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1330 entries · by decade

Conspiracy theories arranged by the decade in which the alleged events took place.

2020s106 entries

2010s67 entries

2000s77 entries

1990s73 entries

1980s50 entries

1970s52 entries

1960s97 entries

1950s69 entries

1940s140 entries

1930s118 entries

1920s70 entries

1910s91 entries

1900s33 entries

1909Ancient Egyptian Artifacts Found in the Grand CanyonA hidden-history legend centered on a 1909 Arizona newspaper report claiming that a Smithsonian-linked expedition discovered a vast man-made cavern in the Grand Canyon containing mummies, hieroglyphs, statues, weapons, and relics of Egyptian or “Oriental” origin.
1909Grand Canyon Egyptian Cover-up (Continued)The Grand Canyon Egyptian Cover-up (Continued) theory extends the 1909 Arizona Gazette story alleging a Smithsonian-linked discovery of Egyptian-style artifacts, mummies, and chambers in the Grand Canyon. In its continued form, the theory claims that the story was not simply denied but physically buried: caves were blasted, entrances sealed, and access zones restricted in order to suppress evidence of a pre-Columbian Old World civilization in North America. The historical basis is the famous 1909 newspaper article and the later persistence of monument names such as Isis Temple and Tower of Ra in the Grand Canyon’s mapped landscape. The theory’s strongest version insists that denial was followed by destruction.
1909The "Grand Canyon" Egyptian ColonyThis theory claimed that the Grand Canyon concealed evidence of an ancient Egyptian or otherwise Old World colony, discovered in 1909 and then covered up by the Smithsonian or federal authorities. It originated in a front-page Arizona Gazette story about a supposed underground complex containing mummies, hieroglyphs, and “Oriental” artifacts. Although later research found no evidence that the expedition, discoverers, or excavation were real, the story became one of the most durable American hidden-archaeology legends of the twentieth century.
1909The "Hollow Earth" Pole Hole (1909)This theory claimed that Robert Peary’s 1909 polar expedition did not merely reach the North Pole or fail to reach it, but encountered evidence of the polar opening long predicted by hollow-earth believers. In its stronger forms, Peary was said to have found the entrance and then been paid or pressured into silence. The theory drew on a longstanding tradition of hollow-earth literature that imagined large openings at the poles, combined with the extraordinary symbolic weight of polar exploration and the fact that Peary’s claim itself was contested almost immediately.
1909The Income Tax SlaveryThis theory claims that the Sixteenth Amendment was never lawfully ratified and that the federal income tax was imposed through procedural fraud in order to bind Americans to permanent taxation, federal debt, and future war finance. It became especially visible in twentieth-century tax-protester movements, though it draws on much earlier hostility to income taxation and centralized federal revenue collection. The theory attaches particular significance to the year 1913, linking the Sixteenth Amendment, the Federal Reserve Act, and the approach of World War I into a single plot narrative.
1908The "Tunguska" Alien Crash (1908)This theory claimed that the Tunguska explosion in Siberia on 30 June 1908 was not a natural celestial event but the crash or impact of an artificial extraterrestrial object, often imagined in early sensational forms as a “Martian cannonball.” The theory grew out of the event’s extraordinary scale, the lack of an obvious crater, and the long delay before systematic investigation. Because early explanations were incomplete and the site remained remote, the event became a magnet for speculative interpretations long before a modern scientific consensus formed around an airburst.
1908The Model T as Anti-SocialThis theory argued that the automobile, and especially the mass-market Model T, was not simply a transportation device but a social weapon. It claimed that cars were designed to detach people from porches, sidewalks, and neighborly exchange and to reorganize everyday life around private movement and individual isolation. The theory drew energy from a very real early backlash against automobiles, which many critics saw as dangerous, arrogant, and disruptive to village life. Yet it also developed in tension with Ford-era rhetoric that celebrated the Model T as a machine that connected rural households and widened social horizons. The resulting theory treated social change not as an unintended consequence of the automobile but as its hidden purpose.
1907The "Boy Scouts" as a Secret MilitiaThis theory claimed that Robert Baden-Powell’s Scout movement was not principally a civic youth program, but a disguised military structure preparing boys for political or imperial use. In the strongest versions, the Scouts were described as a child army that could be mobilized for authoritarian or coup-like purposes inside Britain. The theory grew from Baden-Powell’s military background, the movement’s use of uniforms, drills, patrol structures, and scouting manuals, and the close historical relationship between youth discipline and imperial citizenship in the early twentieth century.
1907The Automatic Washing Machine Laziness PanicThe Automatic Washing Machine Laziness Panic was a moral panic rather than a strictly political conspiracy, built around the belief that labor-saving laundry technology would weaken discipline, domestic virtue, and the moral character of the United States. In this view, the automatic washer did not merely save work; it threatened to produce softness, dependency, and a household culture detached from effort and duty.
1907The Standard Oil Plastic PlotA theory that Rockefeller interests sought to replace traditional wood products with petroleum-based materials, creating dependence on oil not only as fuel but as the raw substance of modern life. The idea drew power from monopoly fears surrounding Standard Oil and from the real rise of synthetic materials, petrochemicals, and industrial substitutes during the early twentieth century.
1906Dreadnought as UselessA theory that the giant battleships launched after HMS Dreadnought were largely prestige objects rather than practical weapons, with more extreme versions claiming they were effectively hollow showpieces designed to impress taxpayers and intimidate rivals. The idea grew from the enormous cost of naval arms racing and the relatively limited number of decisive fleet engagements involving dreadnoughts.
