Verdict view
These are the entries that make the rest of this archive worth reading. Each one was, at some point, a claim that a reasonable person would have dismissed. Each one is now in the congressional record, a court judgment, or a declassified file.
The standard applied
Declassified records, sworn congressional testimony, court findings, or an admission by the responsible institution establish that a real conspiracy took place — coordinated action by multiple parties. A fabrication by a single author is DEBUNKED, however well documented: one person is not a conspiracy.
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
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
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
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
1985–1987 · United States / Iran / Nicaragua
The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, then an embargoed state sponsor of terrorism, and diverted the proceeds to fund Nicaraguan rebels whom Congress had explicitly prohibited it from funding. Both halves were illegal. Both were confirmed on the record.
Government & Intelligence · 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
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
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
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
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
1950–1969 · United States
In 1950 the US Navy sprayed bacteria over San Francisco from a ship offshore to model a biological attack. It was one of hundreds of open-air tests conducted over American cities for two decades. Residents were not told, then or for twenty-six years afterwards.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1973 · United States
For twenty years the CIA funded research into chemical and psychological control of human behaviour, including administering LSD to people who had not consented and did not know. Most of the files were destroyed on the director's order in 1973. What survived was enough.
Government & Intelligence · 3 min
1953–1957 · Global
To measure how much fallout from nuclear testing was ending up in human bone, the Atomic Energy Commission collected thousands of tissue samples — many from dead infants — from around the world, without telling the families. The programme's own transcripts record officials discussing the difficulty of obtaining bodies.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
1965–1980 · United States
In the 1960s a sugar industry trade group paid Harvard nutrition researchers to write a review that shifted blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. The funding was not disclosed. The review shaped dietary guidance for decades.
Medicine & Public Health · 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
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
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
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
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