Category File
Historical Conspiracies
238 documented theories filed under this subject. Showing the 120 most recently updated.
- Who Paid for the Scofield Reference BibleThe 1909 Scofield Reference Bible did more than any other book to make American evangelicals Zionists, and a claim circulating since 1988 holds that a Zionist financier paid for it. The claim's author wrote "we assume"; the club's own membership book, the project's own historian and the dates all point elsewhere. The interesting part is the thirty-eight-year chain by which an assumption became a citation.
- Rush Limbaugh Is Jim MorrisonJim Morrison died in Paris on 3 July 1971 and no autopsy was performed, which is the gap every survival story about him is built in. This one holds that he staged the death and resurfaced as Rush Limbaugh — who was sixteen that year, and already on the air in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, under the name Rusty Sharpe.
- Ruby RidgeThe rules the FBI snipers were given at Ruby Ridge said deadly force “can and should be employed” against any armed adult male seen before a surrender announcement — and a Senate subcommittee later called them unconstitutional on their face. Over eleven days in August 1992 a fourteen-year-old boy, a deputy US marshal and a woman holding her infant were killed on a mountain in Idaho, over a warrant for missing a court date he had been given wrong.
- Project Cirrus and the Savannah HurricaneOn 13 October 1947 a US Air Force B-17 dropped 180 pounds of crushed dry ice into a hurricane off Florida. Two days later the storm, having turned 135 degrees and strengthened, came ashore at Savannah — and the Nobel laureate who ran the experiment told the public he was 99% sure the seeding had done it.
- The Sandy Hook Crisis Actors TheoryFamilies of the victims and an FBI agent won defamation judgments against Alex Jones, left in place on appeal. The claim they sued over was that nobody died at Sandy Hook in December 2012 — that the children and staff were invented and the grieving parents were actors hired to sell gun control.
- The Jonestown Massacre & Mind Control (1978): The MK-Ultra ConnectionThree weeks after the deaths, a House committee demanded every document ten federal agencies held on Peoples Temple. The CIA and NSA replies are printed in the appendices of its report. The theory holds that Jonestown was an intelligence experiment in behavioural modification, that Jim Jones was a CIA asset, and that the deaths were carried out by an outside execution team.
- The Phantom Time HypothesisThe ten-day correction in the Gregorian reform of 1582 was calculated from the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, not from 45 BC. That is the hinge the whole theory turns on. Heribert Illig’s claim is that nearly three centuries of the Early Middle Ages never happened, inserted into European history through falsified chronology and forged records.
- Spirit Radio (Tesla)The claim began with Tesla himself: at his Colorado Springs station in 1899 he reported receiving rhythmic impulses he believed were not terrestrial. What later theory added was a destination and a motive — deliberate signals from Mars, and governments or rival inventors playing the event down afterwards.
- Titanic Insurance FraudThe official record attributes the sinking to iceberg damage, and later inquiries and wreck analysis reinforced it. The fraud theory holds that White Star, or the interests behind it, used the loss of the liner to recover insurance money, conceal prior damage, or clear a costly asset off the books.
- The Gemstone FileBruce Porter Roberts died in July 1976, a year after the Skeleton Key began circulating — he was never publicly questioned about it. The letters attributed to him assemble a single hidden history of the twentieth century, linking Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, the CIA, the Mafia and Watergate into one continuous system of covert rule.
- Titanic Was Secretly Swapped with RMS OlympicIdentifying features on the wreck on the seabed confirm that the ship which sank in 1912 is Titanic. The switch theory holds that White Star sent her damaged sister Olympic out under Titanic’s name to be lost for the insurance, after a collision in 1911 left her an expensive liability.
- The C RockThe original photograph has no C on it. The letter shows up only in a later-generation print, where it behaves like a hair or a fibre lying on the copy — and the picture is from Apollo 16 in 1972, not the Apollo 11 landing the claim is usually attached to.
- The Business PlotA House committee found Smedley Butler credible, reported that the approach he described had been discussed, and nobody was ever prosecuted. In 1934 the retired Marine Corps major general testified under oath that a bond salesman acting for wealthy backers had tried to recruit him to march on Washington and reduce Roosevelt to a figurehead.
- The Priory of SionThe Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogues Pierre Plantard as the inventor of the Priory of Sion, in 1956. The forged dossiers behind the legend of a thousand-year order guarding the bloodline of Jesus sit in the national library, filed under the pseudonym the two men who wrote them shared.
- The Crop CirclesIn 1991 two men from Southampton said they had been flattening wheat for thirteen years with a plank, a rope and a wire sight on a baseball cap. To prove it they made a circle in front of journalists and invited Britain's best-known crop circle researcher to examine it. He pronounced it genuine.
- The Crystal SkullsCarved quartz skulls said to be Aztec or Maya, credited with healing, prophecy and a role in the end of the world. Not one has ever come out of a documented excavation. Under an electron microscope they carry the circular grooves of rotary grinding wheels, and the Smithsonian's was worked with a synthetic abrasive that did not exist before the 1890s.
- Project CamelotIn 1964 the US Army paid several million dollars for a study of how societies come apart, run out of a research office at American University and staffed with eminent sociologists and economists. Chile was to be the first field site. When Chilean academics learned who was funding it, the government lodged a diplomatic protest and the project was cancelled within a year. None of this is alleged — it is the documented reason a generation of social scientists stopped trusting their own funding.
