The open questions
Which conspiracy theories are still unproven?
Some claims sit in the middle. 390 of the 895 we have rated are unproven: there is no firm evidence either way, so we leave them open rather than force a verdict. Being honest about what is unresolved is the point. Here are the most-read, each with the case laid out both ways.
Phoenix Lights
On the night of March 13, 1997, thousands of people across Arizona watched two different things: a huge, silent V-shaped formation of lights that crossed the state around 8 p.m., and a row of stationary lights over Phoenix two hours later. The military solved the second event: confirmed flares from a training exercise. The first has never been officially explained at all.
Read the case file →Pope John Paul I's death
Albino Luciani, Pope John Paul I, was found dead in his bed on the morning of 28 September 1978, only about 33 days into his papacy. The Vatican said he had died of a heart attack, and no autopsy was performed. Then the details started to shift: the Vatican's first account of who discovered him and what he had been holding turned out to be false, and the corrections looked, to many, like a cover-up. Into that gap stepped a theory that he had been poisoned to stop him from cleaning up the scandal-ridden Vatican Bank. The financial corruption around that bank was real and, as later deaths showed, sometimes lethal. The murder of the Pope himself is a separate claim, and it is one the evidence has never been able to carry.
Read the case file →Bob Marley's death
Bob Marley died on 11 May 1981, aged 36, of a melanoma that had started under a toenail and spread to his lungs, liver, and brain. To many admirers that ending felt too cruel and too convenient, and a theory grew up around it: that the cancer was not natural but was induced by the CIA as an assassination. The theory draws on a genuine, disturbing record, the unsolved 1976 shooting at Marley's home two days before a concert, and real CIA hostility toward Jamaica's left-wing government during the Cold War. The best-known version claims Marley was handed a pair of boots rigged with a copper wire or needle that seeded the disease. That last step is where the story leaves the evidence behind: melanoma does not spread from person to object to person, and the documented medical facts explain his death without any plot.
Read the case file →Marilyn Monroe's death
On the night of 4 August 1962, the actress Marilyn Monroe died at her Los Angeles home at age 36. The county coroner ruled the cause acute barbiturate poisoning and the manner a probable suicide. Almost immediately, a counter-story took hold: that she was murdered, often tied to alleged affairs with President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, with the CIA, FBI, or organized crime variously implicated, and the evidence tidied away. This case file separates what is documented (a lethal overdose, a genuinely botched death scene, and unanswered forensic questions) from the central claim (that she was killed and it was hidden), which after more than sixty years and an official review remains unproven.
Read the case file →Malcolm X assassination
Malcolm X was shot dead at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 21 February 1965. Three men were convicted, but one confessed and always swore the other two were innocent, and for decades their supporters said the case was rotten. In 2021 the state agreed: after a 22-month reinvestigation, Muhammad Aziz and the late Khalil Islam were exonerated because the FBI and NYPD had hidden evidence that pointed away from them, and New York paid $36 million. This file separates what is now proven (a wrongful conviction built on withheld evidence) from what is not (how far the agencies' foreknowledge went, and who else took part).
Read the case file →Franco's alien TikToks
In June 2026, James Franco, 48, quietly started a TikTok account and began posting a string of cryptic, low-lit videos. He insisted he was really himself and not promoting anything, then claimed that a creature with glowing eyes, something he described as not human, was lurking in the garage where he paints, and that he believed he was being watched or followed. He promised his followers he would keep filming to prove it and later shared grainy black-and-white footage of a shape moving through his yard. The clips racked up millions of views and set off a wave of alien and conspiracy chatter, memes, and some sincere worry. This case file separates the documented record (the videos were posted and widely reported) from the rated claim (that a real alien or creature and a real surveillance plot exist as described). On the available evidence, no literal creature or plot has been shown, so the claim is rated unproven; the range of ordinary explanations, from a deliberate bit to earnest belief, is not something we presume to adjudicate about a living person.
Read the case file →Area 51 aliens
The famous claim that a secret Nevada base stores and reverse-engineers crashed alien craft, and why the real, documented secrecy around Area 51 has a far more terrestrial explanation.
Read the case file →Cicada 3301
Three rounds of ferociously difficult puzzles, posted between 2012 and 2014 and authenticated by a single consistent PGP key, sent thousands of solvers through cryptography, steganography, phone numbers, and physical posters on four continents in search of an anonymous group calling itself 3301. Who built it, and why, has never been established.
