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On 24 February 1910 the First Lord of the Admiralty told the House of Commons that "a number of persons" disguised as Abyssinians had visited one of His Majesty's ships. The ship was HMS Dreadnought, and the party, led by the prankster Horace de Vere Cole, included the future Virginia Woolf. They had been admitted on a forged Foreign Office telegram. Four years later Winston Churchill ordered a "dummy fleet" of merchant ships disguised in wood and canvas as battleships. Placed side by side, the two episodes produced a theory that British sea power in the dreadnought era was partly theatre.

The Senate's Church Committee found that the CIA produced, subsidized or sponsored "well over a thousand books" before the end of 1967, and that until 1976 it kept covert relationships with about 50 American journalists. Both were part of what Frank Wisner, the first head of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination, reportedly called his "mighty Wurlitzer": a network of front groups, publishers, student and labour organisations and journalists, built under the 1948 directive NSC 10/2. It was exposed in February 1967, when Ramparts revealed the agency's funding of the National Student Association.

The World Economic Forum's own launch release for the Great Reset, announced by the Prince of Wales and Klaus Schwab on 3 June 2020, said the plan "requires a new social contract." Believers took the phrase literally, as the terms of a New World Order agreed during the pandemic: safety in exchange for property, privacy and sovereignty. The theory was built from a public record, including Henry Kissinger's April 2020 call for a "post-coronavirus order," Gordon Brown's proposal for a global executive, the Forum's 2019 Event 201 pandemic exercise, a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation scenario called "Lock Step," and a 2016 Forum essay that opened "I don't own anything." No binding agreement of any kind has been produced.

Colonel House's own diary records him and King George V discussing the sinking of the Lusitania on the morning it happened. James Corbett's 2018 documentary The WWI Conspiracy builds on documents like that one: the Rhodes wills, Edward Grey's secret staff talks with France, and the October 1915 letter in which Woodrow Wilson added the word "probably" to a promise that America would join the war. From them it argues that a British imperial network founded by Cecil Rhodes engineered the First World War.

The theory's own numbers come from an OPM report that labels those people career civil servants. It holds that the Senior Executive Service — the eight thousand federal managers sitting below presidential appointees — is a shadow government installed by Barack Obama, identifying itself by a keystone lapel pin. The same report gives the number of political appointees among them as 736.

The US indictment speaks of damage and deleted files, and says nothing at all about what Gary McKinnon says he read there. He has maintained since 2002 that the machines held a spreadsheet of “non-terrestrial officers” and logs of fleet-to-fleet transfers — the origin of the claim that the Navy runs a secret space fleet called Solar Warden. He captured no screenshots, and the UK blocked his extradition in 2012.

The account was published in 2009 — thirty-one years after the contacts are said to have ended, and six years after the man at the centre of them died. Amicizia holds that from 1956 a circle of Italians, perhaps a hundred of them over the years, ferried crates of fruit to human-looking extraterrestrials living in bases under the hills near Pescara. Nothing was ever recovered or excavated.

A serving Air Force investigator pitched this same story to a journalist in 1983, twenty-two years before the anonymous emails that made it famous. Richard C. Doty’s approach to Linda Moulton Howe, who was then preparing a UFO documentary for HBO, is documented. Project Serpo holds that twelve US military personnel travelled to a planet in the Zeta Reticuli system between 1965 and 1978; no document, photograph or named participant has ever surfaced.

On 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 stacks photographed in Georgia are burial vaults, identified as such by the company that manufactures them and sells them to funeral homes. The theory holds that FEMA began quietly stockpiling plastic mass coffins in 1994 against a coming crackdown.

The helicopters were real: the United States military flies unmarked black rotary aircraft for special operations. What the 1990s theory supplied was the reason — a United Nations or New World Order takeover read into aircraft that already had an ordinary explanation.

Saltpetre is in military rations for a reason that has nothing to do with the soldiers eating it: potassium nitrate is a curing agent, and the nitrite it yields suppresses botulism. The barracks story holds that it was added to food, coffee or water to dampen the sex drive of recruits — a claim no evidence supports, for an effect that training produces on its own.

