Rated on the evidence
Which conspiracy theories have been debunked?
Plenty of them. Of the 895 claims we have rated, 365 are false: outright hoaxes, fabricated documents, and theories the checkable evidence runs directly against. Below are the most-read, each linked to a sourced case file that shows exactly how it falls apart.
9-day global blackout
In the summer of 2026 a claim spread across social media that a coordinated 9-day global blackout would begin on 18 July 2026, shutting down electricity, the internet, and communications worldwide. Many versions tied the supposed shutdown to Agenda 2030 or a planned great reset and said governments were hiding the plan from the public. Fact-checkers including Tempo, Factually, and Boatos examined the claim and found nothing behind it: no official statement, no scientific study, no technical basis, and no single global grid that could be shut off at once. Indonesia's energy ministry explicitly denied any such plan. This case file separates the documented record (that the hoax went viral and was checked and rejected) from the rated claim (that the blackout was real or planned). The rated claim is debunked. It follows a well-worn template of dated blackout and darkness hoaxes, several of them falsely attributed to NASA, that recur every year or two and always pass without event.
Read the case file →World Cup 'scripted'
Ahead of the 2026 World Cup, co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, a theory raced across TikTok claiming that FIFA fixes the tournament in advance, “just like the NFL,” and hides the answer in plain sight. The proof, believers said, is colour: each recent World Cup's official palette supposedly matches the eventual winner's flag, Germany in 2014, France in 2018, Argentina in 2022. Reading the 2026 brand's reds and greens, the theory named Portugal the “mathematically scripted” champion. This case file keeps the documented record (a viral claim, a real colour system, a real FIFA corruption history) apart from the rated claim (that the result is predetermined and encoded). On the rated claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →McConnell health cover-up
In the summer of 2023, Mitch McConnell twice froze mid-sentence in front of cameras, unable to speak for many seconds. In June 2026 the 84-year-old senator entered a hospital after a fall, and for roughly a month his office declined to say why, offering only that he continued to improve. Into that silence rushed a familiar kind of theory: that McConnell was actually dead, brain-dead, or so incapacitated that aides were propping up a shell and hiding it from the public, some versions claiming a body double or an AI-generated photo. This case file separates the documented record (real health scares, a real hospitalization, and a genuinely thin flow of information) from the rated claim (a concealed death or replacement). On the conspiracy, the evidence does not hold up: McConnell reappeared with a statement, a photo, and a third-party account of a phone call, and explained the hospitalization as a fall and mild pneumonia. The verdict is debunked, with the legitimate transparency question left standing on its own.
Read the case file →The suppressed cancer cure
Few conspiracy claims touch as raw a nerve as this one: that a cheap, effective cure for cancer already exists and is being deliberately hidden by drug companies, doctors, or governments because a lifetime of treatment is more profitable than a cure. It usually comes attached to a specific remedy said to have been suppressed, laetrile from apricot kernels, the Rife frequency machine, high-dose vitamin C, cannabis oil, Antineoplastons. This case file treats the topic with the care it deserves, because the people drawn to it are often frightened and out of options. It separates the legitimate anger, at drug pricing, corporate dishonesty, and buried trial data, from the central claim, and finds that claim debunked. This is not medical advice; it is an account of what the evidence shows.
Read the case file →Lindsey Graham's death
On the evening of Saturday, 11 July 2026, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, 71, collapsed at his Washington home and could not be revived. His office described a brief and sudden illness. The District of Columbia chief medical examiner's preliminary finding was an aortic dissection, a tear in the aorta, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with no indication of foul play. Because Graham had returned only days earlier from a trip to Ukraine and was a hawkish figure with many foreign adversaries, his death was immediately met with a wave of claims that he had been assassinated or poisoned by a hostile state and that the real story was being suppressed. This case file separates the documented record (a natural, well-understood cardiovascular catastrophe in an elderly man) from the rated claim (a concealed foreign hit). On the evidence, the assassination claim is debunked, while the ordinary caveat that final toxicology is still pending is treated as the open detail it is, not as a smoking gun.