Read the case file →The Bell Witch
Between 1817 and 1821, according to legend, the family of farmer John Bell in Adams, Tennessee was harassed by an invisible force that knocked on walls, pulled hair and slapped faces, spoke aloud in a disembodied voice, and singled out Bell and his young daughter Betsy for abuse. The entity, which came to be called Kate, is said to have predicted John Bell's death and to have boasted of poisoning him when he died in December 1820. The tale is one of the most famous American ghost stories, complete with a celebrated (and doubtful) episode in which a party led by Andrew Jackson was supposedly turned back from the farm. This case file separates the documented record (a real frontier family, real deaths, and a genuinely old and important piece of Tennessee folklore) from the rated claim (that a supernatural being actually did these things). The problem for the claim is not that it is strange but that it is unsupported: the story was first written down long after everyone involved was dead, its foundational source cannot be verified, and its most-quoted proofs have been shown to be false. On the evidence available, the paranormal claim is unproven.
Read the case file →The Yuba County Five
On the night of 24 February 1978, five men from the Yuba City and Marysville area of California, Ted Weiher, Jack Madruga, Bill Sterling, Jack Huett, and Gary Mathias, drove north to watch a college basketball game in Chico, stopped for snacks on the way home, and were never seen alive again. Four had intellectual disabilities and one lived with a psychiatric condition; all were closely tied to their families and to a recreational basketball team, and none had reason to vanish. Days later Madruga's car turned up abandoned, undamaged, and still holding fuel on a remote mountain road far off their route. In June, after the snow melted, four of the men were found dead across miles of forest, including Weiher, who had sheltered in a Forest Service trailer stocked with food and heat he seemingly never used, and who had survived weeks before dying of starvation and cold. Mathias was never found. This case file separates the documented record (the drive, the car, the recovered bodies, the unused supplies, the failed searches) from the rated claim (what actually happened to them). The verdict is unproven: the leading explanations are steelmanned and weighed, and none can be shown to be the answer.
Read the case file →RFK assassination
Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles just after winning the California Democratic primary, and died the next day. Sirhan Sirhan was caught firing a revolver in the pantry, was convicted of first-degree murder, and is still imprisoned. Yet the forensic record contains an anomaly that has never gone away: the coroner found the fatal wound was inflicted from behind at point-blank range, and no witness ever put Sirhan behind Kennedy or that close. This case file separates what is documented (Sirhan fired, was convicted, and remains in custody) from the second-gun claim (that more shots were fired than his eight-round revolver could hold and that a second weapon was involved), which is genuine, contested, and unproven.
Read the case file →Lennon assassination plot
Late on 8 December 1980, Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon four times in the archway of the Dakota, Lennon's apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Chapman remained at the scene reading a copy of 'The Catcher in the Rye' until police arrested him, and the following June he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder against his own lawyers' advice. Because Lennon had been a target of real Nixon-era surveillance, and because the CIA's MKUltra mind-control program was by then a matter of public record, a theory took hold that the murder was no lone act but a state assassination carried out through a programmed patsy. A separate, more forensic strand, argued in detail by the researcher David Whelan, points instead to anomalies in the physical evidence: the medical team's account of the wounds, bullet holes in the Dakota's glass, the doorman's background, and an investigation that ended the moment a confession was in hand. This case file separates the documented record (a confessed, convicted shooter, and a real but limited FBI surveillance campaign years earlier) from the rated claims (that an agency ordered the killing and controlled Chapman, or that a second gunman was covered up). It takes the anomalies seriously and one by one, and finds that they do not establish a second shooter; on the larger conspiracy the verdict is unproven, held open by a case that a guilty plea meant was never tried.
Read the case file →Dulce Base
Dulce Base is the claim that a secret, multi-level facility runs beneath Archuleta Mesa near the small town of Dulce in northern New Mexico, jointly operated by the United States government and extraterrestrial greys, where humans are abducted and subjected to genetic experiments, and where, in the fullest versions, a 1979 firefight (the “Dulce Wars”) killed dozens of human security personnel. The story is traceable to one man: Paul Bennewitz, an Albuquerque businessman who from 1979 became convinced that lights and radio signals he recorded near Kirtland Air Force Base were alien. This case file separates the documented record (a real, unsettling disinformation effort aimed at Bennewitz, plus the ordinary existence of classified sites in the American West) from the rated claim (an underground base shared with aliens). On the evidence, the base itself is unproven: no physical trace of it has ever been produced, while the legend’s human origins are unusually well documented.
