Conspiracy Clearinghouse

EPISODE 141 | Spirits in the Material World: Mediums and Spiritualism The late 19th and early 20th were rife with claims of contact with spirits of the departed, and plenty of people made a pretty penny convincing the grieving or the curious that they had the right stuff, the special connection to the Other Side. But it has continued past then, and even today there are those who would prey upon pe...

EPISODE 140 | Rock On: Freemasons (Big 'Uns 7) Who are the Freemasons? People sure freak out about the them, even though many don’t even know what they get up to. What the heck do they do at their meetings? Why all the secrets and secret handshakes and code words and the like? Are they weird, scary, evil or just harmless? Let’s take a look and see. Like what we do? Then buy us a beer or three via...

EPISODE 139 | A Numbers Game: Mathspiracies Guest: Gary Arndt, writer and host of the Everything Everywhere Daily podcast We aren't really very good with numbers, so naturally we've come up with a lot of wacky ideas about them. Gary Arndt talks about numbers of all sorts, like why Pi is stupid, why prime numbers are cool, why the Fibonacci sequence isn't all that, when math leads to murder and muc...

EPISODE 138 | Midnight Sun: Arctic Tales The Far North is a region of extremes and stark beauty, and it is also trying to kill you if you’re a human. And yet we still live there, around 4 million of us call the Arctic our home, and we still weave stories about it, often quite fanciful ones.  It’s a land of adventure, danger, murder, mishap, giants, ancient aliens, the origin of white people, secre...

EPISODE 137 | Tell Me a Story: 3 UFO Tall Tales When a narrative takes off, some folks want to get in on the action, and this is especially true in the world of woo or conspiracy, and really especially true when it comes to UFOs. Here are three tall tales from the UFO space - Whitely Streiber’s abduction writings, Budd Hopkins's Manhattan Alien Abduction and Linda Moulton Howe's incredible, fancif...

EPISODE 136 | Incel-ation Some say there’s a crisis of masculinity, or maybe it’s just that there’s still a lot of misogyny in our culture. Whatever the causes, one thing is clear – there are some young men out there who have difficulty interacting with women while also buying into the narrative that sex and female attention is somehow their right. And every once in a while, one of these guys goes...

EPISODE 135 | On Shakey Ground: More Shakespeare Authorship Guest: Scott Jackson, Mary Irene Ryan Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at the University of Notre Dame, current president of the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA), stage actor and director  On the anniversary of Shakespeare's life and death (both), a look at some of the more fringe of fringe theories as to who "really" wrote...

EPISODE 134 | Behind the History Mysteries Guest: Neil Laird, Emmy-nominated  TV producer  (Discovery, BBC, PBS, History, National Geographic), author of the  Prime Time  novel series TV has so many of these Secrets of..., Mysteries of... shows, you have to wonder how they keep the stories fresh and compelling. Well, wonder no more, as Emmy-nominated producer Neil Laird takes us behind the camera...

EPISODE 133 | Cult Pop Suicide: Japanese Cults Japan is a land of many contradictions - very forward-looking but also retrograde. And when it comes to the spiritual side of things, quite a few people seem to fall for various cults, scammers and charlatans. And just offbeat beliefs, like that Jesus' brother died on the cross while He moved to Aomori Prefecture in northern Honshu, where he married a...

EPISODE 132 | Keel Hauled: UAP Update Recent revelations, reports, videos and hearings have been leading up to what many UAP folks call Disclosure. Some interesting things have come out, and a whole lot of nonsense as well.  Spoiler: UFOs are real. Apart from that single fact, no one really has any hard evidence for anything else. So, they speculate.  Like what we do? Then buy us a beer or three v...

EPISODE 131 | Hotlantis: The Lost Continent We all love mysteries, and Atlantis is one of the biggest ones. Was it a real place or just an allegory? If real, then where was it? Many people have spent a lot of time and money trying to discover the answer to that question.  Like what we do? Then buy us a beer or three via our page on  Buy Me a Coffee . Review us here or on  IMDb. And, seriously, sub...

EPISODE 130 | Lost Cities of the New World Guest: Neil Laird, Emmy-nominated TV producer (Discovery, BBC, PBS, History, National Geographic), author of the Prime Time novel series What's commonly called the "New World" is actually very old, and for a long time, people have been trying to track down supposedly lost locations in the Americas. While these folks have not succeeded, advances in technol...