Read the case file →Celebrity clone theory
The celebrity clone theory holds that famous people, and some politicians, who look or sound different after an absence or a change in appearance have secretly died and been replaced by clones, body doubles, or robots. Milder versions just call a star's new look proof of a swap; fuller versions tie it to a hidden Hollywood or royal cloning center, a story pushed most prominently by the self-described insider Donald Marshall, and fold in the older Paul is dead and Avril Lavigne replacement templates. The genre is real and it is spreading, and it borrows real facts: body doubles, plastic surgery, and de-aging or CGI do exist. This case file separates that documented record from the rated claim, which is that celebrities are literally being cloned and replaced by duplicates. On the science and the evidence, that literal claim is debunked. What the theory actually tracks is the uncanny feeling produced by aging, surgery, and increasingly convincing digital effects, not a secret vat-grown copy.
Read the case file →Nibiru / Planet X
The claim that a hidden planet, 'Nibiru' or 'Planet X,' is speeding toward a collision with Earth: an idea that began with a single self-described alien contactee, borrowed a real ancient name, folded into the 2012 panic, and has resurfaced under new predicted dates ever since, each one passing without incident.
Read the case file →Finland doesn't exist
In December 2014 a Reddit user answering a thread about things their family did that turned out not to be normal wrote that his parents never believed in Finland. The gag was elaborated into a full mock-conspiracy: that Finland is a fiction cooked up during the Cold War by the Soviet Union and Japan so the Japanese could fish an unclaimed stretch of the Baltic without limit, that the “land” on the map is really open water, and that the “Finns” you meet actually live in eastern Sweden or western Russia. It went viral precisely because it is a flawless imitation of conspiratorial logic. This case file keeps the documented record (a joke, knowingly authored and spread as satire) apart from the rated claim (that Finland is a fabrication with no physical existence). On the rated claim the answer is easy and the verdict is debunked; the reason it is worth an entry is what it reveals about how conspiracy narratives are built.
Read the case file →Crop circles
Elaborate geometric patterns appearing overnight in English fields were once billed as evidence of alien visitation or mysterious energy vortices, until two retirees admitted they had been making them with a plank, a rope, and a baseball cap.
Read the case file →Elvis is alive
The most beloved version of celebrity-survives-death folklore: decades of alleged sightings, a supposed alias on an impossible flight, and a gravestone “clue” that turns out to be nothing, set against an official cardiac-related cause of death and a funeral thousands of people personally watched happen.
Read the case file →Disney's 'frozen head'
One of the most durable rumors in American pop culture holds that Walt Disney, rather than being buried or cremated, had himself cryogenically frozen after death so that he could one day be thawed and revived, with the more colorful versions placing his frozen body, or just his severed head, in a secret chamber beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disneyland. The documented record is plain and public: Disney died of lung cancer on 15 December 1966, was cremated on 17 December, and his ashes were interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, where the family plot can be visited. This case file separates that record from the rated claim (that he was frozen). On the evidence the freezing story is debunked. It is contradicted by the cemetery and family record, undercut by the fact that human cryonics did not yet exist in practice when Disney died, and traceable instead to his intense privacy, his public identity as a man of tomorrow, and a joke that hardened into legend.
Read the case file →Elisa Lam
In February 2013, the body of Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old student from Vancouver, was found in a rooftop water tank at the Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, weeks after she vanished. Days before she was found, police had released hotel elevator footage of her behaving strangely, hoping it would help locate her. The video went viral instead, and the case became one of the internet's defining unsolved mysteries. The Los Angeles County coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning, with bipolar disorder a significant contributing condition. This file separates that documented record from the claims that grew around it: that she was murdered and it was hidden, that something paranormal occurred, that a coincidental tuberculosis-test name meant something, and the false online accusation of an innocent man. The mundane account is supported by the evidence. The mystery is mostly a story told over the gaps.
Read the case file →Tesla's free energy
The claim that Nikola Tesla perfected a machine giving the world limitless free electricity, and that it was shut down by J.P. Morgan and corporate interests to protect the profits of the power industry. The real story is stranger and sadder: a real genius, a real tower, a real funding collapse, and no evidence any such device ever worked.
