19 Conspiracy Theories, Ranked by How Close They Are to True
Take each one seriously enough to ask what it would take. Then watch it break.
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
Every conspiracy theory has one second where it almost works. That little moment of… what if...
Let's live in that second for a moment.
The rule is simple. Take each theory seriously enough to ask what it would actually take for it to be true. Then look at what breaks. At the end, a ranking of how close each one gets to real.
Not very. But some get closer than others.
The Earth is flat
The oldest one here, and somehow one of the newest too. Serious people stopped believing it more than two thousand years ago. A British writer named Samuel Rowbotham revived it in the 1800s, and then YouTube revived it again around 2015, which is where most of today's believers come from.
If true: Every image from NASA, the ESA, China's CNSA and Russia's Roscosmos is faked, or part of one agreed lie. GPS built on a curved Earth still works perfectly, and nobody notices the geometry underneath is wrong. Pilots fly globe routes every day and never hit anything that doesn't add up. And millions of people, engineers, astronauts, meteorologists, backyard astronomers with their own telescopes, are either in on it or handing out proof of the lie without knowing.
Why it breaks: That headcount is the whole problem. Rival states that agree on almost nothing, the US, China, Russia, India, the ESA countries, would have to cooperate flawlessly for decades. No leak, no whistleblower, no stray measurement out of Beijing or Moscow, even though the payoff for exposing a Western hoax would be enormous. Meanwhile the curve of the Earth was measured with simple tools back in antiquity, by Eratosthenes around 240 BC, and reproduced by amateurs ever since. The bigger the circle of insiders, the smaller the odds it stays sealed.
The moon landing was faked
It started in 1976, with a self-published book by Bill Kaysing, a former writer at one of the rocket companies, called "We Never Went to the Moon". It landed in the right decade for it. Post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, when trust in the US government was near the floor.
If true: NASA staged the 1969 footage, the radio traffic, the telemetry and the rock samples, with hundreds of thousands of Apollo workers and not one of them ever talking. The shots would have to be simulated on a set, without a single independent expert in optics, physics or film ever confirming the supposed tells, the missing stars, the "waving" flag, the odd shadows.
Why it breaks: There is one witness who would have loved to embarrass the US: the Soviet Union. Mid space race, with its own rocket experts, its own radar tracking of the mission, and every propaganda reason to call it a fraud. And still not one word from Soviet leadership doubting the landing. On top of that, moon rock that has survived every geochemical test for over fifty years, and landing sites since photographed by several countries, India and Japan included, gear still sitting there.
Chemtrails control weather or people
This one is relatively young. It grew in the late 1990s, after a 1996 US Air Force paper on weather modification got read as a confession, and spread from there through internet forums and late-night radio.
If true: Tens of thousands of pilots worldwide, from countries that agree on almost nothing, keep one shared secret for decades. Airlines and plane makers fit the spray gear into passenger jets unnoticed, and the aviation authorities that inspect and certify every aircraft somehow never spot it or are told to "not see it". Plus a volume of chemicals big enough to move weather or health across whole continents, without a single cargo manifest, fuel log or maintenance record giving it away.
Why it breaks: Contrails were explained a long time ago. Water vapor from engines freezes into ice crystals at altitude, and how long they hang around depends on the humidity of that air layer. That is why a trail lasts minutes one day and hours the next, with zero change to the plane. Environmental agencies in several countries have measured ground air for years and never found raised levels of the claimed stuff, aluminum or barium. A theory that needs rival states and corporations to cooperate dies right at the cooperation.
Elections are centrally rigged
As old as elections themselves, and it flares up every time a big one is close or bitterly lost. Now throughout history, there have always been rigged elections. That part's not wrong. But the modern everything-is-rigged version is something else and it travels fastest online, usually right after a result someone didn't want.
If true: Steering entire national results across several cycles would mean fooling or enlisting independent observers, rival parties with opposite interests, thousands of local poll workers in decentralized counting systems, and often courts too, across very different political systems, consistently enough to stay hidden for years.