- The Death of Gareth WilliamsA GCHQ codebreaker seconded to MI6 was found dead in August 2010, naked inside a sports bag padlocked from the outside, in the bath of his London flat. The key was inside the bag beneath his body. A coroner found he was probably killed unlawfully. Eighteen months later the Metropolitan Police concluded he had probably locked himself in by accident. Both findings stand.
- The Murder of Georgi MarkovA Bulgarian defector broadcasting for the BBC felt a jab in his thigh on Waterloo Bridge in September 1978 and turned to see a man picking up an umbrella. He died four days later of ricin poisoning, delivered by a platinum-iridium pellet the size of a pinhead. Bulgaria's own prosecutors called it murder and closed the file in 2013 without charging anyone — the sixteen folders of secret-police records on him had been destroyed as Communism ended.
- The Assassination of Olof PalmeSweden's prime minister was shot dead on a Stockholm street in February 1986, walking home from the cinema with his wife and no bodyguards. One man was convicted and acquitted on appeal. The weapon has never been found. In 2020 prosecutors named a dead man as the killer and closed the case — and in December 2025 the prosecution service said he should never have been named, while leaving the case closed.
- The Phoebus CartelIn December 1924 the world's largest lightbulb manufacturers met in Geneva and agreed to fix the life of an incandescent bulb at 1,000 hours, with a Swiss laboratory to test compliance and fines for anyone whose bulbs lasted too long. The cartel is documented and the fines were real. The popular version — that they suppressed an everlasting bulb — runs into a problem from physics that is worth understanding, because it is what makes the actual offence legible.
- The Katyn Cover-UpIn the spring of 1940 the NKVD shot some 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and professionals and buried them in mass graves. For fifty years the Soviet Union said the Germans had done it, and produced a commission of its own to prove it. What is less often told is that Poland's wartime allies knew better and helped keep it quiet, and that American records confirming as much were not declassified until 2012.
- The Zinoviev LetterFour days before the 1924 general election the Daily Mail printed what it said was an instruction from Moscow to British communists to subvert the armed forces. Labour lost, and the letter was blamed for it. No original has ever been found. In 1998 the Foreign Secretary commissioned his own department's historians to settle the question, and their report concluded it was a forgery — probably the work of White Russians in Latvia rather than of British intelligence.
- Propaganda DueIn March 1981 Italian police searching a villa in Arezzo found a list of 962 names: three cabinet ministers, the heads of all three Italian intelligence services, generals, magistrates, bankers, journalists and a property developer named Silvio Berlusconi. They were the membership of a masonic lodge that had been operating without a charter for five years. The list is not in dispute. What the lodge was actually doing with its members is where the argument starts.
- The Gleiwitz IncidentOn the evening of 31 August 1939 seven SS men in Polish uniforms seized a German radio transmitter near the Polish border, fired shots, and left two bodies behind — one of them a Silesian farmer arrested the day before and killed for the purpose. Germany invaded Poland the next morning, citing Polish aggression. Almost everything known about how it was staged comes from the affidavit of the man who ran it.
- The Simonini LetterIn August 1806 a letter reached the Abbé Barruel from a man claiming to have infiltrated the Jewish community of Piedmont, telling him that the Freemasons and the Illuminati had both been founded by Jews who intended to take Europe. Barruel declined to publish it and circulated it privately instead. The letter is one of the earliest recognisable statements of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy, and almost everything about its origin is contested.
- The Doctors' PlotOn 13 January 1953 Pravda announced that nine Kremlin physicians had been arrested for murdering Soviet leaders on behalf of American intelligence and what it called international Jewry. The arrests were real, the confessions were extracted under torture, and the plot was manufactured. Seven weeks after Stalin died the state quietly exonerated everyone and shot the investigator who had built the case.
- The Lavon Affair and Operation SusannahIn July 1954 an Israeli military-intelligence cell planted firebombs in Egyptian post offices, American libraries and a British-owned cinema, intending the attacks to be read as the work of Egyptians. The operation is not in dispute; Israel honoured the surviving operatives in 2005. What has never been settled is who authorised it, and the inquiry into that question brought down a defence minister, a prime minister and eventually Ben-Gurion himself.
- Oklahoma City: The Unresolved QuestionsThe conspiracy literature around the 1995 bombing mostly does not dispute that Timothy McVeigh did it. It disputes whether he did it alone, and whether anyone knew beforehand. Those questions survive because the official record contains real loose ends — a second suspect the FBI hunted and then unhunted, and an ATF informant who spent months reporting that people at a specific compound were discussing bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City.
- Fomenko's New ChronologyA distinguished Russian mathematician argues that written history begins around 800 AD, that antiquity is a forgery assembled in the sixteenth century, and that Jesus was a Byzantine emperor executed in 1185. Garry Kasparov helped carry it to a wide audience. The objections to it are unusually concrete, because the claim is testable.
- The 1561 Sky Battle Over NurembergOn an April morning in 1561 the people of Nuremberg reported spheres, crosses and rods fighting in the sky above the city for over an hour. A printer sold a woodcut of it within weeks. The sheet still exists, which is more than can be said for most of what gets cited as ancient evidence of visitors.