Read the case file →Ong's Hat
Ong's Hat is a real, nearly abandoned spot in the New Jersey Pine Barrens that became the hub of one of the internet's first great works of collaborative fiction. Photocopied pamphlets and early-1990s Usenet posts told of a hidden institute where fugitive scientists built a device that let them step into parallel worlds, then vanished. It reads like a leaked conspiracy, but it was written as one: a deliberate transmedia story now widely credited as a proto alternate-reality game.
Read the case file →2026 'stolen election' probe
In early 2026 the federal government took two unprecedented actions around long-settled election claims. On January 28 the FBI raided Fulton County, Georgia's election operations center and seized more than 650 boxes of original 2020 ballots, images, tabulator tapes, and voter rolls; days later it emerged that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, under Tulsi Gabbard, had obtained and forensically examined voting machines from Puerto Rico. Supporters framed both as the beginning of the end for a cover-up: proof, at last, that the 2020 election was stolen and that the machinery of fraud was about to be exposed. This case file separates the documented record, the seizures happened and are being fought in court, from the rated claim, that they are uncovering real election fraud. On the evidence, that claim is debunked: the 2020 Georgia result was checked three separate ways, the affidavit behind the raid recycled complaints the state had already found did not change the count, and the intelligence review turned up no foreign hack. The file names no fraud because the record establishes none.
Read the case file →Phantom time hypothesis
In 1991 the German writer Heribert Illig proposed that a chunk of the Early Middle Ages, roughly AD 614 to 911, was never actually lived through: the years were inserted into the record by a calendar fraud, and figures such as Charlemagne were invented to fill the gap. On this account the true year is about three centuries earlier than the one on the calendar. The idea leans on two things people do find genuinely puzzling: the arithmetic of the Gregorian calendar reform, and the relative thinness of the written and archaeological record for the period. This case file keeps that documented starting point apart from the rated claim that 300 years of history were fabricated. The steelman is that early-medieval evidence really is sparser than what came before and after. The rebuttal is decisive: independent dating methods and non-European records leave no room for missing centuries. The verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Nazi Antarctica (Base 211)
The story braids two genuine historical events into a single myth. In the summer of 1938-39, a German expedition aboard the ship Schwabenland flew over and photographed part of Dronning Maud Land, dropped marker darts, and named the region Neuschwabenland. Seven years later, in 1946-47, the US Navy mounted Operation Highjump, a fleet-scale expedition of thousands of men, thirteen ships, and dozens of aircraft under Rear Admiral Richard Byrd, to train for polar conditions and map the continent from the air. From these facts the legend grows a secret survival: a hidden Nazi stronghold, Base 211, carved into the ice; escaping U-boats carrying senior Nazis or Hitler himself; a fleet of advanced disc-shaped aircraft; sometimes an entrance to a warm, inhabited hollow earth; and a reading of Highjump not as science and training but as a botched military assault on the base, driven off by superior technology and hushed up ever since. This case file keeps the documented record (a real German mapping flight and a real US Navy expedition) apart from the rated claim (a surviving Nazi fortress, saucers, and hollow-earth war), which is debunked.
