Government & Intelligence
Covert 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.
'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 →A coded sculpture at CIA headquarters hides a message no one has cracked
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 →A foreign adversary attacked US personnel with a secret energy weapon and the government is hiding it
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 →A July 2026 wave of AI deepfake videos falsely showed Union Minister Piyush Goyal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi threatening student protesters as though those were their real words; the most viral clip took genuine PTI footage of Goyal and swapped in a fabricated audio track, and the government's PIB Fact Check unit dismissed the videos as AI-generated, with an FIR registered on 25 July
In late July 2026, as students protested at Jantar Mantar over an alleged NEET-UG paper leak, a batch of short videos spread that appeared to show senior Indian leaders threatening the demonstrators. In the most viral, Union Minister Piyush Goyal seemed to call, on camera at a real media interaction, for protesters to be violently punished; another clip put similar words in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's mouth. None of it was authentic. The Goyal video was built from genuine footage recorded by PTI outside Parliament on 23 July, with the original audio stripped out and an AI-generated track dropped in, so the visuals looked like a real news clip while the words were invented. The government's PIB Fact Check unit dismissed the Modi and Goyal videos as AI-generated deepfakes. Goyal said his remarks had been maliciously doctored, an FIR was registered on 25 July, and platform links were taken down. This case file treats the videos as what fact-checkers found them to be, manufactured clips, and examines how an audio swap on real footage can weaponise a public figure's own image within hours. It does not repeat the fabricated remarks as anyone's actual words.
Read the case file →A political consulting firm secretly harvested tens of millions of Facebook profiles to manipulate elections
In 2018 a whistleblower and a pair of newspapers exposed how Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm funded by the Republican donor Robert Mercer and linked to strategist Steve Bannon, had obtained personal data on tens of millions of Facebook users, commonly cited as up to 87 million, without their knowledge. The data came through a personality-quiz app that harvested not just the people who took it but their entire friend networks, then was passed to a company selling voter manipulation. The harvesting, the missing consent, and the consequences are all documented: Facebook was fined 5 billion dollars, the firm shut down, and executives testified before lawmakers. This case file keeps that established record separate from the harder question the marketing leaves behind: whether the firm's psychographic targeting ever actually worked as advertised.
Read the case file →A secret, coordinated network of unelected officials covertly controls the government and works to undermine elected leaders
The 'deep state' is the claim that a secret, coordinated network of unelected officials, drawn from the intelligence agencies, the military, and the permanent bureaucracy, covertly controls government policy and works to undermine elected leaders and thwart the will of voters. This case file insists on a distinction that the phrase itself blurs. On one side sits a documented reality: the permanent government is real, bureaucracies and spy agencies hold real power, and there is a hard historical record of those agencies breaking the law and abusing citizens. On the other sits a much stronger and unsupported claim: that all of this constitutes one unified cabal secretly ruling the nation and sabotaging whoever the voters elect. The first is substantiated and worth worrying about. The second is not established, is difficult or impossible to falsify, and names a villain that conveniently changes with the political weather.
Read the case file →A US military GPS jamming exercise brought down a medical evacuation flight in New Mexico in May 2026, killing all four people aboard, and the military is responsible for their deaths
Shortly after midnight on 14 May 2026, a Beechcraft King Air C90 air ambulance left Roswell, New Mexico, to collect a patient. Twenty-three minutes later it flew into the side of the Capitan Mountains near Ruidoso. Both pilots and both flight nurses were killed. What emerged in the NTSB's preliminary findings, and reached a wide audience when Stars and Stripes reported it on 5 August, is a sequence that reads badly for the United States military. The crew told air traffic control they had lost GPS. A supervisor called the military, which was conducting a jamming exercise at White Sands Missile Range, and asked it to stop. As the aircraft neared Ruidoso the supervisor called back and said jamming could resume. Five minutes after that, the aircraft hit the mountain. Three other aircraft reported GPS problems to controllers the same night. This file rates the claim that the jamming caused the crash and that the military is therefore responsible for four deaths. That claim is unproven, and the NTSB has said in terms that it has not determined a probable cause or any contributing factor. The documented sequence and the causal conclusion are two different things, and most of the coverage has collapsed them.
Read the case file →After Colombian army forces retook the Palace of Justice from M-19 guerrillas in 1985, they forcibly disappeared and executed survivors, as found by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
On 6 November 1985, about 35 fighters of the M-19 guerrilla movement stormed the Palace of Justice in central Bogota and seized Colombia's Supreme Court, taking hundreds of hostages. Rather than negotiate, the government handed the crisis to the military, which retook the building over roughly 27 hours using tanks, rockets, and gunfire. A fire gutted the palace, and when it was over about 100 people were dead, including 11 of the 25 Supreme Court justices and the court's president, Alfonso Reyes Echandia. This file separates that documented catastrophe from the rated claim: that a number of people who came out of the building alive, mostly cafeteria workers and visitors, were then detained by the army, disappeared, tortured, and in at least one case executed. That claim is not a rumor. It is the conclusion of Colombia's Supreme Court Truth Commission and of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which in 2014 held the Colombian state responsible for the enforced disappearances.
Read the case file →Agents of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence carried out a series of “chain murders” of dissident intellectuals and writers over roughly a decade ending in 1998, a fact the ministry itself admitted
Between the late 1980s and 1998, a string of Iranian dissident intellectuals, writers, translators, poets, and opposition politicians were murdered or disappeared in what became known as the chain murders, so called because the cases appeared linked. Investigators and rights groups later counted upward of eighty victims killed over the decade by methods designed to look unrelated: staged car crashes, faked robberies, stabbings, and injections meant to mimic a heart attack. The pattern surfaced publicly in late 1998 when the opposition leader Dariush Forouhar and his wife were stabbed to death in their Tehran home and two writers were strangled within weeks. In January 1999 the Ministry of Intelligence admitted its own agents were responsible. This file treats the killings and the ministry's role as documented fact, and separates that from the still-contested question the state's own account raises: who, above the arrested agents, ordered the campaign.
Read the case file →American Airlines Flight 77 did not hit the Pentagon on 9/11: the damage was caused by a missile, a drone, or a smaller aircraft
At 9:37 a.m. on 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 was flown into the western face of the Pentagon, killing all 64 people aboard the Boeing 757 and 125 people inside the building, 189 deaths in all. Within months a counter-narrative spread: that no large plane hit the Pentagon at all, and that the damage was really caused by a cruise missile, a military drone, or a smaller aircraft, with Flight 77 disappeared and the scene staged. This case file is the specific Pentagon companion to our broader file on the 9/11 'inside job' theory. It separates the documented record (Flight 77 struck the Pentagon; 189 people died there) from the rated claim (a missile did it), walks through the exact talking points, the 'small' entry hole, the 'missing' plane debris, the withheld video, and rebuts each against the physical, forensic, and eyewitness evidence. It treats the 64 people aboard the flight with the dignity they are owed.
Read the case file →Americans are being tracked by a secret nationwide mass-surveillance dragnet built from license-plate cameras and phone-location warrants
The claim that Americans live inside a pervasive tracking dragnet was once easy to dismiss as paranoia. Much of it is now documented. Flock Safety runs a nationwide network of automated license-plate-reader (ALPR) cameras that log passing vehicles in thousands of communities, and police search the pooled database. For years, 'geofence' warrants let investigators ask Google for every device inside a chosen area and time window, sweeping in bystanders. Data brokers sold precise phone-location data that the government could simply buy. This file separates the documented apparatus, which is real and sprawling, from the strongest conspiracy framing, a single secret program run to a hidden central plan, which the record does not support. The infrastructure is substantiated; a coordinated master-plot behind it is not.
Read the case file →ANC representative Dulcie September was assassinated outside her Paris office in 1988 in a still-unsolved apartheid-era killing
On the morning of 29 March 1988, Dulcie September, the African National Congress's chief representative to France, Switzerland and Luxembourg, was shot five times outside the ANC office at 28 Rue des Petites-Écuries in central Paris as she returned with the mail. She was 52, a Cape Town teacher who had spent five years in apartheid prisons before going into exile, and in Paris she had been probing the arms trade that helped Pretoria evade the UN embargo. Her killers were never caught. The French investigation was closed as unprosecutable in 1992, and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission later found the murder consistent with an apartheid operation against senior ANC figures but could not identify who carried it out. This file separates the documented crime, a professional political assassination in a European capital, from the still-unproven question of who ordered and executed it, and reports the widespread attribution to South Africa's security services as an allegation the evidence supports but has never closed.
Read the case file →Anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in 1977 from head injuries inflicted in police custody, a killing the apartheid state then covered up
Steve Biko was the young founder of South Africa's Black Consciousness Movement and one of the most influential opponents of apartheid. On 18 August 1977 he was detained at a roadblock and held by the Security Branch in Port Elizabeth, now Gqeberha, under laws that allowed indefinite detention without trial. On 12 September 1977 he died, aged 30, after being driven naked and manacled some 1,100 kilometres to a Pretoria prison hospital. The government first claimed a hunger strike; a post-mortem showed he had died of brain injury. A 1977 inquest cleared the police of any blame, and no one was prosecuted. That verdict stood as the official account for two decades until, at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the late 1990s, the officers who had held Biko admitted they assaulted him, that his fatal head injuries were inflicted in detention, and that they had lied at the original inquest. This file treats Biko's death in custody as documented fact and reports the apartheid cover story as the debunked account it is; the live question, reopened by South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority in 2025, is criminal accountability.
Read the case file →Apartheid South Africa ran a secret chemical and biological weapons programme, Project Coast, that developed poisons, disguised assassination devices, and research aimed at regime opponents
Project Coast was the code name for apartheid South Africa's secret chemical and biological weapons programme, launched in 1981 under the military cardiologist Wouter Basson and run through a web of front companies. Ostensibly defensive, the programme in practice developed lethal poisons, incapacitating agents, and assassination devices disguised as ordinary objects, and it researched more sinister ideas, including an anti-fertility agent that testimony said was meant to target the Black majority. Much of what is known came out through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 1998 hearings, the long criminal trial of Basson, and later academic and nonproliferation studies. This file treats the programme's existence and its documented outputs as substantiated, while keeping separate the still-unresolved questions of who ordered particular killings and how far the most extreme projects ever got. Basson, nicknamed “Dr Death,” was acquitted of all criminal charges in 2002.
Read the case file →Army scientist Frank Olson did not fall or jump to his death in 1953: the CIA murdered him to protect its secrets
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 two things apart: the covert LSD dosing and the MKUltra link, both established; and the claim it rates, that Olson was deliberately pushed to his death by the CIA, which remains disputed.
Read the case file →Artificial intelligence, from chatbots like Grok to AI deepfakes, is being used as part of a coordinated covert scheme to secretly control or rig the 2026 US midterm elections
Going into the 2026 US midterm elections, a claim has spread that artificial intelligence is the hidden instrument of a plot to rig the vote: that AI chatbots such as Grok, together with AI-generated deepfake audio and video of candidates, are being coordinated to covertly control who wins. The claim braids together two things that should be kept separate. One is documented and real: generative AI tools have a well-recorded habit of producing false election information, and synthetic media impersonating candidates has genuinely circulated, both of which election officials and security agencies treat as serious threats to information integrity. The other is the rated conspiracy: that this amounts to a single coordinated covert scheme to secretly predetermine the 2026 result. This file states the record plainly and with sources, then explains why the leap to a centralized rigging operation is, on the public evidence, unproven. It attributes every allegation as an allegation, names no culprit, and accuses no one of a crime.
Read the case file →Bangladesh's founding president Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was killed with most of his family in a 1975 military coup, amid a contested theory that the CIA had foreknowledge of the plot
In the early hours of 15 August 1975, a group of mid-ranking Bangladesh Army officers led a coup against Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the independence leader and founding president of Bangladesh. They attacked his home on Road 32 in Dhaka's Dhanmondi district and killed him along with his wife, three sons including a ten-year-old, two daughters-in-law, his brother, and other relatives and staff: at least eighteen people died that night across coordinated raids. His daughters Sheikh Hasina and Sheikh Rehana survived only because they were in Europe. The killers installed a new government and, weeks later, an Indemnity Ordinance that made them untouchable for two decades. When that shield was finally repealed in 1996, the case went to trial; five of the convicted officers were executed in 2010. This file separates the documented event, a planned coup proven in court, from a contested attribution layer: the long-running theory, associated above all with journalist Lawrence Lifschultz, that the CIA had foreknowledge of the plot. That claim is reported here as an unproven allegation weighed against its thin sourcing.
Read the case file →Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was killed in a 1969 police raid coordinated with the FBI's COINTELPRO program
Before dawn on 4 December 1969, a team of Chicago police officers detailed to Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan raided an apartment at 2337 West Monroe Street. When the shooting stopped, Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, and 22-year-old Panther Mark Clark were dead, and four others were wounded. Officials first described a two-sided gun battle. Physical evidence and a federal grand jury later found that officers had fired dozens of rounds and the people inside at most one. In the years that followed it became documented that the FBI's COINTELPRO program had targeted the Chicago Panthers, that a paid Bureau informant had provided a floor plan of the apartment, and that the survivors and families would win a $1.85 million civil settlement jointly funded by the federal government, the county, and the city. This case file keeps two things apart: an FBI counterintelligence campaign, an informant's floor plan, a lopsided volume of fire, and a landmark settlement on one side, and the strongest framing of the claim, that the killing was a deliberate, coordinated assassination, on the other; it rates the claim substantiated for the facts the record establishes, while noting where criminal intent was never proven in court.
Read the case file →Bob Marley's fatal cancer was not natural but the result of a covert CIA assassination plot
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 →Brazil's electronic voting machines are rigged and stole the 2022 election
The claim that Brazil's electronic voting machines, the urnas eletrônicas used nationwide since the late 1990s, are secretly hackable or rigged, and that they were used to fake results and steal the 2022 presidential election from Jair Bolsonaro. The machines are real, the political campaign against them is real and long-running, and the audits are real; the fraud itself is the part that has never appeared. Every official body and monitor that examined the 2022 vote, including Bolsonaro's own Defense Ministry, found no evidence of tampering. This is a distinct system, and a distinct claim, from the U.S. voting-machine allegations that circulated after 2020.
Read the case file →British authorities ran a single, deliberate national cover-up of 'grooming gangs' and operate 'two-tier policing' to protect Muslims
The claim that Britain's police, prosecutors and politicians knowingly ran one coordinated national cover-up of 'grooming gangs' to shield a Muslim or Pakistani-heritage community and to avoid accusations of racism, and that the country now practices 'two-tier policing' that goes easy on minorities. A real, documented scandal of organized child sexual exploitation and real institutional failure sit underneath the story. The overreach laid on top, a single deliberate plot plus a racialized 'two-tier' frame, is not what the evidence, the fact-checks, or the official audits show.
Read the case file →British intelligence floated a corpse carrying fake invasion plans to trick Nazi Germany before the 1943 landings in Sicily
In the spring of 1943, British intelligence dressed a dead man as a Royal Marines officer, chained a briefcase of forged secret papers to him, and slipped his body into the sea off Spain so that the documents would reach Germany. The papers pointed to invasions of Greece and Sardinia; the real target was Sicily. The Germans believed the planted plans and moved forces away from Sicily, and the Allied landings there in July 1943 met lighter resistance than expected. The operation, later immortalised as The Man Who Never Was, is one of the best-documented deception successes of the war.
Read the case file →Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated in London in 1978 with a ricin pellet fired from a modified umbrella, on the orders of the Bulgarian secret service with KGB help
On 7 September 1978, Georgi Markov, a 49-year-old Bulgarian writer and broadcaster who had defected in 1969 and gone on to ridicule the Sofia regime on the airwaves of the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe, and Deutsche Welle, was waiting for a bus on Waterloo Bridge in London when he felt a sharp sting in the back of his right thigh. He turned to see a man picking up a dropped umbrella, who murmured an apology and left by taxi. Markov fell ill with a high fever and died four days later. A postmortem recovered a pinhead-sized platinum-iridium pellet drilled with two tiny cavities that had held ricin, a poison for which there is no antidote. A coroner ruled that he had been unlawfully killed. This case file separates the record (a poisoning ruled an unlawful killing) from the claim it rates (that the Bulgarian secret service, aided by the KGB, was responsible), which is the accepted historical account and is rated substantiated, with the genuine loose ends noted.
Read the case file →Burkinabè revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara was assassinated in a 1987 coup, as established by a 2022 military tribunal that convicted his successor Blaise Compaoré
On 15 October 1987, Thomas Sankara, the pan-Africanist army captain who had led Burkina Faso since 1983 and renamed the former Upper Volta the “land of upright people,” was shot dead along with twelve companions at a meeting of his revolutionary council in Ouagadougou. Power passed the same night to his closest comrade, Blaise Compaoré, who would rule for the next twenty-seven years while Sankara's grave went unmarked and his death was officially attributed to natural causes. Only after Compaoré was toppled in a 2014 popular uprising did the case reopen: the body was exhumed, a military tribunal was convened, and in April 2022 the court convicted Compaoré and others of the killing. This file separates the documented event, a mass political assassination, from the rated attribution, and treats the recurring claim of foreign orchestration as a serious but unproven allegation.
Read the case file →California keeps counting ballots until the Democrat wins, and the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral count was manipulated to deny a Republican the runoff
When the Los Angeles mayoral primary count stretched past a week in June 2026 and a candidate who had led for the second runoff spot fell behind, a familiar explanation arrived: California must be counting until it gets the answer it wants. This case file separates the parts. The lead genuinely did change, the count genuinely was slow, and both have documented causes written into California election law. What is not supported is the claim that the delay is a mechanism for manufacturing outcomes. The story has an unusual wrinkle that makes it worth its own entry: some of the accounts driving the fraud claim were being paid to post by the very betting markets whose shifting odds they cited as evidence, and those companies pulled the posts when journalists started asking.
Read the case file →Central bank digital currencies are a coordinated plan to abolish cash, surveil every transaction, and let the state freeze or program your money
Central bank digital currencies are real. China is running the world's largest digital-yuan pilot, the European Central Bank is preparing a digital euro, and dozens of other central banks are studying the idea. So is the underlying worry: a digital form of state money could, if built carelessly, record every transaction, be switched off for individuals, or be programmed to expire or restrict what it buys. That genuine design question is the seed of a much larger claim: that CBDCs are a single, coordinated plot to abolish cash and impose a social-credit system of total control. The surveillance risk is documented and unsettled. The coordinated-tyranny plot is not, and the halting, openly argued, frequently abandoned real-world record cuts against it.
Read the case file →Charlie Kirk's killing was staged, an inside job, or a cover-up, not the shooting that law enforcement described
Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of the conservative organization Turning Point USA, was shot and killed on 10 September 2025 while speaking at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. A suspect was arrested about 33 hours later and charged with aggravated murder; that prosecution is ongoing and unproven, and the accused is presumed innocent. Alongside the official account, a wave of conspiracy theories spread almost immediately: that the killing was staged or faked, that it was an inside job, or that the real perpetrators or motive are being covered up. This case file separates the thin documented layer (a death, an arrest, a set of criminal charges, and official law-enforcement statements) from those claims, all of which remain unproven. It names no alternative culprit, because none has been established.
Read the case file →Chinese-American journalist Henry Liu was assassinated on US soil in 1984 in an operation that Taiwan's military intelligence service admitted directing
Shortly after nine on the morning of 15 October 1984, two men on bicycles shot and killed Henry Liu in the garage of his home in Daly City, California. Liu, a naturalized US citizen who wrote under the pen name Chiang Nan, was a journalist and author whose critical, unauthorized biography of Taiwan's president Chiang Ching-kuo had angered the ruling Kuomintang. The gunmen belonged to the United Bamboo, a Taiwanese triad, and their leader Chen Chi-li had been recruited by Taiwan's Military Intelligence Bureau. Three months later, confronted with an FBI-obtained recording, Taiwan admitted that its own intelligence officers had directed the operation and arrested its intelligence chief. This file separates the documented event, the assassination of an American journalist on American soil by agents of a foreign government, from the one still-open question: whether the order came from Taiwan's ruling family or stopped at the intelligence bureau.
Read the case file →Colonia Dignidad, a secretive German settlement in Chile run by the fugitive Paul Schäfer, doubled as a torture and detention site for Pinochet's secret police
Colonia Dignidad (“Colony of Dignity”) was an isolated, fortified settlement of German immigrants founded in 1961 near Parral, about 340 kilometers south of Santiago, and ruled for decades by Paul Schäfer, a former German army medic and lay preacher who fled Germany ahead of child-abuse allegations. Behind its barbed wire, watchtowers, and its public face as a charitable farming community, the colony functioned as a totalitarian cult. After Augusto Pinochet seized power in the 1973 coup, the colony was drawn into the machinery of state terror: Chile's secret police, the DINA, used it as a secret detention and torture center. This file separates the documented core, that regime opponents were held, tortured, and in some cases killed or disappeared at the colony, which Chile's official truth commission found and Chilean courts have since confirmed, from the still-open questions of exactly how many died there and where their remains lie. Schäfer, captured in 2005 after eight years as a fugitive, was convicted of child sexual abuse, torture, and a homicide, and died in a Chilean prison in 2010.
Read the case file →Congress voted to merge the United States military with Israel's, placing American forces under foreign command
In July 2026 a claim spread quickly that Congress had voted to merge the American and Israeli armed forces. The underlying legislation is real and the fight over it is real: a provision creating a United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative survived a bipartisan revolt and a 216 to 212 House vote, and Senate Democrats blocked a motion to advance their chamber's version. What the provision does not do is create a joint military. This case file separates the documented legislative record, including the substantial and legitimate opposition to the provision, from the merger claim itself, which fact-checkers examined and rated false.
Read the case file →Conspiracy narratives claiming that the January 2026 US military operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was secretly staged or pre-arranged, rather than the real special-operations raid documented by the US government and international press, are unproven and unsupported by the evidence
In the early hours of 3 January 2026, US forces struck targets across northern Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at a compound in Caracas in an operation the Trump administration named Operation Absolute Resolve. Maduro and Flores were flown to New York, arraigned in a Manhattan federal court on 5 January on narco-terrorism and drug-trafficking charges that they denied, and Vice President Delcy Rodríguez was installed as Venezuela's acting leader. The raid is documented and officially confirmed. What is not established is a fast-spreading online narrative that the whole thing was staged, fabricated, or secretly arranged in advance. This file separates the documented operation from that conspiracy layer. It reports what governments, courts, and reputable press have confirmed; explains why a chaotic, image-poor first day was fertile ground for hoaxes; and summarizes findings by disinformation researchers that Russia- and China-linked networks amplified the confusion. It takes no side on the contested politics and asserts no one's guilt.
Read the case file →COVID-19 leaked from the U.S. Army biolab at Fort Detrick, not from Wuhan
The claim, promoted from 2020 onward by Chinese foreign-ministry spokespeople and state media, that SARS-CoV-2 escaped from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, rather than emerging in Wuhan. A real event sits underneath it: the CDC did pause research at the lab in 2019 over biosafety lapses. But no evidence connects that pause, or the lab, to the coronavirus, and analysts across the BBC, VOA, DFRLab, and the AP have documented the Fort Detrick narrative as a state-directed information operation that assigns blame without proof. This file rates only that Fort Detrick claim; it does not attempt to settle where the pandemic did begin.