Why it breaks: Small local vote fraud is there, documented, and sometimes prosecuted. The big version is a different claim entirely. Recounts and forensic audits run after the most disputed elections in several countries have kept confirming the original results, not the fraud claims. A system decentralized enough to produce local errors is a bad fit for central, invisible control. You can't have both.
Vaccines contain tracking microchips
Basically a child of 2020. It spread during the COVID vaccine rollout, often bolted onto older Bill Gates and 5G stories that don't fit together with it at all. That rarely matters to a theory in motion.
If true: An injectable chip fits through a standard needle, inner diameter usually 0.3 to 0.5 millimeters, runs with no power source, carries an antenna for data, and stays invisible in every one of billions of vials through every quality check at independent labs worldwide, across makers, countries and batches.
Why it breaks: This is a physics question. Even passive RFID chips, the kind that need no battery, require an antenna too big to pass through an injection needle, and once in tissue it would show up on ultrasound or an X-ray. If tech that small existed, it would surface first in logistics or the military, where people already pay for it openly. Not hidden in a vaccine dose, where it barely adds anything.
A secret world government runs everything
The granddaddy...
Its bones go back to 18th-century Illuminati panic, and the modern "New World Order" version took off in the 1990s, once the Cold War ended and people went looking for a new single villain. Now, there are powerful people that run a lot of stuff. No argument there. But the world government…
If true: One central group choreographs wars, financial crises and pandemics with a precision that keeps political, economic and media systems in sync for decades, across rival governments, central banks and corporations that otherwise fight in public.
Why it breaks: That elites and connected institutions hold outsized sway is boring and well documented. Lobbying, tangled interests, informal networks, all real. The stronger claim, one group steering it all, explains everything after the fact and predicts nothing you can check. That is the classic mark of a theory that dodges any test. It would also have to explain why the alleged puppet masters keep eating huge losses themselves.
Area 51 hides aliens
I always love a good alien story.
And Area 51 is the most famous, of course. It runs on two real things stitched together: the 1947 Roswell crash story, and a genuinely secret base in Nevada. It got its alien-tech shape in 1989, when a man named Bob Lazar went on TV claiming he had reverse-engineered a saucer at a site near Groom Lake.
If true: The US military has held alien tech far beyond our own for decades and hoards it in a sealed desert base in Nevada, without a single visible jump in military or civilian technology coming out of it.
Why it breaks: Area 51 is real, it is secret, and experimental military tech was tested there for decades, the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes, early stealth. That fully explains the secrecy and the strange lights and craft seen over the base, with no aliens needed. Anyone still holding on to aliens has to also explain why the military got no visible tech leap out of supposedly superior alien hardware, none that "normal" research can't already account for.
Big Pharma is hiding a cancer cure
An old, sticky one. And man, this is one that would probably be the worst if true.
The "they're hiding the cure" idea has floated around cancer treatment for decades, latching onto whatever unproven remedy happens to be current at the time.
If true: Oncologists, nurses and research bodies worldwide, including in countries with state health systems and no profit motive, and individual scientists who lose their own family to cancer, all know about a working cure and stay quiet forever, without one whistleblower from inside science ever going public.
Why it breaks: Patents run out anyway, usually 20 years from filing, which guts the supposed reason to bury something. A company could patent a cure and sell it, rather than hide it. And nonprofit and public research, at universities and state-funded institutes, keeps searching independently of industry, with every scientific and career reason to expose a suppressed cure the moment they found one.
Paul McCartney died in 1966 and was replaced
October 1969. A Detroit radio DJ, Russ Gibb, took a caller who told him to play Beatles tracks backward for "clues." A college newspaper ran with it, and the rumor that Paul had died in a 1966 crash went global in weeks.
If true: The three other Beatles, their management, their families and dozens of session musicians all hid a swap for almost sixty years, through public shows, endless interviews, fingerprints on paperwork, and, since the 2000s, public DNA from his own family. The stand-in would also have to look and age like him for decades, and match his songwriting and his singing voice.