Read the case file →Cybertruck explosion
On the morning of January 1, 2025, a Tesla Cybertruck loaded with firework mortars and fuel canisters caught fire and exploded in the valet portico of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The sole occupant, active-duty U.S. Army Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, had shot himself in the head moments before the blast; seven bystanders suffered minor injuries. Because a second veteran had driven a truck into a crowd in New Orleans hours earlier, and because the target was a Tesla parked at a Trump property, a conspiracy took shape almost at once: that this was staged, an inside job, or a coordinated plot being covered up. This case file keeps the documented record (a lone, premeditated act ending in suicide) apart from that rated claim, and follows what investigators actually found. On the conspiracy, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Butler shooting 'staged'
On 13 July 2024, at an outdoor campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a 20-year-old gunman fired multiple rounds from a nearby rooftop. He wounded former President Donald Trump in the ear, killed rally attendee Corey Comperatore, and critically injured two other men before a Secret Service counter-sniper killed him. In the aftermath, two rival conspiracy claims spread at once: that the whole thing was staged for political effect, and that it was a deliberate inside job in which security was stood down on purpose. This case file separates the documented record from the rated claim. The record, confirmed by the FBI and by bipartisan investigations in the US Senate and the House, is that the attack was real and that the security planning around it failed grievously. The rated claim, that the attempt was faked or intentionally permitted, is not supported by that record. A man died, a wound was real, and the event was filmed from every angle. On the conspiracy claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Gang stalking
'Gang stalking' is the belief that organized groups conduct a coordinated campaign of surveillance and harassment against particular people, often paired with claims of 'electronic harassment' by directed-energy or voice-to-skull weapons. Online communities of 'targeted individuals' share strikingly similar accounts. This file treats the people with care and the claim with rigor. As a coordinated program run by hidden networks with exotic weapons, it is unsupported by any evidence, and the leading clinical study found reports of group-stalking almost entirely consistent with persecutory delusion, in contrast to reports of ordinary single-person stalking, which are usually genuine. The suffering is real; the organized-plot explanation is not. Real, separate phenomena, individual stalking and historical state surveillance, are often invoked but do not establish the claim, which is debunked.
Read the case file →Where is Kate?
In January 2024 Kensington Palace announced that Catherine, Princess of Wales, had undergone planned abdominal surgery and would step back from public duties to recover. Weeks of near-total silence followed. When an official Mother's Day photograph was released on 10 March, the world's main news agencies spotted digital alterations and issued a rare “kill notice” retracting it, and Catherine said she had edited it herself. Into that vacuum poured a frenzy of speculation: that she was gravely ill, in a coma, dead, divorcing, or that a body double had replaced her. This case file keeps the documented record (a real surgery, a real absence, a genuinely botched photo) apart from the rated claim (that the absence hid something sinister the palace was concealing). On 22 March she revealed a cancer diagnosis, later returned to public life, and in January 2025 said she was in remission. The sinister reading is debunked.
Read the case file →Key Bridge collapse
At about 1:29 a.m. on 26 March 2024, the Singapore-flagged container ship Dali lost electrical power and propulsion while outbound from the Port of Baltimore and struck a support pier of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The central truss spans collapsed into the Patapsco River within seconds. Six road-maintenance workers who were filling potholes on the deck were killed. Because the ship had issued a mayday as it drifted powerless, police were able to hold traffic off the bridge, which almost certainly saved lives. The event was filmed from several angles, and the footage went everywhere. Within hours a second story formed alongside the first: that the collision was no accident at all. This case file keeps the documented record (a power failure on a large vessel and an unprotected 1970s bridge) apart from the rated claim (a deliberate attack, a cyberattack, or a controlled demolition). On the conspiracy, the evidence is clear, and the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →Missing scientists
In February 2026, retired U.S. Air Force Major General William Neil McCasland, a 68-year-old former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory, walked out of his Albuquerque home and did not return. His disappearance, still unresolved, became the seed of a viral theory: that a run of deaths and disappearances among people described online as scientists tied to classified research (UFOs and UAP, advanced energy, materials science) reflects a campaign to silence those who know too much. This case file separates the documented record, real cases, a real open investigation, real secrecy around defense research, from the rated claim, that the cases are linked and that people were killed or made to vanish to bury secret knowledge. Experts and fact-checkers who examined the list found cases scattered across years and explained by unrelated circumstances, with no evidence of a coordinated hand. On the pattern claim, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →'7 seconds of no gravity'
A viral social-media claim holds that Earth will lose gravity for roughly seven seconds on August 12, 2026, at a precise time (often given as 14:33 UTC), and that a secret NASA document titled 'Project Anchor,' supposedly leaked in November 2024 with a budget in the tens of millions or billions, shows the agency is bracing for the anomaly. None of it holds up. No such NASA project or document exists, NASA has denied the claim, and gravity, a product of mass, cannot simply turn off. The only genuine event on the date is a total solar eclipse, unrelated to gravity. This case file separates the documented record (a spreading hoax, a real eclipse) from the rated claim (a coming gravitational blackout), which is debunked.