Read the case file →Frank Olson's death
Frank Olson was a US Army biological-warfare scientist at Camp Detrick in Maryland. On 19 November 1953, at a working retreat at Deep Creek Lake, a CIA officer named Sidney Gottlieb secretly spiked the group's after-dinner drinks with LSD as part of the mind-control program later known as MKUltra. Olson was not told. Nine days later, in the early hours of 28 November, he went through a closed window of the Hotel Statler in New York and fell ten floors to his death, while a CIA colleague, Robert Lashbrook, was in the room. For more than two decades the government told the family only that Frank had suffered a breakdown and fallen or jumped. In 1975 the Rockefeller Commission exposed the secret dosing, President Gerald Ford apologized in person, and Congress voted the family a settlement. This case file keeps the documented record (the covert LSD dosing and the MKUltra link, both established) apart from the rated claim (that Olson was deliberately pushed to his death by the CIA), which remains disputed.
Read the case file →1952 Washington UFO flap
Over two July weekends in 1952, radar scopes at Washington National Airport and nearby Andrews Air Force Base lit up with unexplained returns moving over the U.S. capital, at times seemingly loitering near the White House and Capitol. Controllers described targets that behaved unlike conventional aircraft, several were seen as lights by pilots and people on the ground, and Air Force F-94 jets were scrambled to intercept. The episode produced the largest Pentagon press conference since the Second World War, at which the Air Force attributed the radar echoes largely to temperature inversions, a weather condition that can bend radar beams and create false blips, and the visual reports to stars and meteors. This case file separates the documented record (real, well-attested sightings by credible witnesses) from the rated claim (that the objects were structured craft of unknown or non-human origin). On that claim the verdict is unproven: the case is iconic and the raw observations are strong, but the inversion explanation is disputed, the anomalous-craft conclusion is unproven, and no physical object was ever recovered or identified.
Read the case file →Roberto Calvi's death
Roberto Calvi was chairman of Banco Ambrosiano, once Italy's largest private bank, and was nicknamed God's Banker for his tangled dealings with the Vatican's own bank, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione. He was also a member of Propaganda Due (P2), a secret and illegal Masonic lodge run by Licio Gelli whose membership rolls, seized in 1981, read like a directory of Italian power. In June 1982 Banco Ambrosiano collapsed with debts of well over a billion dollars, Calvi fled Italy on a false passport, and on the morning of 18 June 1982 his body was found hanging from scaffolding beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, his pockets weighted with bricks. A London inquest first ruled suicide; a second returned an open verdict; and years later an Italian forensic inquiry concluded he had been murdered and his body staged. This case file separates the documented record (the bank failure, the P2 scandal, the two inquests, the exhumation and re-examination, and a Rome murder trial that ended in acquittals) from the rated claim (that Calvi was deliberately killed rather than a suicide). On the evidence available, that claim is disputed.
Read the case file →Hall-Mills murder
On the morning of 16 September 1922, a couple out walking in a lovers' lane off De Russey's Lane in Franklin Township, New Jersey, found two bodies laid side by side beneath a crab apple tree. They were the Reverend Edward Wheeler Hall, rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in New Brunswick, and Eleanor Mills, a married member of his choir with whom he had been having an affair. Both had been shot in the head; Mills had also had her throat cut. Torn fragments of the couple's love letters lay scattered around them. The case became one of the first great American tabloid sensations. A 1922 grand jury returned no indictment; a 1926 trial of Hall's widow and her two brothers ended in acquittal. This file separates the documented murders and trial from the still-open question of who was responsible, which the record has never resolved.
