The files, opened
Every conspiracy theory, laid out and weighed against the evidence.
The things you were told were crazy, sorted into what the record actually confirms, disputes, or debunks. No preaching, no promoting: the claim, the origin, the evidence, and an honest verdict, so you can judge for yourself.
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Proven or contradicted when the evidence settles it, open when it doesn't.
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691 declassified documents, in one place
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Declassified file of the week
The archive →Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed (Year Zero release)
The WikiLeaks release page for the first Vault 7 batch, drawn from what WikiLeaks said was a high-security network inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence. It indexes the leaked tool guides and technique documents covering exploits for iOS, Android, Windows, routers, browsers, and smart TVs, including the Weeping Angel implant.
From the case file: CIA Vault 7Featured case files
Browse all 956 →A French judge was pressured to fix the 2002 Olympic pairs figure skating result
At the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, the pairs figure skating gold went, by a 5-4 judging split, to Russia's Elena Berezhnaya and Anton Sikharulidze over Canada's Jamie Salé and David Pelletier, whose clean skate had seemed to many observers to be the stronger. Within hours, French judge Marie-Reine Le Gougne was reported to have admitted, in a tearful hotel-lobby confrontation, that she had been pressured to favour the Russians. This case file separates the documented record (an ISU disciplinary finding, three-year suspensions for Le Gougne and Didier Gailhaguet, a duplicate Olympic gold for the Canadians, and a complete overhaul of skating's scoring system) from the rated claim (that a judge was pressured and the result manipulated). On that claim the verdict is substantiated. A separate, unproven allegation, that the scheme was orchestrated by an alleged Russian organised-crime figure, is reported here as an untested indictment.
Read the case file →“AI took my job” is often a corporate cover story, with companies over-crediting artificial intelligence for layoffs actually driven by pandemic-era over-hiring and ordinary cost-cutting
By 2025 and 2026, “AI is taking the jobs” had hardened into conventional wisdom, repeated in earnings calls and layoff memos across the technology sector. This file examines the counter-claim: that in many cases the story is spin. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas logged artificial intelligence as the stated reason for roughly 55,000 announced job cuts in 2025, a real and growing number, yet a small share of the more than a million cuts announced that year. Meanwhile a large academic survey of thousands of executives found that around nine in ten firms reported no impact from AI on employment or productivity over the previous three years, and analysts noted that many companies announcing “AI-related” layoffs did not yet have the mature AI systems that would be needed to actually replace those workers. Some executives said the quiet part aloud: Amazon's chief executive told analysts that a 14,000-person corporate cut was “not really” AI-driven. The pattern has a name, AI-washing, and this file weighs how much of the AI-layoff wave is genuine automation and how much is a more flattering label for over-hiring and cost-cutting.
Read the case file →“Peter Bergmann,” a man who methodically erased his own identity before dying on a Sligo beach in 2009, has never been identified
In the second week of June 2009, an unidentified man arrived in Sligo, in the northwest of Ireland, and checked into the Sligo City Hotel under the name “Peter Bergmann,” giving an Austrian address that does not exist. Over the next four days he was recorded on the town's CCTV cameras leaving the hotel again and again with a purple plastic bag full of items and returning without it, apparently scattering his belongings around Sligo. Every label had been removed from his clothing, and he carried no identification. On the morning of 16 June his body was found on the beach at Rosses Point. A postmortem revealed advanced terminal cancer and severe heart disease, and the inquest found he had died of natural causes. Despite a five-month investigation and international enquiries, the Gardai never learned his real name. This file separates what the cameras and the pathologist documented from the still-open question of who he was and why he came to Sligo to disappear.