Read the case file →Coral Castle
Coral Castle, near Homestead, Florida, is a garden of megalithic sculpture built single-handedly by Edward Leedskalnin, a slight Latvian immigrant who stood barely five feet tall and weighed around a hundred pounds. Over nearly three decades he quarried, carved, and raised more than 1,100 tons of oolite limestone into walls, towers, a working sundial, a Polaris telescope, and a nine-ton revolving gate balanced so finely a child could once push it open. He did the heavy work after dark, told no one his method, and left behind a phrase he liked to repeat: that he understood the laws of weight and leverage and knew the secrets of the people who built the pyramids. Because he kept his method secret and because the scale seems impossible for one man, a legend took hold that he had rediscovered anti-gravity or a lost magnetism and floated the stones into place. This case file separates the documented record (an extraordinary feat of solitary, patient engineering) from the rated claim (that it required a physics unknown to science), which the evidence debunks.
Read the case file →Aurora airship crash (1897)
In the spring of 1897, months before the airplane, thousands of Americans reported a mysterious airship drifting across the night sky. On 19 April 1897 the Dallas Morning News carried a short dispatch, datelined Aurora and written by resident S.E. Haydon, reporting that two days earlier one of these airships had sailed low over the town, clipped a windmill on Judge J.S. Proctor's farm, and exploded. Among the wreckage, Haydon wrote, lay the badly disfigured body of the pilot, judged by a supposed Signal Service officer to be "a native of the planet Mars," and the townspeople gave him a Christian burial in the Aurora cemetery. The story lay largely forgotten until the 1970s, when UFO researchers rediscovered it, a grave marker and metal-detector readings became local attractions, and Aurora acquired a reputation as the site of America's first alien burial. This case file separates the documented record (a single 1897 newspaper story and the folklore that grew around it) from the rated claim (that a genuine alien craft crashed and an extraterrestrial is buried there). On the evidence the rated claim is debunked, while the real curiosities the tale left behind are treated as the modest anomalies they are.
Read the case file →Project Blue Beam
A Canadian writer's 1994 self-published claim that NASA and the United Nations are preparing a staged, technologically faked 'second coming' or alien invasion (complete with sky-projected holograms and mind-beamed telepathy) to frighten humanity into a single world government and religion. It has no supporting documentation of any kind, and the core technology it describes is not physically achievable at the scale claimed.
Read the case file →The Fiji Mermaid
In the summer of 1842, the American showman Phineas Taylor Barnum presented what he billed as a genuine mermaid, said to have been caught near the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific. The reality was far stranger and more mundane: the Fiji Mermaid was a grotesque composite, the shriveled upper body of a young monkey sewn onto the back half of a fish, a kind of curiosity manufactured by craftsmen in Japan and the East Indies. Barnum did not create the object; he leased it from Boston museum proprietor Moses Kimball and drove ticket sales with an elaborate hoax, planting anonymous letters in the press and using an accomplice who posed as a British naturalist named Dr. Griffin. This case file separates the documented record (a real, man-made object with a traceable history, now associated with collections including Harvard's Peabody Museum) from the rated claim (that it was a true mermaid proving such creatures exist). On the evidence, that claim is debunked.
Read the case file →Montauk Monster
On 12 July 2008, four young people walking Ditch Plains beach in Montauk, on the eastern tip of Long Island, came upon a strange carcass: hairless, bloated, roughly the size of a large dog, with a beak-like snout and clawed front feet. A photograph reached a local paper and then the website Gawker, and within days the "Montauk Monster" was a national sensation. Because the beach sits near the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a federal research facility, speculation quickly ran to escaped experiments and unknown species. This case file separates the documented record (a rotting carcass that experts identified from its anatomy) from the rated claim (that it was a monster or a lab mutant). On the evidence, the identification as a water-degraded raccoon is firm, and the monster claim is debunked. The one honest caveat, that the body disappeared before anyone could dissect it, is treated below as the loose end it is, not as proof of anything hidden.