Gucci Mane served thirty-nine months on a federal gun charge and got sober inside — a change he has since described at length in his own autobiography. The theory holds that the man released in May 2016 was a government-made replacement, the evidence being the weight loss, the calmer manner, and a voice that struck listeners as different.

Jim 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.

Families 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 meeting was real and it was secret: six men met privately at the Jekyll Island Club in November 1910. The Library of Congress and Federal Reserve History both describe it as a step toward the Aldrich Plan. The theory reads it instead as a covert attempt to place the United States permanently under debt-based control.

Graceland’s own historical materials state that Elvis Presley died there on 16 August 1977, at 42, and a death certificate and autopsy record exist. The theory holds that he staged it to escape criminal pressure or federal danger, entered witness protection after helping authorities against organized crime, and returned to Graceland in disguise as a groundskeeper.

The language justified real laws: Chinese exclusion in the United States, and immigration policy shaped by the same panic in Australia and Canada. The theory itself held that Asian migrants and rising Asian states were not ordinary migration or trade but a civilizational campaign to overwhelm white nations from within and without.

Three 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 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.

Modern historians note that slaveholders did exercise disproportionate influence in federal institutions. The antebellum theory went further: that a small, wealthy class of Southern slaveholders had captured the presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court outright, and was using them to nationalize slavery through law, patronage, territorial expansion and intimidation.

Vril was invented by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1871 novel The Coming Race. The society said to have pursued it in early twentieth-century Germany — psychic contact with Aldebaran, female mediums, subterranean beings, antigravity discs built for the Nazis — was assembled out of that fiction by later occult and conspiracy writing.

There really were prisoners on the island. Fort Wood, the star fort beneath the statue’s pedestal, held wounded Confederates during the Civil War before exchange or transfer. The rumour extended that into the monument itself: secret cells in the base, for political enemies and dissidents whose existence could not be admitted.

The New York medical examiner ruled Heath Ledger’s death an accident caused by the combined effects of prescription medications. The finding came on 6 February 2008. The curse theory treats his Joker instead as a channel for something malignant that overwhelmed him during and after production.

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.

Beverly Oliver said she was the Babushka Lady, and that she handed the undeveloped film to men identifying themselves as federal agents. It was never returned. The woman in the headscarf appears in Dealey Plaza footage to be filming while other witnesses dive for cover; she was never identified in the official record, and no film from her camera has ever surfaced.

The Los Angeles County coroner gave acute propofol intoxication as the cause of death and homicide as the manner. Conrad Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The fake-death theory holds that Jackson staged 25 June 2009 to escape debt and scrutiny, and afterwards appeared in disguise as his friend Dave Dave, a burn survivor who gave television interviews after the memorial.

Imperva’s 2023 Bad Bot Report found that 47.4% of internet traffic in 2022 was automated. The theory built on that number goes considerably further: that since around 2016 the social web has been so saturated with bots and machine-generated content that most of the people on it are not people, kept that way by states and platforms to steer opinion.

The 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.

Bruce 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.

Paul Freshour was convicted in 1984 over the booby-trapped handgun — and the anonymous letters kept arriving while he was in prison. That paradox is what keeps the case open. The campaign began in the late 1970s around Circleville, Ohio, with letters that named names, demanded action, and implied a level of surveillance that made the writer seem omnipresent.

Roger Elvick, the North Dakota farmer who assembled the strawman theory, was sentenced to five years in federal prison in 1991. No US court has ever ruled for anyone on this basis. The claim is that the state creates a second, corporate ‘you’ at birth, identified by the capital letters on official documents, which holds your debts and is backed by a secret Treasury account the right filing can reach.

Identifying 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 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.

A 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 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.

In November 1965 an Atomic Energy Commission audit found 178 kilograms of highly enriched uranium unaccounted for at the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania — 93.8 kg of it with no identifiable loss mechanism, the largest such loss at any American commercial site. A senior Mossad officer visited the plant in 1968 under a false description, and in 1976 the CIA told regulators it believed the material had reached Israel. Nobody was ever charged, and the Army Corps of Engineers is still digging contaminated soil out of the site at a cost near $400 million.

