Category
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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