Read the case file →Tupac is alive
Tupac Shakur, one of the most influential rappers of all time, was shot four times in a drive-by while stopped at a Las Vegas intersection on 7 September 1996 and died six days later, on 13 September, at age 25. Almost immediately, a rumor took hold that he had faked it: that the shooting was staged, that no death this large could be real, and that he had slipped away to live in secret. This case file separates the documented record (a shooting, a hospital death with an autopsy, a cremation, and a decades-long murder investigation that produced a 2023 arrest) from the rated claim (that he is alive in hiding). On the evidence, the “still alive” claim is debunked. The theory draws its energy from his Machiavelli-inspired Makaveli alias, from a flood of posthumous music, and from a hunger to keep an artist who died young among the living. Tupac's killing was a real crime with a real victim, and this file treats it as such.
Read the case file →John Titor
In November 2000, an anonymous poster calling himself TimeTravel_0 began describing time travel on internet forums, and by January 2001 was posting as John Titor: an American soldier, he said, sent from the year 2036 on a military mission to fetch a vintage IBM 5100 computer needed to fix legacy code in his own time. Over a few months he answered questions in remarkable detail, posted grainy photographs of a device he called a C204 time displacement unit, and forecast a violent American civil war beginning around the 2004 election and a global nuclear war in 2015. Then, in late March 2001, he signed off and vanished, promising to return to 2036. None of the dated predictions came true. This case file separates the documented record (that the posts were written, and that the forecasts failed) from the rated claim (that their author truly came from the future). On the evidence, that claim is debunked, and the weight of investigation points to an elaborate hoax rather than a traveler.
Read the case file →5G health fears
5G is the fifth generation of mobile-network technology, and like every wireless system before it, it communicates using radiofrequency electromagnetic fields. Two overlapping fears attach to it. The first is that 5G radiation causes illness, from cancer to a vaguely defined radiation sickness. The second, which erupted in the spring of 2020, is that 5G caused the COVID-19 pandemic, or helped the virus spread, a claim that moved from fringe posts to real-world arson in a matter of weeks. This file separates the physics from the fear: radiofrequency energy at the frequencies and power levels 5G uses is non-ionizing and, at compliant exposure, has no established health harm; a respiratory virus cannot propagate on a radio signal; and the one legitimate loose end, an ongoing 'possibly carcinogenic' hazard classification and continuing long-term research, is far weaker than the claims it is used to prop up.
Read the case file →The Lee 'curse'
Bruce Lee, the martial artist and actor who made kung fu cinema a global phenomenon, died suddenly in Hong Kong on 20 July 1973 at the age of 32. A coroner's inquest returned a verdict of death by misadventure, attributing the death to cerebral edema, a swelling of the brain, connected to a hypersensitivity reaction to the painkiller Equagesic. Twenty years later, on 31 March 1993, his son Brandon Lee, a rising actor of 28, was fatally wounded on the North Carolina set of the film The Crow when a prop revolver discharged a fragment of a badly improvised dummy round; his death was ruled an accidental shooting. The symmetry of two young, talented men from the same family dying in the middle of their careers gave rise to a durable belief in a Lee family curse, and in some tellings to a suspicion of murder by organized crime. This case file holds the documented record apart from the rated claim. Both deaths are real and both are explained; the supernatural curse is debunked, and no evidence of foul play has ever been produced in either case.
Read the case file →Atlantis
The granddaddy of all lost-civilization legends: a magnificent island empire that supposedly sank beneath the sea in a single catastrophic night. Its only source is a single ancient philosopher, writing a moral fable, whose own student thought he'd made it up.
