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Every conspiracy theory, laid out and weighed against the evidence.
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The archive →Remarks by the President in Apology for Study Done in Tuskegee
President Bill Clinton's formal apology, delivered to the study's surviving participants, calling what the U.S. government did 'deeply, profoundly, morally wrong.'
From the case file: The Tuskegee StudyFeatured case files
Browse all 974 →The Order of the Solar Temple, an apocalyptic neo-Templar society, killed dozens of its members in staged fires and ritual murder-suicides across three countries
The Order of the Solar Temple was a neo-Templar apocalyptic society founded in Geneva in 1984 by Joseph Di Mambro, a French esotericist with a fraud record, and Luc Jouret, a charismatic Belgian homeopath. It blended Knights Templar mythology, Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, and New Age doctrine into a single system in which the world was nearing an apocalypse and the initiated could escape it by a 'transit': leaving their bodies to be reborn on a plane associated with the star Sirius. Between 30 September 1994 and 22 March 1997, roughly 74 members died in three waves across Switzerland, Quebec, and France, in a mix of murder and suicide staged around fire. This case file lays out what is established: the group, its leaders, its doctrine, the financial fraud and faked mysticism beneath it, and the forensic record showing that a large share of the deaths were killings, not chosen departures. The account is substantiated.
Read the case file →Roberto Calvi, "God's Banker," was murdered to bury the secrets of Banco Ambrosiano and the P2 lodge, not a suicide under Blackfriars Bridge
Roberto Calvi was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, once Italy's largest private bank, and was nicknamed God's Banker for his tangled dealings with the Vatican's own bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione. He was also a member of Propaganda Due (P2), a secret and illegal Masonic lodge run by Licio Gelli whose membership rolls, seized in 1981, read like a directory of Italian power. In June 1982 Banco Ambrosiano collapsed with debts of well over a billion dollars, Calvi fled Italy on a false passport, and on the morning of 18 June 1982 his body was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets weighted with bricks. A London inquest first ruled suicide; a second returned an open verdict; and years later an Italian forensic inquiry concluded he had been murdered and his body staged. This case file keeps two things apart: the bank failure, the P2 scandal, the two inquests, the exhumation and re-examination, and a Rome murder trial that ended in acquittals, all on the record; and the claim it rates, that Calvi was deliberately killed rather than a suicide.
Read the case file →Men in dark suits visit UFO witnesses to threaten them into silence, acting for a secret agency or as otherworldly agents in disguise
The Men in Black are among the most recognizable figures in UFO lore: pale, oddly dressed men in dark suits and hats who arrive after a sighting, seem to know things they should not, and warn the witness to keep quiet. The folklore is real and its history is traceable. It begins in 1953 with Albert Bender, a Connecticut man who ran a small saucer-research club and then abruptly shut it down, saying three men in black had frightened him into silence. The writer Gray Barker turned Bender's story into a 1956 book, and in the 1960s and 1970s John Keel wove the Men in Black into a wider paranormal mythology in which the visitors were not merely government agents but something stranger, robotic, out of place, not quite human. Keep two things apart: a piece of modern folklore with identifiable authors and a clear path of transmission, and the claim this file rates, that a real agency or alien intelligence is actually silencing witnesses. On the evidence the rated claim is unproven: no such organization has been shown to exist, the surviving accounts are anecdotal and sometimes demonstrably invented, and the eerie, mechanical details that define the classic Man in Black read as legend rather than as any plausible agent.