Read the case file →DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena was tortured and murdered by the Guadalajara cartel in 1985, amid disputed and unproven claims that the CIA ordered or was present at his interrogation
On 7 February 1985, US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar was seized outside the US consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico, taken to a cartel safehouse, and tortured over roughly 30 hours before being killed; his body was recovered weeks later. The murder, retaliation for a DEA-guided raid that had destroyed a billion-dollar marijuana plantation, triggered Operation Leyenda, the largest homicide investigation in DEA history, and eventually the prosecution of the Guadalajara cartel's leaders. This file keeps two layers apart. The documented core is the cartel abduction, torture, and murder, and the convictions that followed. The contested layer, added years later, is the allegation that the CIA ordered the killing or had a role in Camarena's interrogation, published by Proceso and Fox News in 2013. That claim is reported here as an unproven, disputed allegation, weighed against a documented but very different fact: the CIA's indirect ties to the same traffickers through Contra-era supply operations.
Read the case file →Democratic Republic of Congo President Laurent-Désiré Kabila was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards in January 2001, with the wider plot behind the killing still contested
On 16 January 2001, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was shot in his office at the Palais de Marbre in Kinshasa by a young member of his own bodyguard. The gunman, Rashidi Kasereka, was killed at the scene. Kabila, gravely wounded, was flown toward Zimbabwe; his death was formally announced two days later, and his son Joseph was sworn in as president on 26 January 2001. A special military court, the Cour d'Ordre Militaire, later tried scores of defendants and in January 2003 convicted dozens, sentencing about thirty to death, in proceedings that Amnesty International and independent historians denounced as unfair. This file separates the documented event, the assassination of a head of state by his own guard, from the contested question of who, if anyone, organized it. It reports what the court found and treats the rival theories of the plot's sponsors as attributed allegations that no credible process has established.
Read the case file →Denial of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide is a debunked, court-refuted campaign that contradicts the overwhelming forensic, documentary, and judicial record of the murder of roughly 8,000 Bosniak men and boys
In July 1995, near the end of the Bosnian war, forces of the Bosnian Serb Army under General Ratko Mladic overran Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia that the UN Security Council had declared a protected “safe area.” Over the following days they separated the men and boys from the women, and executed roughly 8,000 of them at fields, warehouses, dams, and schools, then used bulldozers to bury the dead and later dug the graves up again to scatter the remains and obscure the scale. Two international courts, the ICTY and the ICJ, examined this evidence and ruled that it was genocide, and multiple commanders were convicted. Genocide denial takes several forms, from inflating or deflating the death toll to recasting the massacre as ordinary combat or staging, but each has been tested against the physical and documentary record and found false. This file centers that evidence, names denial as the political project it is, and reports its claims only to refute them.
Read the case file →Diana, Princess of Wales, was murdered in a staged car crash rather than killed in an accident
Diana, Princess of Wales, died in the early hours of 31 August 1997 when the Mercedes carrying her and Dodi Fayed crashed in the Pont de l'Alma road tunnel in Paris, killing them and the driver, Henri Paul, and leaving bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones the sole survivor. Within weeks the accident was recast, by grieving relatives and then by a global public, as an assassination staged by the British secret services or the royal family. This case file separates the documented from the alleged. What is documented is that the crash was investigated more thoroughly than almost any road accident in history, and that the French inquiry, the Metropolitan Police's Operation Paget, and a six-month British inquest all concluded it was a tragic accident driven by a drunk, speeding driver and a pursuing pack of photographers, with no evidence of foul play. The claim we rate, that Diana was murdered and the truth concealed, remains unproven and was rejected outright by every inquiry that examined it.
Read the case file →Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a conspiracy, and James Earl Ray did not act alone
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on 4 April 1968. James Earl Ray, a career criminal and prison escapee, pleaded guilty the next year, then recanted within days and spent the rest of his life demanding a trial he never received. This case file separates what is documented from what is disputed: the FBI's very real COINTELPRO campaign to surveil and destroy King; a 1979 House committee that concluded Ray fired the fatal shot but found a likelihood of a conspiracy; a 1999 Memphis civil jury that blamed a plot including unnamed government agencies; and a 2000 Justice Department review that found the conspiracy allegations not credible. It weighs why the sole-gunman account has never satisfied, including the King family itself, against why no plot has ever been proven.
Read the case file →Ecuadorian president Jaime Roldós died in a 1981 plane crash that many have long suspected, but no one has ever proven, was an assassination
On 24 May 1981, a Beechcraft Super King Air carrying Jaime Roldós Aguilera, Ecuador's first president elected after years of military rule, crashed into a hillside near Guachanamá in Loja Province. Roldós, his wife Martha Bucaram, his defense minister, and six others were killed. Roldós was a young reformer who had made human rights the center of his foreign policy and had clashed with regional dictatorships and, in the telling of his supporters, with Washington. His death came just over two months before Panama's General Omar Torrijos also died in a plane crash, and the two losses fused into a lasting suspicion that both men were killed to remove them. This file separates the documented event, a fatal crash officially ruled an accident, from the contested claim that it was an assassination. It reports what the investigations found, what they left unresolved, and why the case has never been closed to everyone's satisfaction.
Read the case file →Eduardo Mondlane, the founding president of Mozambique's FRELIMO independence movement, was killed by a parcel bomb in 1969, an assassination the historical record attributes to Portugal's PIDE/DGS secret police
On 3 February 1969, Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, the American-educated anthropologist who founded and led the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) in its war against Portuguese colonial rule, was killed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, when a bomb concealed inside a parcel detonated as he opened it at the home of an acquaintance. The device was hidden in a book; the package carried forged Soviet postal markings. Tanzanian investigators, and Scotland Yard through Interpol, traced parts of the bomb to colonial Mozambique, and police intercepted two more identical book-bombs addressed to other FRELIMO figures. This file separates the documented event, the assassination of a liberation leader by a planted bomb, from the rated claim, the attribution of the operation to Portugal's secret police, the PIDE (reorganized in 1969 as the DGS), working with the far-right Aginter Press. It reports the strong historical consensus behind that attribution while treating the precise hand that built and delivered the device, and the question of inside FRELIMO help, as contested and unresolved.
Read the case file →EgyptAir Flight 990 was deliberately crashed into the Atlantic in 1999 by its relief first officer, the finding of the US NTSB, which Egypt's aviation authority formally rejects in favor of mechanical failure
In the early hours of 31 October 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767 bound for Cairo, took off from New York's John F. Kennedy airport, reached cruising altitude, and roughly half an hour later plunged from 33,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean about 60 miles south of Nantucket. All 217 passengers and crew were killed. Recovered from deep water, the flight recorders showed the aircraft dived shortly after the command captain left the cockpit, leaving relief first officer Gameel Al-Batouti alone at the controls, and that the engines were shut down during the descent. The US NTSB concluded the dive was caused by Al-Batouti's deliberate control inputs, without determining why. Egypt's Civil Aviation Authority rejected that finding and argued for a failure in the elevator control system. This file separates the documented crash from the still-contested cause, and reports the durable US-versus-Egypt dispute even-handedly.
Read the case file →Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured alive in Bolivia in 1967 and executed the next day on the orders of the Bolivian army, with a CIA officer present, as shown by declassified U.S. documents
On 8 October 1967, a U.S.-trained Bolivian Ranger battalion cornered a small guerrilla band in the Quebrada del Yuro ravine and captured Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine-born revolutionary and comrade of Fidel Castro, wounded but alive. He was held overnight in the one-room schoolhouse of the hamlet of La Higuera. The next afternoon, after an order came by radio from the army high command in La Paz, a Bolivian sergeant shot him dead. Present through the final hours was Felix Rodriguez, a Cuban-American CIA operative attached to the Bolivian unit. The Bolivian government first told the world that Guevara had died of battle wounds, a version that quickly frayed. This file separates the documented core, a capture followed by an execution on Bolivian orders with a CIA man on the ground, from the still-argued questions of what Washington wanted, who precisely gave the order, and where the body lay hidden until 1997.
Read the case file →Federal agents ran an undercover operation against protest organisers, climate groups and labour unions in Minnesota, infiltrating meetings in churches and libraries and pulling union financial records
On 13 August 2026 a defence lawyer in a Minnesota federal case filed a motion asking for more of the material investigators had gathered. Attached to it were government documents describing an operation nobody outside it had heard of. Homeland Security Investigations had run a programme called Operation Puppet Master, aimed at what officials described as a network of conspirators assisting violent opportunists and agitators, and a later effort called Project Whipple Shield. According to the records, undercover officers sat in on organising meetings in churches, schools, libraries and parks; agents monitored activist chat groups and used licence plates to work out who had attended; and the government pulled years of financial records on labour unions and campaign groups, asking a Federal Reserve transfer system not to disclose the request for an indefinite period. One slide, headed 'The Conspiracy', mapped 18 organisations including a bicycle repair collective and the largest federation of unions in the country. Most files on this site rate a claim that outran its evidence. This one is the other kind: a conspiracy chart that exists, drawn by a federal agency, and now sitting in a court file.
Read the case file →Former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in a 2005 Beirut bombing carried out by a member of Hezbollah, as found by a UN-backed tribunal
On 14 February 2005, a truck packed with roughly 1,800 kilograms of explosives detonated as the motorcade of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri passed the seafront St George Hotel in Beirut, killing Hariri and 21 other people and wounding more than 200. The killing set off the mass protests known as the Cedar Revolution and, within two months, the withdrawal of Syrian troops that had been in Lebanon for nearly three decades. The United Nations created the Special Tribunal for Lebanon to try the case. This file separates the documented event, a mass-casualty assassination, from the rated claim, the tribunal's attribution of the attack to a Hezbollah cell. It reports what the STL concluded and convicted, and treats the larger question of who ordered the killing as a contested, attributed matter that the tribunal itself said the evidence did not resolve.
Read the case file →Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in 2007 amid a documented official cover-up, and the masterminds who ordered her killing have never been established
On 27 December 2007, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed as she left an election rally at Liaquat Bagh in Rawalpindi, standing through the escape hatch of her vehicle when a gunman fired and a suicide bomb detonated, killing more than twenty other people. Her death, weeks before a general election and after years in exile, convulsed Pakistan. This file separates two things that are often blurred. The first is the documented core: the assassination itself and the official failures around it, which a 2010 United Nations Commission of Inquiry described as fatally insufficient security and a prejudiced, whitewashed investigation, including a crime scene hosed clean within hours. The second is the contested question of who planned and ordered the attack, which the UN commission expressly declined to answer and which no court has resolved. The cover-up is established; the masterminds are not.
Read the case file →Former Russian military-intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury in 2018, in an operation attributed to the Russian state
On the afternoon of 4 March 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former colonel in Russia's GRU military-intelligence service who had been convicted in Russia of spying for Britain and later freed in a spy swap, was found slumped with his daughter Yulia on a bench in Salisbury, a cathedral city in southern England. Both were gravely ill; a police officer who responded also fell sick. Investigators traced the cause to a Novichok, a class of military-grade nerve agent developed in the Soviet Union, smeared on the handle of Skripal's front door. This file separates the documented event, a chemical-weapon attack on British soil confirmed by the OPCW, from the rated claim, the attribution of that attack to the Russian state. It reports what the OPCW verified, what the UK government and open-source investigators established about the two GRU officers sent to carry it out, and what the 2025 public inquiry into the resulting death of a bystander, Dawn Sturgess, concluded about who bears responsibility.
Read the case file →Franklin Roosevelt knew Pearl Harbor was coming and let it happen
The most consequential surprise attack in American history, and the one where codebreaking, bureaucratic rivalry and hindsight collide. The mainstream case is intelligence failure, not conspiracy, but the debate has never fully closed.
Read the case file →French forces storming a hostage cave on Ouvéa in New Caledonia in 1988 killed 19 Kanak independence militants, several of whom accounts and autopsies indicate were executed after being captured
On 22 April 1988, two days before the first round of a French presidential election, Kanak independence militants attacked the gendarmerie at Fayaoué on Ouvéa, an atoll in New Caledonia's Loyalty Islands, killing four gendarmes and taking 27 hostages, most of whom were hidden in a cave near the village of Gossanah. After a two-week standoff, and amid a bitter Mitterrand–Chirac runoff, French forces launched Operation Victor at dawn on 5 May. The assault freed the hostages but left two soldiers and 19 Kanaks dead. This file separates the documented event, a lethal cave assault, from the rated claim, that several of the dead Kanaks were killed after they had surrendered or been wounded and captured. It reports what autopsies, the account of GIGN commander Philippe Legorjus, and later inquiries indicate, and it notes that a 1988 amnesty blocked prosecutions, so no court ever tested the question. It anchors the site's coverage of the Pacific and Oceania.
Read the case file →French intelligence bombed the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour
The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior is one of the rare conspiracies that ends not in a coverup but in a confession. Shortly before midnight on 10 July 1985, two bombs tore open the hull of Greenpeace's flagship as it lay berthed in Auckland harbour, ready to lead a protest flotilla against French nuclear testing at Mururoa. The ship sank in minutes; a Dutch-Portuguese photographer, Fernando Pereira, drowned. The attackers were not eco-radicals or a rogue cell: they were combat divers of France's Directorate-General for External Security, the DGSE, acting on orders in an operation codenamed Satanique. New Zealand police caught two of them, France first denied everything, then a whitewash inquiry collapsed, and within ten weeks the French prime minister went on television to admit the state had done it. This file lays out what is documented, and it is nearly all documented.
Read the case file →Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" exposed a CIA scheme to flood Black Los Angeles with crack cocaine to fund the Contras, and he was destroyed and later killed for it
In August 1996, San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb published a three-part series called Dark Alliance. It traced a chain from a Nicaraguan cocaine ring, whose members had ties to the CIA-backed Contra rebels, to Los Angeles dealer Ricky Ross and the crack trade of the 1980s, and it argued that drug profits had helped fund the Contras. The series set off an uproar, especially in Black communities that read it as evidence the government had a hand in the crack epidemic. Within months, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times ran lengthy rebuttals, and in May 1997 Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos published a column saying the series had fallen short of the paper's standards. Webb's career collapsed. In 1998 the CIA's own Inspector General acknowledged that the agency had kept working with Contra-linked individuals despite drug allegations, a finding many took as partial vindication. Webb died in 2004 of two gunshot wounds; the coroner ruled it a suicide. This case file separates the record (real Contra-drug links, real CIA foreknowledge, real flaws in the series) from the claim it rates in its strongest form (a deliberate government plot to addict Black neighborhoods, and a later assassination), which the record does not establish.
Read the case file →Governments and elites secretly control the weather, steering and strengthening hurricanes at will
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 claim it rates: 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 →Grenadian prime minister Maurice Bishop was executed by firing squad in a 1983 internal coup that triggered the US invasion, and his remains were never found
Maurice Bishop came to power in Grenada in a 1979 revolution and led its socialist People's Revolutionary Government for four years. In October 1983 a power struggle inside his own party, the New Jewel Movement, ended in his death. After a hardline faction placed him under house arrest, thousands of supporters freed him on 19 October 1983 and marched to Fort Rupert; soldiers loyal to the faction retook the fort, and Bishop and seven others, including cabinet ministers and his partner Jacqueline Creft, were lined up and shot. The killing threw the tiny island into military rule and, on 25 October, drew a US-led invasion, Operation Urgent Fury. This file separates the documented facts, the execution, the coup, and the invasion, from two contested threads: exactly who ordered the shootings, resolved in part by the Grenadian courts through the trial of the “Grenada 17,” and the fate of the bodies, which US forces recovered in charred condition but could never conclusively identify.
Read the case file →Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi was beaten to death in April 1998, two days after his church released a report blaming the army for most of the civil war's atrocities, and a civilian court convicted military officers of the killing
On the night of 26 April 1998, Auxiliary Bishop Juan José Gerardi was beaten to death with a chunk of concrete in the garage of the parish house of San Sebastián church in Guatemala City. Two days earlier he had presented Guatemala: Nunca Más, the four-volume REMHI report that documented tens of thousands of killings and disappearances from the country's 36-year civil war and laid roughly nine in ten of them at the door of the army and allied state forces. The investigation was flooded with red herrings, a dog blamed for the wounds, a crime-of-passion story, before a Guatemalan civilian court convicted three military men and a priest in 2001. This file separates the documented core, a targeted killing days after a report the army hated, followed by a landmark conviction of military officers, from the still-open question the court did not answer: who inside the state ordered it.
Read the case file →Guinea-Bissau independence leader Amílcar Cabral was assassinated in 1973 by dissident members of his own party, with Portugal's secret police widely implicated in fostering the plot
Amílcar Cabral was the agronomist-turned-revolutionary who founded the PAIGC and led the guerrilla war that was pulling Portuguese Guinea toward independence. On the night of 20 January 1973, as he returned to his home in Conakry, the exile capital from which the movement was run, he was shot dead by a small group of dissident PAIGC members led by the naval commander Inocêncio Kani. The same faction seized his deputy Aristides Pereira and other senior figures and set out by boat toward Portuguese-held Bissau before Guinean forces caught them. Several captured plotters confessed that they had been acting for the Portuguese, whose secret police, the PIDE/DGS, had spent years trying to kill or capture Cabral and had quietly infiltrated the party. This file separates the documented event, an internal party assassination, from the contested attribution layer, exactly how far Portugal's Lisbon leadership planned and directed it. It reports what the historical record supports and treats the degree of direct Portuguese command as the genuine open question.
Read the case file →Gulf War Illness is real, and the government deliberately covered up its true cause
Beginning shortly after they came home, veterans of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War reported a cluster of persistent symptoms: fatigue, joint and muscle pain, headaches, memory and concentration problems, rashes, and digestive trouble. For years many were told there was nothing physically wrong, or that stress explained it. Today the condition, usually called Gulf War Illness, is officially recognized as a real, chronic, multi-symptom disorder, and the Department of Veterans Affairs pays presumptive compensation for it. This case file separates two things that the phrase "Gulf War Syndrome" tends to fuse. What is on the record is a genuine illness that was under-acknowledged at first, a real and reasonable grievance. The claim it rates is that the government deliberately covered up the cause, variously pinned on nerve-agent exposure, anti-nerve-agent pills, pesticides, depleted uranium, oil-fire smoke, or vaccines. On the evidence, the illness is real and the early dismissiveness is substantiated, while a single proven cause and a knowing, coordinated cover-up are not.
Read the case file →HAARP is a secret weather-control, earthquake, and mind-control weapon
A remote Alaskan antenna field built by the US military to study the upper atmosphere has spent three decades being blamed for hurricanes, earthquakes, and mind control. The facility is real and its research is public; the weaponized version of it is not.
Read the case file →Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in 2021 by a team of mostly Colombian mercenaries recruited through a Florida security firm, with the masterminds who ordered and financed it still contested
Shortly after 1 a.m. on 7 July 2021, a heavily armed team entered the hillside residence of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in Pèlerin 5, above Pétion-Ville, some of them shouting in English that this was a US Drug Enforcement Administration operation. They shot Moïse a dozen times and wounded his wife, Martine. Haitian forces killed three of the attackers and captured most of the rest within days; the great majority were former Colombian Army soldiers, recruited through a Miami-area security company called CTU. Prosecutions followed on two tracks. In Haiti, roughly twenty people including seventeen Colombians face charges; in Miami, the US Department of Justice charged eleven, won several guilty pleas and life sentences, and in May 2026 secured a jury verdict against four more. This file separates the documented killing and mercenary operation, which the courts have established, from the still-contested question of who ordered and paid for it.
Read the case file →Imperial Japan's Unit 731 ran a lethal human-experimentation and biological-warfare program, and after the war the United States gave its leaders immunity in exchange for the data
Between the 1930s and 1945, the Imperial Japanese Army operated a secret biological-warfare complex in occupied Manchuria known as Unit 731, headquartered at Pingfang near Harbin and led by the army physician Shiro Ishii. Its personnel conducted lethal experiments on prisoners, referred to in unit slang by a term meaning logs, and field-tested plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhus against Chinese towns. When Japan surrendered, the unit destroyed its facilities and killed its remaining captives. In the occupation that followed, American investigators concluded the program's data was valuable and, rather than prosecute, recommended immunity. Ishii and other leaders were shielded from war-crimes charges, the subject was kept out of the Tokyo tribunal, and the records moved quietly into US hands. This case file keeps two things apart: the experiments, the attacks, and the immunity bargain, all supported by declassified files and scholarship, and the questions that genuinely remain open, the precise death toll, the real worth of the data, and the full chain of knowledge. On the central claim, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →In 1949 the U.S. government secretly released a radioactive cloud over its own citizens and hid it for decades: the Hanford 'Green Run'
For nearly forty years, an official secret sat in classified files: one December night in 1949, the U.S. government intentionally released a radioactive cloud over its own farmland and told no one. The Hanford Site, the plutonium factory that fueled the Nagasaki bomb, ran what insiders called the Green Run. Operators dissolved 'green' fuel, irradiated uranium cooled for only about sixteen days instead of the usual months, and let the resulting iodine-131 and xenon escape up the stack, apparently to generate a signature that would help U.S. aircraft detect the Soviet Union's new nuclear program. Weather scattered the plume farther than planned, across a region of dairy farms, and no evacuation or warning was issued. The release only came to light in 1986, through declassified documents pried loose by local journalists and activists. This case file lays out what the record firmly establishes, and where the science of downwind harm remains honestly unresolved.
Read the case file →In 1985, the Philadelphia city government dropped a bomb on a house full of its own residents and let the fire burn, killing 11 people and destroying a neighborhood
MOVE was a Black liberation and back-to-nature group founded in Philadelphia in the early 1970s. After years of conflict with the city, including a 1978 shootout in which a police officer was killed, MOVE settled in a row house at 6221 Osage Avenue in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood. On 13 May 1985, after evacuating the block, police tried to serve arrest warrants and evict the occupants; the day dissolved into a gun battle, tear gas, and water cannon. That evening a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter dropped an explosive device onto a rooftop bunker, and the house caught fire. Commanders decided to let the blaze burn, and it spread unchecked, killing 11 people, five of them children, and leveling a residential block. This case file keeps two things apart: a city government bombed an occupied home and allowed the fire to consume a neighborhood, findings established by an official commission and a federal jury, and the narrower, still-disputed questions about intent and accountability. On the central claim, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →In the summer of 1988, Iran secretly executed thousands of imprisoned political dissidents on the orders of judicial and intelligence panels that survivors call “death commissions”
In late July 1988, as the Iran–Iraq War ended and an armed incursion by the exiled opposition group the People's Mojahedin (MEK) was crushed, Iranian authorities began systematically executing political prisoners already held in the country's jails. Over roughly five months, in Tehran's Evin and Gohardasht prisons and in jails across at least a dozen provinces, small panels of officials questioned inmates about their beliefs and affiliations and sent those who refused to renounce them to the gallows, often within minutes. Survivors named the panels “death commissions.” The victims were mostly MEK supporters, along with leftists from the Fedaian and the Tudeh (communist) party; many were serving fixed sentences and some were minors. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch document the killings from extensive testimony and estimate the dead in the thousands. This file separates the documented massacre from the still-contested questions of exactly how many died and who bears responsibility.
