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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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