The Conspiratory

The archive, day by day

On this day in conspiracies

The dated turning points behind the case files: assassinations, crashes, leaks, votes, and the moments a theory was born, each drawn straight from a file's sourced timeline. We only place an entry on a day the record actually names.

  1. 1993
    El Mozote massacreGovernment & Intelligence

    Mark Danner's book-length investigation, The Truth of El Mozote, drawing on hundreds of declassified State Department and CIA cables, fills an entire issue of The New Yorker and, the next year, becomes the book The Massacre at El Mozote. Days earlier, a sweeping amnesty law had shielded the perpetrators from prosecution in El Salvador.

  2. 2014
    The 43 missing studentsUnsolved Crimes & Disappearances

    Forensic scientists at the University of Innsbruck in Austria identify a bone fragment as belonging to student Alexander Mora Venancio, the first of the 43 to be confirmed dead.

  3. 2020
    Fakhrizadeh assassinationGovernment & Intelligence

    Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, states publicly that there were no attackers physically present, that the killing was done with “electronic devices,” and blames Israel. The IRGC-linked Fars news agency reports a satellite-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun using facial recognition.

Drawn from 1,967 dated events across our case-file timelines. Dates reckoned in UTC.