Conspiracy Clearinghouse

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, secret tropical paradises, political tal...

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, fanciful, tale of a secret black pyramid ...

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 postal, and violence is the result...

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 the plays and sonnets attributed t...

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 on some of the many shows he's produced...

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 and taught and lived until 106.

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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. 

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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. 

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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 technology are allowing us to make astonis...

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 speculation that crosses disciplinary boun...

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.

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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.

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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 Buster Benson and John Manoogian III, ...

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 one about airplanes, One of Our Ai...

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 commercial aircraft.

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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, a dishwasher spy, Jim Garrison's th...

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...

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 worst it’s ever been, or if in fact, ...

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.

We’re looking at out of place artif...