Read the case file →India's Cockroach Janta Party protests were not an organic student movement but a foreign-backed influence operation, run with Pakistani bot followers, US funding, and an opposition toolkit
In May 2026 the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, said during a Supreme Court hearing that there were 'youngsters like cockroaches' who could not find employment, and referred to 'parasites' attacking the system. Within a day a political communications strategist, Abhijeet Dipke, had registered a satirical website calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, styled as the voice of the lazy and unemployed. It was a joke that stopped being one. Fed by allegations that the NEET-UG medical entrance paper had leaked and by the cancellation and re-sit that followed, the CJP became a mass movement, out-followed the governing party on Instagram, filled Jantar Mantar from 6 June, and ended on 25 July with the education minister's resignation. Running alongside it the whole way was a second story: that none of this was real. Versions held that the followers were Pakistani bots, that the money was American, that an opposition leader was secretly behind the account, and that a leaked toolkit showed the outrage was manufactured. This file keeps the two apart. That the protests happened, and that this counter-narrative was pushed at them, are both documented. The counter-narrative itself is what gets rated, and each of its load-bearing claims has been checked and found false.
Read the case file →Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose did not die in the 1945 Taihoku air crash but survived it in secret, as survival theories have long claimed
Subhas Chandra Bose, revered in India as Netaji, led the Indian National Army against British rule in alliance with Axis powers during the Second World War. The official account holds that on 18 August 1945 he boarded an overloaded Japanese bomber at Taihoku, now Taipei, in Japanese-controlled Taiwan; the aircraft crashed on take-off, and Bose died that evening of severe burns. Because his body was cremated abroad and his ashes were placed in a Tokyo temple, and because he was a figure many Indians did not want to believe was gone, rumours that he had survived took hold almost at once. Over sixty years, three government inquiries reached conflicting verdicts. This file separates the documented core, that a crash occurred and the weight of evidence places Bose's death in it, from the claim it rates, that he secretly survived. It reports the survival theories, including the Gumnami Baba legend, as unproven allegations rather than established fact.
Read the case file →Indian prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death in Tashkent in 1966, officially a heart attack, was suspected by many to be a poisoning, a suspicion kept alive by an absent autopsy and by the state's continuing refusal to open its file
Lal Bahadur Shastri, the second prime minister of India, died in Tashkent, then in the Soviet Union, in the early hours of 11 January 1966, only hours after he and Pakistan's president Ayub Khan signed the Tashkent Declaration ending the 1965 war between their countries. The official cause was a heart attack. Because his death was ruled natural, no post-mortem examination was carried out, in Tashkent or after his body was flown home. That absence, together with family accounts of a discolored body and later reports of unexplained marks, seeded a durable suspicion that Shastri was poisoned. Decades of requests to see the government's records have met with refusal: the Prime Minister's Office has said it holds a single classified file on the death and will not release it, and the Central Information Commission has pushed back. This file separates the documented event from the unproven poisoning theory and reports the doubt as a product of secrecy and the missing autopsy.
Read the case file →Indian strikes during the May 2025 Operation Sindoor crisis hit Pakistan's Kirana Hills nuclear-storage site and triggered a radioactive leak
In May 2025, India and Pakistan fought a short, intense conflict that New Delhi called Operation Sindoor. Amid the fog of war, a claim spread online that Indian strikes had hit Kirana Hills, a suspected underground nuclear-weapons storage site near Sargodha in Pakistan's Punjab, and caused a radioactive leak. The story was dressed up with talk of a US radiation-detection aircraft and Egyptian aid flights supposedly responding to contamination, and with photos and video presented as proof. None of it held up. The IAEA said it had no indication of any radiation leak from a Pakistani nuclear facility; India's Air Marshal A K Bharti said the air force had not struck Kirana Hills; Pakistan's military denied the account; and fact-checkers matched the viral images to a Kazakh nuclear-test site and old footage from Yemen. This file reports the real conflict and the official statements as documented fact, and treats the radiation leak strictly as an unproven claim the evidence does not support.
Read the case file →Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist purge killed an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people, with documented United States complicity
In the early hours of 1 October 1965, a group calling itself the 30 September Movement (G30S) abducted and killed six senior Indonesian army generals in Jakarta. Within days the army, led by Major General Suharto, blamed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and launched a nationwide campaign of extermination. Over roughly the next six months, soldiers and army-organized militias killed an estimated 500,000 to more than a million people across Java, Bali, Sumatra, and beyond, and imprisoned hundreds of thousands more without trial. The purge destroyed what had been the largest communist party outside the socialist bloc and brought Suharto to power for three decades. This file treats the killings and the documented role of the United States as substantiated, drawing on declassified US Embassy cables, academic scholarship, and the 2016 International People's Tribunal. It keeps that documented core separate from the still-disputed question of who actually instigated the 30 September Movement.
Read the case file →Indonesian human-rights activist Munir Said Thalib was murdered with arsenic on a 2004 Garuda flight, a killing that Indonesian courts prosecuted only partly, leaving the intelligence chain of command untouched
Munir Said Thalib was Indonesia's best-known human-rights campaigner: founder of the missing-persons commission KontraS, later head of the monitor Imparsial, and the man who did more than anyone to expose the abduction of pro-democracy activists in the last days of the Suharto dictatorship. On 7 September 2004, flying to the Netherlands to begin a master's degree, he died in agony aboard Garuda Indonesia flight GA-974. A Dutch autopsy found he had been poisoned with arsenic. Indonesian courts convicted an off-duty Garuda pilot who had engineered a seat beside him, and later a Garuda executive who cleared the pilot onto the flight. A government fact-finding team went further, reporting that the plot ran into the state intelligence agency, BIN. This file separates the documented murder and its two convictions from the still-open question of who, above the operatives, ordered Indonesia's most prominent activist killed.
Read the case file →Iran shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 near Tehran in January 2020 and denied it for three days before the Revolutionary Guard admitted firing two missiles at the plane
In the early hours of 8 January 2020, hours after Iran fired ballistic missiles at US bases in Iraq in retaliation for the killing of General Qassem Soleimani, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752, a Boeing 737-800 bound for Kyiv, took off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport. Minutes later it was hit by two Tor-M1 missiles launched by an IRGC air-defence unit and crashed, killing all 167 passengers and 9 crew, among them scores of Iranians, Iranian-Canadians, Ukrainians, and others. Iran spent three days denying that a missile was involved, insisting it was a technical fault, before the armed forces admitted the shootdown on 11 January. This file separates the documented and admitted core, the missile strike and the initial denial, from the still-contested layer of intent and command responsibility, which Iran calls pure accident and which international investigators say its obstruction has left unresolved.
Read the case file →Iran's schoolgirls were the targets of a deliberate, coordinated poisoning campaign
From late 2022, thousands of schoolgirls across dozens of Iranian cities reported sudden illness at school: nausea, breathlessness, dizziness, numbness, and strange odors. Coming amid the woman-led protests that followed Mahsa Amini's death, many Iranians concluded that girls were being deliberately poisoned to frighten them out of the classroom. Iranian authorities cycled through denial, talk of a 'hostile plot,' arrests, and claims of stress and mass hysteria. Independent experts split between a real low-grade chemical irritant and mass sociogenic illness. The opacity of the official response made the truth impossible to nail down, which is why the coordinated-poisoning claim, however plausible to many, stays unproven.
Read the case file →Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed in 2020 by a remote-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun mounted in a parked truck, an operation widely attributed to Israel's Mossad
On 27 November 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, an Iranian physicist and Revolutionary Guard officer whom Israel and the West had long named as the driving force behind Iran's nuclear-weapons program, was ambushed and killed on a road in Absard, east of Tehran. What made the case remarkable was not only the target but the weapon: Iranian officials and later a detailed New York Times investigation described a remote-controlled machine gun, fitted with AI-assisted aiming and facial recognition, concealed in a parked Nissan pickup truck and operated from a distant location, with no assassin physically present. The device fired a burst in under a minute, killed Fakhrizadeh, spared his wife beside him, and then self-destructed. Iran immediately blamed Israel's Mossad. This file separates the documented core, the killing and its unusual method, from the contested layer, the attribution to Israeli intelligence, which is strongly reported but never officially confirmed.
Read the case file →Israel and the Mossad deploy animals, from a "killer shark" to tagged vultures, storks, and a "spy dolphin," as covert espionage and sabotage tools across the Middle East
Every few years an animal turns up in the Middle East wearing a small electronic device, and a familiar story follows: it is a secret Israeli or Mossad spy, or in one Egyptian case a shark deliberately loosed on tourists. The concrete episodes are real and were widely reported, a South Sinai governor musing in December 2010 that Mossad might have planted a shark to wreck Egyptian tourism, a griffon vulture caught in Saudi Arabia in 2011 with a Tel Aviv University tag and called a 'Zionist plot,' a stork detained in Egypt in 2013, a vulture held in Lebanon in January 2016, and Hamas's 2015 announcement of a captured 'spy dolphin.' What ties them together is not espionage but conservation: the devices are GPS and satellite trackers used by the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority, university biologists, and wildlife researchers everywhere to follow migration routes and protect endangered species. In each documented case the official who raised the spy angle retreated, or a vet or wildlife authority identified the tracker, and examined animals were released. This file treats the accusations as claims to be tested, not facts, and rates the animal-spy idea debunked.
Read the case file →Israel deliberately attacked the USS Liberty in 1967 and both governments covered it up
On 8 June 1967, during the Six-Day War, Israeli jets and torpedo boats attacked the USS Liberty, an American signals-intelligence ship in international waters off the Sinai. Thirty-four US sailors were killed and 171 wounded. Israel called it a tragic case of mistaken identity, apologized, and paid compensation; a US Navy Court of Inquiry and later official reviews accepted that finding. But many survivors and some senior officials have argued for more than half a century that Israel knew it was hitting a US ship and that Washington helped bury the truth to protect a strategic ally. This case file separates what is documented (the attack, the deaths, the apology, the investigations) from the rated claim (deliberate intent plus a coordinated cover-up), which remains unproven.
Read the case file →Israel was found indirectly responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre by its own Kahan Commission, which named senior officials, including holding Ariel Sharon personally responsible for failing to prevent the killings carried out by allied Phalangist militia
Between 16 and 18 September 1982, during Israel's occupation of West Beirut in the Lebanon War, Lebanese Phalangist militiamen entered the Sabra neighborhood and the neighboring Shatila refugee camp and killed a large number of civilians, most of them Palestinians and Lebanese Shia. Estimates of the dead range from about 1,300 named victims to 3,500 total. The militia carried out the killings, but the camps sat inside territory the Israel Defense Forces controlled: the IDF had sealed the perimeter, and its commanders had allowed the Phalange in two days after the assassination of Lebanon's president-elect, Bashir Gemayel. Under intense domestic protest, Israel convened the Kahan Commission, which in February 1983 found the state indirectly responsible and held Defense Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible for ignoring the foreseeable danger. This file separates the documented massacre and the commission's findings from the harder, unproven question of Israeli intent.
Read the case file →Italian statesman Aldo Moro's 1978 kidnapping and murder was carried out by the Red Brigades, but the case has long drawn unproven claims of Operation Gladio, P2, or CIA collusion
On the morning of 16 March 1978, a Red Brigades commando ambushed the car of Aldo Moro, the president of the Christian Democracy party and a former prime minister, on Via Fani in Rome. They killed his five bodyguards in seconds and seized Moro, who was on his way to a session that would have sealed his historic compromise bringing the Communists into the governing majority. For 55 days the Red Brigades held him, issued communiqués, and demanded a prisoner exchange the government refused. On 9 May 1978 his body was found in the boot of a red Renault 4 parked near the headquarters of both governing parties. Italian courts convicted the Red Brigades members who carried out the crime. This file keeps that documented core separate from the long-running conspiracy layer: the theories that Operation Gladio, the P2 lodge, or the CIA had a hand in the operation, which remain unproven.
Read the case file →Itavia Flight 870, a civilian DC-9, was brought down by a missile in the skies near the island of Ustica in 1980, and the true cause was buried for decades in a military cover-up
On the evening of 27 June 1980, Itavia Flight 870, a Douglas DC-9 flying from Bologna to Palermo, disintegrated over the Tyrrhenian Sea between Ponza and Ustica, killing all 77 passengers and 4 crew. What began as an air-crash investigation became one of Italy's longest-running state scandals, the strage di Ustica, marked by erased radar tapes, dead witnesses, indicted generals, and competing official theories that pitted a bomb against a missile. This file separates the documented core from the contested attribution. The documented core: a mass-casualty disaster whose cause and cover-up Italy's highest civil court has tied to a military incident and to state concealment, holding two ministries liable. The contested layer: the widely held theory that the DC-9 was caught in an air battle involving NATO forces trying to kill Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, which no criminal verdict has ever confirmed.
Read the case file →Jade Helm 15, a US military training exercise, was cover for imposing martial law, confiscating guns, and detaining dissidents
In the spring of 2015, the US Army announced Jade Helm 15, a two-month special-operations training exercise scheduled to run across parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, California, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A leaked planning map that shaded Texas and Utah as 'hostile' terrain, combined with the scale of the exercise and the involvement of Green Berets and Navy SEALs, set off a wave of claims that the drill was really a rehearsal for a federal takeover: martial law, mass gun confiscation, and the rounding up of dissidents into detention camps, some said hidden beneath abruptly closed Walmart stores. The alarm reached far enough that Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Texas State Guard to monitor the federal exercise. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, announced training exercise and a real, notable political response to it; and the claim it rates, a concealed martial-law plot. On the record, the takeover claim is debunked: Jade Helm 15 ran from 15 July to 15 September 2015 and ended without incident. The interesting residue, including the Russian-disinformation angle raised afterward, is treated as the open matter it is rather than as proof of anything the theory predicted.
Read the case file →Jair Bolsonaro's 2018 campaign-trail stabbing was staged or faked (the 'fakeada')
The claim that the knife attack on presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro at a rally in Juiz de Fora on 6 September 2018, known in Brazil as the 'facada' (the stab wound), was not a real assault but a staged stunt, a 'fakeada,' to win sympathy, dodge debates, or disguise a planned medical procedure. What is on the record, from the surgeons who operated on him that night to the Federal Police investigation, describes a genuine, life-threatening wound. The staged reading does not survive contact with that record.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein faked his 2019 death and is secretly alive, spirited away by powerful allies to escape justice
Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, was found dead in a Manhattan federal jail cell on 10 August 2019. Beyond the well-known dispute over whether he was murdered or died by suicide sits a separate and stranger claim: that he never died at all, that a body double or a protective arrangement among powerful friends let him fake the death and vanish to escape justice. This case file rates that specific claim. It separates the record (Epstein was found unresponsive at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the medical examiner ruled the death a hanging, and the body was identified by and released to his brother) from the rated assertion that he is alive. On the evidence, that assertion is debunked. Even the family's own dissenting pathologist, who contests the suicide finding, agrees Epstein is dead. The viral clips of an Epstein lookalike driving in Florida show an identified local man, not the financier. For the genuinely open murder-versus-suicide question, see the companion file.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein was a working intelligence asset, run by Israel's Mossad or by US intelligence as a sexual-blackmail operation against the powerful
The idea that Jeffrey Epstein was not just a well-connected financier but an actual intelligence operative, run by Israel's Mossad or by US intelligence to collect sexual blackmail on the powerful, is one of the most persistent theories of the entire saga, and unlike much of the surrounding lore it draws on a real documentary record. Epstein's orbit included Robert Maxwell, long alleged to have had Mossad ties, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, with whom Epstein had dozens of documented meetings and a shared investment in the surveillance startup Carbyne. A 2019 Daily Beast report quotes prosecutor Alexander Acosta being told Epstein 'belonged to intelligence.' A 2020 FBI document released in 2026 records an anonymous claim that Epstein 'trained as a spy,' and Vice President JD Vance said in July 2026 that Epstein had connections to the 'highest levels' of US and Israeli intelligence. This case file weighs that record honestly. The intelligence-adjacent ties are documented; the conclusion that a state ran Epstein as an asset is not established, its hardest version rests on a discredited source, and the leap to 'Israel controls America' is an antisemitic trope the file reports on but never asserts.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his jail cell to stop him testifying, not left to kill himself
Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, was found dead in a Manhattan federal jail cell on 10 August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled it a suicide by hanging. A large public majority does not believe it. This case file is a deep dive on the death alone: the night it happened and the weeks before, the two officers who faked their rounds, the cameras that were not recording, the DOJ Inspector General's findings, and the forensic dispute over Epstein's neck injuries. It separates what is documented (a catastrophic chain of institutional failures) from the central claim (that he was murdered to keep him quiet) which remains unproven.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein's "little black book" is a coded client list of the powerful men he trafficked to, and its markings identify co-offenders being covered up
Jeffrey Epstein kept a bound contact directory, the so-called "little black book," listing roughly 1,500 names with phone numbers, emails, and addresses: celebrities, business titans, and political figures among them. It is a real document, and large portions are public, published in redacted form by Gawker in 2015, transcribed into a searchable database, introduced as evidence at Ghislaine Maxwell's trial, and later auctioned. This case file separates what is on the record from the theory built on top of it: that the book is a coded list of Epstein's clients and co-offenders that is being hidden. It is not the same document as the flight logs from his private jets, which are treated in the broader Epstein case file.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein's 2008 non-prosecution deal proves a directed cover-up ordered from above to shield his powerful clients
In 2007 the US Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Alexander Acosta, signed a non-prosecution agreement that ended a federal sex-trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and let him plead instead to two state prostitution charges. He served under 13 months in a county stockade with daily work release, and the agreement immunized four named associates and any unnamed potential co-conspirators, all while his victims were kept in the dark. A federal judge ruled the secrecy violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act, and the Justice Department later found Acosta had used "poor judgment." This file separates that documented record from the theory built on top of it: that the deal proves a cover-up directed from above to protect Epstein's elite clients. The separate question of whether a suppressed client list exists is treated in the main Epstein entry.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein's fortune was unexplained, so the money must have come from a blackmail operation or an intelligence agency
Jeffrey Epstein presented himself as a money manager who worked only for billionaires, yet for years almost no one on Wall Street could say what he actually traded or where his fortune came from. That mystery became the engine of a theory: that money this large and this opaque could not have been earned, and so must have flowed from a blackmail operation or a sponsoring intelligence agency. This case file separates the documented financial record, which is murky but real, from that rated claim. The record runs through Bear Stearns, the Towers Financial Ponzi scheme, and above all the fortunes of Leslie Wexner and Leon Black. It accounts for a great deal of the money and leaves real questions open, but it does not require a secret paymaster.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein's private-jet flight logs are a hidden client list of powerful co-offenders, and the names are being suppressed to protect them
Jeffrey Epstein owned a fleet of private aircraft, including a Boeing 727 that tabloids nicknamed the "Lolita Express," and his pilots kept meticulous logs of who flew and when. Those logs are real, they were entered as evidence at Ghislaine Maxwell's 2021 federal trial, and they place many prominent people on Epstein's planes over the years. This case file separates that documented record from the conspiracy claim built on top of it: that the passenger lists constitute a secret list of clients and co-offenders, and that names are being withheld to protect powerful people from prosecution. The core discipline here is a single distinction the courts themselves drew: being listed on a flight log is not an accusation, and it is not evidence of a crime.
Read the case file →Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking ring was shielded by powerful people, and a suppressed elite client list is being covered up to protect them
Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted sex offender who, with his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, ran a sex-trafficking operation across a network of luxury properties for years while moving among the wealthy and powerful. The abuse is proven, and so is the extraordinarily lenient 2008 deal that shielded him and unnamed associates from federal prosecution. This case file separates that record from the central conspiracy claim: that a suppressed list of elite clients exists and that a cover-up is protecting powerful people from exposure. He died in federal custody in 2019, a death covered in a companion entry.
Read the case file →JFK was killed by a conspiracy, not a lone gunman
The most investigated murder in history, and the one most Americans still believe was a conspiracy. The physical evidence points to a lone gunman; the doubts have never fully closed, and we do not close them here.
Read the case file →John Lennon was not killed by a lone gunman but assassinated by the US government, using a mind-controlled patsy
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 keeps two things apart: a confessed, convicted shooter, and a real but limited FBI surveillance campaign years earlier; and the claims it rates, 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 →John Surratt escaped the gallows that hanged his mother because a hidden hand, the Catholic Church or a protective faction, shielded the one conspirator who could expose how high the Lincoln plot really reached
John Surratt Jr. was the conspirator who got away. A Confederate courier and Booth's logistics man in the plot to kidnap Lincoln, he escaped the 1865 dragnet that hanged his mother, Mary Surratt, and four others. He fled to Canada, then England, then Rome, where he enlisted under a false name in the Papal Zouaves, the Pope's volunteer soldiers. Recognized by an old acquaintance, he slipped his guards in Italy and ran to Egypt before United States agents caught him and shipped him home. His 1867 civilian trial ended in a hung jury, and the charges were dropped. That much is settled history. What this file weighs is the conspiracy built on it: that his escape and acquittal prove a hidden protector, most often the Catholic Church, shielded a man who knew how far the Lincoln plot really reached. It keeps the documented flight and trial, a fact, separate from that hidden-hand claim, which is a debunked nativist hoax.
Read the case file →Jonestown was not a mass suicide but a CIA mind-control experiment that ended in mass murder
On 18 November 1978, more than 900 members of the Peoples Temple died in a jungle settlement in Guyana, hours after their leader Jim Jones ordered the killing of a visiting US congressman. The world was told it was a mass suicide. A large part of the public never believed it, and for good reason: much of what happened was plainly murder, and the era was thick with real revelations of CIA abuse. This case file keeps two things apart: the documented horror (the deaths, the assassination of Leo Ryan, the children who could not have consented, the cyanide, the audio recording of the killing itself); and the claim it rates, that Jonestown was a CIA or MKULTRA mind-control operation. The first is established. The second is unproven.
Read the case file →Jorge Eliecer Gaitan's 1948 assassination was ordered by a hidden hand, the CIA, communists, or Colombia's Conservative oligarchy
On 9 April 1948, the Liberal populist and presidential frontrunner Jorge Eliecer Gaitan was gunned down on a Bogota street. The crowd tore his apparent killer, Juan Roa Sierra, to pieces before he could be questioned, and the city exploded into the Bogotazo, the riots that opened Colombia's decade of La Violencia. Almost immediately, three rival stories filled the vacuum left by the dead gunman: that the CIA arranged it, that communists did it to spark revolution, or that the Conservative oligarchy ordered it to stop his rise. That a lone gunman fired the shots is well established. That some hidden hand pointed him is unproven, and yet the question has never been closed.
Read the case file →Kenyan cabinet minister Tom Mboya was assassinated in 1969, a killing widely believed to have been politically motivated and directed by figures more powerful than the lone gunman convicted of it
On the afternoon of 5 July 1969, Tom Mboya, Kenya's minister for economic planning and development and the secretary-general of the ruling Kenya African National Union, was shot twice in the chest as he stepped out of a pharmacy on Government Road in central Nairobi. He died almost at once. A young Kikuyu man, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, was arrested within days, convicted of the murder, and hanged before the year was out. Mboya, a Luo widely seen as a likely successor to President Jomo Kenyatta, was killed at the height of ethnic and factional tension inside the party, and his death set off riots and a lasting rupture between the Kikuyu and Luo communities. This file separates the documented facts, the shooting and the conviction, from the contested and unproven claim that the gunman was sent by more powerful men whose identity was never established and who were never charged.
