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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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