Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

Early on February 5th, 2007, Air Force captain Colleen Shipman was walking to her car at Orlando International Airport when a woman in a wig and a trench coat followed her, banged on her window, and sprayed a chemical through the gap. The woman was Lisa Nowak, a NASA astronaut who had flown aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery seven months earlier. Nowak had driven roughly 900 miles from Houston to...

In the hills outside Melbourne, Australia, a yoga teacher named Anne Hamilton-Byrne convinced several hundred followers that she was Jesus Christ. Her members were not dropouts: they were doctors, lawyers, nurses, psychiatrists and social workers, and at one point they effectively controlled a private psychiatric hospital that fed her new recruits. Between 1969 and 1975, she collected 14 children...

In 2009, at a science fiction convention in Atlanta, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome discovered that strangers shared her vivid memory of Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Mandela walked free in 1990 and died in 2013. Broome named it the Mandela Effect, and the catalogue grew: a children's book spelled wrong, a logo with a horn that never existed, a Sinbad genie movie nobody...

Long before the name Jack the Ripper struck fear into Victorian England, a respectable-looking widow named Mary Ann Cotton was quietly killing her way through the north of the country. By the time investigators caught up with her in 1872, she had outlived four husbands, a lover, and eleven of her own children, nearly all of them poisoned with arsenic and many insured for cash. Hiding in plain sigh...

In 1954, a housewife in Oak Park, Illinois named Dorothy Martin began taking down messages from beings she called the Guardians, and told the small circle around her that a flood would destroy the middle of North America before dawn on December 21st. Flying saucers would collect the believers first. The group, who called themselves the Seekers, gave away possessions and quit jobs, and on the night...

In 2021, an anonymous forum post floated a theory that sounded absurd: the internet effectively died around 2016, and most of what we now see online, the posts, comments, arguments, and trends, is generated by bots and AI designed to manipulate what we think, buy, and believe. People laughed, until the evidence started piling up. Bots surpassed human traffic online for the first time in 2024, more...

Fun fact: Did you know Jaws almost never existed because the shark kept sinking while filming? That is Connor Tomlinson just getting started. If that sounds fascinating, you are going to love Rewind Studios’ new podcast out now called WHAT THE FACT hosted by Connor Tomlinson and Carter Roy. It’s produced by the same team that brings you Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes. Connor and co-host...

In 1925, a con man calling himself Count Victor Lustig read that the Eiffel Tower was costly to maintain. He took a suite at one of the best hotels in Paris and invited five scrap dealers to a confidential meeting. On stationery bearing a government seal, he introduced himself as a ministry official, said the state had secretly decided to demolish it, and offered them its 7,000 tons of iron. One d...

In the 1980s, a charismatic woman named Elizabeth Clare Prophet convinced thousands of followers that she was channeling messages from Jesus, Buddha, and a spiritual entity called Saint Germain, and that nuclear apocalypse was imminent. Her devotees sold their homes, quit their jobs, and moved to a sprawling 12,000-acre compound beside Yellowstone National Park, where the church built an enormous...

John Barnett spent 32 years at Boeing before going public with alarming claims about faulty oxygen masks, substandard parts, and a corporate culture that punished anyone who dared to speak up. In March 2024, in the middle of giving deposition testimony against the company, he was found dead in a hotel parking lot from a gunshot wound. Less than two months later, Joshua Dean, a 45-year-old quality...

On March 8th, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished from the sky with 239 people aboard, disappearing during a routine flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane's transponder went dark, it changed course over the ocean, and then it was simply gone, triggering the largest and most expensive search in aviation history. In the years since, theories have multiplied, ranging from deliberate...

In the early 17th century, mysterious manifestos appeared in Europe announcing the existence of a secret brotherhood called the Rosicrucians, said to possess hidden knowledge of alchemy, mysticism, and the deepest secrets of the universe. Whether the order truly existed or was an elaborate hoax has been debated for centuries, but the legend inspired real societies, esoteric traditions, and endless...