Read the case file →Kenyan foreign minister Robert Ouko was murdered in 1990 in a killing that the state then moved to cover up
On 13 February 1990, a herdsboy found the body of Dr Robert Ouko, Kenya's foreign minister, at the foot of Got Alila Hill a short distance from his rural home in Koru. He had been shot in the head, one leg was broken, and his body had been partly burned. The government's first account, that Ouko had killed himself, was rejected almost at once as physically impossible, and public anger pushed President Daniel arap Moi to invite a Scotland Yard team led by Detective Superintendent John Troon. Troon reported that his investigation was obstructed. A judicial commission of inquiry was then convened and, in November 1991, abruptly terminated by Moi while Troon was still being cross-examined; its report was never published. This file separates the two things that are documented, a murder and a state cover-up, from the thing that is not, the identity of those responsible, which remains officially unresolved.
Read the case file →Kim Jong-nam, the estranged half-brother of North Korea's leader, was assassinated with the banned VX nerve agent at a Kuala Lumpur airport in 2017, in an operation widely attributed to North Korea
On the morning of 13 February 2017, Kim Jong-nam, the eldest son of former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and estranged half-brother of the current leader Kim Jong Un, was attacked in the departure hall of Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Two women approached him, wiped a substance across his face, and walked away; he told airport staff he had been grabbed from behind, felt dizzy, and was dead within roughly twenty minutes. Malaysian investigators determined the substance was VX, one of the deadliest nerve agents ever made and a weapon banned by international treaty. The two women, an Indonesian and a Vietnamese, said they believed they were taking part in a hidden-camera prank show. Four North Korean men left Malaysia on flights toward Pyongyang the same day. This file separates the documented event, a public assassination with a banned chemical weapon, from the contested question of exactly who inside the North Korean state ordered and directed it, which it reports as attributed by governments and press rather than proven in court.
Read the case file →Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet interceptor in 1983 after straying into Soviet airspace, an event that spawned enduring but unsupported theories that the airliner was a deliberate spy mission and that its passengers survived
In the early hours of 1 September 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Boeing 747 flying from New York to Seoul by way of Anchorage, drifted far off its planned route and crossed into Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island. A Soviet Su-15 interceptor shot it down over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew, among them a sitting United States congressman. The shootdown became one of the sharpest flashpoints of the late Cold War. It also became a magnet for theories: that the airliner had been on a deliberate spying mission, that the Soviets knew it was a spy plane, and that the passengers survived and were spirited into Soviet camps. This file keeps the documented shootdown, established by the ICAO investigation and the recovered flight recorders, separate from that conspiracy layer, which the evidence does not support.
Read the case file →Large numbers of noncitizens vote illegally in US elections and decide the outcomes
The claim is that noncitizens, especially undocumented immigrants, are voting in US federal elections in large numbers and tipping the results, and that only proof-of-citizenship rules can stop it. This case file separates the narrow truths from the large claim. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal and does happen in isolated cases that are caught and prosecuted; separately and lawfully, a few localities let noncitizens vote in local races only. But the audits are consistent and one-directional: across millions of ballots reviewed, confirmed noncitizen votes number in the single or low double digits, far too few to affect a federal outcome. Stripped back to the version this file actually rates, noncitizens voting in election-deciding numbers, it is debunked. The real cases and the local-voting exceptions are set out rather than denied, because an accurate account of the facts is already enough to answer the claim.
Read the case file →Libyan security forces killed roughly 1,270 prisoners at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison in June 1996 and then hid the deaths for over a decade, as documented by Human Rights Watch and a survivor's account
On 28 and 29 June 1996, after a prisoner uprising over brutal conditions at Abu Salim, a high-security prison in Tripoli, Libyan security forces are documented to have shot dead a large number of inmates penned into the prison's courtyards. Human Rights Watch, drawing on the detailed testimony of a survivor who worked in the prison kitchen and on the prison's known population, estimated that roughly 1,270 prisoners were killed. For years the Gaddafi government neither confirmed nor explained the deaths: families kept traveling to the prison with food and clothing for men who were already dead, and only from 2001 did officials begin quietly informing some relatives. In 2004 Gaddafi publicly acknowledged that killings had taken place. This file treats the massacre itself as established while flagging the death toll as an estimate, and it traces how the families' long campaign for the truth, and the 2011 arrest of their lawyer Fathi Terbil, helped ignite the Libyan revolution.
Read the case file →Lin Biao, Mao Zedong's designated successor, died in a 1971 plane crash in Mongolia after fleeing a failed coup plot, in an account many historians dispute
Lin Biao was a decorated marshal, Mao Zedong's closest wartime ally in the Cultural Revolution, and, from 1969, the only person named in the Chinese Communist Party's constitution as Mao's successor. Two years later he was dead, and the state that had elevated him declared him a traitor. According to Beijing, Lin plotted to assassinate Mao under a scheme called Project 571, was exposed, and fled by air toward the Soviet Union on 13 September 1971, only for his plane to run out of fuel and crash in Mongolia, killing him, his wife, and his son. The bodies were recovered and, Soviet examiners concluded, were indeed the Lins. But the surrounding story has been picked apart for decades: the aircraft was heading away from the USSR, much of the archive was deliberately destroyed, and respected historians doubt that Lin planned any coup at all. This file keeps the documented deaths separate from the disputed account of why they happened.
Read the case file →Mail-in and absentee voting is riddled with fraud that swings elections
As mail and absentee voting expanded, so did the claim that it is the soft underbelly of American elections: that mailed ballots are forged, harvested, and dumped by the thousands, and that this fraud is large enough to flip races. This case file separates two things that are usually blurred. Mail-ballot fraud is real and does occur, and one modern case, a ballot-harvesting operation in North Carolina's 9th congressional district in 2018, was serious enough that the state threw out the result and ordered a new election. But the measured rate of such fraud is tiny, states have voted largely by mail for decades without stolen outcomes, and no evidence shows mail fraud deciding a presidential election. The claim we rate, that mail voting is systematically rigged, is debunked; the real, rare cases are treated here honestly rather than waved away, because they are also the clearest proof that the safeguards catch it.
Read the case file →Major banks knowingly protected and enabled Jeffrey Epstein, moving more than a billion dollars for him as part of a coordinated cover-up
Jeffrey Epstein could not have run a global operation without banks to move the money, and the record of how the money moved is genuinely damning. Over two decades his cash flowed through JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America, and others; regulators and a Senate committee later found billions in transfers, missed suspicious-activity reports, and years of ignored red flags. This case file separates that documented institutional failure from the central conspiracy claim: that the banks knowingly protected Epstein as part of a coordinated cover-up, or because he was a shielded intelligence asset. The failures are real and, in several cases, penalized. The knowing conspiracy is not established.
Read the case file →Malala Yousafzai is a Western agent and her 2012 shooting by the Taliban was staged
The claim, circulated widely in Pakistan under nicknames like 'Malala drama' and 'Dramazai,' that Malala Yousafzai was never really shot by the Taliban, or was shot with blanks in a staged event, and that she is a CIA or Western agent whose fame serves a foreign agenda. This is a smear, not a finding. The people who tried to kill her have said, more than once and in their own words, that they did it and why; her injuries were real and extensively documented; and the single most-shared 'exposé' behind the theory was a work of satire that credulous outlets reprinted as fact.
Read the case file →Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian-supplied Buk surface-to-air missile, killing all 298 people on board
On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a Boeing 777 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, broke apart in the air over eastern Ukraine and fell in fields near the village of Hrabove, in territory then held by pro-Russian separatists. All 298 people on board were killed, among them 196 Dutch nationals. A Dutch Safety Board investigation concluded the aircraft was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile; a Dutch-led criminal investigation, the Joint Investigation Team, traced the launcher to a Russian army brigade and reconstructed its route into Ukraine and back; and in 2022 a court in the Netherlands convicted three men of the killing. This file separates the documented event, the destruction of a civilian airliner by a Buk missile, from the attribution layer, who supplied and operated it, and reports the official findings alongside the Russian counter-narratives that were examined and rejected.
Read the case file →Mary Surratt was an innocent widow, half-blind and pious, railroaded by a military court and hanged for a plot she never knew, or perhaps put to death to punish the son who got away
Mary Surratt kept a boarding house at 604 H Street in Washington (older accounts give the period address as 541), and it was there that John Wilkes Booth and his circle, including her son John, met to plot first the kidnapping and then, in Booth's hands, the murder of Abraham Lincoln. On the day of the assassination she rode to her tavern at Surrattsville, where two carbines lay hidden, and a witness later swore she told the tavern keeper to have the shooting irons ready that night. Arrested days later, she was tried by a military commission, convicted, and on 7 July 1865 became the first woman executed by the federal government. This file weighs the enduring claim that she was innocent, an unwitting widow railroaded by a court that should not have existed, or even hanged to punish the son who escaped. It keeps the settled facts of the case apart from that contested reading, which historians still cannot agree on.
Read the case file →Mexican government forces massacred student protesters in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco on 2 October 1968 and then concealed the true death toll for decades
On the night of 2 October 1968, some ten thousand students and supporters gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of Mexico City, the latest rally in months of protest against the authoritarian PRI government of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. Soldiers and tanks ringed the square; plainclothes members of a government unit, the Olimpia Battalion, mixed with the crowd. As dusk fell, gunfire erupted, and army troops fired on the demonstrators. The government said its men had been provoked by snipers and reported only a handful of deaths. Ten days later Mexico opened the Summer Olympics as planned. For a generation the official story held, until declassified Mexican and U.S. documents, the excavations of researchers, and a short-lived federal special prosecutor established the outlines of a planned crackdown and a deliberate cover-up. This file separates the documented massacre and concealment, which are substantiated, from the still-disputed death toll and the unresolved question of who should have answered for it in law.
Read the case file →Mozambican president Samora Machel's 1986 plane crash may have been caused by an apartheid South African decoy navigation beacon that lured his aircraft into a mountainside
On the night of 19 October 1986, a Tupolev Tu-134 flying Mozambican president Samora Machel home from a regional summit at Mbala, Zambia, crashed into hills at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa near the point where South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland meet. Machel and 33 others were killed; ten people survived. South Africa's Margo Commission blamed the Soviet crew for flying the aircraft into the ground. The Soviet investigators refused to sign, insisting the plane had been lured off its Maputo approach by a false navigation beacon transmitting from South African soil. This file keeps the two layers apart: the confirmed disaster that killed a sitting head of state, and the contested claim that apartheid South Africa engineered it. It reports what each official body concluded, why the sabotage theory is credible enough that the TRC urged more inquiry, and why, four decades on, it remains unproven.
Read the case file →NATO and the CIA ran secret armies across Western Europe during the Cold War
Not a rumor but an admitted state secret: for roughly forty years, NATO and Western European intelligence services ran clandestine 'stay-behind' paramilitary networks, armed and trained to resist a Soviet occupation that never came. Italy's prime minister confirmed it to Parliament in 1990, and the European Parliament condemned it days later. What remains genuinely disputed is a darker, narrower claim layered on top: that these networks were turned against their own citizens.
Read the case file →Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogoni campaigners were hanged in 1995 after a rigged military tribunal, amid allegations that the oil company Shell was complicit in the crackdown
Ken Saro-Wiwa was a Nigerian writer, television producer, and environmental campaigner who led the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) against the pollution of the oil-rich Niger Delta and against Royal Dutch/Shell, the dominant operator there. In 1994 he and others were arrested and charged with incitement to the murder of four Ogoni chiefs. A special military tribunal, convened under a decree that allowed no appeal, sentenced nine men to death after a trial that outside observers called a travesty. On 10 November 1995 the Nigerian government hanged all nine at Port Harcourt prison. The killings provoked global outrage and Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth. This file separates two questions: whether the trial and executions were a state injustice, which is documented and settled, and whether Shell was complicit in them, which is a serious allegation that Shell denies and that a U.S. lawsuit ended by settlement in 2009 without any admission of liability.
Read the case file →Nixon's re-election committee conspired to break into Democratic headquarters and the White House covered it up
Five men were caught bugging Democratic Party headquarters in June 1972 with ties running straight back to the president's own re-election committee, and the ensuing cover-up, unravelled by reporters, a Senate committee, the courts and Nixon's own secret tapes, ended in the only resignation of a U.S. president in history.
Read the case file →Nothing happened at the Lekki toll gate: the shooting of #EndSARS protesters was a 'phantom massacre' and soldiers fired only blanks
On the night of 20 October 2020, soldiers opened fire on unarmed #EndSARS protesters at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos. The Nigerian Army and the federal government responded not with an inquiry but with denial: first that troops were even present, then that they fired live ammunition, then that anyone had died, culminating in the label 'phantom massacre' and the claim of a 'massacre without blood or bodies.' The denial is the rated claim here, and it is debunked. A Lagos State judicial panel, Amnesty International, forensic pathologists, ballistics experts, and hours of geolocated video establish that live rounds were fired and that people were killed.
Read the case file →On 27 October 1999, five gunmen stormed the floor of Armenia's National Assembly and shot dead Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Speaker Karen Demirchyan, and six others, a decapitating attack that a court attributed to the attackers themselves but that still draws claims of a wider political plot
At around a quarter past five in the afternoon on 27 October 1999, five men led by Nairi Hunanyan, a former journalist with a grievance against Armenia's political class, walked into the National Assembly in Yerevan carrying Kalashnikov rifles under long coats. During a routine question-and-answer session they opened fire on the government benches, killing Prime Minister Vazgen Sargsyan, Speaker Karen Demirchyan, and six others, and wounding dozens more. The gunmen held surviving deputies hostage overnight, negotiated with President Robert Kocharyan, and surrendered the following morning, claiming they had acted to punish leaders who had ruined the country. In December 2003 the five were sentenced to life in prison. The event and the convictions are firmly established. This file separates that documented core from the enduring, unproven belief that the attackers were the visible edge of a larger conspiracy reaching into the state itself.
Read the case file →Operation Fast and Furious was a deliberate scheme to inflate U.S. gun-crime statistics and justify new gun-control laws
Operation Fast and Furious was a real and disastrous law-enforcement operation. From 2009 to 2011 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, working out of its Phoenix field division and the Arizona U.S. Attorney's Office, deliberately allowed suspected straw purchasers to buy firearms rather than arresting them, hoping to follow the guns up the chain to Mexican cartel figures. Instead the ATF lost track of roughly 2,000 weapons. Some were later recovered at violent crime scenes on both sides of the border, including the December 2010 killing of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The Justice Department Inspector General documented the failures in a 2012 report, named officials were faulted, and the Attorney General was held in contempt of Congress in a fight over withheld documents. All of that is on the record. This case file separates that substantiated scandal from a further, contested claim: that the operation was secretly designed to drive up the number of American guns at Mexican crime scenes so that officials could argue for new gun-control laws. On the evidence, the botched operation is established; the deliberate gun-control motive is not.
Read the case file →Organized groups covertly stalk and torment 'targeted individuals' with mind weapons
'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 →Peru's government sterilized roughly 300,000 people, overwhelmingly poor Indigenous women, under a quota-driven family-planning program during the Fujimori era in the 1990s, many of them without free and informed consent
During the second half of the 1990s, the government of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori carried out one of the largest state sterilization campaigns in Latin American history. Under the National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program, presented publicly as a poverty-fighting expansion of contraceptive access, health teams sterilized roughly 300,000 people between 1996 and 2000, overwhelmingly poor Indigenous women in the Andean highlands and the Amazon. Survivors and Peru's own Ombudsman documented numerical quotas imposed on medical staff, campaigns that pressured, deceived, or coerced women into tubal ligations, and operations performed in unsafe conditions that left some women dead. This file treats the program itself as documented fact, anchored to Peru's health-ministry records, its victims' registry, Amnesty International, a 2024 UN CEDAW ruling, and the Inter-American Court's 2026 judgment in the Celia Ramos case, while keeping the still-contested questions, how many were coerced and who bears criminal responsibility, clearly marked as unresolved.
Read the case file →Philippine opposition leader Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr. was killed in 1983 by a military conspiracy, not by the lone communist gunman the Marcos government blamed
On 21 August 1983, former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino Jr., the most prominent opponent of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, was shot dead moments after his plane landed at Manila International Airport, as soldiers escorted him down a service stairway from the aircraft. The government said the killer was Rolando Galman, an alleged communist hitman who was gunned down on the tarmac seconds later. Almost no one believed it. A fact-finding board the government itself created concluded that Aquino had been killed by a conspiracy of military men, not by a lone gunman. His death galvanized the opposition and, less than three years later, the People Power revolution that drove Marcos from power. This file separates the documented event, a point-blank assassination inside a military cordon, from the contested question the courts never resolved: who, above the convicted soldiers, gave the order.
Read the case file →Poland has secretly lost its sovereignty, become a puppet of the EU, Germany, and Washington, and is being turned into a NATO forward base to launch an aggressive war on Russia
One of the most durable Russian influence narratives aimed at Poland holds that the country has quietly forfeited its independence: that it is a "puppet" or "51st state" run from Washington, Brussels, or Berlin, and that it is being converted into a NATO staging ground to fight an aggressive, suicidal war against Russia. In this telling, Poland's own defensive programs, its East Shield (Tarcza Wschod) fortifications along the borders with Belarus and Kaliningrad, and NATO reinforcement exercises such as Amber Shock, are recast as proof of warmongering that will get Poles used as "cannon fodder." Reputable analysts tell a very different story. The EU's EUvsDisinfo project catalogues the "lost sovereignty" theme as a core pro-Kremlin narrative; the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, Demagog, and Propastop document how it is deployed against Poland specifically. This case file treats the sovereignty-loss and warmonger framing as what those analysts describe, a disinformation narrative, and lays out why the underlying facts do not support it. It reports the claim to rebut it, never to endorse it.
Read the case file →Robert F. Kennedy was killed by a second gunman, not by Sirhan Sirhan alone
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 →Ruby Ridge and Waco were deliberate federal massacres of civilians, then covered up
Within eight months, federal agents were involved in two lethal confrontations with armed Americans on their own property: the August 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, where an FBI sniper killed Randy Weaver's unarmed wife Vicki, and the 51-day siege near Waco, Texas, that ended on 19 April 1993 with a fire in which 76 Branch Davidians died. Out of these came a durable belief that the government had set out to slaughter civilians and then buried the truth. This case file separates two very different claims. The first, that federal agencies committed serious, documented misconduct and killed people who should not have died, is established. The second, that these were deliberate, planned massacres concealed by a unified cover-up, is unproven and, on the central question of who started the Waco fire, contradicted by the government's own most independent investigation.
Read the case file →Russiagate was either a criminal collusion or a manufactured deep-state hoax
Russiagate is the umbrella name for the belief, in two mirror-image forms, that something corrupt happened around the 2016 election and the investigation that followed. One version holds that Donald Trump's campaign criminally colluded with Russia to win. The other holds that there was no collusion at all and that Russiagate was a hoax, a deep-state coup by Obama-era officials to frame Trump. This file separates the established record, which is substantial and bipartisan, from the two claims it rates. The record establishes that Russia interfered in 2016, that Mueller did not establish a criminal Trump-Russia conspiracy, and that the FBI made real but non-partisan-motivated errors along the way. Both maximalist stories claim more than the evidence shows.
Read the case file →Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was assassinated in a 2006 contract killing whose gunman and organizers were convicted, while the person who ordered the murder was never identified
On 7 October 2006, Anna Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the independent Moscow newspaper Novaya Gazeta and one of Russia's best-known investigative reporters, was shot four times at close range in the lobby of her apartment building on Lesnaya Street in central Moscow. She had built her reputation on unflinching coverage of human-rights abuses in the second Chechen war, and the murder fell on President Vladimir Putin's birthday. Investigators treated it from the outset as a contract killing. After a jury acquitted several defendants in 2009, the Supreme Court ordered a retrial, and in 2014 a Moscow court convicted five men, including the gunman and the organizer. This file separates the two questions the case raises: the documented killing and the convictions of the people who carried it out, which the courts have established, and the identity of whoever commissioned the murder, which remains officially unknown and which the European Court of Human Rights faulted Russia for failing to pursue.
Read the case file →Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent in 2020, an attack that international labs confirmed and that investigative reporting tied to an FSB team
On 20 August 2020, the Russian anti-corruption campaigner and opposition leader Alexei Navalny fell violently ill on a flight from Tomsk to Moscow. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, and he was placed in a coma. Two days later he was flown to the Charité hospital in Berlin, where a German military laboratory identified a nerve agent of the Novichok group. Designated laboratories in France and Sweden, and then the OPCW, confirmed the finding. A joint investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, CNN, and Der Spiegel identified a specialist FSB unit that had tailed Navalny for years, and Navalny published a recorded phone call in which one man described how the poison was applied. This file separates the documented core, a confirmed Novichok poisoning, from the attribution layer, reported here through the OPCW and the investigative reporting rather than asserted as a court's finding. Navalny recovered, returned to Russia in January 2021, was imprisoned, and died in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024.
Read the case file →Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was assassinated on a bridge steps from the Kremlin in 2015, and while a court convicted the gunmen, whoever ordered the killing has never been identified
Late on the night of 27 February 2015, Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who had become one of the most prominent opponents of Vladimir Putin, was shot four times in the back as he walked across the Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge, within sight of the Kremlin walls, in the company of his partner Anna Duritskaya. He died almost instantly, hours after publicly urging Russians to join a march against the war in Ukraine. In 2017 a Moscow military court convicted five Chechen men of the killing and identified former security officer Zaur Dadayev as the gunman. This file separates the documented facts, a planned assassination and the conviction of the shooters, from the unresolved question the trial never answered: who ordered and paid for the murder. It reports the court's findings as the anchor, and treats the theories pointing at Chechen leadership as serious but unproven allegations, not as established fact.
Read the case file →Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated in 1980 by a right-wing death squad, a killing the UN Truth Commission for El Salvador attributed to a network linked to Roberto D'Aubuisson
On 24 March 1980, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador and the country's most prominent critic of state violence, was shot dead by a single sniper's bullet as he raised the chalice at the end of Mass in the chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia. He was killed a day after a homily in which he directly ordered Salvadoran soldiers, in the name of God, to stop the repression. The murder came at the opening of a civil war that would kill some 75,000 people over twelve years. This file separates the documented event, the assassination of an archbishop at the altar, from the rated claim, the attribution of the killing to a right-wing death squad. It reports what the UN-established Commission on the Truth for El Salvador concluded in 1993, and treats the failure to convict anyone in a Salvadoran court, under an amnesty law struck down only in 2016, as a matter of impunity rather than doubt about who was responsible.
Read the case file →Senator Lindsey Graham was assassinated by a foreign power, and the true cause of his death is being covered up
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 keeps two things apart: on one side a natural, well-understood cardiovascular catastrophe in an elderly man; on the other the claim we actually rate, 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 →Serbian authorities used an illegal sonic weapon against a silent vigil at the March 15, 2025 Belgrade protest
During a 15-minute silence at one of the largest protests in modern Serbian history, a sudden, jarring sound tore through the crowd on a central Belgrade boulevard and set off a stampede. Opposition politicians and rights groups say security forces fired an illegal acoustic weapon, most likely a Long-Range Acoustic Device, at peaceful demonstrators. The government flatly denies it. The core events are real and documented; the cause of the sound is not established, and the competing expert findings do not agree.