Read the case file →Texas floods 'cloud seeding'
In the pre-dawn hours of 4 July 2025, torrential rain fed by the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry and an unusually moist atmosphere triggered catastrophic flash flooding along the Guadalupe River in the Texas Hill Country. The river rose more than two stories in under an hour; more than a hundred people were killed, many of them in Kerr County, including children at a riverside summer camp. Days earlier, on 2 July, a small California firm called Rainmaker Technology had run a brief cloud-seeding operation roughly 150 miles to the south. Online accounts stitched the two together and declared the flood engineered. This case file keeps the documented record (a real, tiny seeding operation did occur) apart from the rated claim (that it caused the flood). On the science and the timeline, the claim does not hold: seeding is a marginal, local, short-lived technique, and the flood's meteorology is well understood. The verdict is debunked. For the broader myth of engineered storms, see the companion file on weather control.
Read the case file →Bielefeld conspiracy
In May 1994 a computer-science student named Achim Held posted to a German Usenet group the mock-solemn thesis that the city of Bielefeld does not exist, and that its supposed existence is an illusion sustained by a shadowy power he called only SIE (German for THEY). He offered three deadpan test questions: Do you know anyone from Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld? Do you know anyone who has ever been to Bielefeld? Answer yes to any, the joke runs, and you are either lying, deceived, or part of the cover-up. Held later said plainly that he built the bit to show how easily a conspiracy theory forms and spreads. It became one of Germany's most durable running gags, referenced in the city's own marketing and, in 2012, glancingly by the Chancellor herself. This case file keeps the documented record (a knowingly authored satire) apart from the rated claim (that Bielefeld has no physical existence). On the rated claim the answer is trivial and the verdict is debunked; the reason it earns an entry is what it reveals, like its younger cousin the 'Finland does not exist' joke, about how conspiracy narratives are assembled.
Read the case file →Myrtles Plantation ghosts
The Myrtles Plantation is a genuine historic house near St. Francisville, Louisiana, built in 1796 by General David Bradford and listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1978. It is also one of the most heavily marketed haunted sites in the United States, sold to tourists through a cluster of vivid legends: that a favored house slave called Chloe, her ear cut off as punishment for eavesdropping, baked a cake laced with oleander that killed her mistress and two children; that as many as ten people were murdered on the grounds; and that the victims still walk the property, sometimes caught in photographs. This case file separates the documented record (slavery on the site, a family devastated by yellow fever, and one authenticated 1871 shooting) from the rated claim (the Chloe poisoning and the ten-murder tally as literal history that produced hauntings). On the evidence, the marketed legend is debunked. It is a twentieth-century invention layered onto a real and often tragic past, and the history of the people actually enslaved there deserves to be told accurately rather than folded into a ghost tour.
Read the case file →Wayfair trafficking
In July 2020 a claim raced across social media that Wayfair, the big online furniture retailer, was secretly trafficking children through its own website. The “evidence” was a set of storage cabinets and other household goods listed at prices that looked absurdly high, each carrying a woman’s first name, which posters said matched the names of missing children. A follow-on step told people to paste the product SKU into certain search engines or stock-photo sites and claimed the results showed photographs of kids. Wayfair said the prices reflected genuine industrial-grade products and briefly removed the listings to re-describe them. Fact-checkers found the name “matches” were coincidences involving common names, that the people named were not missing, and that the SKU trick was a misunderstanding of image search. This file separates the documented record (what was posted, what Wayfair said, what checkers found) from the rated claim (that Wayfair ran a trafficking scheme), which is debunked.
Read the case file →Agenda 21 / 2030
In June 1992, 178 governments meeting at the Rio Earth Summit adopted Agenda 21, a sprawling, non-binding action plan on sustainable development, the environment, poverty, and how a crowded planet might grow without wrecking itself. In September 2015 the UN General Assembly adopted its successor, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, built around 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Both are voluntary frameworks with no power to compel any country or person. Around these real documents a darker reading hardened: that the UN's true aim is a one-world government using 'sustainability' as cover to slash the human population, abolish private property, and force people into dense, controlled 'human settlement zones'. This case file separates the documented record (voluntary UN development frameworks) from the rated claim (a covert authoritarian blueprint). On the evidence, the plot reading is debunked.
Read the case file →2000 Mules
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 →And 325 more. Browse the full library →