1906Ordo Templi OrientisOrdo Templi Orientis, or O.T.O., is portrayed in conspiracy literature as far more than a modern occult fraternity. While the order publicly presents itself as a Thelemic initiatory and religious body organized around the Law of Thelema and a graded initiatory system, conspiracy theories recast it as a hidden transmission line for elite esoteric power, sexual-magical ritual, Templar and Masonic survivals, and covert influence stretching from Aleister Crowley into politics, intelligence, science, and culture. In that framework, O.T.O. is seen not simply as an occult order but as a node where ritual secrecy, symbolic inversion, and long-range social influence intersect.
1906The "San Francisco Earthquake" (1906) Dynamite PlotThis theory claimed that explosives used after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake were not primarily intended to stop the fire, but were used to destroy buildings in ways that benefited insurers, owners, speculators, or officials. The rumor grew from a real historical fact: authorities and troops did use dynamite to create firebreaks, and those efforts often worsened the destruction. Because insurance coverage treated fire and earthquake damage differently, the disaster created a lasting environment of suspicion around motive, classification, and profit.
1906The Dreadnought Steel TheftA naval corruption theory of the dreadnought era holding that contractors and insiders in the Navy or Admiralty substituted inferior steel or armor plate in capital ships while billing the government for top-grade material and quietly pocketing the difference. The idea drew force from the enormous cost of dreadnought construction, public anxiety about graft in naval procurement, and earlier armor-plate controversies that had already made steel contracts a politically sensitive subject.
1905Einstein as a PlagiaristThe Einstein as a Plagiarist theory held that Albert Einstein did not originate relativity through his own sequence of conceptual breakthroughs but took key ideas from hidden archives, suppressed predecessors, or a secret Eastern library containing older knowledge of time, space, and motion. In some variants, the theory centers on known scientific contemporaries such as Henri Poincaré or David Hilbert; in its more esoteric form, it claims that the decisive insight came from manuscripts in an inaccessible “East,” variously imagined as Tibetan, Islamic, Indian, or otherwise concealed from the West. The theory arose partly because relativity was both mathematically difficult and culturally disruptive, making it seem to many observers too strange to have emerged from ordinary modern science alone. It then fused real priority disputes with a much larger archive-conspiracy narrative.
1905The Einstein Spy TheoryA theory that Albert Einstein’s equation E=mc2 was not simply a statement of mass-energy equivalence but a coded key to an undisclosed weapon, and that Einstein or people around him passed its practical meaning to Soviet channels before the United States fully understood it. The theory grew out of later nuclear anxieties, Soviet espionage fears, Einstein’s FBI surveillance file, and the public tendency to treat a famous scientific formula as hidden strategic knowledge rather than published physics.
1904Subway EarthquakesSubway Earthquakes was the fear that the immense weight of underground rail systems, together with their constant vibration and excavation, was disturbing the balance of the planet itself. In its most dramatic form, the rumor claimed that great subway cities were not only cracking streets and unsettling buildings, but slowly tilting the Earth’s axis and helping trigger earthquakes. The theory emerged naturally from the age of giant underground systems, especially in cities like New York where the subway quickly became one of the largest and most visible feats of urban engineering. The conspiracy version treated metropolitan mass transit as a planetary burden rather than merely a local machine.
1904The "Automobile" as a "Rural Purge"This theory claimed that the spread of the automobile was not simply a technological change, but a city-driven campaign against the countryside. In its stronger forms, farmers argued that urban motorists, road lobbies, and machine interests were effectively purging rural life by frightening horses, crushing livestock, damaging roads, and imposing new economic burdens on farming communities. The theory grew out of real rural hostility to early motoring, documented anti-automobile associations, and repeated conflicts between farmers and drivers over roads, safety, and property.
1904The "Panama" Malaria HoaxThis theory claimed that the mosquito explanation for malaria and yellow fever on the Panama Canal was exaggerated or manipulated in order to conceal the true cause of worker deaths: extreme labor conditions, racialized neglect, and what critics called “death labor.” The theory grew in a context where both sides contained truth-bearing elements. Mosquito-borne disease was real and central to canal mortality, but labor conditions, unequal housing, and dangerous working environments also killed and disabled large numbers of workers. In rumor form, the scientific explanation of disease became a cover story for labor exploitation.
1904The "Subway" Air PoisoningThis theory claimed that the new New York City subways did not merely carry passengers underground, but poisoned the city’s atmosphere by drawing oxygen below street level and leaving the surface depleted. In other versions, the problem worked in reverse: the subways trapped foul air below and then returned it altered, exhausted, or disease-bearing. The theory belonged to the earliest years of underground rail travel, when ventilation, crowding, dust, heat, and fear of enclosed air were central public concerns.
1903The "Black Hand" in AmericaThis theory held that the so-called Black Hand was not simply a loose pattern of extortion letters and local immigrant criminality, but a unified Italian “Shadow Government” exerting hidden control over the United States. The theory grew from genuine fear surrounding extortion, bombings, kidnappings, and threats in Italian immigrant communities. However, historians have shown that “Black Hand” often functioned more as a press label and panic category than as a single centralized organization.
1903The "Wright Brothers" French HoaxThis theory claimed that the Wright brothers were not the rightful inventors of powered flight and that French aviators had actually flown first, but that American interests later monopolized credit and patent rights. The theory drew on real European aviation achievements, especially Alberto Santos-Dumont’s public 1906 flights in France, and on the bitter patent wars that followed the Wrights’ 1903 breakthrough. In rumor form, disputes over priority, publicity, and control became a national-theft narrative.
