Conspiracy files
The conspiracy theories, secret societies and strange chapters of history behind our comics. Each file lays out what is on the record, what is claimed, and where to read the sources yourself.
Mind control & the spooksSecret societies & the moneyOccult & alchemyCultsStrange scienceAncient philosophersModern legendsMyths, mysteries & the mind
Mind control & the spooks
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Founded 1961
Dignity Colony
A closed German settlement in southern Chile, founded in 1961 by the lay preacher Paul Schäfer. For decades its residents lived under his total control, children were abused, and under Pinochet the secret police used it to hold and torture prisoners.
- 1946 Operation Paperclip The secret U.S. program that brought more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers and technicians to America after World War II, Nazi party members among them. It built the rockets that went to the Moon, and its paper trail feeds the theory that much more than rocketry came over too.
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1950–1951
Project BLUEBIRD
The CIA's first behavior-control program, approved in April 1950: interrogation teams armed with drugs, hypnosis and the polygraph. It became ARTICHOKE in 1951 and led to MK-ULTRA.
- 1947 Project CHATTER The U.S. Navy's search for a truth drug, begun in the fall of 1947 and wound up in 1953. It tested mescaline, scopolamine and other drugs for interrogation: the first of the Cold War programs that led to MK-ULTRA.
- April 3, 1953 Project MK-ULTRA The CIA's secret research into drugs, hypnosis and other ways to control behavior, approved in April 1953 and run into the 1960s. It dosed unwitting people with LSD, funded work at dozens of universities and hospitals, and was exposed in the 1970s after most of its records had been destroyed.
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The legend since 1995
Project Monarch
The claim that a secret branch of the CIA's MK-ULTRA used extreme childhood trauma to split victims' minds into separate, programmable personalities. MK-ULTRA is documented. No record of a Project Monarch has ever surfaced.
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Since 1945
Sheeple
A blend of "sheep" and "people": a put-down for anyone who follows the herd without asking questions. The word dates to 1945 and has been a staple of conspiracy talk ever since.
Secret societies & the money
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1776–1785
Bavarian Illuminati
A secret society of Enlightenment radicals founded in Bavaria on May 1, 1776, by law professor Adam Weishaupt. It was banned within a decade, and it has been blamed for revolutions, wars and world government ever since.
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Since 1878
Bohemian Grove
A 2,700-acre redwood camp in Monte Rio, California, owned by San Francisco's all-male Bohemian Club. Each July its members and guests, former presidents among them, gather for a two-week encampment that opens with a ritual called the Cremation of Care.
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Since 1717
Freemasonry
A fraternity of local lodges that grew out of the stonemasons' trade and was organized under a Grand Lodge in London in 1717. Its oaths, rituals and well-known members have drawn bans, papal condemnations and conspiracy theories for three centuries.
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November 1910
Jekyll Island
A millionaires' island club off the Georgia coast where, in November 1910, a senator, a Treasury official and a handful of Wall Street bankers secretly drafted the plan that became the Federal Reserve. They said they were going duck hunting.
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Since 1990 · the phrase since 1940
New World Order
The theory that a small, secretive elite is steering the world toward a single global government. The phrase itself is real and perfectly respectable: H. G. Wells used it for a 1940 book, and President George H. W. Bush made it famous in 1990.
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Since 1832
Skull & Bones
Yale's most famous secret society, founded in 1832. Every year it chooses fifteen students, meets in a windowless "Tomb" in New Haven, and it has counted three U.S. presidents among its members.
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April 14–15, 1912
The Titanic
The White Star liner that hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sank on April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 people. The sinking is history. The idea that it was planned, for the insurance money or to clear the way for the Federal Reserve, is the theory.
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1848–1884
Washington Monument
The marble obelisk on the National Mall honoring George Washington, begun in 1848 and finished in 1884: 555 feet 5⅛ inches tall. Freemasons laid its cornerstone, which is all a good theory needs.
Occult & alchemy
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1875–1947
Aleister Crowley
English occultist, poet and mountaineer who founded the religion of Thelema on a text he said was dictated to him in Cairo in 1904. The British press called him "the wickedest man in the world." He died in 1947, and the stories about him have kept growing.
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1582–1587 · revived in the 1880s
Enochian Magic
A system of angel magic written down in the 1580s by John Dee and his scryer Edward Kelley: an alphabet, a language, 48 calls and tables of letters, all said to be dictated by angels. The Golden Dawn revived it in the 1880s and Aleister Crowley carried it on.
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Since 1537
Homunculus
Latin for "little person": a miniature human that alchemists said could be grown in a sealed flask, without a mother. The best-known recipe is dated 1537. The word now also names the distorted body map that neurologists draw across the surface of the brain.
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1527–1608/9
John Dee
Elizabethan mathematician, astrologer and adviser to Elizabeth I. John Dee trained England's navigators and built one of the largest libraries in the country, then spent his later years trying to talk to angels. He died poor at Mortlake around 1609.
Cults
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1972–1997
Heaven's Gate
A UFO religion led by Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. In March 1997, as Comet Hale-Bopp passed, Applewhite and 38 members died together in a rented house in Rancho Santa Fe, California, believing a spacecraft would collect them.
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November 18, 1978
Jonestown
A settlement in the Guyanese jungle built by Peoples Temple, a California church led by Jim Jones. On November 18, 1978, 918 people died there and nearby, 304 of them children and minors.
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1993
Waco
The 1993 standoff between federal agents and the Branch Davidians at Mount Carmel, outside Waco, Texas. It began with a gun battle that killed four ATF agents and six Davidians. It ended 51 days later in a fire in which at least 76 people died, more than 20 of them children.