- Inslaw, PROMIS and the OctopusTwo federal courts found that the Justice Department took a small company's software by trickery, fraud and deceit. A House committee spent three years agreeing with them. The Department investigated itself and found nothing. In the middle of it a freelance writer who called the whole thing the Octopus was found dead in a hotel bathtub.
- The Vatican Created IslamA claim that the Catholic Church built Islam as an instrument to capture Jerusalem, and that Muhammad's first wife was a nun acting under a bishop's instructions. It reached a very large audience through comic tracts in the 1980s, and it traces to the testimony of one man whose account of his own life was investigated in 1981.
- The Jesuit Plot to Kill LincolnA former Catholic priest spent the last fifteen years of his life arguing that Rome ordered Lincoln's murder and that John Wilkes Booth was a Jesuit instrument. The case rests almost entirely on one Illinois slander suit in 1856, and the court record of that suit describes something quite different from what he wrote about it.
- Black Panther Fred Hampton HitThis theory held that Fred Hampton was not killed in a lawful police raid gone wrong, but deliberately assassinated in his bed through coordinated action by the FBI and the Chicago police. Unlike many conspiracy claims, the documentary core here is unusually strong. Federal records, later court proceedings, and archival releases established that the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation targeted Hampton, that informant William O’Neal supplied a floor plan of the apartment, and that police fired overwhelmingly more shots than the Panthers. The legal settlement in 1982 did not formally admit guilt, but the accumulated documentary record made “assassination” the dominant historical interpretation in scholarship and public memory.
- The Roswell Incident (1947)The Roswell Incident became the foundational modern UFO conspiracy in the United States. It centers on the July 1947 recovery of unusual debris near Roswell, New Mexico, followed by contradictory military statements and later claims that the wreckage was not from a balloon project at all, but from an extraterrestrial craft. In the strongest version of the theory, military personnel also recovered nonhuman bodies and then concealed both the craft and the occupants behind a weather-balloon explanation. The event gained lasting force because it combined a real military recovery, a documented same-day shift in public explanation, later secrecy around classified balloon programs, and decades of witness recollections that expanded the story from debris recovery into a full crash-retrieval narrative.
- Hitler and the Occult GrailMost of what circulates about the Nazi Grail hunt traces to a 1972 book whose author said his source was Walter Stein — then said he had reached Stein through a medium, after Stein was dead. The real Otto Rahn is a stranger and sadder story.
- Hitler and Eva Braun's ChildA theory that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun secretly had a child, often described in one prominent postwar rumor as a son born on 31 December 1938, whose existence was concealed from the German public and later managed through clandestine relocation. Some variants claimed the child was hidden in Europe; others extended the story by alleging he was smuggled to the United States under a new identity. The theory grew from the secrecy surrounding Hitler’s private life, postwar disinformation, and the public appetite for hidden heirs of notorious leaders.
- Censorship and the TruthThis theory claimed that postwar news in the United States and allied information systems was not merely influenced by military priorities but effectively scripted from above, with the Pentagon serving as the shorthand symbol for a wider defense and intelligence information apparatus. In its strongest form, the allegation held that newspapers, radio, newsreels, and later broadcasters transmitted an approved reality rather than reporting independent facts. The theory drew energy from several documented histories: wartime censorship under Byron Price’s Office of Censorship, immediate postwar disputes over whether censorship functions should survive into the occupation period, the growth of psychological warfare planning, and later revelations about covert state interest in shaping media environments. The “100 percent scripted” form is the conspiratorial absolute built on top of those real mechanisms.
- Barbie and the Anorexia PlotThe Barbie and the Anorexia Plot is the belief that Barbie’s body proportions were not merely stylized toy design but part of a deliberate long-term program to normalize unhealthy thinness, distort female self-perception, and weaken American women physically and psychologically. In this theory, the doll is treated as a cultural delivery mechanism for bodily frailty.
- NASA and the Biblical GiantThe NASA and the Biblical Giant theory claims that lunar missions uncovered the preserved body of a giant humanoid identified in some retellings as a Nephilim. According to the theory, photographs, samples, and astronaut accounts were classified because the discovery would have linked modern space exploration to biblical prehistory and to forbidden evidence of ancient nonhuman-human hybrid beings.
- Loch Ness and the SonarThis theory claims that the sonar-linked underwater photographs associated with Robert Rines and 1975 Loch Ness expeditions were not merely overinterpreted images, but deliberately staged materials involving British naval or naval-adjacent technical assistance. In stronger versions, sonar returns, underwater strobes, and murky “full body” images are said to have been orchestrated to create the illusion of a scientifically validated monster, either as a publicity maneuver, a psychological experiment, or a naval cover story. The public record confirms that sonar-linked underwater imaging work at Loch Ness produced famous 1972 and 1975 images. Later scientific and skeptical commentary argued that the photos were ambiguous, retouched, or examples of pareidolia. The public record does not establish British Navy staging of the 1975 images.