1903The Panama Canal as HollowThis theory claimed that the Panama Canal was more than an exposed waterway and lock system: it was said to conceal a hollowed strategic interior, hidden chambers, tunnels, and submarine facilities usable by imperial powers, especially the British in some versions. The theory drew strength from the canal’s immense military importance, the existence of real naval and submarine facilities in the Canal Zone, and the secrecy that often surrounded strategic defenses. While the open historical record confirms extensive U.S. military and submarine infrastructure around the canal, it does not establish that the canal itself was constructed as a hidden hollow submarine base.
1902The "Chicago Meat" TaintThis theory emerged in the years after Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and held that the Chicago “Meat Trust” was not only selling adulterated meat, but was deliberately adding chemicals to sausages and processed meats to create dependence, increase repeat consumption, and mask spoilage. The theory built on real Progressive Era scandals involving preservatives, adulteration, and unsanitary meatpacking conditions. In its stronger forms, the claim treated industrial food chemistry as a system of mass bodily management rather than merely commercial fraud.
1902The "Hidden Hand" (The Milner Group)This theory argues that Lord Alfred Milner’s circle, often identified with the Round Table movement or the so-called Milner Group, acted as a secret imperial network that pushed Britain into the First World War in order to consolidate the British Empire and redesign global politics. The theory draws on a real and documented set of relationships among imperial thinkers, administrators, editors, and policy advocates associated with Milner and Round Table circles. In conspiratorial form, those networks are treated not merely as influential but as covert architects of the war itself.
1902The "Standard" Education PlotThis theory claimed that John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board was not principally about uplifting schools, but about producing obedient industrial workers and culturally standardized citizens. It drew on a real historical emphasis within the Board and allied reform circles on vocationalism, practical training, rural efficiency, and schooling aligned with social and economic productivity. In conspiracy form, education reform became a deliberate factory of submission.
1902The Telegraph to MarsThis theory claimed that the shortwave boom of the 1930s was not only about terrestrial broadcasting and communications but also part of a hidden or semi-hidden attempt to contact Mars or other worlds. It grew out of older wireless-age enthusiasm for interplanetary signaling, popular press fascination with mystery transmissions, and the new technical culture around shortwave sets, amateur radio, and atmospheric propagation. When unusual static, fading, or unexplained signals were heard, believers could interpret them as evidence that engineers and scientists were already using radio to reach beyond Earth.
1901Free-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.
1901The "British" Royals are GermanThis theory was unusual because its central factual claim was true: the British royal house was, by dynastic descent, the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until George V changed the family name to Windsor in 1917. What made it function as a conspiracy theory was not the genealogy itself, but the implication that Britain was secretly ruled by “Germans” during a war against Germany. In that context, a dynastic fact became a political accusation of hidden foreignness and divided loyalty.
1900The "Standard Oil" Spy NetworkThis theory claimed that Standard Oil did not merely distribute fuel through ordinary retail channels, but used its gas stations and field infrastructure as a continent-wide intelligence system. In its most elaborate form, every station became a listening post for Rockefeller interests. The theory drew on a real historical foundation: Standard Oil maintained a documented intelligence network that tracked shipments, competitors, and market conditions. Later rumor expanded that commercial surveillance into a literal communications and listening apparatus tied to roadside fuel outlets.
1900The "Submarine" TerrorThis theory claimed that invisible submarines or “boats no one could see” were responsible for unexplained sinkings throughout the Atlantic, especially in the early twentieth century when undersea warfare was still poorly understood by much of the public. It grew from the very real novelty of practical submarines, the secrecy surrounding naval development, and the dramatic tactical advantage of underwater attack. In rumor form, all missing ships could be folded into the same terrifying explanation: unseen craft were already ruling the sea.
1900The "Tuberculosis" Sanatorium "Harvest"This theory claimed that tuberculosis patients in sanatoriums were not simply being isolated and treated, but were being exploited after death for material use, including the lurid idea that bodies or body fat were rendered into “medical tallow.” The theory belongs to a broader family of hospital and corpse-harvest rumors that attached themselves to institutions with high death rates, secretive disposal practices, and limited public access. In the tuberculosis context, sanatorium isolation, body transport systems, and the sheer scale of mortality made such stories particularly durable.
1900The Chicago Underground WarThe Chicago Underground War was the theory that Chicago’s hidden freight-tunnel railway, including the small underground electric trains that later folklore sometimes called “Bunnies,” formed a covert logistics network for gangland operations during Prohibition. In the specific St. Valentine’s Day Massacre version, the theory claimed that bodies, weapons, or participants were moved through these tunnels to conceal routes of travel or dispose of evidence after the killings. The historical tunnel system was real: a freight and utility tunnel network built under downtown Chicago, with an early but short-lived mail contract and long-running freight service. The conspiracy version arose by combining that genuine underground infrastructure with the city’s gang mythology and then stretching the tunnel system beyond what is clearly documented in the massacre itself.

