Category
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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