- Winston Churchill and the Titanic: The Ship That Was Found to Hide the GoldThis phrase appears to be a later hybrid of two older maritime conspiracy traditions rather than a single original theory. One strand is the long-running claim that Titanic carried hidden gold bullion. The other is the better-known allegation that Winston Churchill or the British government deliberately exposed the Lusitania to danger for wartime reasons. In hybrid form, these stories are collapsed into a claim that Churchill-era authorities manipulated the Titanic narrative, cargo story, or later wreck interest in order to conceal gold. The historical record does not support a large gold shipment on Titanic, and Churchill-related conspiracy scholarship primarily concerns Lusitania, not Titanic.
- The Mechanical SoldierA rumor of the late interwar period that the U.S. Army or military engineers were developing a humanoid “mechanical soldier,” often described in sensational retellings as a steam-powered or armored man, for use in the next war. The theory fused older nineteenth-century “steam man” imagery with newer twentieth-century ideas of robots, remote control, mechanized infantry, and the hope that machines might take over battlefield labor or killing.
- The Kidnapping of ShergarShergar won the 1981 Epsom Derby by ten lengths, the widest margin in the race's history, and was retired to stud in County Kildare at a syndicated valuation of about £10 million. On the evening of 8 February 1983 armed men took him from the Ballymany Stud. Ransom demands followed and collapsed within days. No trace of the horse has ever been confirmed, nobody has been charged, and the most widely accepted account — that the IRA took him to raise funds — rests largely on the testimony of former members.
- The Dyatlov Pass (Revisited 2013) Infrasound Weapons TheoryA revived Dyatlov Pass theory arguing that the 1959 hikers were killed or driven into fatal panic by infrasound weapons tied to a hidden Soviet-remnant or military research network. The 2013 revival reframed natural infrasound ideas into a more overtly weaponized narrative in which acoustic or resonance technology caused terror, disorientation, and flight from the tent.
- The Japanese and the Submarine Aircraft CarriersA wartime secret that sounded implausible enough to resemble a rumor: Imperial Japan really did build giant submarines capable of carrying aircraft in a watertight hangar, surfacing to assemble and launch them before submerging again. The most famous were the I-400-class boats, designed for very long-range surprise attacks and fitted to carry Aichi M6A1 Seiran attack aircraft.
- The HMS Sheffield MysteryClaims that the 1982 sinking of the British destroyer by an Argentine missile involved a failure of "secret" IFF codes or deliberate sacrifice to harden public resolve.
- The Philadelphia ExperimentAn alleged U.S. Navy experiment in 1943 in which the destroyer escort USS Eldridge was supposedly rendered invisible and teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia, with horrific effects on the crew — a story widely regarded as a hoax but enduring in popular culture.
- John TitorAn early-internet time traveler figure who appeared online in 2000–2001 claiming to be a U.S. military man from 2036, sent back to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer and warning of civil conflict, worldline divergence, and a coming nuclear war.
- Shoot-to-Kill and the Stalker AffairSix men were shot dead by RUC units in County Armagh over six weeks in late 1982. The English detective sent to investigate was removed from the inquiry before he could finish it, and the government later announced that no officer would be prosecuted, citing national security.
- Cultural MarxismThe claim that a group of German philosophers wrote a plan to destroy Western civilisation, and that everything since is the result. The Frankfurt School was real; the plan is not something its members wrote. The phrase in this sense is traceable to a LaRouche-movement essay of 1992, and the historian of the School describes it as a recycling of a Weimar-era charge.
- Was the 2000 Florida Recount Engineered?An election decided by 537 votes, a purge list that removed eligible voters, a ballot design that invalidated thousands, and a court that stopped the counting. Whether that adds up to a stolen election or a broken one is still argued from the same documents.
- The Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.The common framing of this case is wrong in a way that makes it less interesting than it is. The official position has not been that James Earl Ray acted alone since 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations found a likelihood that he killed Dr. King as a result of a conspiracy — a segregationist bounty out of St. Louis, not a government plot. The FBI's campaign against King is documented in detail and needs no exaggeration. What separates the two is the question the record keeps returning to.
- Did Roosevelt Know Pearl Harbor Was Coming?The claim that Franklin Roosevelt saw the attack coming and let it happen has been argued since the smoke cleared in 1941. It has been made by congressmen, admirals and archive researchers, and rejected by most historians who have checked the same files. What survives the checking is narrower and stranger than the theory: Washington did hold intelligence it never sent to Hawaii, and four separate official findings say so.
- The McCollum MemoOn 7 October 1940 Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, who ran the Far East desk at the Office of Naval Intelligence, wrote a memorandum listing eight actions the United States could take against Japan. It closed with the observation that if these measures led Japan to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. Reported to have been declassified in 1994 and popularised by Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit in 1999, it is the central document in the claim that Roosevelt engineered Pearl Harbor. Most historians read it as a case for deterrence.
- The Hindenburg Sabotage (1937)Sixty-two of the ninety-seven people aboard the Hindenburg survived, which is the first thing the newsreel makes you forget. The sabotage theory has a named suspect, and he was named twenty-five years later by an author who then sued a film studio over him and lost.
- The Bolshevik Treasure EscapeThree men connected to Communist Party finances died in falls from their own windows within eight weeks of the failed coup. The Yeltsin government then hired an American investigation firm to find the money, and never published what it found.
- The Gold in the PhilippinesA Honolulu jury put a number on Yamashita's gold in 1996: twenty-two billion dollars, against the estate of Ferdinand Marcos. Two years later the Hawaii Supreme Court threw that figure out as unprovable while leaving the rest of the verdict standing.