Read the case file →Shinzo Abe's assassination was staged or an inside job, not the homemade-gun shooting that police described
Shinzo Abe, Japan's longest-serving prime minister, was shot dead on 8 July 2022 while giving a campaign speech outside Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara. His attacker, Tetsuya Yamagami, used a bulky homemade gun and was tackled at the scene; he told police he blamed the Unification Church for bankrupting his family through his mother's donations and targeted Abe over the former leader's perceived ties to the group. That account was tested at trial, where Yamagami pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. Alongside it, a set of conspiracy theories spread almost immediately: that the killing was staged, that the crude homemade weapon could not have been the murder weapon, or that a concealed sniper or the state itself did the killing and Yamagami is a scapegoat. This file separates the well-established record from those claims, which the evidence does not support.
Read the case file →South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani was assassinated in 1993 in a plot intended to derail the transition from apartheid
On Easter Saturday, 10 April 1993, Chris Hani, general secretary of the South African Communist Party and a former chief of staff of the ANC's armed wing, was shot dead outside his home in Dawn Park, Boksburg, near Johannesburg. The gunman, Polish anti-communist immigrant Janusz Waluś, was arrested within hours after a neighbour noted his car's licence plate. Waluś and Conservative Party figure Clive Derby-Lewis, who had supplied the weapon, were convicted of the murder later that year. The timing was incendiary: South Africa was in the middle of the fragile negotiations that would end apartheid, and Hani was one of the country's most popular leaders. Nelson Mandela's televised appeal for calm is widely credited with holding the country back from wider bloodshed and is often said to have hastened the setting of an election date. This file separates the documented, court-proven assassination from the contested claim that a wider network stood behind the two convicted men.
Read the case file →South African police shot dead 34 striking miners at Marikana in 2012 under an operational plan the Farlam Commission later found to be defective, amid disputed questions of political pressure behind the crackdown
On 16 August 2012, near the Lonmin platinum mine at Marikana in South Africa's North West province, officers of the South African Police Service opened fire on striking rock-drill operators who had gathered on a rocky outcrop during a wildcat strike over wages. Thirty-four miners were shot dead and about seventy-eight were wounded, many hit in the back or as they fled. Ten other people, including two police officers and two mine security guards, had been killed in the violent week before. It was the deadliest act of state violence in post-apartheid South Africa, drawing comparisons to the apartheid-era Sharpeville and Soweto killings. President Jacob Zuma appointed a Judicial Commission of Inquiry under retired judge Ian Farlam. Its 2015 report found the police operational plan defective and criticised police, the mining company Lonmin, and the unions, while clearing senior politicians of legal responsibility. This file separates the documented killing and the commission's defective-plan finding from the still-contested question of who, if anyone, applied political pressure to force the confrontation.
Read the case file →South America's military dictatorships ran a joint campaign of cross-border assassination and terror
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil ran a secret joint operation, code-named Condor, to hunt down, kidnap, torture and kill each other's political exiles across borders, reaching as far as a car bomb on a Washington, D.C. street. It sounded like the kind of thing only a paranoid exile would claim, until a judge in Paraguay pulled three tons of the regimes' own paperwork out of a police station.
Read the case file →South Korea's April 2024 National Assembly election was electronically rigged
The claim that South Korea's April 2024 National Assembly election, a heavy defeat for President Yoon Suk-yeol's party, was not a genuine result but a theft carried out by hacking the National Election Commission's servers, with North Korean or Chinese hands behind the machines. The vote was real, the opposition win was large and well observed, and every official review, security audit, and court to examine the fraud claims has come back empty. When Yoon cited those same suspicions to declare martial law in December 2024 and sent troops to seize the commission's servers, no evidence emerged, and he was impeached and removed.
Read the case file →Sri Lanka's 2019 Easter Sunday bombings were a 'grand plot' enabled or orchestrated by state intelligence to help Gotabaya Rajapaksa win the presidency
On Easter Sunday 2019, coordinated suicide bombers struck three churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, killing some 269 people. A local group inspired by the Islamic State carried out the attack, and repeated foreign intelligence warnings beforehand went unacted upon. From those documented facts a graver claim has grown: that parts of the state did not merely fail but deliberately let the plot proceed, or helped steer it, to spread fear and lift Gotabaya Rajapaksa into the presidency months later. The negligence is established. The orchestration is alleged, uninvestigated to a conclusion, and rated here as unproven.
Read the case file →State and local officials switched a majority-Black city's water supply without corrosion control, poisoned it with lead, and dismissed residents' complaints
In April 2014, a state-appointed emergency manager switched the water supply of Flint, Michigan from the Detroit system to the Flint River as a cost-saving measure, and the state environmental agency let the city distribute that water without corrosion-control treatment. The corrosive river water stripped lead from aging pipes and carried it into homes across a majority-Black, high-poverty city. For more than a year officials publicly insisted the water was safe and waved away residents' complaints, even as a Legionnaires' disease outbreak spread. It took independent testing by Virginia Tech's Marc Edwards, a blood-lead study by pediatrician Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, and a federal emergency declaration to force action. This case file lays out the documented record: what went wrong, who said what, the human toll, and the criminal and civil aftermath, including a $626 million settlement for residents and a criminal prosecution that collapsed without a single conviction.
Read the case file →Storm-1516 is a Russia-linked disinformation operation that manufactures fake videos and cloned news sites to smear Western and Ukrainian figures
Storm-1516 is the tracking name for a prolific Russia-linked disinformation operation that mass-produces fabricated content: staged videos of supposed whistleblowers and pseudo-journalists, cloned pages dressed up as local TV stations, and AI-generated "scandals" aimed at discrediting Ukraine and Western leaders. Researchers first mapped its output in late 2023, Microsoft assigned the Storm-1516 label in April 2024, and by early 2026 the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center was counting more than a thousand synthetic videos in a single quarter. Its hoaxes are engineered to launder from anonymous "burner" accounts through fringe sites and paid influencers until real politicians and mainstream outlets repeat them. Unlike most files in this archive, the rated claim here is true: the operation is real, extensively documented, and attributed to Russia-linked actors by reputable researchers and Western governments.
Read the case file →The 11-M Madrid train bombings were carried out by ETA and covered up by the state to swing the 2004 election
The claim that the 11 March 2004 bombing of four Madrid commuter trains, which killed roughly 191 people that morning, was really the work of the Basque separatist group ETA rather than an Islamist cell, and that the incoming Socialist government, the police, or a hidden faction manipulated or destroyed evidence to hide the truth and tip the 14 March general election. A real Islamist mass-murder attack, a real and bitter political fight over who did it, and a real election upset sit underneath the story. The specific claim laid over them, that ETA did it and the state covered it up, was tested in court and in Parliament and did not survive.
Read the case file →The 1924 Zinoviev Letter was a forgery that helped swing a British election
Four days before Britain's October 1924 general election, the Daily Mail splashed a letter supposedly from Moscow's Comintern chief Grigory Zinoviev, ordering British communists to prepare for revolution. It stoked a Red Scare and is often blamed for helping bury the first Labour government. The document was a forgery. The open questions are who wrote it and how much of British intelligence knew.
Read the case file →The 1954 overthrow of Guatemala's elected president Jacobo Arbenz was a covert CIA operation, not a spontaneous anti-communist uprising
In June 1954 Guatemala's elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, was forced from power after a small exile army crossed the border from Honduras, unmarked planes bombed Guatemala City, and a clandestine radio network flooded the country with reports of an unstoppable invasion. At the time the United States described the events as an internal Guatemalan anti-communist revolt and denied any role. Decades of declassification told a different story. The operation, code-named PBSuccess, was planned and run by the Central Intelligence Agency, authorized by President Eisenhower in 1953, and built around psychological warfare rather than a real military conquest. This case file separates the record (a coup that unfolded largely as a covert US operation) from the claim it rates (that the CIA orchestrated it), which the agency's own files now confirm. The verdict is substantiated. It also flags what is still argued: the mix of motives behind the operation, and the documented but unconsummated assassination planning that ran alongside it.
Read the case file →The 1979 Vela flash over the South Atlantic was a covered-up covert nuclear test
Just before dawn on 22 September 1979, a veteran US surveillance satellite over the far southern ocean recorded a brief, intense double flash: the optical fingerprint of a nuclear explosion, and the very thing the satellite had been launched to detect. What followed was a decade-long argument inside the US government that has never fully closed. One White House panel decided the flash was probably not a bomb; the Navy, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA's own analysts were not convinced, and many concluded a nuclear test had happened. This case file separates what is documented (a real detection, a genuine scientific dispute, and later evidence tilting toward a blast) from the claim it rates: that a covert nuclear test, most likely a joint Israeli-South African one, was carried out and then deliberately explained away.
Read the case file →The 1980 bombing of Bologna's railway station was a neofascist terror attack tied to Italy's “strategy of tension,” with courts convicting NAR militants and later naming P2 lodge master Licio Gelli as instigator and financier
At 10:25 on the morning of 2 August 1980, a time bomb hidden in an unattended suitcase detonated in the second-class waiting room of the Bologna Centrale railway station, one of the busiest in Italy at the height of the summer holiday. The explosion killed 85 people and wounded more than 200, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in postwar Italian history. From the first day, two stories ran in parallel: an investigation into who planted the bomb, and a separate effort inside the state to derail that investigation. This file separates the documented event, a neofascist massacre, from the layered question of who ordered and shielded it. It reports what Italy's courts have actually convicted, from the NAR militants found to have carried out the bombing to the P2 lodge master and secret-service officers convicted of the cover-up, and it treats the fuller strategy-of-tension picture through those judgments rather than through rumor.
Read the case file →The 1988 C-130 crash that killed Pakistani military ruler Zia-ul-Haq was probably sabotage, as the Pakistan Air Force board of inquiry concluded when it named a criminal act the most likely cause
On 17 August 1988, a Pakistan Air Force C-130B Hercules known as Pak One took off from Bahawalpur in Punjab carrying President General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had just watched a demonstration of the US-built M1 Abrams tank. Minutes into the flight the aircraft began to pitch up and down, then plunged into a near-vertical dive and exploded on impact, killing all thirty or so people aboard. Among the dead were the army's most senior general besides Zia, Akhtar Abdur Rahman; a cluster of other generals; the US ambassador, Arnold Raphel; and the senior US military attache, Herbert Wassom. Pakistan's board of inquiry, working with a US Air Force team, ruled out mechanical and pilot causes and named sabotage the most probable one, raising the possibility of a chemical agent hidden aboard. A later US review called the evidence inconclusive. This file separates the documented catastrophe from the contested cause and the wholly unresolved question of who, if anyone, was responsible.
Read the case file →The 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people, was followed by a state cover-up that Argentine courts have since found and prosecuted
On 18 July 1994 a van packed with explosives was driven into the headquarters of the Asociacion Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA), the main Jewish community organization in Buenos Aires. The blast collapsed the seven-story building, killed 85 people, and wounded roughly 300. It was the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history and, until recent years, the largest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust. More than three decades on, no one has been convicted of carrying out the bombing. What Argentine courts have established is something almost as damning: that the state's own investigation was sabotaged. This file separates the documented attack from two layers of cover-up. The first, the deliberate derailing of the original probe, has produced criminal convictions upheld on appeal and is rated substantiated. The second, the allegation that a later government signed a pact with Iran to bury the case, is reported as a contested, still-unresolved matter. The identity of the bombers, officially attributed to Iran and Hezbollah, is treated here as the official-but-contested finding it is.
Read the case file →The 1994 sinking of the ferry MS Estonia, which killed 852 people, has drawn cover-up and sabotage theories that the official inquiry, and a later reexamination, reject
In the early hours of 28 September 1994, the cruiseferry MS Estonia was crossing the Baltic from Tallinn to Stockholm in a storm when it took on water, listed heavily, and sank within about an hour. Of the roughly 989 people aboard, 852 died and 137 survived, making it one of the worst peacetime shipping disasters in European history. The Joint Accident Investigation Commission of Estonia, Sweden and Finland concluded that the locks securing the bow visor failed under wave loads, the visor detached and dragged open the loading ramp, and the flooded car deck capsized the ship. That finding has never satisfied everyone. Theories of a concealed explosion, a collision, or a state cover-up linked to military cargo have circulated for three decades. This file separates the documented catastrophe from those contested cause-and-cover-up claims, and reports what the original inquiry and a later reexamination found: no evidence of an explosion or a collision, and no proof of any of the alternative theories.
Read the case file →The 2000 abduction and beheading of Ukrainian journalist Georgiy Gongadze was carried out by serving interior-ministry officers, though who ordered the killing at the top remains legally unresolved
Georgiy Gongadze was a 31-year-old journalist who co-founded Ukrainska Pravda, a scrappy online outlet that investigated corruption around President Leonid Kuchma. On 16 September 2000 he vanished from central Kyiv. In early November a headless body was found in a forest near Tarashcha, about 100 kilometres south of the capital, and was later identified as his. Weeks after that, opposition politician Oleksandr Moroz played parliament secret recordings, made by a presidential guard named Mykola Melnychenko, that appeared to catch Kuchma ordering that Gongadze be silenced. The killing and the tapes together set off the mass Ukraine without Kuchma protests. This file keeps two layers apart: the documented crime and its convicted perpetrators, a squad of interior-ministry officers led by General Oleksiy Pukach, and the contested, legally unresolved question of who at the top gave the order.
Read the case file →The 2001 Nepalese royal massacre, which killed nine members of the royal family, was officially blamed on Crown Prince Dipendra, but the absence of a trial still fuels palace-plot theories
On the evening of 1 June 2001, during a monthly family gathering at the Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu, a gunman opened fire on Nepal's assembled royals. King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya, and seven other members of the family were killed; several more were wounded. Crown Prince Dipendra was found gravely injured by a gunshot to the head and died three days later, on 4 June, without ever waking. A hastily convened two-man inquiry led by the country's chief justice and the speaker of parliament reported on 14 June that Dipendra had carried out the killings, reportedly after a bitter dispute over his choice of bride, and had then shot himself. Because the presumed perpetrator was already dead, there was never a trial, an adversarial forensic contest, or a public airing of evidence. Into that gap poured a durable body of conspiracy theories holding that the massacre was a plot, most often pointed at those who gained from the shift in succession. This file separates the documented mass killing from the official attribution, and both of those from the palace-plot theories, which remain unproven.
Read the case file →The 2003 Iraq War was built on a lie: the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was deliberately fabricated to justify a war already decided on
In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, the United States and Britain told the world that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was reconstituting a nuclear program. No such stockpiles existed. The government's own Iraq Survey Group concluded that Iraq's unconventional weapons had been destroyed years earlier, and official inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic found the prewar case riddled with claims the evidence did not support. That much is settled. What remains fiercely contested is the next step: whether this was a deliberate, knowing deception engineered to sell a war leaders had already chosen, or a genuine and disastrous intelligence failure dressed up with far more certainty than it deserved. This file separates the substantiated core from that unresolved question.
Read the case file →The 2006 murder of Mongolian national Altantuya Shaariibuu, shot and destroyed with military-grade explosives near a Malaysian defense-deal scandal, produced two convictions but left the motive and who ordered it contested
On the night of 18 October 2006, Altantuya Shaariibuu, a 28-year-old Mongolian national who had worked as a translator, was driven to scrubland near Shah Alam outside Kuala Lumpur, shot, and her body destroyed with military-grade explosives. Two officers of the Malaysian police Special Action Unit, bodyguards attached to the office of then deputy prime minister Najib Razak, were charged and, after one of the longest murder trials in the country's history, convicted. A defense analyst and Najib adviser, Abdul Razak Baginda, who had been in a relationship with Altantuya, was charged with abetting the murder and acquitted. The case became entangled with a US$1.1 billion purchase of French Scorpene submarines and the large commissions paid around it, work on which had brought Altantuya into contact with Razak Baginda. This file separates the documented core, a murder and two convictions upheld by Malaysia's highest court, from the still-unproven questions of motive and who, if anyone, gave the order.
Read the case file →The 2010 Smolensk plane crash that killed Polish president Lech Kaczyński was a deliberate assassination staged to look like an accident, not the pilot-error crash that two official investigations found
On 10 April 2010, a Polish Air Force Tupolev Tu-154M carrying President Lech Kaczyński and a large state delegation crashed on approach to Smolensk North airfield in western Russia, killing all 96 people aboard. They were flying to a ceremony marking the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre, in which Soviet forces murdered thousands of Polish officers and elites in 1940. The plane went down in dense fog, and two official inquiries, the Russian Interstate Aviation Committee and a separate Polish state commission, both concluded that the crew descended far below a safe altitude in near-zero visibility. Almost at once, a rival theory took hold in Polish politics: that the crash was no accident but an assassination, most often blamed on Russia and abetted by a domestic cover-up. This file separates the documented disaster from that contested claim, and reports why the assassination narrative, though repeatedly investigated and unsupported, became a lasting feature of Polish political life.
Read the case file →The 2020 Beirut port explosion resulted from years of official negligence over a stockpile of ammonium nitrate, and the judicial investigation into it was deliberately obstructed by the officials it sought to question
At 6:08 p.m. on 4 August 2020, roughly 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in Hangar 12 at the Port of Beirut detonated, producing one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. At least 218 people were killed, more than 7,000 injured, and around 300,000 left homeless as the blast wave flattened whole neighborhoods. The chemical had arrived on a troubled cargo ship, the Rhosus, in 2013, been offloaded into the warehouse in 2014, and sat there for years despite repeated official warnings about the hazard. This file separates the documented core, that the disaster grew out of official negligence and that the criminal investigation was then obstructed, from the separate and unsupported rumor that the port was struck by a missile or attacked. It anchors the negligence and obstruction findings to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Lebanese court rulings, and reports the sabotage theories as the unproven claims they remain.
Read the case file →The 2020 US presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump through mass fraud
In the days after the 2020 US presidential election, Donald Trump and his allies declared that the vote had been stolen through mass fraud, and 'Stop the Steal' became a movement that fed months of lawsuits, rallies, and, on January 6, 2021, the storming of the US Capitol. This case file separates the record from the claim it rates. It is documented that the election was contested: more than 60 lawsuits were filed, several states recounted or audited, and the result was disputed for months. The claim it rates is the sweeping one, that the election was actually stolen and Trump truly won. On the evidence, that claim is debunked. The Trump-aligned lawsuits lost almost without exception, many for lack of any evidence and several before Trump-appointed judges; federal officials found no sign any vote was altered; the Attorney General said the Justice Department found no outcome-changing fraud; Georgia counted three times including a full hand recount; a partisan Arizona review found no fraud and nudged Biden's margin up; Fox News paid 787.5 million dollars to settle a defamation suit over false machine-fraud claims; and every state certified. The file names no fraud because the record establishes none. Two narrower pieces of this story are treated in their own files: the specific voting-machine allegations in the voting-machine-fraud case, and the 2026 federal seizures in the stolen-election-2026-probe case.
Read the case file →The 2021 US infrastructure law secretly mandates a remote government “kill switch” in every new car
In November 2021, Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and buried in its hundreds of pages was Section 24220, an instruction to federal regulators to require new cars to include technology that can detect an impaired driver. A viral retelling quickly recast that provision as something far more sinister: a secret mandate for a remote “kill switch” that would let the government or police turn off your car, watch where you go, and harvest your data. This case file separates two things that are constantly fused. What is on the record is that the impaired-driving mandate is real and its final technical form is still being written by NHTSA. The claim we rate, that the law creates a remotely operated government kill switch with police access to your vehicle and data, is false: fact-checkers who read the statute found an in-car detection system, no remote shutoff, and no police access. The privacy unease underneath the panic is not baseless, because modern connected cars genuinely collect and sell enormous amounts of driver data. But that real problem is a separate matter from the specific kill-switch claim, which does not hold up.
Read the case file →The 2022 Itaewon Halloween crowd crush was staged, or was caused by drugs, spilled oil, or a gas attack rather than crowd density
In the days after 159 people were killed in a Halloween crowd crush in Seoul's Itaewon district on 29 October 2022, a set of online claims recast the disaster as something other than what investigators documented: that it was staged with crisis actors and fake bodies, or that the real cause was partygoers on drugs, cooking oil spilled to make the slope slippery, or a covert gas or chemical attack. The rated claim is that hidden alternative cause. It is debunked. Underneath sits a genuine, painful record: a preventable crush, official failures that a police investigation laid out, and grieving families who were then abused online with these very theories.
Read the case file →The 2022 Nord Stream pipeline blasts were a covert state sabotage operation whose real perpetrator is being concealed
In the early hours of 26 September 2022, underwater explosions tore open the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines beneath the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismographs recorded the blasts, gas boiled to the surface for days, and investigators from three countries found residue of explosives. That it was deliberate sabotage is established. Who ordered it is not. The vacuum filled quickly with rival state-actor theories: a pro-Ukrainian operation, a Russian false flag, a covert US strike. This case file keeps the settled fact (sabotage) apart from the contested claim (attribution plus an alleged cover-up), and weighs what each official investigation actually found.
Read the case file →The 2023 Chinese spy balloon was not what officials said: it was deliberately let in, a distraction, or something other than a balloon
For a week in early 2023, a Chinese balloon the height of the Statue of Liberty drifted across North America while millions watched, until an F-22 shot it down off the Carolina coast. The documented event is remarkable enough on its own: a foreign surveillance craft crossing the United States, tracked in public, then downed and recovered. Around that hard core grew a cloud of alternative readings. Some hold the balloon was deliberately waved through as part of a scheme; others that its very public transit was a distraction from something else; others that the object was not really a balloon but a suppressed craft or weapon. This file keeps the documented balloon separate from those embellishments, and takes the real open questions seriously without endorsing the conspiracy frame.
Read the case file →The 2024 Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore was a deliberate attack, a cyberattack, or a controlled demolition disguised as a shipping accident
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 two things apart: a power failure on a large vessel and an unprotected 1970s bridge; and the claim it rates, 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 →The 2024 New Jersey drone sightings were a covered-up secret: mystery craft the government knows about and is hiding
Beginning around mid-November 2024, residents across New Jersey, and soon other northeastern states, reported large drones and lights in the night sky, often near the Raritan River, Picatinny Arsenal, and local reservoirs. The reports drew national media coverage and intense political attention through December. Federal agencies eventually said the sightings were a combination of lawful commercial and hobbyist drones, law-enforcement and military aircraft, helicopters, and misidentified manned planes, stars, and planets, with no evidence of a threat or a foreign operation. A popular counter-claim holds that officials secretly knew exactly what the craft were, whether a covert government program, an Iranian mothership, or a search for a lost nuclear device, and hid the truth. This file keeps the documented event separate from those readings and weighs the cover-up claim as unproven.