Strange science
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1961–1972
Apollo Missions
NASA's program to land people on the Moon. Six crews landed between July 1969 and December 1972 and twelve astronauts walked on the surface. Since 1976 a persistent theory has said the landings were staged.
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Since 1993
H.A.A.R.P.
The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program: a field of 180 antennas near Gakona, Alaska, built by the U.S. Air Force and Navy to study the ionosphere. Theorists say it can steer the weather, trigger earthquakes and broadcast into people's heads.
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1856–1943
Nikola Tesla
Serbian-American inventor (1856–1943) whose alternating-current system still runs the power grid. He died alone in a New York hotel room, and the government seized his papers within days, which is where the legends begin.
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1942–1981 · the legend since 1992
Project Montauk
The claim that a Cold War radar base at the tip of Long Island hid secret government experiments in mind control, psychic warfare and time travel. The base is real and its radar tower still stands. The experiments have never been documented.
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Since 1957
Transhumanism
The movement that wants technology to carry humans past their natural limits: aging, disease, maybe death itself. It is a real philosophy with real labs and real money behind it. The theory is about who gets upgraded first.
Ancient philosophers
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Died 323 BC
Diogenes
The Greek philosopher who lived in a jar, begged for a living, mocked everyone from Plato to Alexander the Great and called himself a citizen of the world. He founded no school and none of his writing survives, but he is still the patron saint of people who refuse to play along.
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Hidden masters since 1614
Empyreans
In Secret Mystery School, the Empyreans are philosophers who unlocked their minds, cheat death by moving from body to body and travel the world through the ether. They are fiction, built from a real and long tradition: the hidden masters of Rosicrucian, Theosophical and Ascended Master lore.
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Since the 5th century BC
Enlightenment
The awakening that mystics say lies beyond ordinary consciousness: bodhi to Buddhists, illumination to the mystery schools. It is also the name of the 18th-century movement that put reason first, and the two meanings have been arguing ever since.
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341-270 BC
Epicurus
The Athenian philosopher who taught that pleasure is the goal of life, and then defined pleasure as the absence of pain and worry. Two thousand years of critics have preferred the first half of that sentence.
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Since c. 585 BC
Philosophy
Philosophia, the love of wisdom: the Greek habit, begun around 600 BC, of explaining the world by argument instead of myth. Its first practitioners were also astronomers, mystics and members of secret brotherhoods, which is how philosophy and the mystery schools got tangled together.
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c. 570-c. 495 BC
Pythagoras
The Greek sage best known for a theorem he probably did not discover. In his own time he was famous for something else: a secretive brotherhood with strict rules, a belief in reincarnation and the conviction that the universe is made of number.
Modern legends
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Since 1937 · the legend since the late 2010s
Adrenochrome
A real compound, formed when adrenaline oxidizes. Psychiatrists studied it in the 1950s and novelists made it a fictional super-drug. Since the late 2010s, Pizzagate and QAnon followers have claimed that elites harvest it from children. No evidence of that has ever surfaced.
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Since 2017
Birds Aren't Real
A satirical conspiracy movement started by Peter McIndoe in 2017. In character, its followers say the U.S. government killed every bird and replaced it with a surveillance drone. Out of character, McIndoe describes it as a way to laugh at misinformation.
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1968–1999
Kubrick Symbolism
Stanley Kubrick's films are among the most decoded ever made. Viewers find hidden messages in The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Eyes Wide Shut, and a long-running story says he filmed the Apollo Moon landings for NASA.
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On maps 1200s–1800s · the legend since 2016
Tartaria
Tartary was the name European mapmakers gave to northern and central Asia from the 1200s to the 1800s. Since about 2016 an internet theory has recast it as a lost world empire whose grand buildings were buried by a "mud flood" and erased from history.
Myths, mysteries & the mind
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Bronze Age Crete
Labyrinth
The maze King Minos had Daedalus build at Knossos to hold the Minotaur. Archaeology found a palace, not a maze, but the word was already on a Bronze Age tablet there, and the design has been walked as a path to God, or to the center of the self, ever since.
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Bronze Age Crete (myth)
Minotaur
The bull-headed son of a Cretan queen, shut in the Labyrinth and fed on young Athenians until Theseus killed it. A myth, not a creature, but one the ancients already tried to explain away, and one modern writers keep feeling sorry for.
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Lemurian lore since 1905
Mt. Shasta
A 14,163-foot volcano in Northern California, sacred to the tribes around it long before anyone wrote it down. Since the early 1900s it has also been the reputed home of Lemurians, Ascended Masters and a hidden city called Telos.
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Jaynes, 1976 · McKenna, 1992
Origins of Consciousness
How and when humans became conscious, aware of themselves and able to reflect, is one of science's open questions. The boldest answers say it happened late and suddenly: when the voices of the gods fell silent, or when our ancestors ate the right mushrooms.
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Seat of the soul since 1649
Pineal Gland
A tiny pine-cone-shaped gland deep in the brain that makes melatonin, the hormone that tracks day and night. Descartes called it the principal seat of the soul, and mystics still call it the third eye.
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Since 1943
Psychedelics
Drugs such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT and mescaline that change perception, mood and the sense of self, mostly by acting on the brain's serotonin 2A receptors. Banned in the U.S. since 1970, they are back in university labs, and the theories about them never left.
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Ended AD 392
The Eleusinian Mysteries
The most famous secret rite of the ancient world: an initiation held every year at Eleusis, near Athens, for Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Thousands were initiated over many centuries, and the secret of what they saw was kept.
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