- Who Ordered the St Valentine's Day Massacre?Seven men were machine-gunned in a Chicago garage in 1929. Everyone knows Al Capone did it, and nobody was ever tried. He was not questioned, the murder weapons surfaced in another state, and the fullest account came from an informant most historians only half believe.
- Did Rome Invent Jesus? The Flavian ThesisJoseph Atwill argued in 2005 that the Gospels were composed by associates of the Flavian emperors as a pacification tool, and that Josephus left the key in his own history. Biblical scholars, including mythicists who share his conclusion about Jesus, have largely rejected the method.
- What Was Taken Out of the Bible?A King James Bible printed in 1611 contains fourteen books that a King James Bible printed today does not. Verses that appear in older English Bibles now sit in brackets or in footnotes. The removals are real and documented — the disagreement is over who decided, and why.
- Andrew Johnson and the Lincoln AssassinationJohn Wilkes Booth left a calling card at the vice president's hotel on the afternoon of the assassination. The man assigned to kill Andrew Johnson never tried. Within two years a congressional committee was formally investigating whether Johnson had been part of the plot that made him president.
- The 1995 Paris Bombings and the Algerian Infiltration ClaimA bomb at Saint-Michel station killed eight people in July 1995, the first of a wave attributed to the Armed Islamic Group. Former Algerian intelligence officers later stated that the network's European organiser was their own agent, and that he was allowed to go home.
- Was the Fall of Ceaușescu Engineered?Romania's 1989 revolution was the only violent one in the Eastern Bloc. Television reported tens of thousands dead at Timișoara; the real figure was in the hundreds. Nobody was ever identified as the 'terrorists' who did most of the killing, and Romanian prosecutors have since called the uprising orchestrated.
- The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing and the Informant TapesAn FBI informant inside the circle that bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993 secretly recorded his own handlers. On the tapes he and an agent discuss a plan to substitute harmless powder for the explosives — a plan he says a supervisor vetoed.
- The Madrid Bombings and the ETA AttributionTen bombs on four Madrid commuter trains on 11 March 2004 killed 193 people. For three days the government insisted ETA was responsible while its own investigators followed a trail to an Islamist cell. A general election fell on the fourth day, and the government lost it. A court later found no evidence of ETA involvement — and no evidence of an external mastermind either.
- The 7/7 Official NarrativeFifty-two people were killed on London's transport network on 7 July 2005. The government's first account of how the four bombers travelled to the capital was wrong in a checkable way, and it took five years and a coroner's inquest before the fullest public examination of the day took place.
- The Nepalese Royal Massacre (2001)On the evening of 1 June 2001, nine members of Nepal's royal family were shot dead at a gathering in the Narayanhiti Palace, among them King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya. A two-man inquiry chaired by the Chief Justice reported thirteen days later that Crown Prince Dipendra had acted alone and had then shot himself. Dipendra died without regaining consciousness, having been technically king for three days while comatose. His uncle Gyanendra took the throne, and much of the Nepali public has never accepted the finding.
- The Murder of Pat FinucanePat Finucane, a Belfast solicitor who had represented republican clients, was shot fourteen times in front of his wife and three children on 12 February 1989 by a loyalist gang. The allegation that British state agencies had helped identify, target and arm his killers was treated as republican propaganda for two decades. In December 2012 Sir Desmond de Silva reported shocking levels of collusion involving the army, the police and MI5, and the Prime Minister apologised in the Commons. A public inquiry was announced in 2024.
- The Disappearance of Lord LucanOn the night of 7 November 1974 the children's nanny Sandra Rivett was beaten to death in the basement kitchen of a house in Belgravia. Lady Lucan was attacked shortly afterwards and named her estranged husband, the seventh Earl of Lucan, as her assailant. His car was found abandoned at Newhaven three days later. An inquest jury took thirty-one minutes to name him as Rivett's murderer, a verdict that led Parliament to remove coroners' power to do so. He was never found, and was declared dead in 2016.
- The Knights TemplarThe Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon were founded around 1119, became the medieval world's most sophisticated financial network, and were destroyed with extraordinary speed: mass arrests across France on Friday 13 October 1307, dissolution by papal bull in 1312, and the burning of the last Grand Master in 1314. The suddenness, the confessions extracted under torture and the missing treasury have supported eight centuries of claims that the order survived — in Scotland, in Freemasonry, or as the hidden origin of modern banking.
- George H. W. Bush in Dallas (1963)A memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover dated 29 November 1963 records that a briefing on the reaction of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami had been given to "Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency." The journalist Joseph McBride found it in 1988 and published it in The Nation during that year's presidential campaign. Bush, then vice president and running for the presidency, said it was a different man. A CIA employee named George William Bush was subsequently identified and swore an affidavit saying he was not the person referred to.
- Free-Energy SuppressionThe claim is that working devices producing more energy than they consume have been built repeatedly, and that each time the inventor has been bought off, discredited, raided or killed before the technology could reach the market. It is one of the oldest continuous strands in conspiracy culture, running from Tesla's wireless power through Thomas Henry Moray's radiant-energy receiver to Stanley Meyer's water fuel cell. The pattern it describes is real; what it requires of physics is a violation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics.