Five Israeli nationals working for a New Jersey removals company were arrested on 11 September 2001 after a neighbour reported them watching the burning towers and giving each other high fives. They were held seventy-one days and deported for working without visas. Two FBI divisions concluded they had no prior knowledge of the attacks and were not engaged in clandestine intelligence work. The companion claim that Israelis were warned to stay away traces to a Jerusalem Post report of families ringing to ask whether their relatives were alive, inverted five days later by a Hezbollah-linked broadcaster.

A claim that the Large Hadron Collider has thinned the boundary between this world and another, letting something through — in its current form not as monsters but as anomalous AI, unexplained aerial phenomena and recurring symbols. Its anchors are real: a Shiva statue given by India in 2004, a mock human sacrifice filmed on site by badge-holders in 2016, and a 2008 lawsuit to stop the machine. The older version of the theory predicted the end of the world and was tested. The current version has been built so that nothing could test it.

A CIA programme of research into behavioural modification, authorised on 13 April 1953 and run through 149 subprojects at 80 institutions — 44 universities, 12 hospitals, 3 prisons — with most of the researchers unaware whose money they were taking. Its records were destroyed in January 1973 on the order of the Director of Central Intelligence. Seven boxes survived because they had been misfiled in a financial records building, which is why the scale of MKULTRA is known precisely and its results are not: what came back was the accounting, not the findings.

A postwar theory holding that flying saucers operated from a hidden Antarctic base — Nazi-built, alien-inherited, or reached through an opening beneath the South Pole. Each anchor is real: a secret German expedition in 1939, two U-boats surrendering in Argentina in 1945, a 4,700-man American fleet in 1946, three classified nuclear detonations in 1958. The expedition was looking for somewhere to render whale oil, the submarines could not have reached the ice, and the famous Byrd quotation about craft flying pole to pole is a mistranslation of an interview in which he was warning about bombers.

British officials in the 1830s described a hidden fraternity of ritual stranglers covering the whole of India, bound by hereditary obligation and devotion to a goddess. Gangs who robbed and strangled travellers were real, and Indian states had been recording and policing them for five centuries before the British arrived. The rest was built by a department: a statute under which belonging was itself the crime, a hundred informants kept alive to name others, a conviction rate of 98.9 per cent — and, inside the founding text of the cult theory, its own star witness denying the cult.

A Boeing 747 freighter lost both right-hand engines to a fatigued fuse pin and came down on two Amsterdam apartment blocks on 4 October 1992. The mechanism was established quickly and thoroughly. Everything after it — a cargo manifest that took six years to yield a sarin precursor, twenty tonnes of unaccounted freight, 150 kilograms of missing depleted uranium, a cockpit voice recorder never found, and an archive still partly sealed until 2069 — took considerably longer.

A claim that surfaced in April 2018 holding that a video recovered from Anthony Weiner's seized laptop showed Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin assaulting a child.

From 1997 until his death in 2015, Gene Ray published a website arguing that each day is in fact four simultaneous days, and that the world's academics were engaged in a conspiracy to omit his discovery. He offered ten thousand dollars to any professor who could disprove it. He was invited to say so at MIT and Georgia Tech, which is an unusual thing for a suppressed man to be offered.

An elongated shape in the ice near the summit of Mount Ararat, photographed by a US Air Force reconnaissance flight in 1949 and classified. The imagery was eventually released. Separately, a boat-shaped formation eighteen miles south has been promoted since 1977 as the Ark itself — and the people least convinced by it include the other ark hunters.

John Wayne Gacy was convicted of thirty-three murders in Chicago and executed in 1994. A question has outlived him, and it is not a fringe one: for at least three of the victims, he appears to have been out of the city or without the time. Defence lawyers who examined the records think he had help. Nobody has ever been identified.

In 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.

Carved 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.

In 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.