Read the case file →The 2025 GENIUS Act is a secret central bank digital currency in disguise, a scheme to abolish cash and let the government surveil, freeze, and confiscate everyone's money
In July 2025 President Trump signed the GENIUS Act, the first federal framework for dollar-backed payment stablecoins. Within a year a claim had spread that the law is really a central bank digital currency in disguise: the surveillance-and-freeze digital dollar that Congress had publicly disavowed, smuggled in under a friendlier name. The framing gets the basic architecture backwards. A CBDC is money issued directly by the central bank; the GENIUS Act instead licenses private companies and banks to issue tokens backed by reserves, and the same Congress separately moved to forbid the Federal Reserve from issuing a retail CBDC at all. There are real, documented worries about stablecoins, on privacy, traceability, address-freezing, and consumer safeguards, and this file keeps them in view. What the record does not support is the specific claim that the law is a covert government currency for total control.
Read the case file →The 2025 Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion outside the Trump hotel was a staged inside job or a coordinated plot whose true cause is being covered up
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 two things apart: a lone, premeditated act ending in suicide; and the conspiracy claim it rates, following what investigators actually found. On the conspiracy, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2025 New Orleans Bourbon Street truck attack was a coordinated plot or inside job whose real perpetrators are being concealed
In the early hours of 1 January 2025, a man drove a rented pickup truck into a crowd celebrating the new year on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing fourteen people and injuring dozens before he was shot and killed in a gunfight with police. An ISIS flag was in the vehicle. The FBI investigated and concluded he was inspired by the Islamic State and had acted alone. That is the record. Around it, a fog of conspiracy claims formed almost immediately: that a team of attackers was involved, that the whole event was staged, that evidence was being hidden, that it was tied to the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion the same morning, and, most corrosively, false narratives blaming immigrants or Israel. This case file keeps the record apart from those rated claims, explains the legitimate reasons early reporting was confused, and shows why the conspiracy layer does not hold. On those claims, the verdict is debunked.
Read the case file →The 2026 federal seizures of 2020 ballots and voting machines are uncovering the fraud that stole the election
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 →The 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting was staged or deliberately allowed to happen
On the night of 25 April 2026, shots were fired at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner in Washington. According to the Justice Department and contemporaneous reporting, an armed man rushed the event as officers were breaking down security screening, a federal officer wearing a bullet-resistant vest was hit by buckshot and was expected to recover, and President Trump was hurried off the stage while guests took cover. A suspect, Cole Tomas Allen, 31, was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the president; he pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent pending trial. Within hours, a conspiracy claim spread that the whole thing had been staged or theatrically arranged, in a rival version, that it was real but deliberately permitted. This case file separates the record from that claim. On the evidence assembled by investigators and reviewed by fact-checkers, the staged and deliberately-allowed claims are debunked. The security operation raised real and serious questions, but a documented failure is not the same as a proven plot.
Read the case file →The 6 April 1994 missile shootdown of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's plane, the event that triggered the genocide, remains an unsolved and bitterly contested whodunit that no court has ever pinned on a proven culprit
On the evening of 6 April 1994, as it prepared to land at Kigali airport, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was struck by surface-to-air missiles and crashed, killing both presidents, their aides, and the French crew. Within hours the genocide of Tutsi and moderate Hutu began, and roughly 800,000 people were killed over the following hundred days. This file separates the documented event, a missile attack that no one disputes, from the still-open question of who ordered and carried it out. For thirty years two rival explanations have competed: that Hutu Power hardliners killed Habyarimana to sabotage a peace deal and unleash the slaughter they had prepared, or that the RPF shot the plane down to seize power. Official inquiries have pointed in opposite directions and none has produced a conviction. The site names no culprit and reports the contest as unresolved.
Read the case file →The banned Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) is secretly reviving to seize power, with covert communists, including President Joko Widodo, working from within the state
The Indonesian Communist Party, once the largest communist party outside the socialist bloc, was annihilated in the 1965-66 mass killings, banned in 1966, and has not existed as an organization since; Indonesian law still criminalizes communism and the spread of Marxist-Leninist teaching. Yet a persistent conspiracy theory holds that the PKI is secretly resurging to seize power, and that prominent figures, above all President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), are covert communists. This "kebangkitan PKI" narrative surges around elections. It flared in the 2014 and 2019 presidential races, in a 2017 wave of anti-communist scares, and has recycled since, driven by fabricated "PKI symbols," doctored photographs, and false alarms over hammer-and-sickle imagery that Indonesian fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked. A 2017 SMRC national survey found about 86.8 percent of respondents did not believe the party was reviving, and 75.1 percent rejected the claim tying Jokowi to it. This file treats the revival claim as what scholars and fact-checkers describe: a political bogeyman with no organized party behind it, tied to the state's decades-old "latent danger of communism" doctrine and used to justify denial of the 1965 atrocities. It reports the smear to rebut it, and it does not assert that any living person is a hidden communist.
Read the case file →The Bucha massacre was staged by Ukraine, with bodies planted after Russian forces withdrew
After Russian forces retreated from the Kyiv suburb of Bucha at the end of March 2022, journalists and Ukrainian authorities found the streets strewn with the bodies of murdered civilians, some with their hands bound, many shot at close range. Within days Russia's Ministry of Defence declared the scene a fabrication: the bodies, it said, were actors or corpses planted after Russian units had left, a 'staged performance' by Kyiv to smear Moscow. That denial is the claim rated here, and it is debunked. Satellite imagery, forensic pathology, on-the-ground reporting, and multiple independent visual investigations place the bodies in Bucha's streets while Russia still controlled the town, and identify the Russian units responsible.
Read the case file →The Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting was staged, or was a deliberate inside job in which security was intentionally stood down
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 keeps two things apart. 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 separate claim it rates, 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 →The Cambridge Five: British establishment insiders secretly spied for the Soviet Union
The Cambridge Five is the rare 'conspiracy' that is entirely real and fully documented. In the 1930s Soviet intelligence recruited a group of idealistic, well-connected young men at Cambridge University (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross) and steered them into the heart of the British establishment: the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6, Bletchley Park, and the wartime atomic project. For roughly twenty years they handed Moscow a torrent of secret material, including diplomatic traffic, intelligence on British and American operations, code-breaking work, and early information on the Anglo-American atomic bomb programme. Maclean and Burgess bolted to Moscow in 1951; Philby followed in 1963; Blunt confessed secretly in 1964 and was exposed to the public by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979; Cairncross was eventually confirmed as the 'fifth man'. This case file sets out that record, anchored in the men's confessions and the MI5 files declassified at the UK National Archives, and marks the genuine questions that historians still argue over.
Read the case file →The Church of Scientology infiltrated the U.S. government to steal and destroy its files
In the early-to-mid 1970s the Church of Scientology ran a coordinated campaign, code-named Operation Snow White, to plant covert operatives inside federal agencies and steal or destroy government files it judged unfavorable to Scientology and its founder, a scheme so extensive that when the FBI finally raided its offices in 1977, the paper trail alone was enough to convict eleven of the Church's most senior officials.
Read the case file →The CIA and British intelligence secretly overthrew Iran's elected prime minister in 1953
Not a theory in the usual sense but a covert operation the US government spent sixty years denying, then admitted in its own words. In August 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, after he nationalized the British-controlled oil industry, and installed the Shah as an absolute monarch in his place.
Read the case file →The CIA plotted to assassinate Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba, and Western powers engineered his 1961 death
Patrice Lumumba was the first elected prime minister of the newly independent Congo, in office for barely ten weeks in 1960 before he was dismissed, arrested, and, on 17 January 1961, executed in the breakaway province of Katanga. For decades the charge that Western intelligence services had a hand in his death was treated as anti-colonial rhetoric. Then the documents arrived. In 1975 the U.S. Senate's Church Committee found that the CIA, under authorization traced to the Eisenhower administration, had plotted to assassinate Lumumba, going so far as to ship poison to its Congo station. In 2001 a Belgian parliamentary inquiry found that Belgian officials helped organize his transfer to his enemies and bore moral responsibility for his death. This case file separates the record (a real CIA assassination plot, and heavy Belgian involvement in the killing) from the sweeping claim (that the CIA itself murdered him). The plot is substantiated; the identity of who actually carried out the killing is a separate and carefully attributed question.
Read the case file →The CIA ran a secret domestic program, Operation CHAOS, that spied on the anti-war and civil-rights movements and built files on hundreds of thousands of Americans
In August 1967, under pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to prove that foreign powers were secretly directing the anti-Vietnam War movement, CIA Director Richard Helms authorized a compartmented domestic operation that came to be known as CHAOS. Led by counterintelligence officer Richard Ober and tied to James Angleton's counterintelligence staff, it expanded under President Nixon and ran until 1974. CHAOS infiltrated and monitored anti-war and civil-rights groups, drew on mail-opening and other collection, and compiled files on about 7,200 Americans alongside a computer index of roughly 300,000 names and around 1,000 organizations. Repeatedly, the CIA reported it had found little or no evidence of the foreign control it had been sent to find. After Hersh's 1974 exposure, the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee investigated and documented the program. This case file separates the record (a real, government-confirmed domestic surveillance program) from the broader and still-contested readings layered on top of it.
Read the case file →The CIA ran a secret program to overthrow Castro and plotted his assassination
Operation Mongoose, also called the Cuban Project, was a real, government-wide covert program authorized by President Kennedy in November 1961 to sabotage and overthrow Fidel Castro's government after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Alongside it, and separately, the CIA ran assassination plots against Castro (some using organized-crime contacts) later confirmed in detail by the Senate's Church Committee. The program is not a theory; it is documented history. What remains genuinely contested is how far up the chain of command the assassination plotting was known and approved.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly built a ship to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the Pacific floor
Not a rumor but a declassified CIA operation: in the early 1970s, the agency secretly built a purpose-designed ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to lift a sunken Soviet ballistic-missile submarine from nearly three miles down in the Pacific, all under the cover story that reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes was mining seabed minerals. Leaked to the press in 1975 and partially declassified by the CIA in 2010, it also produced the legal doctrine now known as the 'Glomar response.'
Read the case file →The CIA secretly built an arsenal of hacking tools to turn phones, smart TVs, and cars into covert surveillance devices
On 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing Vault 7, the largest leak of internal CIA documents in the agency's history: thousands of pages describing hacking tools built by its Center for Cyber Intelligence. The files detailed malware and zero-day exploits to compromise iPhones, Android phones, Windows and Linux machines, routers, web browsers, and internet-connected televisions, along with an implant called Weeping Angel that could make a Samsung smart TV record audio while appearing to be off. The CIA declined to confirm the authenticity of specific documents but treated the breach as real and serious, and a jury later convicted CIA software engineer Joshua Schulte of the leak. This case file keeps two things apart: the documented capabilities, which are substantiated, and the overreaching claim that the tools amounted to mass, passive surveillance of the public, which the record does not support.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly compiled an internal report, the "Family Jewels," cataloguing decades of its own illegal and improper activity
In May 1973, with the Watergate scandal implicating former CIA officers, Director James Schlesinger ordered every senior official to report any agency activity that might lie outside its legal charter. The result was a loose-leaf compilation of memos, roughly 700 pages, that William Colby, who inherited it as director later that year, called the skeletons in the CIA's closet. Its existence stayed secret until Seymour Hersh exposed CIA domestic spying in December 1974, triggering the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee. The full file remained classified for another three decades. On 25 June 2007, the CIA declassified and released it. This case file keeps two things apart: a real internal inventory of illegal and improper acts, since corroborated by congressional investigations, and the temptation to treat that inventory as proof of every claim ever made about the agency. On the documented abuses it catalogues, the record is substantiated.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly experimented on people with drugs and mind control
Long dismissed as paranoia, the claim that the CIA ran covert mind-control and drug experiments on often unwitting subjects turned out to be documented fact: a case study in why institutional distrust is not always irrational.
Read the case file →The CIA secretly influenced the news media during the Cold War
That the CIA covertly recruited journalists and shaped US news coverage during the Cold War sounds like a classic conspiracy theory. It isn't one: a Senate investigation and a major press exposé both confirmed the core relationships were real. What is not confirmed is the popular name attached to them, or the idea of a single, centrally run operation that controlled the American press.
Read the case file →The CIA supplied weapons to the Dominican conspirators who assassinated dictator Rafael Trujillo in a 1961 highway ambush, as documented by declassified files and the US Senate's Church Committee
On the night of 30 May 1961, a group of Dominican conspirators ambushed the car of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo on a lonely stretch of seafront highway outside the capital that bore his name, Ciudad Trujillo. In a short, ferocious gun battle they killed the man who had run the country as a personal fiefdom for thirty-one years. The plot was Dominican, driven by men from within Trujillo's own elite who had turned against him. But it did not happen in a vacuum: the United States, alarmed that Trujillo's excesses might provoke a Castro-style upheaval, had spent more than a year cultivating the dissidents. This file separates the documented core, that US officials and the CIA passed weapons to the plotters and knew of their intent, from the contested layer of exactly how much those weapons mattered and how direct the US hand in the killing was. It anchors the account to the Church Committee's findings and the declassified files behind them.
Read the case file →The CIA surgically wired a live cat as a covert listening device, and its first spy mission ended when it was run over by a taxi
In the 1960s the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology pursued an unusual surveillance idea: implant listening equipment inside a house cat and let the animal wander near targets to pick up conversations. In an hour-long operation, a veterinary surgeon placed a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small transmitter at the base of its skull, and a fine antenna wire woven through its fur. The effort, later nicknamed Acoustic Kitty, reportedly ran for several years and cost a great deal of money before being abandoned as impractical, a conclusion set out in a heavily redacted 1967 memo declassified in 2001. The story is usually told with a vivid ending: on its first mission outside the Soviet embassy in Washington, the cat is said to have been struck and killed by a taxi within moments. This case file keeps two things apart: a real, funded, and ultimately cancelled CIA project; and the claim it rates, the specific taxi-death legend, which rests on a single source and has been directly disputed by another former CIA officer.
Read the case file →The CIA was complicit in the crack-cocaine trade that funded the Nicaraguan Contras
The claim runs along a spectrum. At the documented end: Nicaraguan Contra fighters and their supporters included cocaine traffickers, some of that cocaine reached American cities, and US officials knew and mostly looked away. At the far end: that the CIA deliberately flooded Black neighborhoods with crack as a matter of policy. This case file separates the two. It traces the early reporting, the 1989 Kerry Committee findings, Gary Webb's 1996 Dark Alliance series and the ferocious backlash it drew, the 1998 CIA Inspector General report that quietly conceded much of the underlying story, and Webb's ruined career and 2004 death. The substantiated core and the overstated tier are not the same claim, and telling them apart is the whole discipline of the case.
Read the case file →The CIA's Phoenix Program was a mass-assassination campaign that deliberately murdered tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians
The Phoenix Program was a real, CIA-coordinated counterinsurgency effort of the Vietnam War, run alongside a parallel South Vietnamese program called Phung Hoang. Its stated purpose was to dismantle the Viet Cong Infrastructure, the clandestine civilian and political apparatus that supported the insurgency, by identifying suspected members and 'neutralizing' them through capture, defection, or death. Over its life the program neutralized tens of thousands of people; by South Vietnamese government figures roughly 81,740 between 1968 and 1972, of whom about 26,369 were killed, and its own director, William Colby, told Congress in 1971 that 20,587 suspected cadre had been killed from January 1968 through May 1971. Congressional hearings and later disclosures documented a quota system, unreliable identification of who was actually Viet Cong, torture, arbitrary detention, and killings. This case file separates the record (a real program that killed and detained at scale amid serious abuses) from the most expansive claim it rates (that it was fundamentally a deliberate mass-assassination campaign that murdered tens of thousands of civilians as a matter of policy), where the evidence on scale and intent remains contested.
Read the case file →The claim that the 1932–1933 Holodomor famine in Soviet Ukraine did not happen, was a purely natural crop failure, or carried no state responsibility is a debunked denial, contradicted by Soviet policy records, opened archives, and the historians' consensus that the famine was man-made
In 1932 and 1933 a catastrophic famine swept Soviet Ukraine and other grain-growing regions of the USSR, killing an estimated 3.5 to 5 million Ukrainians. It did not fall from the sky. It followed forced collectivization, punishing grain-requisition quotas that stripped villages of food, the blacklisting of communities that failed to meet those quotas, and a January 1933 order that sealed Ukraine's borders so starving peasants could not flee to find bread. Moscow suppressed the news, banned the word famine, and was assisted abroad by correspondents like Walter Duranty, who told readers there was no starvation, while the Welsh journalist Gareth Jones reported the truth and was denounced for it. Since then, denial has passed from Soviet propaganda to modern Russian minimization. This file centers the documented policies and the archival and eyewitness record, and reports the denialist claims solely in order to refute them. It also treats honestly the live scholarly question of whether the Holodomor legally constitutes genocide, which is a debate about a legal label, not about whether the famine happened.
Read the case file →The claim that the Ottoman Empire did not commit genocide against its Armenian population in 1915–1917 is a debunked, state-sponsored denial campaign that contradicts the overwhelming scholarly, documentary, and judicial record of the extermination of roughly a million or more Armenians
During the First World War, the Ottoman government controlled by the Committee of Union and Progress set out to destroy the empire's Armenian community. Beginning with the arrest of Armenian leaders in Constantinople on 24 April 1915 and formalized by a deportation law that May, Armenians across Anatolia were driven from their homes, the men often killed outright and the women, children, and elderly marched into the Syrian desert toward Deir ez-Zor, where hundreds of thousands died of starvation, exposure, disease, and massacre. Estimates of the dead run from about one million to 1.5 million. The atrocity was documented as it happened by American and German diplomats, by missionaries and aid workers, and later by the Ottoman Empire's own postwar tribunals, and it helped inspire the word genocide itself. Denial recasts this as ordinary wartime loss, a benign relocation, or a two-sided civil war, and disputes the numbers. This file centers the documented genocide and the scholarly consensus, names the denial as the state project it is, and reports its claims only to rebut them.
Read the case file →The Confederate government in Richmond, and Jefferson Davis himself, secretly ordered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, using John Wilkes Booth as its agent
This is the one grand theory about Lincoln's death that credible historians still argue over. Booth did not act in a vacuum: he traveled to Montreal in 1864 and met Confederate agents at their known hub, carried a Canadian bill of exchange found later on his body, and built his plot to kidnap Lincoln on the Confederacy's real underground of couriers and safe houses. When the abduction scheme failed and Booth turned to murder, the 1865 military commission charged that the order had come from Richmond and named Jefferson Davis. The case rested heavily on witnesses who were soon exposed as paid perjurers, the assassination charge against Davis was quietly dropped, and he was never tried for it. This file keeps the established record, that Booth was tied into a Confederate covert network running a sanctioned kidnapping plan, separate from the claim it rates, that Richmond or Davis ordered the killing. On the evidence, the second remains unproven.
Read the case file →The European Union is building a censorship grid over the internet: an 'internet passport' will be required before anyone can go online, VPNs are to be banned so nobody can escape it, and the AI Act completes the control system
Through 2026 a set of claims spread across European and English-language social media holding that Brussels was about to close the open internet: that an 'internet passport' would soon be required before anyone could go online, that VPNs would be banned so the requirement could not be evaded, and that the AI Act supplied the censorship machinery to finish the job. Individual posts were viewed millions of times. Each claim points at something real and then misdescribes it. The passport is an age-verification app the Commission is building so that platforms can keep children away from age-restricted material; a user verifies their age once with an official document and afterwards proves only that they are above a threshold, and it does not gate the internet. The VPN ban does not exist: a Commission official said the goal is making age checks harder to circumvent, and her office said flatly there is no crackdown on VPNs and no proposal targeting them. The AI Act obligations that took effect on 2 August 2026 are a disclosure rule requiring deepfakes to be labelled as artificial, not a takedown power. There are real arguments to have about all three, and digital-rights groups are having them. This file rates the viral version, and the viral version is false.
Read the case file →The fake passport and cash-filled safe found when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested prove he was an intelligence operative preparing to flee
When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on federal sex-trafficking charges, prosecutors told the court that agents searching a safe in his Manhattan townhouse had found piles of cash, dozens of loose diamonds, and an expired foreign passport that carried his photograph but someone else's name and gave his residence as Saudi Arabia. Prosecutors used these items to argue he was an extreme flight risk. Reporting later showed that in the days before the arrest, an Epstein company had tried to wire tens of millions of dollars toward a palace in Marrakesh. This file separates what is documented, the safe contents, the false-name passport, and the flight-risk argument, from the further claim that these items prove Epstein was a trained spy or had a state handler. The narrower intelligence-asset question is weighed in the companion file on Epstein's case.
Read the case file →The FBI blamed the 2001 anthrax attacks on the wrong man, and the true origin is being obscured
In the weeks after 9/11, letters filled with powdered anthrax moved through the US mail, killing five people and sickening seventeen more. After the longest and most expensive investigation in its history, the FBI concluded that a single Army scientist, Dr. Bruce Ivins, had done it alone. He died of an apparent overdose in 2008, before he was charged, so the case was never tested in a courtroom. This file separates what is documented (the attacks, the deaths, and the FBI's conclusion) from what remains disputed: whether that conclusion is right, given a later National Academy of Sciences review that found the science did not definitively point to Ivins, and given that an earlier suspect, Steven Hatfill, was publicly hounded, wholly exonerated, and paid a large settlement.
Read the case file →The FBI ran a secret campaign to spy on and sabotage domestic political activists
For fifteen years the FBI ran a secret program, code-named COINTELPRO, to not just watch but actively disrupt civil-rights, anti-war and other domestic political movements, a claim that sounded like paranoia until burglars stole the paperwork and Congress confirmed the rest.
Read the case file →The former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was assassinated in London in 2006 with polonium-210, in an operation carried out by Russian agents and probably approved at the top of the Russian state
On 1 November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) who had defected to Britain and become a fierce public critic of the Kremlin, drank green tea at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in Mayfair with two Russian contacts, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Within hours he fell violently ill. He died three weeks later, on 23 November, the first known victim of deliberate polonium-210 poisoning. In a statement dictated from his deathbed, Litvinenko accused Vladimir Putin of ordering his death. British police, following a radioactive trail left across hotels, restaurants, and aircraft, identified Lugovoi and Kovtun as the men who administered the poison. This case file separates the record (a fatal polonium poisoning, ruled an unlawful killing) from the claim it rates (that Russian agents carried it out on behalf of the FSB, with approval reaching the Russian president), which is the conclusion of the 2016 Owen Inquiry and the 2021 European Court of Human Rights and is rated substantiated, with the genuine limits noted.
Read the case file →The Gleiwitz incident was a Nazi false-flag attack staged to justify invading Poland
The Gleiwitz incident is the clearest, best-documented false flag in modern history: not a suspected one, a proven one. On the evening of 31 August 1939, a small SS team in civilian clothes and Polish uniforms, led by Alfred Naujocks, seized the German radio transmitter at Gleiwitz (today Gliwice, Poland), broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish, and left behind the body of a murdered prisoner dressed to look like a Polish saboteur. It was one of several staged 'border incidents' run under Operation Himmler. The next morning Adolf Hitler told the Reichstag that Poland had fired first, and German forces invaded, opening the Second World War in Europe. The scheme was exposed after the war through Naujocks' own sworn testimony at Nuremberg. This case file lays out what is firmly established, and separates it from the operational details that rest largely on one man's account.