1890s30 entries

1880s31 entries

1870s27 entries

1860s25 entries

1850s17 entries

1840s11 entries

1830s21 entries

1820s7 entries

1810s18 entries

1800s11 entries

1790s6 entries

1780s7 entries

1770s4 entries

1760s4 entries

1740s4 entries

1730s1 entry

1735Jersey DevilThe Jersey Devil is a legendary creature of American folklore said to inhabit the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Known earlier as the Leeds Devil, the figure is tied to a colonial-era origin story about “Mother Leeds” and her cursed thirteenth child. Over time, the legend grew from local oral tradition into one of the most famous monster stories in the United States, especially after the 1909 wave of sightings and media hysteria that helped standardize the modern image of the creature.

1710s2 entries

1700s2 entries

1690s1 entry

1695The "Bachelor" Tax PlotThis theory holds that proposed bachelor taxes were not merely moral or fiscal measures, but part of a broader state effort to pressure men into marriage and childbearing in order to increase the labor supply for industrial society. The idea draws on real historical proposals to tax unmarried men, especially in periods of anxiety about declining birthrates, social disorder, and national strength. In conspiracy-oriented retellings, these proposals become evidence that government and industrial elites wanted to eliminate bachelorhood as an obstacle to producing more future workers.

1660s3 entries

1640s1 entry

1649The "Stolen" Crown JewelsThis theory claimed that the Crown Jewels displayed in the Tower of London were not the real regalia but expertly made replicas of glass and paste, while the genuine jewels had been secretly sold to cover royal debts. The theory drew plausibility from the real destruction and sale of the medieval regalia in 1649, the remaking of the regalia after the Restoration, and the strict security around the current collection. In conspiracy-oriented versions, those facts become evidence that substitution occurred again in secret.

1610s1 entry

1612The 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.

1600s1 entry

1600The Lost Colony of the Welsh IndiansThis theory held that descendants of the medieval Welsh prince Madoc had crossed the Atlantic in the twelfth century and survived among Native peoples in North America. In the nineteenth century, the Mandan in particular were often claimed to be “Welsh Indians,” and explorers, writers, and antiquarians repeatedly sought evidence of European features, Christian traces, fortified settlements, or even the Welsh language among them. The documented record clearly shows that the Madoc legend circulated for centuries and that the Welsh-Indian hypothesis remained active throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What is not supported is the claim that the Mandan or any other Native nation were actually descendants of a lost Welsh colony.