Read the case file →'2000 Mules' proved thousands of paid operatives illegally stuffed ballot drop boxes in 2020
In May 2022, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza and the activist group True the Vote released '2000 Mules,' which claimed that anonymized cellphone geolocation data, combined with drop-box surveillance video, proved that thousands of paid operatives had illegally collected and deposited ballots across five swing states in 2020. The film became a rallying point for people who believed the election was stolen. Its method does not hold up: experts and the Associated Press explained that phone-location data is far too imprecise to show that a device visited a particular drop box, the surveillance clips depicted lawful ballot returns rather than crimes, and not a single 'mule' was ever identified or charged. Georgia's State Election Board dismissed the related ballot-harvesting complaint, and True the Vote later admitted in court it had no underlying names or proof. In 2024 the film's distributor retracted it, pulled the book, and apologized to a Georgia man it had falsely cast as a criminal. This file separates the documented record (the film was made, then retracted) from the rated claim (that it proved mass fraud), which is debunked.
Read the case file →'Cultural Marxism' is a deliberate plot to destroy Western civilization from within
The 'Cultural Marxism' conspiracy theory holds that a deliberate plot, hatched by the Frankfurt School of Marxist thinkers, has spent decades corroding Western civilization through feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. This file separates the real from the conspiratorial. The Frankfurt School and its 'critical theory' genuinely existed and remain a fair subject of academic argument. But the story of a coordinated civilization-destroying scheme is a conspiracy theory: the Southern Poverty Law Center traces its modern form to 1990s activists, above all William S. Lind, and historians note that it recycles the Nazi-era slur 'Cultural Bolshevism' and its antisemitism. Sweeping, diverse social changes have many independent causes; attributing them to one secret plan is what makes the claim false. Rated as a conspiracy theory, it is debunked; the underlying intellectual history is real and open to honest debate.
Read the case file →'Judeo-Bolshevism,' the claim that Jews created and controlled communism to destroy Western civilization, is a debunked antisemitic canard that served as a rationale for genocide
'Judeo-Bolshevism' is the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Jews, as a people, created and secretly controlled communism in order to destroy Western and Christian civilization from within. It took hold during the 1917 Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed, drew on the forged 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion,' and became one of the central beliefs of Nazism, invoked to justify the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union and the mass murder of Europe's Jews. This file reports the claim as what historians have established it to be: a false and lethal slur, not a description of reality. The historian Paul Hanebrink and institutions like the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum document both why the myth is baseless, Jews were a small minority of the Bolsheviks and were among communism's victims, and why it proved so durable, spreading long after 1945 and echoing today in 'cultural Bolshevism' and 'cultural Marxism.' The target of this page is the canard, never Jewish people.
Read the case file →Browse by category
Ten fields of the strange, from declassified operations to cryptids and doomsday prophecy. Each hub collects its case files with the evidence and a verdict.
Government & Intelligence
249Covert operations, surveillance programs, and official cover-ups: the ones proven true in declassified files, and the ones that never happened. Where state secrecy meets public suspicion.
UFOs & Aliens
75Sightings, landings, and the long fight over disclosure, from documented military encounters to the claims that outran the evidence.
Unexplained Phenomena
52Strange lights, sounds, and events that resist easy answers. Some dissolve under scrutiny; a few stay genuinely open.
Cryptids & Monsters
82The creatures said to lurk at the edge of the map, and what a century of expeditions, hoaxes, and folklore actually turned up.
Unsolved Crimes & Disappearances
90Cold cases, vanishings, and deaths where the record runs out before the answer does. Handled with the evidence, and with care.
Lost History & Ancient Mysteries
73Lost civilizations, impossible maps, and the claim that the real past is being hidden. Where genuine wonder meets pseudoarchaeology.
Secret Societies & Power
80The clubs, banks, and families accused of quietly running the world, and the line between real elite influence and the imagined cabal.
Science, Space & Technology
109Health scares, hidden inventions, and fears about the tools reshaping daily life. What the evidence supports, and what it does not.
Doomsday & Prophecy
28Predicted apocalypses, overdue catastrophes, and the end that never quite arrives. Why the world keeps almost ending.
Hoaxes & Pop Culture
118Celebrity swaps, staged events, and the internet's favorite rabbit holes: the debunked, the tongue-in-cheek, and the surprisingly durable.
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