Conspiracy Clearinghouse

EPISODE 146 | The Bicameral World of the Zizians

One striking thing about the many stories that have appeared about the Zizians and the crimes they are accused of committing, is that each one starts at a different place. Some start with the attack on a Vallejo landlord that resulted in his being run through with a samurai sword and then work backwards and then forwards. Others begin their tale with the shooting of an older couple i...

EPISODE 145 | Trumpspiracies: What a Tangled Web

Ever since Donald Trump first decided to run for the highest office in the United States, he has promoted an astonishing number of conspiracy theories. It’s almost as if a New York real estate baron famous for lying to clients, not paying his bills and exploiting loopholes for his own benefit had learned, somewhere along the way, that “truth” is a slippery subject. And because he’s n...

EPISODE 144 | Unwell and Unregulated: The Militia Movement

The United States has always had a certain comfort level with violence, or at least the idea of it. Throughout its history, groups of armed citizens will threaten to use, or actually use, force to get their point across, either to effect change or to prevent that from happening.

But in the 1990s, something changed, and groups formed around new ideologies that sometimes had ...

EPISODE 143 | Paranoia Is Forever: Disney Conspiracies

Walt Disney’s goal was to make the “Happiest Place on Earth”, and to delight and inspire both children and adults through the ages. Many would say he succeeded beyond even his own wildest expectations. Others might say that Disney is, and always has been, a place of evil. And when you get as big as Disney has, you are naturally going to attract some rather wild narratives. 

Lik...

EPISODE 142 | Project 2025: The First 180 Days (World Is Weird 15)

Donald Trump said he didn’t really know much about Project 2025 except that they sure liked him. And yet, of 313 specific Project 2025 initiatives, he’s already enacted 108 of them, and another 63 are actively in the works as of this recording. Quite a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?

Project 2025 put a lot of importance of a sort of blitzkrieg if their boy won the 20...

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 people to make a fast buck, superchar...

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.

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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 much more.

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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.

Like...

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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