Read the case file →The government is secretly plotting to ban and confiscate Americans' existing gas stoves
In January 2023, a single interview turned an obscure regulatory question into a national culture-war flashpoint. A commissioner at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission told Bloomberg that gas stoves were a 'hidden hazard' and that a ban was 'on the table,' and within days the claim had mutated online into a sweeping charge: that the government was secretly planning to ban gas stoves and even seize the ones people already owned. This case file keeps two things apart, the record and the claim it rates. The record is real and contested: a commissioner's comments, proposed federal efficiency standards for new stoves, peer-reviewed studies on indoor air pollution, and genuine local and state bans on new gas hookups in new buildings, one of which a federal appeals court upheld in 2026. The claim we rate, a secret federal plot to confiscate the stoves already in Americans' homes, is not supported: the safety commission's chair publicly said the agency was not banning gas stoves, and every measure that has actually advanced applies to new products or new construction, not to existing appliances.
Read the case file →The Gulf of Tonkin incident that launched the Vietnam War was misrepresented
The naval battle that supposedly launched America into Vietnam turned out to be half real. The first attack happened. The second (the one Congress voted on) almost certainly did not, and the National Security Agency's own declassified history says the signals intelligence used to sell it was misread and then misrepresented.
Read the case file →The Guyanese historian and activist Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 by a bomb hidden in a walkie-talkie, in a killing that a later state commission of inquiry found the Forbes Burnham government had organized
On 13 June 1980, Walter Rodney, a Guyanese historian, Pan-Africanist, and leader of the opposition Working People's Alliance, was killed in Georgetown at the age of 38 when a device hidden inside a walkie-talkie exploded as he sat in a car with his brother Donald. Rodney, author of the landmark 1972 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, had become the most formidable opponent of Prime Minister Forbes Burnham's People's National Congress government. The killing was widely blamed on the state from the first day, but no one was prosecuted for it. In 2014 the Guyanese government appointed a Commission of Inquiry, which reported in February 2016 that Rodney had died in a state-organized assassination. This file separates the documented event, a bomb killing, from the rated claim, the Commission's attribution of that killing to the Burnham government, and reports what the Commission concluded as the anchoring authority.
Read the case file →The journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in a premeditated operation carried out by Saudi agents
On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist who had become a leading critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to collect a document for his forthcoming marriage. He never walked out. A team of Saudi agents, flown in from Riyadh, killed him inside the building; his body was dismembered and has never been recovered. Saudi Arabia first said he had left the consulate alive, then, as Turkish evidence mounted, admitted he had died there, describing it first as a fistfight and then as a rogue operation, and eventually tried and convicted eight agents behind closed doors. This case file keeps two things apart: a premeditated killing carried out by Saudi state agents, now officially acknowledged, and the contested question of who at the top authorised it, which the site reports strictly as the attributed findings of the UN Special Rapporteur and the US intelligence community, alongside Saudi Arabia's denial.
Read the case file →The military secretly stole Eva Peron's embalmed body and hid it abroad for 16 years
When Eva Peron died in 1952 she was embalmed to lifelike perfection and meant to rest in a colossal monument. Instead, after the 1955 coup that toppled her husband, the Argentine military spirited her corpse away and hid it for 16 years: shuttled around Buenos Aires by an intelligence officer, smuggled to Italy, buried in Milan under the false name María Maggi de Magistris, and finally handed back to Juan Peron in exile in Madrid. That saga is real. The macabre legends that attached themselves to it, from three flawless copies to a wandering curse, are a separate matter, and this file keeps the documented record and the folklore apart.
Read the case file →The murder of Abraham Lincoln was a grand conspiracy reaching beyond John Wilkes Booth, directed by his own war secretary, the Confederate government, or hidden foreign hands
On the night of 14 April 1865, five days after Robert E. Lee's surrender, John Wilkes Booth entered the presidential box at Ford's Theatre in Washington and shot Abraham Lincoln in the head; the president died the next morning. It was not a lone act. Booth headed a conspiracy that struck the same night: Lewis Powell forced his way into Secretary of State William Seward's home and stabbed him nearly to death, while George Atzerodt was assigned to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson but lost his nerve. Booth was tracked to a Virginia barn and shot; a military commission tried eight conspirators and four were hanged. That coordinated plot is settled history. What this case file weighs is the far larger claim that grew up around it: that Booth was the visible tip of a deeper conspiracy run by his own government's War Department, by the Confederacy's leaders, or by shadowy foreign interests. It separates the documented Booth conspiracy, a fact, from those grand theories, which range from debated to baseless and together remain unproven.
Read the case file →The Navy made a warship invisible and teleported it in 1943
The claim that a secret 1943 Navy experiment made the destroyer escort USS Eldridge invisible and teleported it between two ports, driving its crew mad: traced to a single letter-writer's tale, contradicted by the ship's own logs, and most likely a distorted memory of ordinary wartime degaussing.
Read the case file →The Navy ran secret time-travel experiments at Camp Hero, Montauk
The claim that a covert government project used the decommissioned Camp Hero / Montauk Air Force Station on Long Island to research time travel, teleportation, and mind control: traced to the unverifiable 'recovered memories' of two men, one of whom fabricated his own biography, at a real Cold War radar base that closed in 1981.
Read the case file →The Nayirah incubator testimony that helped sell the Gulf War was a PR-manufactured atrocity story
In the autumn of 1990, as Washington weighed war with Iraq, a tearful 15-year-old girl gave Congress an unforgettable account: Iraqi soldiers, she said, had stormed a Kuwaiti hospital, torn newborns from their incubators, and left them to die on the cold floor. The story spread everywhere. President Bush repeated it; senators cited it on the floor. It was also, in the form it was told, unproven, and the way it reached Congress was a deception. The girl was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States, a fact hidden at the time, and her testimony was arranged and coached by a hired public relations firm working for a Kuwaiti-government front group. This case file separates two things that are easy to blur: the manufactured incubator claim, which is debunked, and the genuine Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait, which happened and is not the subject of this file. What was fabricated was not the war's existence but one of its most emotionally powerful selling points.
Read the case file →The Nazis set the 1933 Reichstag fire themselves as a false flag to seize power
On the night of 27 February 1933, the German parliament building in Berlin went up in flames. Police arrested a young Dutch council-communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, at the scene; he confessed to setting the fire alone to rouse workers against fascism. The next day the Nazi government pushed through the Reichstag Fire Decree, suspending civil liberties across Germany and clearing the way for mass arrests of its opponents. The blaze became one of the pivotal events in the Nazi consolidation of power. Ever since, one question has refused to settle: did van der Lubbe truly act alone, or did the Nazis set or help set the fire as a false flag they were poised to exploit? This case file separates what is firmly established (the exploitation) from what remains a live historiographical dispute (the culprit).
Read the case file →The near-simultaneous knife attack on Secretary of State William Seward, on the same night Booth shot Lincoln, proves the assassination was a real, coordinated, multi-target conspiracy and not the act of a lone gunman
Lincoln's murder is remembered as a lone act in a theater, but it was one prong of a planned strike at the whole top of the government. On the night of 14 April 1865, at almost the same hour Booth shot the president, Lewis Powell, a former Confederate soldier in Booth's circle, talked his way into the Washington home of Secretary of State William Seward and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Seward survived, most likely because a metal-and-leather splint immobilizing a jaw he had broken days earlier in a carriage accident helped deflect the blade. A third conspirator, George Atzerodt, was assigned to kill Vice President Johnson but lost his nerve. This file rates the claim that the assassination was a coordinated, multi-target conspiracy, and on that narrow question the answer is yes, substantiated. It keeps that proven coordination apart from the separate, unproven claim that the Confederate government directed the plot.
Read the case file →The Oklahoma City bombing was a wider plot: a hidden John Doe 2, government foreknowledge, and explosives inside the building
At 9:02 a.m. on 19 April 1995, a rented truck packed with roughly two tonnes of fertilizer-and-fuel explosive tore the face off the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, 19 of them children. It was, until 2001, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. The core facts were established quickly and are not seriously disputed: an anti-government extremist, Timothy McVeigh, built and drove the bomb, with help from Terry Nichols and the foreknowledge of Michael Fortier. This case file separates that documented spine from the claims that grew around it: that a never-identified John Doe 2 points to a larger cell, that the government knew in advance, and that the truck bomb alone could not have caused the damage. Those claims have real anomalies behind them, and they are unproven.
Read the case file →The Pentagon Papers proved the government systematically lied to the public about Vietnam
A classified Defense Department history of the Vietnam War, secretly commissioned by Robert McNamara and leaked by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, showed on the government's own paper trail that Truman through Johnson had misled Congress and the public about the war's scope and its odds of success. The Supreme Court refused to block publication, and in 2011 the study was declassified in full.
Read the case file →The president's stated reason for changing planes in Ankara was a cover story, and the aircraft the press and staff flew home on was a decoy
Most files here rate a claim that outran its evidence. This one runs the other way. On 8 July 2026 the president left a NATO summit in Ankara and announced he would take the old Air Force One home instead of the new Qatari-donated jet, for old time's sake. Reporters watched him climb the stairs. A catering truck was parked on the far side of the aircraft, and a few minutes later it drove away to another government plane. According to the Washington Post, which broke the story on 10 August, and to the New York Times and CBS News, which matched it citing their own officials, the president was in that truck. He flew to Britain on a separate aircraft while the press pool and some of his own staff crossed the same route on the plane they believed he was on, with the window shades in the press cabin closed. CBS reports an official saying US intelligence had picked up a credible plot to fire a missile at his departing aircraft. The documented record is the deception operation and its reported reason. What this file rates is the narrower claim that the announced reason for the plane change was a cover story, and on the reporting that is substantiated. It is not an allegation of wrongdoing against anyone, and this file makes none.
Read the case file →The Russian government misled the public and stalled foreign rescue help after the nuclear submarine Kursk sank in 2000, a real official cover-up that fed enduring but unsupported theories of a NATO collision
On 12 August 2000, during a Northern Fleet exercise in the Barents Sea, two explosions tore through the bow of the Oscar II-class nuclear submarine Kursk, and it sank in about 108 metres of water. All 118 sailors aboard died. Russia's handling of the disaster became a scandal in its own right: the navy did not acknowledge the sinking for roughly two days, insisted it was in contact with survivors, and held off Western rescue offers until it was too late. A note recovered from one officer later proved that 23 men had survived the initial blasts and lived for a time in a rear compartment. This file separates two things. The documented, substantiated part is the cover-up and the mishandled rescue. The contested part is the cause: an official Russian inquiry concluded a leaking HTP practice torpedo exploded and detonated other warheads, while a rival theory blames a collision with a NATO submarine. That collision theory is reported here as an unsupported allegation.
Read the case file →The September 11 attacks were an inside job: the towers were brought down by controlled demolition and the US government orchestrated or allowed them
On 11 September 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers flew passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and crashed a fourth plane in Pennsylvania, killing nearly three thousand people. Within months a counter-narrative took shape: that the Twin Towers and the third skyscraper to fall that day, World Trade Center 7, were destroyed by pre-planted explosives rather than by the planes and fires, and that the US government either staged the attacks or deliberately let them happen and then covered it up. This case file separates what is documented (that al-Qaeda carried out the attacks, that engineers spent years reconstructing exactly how the buildings failed, and that real intelligence warnings were missed beforehand) from the rated claims (controlled demolition, government orchestration, and cover-up). It treats the dead with the seriousness they are owed, and it follows the physical evidence where it leads.
Read the case file →The September 1999 apartment bombings that killed nearly 300 people across Russia may have been a false-flag operation staged by the FSB, rather than Chechen terrorism, to justify the Second Chechen War and lift Vladimir Putin to power
Over ten days in September 1999, a wave of explosions tore through residential apartment buildings in the Russian towns of Buynaksk and Volgodonsk and in the heart of Moscow, killing close to 300 sleeping civilians and injuring more than a thousand. The Russian government blamed Chechen and other North Caucasus militants, and the attacks, alongside an incursion into Dagestan, propelled the country into the Second Chechen War and lifted the little-known prime minister, Vladimir Putin, toward the presidency. Then, on 22 September, residents and police in Ryazan caught men planting a device in an apartment basement; the men turned out to be FSB agents, and the agency called it a training exercise. That episode anchors a persistent theory that Russia's security services staged the bombings themselves. This file separates the documented massacre from that contested attribution, and reports the false-flag charge as a serious, unresolved allegation.
Read the case file →The Soviet NKVD murdered roughly 22,000 Polish officers and citizens at Katyn in 1940, then blamed Nazi Germany and covered it up for half a century
Katyn is the rare conspiracy that turned out to be exactly what its accusers said: a mass murder by one government, pinned on another, and buried by both sides of an alliance for reasons of state. In the spring of 1940 the Soviet NKVD executed roughly 22,000 Polish army officers, police, and members of the intelligentsia on a written order signed by Stalin and five other Politburo members. When Nazi Germany uncovered the graves in 1943 and correctly blamed the Soviets, Moscow accused the Germans instead and manufactured a false investigation to prove it. Poland's Western allies, needing the USSR to win the war, looked away; the United States shelved intelligence from its own officers that pointed to Soviet guilt. The truth was established in stages: a 1952 congressional investigation, the Soviet admission of 1990, the Russian parliament's acknowledgment in 2010, and US documents declassified in 2012. This case file lays out that record and separates what is settled from the narrower points still argued.
Read the case file →The sudden ten-day shutdown of El Paso's airspace in February 2026 was cover for a catastrophe the government has never disclosed
Late on a Tuesday night in February 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration closed the sky over El Paso and southern New Mexico for ten days and gave a three-word reason: special security reasons. El Paso International Airport, a regional hub, effectively shut. It was the first sudden security closure of American airspace since the September 11 attacks, and for several hours nobody outside government could say why. Then the order was withdrawn, about seven hours in. Into that gap went the obvious inference: that a ten-day emergency lifted in seven hours had to be covering something. What the reporting established instead was a bureaucratic failure with a laser in it. This file keeps the two apart. The closure, the wording, the reversal and the cancelled flights are documented. The claim that it concealed an undisclosed catastrophe is not, and the sequence of official statements that made that claim plausible is itself the most interesting thing here.
Read the case file →The trails behind airplanes are secret chemical “chemtrails,” not ordinary contrails
The claim that the long white lines behind high-flying jets are evidence of a secret, government-run spraying program, rather than the ordinary condensation trails atmospheric science has documented for over a century.
Read the case file →The U.S. Army secretly planned to hide hundreds of nuclear missiles in tunnels under the Greenland ice
Camp Century was sold to the world in 1960 as a marvel of peacetime science: an under-ice 'city' beneath the Greenland ice sheet, powered by the first mobile nuclear reactor, where U.S. Army engineers studied Arctic construction and glaciologists drilled the first ice core to bedrock. What the public (and even the Danish government that hosted it) was not told is that the base doubled as a feasibility test for Project Iceworm, a top-secret plan to bury up to 600 nuclear missiles in a shifting maze of ice tunnels aimed at the Soviet Union. The scheme was abandoned when the ice itself proved too unstable, and it stayed secret until Danish investigators forced the documents into the open in the 1990s.
Read the case file →The U.S. government is about to confiscate privately held gold from ordinary citizens, just as it did under Executive Order 6102 in 1933
It really happened once. In 1933, under Executive Order 6102, the federal government required Americans to turn in most of their gold. That single fact is the engine of a scare that resurfaces every time gold rallies or a crisis looms: that a modern, door-to-door confiscation is imminent, and that the only safe move is to buy 'non-confiscatable' collector coins now. The 1933 order was genuine, but it was a paid buy-back at the official price, carried out to defend a gold standard the country no longer has, and it was enforced almost entirely by voluntary compliance rather than raids. There is no modern plan, proposal, or legal path toward seizing citizens' gold, and the loudest voices predicting one are usually selling the cure.
Read the case file →The U.S. government secretly let Black men go untreated for syphilis for forty years
From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service enrolled roughly 600 Black men in Macon County, Alabama, in a study of untreated syphilis, and deliberately withheld treatment, including penicillin once it became the standard cure, so researchers could observe the disease destroy their bodies. This is not a contested claim. It is documented, admitted, and apologized-for government conduct, and its consequences for medical trust in Black communities endure.
Read the case file →The U.S. government spent two decades studying psychic spies
For more than twenty years, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the U.S. Army really did fund an effort to gather intelligence by clairvoyance, a program eventually code-named Star Gate. That the program existed is beyond dispute; it was declassified in 1995 and its files fill the CIA's reading room. Whether "remote viewing" ever actually worked is a separate question, and the government's own final review answered it in the negative.
Read the case file →The U.S. Navy secretly sprayed bacteria over San Francisco in a Cold War biological-warfare test
For a week in September 1950 the U.S. Navy sprayed a cloud of live bacteria over San Francisco to see how a real biological attack might spread. The program stayed secret for a quarter-century, surfaced in the press in 1976, and was confirmed under oath in 1977, by which time one of the supposedly harmless test bacteria, Serratia marcescens, had been reclassified as a genuine human pathogen and blamed for a fatal infection.
Read the case file →The U.S. REAL ID is a covert national tracking and social-control system disguised as a driver’s license upgrade
On 7 May 2025, after two decades of delays, the Transportation Security Administration began full enforcement of the REAL ID Act at airport checkpoints. From that date, adults boarding a domestic flight or entering certain federal facilities need a REAL ID-compliant license (marked with a star) or another acceptable document such as a passport. The rule change revived an old claim: that REAL ID is not really an ID standard at all but a covert national tracking system, a step toward a social-credit regime, or a biblical mark of control. This case file keeps two things apart: a post-9/11 federal standard for state-issued IDs, issued by states from ordinary breeder documents; and the claim it rates, that the card tracks your movements and enables government control. It also takes seriously the genuine civil-liberties questions that sit alongside the false ones. On the surveillance claim itself, the record does not support it.
Read the case file →The U.S. Virgin Islands government was captured by Jeffrey Epstein and deliberately shielded his trafficking operation through tax breaks, waived monitoring, and a sham shell company
For two decades Jeffrey Epstein based his operation on his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the territory's government became deeply entangled with him. His shell company Southern Trust Company, pitched as a cutting-edge DNA and biomedical consulting venture, collected a roughly decade-long package of tax exemptions despite performing no such work; a registered sex offender saw monitoring requirements relaxed; and officials, including the sitting first lady on Epstein's payroll, solicited his input on the territory's sex-offender laws. This file separates that documented record from the stronger claim it fuels: that the territorial government was a knowing, coordinated partner in a conspiracy to shield him. The companion file on his banks treats the money that moved through the financial system; this one is about the government relationship and the company at the center of it.
Read the case file →The United States covertly worked for years to destabilize Salvador Allende's Chile before the 1973 coup
For three years the Nixon administration ran a covert campaign to keep Salvador Allende out of Chile's presidency, and then to make his government fail: funding opposition media and strikes, backing a plot that got Chile's army commander killed, and, in Nixon's own recorded instruction, moving to 'make the economy scream.' All of this is documented in the U.S. government's own files. The harder question is what the United States did on the day of the coup itself, and there the plain answer is narrower than the shorthand.
Read the case file →The United States engineered the 2022 ouster of Pakistani PM Imran Khan through a secret diplomatic cable, the 'cypher'
In March 2022, weeks before he lost a no-confidence vote, Prime Minister Imran Khan told a rally that a foreign power, which he soon named as the United States, was conspiring to remove him, and he waved a paper he called proof: a classified diplomatic cable, the 'cypher.' A real cable does exist, and the text later published by The Intercept records a senior U.S. official expressing displeasure with Khan's neutrality on the Ukraine war and indicating that relations would warm if he were gone. What remains contested is the leap from that documented displeasure to the claim that Washington orchestrated his removal. Pakistan's parliament, army, and coalition politics drove the ouster, and Pakistan's own official bodies rejected the conspiracy finding.
Read the case file →The United States gave Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leftist leaders cancer with secret technology
The claim that Washington used a secret, undetectable technology to give Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, and a cluster of other Latin American leftist leaders, the cancer that killed him. It began as a hypothetical Chavez raised aloud in 2011, hardened after his 2013 death into an allegation of deliberate poisoning by his vice president and successor Nicolas Maduro, and rests on the coincidence of several regional leaders falling ill at once. No such technology is known to exist, the illnesses have ordinary medical explanations, and no evidence for foul play was ever produced.
Read the case file →The US Army secretly exposed thousands of volunteer soldiers to nerve agents and mind-altering chemicals at Edgewood Arsenal
Between roughly 1955 and 1975, the US Army Chemical Corps conducted classified human research at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, exposing about 7,000 volunteer soldiers to more than 250 chemical substances. The list included nerve agents such as sarin and VX given at low doses, nerve agent antidotes, and a class of incapacitating psychochemicals, most notably BZ and LSD, meant to disorient rather than kill. The stated purpose was defensive: to understand how these agents affected troops and to develop protective gear, antidotes, and detection. The work was secret until congressional hearings in the mid-1970s brought it into public view, after which the program was shut down and later reviews found the volunteers had not been properly informed of the risks. This case file separates the record (a real, government-acknowledged testing program) from the contested edges (how much lasting harm it caused, and the darker readings that cast it as a scheme to build assassins or to kill its subjects). On the core claim that the testing occurred as described and was concealed for years, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →The US government maintains a secret network of FEMA concentration camps, tied to the Reagan-era Rex 84 plan, ready to detain American citizens under martial law
The claim is one of the most durable in American conspiracy culture: that somewhere out of sight the federal government keeps a network of concentration camps, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, ready to fill with citizens the moment a president declares martial law. Believers tie it to Rex 84, a real Reagan-administration readiness exercise, and to a genuine and shameful precedent, the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans. This case file keeps the record separate from the claim it rates. The record is that Rex 84 existed as a continuity-of-government and mass-detention contingency exercise, that it became public during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, and that the government has, in living memory, actually built and used internment camps. The claim it rates is that a standing camp network exists today, hidden and waiting. On that claim the verdict is debunked: no such network has ever been located, the photographs offered as proof turn out to be rail yards, existing prisons, or unrelated foreign sites, and a contingency plan drawn up in 1984 is not the same thing as camps operating in 2026.
Read the case file →The US government secretly runs mass surveillance on ordinary citizens
For years, warnings about a secret US government dragnet on ordinary citizens' communications were dismissed as paranoia. In June 2013, leaked and subsequently declassified NSA documents showed the claim was real: the government had been collecting Americans' phone records in bulk and tapping into major internet platforms: programs it later confirmed, a federal court found partly unlawful, and Congress moved to rein in.
Read the case file →The US government secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the money to Nicaraguan rebels
Not a rumor but a proven, prosecuted scandal: senior Reagan administration officials secretly sold arms to Iran, then under a US embargo, and diverted the proceeds to arm Nicaraguan rebels Congress had explicitly forbidden the government to fund. Exposed in late 1986, it produced a presidential commission, a joint congressional inquiry, and criminal convictions of the operation's key figures.
Read the case file →The US military drew up plans to fake terror attacks and blame Cuba
Long before 'false flag' entered everyday vocabulary, America's own Joint Chiefs of Staff put their names to a plan to stage fake terrorism against American citizens and pin it on Cuba. The proposal is real, signed, and declassified. It was also rejected, and it never happened.
