guilty to offences arising from staging it, and both were pardoned eleven years later without conceding they had.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2009–2012 · United Kingdom / United States
Thousands of emails stolen from a British climate research unit weeks before the Copenhagen summit, presented as proof that the temperature record was fabricated. Eight inquiries found no fabrication. The phrases that made the story famous meant something other than what they were said to mean.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
2009 · European Union / Czech Republic
A sculpture commissioned for the Czech EU presidency was presented as the work of one artist from each member state. All twenty-seven were invented, complete with fake biographies. Three people made the whole thing.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2009–2024 · Global
Large numbers of people share the same false memory. That much is true and has been demonstrated in the laboratory for decades. The claim that this indicates timeline manipulation is answered by the fact that psychologists can create the effect deliberately.
Pseudoscience · 3 min
2009 · United States
Red lights over New Jersey in 2009 drew police, news crews and a television investigation. Two men had tied road flares to helium balloons, five times, and were recording the response as an experiment.
Space & Aviation · 3 min
2010 · Georgia
In March 2010 a Georgian channel broadcast a report that Russian tanks were advancing and the president was dead. It was a simulation, aired with almost no warning, two years after a real Russian invasion.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2010–2019 · United States
The claim that Hillary Clinton sold a fifth of American uranium to Russia for donations. The committee that approved it has nine members, she was not the one who sat on it, and the uranium cannot legally leave the country.
Finance & Economics · 3 min
2011 · Syria / United Kingdom
During the Syrian uprising a blog by a gay Syrian woman drew international attention, and her reported abduction drew a campaign. She had been invented by a 40-year-old American man, using photographs of a woman in London who knew nothing about it.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2012–2022 · United States
Twenty children and six staff were murdered at an elementary school in Connecticut in December 2012. The claim that it was staged has been tested in open court twice and lost, and the families who brought those cases had spent a decade being hunted.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2014–2017 · United States
A 2014 magazine account of a gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity collapsed within months. A police investigation found no basis for it, and an outside review commissioned by the magazine called it an avoidable failure at every stage.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2014–2018 · United Kingdom / United States
A political consultancy obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users without their consent and sold psychological targeting to election campaigns. The data harvesting is documented and was penalised. Whether the targeting changed any votes is not established.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2014–2016 · United States
A celebrated study found that a short conversation with a gay canvasser durably changed minds on same-sex marriage. The data was invented. The finding was then partially vindicated by researchers who did the work properly — which is the part worth knowing.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2015–2020 · United States / Ukraine
The claim that Joe Biden forced out a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect his son's employer. The prosecutor's removal was allied policy, urged for the opposite reason, and the case in question was not active.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2016–2024 · Global
US diplomats and intelligence officers reported sudden, directional sensations followed by lasting symptoms, starting in Havana in 2016. Seven years of investigation produced two credible and incompatible readings of the same case files.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2016–2017 · United States
A claim that a Washington pizzeria housed a child trafficking operation in its basement was assembled from hacked emails in October 2016. Six weeks later a man drove 350 miles and fired an assault rifle inside the restaurant. There is no basement.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2016–2023 · United States
The claim that the FBI's Russia investigation was manufactured by officials to sabotage a candidate. Two adversarial reviews looked for the plot and did not find one. Both found significant misconduct of a different kind, which the claim tends to swallow.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2017–2024 · United States
A movement claiming that the US government replaced every bird with surveillance drones was invented on the spot in 2017 as a joke. Its founder has been explicit about this in interviews. It nonetheless acquired merchandise, rallies and billboards.
Modern Internet-Era · 2 min
2017–2022 · United States
An anonymous poster claiming high-level clearance promised a wave of mass arrests that never came. The movement is falsifiable in a way most conspiracy theories are not — it made specific predictions with dates — and it failed every one.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2017–2019 · United States
Three writers spent a year submitting deliberately absurd papers to humanities journals. Seven were accepted. What the exercise proves has been argued about ever since, largely because it was designed without anything to compare the result against.
Media & Technology · 3 min
2017–2018 · Puerto Rico / United States
Puerto Rico's official Hurricane Maria toll stood at 64 for eleven months. Independent researchers estimated thousands. The government fought the release of death records, lost, commissioned its own study, and revised the figure to 2,975.
Historical Cover-ups · 3 min
2017–2019 · United States
A president alleged in a Saturday-morning post that his predecessor had wiretapped his building before the election. The Justice Department subsequently told a court that no such records exist. The allegation nonetheless became the seed of a longer story.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2018–2019 · Global
A claim that a WhatsApp account with a grotesque avatar was instructing children to hurt themselves swept schools and news bulletins in early 2019. No verified victim was ever found. The warnings were the thing that spread.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2019–2021 · Global
A claim that 5G networks caused or spread COVID-19 circulated in early 2020 and led to more than a hundred arson attacks on telecommunications masts in Europe. Several of the burned masts were not 5G. One was serving a hospital.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2019–2024 · China / Global
Two hypotheses remain live: that SARS-CoV-2 entered humans through the wildlife trade, and that it escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan. Serious scientists hold both positions. The decisive early evidence sits in China and has not been released.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2019–2023 · United States
Epstein died in federal custody in August 2019 awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. The medical examiner ruled suicide. A pathologist hired by his family disputes it. An inspector general found the jail's failures so complete that verification is no longer possible.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2019–2024 · United States
An actor reported a racist and homophobic assault in Chicago in 2019. Detectives concluded he had paid two acquaintances to stage it. He was convicted, and the conviction was later thrown out over a broken plea agreement rather than over the facts.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2020–2022 · United States
New York published a nursing home death toll that excluded residents who died after transfer to hospital. The Attorney General found the real figure was about twice as high. The administration's own aide said the data had been held back.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
2021–2024 · United States
A claim that schools were providing litter boxes for pupils who identify as cats travelled from a Michigan school board meeting to the floor of state legislatures. Every named instance dissolved on contact. The one real thing underneath it is a school-shooting supply.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min
2022–2024 · Ukraine / Russia
Russia told the UN Security Council that the United States operated a military biological weapons network in Ukraine. The laboratories are real and their funding is published. What they do is upgrade the security of Soviet-era pathogen collections.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
2024 · United States
A secondhand Facebook post became a line in the 2024 presidential debate within three weeks. Springfield, Ohio had no such reports. The city then received dozens of bomb threats.
Modern Internet-Era · 3 min