Read the case file →The 2025 New Orleans Bourbon Street truck attack was a coordinated plot or inside job whose real perpetrators are being concealed
In the early hours of 1 January 2025, a man drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing fourteen people and injuring dozens before he was shot and killed in a gunfight with police. An ISIS flag was in the vehicle. The FBI investigated and concluded he was inspired by the Islamic State and had acted alone. That is the record. Around it, a fog of conspiracy claims formed almost immediately: that a team of attackers was involved, that the whole event was staged, that evidence was being hidden, that it was tied to the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion the same morning, and, most corrosively, false narratives blaming immigrants or Israel. This case file keeps the record apart from those rated claims, explains the legitimate reasons early reporting was confused, and shows why the conspiracy layer does not hold. On those claims, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Israel, working through Morocco, engineered the July 2026 mass crossing into Ceuta to punish Spain for its criticism of the war in Gaza
On 30 July 2026, between 50,000 and 60,000 people crossed from Morocco into the Spanish city of Ceuta. Spain declared an emergency and at least 72 people died. The causes were on the public record within days: a Spanish Supreme Court ruling of 8 July that smuggling networks distorted and marketed, the state of Spanish-Moroccan relations, and a decade of pressure on Europe's asylum system. That is not the story that spread. Within hours, a false claim took hold that Israel had engineered the crossing, using Morocco as an instrument, to punish Spain for condemning the war in Gaza. Researchers at the Combat Antisemitism Movement's Antisemitism Research Center counted 173 high-impact posts from 119 named influencer accounts in the first 72 hours, generating 57.5 million views and an estimated reach of 103.1 million. The evidence offered was manufactured: a threat attributed to Benjamin Netanyahu that appears nowhere but the post that invented it, a claim of a Mossad admission sourced to a labelled parody account, and a statement invented for the actor Javier Bardem, who said no such thing. This file reports the claim as the antisemitic hoax it is. Both governments concerned have publicly contradicted it, no evidence for it exists, and its structure is a direct descendant of the Kalergi Plan and great replacement libels.
Read the case file →It really happened: stories that a satirical site published as jokes are circulating as reports of real events
In August 2026 two stories spread as news that had begun life as jokes. One said New York City's planned government-run grocery stores would serve anyone carrying a special mark on the hand or forehead, illustrated with the number 666. The other said Massachusetts Democrats had unveiled a statue of Molech, the deity the Bible associates with child sacrifice, outside the state Capitol. Snopes checked both and traced each to The Babylon Bee, a site that advertises itself as Christian news satire. Neither event happened. The interesting part is not that a satirical site published satire, it is what the two have in common: each takes a real and disputed policy argument and restates it as biblical prophecy, which is the form most likely to survive being stripped of its source. Research by Ohio State University found this is neither rare nor one-sided, with Babylon Bee stories among the most-shared inaccurate content in almost every wave of a six-month survey, and Onion stories fooling readers on the other side of the aisle. This file rates the circulating claims as false and does not take a view on the policies being satirised.
Read the case file →Browse by category
Ten fields of the strange, from declassified operations to cryptids and doomsday prophecy. Each hub collects its case files with the evidence and a verdict.
Government & Intelligence
256Covert operations, surveillance programs, and official cover-ups: the ones proven true in declassified files, and the ones that never happened. Where state secrecy meets public suspicion.
UFOs & Aliens
75Sightings, landings, and the long fight over disclosure, from documented military encounters to the claims that outran the evidence.
Unexplained Phenomena
52Strange lights, sounds, and events that resist easy answers. Some dissolve under scrutiny; a few stay genuinely open.
Cryptids & Monsters
82The creatures said to lurk at the edge of the map, and what a century of expeditions, hoaxes, and folklore actually turned up.
Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances
90Cold cases, vanishings, and deaths where the record runs out before the answer does. Handled with the evidence, and with care.
Lost History & Ancient Mysteries
73Lost civilizations, impossible maps, and the claim that the real past is being hidden. Where genuine wonder meets pseudoarchaeology.
Secret Societies & Power
81The clubs, banks, and families accused of quietly running the world, and the line between real elite influence and the imagined cabal.
Science, Space & Technology
112Health scares, hidden inventions, and fears about the tools reshaping daily life. What the evidence supports, and what it does not.
Doomsday & Prophecy
28Predicted apocalypses, overdue catastrophes, and the end that never quite arrives. Why the world keeps almost ending.
Hoaxes & Pop Culture
125Celebrity swaps, staged events, and the internet's favorite rabbit holes: the debunked, the tongue-in-cheek, and the surprisingly durable.
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