Conspiracy Theories

In 1964 an attack by North Vietnamese forces on U.S. naval destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin helped catalyze a war that would claim millions of lives. There was just one problem: the attack never happe...

6 Jun 202242min

When the Navy needed to catch Nazi spies during WWII, they turned to an unlikely source of help: the mafia. How deep did their alliance go? And where else did the rumored entanglements between the maf...

1 Jun 202247min

When mafiosos rose to power in 20th century America, they were untouchable criminals with an unbreakable code. Their origins in Sicily left them with a taste for extreme loyalty, secrecy, and violence...

30 Mai 202247min

In 1669, the French government imprisoned a man whose identity they went to great lengths to keep hidden. The conditions of his lifelong incarceration — hide his face, keep him quiet — inspired rumors...

25 Mai 202243min

In the summer of 1951, a French town became ground zero for a mysterious illness that caused hallucinations, convulsions, and in some cases, death. For decades, the most popular explanation was ergot ...

23 Mai 202242min

The death of the Director in 1972 put an end to a reign that spanned 48 years, and left America to live in his outsized shadow. What happened to Hoover’s secret files? How is the modern FBI still shap...

18 Mai 202242min

While antiwar and Civil Rights movements charged forward, Hoover unleashed the FBI upon his enemies and adversaries. By the end of the 1960s, he was proclaiming that America’s greatest domestic threat...

16 Mai 202247min

In the 1960s, the Director’s adversaries included the Kennedy brothers and leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, which he believed to be part of a larger communist conspiracy. He would do everything i...

11 Mai 202246min