Read the case file →Stephenville lights (2008)
On the evening of 8 January 2008, residents across Erath County, Texas, among them a pilot, a county constable, and business owners, reported seeing large, brilliant lights moving low and fast over the farmland around Stephenville and Dublin. Witnesses described the lights as silent, unusually large, and faster than any aircraft they knew, and some said the lights were briefly pursued by fighter jets. After a local newspaper report by Angelia Joiner, the story went global. The Air Force initially said it had no aircraft in the area, then reversed course on 23 January and confirmed that ten F-16s had been on a nighttime training mission in the adjacent Brownwood Military Operating Area, blaming the first denial on an internal communications error. A privately funded analysis of FOIA-obtained FAA and weather radar, produced for the Mutual UFO Network, reported an uncorrelated radar target with no transponder tracking across the region on a path some described as heading toward the restricted airspace over Crawford. This case file separates the documented record (a real mass sighting, a real military reversal, real jet training) from the rated claim (that a genuinely unexplained craft flew that night and was covered up), which remains unproven.
Read the case file →Bennington Triangle
Between 1945 and 1950, at least five people disappeared in the rugged country around Glastenbury Mountain in southwestern Vermont: an elderly hunting guide, an 18-year-old college student, a war veteran on a bus, an 8-year-old boy, and a 53-year-old woman whose body was the only one ever recovered. Decades later, Vermont author Joseph A. Citro grouped the cases under the name 'the Bennington Triangle.' The disappearances are real and mostly unsolved; whether they add up to anything more than a run of tragedies in dangerous terrain is the question.
Read the case file →Mongolian death worm
The Mongolian death worm, known in Mongolian as olgoi-khorkhoi (roughly “large intestine worm,” because it is said to resemble a length of cattle gut), is a creature of Gobi Desert folklore: a thick, dark red, headless, limbless worm two to five feet long that supposedly surfaces after rain in the hottest summer months and kills anything nearby by spitting a corrosive yellow venom or delivering an electric shock. Nomads have described it for generations, and the explorer Roy Chapman Andrews recorded the tale in the 1920s while leading fossil-hunting expeditions across Mongolia. This case file keeps two things apart. The documented record is the folklore itself, which unquestionably exists and is worth taking seriously as culture. The rated claim is that the animal is literally real with the powers attributed to it. On that question, despite expeditions equipped with everything from Dune-inspired ground thumpers to small explosives, no physical evidence of any kind has ever surfaced, and the verdict is unproven.
Read the case file →The Condon Report whitewash
Between 1966 and 1968 the University of Colorado carried out the first and largest government-backed scientific study of unidentified flying objects, funded by the U.S. Air Force and directed by the eminent physicist Edward U. Condon. Its 1,485-page report concluded that little of scientific value had come from twenty years of UFO study and that further work probably could not be justified. On the strength of that conclusion the Air Force shut down Project Blue Book in 1969. But the study was engulfed in scandal even before it finished. A 1966 internal memo by the project coordinator, Robert Low, spoke of a “trick” to make the work look objective while expecting to find nothing, two investigators who returned with positive findings were summarily fired, and major UFO groups denounced the whole exercise as a fix. This case file separates the documented record (a real study, a real report, and a real, embarrassing memo) from the rated claim (that the study was a deliberate, predetermined whitewash), which remains disputed.
Read the case file →The Enfield Poltergeist
In late August 1977, Peggy Hodgson, a single mother raising four children in a council house at 284 Green Street in Enfield, north London, reported furniture moving and loud knocking that she could not explain. Over the next eighteen months the house became the most famous alleged haunting in Britain. The reported phenomena centred on two of the children, Janet, 11, and Margaret, 13, and included sliding furniture, thrown objects, apparent levitation, and a gruff male voice that seemed to speak through Janet and identified itself as a dead former resident. More than thirty people said they witnessed something, a police officer signed a statement about a moving chair, and two Society for Psychical Research investigators logged roughly two thousand incidents and made about 250 hours of audio recordings. Skeptics documented the girls faking incidents, caught trickery on camera, and argued the investigators were too willing to believe. The sisters themselves later admitted some of it was staged, while insisting most was not. This case file separates the documented record (a genuinely strange, heavily recorded episode that divided serious investigators) from the rated claim (that a real poltergeist was at work), which remains disputed.
Read the case file →Boeing whistleblower deaths
In the spring of 2024, two men who had blown the whistle on aircraft quality problems died within weeks of each other. On 9 March, John Barnett, a former Boeing quality manager who had spent years warning about the 787 Dreamliner, was found dead in his truck in a Charleston hotel car park during a break in the deposition for his own retaliation lawsuit. On 30 April, Joshua Dean, a former quality auditor at Boeing supplier Spirit AeroSystems, died after a sudden and aggressive infection. The proximity of the two deaths lit a viral claim: that Boeing was silencing its critics. This case file keeps the documented record (two deaths, with two very different causes) apart from the rated claim (that Boeing had these men killed). The deaths are real and were a genuine loss; the assassination claim, weighed against what investigators actually found, is unproven.