Why it breaks: The supposed proof, the barefoot Abbey Road cover, lyrics said to be hidden in reversed audio, a "telling" number plate on a record sleeve, almost always turns out… let's call it mundane... on a closer look. The plate belonged to a car parked in the street that happened to be in shot, not a planted clue. The more you check each "proof" on its own, the more it dissolves into coincidence and hindsight, instead of adding up to anything.
The internet runs mind control
A newer theory on this list, and the only one that needed the internet to exist at all. It grew through the 2010s as social feeds took over how people get their news, and ordinary fear of the algorithm hardened into something huge.
If true: A few big platform owners use their algorithms not just to farm attention (which is true) but to grow one uniform set of political or social beliefs in billions of users, coordinated enough to land the same way across borders and languages. I mean… theoretically this is possible.
Why it breaks: That algorithms shape behavior is well studied and not in doubt. Platforms actively test what keeps you scrolling and tune the feed for it. Coordinated, targeted opinion steering is a different claim. It would have to explain why rival platforms with opposite business models and owners pull in the same direction, and why single countries, and single platforms, still hold sharply opposed political camps that successful central steering should have erased. The research shows filter bubbles hardening opinions people already had, not redirecting them. With more research and AI in the picture, this whole story will get more interesting in the coming years, I am sure.
Hitler survived and fled to Argentina
Ah, yes. The Nazi stories. As a German, I know those too well.
The Hitler survived story started almost immediately in 1945 after the capitulation, and Stalin himself fed it by publicly suggesting Hitler might still be alive. Real Nazi escapes to Argentina in the following years gave it a believable stage. So, yes, this would have been the place for Hitler. Probably the only one on earth.
If true: Soviet intelligence, first into the bunker in 1945, faked dental IDs and skull fragments as evidence for decades, even though the USSR had every reason to milk a real find for propaganda rather than fake one. An escape network across the Atlantic slipped past British and American intelligence saturating Europe in 1945, and Argentina hid one of the most wanted people alive for decades, without one verified photo, fingerprint or DNA trace surfacing. I mean a few very famous Nazis did exactly that.
Why it breaks: Nazi war criminals like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele did flee to Argentina, which is what makes the country a plausible backdrop at all. For Hitler himself the evidence points the other way. In 2018 a team led by French forensic scientist Philippe Charlier matched tooth fragments and a skull piece with a bullet hole, held in the Russian state archive, to Hitler's known dental X-rays from 1944. Charlier said afterward you could "end all conspiracy theories about Hitler." Worth being fair about a wrinkle: a 2009 DNA test on a separate skull fragment from the Moscow archive found it came from a woman. Conspiracy fans have run with that ever since, but historians put it down to different finds getting mixed up in the chaos after the war, while the 2018 teeth and their skull piece were kept separate and clearly matched. The escape stories themselves trace largely to a deliberate Soviet disinformation campaign after the war, and the FBI and CIA chased the tips without ever confirming them.
The Titanic was sunk on purpose
I had never heard this one before writing this.
Fairly modern, as these go. The idea that the damaged sister ship Olympic was sunk in the Titanic's place got its popular form from Robin Gardiner's 1998 book, Titanic: The Ship That Never Sank?
If true: White Star Line quietly swapped the damaged Olympic, hurt in an earlier collision, for the new Titanic, to sink the battered sister ship for insurance in the North Atlantic. That means over 1,500 dead out of more than 2,200 aboard, including upper-class passengers like John Jacob Astor IV, whose families would surely have gone public with any hint of a con.
Why it breaks: Photos of both ships before and after the supposed swap show clear, unchanged build details, like the number and layout of portholes on the forward A-deck suites, which differed between Olympic and Titanic. And an insurance fraud that accepts thousands of real deaths of prominent, powerful passengers makes little economic sense, when a plain insurance job had far less risky, quieter routes.
Elvis is alive
It began the moment he died in 1977, and never really stopped. Decades of "sightings" and tabloid covers kept it going long after the man was gone.