- Operation Ajax and the Regime-Change TemplateIn August 1953 the CIA and Britain's SIS removed Iran's elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh after he nationalised the country's oil. The agency denied it for sixty years, then in August 2013 released an internal history stating that the coup was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy. Guatemala followed in 1954. The documented record of those operations has since become the reference point for a much broader claim: that popular uprisings from Ukraine to Hong Kong are American productions rather than domestic events.
- The Nixon PardonGerald Ford became president on 9 August 1974 and pardoned Richard Nixon a month later, before any charge had been brought. The immediate suspicion was that the two things were connected — that Nixon had resigned in exchange for a promise. Ford went to Capitol Hill on 17 October 1974 and testified under oath that there had been no deal, the first sitting president to give sworn testimony to a congressional committee. Bob Woodward later reported that Nixon's chief of staff Alexander Haig had put a pardon among three options to Ford eight days before the resignation.
- The Great Fire of Rome (64 AD)Fire broke out near the Circus Maximus on the night of 18 July 64 AD and burned for six days, damaging ten of Rome's fourteen districts and destroying three. Nero was at Antium when it started. Rumour held that he had ordered it to clear ground for his palace, and that he had performed a song about the fall of Troy while the city burned. Tacitus, writing some fifty years later, records the rumour, records Nero's relief measures, and records that the emperor then fixed the blame on the Christians.
- The Death of Zachary Taylor (1850)President Zachary Taylor fell ill after a Fourth of July ceremony in 1850 and died five days later, at the height of the crisis over slavery in the territories. He was a southerner and a slaveholder who nonetheless opposed the compromise the South wanted, and his successor signed it within weeks. In 1991, on the strength of a case argued by the writer Clara Rising, his descendants and a Kentucky coroner agreed to an exhumation. Neutron activation analysis found no arsenic, and no lead or mercury either.
- The John Birch Society and "The Politician"Robert Welch founded the John Birch Society in 1958 on the premise that the United States government was already substantially under communist control. In a manuscript circulated privately to supporters and published in 1963 as The Politician, he wrote that President Eisenhower was a dedicated, conscious agent of the communist conspiracy, and extended the charge to Eisenhower's brother, to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, to CIA director Allen Dulles and to Chief Justice Earl Warren. William F. Buckley spent the early 1960s manoeuvring the Society out of the conservative mainstream.
- J. Edgar Hoover and the MafiaFor decades the director of the FBI maintained that there was no national crime syndicate, while devoting the Bureau's resources to communists, civil rights leaders and bank robbers. The position collapsed in November 1957 when New York State police stumbled on a meeting of around sixty mob leaders at Apalachin. The theory is that Hoover's blindness was purchased: that Frank Costello and Meyer Lansky held compromising material on him, a claim advanced most prominently by Anthony Summers in 1993 and never corroborated by any document.
- The Vatican Secret ArchivesFor centuries the papal archive carried a name that did most of the work: the Archivum Secretum Vaticanum. In the popular imagination its 85 kilometres of shelving hold suppressed gospels, evidence about Jesus, records of extraterrestrial contact and the largest collection of pornography on earth. In 2019 Pope Francis renamed it the Vatican Apostolic Archive, saying the Latin secretum had only ever meant private, and that the modern English sense had attracted needless misunderstanding. Access ends at the close of the Pius XII papacy in 1958.
- The USS Maine (1898)The battleship USS Maine blew up in Havana harbour on the evening of 15 February 1898, killing about 266 men. Within weeks the United States was at war with Spain. Four investigations have reached different answers: the 1898 Sampson board and the 1911 Vreeland board both found an external mine set off the forward magazines; Admiral Hyman Rickover's 1976 study concluded a coal bunker fire was the likelier cause; a 1998 National Geographic modelling study found the evidence could support either. No one has ever been shown to have placed a mine.
- Extraordinary Rendition and the Black SitesFor years the claim that the CIA was flying prisoners to secret prisons in allied countries and interrogating them under torture was treated as the province of activists and conspiracy writers. It was true. The Senate Intelligence Committee's 2014 study, drawn from 6.3 million pages of the Agency's own documents, established that 119 detainees passed through sites in Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Thailand, Afghanistan and elsewhere. The European Court of Human Rights has since ruled against three European governments for hosting them.
- Harold Wilson "KGB Spy" AllegationsClaims that the former British Prime Minister was a Soviet asset, leading to a reported MI5 plot to destabilize his government.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls SuppressionFound in caves at Qumran from 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were assigned to a small international editorial team that held exclusive access for four decades. By the late 1980s only a fraction had been published, and scholars outside the circle could not see the rest. Claims circulated that the delay was deliberate — that the texts contained something damaging to Christianity, with the Vatican often named. The monopoly broke in autumn 1991 when the Huntington Library opened its photographic archive to anyone who asked.
- The Chennault Affair (1968)In the closing weeks of the 1968 presidential race, Richard Nixon's campaign used the Republican fundraiser Anna Chennault as a back channel to South Vietnam's president Nguyen Van Thieu, urging him to stay away from Lyndon Johnson's Paris peace talks and wait for a better deal. Thieu withdrew on 29 October 1968. Johnson knew, because the FBI was wiretapping the South Vietnamese embassy, but said nothing publicly. H. R. Haldeman's handwritten notes, opened by the Nixon Library decades later, record Nixon directing that a monkey wrench be thrown into the talks.