Read the case file →The Nazi Bell
Die Glocke, German for 'the Bell', is the name given to an alleged top-secret Nazi wonder weapon: a bell-shaped apparatus, said to be several meters tall and filled with a violet, mercury-like substance, that supposedly harnessed exotic physics to defy gravity or bend time. The story entered print in 2000 through Polish journalist Igor Witkowski, who said he was shown, but not allowed to copy, a transcript of the postwar interrogation of SS officer Jakob Sporrenberg. British aviation writer Nick Cook then folded it into The Hunt for Zero Point, tying it to anti-gravity research and a suppressed-technology narrative. This case file separates what is documented (that the Third Reich genuinely pursued advanced weapons, and that some senior SS figures and records went missing in 1945) from the rated claim (that a functioning anti-gravity or time device existed). On the evidence, the device claim is unproven: there is no physical artifact, no photograph, no verifiable document, and no coherent physics, only a single account of a paper no one else has seen.
Read the case file →Weather control
After nearly every catastrophic hurricane, a familiar claim surfaces: that the storm was not natural but engineered, steered, or intensified by a government or a shadowy elite using cloud seeding, HAARP, or geoengineering. This case file separates the parts that are documented (cloud seeding is a real if limited technique, the US really did weaponize rain over the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Operation Popeye, and a UN treaty bans hostile weather modification) from the rated claim: that a hidden capability to manufacture or steer major storms exists and is being deliberately used. On the evidence, real weather modification is genuine but small; the ability to create or aim a hurricane is not shown, and the sheer energy of these storms makes it implausible.
Read the case file →Colares UFO flap
Over the second half of 1977, people living on Colares, a low island at the mouth of the Amazon in Pará state, Brazil, reported strange lights in the night sky that they said descended over houses and beaches and projected narrow beams onto them. Locals named the lights chupa-chupa, roughly the sucker, and said the beams left small burns, puncture-like marks, weakness, and dizziness. A physician at the town health post, Wellaide Cecim Carvalho, later said she treated dozens of people with similar burns. Amid public panic and a mayor's appeal, the Brazilian Air Force launched a field investigation, Operação Prato (Operation Saucer), commanded by Captain Uyrangê Hollanda, which interviewed witnesses across Colares and surrounding villages and collected photographs and film. This case file separates the documented record, that the flap and the military investigation genuinely happened, from the rated claim, that the objects were intelligently controlled craft that attacked civilians and that the truth was confirmed and concealed. On the public evidence that larger claim is unproven: the cause of the 1977 lights was never established, and the most dramatic elements depend on accounts that cannot be verified.
Read the case file →Michael Jackson's death
On 25 June 2009, Michael Jackson, 50, was found unresponsive at his rented Los Angeles home while rehearsing for a fifty-date comeback residency, This Is It. The Los Angeles County coroner determined that he died of acute propofol intoxication, a surgical anesthetic that his personal physician had been using to help him sleep, with other sedatives contributing, and ruled the death a homicide. In 2011 that physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years. Around this documented core grew a set of larger claims: that a wider conspiracy, variously involving the concert promoter, the music industry, or others, had Jackson killed for money or insurance, and, separately, that he faked his own death and is alive. This case file separates the documented record (a fatal overdose and a physician's criminal conviction) from the rated claim (a grand plot or a hoaxed death). On the evidence the wider claims are unproven, while the genuine oddities that make people uneasy are set out honestly rather than waved away.
Read the case file →Neuralink mind control
Neuralink, the brain-implant company founded by Elon Musk, is real, and so is the science behind it: brain-computer interfaces have helped paralyzed people operate computers for two decades. In January 2024 Neuralink implanted its first human participant, who used the device to move a cursor by intention alone. A popular claim takes that documented technology and recasts it as something sinister: a covert program to read people's thoughts, remotely control their behavior, enable mass surveillance, and eventually chip the whole population behind a medical cover story. This case file separates the two. The technology, the trial, and even the ethical controversies around Neuralink are on the record. The secret mind-control agenda is not; it misreads what these devices can actually do and how they are actually deployed.
