Category
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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