Category
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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