Read the case file →OpenAI whistleblower death
Suchir Balaji (1998–2024) spent about four years as a researcher at OpenAI, helped build the systems behind ChatGPT, then left the company and went public in October 2024 with a detailed argument that OpenAI had violated United States copyright law. One month later, on 26 November 2024, he was found dead in his San Francisco apartment of a gunshot wound to the head. The San Francisco Police Department reported no evidence of foul play and the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the death a suicide, a conclusion the office reaffirmed in 2025. His parents dispute the ruling, commissioned a private second autopsy they say found an atypical trajectory, and argue he was murdered to stop his testimony. This case file keeps the documented record separate from the rated claim. The record is a young whistleblower found dead and officially ruled a suicide. The claim is that he was murdered and the ruling faked. On that claim, the verdict is unproven.
Read the case file →Project 1794 (the saucer program)
In the early Cold War the US Air Force quietly funded a Canadian firm, Avro Aircraft Limited of Malton, Ontario, to design a flying saucer. Under the code name Project 1794, engineers led by John Frost sketched a disc-shaped, vertical-takeoff craft meant to reach between Mach 3 and Mach 4, climb above 100,000 feet, and intercept Soviet bombers. A low-speed proof-of-concept vehicle, the VZ-9 Avrocar, was actually built and flown. When the National Archives declassified the program's records in 2012, the documents made headlines and revived an old idea: that secret craft like these, not aliens, were what people saw when they reported flying saucers. This case file separates the documented record (a real, failed saucer-aircraft program, now declassified) from the rated claim (that the program explains the era's UFO reports). The program's existence is not in question; the UFO-explanation claim is unproven, and its strongest form is undercut by how poorly the aircraft actually flew.
Read the case file →Foo fighters
In the last winter of World War II, Allied night-fighter crews began reporting something strange: glowing balls of red, white, or orange light, and sometimes clusters of them, that appeared alongside their aircraft, kept pace through turns and dives, and then vanished. Pilots of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron gave them a name borrowed from a newspaper comic strip, the foo fighters. The reports were numerous, they came from trained observers, and similar accounts later surfaced from the Pacific and, reportedly, from German and Japanese crews. Commanders took them seriously enough to suspect a new enemy weapon, and investigated. This case file separates the documented record (a real body of sincere sightings that neither side could tie to an enemy device) from the rated claim (that the lights were alien craft or a secret weapon). On the evidence, the exotic claim is unproven: the mundane explanations, electrical and optical phenomena, misperception, and fatigue, are individually plausible and collectively likely, but the record is too thin to prove which cause applies to which sighting, and no hardware was ever found.
Read the case file →The Delphos UFO ring
On the evening of 2 November 1971, sixteen-year-old Ronald Johnson was tending sheep on his family's farm near Delphos, Kansas when, he said, a glowing, mushroom-shaped object hovered low over a nearby grove, brightened, and shot upward, leaving him briefly unable to see. Where it had been, the family found a whitish, faintly glowing ring of soil about eight feet across. The ring became one of the most studied physical-trace UFO cases anywhere: it resisted water, stayed dry to a foot deep under snow while the ground around it was mud, and it was still visible weeks later when APRO investigator Ted Phillips collected the samples that chemists would analyze for decades. This file separates the documented record, an unusual and genuinely anomalous soil ring on a respected family's farm, from the rated claim, that an extraterrestrial craft landed and made it. The soil is real. The craft is an inference, and on the evidence it stays unproven.
Read the case file →The Tic Tac (Nimitz UAP)
On 14 November 2004, during pre-deployment workups roughly 100 miles southwest of San Diego, off the coast of Baja California, the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group logged a genuinely strange event. The cruiser USS Princeton had been tracking anomalous objects on its advanced radar for days. When two F/A-18F Super Hornets were vectored to one, Cmdr. David Fravor and Lt. Cmdr. Alex Dietrich reported a white, wingless, roughly 40-foot object shaped like a Tic Tac, hovering over a patch of disturbed water with no visible wings, exhaust, or means of propulsion, before it darted away at extraordinary speed. A follow-up jet captured the now-famous FLIR1 infrared video. In 2017 the story broke publicly, and in 2020 the Department of Defense formally released the footage and confirmed it was authentic and unidentified. This case file separates the documented record (a credible, multi-sensor, multi-witness encounter with an object that has never been positively identified) from the rated claim (that the object was an extraterrestrial or non-human craft defying physics), which remains unproven.