- Operation Mongoose and "Elimination by Illumination"Operation Mongoose was the covert American programme to bring down Fidel Castro, running from November 1961 into early 1963 under Edward Lansdale, with Robert Kennedy driving it from the Special Group Augmented. Among the schemes considered was one to convince Cubans that the Second Coming was imminent and that Christ opposed Castro, with an American submarine surfacing offshore to fire starshells as the promised sign. It was never carried out. The Church Committee recorded it in 1975 in the words of a witness who found it absurd, along with the nickname somebody had given it.
- CIA Document 1035-960On 1 April 1967 the CIA's Chief of Clandestine Services sent a dispatch numbered 1035-960 to stations and bases worldwide, headed "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report". It instructed officers to raise the subject with friendly editors and politicians, to employ propaganda assets in answering critics, and it used the phrase "conspiracy theorists" for the people it wanted answered. The New York Times obtained it under FOIA in 1976. It is frequently cited as the moment the term was weaponised, though the phrase itself was in print decades earlier.
- Antony Sutton and the Dictatorial EliteBetween 1974 and 1976 the economist Antony C. Sutton, a former Hoover Institution research fellow, published three books arguing that the same concentration of American financial and industrial interests had underwritten the Bolshevik regime, the New Deal, and Nazi Germany — not out of ideological sympathy in any case, but because a managed political order is more profitable than a competitive one. The final volume closes with the question that has carried the argument ever since: is the United States ruled by a dictatorial elite? The commercial record Sutton assembled is largely documented and was investigated by the U.S. Senate at the time. What remains contested is whether it shows coordination or only convergence.
- The "Monitor" vs. "Merrimack" TreasonThis theory held that the famous ironclad clash at Hampton Roads was not simply an indecisive military encounter but a mutually useful spectacle manipulated by industrial interests. In its strongest form, the story claimed that speculators, shipbuilders, and iron or steel contractors quietly benefited from an inconclusive first duel that would guarantee huge naval contracts and continued investment in armored fleets. The documented record clearly shows that the battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (formerly Merrimack) revolutionized naval warfare and triggered an enormous new appetite for ironclad construction. What remains unproven is the claim that the battle itself was “fixed” by industrial speculators or arranged to maximize procurement.
- The Ponzi Government ConnectionThe Ponzi Government Connection was the belief that Charles Ponzi was not merely an independent swindler exploiting international reply coupons, but a disposable public face placed in front of a deeper fraud system tied to government institutions, postal mechanisms, or protected financial interests. In this theory, Ponzi’s notoriety served to isolate blame onto one flamboyant operator while shielding the larger machine that made the scheme possible. The historical record shows that Ponzi’s plan centered on a real international postal instrument—the international reply coupon—and that federal postal inspectors investigated the fraud. The conspiracy version turned those genuine institutional links into evidence that Ponzi was acting inside, or on behalf of, a government-connected pyramid structure.
- The "Astor" Fur MonopolyThis theory claims that John Jacob Astor, while building his fur empire, entered into private arrangements with British or British-Canadian interests that went beyond commerce and amounted to a hidden partition plan for North America. In the strongest version, Astor is said to have coordinated with British power brokers so that American and British elites would divide the continent between them, with the Pacific Northwest and interior fur country effectively forming the western half of a managed Anglo-American order. The documented history does show that Astor made private deals with British-Canadian fur traders, used commerce to advance territorial influence, and operated in the middle of real Anglo-American boundary disputes. What remains unproven is the specific claim that he personally negotiated a secret treaty to split the United States in half.
- The Lockerbie Bombing (Pan Am Flight 103, 1988)Alternative theories regarding the 1988 bombing of a Boeing 747, suggesting the official blame on Libya was a cover for Iranian or Syrian involvement.
- 9/11 Inside Job TheoriesA collection of conspiracy theories alleging that the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were either orchestrated or deliberately allowed by elements within the U.S. government to justify wars in the Middle East and expanded domestic surveillance powers.
- The Kensington SystemThis theory held that Victoria, Duchess of Kent, and Sir John Conroy were deliberately keeping the young Princess Victoria in an artificial world of dependency, isolation, and surveillance so they could rule through her as a puppet if she reached the throne young. The historical record clearly shows that an elaborate upbringing regime later called the “Kensington System” did exist, that it was designed by the Duchess and Conroy, and that it restricted Victoria’s independence in extreme ways. What remains more interpretive is whether the full intention was simple overprotection, personal domination, or an outright regency plot. Victoria herself believed it had been designed to break her will and keep her dependent.
- The Vela IncidentAn unidentified double flash of light detected by a U.S. satellite in 1979 near the Prince Edward Islands, widely believed to be a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test.
- The Stanislav Petrov IncidentA confirmed 1983 technical malfunction that nearly led to a full-scale Soviet nuclear retaliatory strike against the United States.
- The Qana 1996 Massacre AllegationsThe 1996 shelling of a UN compound in Lebanon, where accusations of a deliberate attack and a subsequent UN cover-up led to major international friction.