In the final years of Imperial Russia, a mysterious peasant mystic named Grigori Rasputin rose to extraordinary influence over the royal Romanov family. Trusted by the Empress for his apparent ability to ease her son's illness, Rasputin became a figure of endless rumor, accused of everything from manipulation and debauchery to holding secret sway over the crumbling empire. His dramatic murder in 1...

On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was shot and killed alongside his wife on the streets of Sarajevo by a young nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. The assassination was the work of a shadowy network of secret societies bent on breaking apart the empire, and within weeks, it plunged the world into the catastrophe of World War I. A single act of violen...

In the aftermath of World War I, a secretive occult group emerged in Germany called the Thule Society, blending Norse mythology, racial mysticism, and extreme nationalism into a dangerous new ideology. Its members believed in a master race descended from a mythical northern homeland, and their obsession with ancestry and bloodline would seep directly into the beliefs of the fledgling Nazi Party. T...

Since it opened in 1995, Denver International Airport has been the subject of some of the most enduring conspiracy theories in America. Built years behind schedule and wildly over budget, the airport is famous for its unsettling apocalyptic murals, a towering demonic horse statue with glowing red eyes, cryptic dedication plaques, and a sprawling network of underground tunnels. To believers, these...

In December 1996, 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family's home in the quiet mountain town of Boulder, Colorado, in a case that would become one of the most controversial in American history. A bizarre ransom note, a badly mishandled crime scene, and a swirl of suspicion around her own family turned a private tragedy into a national spectacle, with...

Deep in the redwood forests of Northern California lies Bohemian Grove, a private retreat where some of the most powerful men in the world, presidents, business titans, and political power brokers, have gathered in secret for more than a century. Each summer, members of the exclusive Bohemian Club convene for two weeks of camping, revelry, and a strange opening ritual called the "Cremation of Care...

During the Cold War, the CIA quietly turned modern art into a weapon. Convinced that America needed to prove its cultural superiority over the Soviet Union, the agency secretly promoted abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning as symbols of American freedom. Through a front group called the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a network of fake foundati...

In the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the Cold War, the CIA launched a secret program called Operation Midnight Climax as part of its notorious MKUltra mind-control research. Operating out of safehouses in San Francisco and New York, agents used sex workers to lure unwitting men, then dosed them with LSD without their knowledge and observed the results through one-way mirrors. The goal was to stu...

In the late 1960s, a group of California idealists calling themselves the Brotherhood of Eternal Love set out to change the world through psychedelics, believing that LSD could bring about spiritual awakening and universal peace. Inspired by figures like Timothy Leary, the Brotherhood started as a hippie collective but soon became one of the largest drug-smuggling operations in the country, traffi...

In January 1996, the small Brazilian city of Varginha became the center of one of the most famous UFO stories in South American history. Multiple witnesses, including three young women, reported seeing a strange creature with a large head and red eyes lurking in the streets, while others claimed the military had captured one or more living beings and recovered a crashed craft. As soldiers reported...

Chico Mendes was a Brazilian rubber tapper who became one of the world's most important environmental activists, organizing peaceful resistance against the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. By the 1980s, he had drawn international attention to the violent clash between cattle ranchers clearing the forest and the communities who depended on it to survive. His activism made him a global symbol o...

Founded in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1930s, Santo Daime is a religion that blends Catholicism, indigenous tradition, and African spirituality around a single sacred sacrament: ayahuasca, a powerful psychedelic brew. During hours-long ceremonies, devotees drink the bitter tea, sing hymns, and describe profound visions, healing, and spiritual enlightenment. The faith has spread far beyond Brazil,...

According to the Bible, the Ark of the Covenant was a gold-covered chest built to hold the Ten Commandments, an object of such immense divine power that it could level cities and strike down anyone who touched it. Then, sometime after the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem, it vanished from history. For thousands of years, the question of what happened to it has fueled legends and obsess...