If true: One of the most famous faces on Earth went fully invisible after his official death in 1977, and in almost fifty years not one verified photo, DNA sample or checkable proof turned up, in a market where tabloids would pay seven figures for the reveal.
Why it breaks: The death certificate, the Memphis autopsy and named eyewitnesses, his doctor, family, the funeral home, are all documented. The money for a real proof would be huge, and the fact that none ever arrived in checkable form, despite decades of sighting reports, points straight against the theory.
JFK was killed by a CIA or Mafia plot
It started the day he was shot in 1963, grew through the Warren Commission and prosecutor Jim Garrison's case, and got a huge second wind from Oliver Stone's 1991 film JFK.
If true: Several intelligence or Mafia players held total silence for decades, in circles better known for turning on each other, cutting immunity deals, and leaking, than for perfect discipline.
Why it breaks: This is the most thoroughly investigated theory of its kind. The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. The House Select Committee on Assassinations landed in 1979 on the softer wording of a "probable conspiracy," without ever naming or proving one. In 2025 the US government ordered the release of nearly all remaining JFK files, and after reading them, historians on the case agreed that new details surfaced, but nothing that shakes the core finding of Oswald acting alone. The longer and harder a claim gets searched with no hard proof of a plot, the more its absence weighs. That doesn't make it true. It makes it the least cleanly closed theory on this list.
9/11 was an inside job
It appeared within months of the 2001 attacks and went mainstream with the 2005 film Loose Change, which spread across the early internet faster than almost anything before it.
If true: A controlled demolition in two skyscrapers plus the neighboring WTC 7, rigged unseen inside busy office towers with thousands of daily users, carried out with thousands of engineers, investigators, cleanup crews and politicians across party lines. All for an event that cost the supposedly guilty government dearly: two wars, thousands of its own soldiers dead, trillions in knock-on costs.
Why it breaks: The official US investigation by NIST concluded that fire and impact weakened the towers' steel enough to explain the collapse spreading down from the impact zones, and found no evidence of explosive residue or controlled demolition. WTC 7 was put down to structural failure from office fires. NIST also worked out that a demolition using the often-cited thermite would need thousands of kilos placed unseen on hundreds of columns, which is hard to do without notice. A group of engineers and architects, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, still disputes this and wants a new inquiry. That shows the technical debate hasn't gone fully silent, but it doesn't change that the overwhelming majority of the field, and several independent bodies, land where NIST did.
Antarctica hides an ancient civilization or a Nazi base
Nazis again. Some of this is true. Germany ran an Antarctic expedition in 1938 and 1939 and named a slice of it New Swabia. After the war that grew into stories of a hidden Nazi base, and folded into older ideas of a lost civilization under the ice.
If true: A working base under the harshest climate on Earth got supplied unnoticed for decades by the more than twenty countries that have run research stations since the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, countries that carry out joint inspections and get to watch each other do it.
Why it breaks: Precisely because the continent was strategically sensitive in the Cold War, it became one of the most closely watched places on the planet. Satellite coverage, ice cores that track climate back hundreds of thousands of years, and international inspection rights leave little room for a base that stays hidden for decades. Picking that spot to hide a secret base runs straight into how densely it is observed.
The Bermuda Triangle is supernatural
This theory even has a coinage date. Writer Vincent Gaddis named the "Bermuda Triangle" in a 1964 magazine article, and Charles Berlitz's 1974 bestseller turned it into a global mystery, Atlantis and all.
If true: Inside one stretch of sea between Florida, Bermuda and Puerto Rico, ships and planes vanish far more often, and far more strangely, than in equally busy waters, through forces no instrument can measure.
Why it breaks: Lloyd's of London, one of the oldest and strictest ship insurers there is, charges no higher premium for this area than for other routes, and the US Coast Guard has said more than once that the incident rate there is not statistically higher than elsewhere in the Atlantic. Author Larry Kusche showed back in 1975, digging into individual "Triangle cases," that many of the underlying reports were simply wrong, bad positions, inflated details, or ships that vanished outside the area. The zone is big, storm-prone and heavily traveled, enough to explain rare losses through chance, weather and human error, no supernatural stuff needed.