Read the case file →The US military secretly exposed thousands of its own service members to real chemical and biological warfare agents in Cold War tests, then concealed the program for decades
Between 1962 and 1973 the Department of Defense conducted Project 112, a classified chemical and biological warfare test program run out of the Deseret Test Center in Utah. Its sea-based arm, Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense), used Navy ships and Army tugboats to gauge how vulnerable US forces were to chemical and biological attack. Roughly 5,900 service members took part. Many tests used harmless simulants and tracer chemicals, but a number involved real agents, including the biological agents that cause Q fever and tularemia, and trace amounts of nerve agents such as sarin and VX. The Pentagon denied the program's existence for decades until a journalist's investigation aired on CBS in 2000, after which the Department of Defense released detailed fact sheets, testified before Congress, and the VA began contacting participants. This case file separates the record (a real, now-acknowledged program of chem-bio tests involving service members who were often not told what they were exposed to) from the questions that are still genuinely open (above all, whether the exposures caused lasting harm). On the existence and concealment of the tests, the verdict is substantiated.
Read the case file →The US military secretly weaponized the weather over Vietnam
For five years the United States ran a classified cloud-seeding program over Southeast Asia, flying military aircraft into monsoon clouds and dumping silver iodide to make it rain harder and longer on North Vietnamese supply routes. The airmen's own motto was 'make mud, not war.' The Pentagon denied it under oath, then admitted it in closed Senate testimony, and the scandal produced the world's first treaty outlawing environmental warfare.
Read the case file →The US Navy, NSA, and CIA secretly wiretapped a Soviet undersea military cable in the Sea of Okhotsk
Not a rumor but a documented Cold War intelligence operation: in the early 1970s, US Navy divers working from a modified submarine placed a covert tap on a Soviet military communications cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk, recording years of unencrypted Soviet naval traffic, until an NSA analyst sold the secret to the KGB and was convicted of espionage for it.
Read the case file →The US secretly brought Nazi scientists to America after WWII
Not a rumor but a documented program: after WWII, US intelligence recruited around 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians (including rocket engineer Wernher von Braun) and in a number of cases rewrote their Nazi Party and SS histories to slip them past America's own immigration bar on 'ardent Nazis'.
Read the case file →The wave of drones over European airports and military bases is a manufactured pretext, staged or inflated by NATO governments to justify rearmament and escalation with Russia
Since September 2025, drones have closed airports across Europe: Copenhagen, Oslo, Munich twice in a day, Brussels, Berlin, Bremen, Liege, Gothenburg. They have appeared over Belgian air bases, a French naval base that hosts the country's ballistic-missile submarines, and Danish military sites. Poland and Estonia both invoked NATO's Article 4. Almost none of it has been solved. A counter-claim travels alongside the incidents and sometimes ahead of them: that this is a manufactured emergency, staged or inflated by European governments to sell rearmament to their voters. That claim is contradicted by the physical evidence, most recently an armed drone recovered at a German cargo hub in August 2026. But the file that stops there is only doing half the job, because the reason the counter-claim finds an audience is a genuine hole in the official account. For fifteen months, across dozens of incidents in seven countries, essentially no operator has been identified and no drone recovered. What this file rates is the pretext claim. What it also documents is how little anyone has proved about who is responsible.
Read the case file →The wrong man was convicted of the Lockerbie bombing, and the real plot points to Iran and a Palestinian cell
On 21 December 1988 a bomb tore apart Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, killing all 259 people aboard and 11 on the ground. After a decade-long manhunt, a single Libyan intelligence officer, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted in 2001; the man tried alongside him was acquitted. Ever since, the conviction has been dogged by doubt. Scotland's own review body twice concluded that a miscarriage of justice may have occurred, a UN-appointed observer called the verdict a spectacular failure of justice, and many researchers argue the trail really led to a Palestinian group acting for Iran. This case file separates what is settled (a bomb, 270 dead, one conviction, one acquittal, one continuing prosecution) from what is genuinely disputed: whether the right man was convicted and who actually ordered the attack.
Read the case file →The wrong men were convicted of assassinating Malcolm X, and the FBI and NYPD buried evidence of it
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 →The Xinjiang detention camps are a Western fabrication, and the facilities are humane vocational training centres
The claim, pushed by Chinese officials and state media, that the mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims in Xinjiang never happened, that the camps documented by journalists and researchers are really voluntary 'vocational education and training centres,' and that the whole account is a lie manufactured by the United States and anti-China forces. This is a case of atrocity denial. The abuses it denies are among the most heavily documented of the last decade, corroborated by the UN, by China's own leaked records, by satellite imagery, and by survivors.
Read the case file →TikTok is a Chinese Communist Party spying and mind-control weapon
The claim that TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese state: that its parent company ByteDance funnels American user data to Beijing and that the Chinese Communist Party secretly tunes the recommendation algorithm to manipulate and brainwash Western users. The data-access and structural-risk concerns behind it are real, officially documented, and serious enough to have produced a US divest-or-ban law. The maximalist version, a proven and operating mind-control operation run on Beijing's orders, has no public evidence behind it.
Read the case file →Turkey's July 2016 coup attempt was a 'false flag' staged by President Erdogan
On the night of 15 July 2016 a faction of the Turkish military tried to seize power, blocking bridges, bombing the parliament, and killing around 250 people before the coup collapsed by morning. That much is documented. Everything about the motive and the mastermind is contested. Ankara blamed the movement of the U.S.-based cleric Fethullah Gulen and launched a purge of some 150,000 officials; Gulen denied any role, and Western governments were never fully convinced by the evidence. Against the official story runs a persistent rival claim: that Erdogan himself staged or allowed the coup as a pretext for the crackdown. This file separates the parts of the record that are settled from the two competing accounts that are not.
Read the case file →TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a missile, and the cause was covered up
On 17 July 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 bound from New York to Paris, exploded in mid-air about twelve minutes after takeoff and fell into the Atlantic off East Moriches, Long Island, killing all 230 people aboard. Scores of people on the ground and on boats reported a streak of light climbing toward the aircraft just before the fireball, and within days the idea took hold that the jet had been shot down: by a terrorist missile, or by a US Navy missile fired in a training accident and then concealed. This case file separates what is documented (a real explosion, a real body of eyewitness accounts, an exhaustive federal investigation) from the specific conspiracy claim. The NTSB spent four years and reconstructed the aircraft from recovered wreckage before concluding the probable cause was an explosion of the center wing fuel tank, most likely ignited by a short circuit. The FBI found no evidence of a crime, and the CIA concluded the streak witnesses described was the burning, climbing aircraft after the initial blast. The missile-shootdown claim is unproven, and where it requires warhead damage to the airframe, the reconstruction points the other way.
Read the case file →U.S. researchers deliberately infected people in Guatemala with syphilis in secret government experiments
Between 1946 and 1948, doctors working for the U.S. Public Health Service travelled to Guatemala and deliberately infected people with sexually transmitted diseases to study the illnesses and test whether penicillin could prevent them. The subjects were prisoners, soldiers, patients in a psychiatric hospital, and sex workers, among the most powerless people in the country, and they were not meaningfully asked. More than 1,300 people were exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea, or chancroid, and only some were treated. The study was funded through a National Institutes of Health grant and carried out with the cooperation of Guatemalan authorities, then filed away and forgotten. It stayed hidden until 2010, when a historian found the lead researcher's own papers. This case file sets out what the government did, how it was uncovered, what the United States admitted, and where careless retellings overstate an atrocity that needs no exaggeration.
Read the case file →Ukraine hosts secret US-run bioweapons labs developing pathogens to attack Russia
The claim that a network of laboratories in Ukraine is secretly run by the United States to develop biological weapons, in some tellings pathogens engineered to target Slavs or ethnic Russians, or diseases meant to spread via migratory birds, bats, and mosquitoes. Underneath the story sits a real and documented program: US-funded public-health and biosafety labs, owned and operated by Ukraine, that secure and study dangerous pathogens to prevent outbreaks. The claim we rate, that these are covert offensive weapons factories, does not survive contact with the evidence and traces to a decades-old Russian disinformation playbook.
Read the case file →UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold's 1961 plane crash was no accident but a covered-up assassination
Just after midnight on 18 September 1961, the aircraft carrying Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, came down in forest near Ndola, in what was then Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). He was flying to broker a ceasefire in the Congo Crisis. All sixteen people aboard died; one, an American security officer, survived the impact only to die days later. Early colonial inquiries called it pilot error, but the case never closed. Local witnesses spoke of a second aircraft and flashes in the sky, the wreck took some fifteen hours to reach despite lying near the airport, and Hammarskjold had made powerful enemies among mining interests, mercenaries, and Western governments. In 2013 an independent commission of jurists found the possibility of attack deserved fresh investigation; the UN reopened the inquiry, and its investigator has since called an external attack 'plausible' while accusing member states of hiding what they know. Whether it was murder or misfortune is still, honestly, unsettled.
Read the case file →Unelected aides secretly ran the country during Biden's term and used an autopen to sign his pardons and orders, making those acts legally void
President Biden, like several presidents before him, used an autopen to place his signature on some documents, including a batch of pardons and commutations issued in the final days of his term. Out of that ordinary fact grew a sweeping claim: that unelected aides secretly ran the country, signed Biden's pardons and executive orders by machine without his authorization, and that those acts are therefore legally void, so a later president can simply terminate them. This case file keeps two things apart: autopen use is real and a House committee issued a report making serious allegations; and the legal claim it rates, that the resulting pardons and orders are void. On the law, the claim does not hold: the Constitution nowhere requires a president to sign a pardon by hand, a 1929 Solicitor General memo and a 2005 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion both endorse machine signing, presidents from Lincoln to Obama delegated or mechanized signatures, and courts have long held that once a pardon is delivered it is final and irrevocable. The verdict on the void-pardon claim is debunked. The distinct questions the report raises about capacity, delegation, and disclosure are treated here as open, not as proof of the theory.
Read the case file →United Airlines Flight 93 was secretly shot down by a US military fighter jet over Shanksville, Pennsylvania
On the morning of 11 September 2001, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a reclaimed strip-mine field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing all 40 passengers and crew and the four hijackers who had seized it. Unlike the three planes flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Flight 93 never reached its target: the passengers and crew, told by phone what had happened in New York and Washington, fought to retake the cockpit. Almost at once a rival story appeared, that the plane had not crashed during the revolt but had been secretly shot down by a US fighter jet, and that the government hid it. This case file separates what is documented (the crash, the recovered recorders, and a genuine shoot-down authorization that morning) from the rated claim (that the plane was actually shot down), and it treats the people who died fighting the hijackers with the seriousness their actions earned.
Read the case file →Unusual 'put option' trading on airline and insurance stocks before September 11 proves that insiders had foreknowledge of the attacks
In the days before 11 September 2001, traders bought an unusually large number of 'put options', bets that a stock will fall, on the parent companies of United Airlines and American Airlines, and on other firms that the attacks would hammer. When the stocks duly crashed, some of those positions became very valuable. To many observers this looked like proof that someone, insiders or an intelligence agency, knew what was coming and cashed in. This case file keeps two things apart: yes, put volume really was elevated, and an academic study found it statistically notable; and the claim it rates, that this proves criminal foreknowledge. The Securities and Exchange Commission investigated every suspicious trade, the 9/11 Commission summarized the results, and each one traced to an ordinary, lawful explanation with no link to the hijackers or their backers. Unusual volume, it turns out, is weak evidence of anything, and this file explains why.
Read the case file →US elections are systematically rigged through hacked or pre-programmed voting machines that secretly flip votes to change the outcome
The claim is that American elections are not really decided by voters but by machines: that electronic voting equipment is hacked, pre-programmed, or remotely manipulated to secretly flip votes from one candidate to another or to invent votes outright, and that the true tallies are hidden. This case file separates two things that get blurred together. What is documented is that voting machines are computers, that computers can have flaws, and that independent researchers have shown specific vulnerabilities under laboratory conditions; that record is real and it is exactly why the United States relies so heavily on paper ballots and post-election audits. The claim we rate is different and much larger: that any real US election was actually decided by secret machine manipulation. On the evidence, that claim is debunked. Full hand recounts and risk-limiting audits have matched machine counts; federal cybersecurity authorities and bipartisan election officials found no evidence of manipulation changing a result; and courts and defamation settlements established that the most prominent rigging accusations were false. The file draws a firm line between legitimate election-security scrutiny, which is valuable, and the false story that machines quietly chose the winners.
Read the case file →US government agencies conduct warrantless mass surveillance of Americans by buying their phone-location and other personal data from commercial data brokers, a documented practice
For years the standard picture of US government surveillance centered on secret programs run by agencies like the NSA. This file is about a quieter, arguably broader channel: agencies simply buying Americans' data on the open market. Data brokers harvest location pings, browsing records, and other personal information from ordinary smartphone apps and aggregate it at enormous scale, then sell access to it. Federal agencies including the FBI, DHS, ICE, CBP, the IRS, and parts of the military have bought that data, and a declassified 2022 intelligence-community report confirms the pattern. Because the data is purchased from a third party rather than compelled from a phone carrier, agencies have argued it does not require the warrant that Carpenter v. United States would otherwise demand. Critics call this a deliberate end-run around the Fourth Amendment. Congress has repeatedly tried, and so far failed, to close the loophole.
Read the case file →US-trained Salvadoran army troops massacred more than 800 civilians at El Mozote in December 1981, and the Reagan administration helped bury the story
In December 1981, during a counterinsurgency sweep called Operation Rescue, the Salvadoran army's elite, US-trained Atlácatl Battalion entered the hamlet of El Mozote and surrounding villages in Morazán department and killed hundreds of civilians, separating and executing men, women, and children over roughly two days. It is remembered as the worst massacre in modern Latin American history. When American journalists reported it in January 1982, the Reagan administration, which was certifying to Congress that El Salvador was improving on human rights in order to keep military aid flowing, dismissed the accounts as exaggerated or as rebel propaganda. This file treats the massacre itself as documented fact, anchored to the 1993 UN Truth Commission's finding of “full proof” and to the forensic exhumations. It reports the US role in discrediting the story as substantiated by declassified State Department and CIA cables, while keeping the precise questions of who gave the order and what Washington knew when separated out as attributed and still-litigated matters.
Read the case file →UVB-76, 'The Buzzer,' is a secret Russian military 'doomsday' channel
A shortwave station on 4625 kHz has broadcast a monotonous, roughly-once-every-few-seconds buzz for more than forty years, occasionally breaking off for a short coded message in Russian. No state has ever admitted running it. It is widely presumed to be a Russian military command channel; just as widely, and far less securely, rumored to be a nuclear doomsday system.
Read the case file →Uzbek government forces killed hundreds of unarmed protesters at Andijan on 13 May 2005 and then imposed a false official account that recast the dead as armed Islamist terrorists
In the early hours of 13 May 2005, armed men stormed a prison in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan, freed 23 local businessmen on trial for alleged religious extremism, and seized the regional administration building. By morning, thousands of ordinary residents had gathered in the city's central Bobur Square, most of them unarmed and voicing anger about poverty, repression, and unfair trials. Uzbek security forces sealed the square and opened fire, according to survivors without warning, using armored vehicles and snipers. The government of President Islam Karimov said about 187 people died, called almost all of them terrorists, and blamed banned Islamist organizations. Human Rights Watch field investigations and a UN mission that interviewed survivors reached a very different conclusion: a mass killing of largely unarmed civilians, with a death toll most likely in the hundreds. Uzbekistan refused every call for an independent inquiry. This file treats the massacre as documented and the official account as a proven falsification, while reporting the exact toll as contested.
Read the case file →Venezuelan security forces killed hundreds of civilians while suppressing the 1989 Caracazo unrest and concealed part of the true death toll in mass graves, as found by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
On 27 February 1989, days after President Carlos Andrés Pérez unveiled a package of IMF-backed austerity measures, a rise in transport fares set off protests, riots, and widespread looting that spread from the town of Guarenas into Caracas and beyond. The government suspended constitutional guarantees and activated Plan Ávila, sending soldiers into densely populated poor districts. Over the following days security forces killed a large number of civilians, and some of the dead were buried anonymously in mass graves in a cemetery sector known as La Peste. The episode became known as the Caracazo. This file separates two layers: the documented reality that state forces killed civilians and concealed bodies, which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights established and Venezuela itself conceded, from the still-contested question of exactly how many people died. It anchors the account in the Court's 1999 and 2002 judgments, in the exhumations at La Peste, and in the work of the victims' families' group COFAVIC.
Read the case file →Videos circulating online prove Moroccan border guards deliberately opened the frontier at Ceuta in July 2026 to engineer a mass crossing into Spain
Starting on Thursday 30 July 2026, tens of thousands of people crossed from Morocco into Ceuta, the Spanish city on the north African coast, mostly by swimming around the breakwaters at Tarajal and Benzu. Spain's Interior Ministry put the figure at close to 50,000 in roughly a day; Ceuta's president said 60,000. Dozens died. It was, by any measure, a major event, and within hours videos were circulating captioned as proof that it had been deliberately opened from the Moroccan side. Two of the most shared were checked by the fact-checking outlet Lead Stories on 31 July and neither is what it claims. One, captioned as showing a Moroccan guard opening the border fence in July 2026, was posted online in 2021. The other, shared with the caption 'Is this an invasion of Spain?', had been online since at least 5 July under a caption that mentioned neither country, and two AI detection tools rated it likely machine-generated, with visible anatomical errors in the crowd. This file keeps the layers apart. The crossings, the deaths, and the emergency are documented and are not in question. The claim rated here is that these particular clips prove a staged operation, and that claim is debunked. The larger question of what Moroccan enforcement did or did not do in July 2026 is unresolved, and is treated as such below.
Read the case file →Videos circulating since late 2025 that appear to show Ukrainian soldiers weeping, apologizing to the Russian people, and surrendering en masse are authentic front-line footage
In early November 2025, videos began circulating that appeared to show Ukrainian soldiers at their lowest: weeping, calling for their mothers, apologizing to the Russian people, blaming their own government for the war, and in some clips surrendering to Russian forces in groups. The footage was ultrarealistic and it traveled fast across YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and X. It was also generated. NBC News reviewed 21 of the videos and reported on 13 December 2025 that in at least half the giveaway was not subtle at all: Sora 2 stamps a small logo on downloaded video, and it was still there. Clips that appeared to come from other generators carried quieter errors instead, principally uniforms and helmets that were incorrect or simplified versions of real Ukrainian kit. A third signal was plain to Ukrainian viewers and meaningless to everyone else: most of the soldiers spoke Russian, and only eight of the 21 clips featured anyone speaking Ukrainian. One recurring face belonged to Aleksei Gubanov, a livestreamer who had fled Russia over his opposition to Putin and recognized himself in a uniform he had never worn. This file separates the real war, in which soldiers genuinely are captured and killed, from the rated claim that these particular videos document it. That claim is debunked. Who made and seeded them has not been established.
Read the case file →Viral videos show Iran striking and sinking a US aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford or USS Abraham Lincoln, with ballistic or hypersonic missiles
Through 2026, short videos spread across social media claiming to show Iran striking a US aircraft carrier with ballistic or hypersonic missiles, setting it ablaze or sinking it. Different versions named different ships, usually the USS Gerald R. Ford or the USS Abraham Lincoln, and the clips resurfaced in waves, including a fresh burst around 24 July 2026. Fact-checkers including Lead Stories, PolitiFact, Misbar, and Tempo examined them and found the same thing every time: the footage is fabricated, either generated by AI tools or ripped from military video games and simulators such as Arma 3 and DCS. Several clips carry a Google Veo watermark or the stamp of a page that describes itself as a digital content creator; AI-detection tools rated some as very likely synthetic at high confidence; and telltale flaws (fire without smoke, flames that animate unnaturally, hulls that do not match the real ships) give them away. No credible outlet reported such a strike, and US military officials said Iran's missiles did not come close to a carrier. This case file keeps two things apart: that these videos circulated and were repeatedly debunked, against a backdrop of real US-Iran tensions in 2026; and the claim it rates, that any of the clips is genuine footage of a carrier being hit. That claim is debunked.
Read the case file →Wealthy financiers plotted a fascist coup against Roosevelt in 1933
In 1934, retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler told Congress, under oath, that a group of wealthy men had approached him to lead half a million veterans on Washington and force Franklin Roosevelt into a figurehead role. A House committee said it had verified much of his story. No one went to prison, and historians have argued for ninety years about how real the danger actually was.
Read the case file →Western weapons sent to Ukraine are being systematically stolen and trafficked into criminal and terrorist networks across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East
One of the most persistently deployed Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine holds that the Western weapons flowing to Kyiv are being stolen, resold, and trafficked at scale: turning up on darknet markets, in European gang violence, in African and Middle Eastern conflicts, even in the hands of terrorists. Since 2022 the West has indeed sent large quantities of arms to Ukraine, and tracking their end-use in an active war zone is genuinely hard, which is the kernel the story exploits. But the sweeping claim of a diversion crisis has never been substantiated. The EU's EUvsDisinfo project catalogues variant after variant; the US Defense Department's inspector general reported no evidence of systemic diversion; the State Department stood up an end-use monitoring plan; and the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, which monitors illicit arms flows, found no organized, large-scale movement of Western weapons out of Ukraine, with most illegal trade involving Soviet-era "trophy" arms handled by individuals rather than NATO-supplied kit. This file treats the systemic-diversion narrative as what those bodies describe, a documented information operation inflating a real but limited problem, and lays out why the evidence does not support it. It reports the claim to rebut it, never to endorse it.
Read the case file →World Trade Center Building 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition, not by fire
At 5:20 p.m. on 11 September 2001, some seven hours after the Twin Towers fell, a third World Trade Center skyscraper collapsed: the 47-story Building 7, which no plane had hit. Its smooth, vertical descent, captured on video, became the cornerstone of the argument that 9/11 was an inside job, the claim being that WTC 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition rather than by fire. This case file examines that specific claim. It separates what is documented (that WTC 7 was gutted by debris from the North Tower, burned unfought for hours, and was studied for years by federal investigators) from the claim it rates (pre-planted explosives), and it walks through each of the movement's signature talking points. It is the WTC 7 companion to our broader file on the 9/11 inside-job theory.
Read the case file →Zimbabwe's government used a North Korea-trained army brigade to massacre up to 20,000 Ndebele civilians in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the 1980s Gukurahundi campaign, then buried the official findings
Gukurahundi, a Shona word for the early rain that washes away the chaff before the spring rains, is the name given to a campaign of state violence that swept Zimbabwe's Matabeleland and Midlands provinces from 1983 to 1987. Its instrument was the Fifth Brigade, an army unit raised and trained by North Korean instructors and answering directly to the ZANU-PF leadership rather than the normal army command. Deployed against a scattered insurgency of former guerrillas, the brigade instead turned overwhelmingly on civilians: mass shootings at village gatherings, torture and rape in detention camps such as Bhalagwe, and curfews used to starve whole districts. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, working with the Legal Resources Foundation, documented the killings in its 1997 report Breaking the Silence and estimated that up to 20,000 people died. The government appointed its own inquiry, the Chihambakwe Commission, but never made its report public. This file treats the massacres and their state authorship as substantiated, and separates that documented core from the still-contested questions of the precise toll and the exact chain of command.
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