- Project Teapot & Target AppleA declassified series of 1955 nuclear tests that used a faked "Survival Town" and civil defense drills to measure the effects of atomic blasts on civilian infrastructure.
- Project SunshineA confirmed 1950s program that harvested tissue samples from deceased infants without parental consent to study the effects of nuclear fallout.
- Project AzorianA confirmed, massive CIA operation to recover a sunken Soviet submarine (K-129) from the ocean floor in 1974, famously using a front story involving billionaire Howard Hughes.
- Phoenicians in AmericaThe theory that ancient Phoenician mariners reached the Americas thousands of years before Columbus, allegedly suppressed by mainstream archaeology.
- Korean Air Lines Flight 007The 1983 shootdown of a South Korean airliner by Soviet forces, leading to theories that the plane was on a secret surveillance mission.
- K-129 and the Glomar ResponseThe confirmed secret recovery of a Soviet nuclear submarine and the birth of the legal phrase "I can neither confirm nor deny."
- The Franklin ScandalAn alleged high-level pedophile ring involving political figures in Omaha, Nebraska, in the 1980s.
- Dyatlov Pass IncidentThe mysterious 1959 death of nine hikers in the Soviet Ural Mountains, often attributed to secret military testing.
- Assassination of Patrice LumumbaA confirmed conspiracy involving Belgian and U.S. intelligence to overthrow and assassinate the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Congo in 1961.
- The 1969 Blackout (London)A theory linking late-1960s London and wider British power-cut anxiety to an alleged alien interference or takeover attempt. In conspiracy retellings, electrical disruption is treated not as infrastructure stress, labor conflict, or ordinary failure, but as evidence that nonhuman forces briefly engaged urban systems and were then explained away as routine outages.
- The Boston Marathon Craft Mercenaries TheoryA conspiracy theory alleging that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was not solely the work of the Tsarnaev brothers, but a security-drill event involving private contractors — especially individuals linked online to Craft International by their clothing and backpacks — that either went live or was later covered up.
- The Challenger Pre-PanicA conspiracy theory alleging that before the 1986 Challenger disaster, NASA and allied policymakers were already compromising shuttle safety in order to protect a larger political project — keeping the shuttle central to commercialization, military payload strategy, and eventual privatization of space access.
- The Columbine Third ShooterA conspiracy theory alleging that the 1999 Columbine High School massacre involved a third gunman — sometimes described as a trench-coated man on the roof or another unidentified accomplice — and that authorities narrowed the case to two shooters to support a political narrative about guns and school violence.
- The TWA 800 Missile TheoryA conspiracy theory alleging that Trans World Airlines Flight 800, which exploded off Long Island on July 17, 1996, was accidentally shot down by a U.S. Navy missile and that the subsequent fuel-tank explanation was a years-long cover-up.
- The 1980 Mount St. Helens Eruption as a Nuclear Deep-Drill TestA conspiracy theory alleging that the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens was not solely a volcanic event, but the result of a secret underground nuclear or deep-drilling experiment that destabilized the mountain and triggered the catastrophic blast.
- Gulf of Tonkin IncidentThe Gulf of Tonkin Incident refers to two reported confrontations between North Vietnamese naval vessels and the U.S. destroyer USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964. The first incident on A
- The British and the Hovercraft (1959)The British and the Hovercraft theory holds that Britain’s first successful hovercraft demonstrations were not the result of conventional engineering alone but of contact with, or access to, alien anti-gravity principles. In the theory, the craft’s ability to ride on a cushion of air was only the public explanation for a deeper propulsion breakthrough.
- The Kitchen Debate (1959)This theory claims that Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev were not truly arguing about kitchens, washing machines, and consumer abundance in Moscow on July 24, 1959. Instead, the confrontation is presented as a coded dispute over which bloc possessed the superior recovered or reverse-engineered alien technology, with the model kitchen serving as a public stage for a hidden technical rivalry.
- The Comic Book Code of 1948The Comic Book Code of 1948 theory holds that postwar anti-comics campaigns and the later formal Comics Code were never just about juvenile delinquency, horror, or crime. Instead, they are portrayed as a coordinated censorship effort meant to suppress stories, images, and ideas that hinted at hidden human potential, mutation, psychic ability, or real “super-human” lineages.
- The Suburban Stepford ProjectThe Suburban Stepford Project is the belief that the first true household robots were not publicly unveiled as machines, but were quietly tested in postwar suburbia beginning around 1949 under the guise of domestic modernization. In the theory, “Stepford” is treated not as a later fictional metaphor but as a coded memory of early robotic housewife experiments.
- The Telephone and the Voice-PrintThe Telephone and the Voice-Print theory claims that governments were not merely capable of wiretapping individual suspects, but had moved toward systematic recording and indexing of calls by voice from the mid-1940s onward. In many versions, 1946 marks the start of a permanent surveillance archive in which calls were captured, cataloged, and later searchable by vocal signature.
- The Great Lakes Sea MonsterThe Great Lakes Sea Monster theory holds that the region’s long-running lake-monster sightings were not encounters with a natural unknown species, but with a mutated military or wartime test animal released into the freshwater system. In most versions, the creature is described as the product of war-era experimentation, pollution, or biological tampering that survived and adapted in the lakes.