1590s1 entry

1595The Prophecy of the PopesThe Prophecy of the Popes is a list of 112 short Latin mottoes, first printed in Arnold Wion's Lignum Vitae in 1595 and attributed to the 12th-century Irish archbishop St. Malachy, purporting to describe every pope from Celestine II to a final "Petrus Romanus" under whom Rome is destroyed. Most historians conclude the list was composed around 1590, noting that its mottoes are precise up to that year and vague afterward, and that no manuscript is attested before publication. The list drew worldwide attention around Benedict XVI's 2013 resignation and again during the 2025 conclave that elected Leo XIV.

1570s1 entry

1570TartariaTartaria, more commonly rendered in English-language history as Tartary, was an early modern European geographic label used for a broad and shifting expanse of Inner Asia, Siberia, and neighboring regions. In modern conspiracy culture, the same name has been reinterpreted as referring to a lost global empire said to have possessed advanced architecture, technology, and knowledge before being erased from history. The modern Tartaria theory combines historical map terminology, architecture-focused hidden-history claims, mud-flood narratives, and ideas of documentary suppression into one of the most prominent internet-era alternative-history systems.

1540s1 entry

1541Dodleston MessagesA British time-slip and haunting mystery centered on a BBC Micro computer in a sixteenth-century cottage at Dodleston, where messages allegedly appeared from a man named Lukas living in the 1540s, producing one of the most unusual cross-time communication stories in modern paranormal literature.

1510s1 entry

1510The "Hidden" Island of CaliforniaThis theory revived the much older belief that California was an island, combining it with modern earthquake and plate-tectonic fears to claim that the state was drifting away from the continent and that officials were secretly “bolting” it down. It fused two separate historical traditions: the early modern cartographic myth of California as an island, and the modern misconception that California could simply break off and fall into the Pacific. In conspiracy form, the state’s geology becomes a concealed engineering problem rather than a matter of tectonic science.

1400s2 entries

1300s2 entries

1270s1 entry

1271The "Great Wall of China" as a HoaxThis theory claims that the Great Wall did not exist as a real historical structure and that its reputation was created or exaggerated by travelers, illustrators, and publishers who profited from exotic descriptions of China. The idea often draws on the fact that some early travelers, especially Marco Polo, did not describe the Wall in the way later European readers expected. In later retellings, that silence was transformed into a claim that the Wall itself was a literary fabrication designed to sell books and shape Western ideas about China.

1200s1 entry

1200Brotherhood of the SnakeThe theory of the Brotherhood of the Snake presents it as the oldest and most important secret society in human history. According to this narrative, it began thousands of years ago as a covert order

1110s1 entry

1119The 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.

1100s1 entry

1100The Tuatha Dé Danann as a Red-Haired Advanced RaceThe Tuatha Dé Danann are presented not simply as mythic Irish gods but as an advanced incoming race associated with red or blond hair, pale skin, blue eyes, aerial arrival, hidden knowledge, and later hybridization with local populations. Irish myth, Basque tradition, unusual archaeological remains, and modern UFO-abduction DNA narratives suggest that the Tuatha were a real high-strangeness people whose legacy survived in folklore, bloodlines, and memory.

610s1 entry

614The Phantom Time HypothesisA radical chronological theory claiming that nearly three centuries of the Early Middle Ages never occurred, and that European history contains an inserted “phantom” period created through falsified chronology, forged records, and retroactive political mythmaking.

320s1 entry

325Council of NicaeaThe Council of Nicaea was the first ecumenical council of the Christian church. It met in 325 CE in Nicaea, a city in Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor, now İznik in modern Turkey. It was convened b

150s1 entry

150DemiurgeIn esoteric and conspiracy-oriented traditions, the Demiurge is described as the false creator of the material world: a lesser cosmic ruler who fashions physical reality, traps divine consciousness in matter, and obscures the existence of the true transcendent Source above him. In classical philosophy the Demiurge appears as a cosmic craftsman, but in Gnostic systems he becomes an ignorant, arrogant, or even oppressive architect of the visible world, often identified with Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas and surrounded by archonic powers that maintain the prison of material existence.

60s1 entry

64The 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.

30s1 entry

30Bloodline of the Lineage of JesusThis theory holds that Jesus did not leave history without descendants, but established a hidden royal bloodline through Mary Magdalene that survived the crucifixion era, passed into southern France, and later merged with the Merovingian dynastic stream. In this framework, the Holy Grail is not a cup but the vessel of that bloodline, preserved in secret through esoteric traditions, noble houses, and hidden guardians across the centuries.

Unknown Date35 entries