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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
2002–2024 · United States
People report fibres emerging from their skin, along with crawling sensations and lesions, and are told by doctors that no infection is present. The distress is genuine and the condition is recognised clinically. What is not supported is the claim that a pathogen is being covered up.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min
1995–2024 · Global
A large planet supposedly on a collision course with Earth has had its arrival date moved at least a dozen times since 2003. If it existed at the distances claimed, it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky.
Pseudoscience · 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
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
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
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
1981–2023 · Global
A chain email circulated from the 1990s attributing multiple sclerosis, lupus and blindness to a sweetener, and a corrupt approval to Donald Rumsfeld. The disease list is fabricated. The regulatory history is real, contested in public, and more interesting than the conspiracy version.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 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
1950–2024 · North Atlantic
Lloyd's of London and the US Coast Guard both report no unusual loss rate in the area. The famous disappearances turn out to involve storms, fuel exhaustion, and in several cases ships that sank somewhere else entirely.
Pseudoscience · 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1889–2024 · United States
A small clay figure said to have come up from 320 feet down an Idaho well shaft in 1889, offered as proof of humans in the Pliocene. The depth is the whole claim, and the depth is unverified.
Pseudoscience · 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
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
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
1992–2008 · Democratic Republic of the Congo / Global
The claim that HIV entered humans through a polio vaccine trialled in the Congo in the late 1950s. The vaccine was tested and was clean, and the virus is older than the trial.
Medicine & Public Health · 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1998–2024 · Global
The claim originates in a twelve-child study that was retracted, whose author was found to have manipulated the data and to have been paid by litigants. Cohort studies since have followed millions of children and found nothing. Measles came back anyway.
Medicine & Public Health · 3 min