Read the case file →The Yowie
The Yowie is Australia's best-known cryptid, an ape-like or man-like figure said to stand anywhere from two to nearly four metres tall, covered in dark hair and walking upright through the forests and ranges of the eastern states. Its roots run deep: hairy, non-human bush beings appear across many Aboriginal oral traditions, and nineteenth-century settlers reported a wild 'Yahoo' or 'Australian ape', most famously in an 1882 account offered to the Australian Museum. From the 1970s a modern cryptozoological version took hold, with research groups, footprint casts, and thousands of catalogued encounters. This case file separates the documented record, a rich body of folklore and eyewitness reports, from the rated claim, that the Yowie is a real undiscovered animal. On that specific claim the verdict is unproven: the evidence is anecdotal, the footprints are inconsistent and easily faked, and no physical specimen has ever been produced, while the notion of a native Australian ape sits badly with a fossil record that contains none.
Read the case file →AI-washing layoffs
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 →The Peter Bergmann case
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 →The Fouke Monster
The Fouke Monster is a Bigfoot-type cryptid said to roam the Sulphur River bottoms near Fouke, a small town in southwestern Arkansas. Reports of a tall, hairy, foul-smelling creature date back to the 1940s, but the legend exploded in May 1971 when Bobby and Elizabeth Ford told authorities that a hairy, red-eyed creature had reached through a window and grappled with Bobby outside their rented home; he was treated at a Texarkana hospital for scratches. A Texarkana Gazette reporter named the creature, a Little Rock radio station posted a bounty, and hunters poured into the area, where three-toed tracks were found. The 1972 film The Legend of Boggy Creek, shot around Fouke with local residents, made the story a nationwide sensation. This case file separates the documented record (genuine, sincerely reported scares in a remote swampland) from the rated claim (that a real unknown animal is responsible). No specimen has ever been recovered, the tracks were called a probable hoax, and investigators argue a black bear explains the sightings. On the evidence the creature's existence is unproven.
Read the case file →Kryptos
Kryptos is a curved copper screen, sculpted by artist Jim Sanborn and installed in 1990 in a courtyard at CIA headquarters, whose surface is punched with roughly 865 characters of ciphertext in four sections. Three were solved by the mid-to-late 1990s and reveal poetic and archaeological passages. The fourth, 97 characters beginning OBKR, has never been publicly cracked. Over the years Sanborn has released a handful of plaintext clues, and in 2025 he auctioned the solution itself, yet the message remains one of the world's most famous unsolved codes.
Read the case file →Havana Syndrome
Beginning in late 2016, US diplomats and intelligence officers in Havana reported a frightening set of symptoms: a sudden sensation of pressure or piercing sound, followed by headaches, dizziness, ringing ears, and lasting cognitive problems. More than 1,000 of these 'anomalous health incidents' have since been reported worldwide. This case file separates two things that are often merged. The symptoms are real, sometimes disabling, and deserve to be taken seriously. The specific conspiracy claim, that a foreign adversary struck personnel with a secret microwave or directed-energy weapon and that the US government is concealing the true cause, is the claim rated here, and on the current record it is unproven: the March 2023 Intelligence Community assessment found a foreign adversary 'very unlikely', while a 2020 National Academies report and a number of unexplained cases keep the medical question genuinely open.
Read the case file →The Florida Skunk Ape
The Skunk Ape is Florida's answer to Bigfoot: a bipedal, hair-covered creature, said to stand five to seven feet tall and to announce itself with a stench compared to rotten eggs, garbage, or a wet skunk, reported for decades in the swamps and sawgrass of the Everglades and Big Cypress. Sightings run back through Florida newspapers of the 1950s and 1960s and surged in the 1970s and again in 1997. The legend is real, complete with a research headquarters, a famous set of 2000 photographs mailed anonymously to a county sheriff, and a state legislator's failed 1977 bill to make harming one a crime. This case file separates that documented folklore from the rated claim: that an actual, undiscovered population of large apes lives in the Florida wetlands. On that claim, after seventy years without a specimen, the record is anecdotal and the photographs are disputed, so the verdict is unproven, and skeptics who point to bears, escaped primates, and hoaxes have the stronger hand.
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