Events
Major events that spawned multiple conspiracy theories. Each event page collects every related theory in one place.
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy
The gunshots in Dealey Plaza didn't just kill a president -- they shattered public trust in American institutions. The Warren Commission's lone-gunman conclusion has been challenged by everyone from New Orleans DA Jim Garrison to the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, which concluded a conspiracy was probable.
COVID-19 Pandemic
A novel coronavirus emerged from Wuhan, China in late 2019 and triggered the most globally disruptive event since World War II. The pandemic generated an unprecedented tsunami of conspiracy theories -- from lab-leak hypotheses (now taken seriously by intelligence agencies) to claims of deliberate engineering, vaccine microchips, and coordinated population control.
September 11, 2001 Attacks
Four coordinated terrorist attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and reshaped the entire geopolitical landscape. Two decades later, the event remains the most dissected day in modern conspiracy research -- from controlled demolition theories to advance-knowledge claims to the 28 redacted pages linking Saudi Arabia.
MKUltra Mind Control Program
The CIA's two-decade mind control program subjected unwitting American and Canadian citizens to LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and psychological torture in the pursuit of creating programmable human beings. Director Richard Helms ordered most files destroyed in 1973, but 20,000 pages survived through a filing error -- and what they revealed was horrifying enough to make you wonder what was in the rest.
Jeffrey Epstein Arrest, Death & Network Exposure
The arrest and suspicious death of Jeffrey Epstein in a federal jail cell -- with both cameras malfunctioning and both guards asleep -- blew open decades of questions about elite sexual blackmail networks. The subsequent release of flight logs, client lists, and the Ghislaine Maxwell trial revealed a web connecting intelligence agencies, billionaires, and heads of state.
Roswell UFO Incident
Something crashed in the New Mexico desert in the summer of 1947, and the U.S. military first said it was a flying disc before retracting the statement hours later. That retraction launched seven decades of UFO conspiracy culture and transformed a small ranching town into the world capital of alien mythology.
Apollo 11 Moon Landing
Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind remains one of humanity's greatest achievements -- and one of conspiracy culture's most enduring targets. Hoax theories have persisted for over fifty years, fueled by photographic anomalies, the Van Allen radiation belts, and Stanley Kubrick's alleged involvement.
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. King was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty but recanted almost immediately, and in 1999 a civil trial jury found that King's assassination was the result of a conspiracy involving the U.S. government. The FBI's documented hatred of King -- including a letter encouraging him to commit suicide -- makes this one of the most credible assassination conspiracies in American history.
Death of Princess Diana
The most famous woman in the world died in a Paris tunnel in a high-speed crash while being pursued by paparazzi. But the circumstances -- a driver who'd been an MI6 informant, a white Fiat that was never found, Diana's own letters predicting she'd be killed in a car crash -- fueled murder theories that have never fully gone away.
Iran-Contra Affair
The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran -- a country it publicly embargoed -- and funneled the profits to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, in direct violation of congressional law. The scandal proved that the executive branch was willing to run covert foreign policy completely off the books, lying to Congress and the public without hesitation.
Bohemian Grove Gatherings
Every July, some of the most powerful men in America -- presidents, CEOs, military leaders, media moguls -- gather at a 2,700-acre campground in the California redwoods for two weeks of drinking, networking, and a bizarre ritual called the Cremation of Care involving a 40-foot stone owl. Alex Jones infiltrated the grove in 2000 and filmed the ceremony, confirming what had long been dismissed as paranoid fantasy.
Waco Siege
The 51-day standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians ended with a fire that killed 76 people, including 25 children. Whether the fire was deliberately set by the government or by David Koresh's followers remains one of the most bitterly contested questions in American law enforcement history -- and it directly inspired the Oklahoma City bombing two years later.
Malaysia Airlines Disasters (MH370 & MH17)
In the span of four months in 2014, Malaysia Airlines suffered two catastrophic losses: MH370 vanished without a trace over the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard, and MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 passengers. One plane was never found; the other's destruction became a geopolitical flashpoint between Russia and the West.
Boston Marathon Bombing
Two pressure cooker bombs detonated near the finish line of the 2013 Boston Marathon, killing three and injuring over 260 in one of the most photographed crime scenes in history. The Tsarnaev brothers were identified within days, but questions about FBI foreknowledge, a mysterious Saudi national, and crisis actor allegations turned the bombing into a conspiracy flashpoint.
Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting
The murder of 20 first-graders and 6 staff members at a Connecticut elementary school was horrifying enough on its face. The conspiracy theories that followed -- amplified by Alex Jones and others claiming the massacre was staged with crisis actors -- represented a new low in American conspiracy culture, one that ultimately cost Jones over a billion dollars in court.
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Bobby Kennedy was shot in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel moments after winning the California presidential primary. Sirhan Sirhan was convicted, but the evidence for a second gunman -- including the number of bullet holes, the direction of the fatal shot, and the presence of a girl in a polka-dot dress -- has kept this case alive for over half a century.
Watergate Scandal
What started as a "third-rate burglary" at the Democratic National Committee headquarters became the defining political scandal of the 20th century. The cover-up consumed Nixon's presidency and proved that the most powerful man in the world would break the law to stay in power -- validating every conspiracy theorist's darkest suspicions about government.
Oklahoma City Bombing
Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare center, in the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Questions about additional conspirators, surveillance footage that was never released, and connections to far-right militia networks have lingered for decades.
TWA Flight 800 Crash
TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island twelve minutes after takeoff, killing all 230 people aboard. Hundreds of eyewitnesses reported seeing a streak of light rising toward the plane before the explosion. The official explanation -- a fuel tank ignition from a short circuit -- has been challenged by former NTSB investigators and military analysts who believe a missile brought the plane down.
Attack on Pearl Harbor
Japan's surprise attack on the U.S. naval base killed 2,403 Americans and dragged the country into World War II overnight. The foreknowledge theory -- that FDR knew the attack was coming and let it happen to overcome isolationist opposition to entering the war -- remains one of the oldest and most debated conspiracy theories in American history.