EPISODE 129 | The Fermi Paradox: Here Comes Nobody If we are not unique as a species, an intelligent one that builds civilizations, then there must be lots and lots of other civilizations out there in the galaxy and the rest of the universe beyond. But if so, where the hell is everybody? That’s the question at the heart of the Fermi Paradox. And this has kicked off a chain of reasoning and specula...

EPISODE 128 | Estimated Prophets: Nostradamus & Cayce Even though almost none of the things that prophets say will happen actually do, we still persist in believing in the capability anyway. We do not like to change out minds very much. Two of the biggest prophets that still hold sway today over Western culture are Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce, and we’ll take a look at each one in turn. Like wh...

EPISODE 127 | Cognitive Biases: Thanks, Big Brain! (Because Reasons 12) This episode looks at the final two categories of biases in the Cognitive Biases Codex – what we tend to do when the information we’re presented with doesn’t contain enough meaning, and the brain’s tendency to favor quick assessments over complete ones, because it feels it need to act quickly. Like what we do? Then buy us a be...

EPISODE 126 | Cognitive Biases and the Brain: Thanks, Evolution! (Because Reasons 11) The first of two episodes looking at cognitive biases - this one at how memory works and how we prevent input overload by filtering out information. Hopefully, this will give us some insight into why people think they way they do.  The primary source material for this is the Cognitive Biases Codex , created by Bu...

EPISODE 125 | Last Flight: More Airliner Weirdness While it's totally normal that things break, sometimes there is also some kind of secret or mystery around something as monumental as an airplane crash or disappearance. And so lots of "theories" get spun, some by those who have lost someone dear to them, others by those who seek to profit from the disaster.  This follow-up episode to our previous...

EPISODE 124 | One of Our Aircraft Is Missing A look at a few outstanding cases of plane crashes and disappearances, commercial flights that have gone awry, and some of the weirdness surrounding those mishaps. And, of course, the ones we’ll look at have had conspiracy theories spun about them. This episode is dedicated to my godson, Vova (or Rusty, as we call him), because he absolutely loves comme...

EPISODE 123 | A Heritage of Nonsense: More JKF Stories Guest: Fred Litwin, author of A Heritage of Nonsense: Jim Garrison's Tales of Mystery and Imagination The JFK assassination truly is the gift that keeps on giving, as this third book on the topic by Fred Litwin demonstrates. People who became suspects after just a two-minute phone call, a comedian who claimed to have channeled Oswald's ghost,...

EPISODE 122 | How to Be a Communist One of the many words tossed about these days as a snarl term is “communist”, but do the people using this sobriquet know what that really means? It certainly doesn’t mean every leftwing philosophy or ideology. In fact, Communism is a very specific set of applications of very certain ideas, and, like it or not, helped define the 20th century. So let’s look at wh...

EPISODE 121 | Coup Coup G'joob: Civic Disturbances in the U.S. 1900 - Present This is a continuation of our previous episode about coup attempts, rebellions and civic unrest in the United States prior to the 20th century. This time, we jump into the 20th century and bring us right up to the present day. After hearing all this, you decide if things really are, as some would have you believe, the wo...

EPISODE 120 | OOPArts Doompa-Dee-Doo Sometimes people find something… interesting, maybe even mysterious. What is that? they ask. And then they or someone else makes a logical leap and says oh, wow, here is the missing link I’ve been looking for that proves all my theories that until now have been ridiculed or ignored. And not even scientists are immune to this very common and very human process....

Episode 119 | False-Flag-A-Go-Go (WIW 14) The false flag trick started with naval warfare, but has also been used to initiate wars and to sabotage political opponents. And the conspirasphere uses the idea of the false flag, both in general and specific terms, quite often to justify certain narratives. In that regard, the two most influential are the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and the attack...

EPISODE 118 | Public Enemy Antifa Much has been made about Antifa. Is it a concept, socio-political stance, or an organized group? Do they oppose oppression by any means necessary, or are they simply hooligans who want to break things? Or, as Trump and others in the Maga mirror world have suggested, are they the quasi-military arm of some insidious plot to undermine the very foundations of western...

EPISODE 117 | Stay Awake: The Wokeness Issue In a classic example of the weird mirror world days we are currently moving through, a term used by Black people to mean one thing has been turned by opportunists into something totally different.  So, let's look at the origin of the term "woke", how it's been used, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), the Black Lives Matter movement, Defund the...