Bigfoot or the Yeti exist and are covered up
The name is from October 1958, when a California logger found huge footprints and a local paper called their maker "Bigfoot." The prints were later revealed to be a hoax, carved wooden feet, though the legend easily outran that reveal. The Yeti is older, out of Himalayan folklore.
If true: A breeding, surviving population of large two-legged primates has lived undetected in North American and/or Asian forests for decades, while wildlife agencies, forestry offices and scientists keep the secret or simply miss it.
Why it breaks: A population like that needs enough food, territory and regular breeding, which means physical traces, droppings, carcasses, clear DNA, skeletal finds. Despite trail cameras and smartphones everywhere now, not one of those has ever been confirmed. The most famous supposed proof, the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, is read by most experts on the case as a person in a fur suit, even if a few believers still argue otherwise.
The Earth is hollow
It has an oddly respectable start. The astronomer Edmond Halley floated a nested-shells Earth in 1692 to explain magnetic quirks, and in 1818 an American named John Cleves Symmes Jr. pushed the version with openings at the poles, even lobbying Congress for an expedition to find them.
If true: Seismic waves would travel through earthquakes in a fundamentally different way than the thousands of stations worldwide record, and the total mass and density worked out from gravity measurements would be flat wrong, for a supposedly hollow structure that still produces the pull we feel at the surface.
Why it breaks: Those seismic and gravity readings come from dozens of countries with no shared reason to cover anything up, and for over a century they have drawn the same picture, a layered inside, mostly solid to liquid, with a solid inner core and a liquid outer one. This is not really a fight over photos or witnesses anymore. It is over hard physical numbers that reproduce daily, which makes it one of the most clearly disproven theories on the list.
The RANKING
No ranking like this is exact. But I love me some rankings… so, let's do it anyway.
With conspiracy theories you can't cleanly compute odds, only compare them. From least unlikely to basically ruled out:
JFK conspiracy. Even after the broad 2025 file release, it's the only one with real historical loose ends, though still no new proof of a coordinated plot.
Central election rigging. Local fraud is real, the nationwide version most likely isn't.
Internet mind control. The behavior nudging is real, the targeted coordination isn't (yet).
Secret world government. Outsized elite influence is true, central steering isn't (yet).
Big Pharma hiding a cure. At least a motive you can follow, even if a weak one economically.
Area 51 and aliens. The secrecy is real, just military, not alien.
Hitler's escape to Argentina. Other Nazis fled there, he didn't, per the 2018 dental match. Also per chance. Would have been hard for the most famous face on earth to flee to a country on the other side of the world in slow trains and planes that could barely cross an ocean.
Chemtrails. Explained by physics, but at least you can point at it and argue.
9/11 inside job. Refuted in detail by NIST, but with a dissenting engineers' group still active.
Antarctic civilization or Nazi base. Beaten by how densely the place is watched.
Bigfoot. No hard biological find after decades of looking, but at least biologically thinkable.
Paul McCartney died in 1966. Specific "proofs" exist, and dissolve one by one.
Elvis is alive. Certificate, autopsy, witnesses, pretty obvious.
Titanic ship swap. Disproven in photos by the build details.
Faked moon landing. Never denied by the USSR itself, which had every reason to.
Bermuda Triangle. Directly refuted by Lloyd's numbers and the Coast Guard.
Microchips in the vaccine. Simply not technically doable.
Flat Earth. Independently disproven since antiquity.
Hollow Earth. Runs against hard seismic data, so it sits at the bottom.
The thread through almost all of them is the same. They need an unrealistically large, unrealistically disciplined group of insiders who never once leak, often people who would take each other out if they could. The real conspiracies, Watergate, the VW diesel scandal, were almost always smaller, shorter-lived, and far worse kept than these nineteen would need to be. Doesn't make all of them entirely implausible… which is the reason conspiracy exists, right?