Who decides what counts as a fact?
Not us, and not a headline. The evidence you can check for yourself decides. A government agency, a famous scientist, or a major news outlet stating that something is true is not, by itself, proof that it is true. It is a claim — and a claim is where an investigation begins, not where it ends.
What settles a question is evidence anyone can examine: a primary document, a measurement you can repeat, a physical object, a record that exists whether or not anyone believes it. When that evidence is overwhelming, we say so. When it is thin, contested, or missing, we say that too — and we do not pretend a question is closed when it is not.
Where our evidence comes from
Every entry is built from the strongest sources available, in this order of preference:
- Primary and official records — declassified files, court and government records, official reports, raw data.
- Peer-reviewed research — studies whose methods and data are open to scrutiny and repetition.
- Original texts — the actual book, letter, transcript or image a claim comes from, rather than a description of it.
- Reference works, for orientation only — useful for pointing you toward the primary material, never treated as the last word.
A news article reporting on any of these is a summary of the evidence, not the evidence itself. Wherever an entry can cite the document, the study, or the record directly, it does — and we treat no outlet's say-so, and no institution's, as proof on its own.
Nothing is dismissed
We take believers seriously. Every entry states the strongest, most honest version of the case for a theory before weighing it, because a case you have not stated fairly is a case you have not actually answered. All evidence is admitted and weighed on its merits; none is waved away because of who raised it. We do not mock, and we assume you are here to think, not to be told what to conclude.