AltMystery

Editorial · The labels

The Chart

Every article carries one of two labels. Confirmed is for cases documented through primary sources. Mystery is for everything else — open cases, contested claims, internet creepypasta, debunked-but-believed lore. The spoiler stays inside the article.

MYSTERYSee all →

Everything that isn't documented as confirmed. Open cases, contested claims, internet creepypasta that won't die, things people have been telling each other for decades without proof. The texture of every story is different — that's the whole point.

How we treat it: We take the case on its own terms. We don't pre-judge the reader with a label like 'debunked' or 'open'. The article tells you where the trail goes.

  • The JFK assassination
  • Epstein didn't kill himself
  • MH370
  • The Olof Palme murder
  • The Voynich manuscript
  • Roswell 1947
  • The Pentagon UAP videos
  • The moon landing hoax theory
  • Chemtrails
  • The Wuhan lab leak
  • The Russian Sleep Experiment
  • The Mandela Effect
  • Bigfoot, Loch Ness, Mothman
  • Flat Earth (as cultural phenomenon)
CONFIRMEDSee all →

Grounded in primary evidence. Official acknowledgments, declassified archives, court rulings, sworn testimony. The conspiracies that turned out to be real.

How we treat it: We tell the story with primary sources foregrounded. The conspiracy didn't have to be theorized — it's documented.

  • MK-Ultra
  • COINTELPRO
  • Watergate
  • Tuskegee Syphilis Study
  • Operation Northwoods
  • Operation Mockingbird
  • NSA mass surveillance (Snowden)
  • Kodak and the Trinity Test
  • Iran-Contra
  • #FreeBritney
  • Dieselgate
  • Big Tobacco cancer cover-up
  • DuPont PFOA
  • Operation Paperclip
  • Cambridge Analytica

Why only two labels?

Most publications about conspiracy theories pick a lane: debunking (everything is wrong) or believer(everything is a cover-up). Both choices are easy. Both are usually wrong.

We tried five labels first — confirmed, partial, open, disputed, debunked. It was pedagogically clean and editorially self-defeating: you tell the reader the answer before they've read the question. A "DEBUNKED" stamp on Flat Earth means the careful unpacking — why do people believe?, what is emotionally true about the claim?, where does the evidence end? — is over before the first sentence.

So we collapsed four into one. Confirmed when the documents are on the table. Mystery for everything else. The article itself does the work of saying where, exactly, this particular mystery stands.

What "Mystery" can mean

  • An open case the official record won't close (Olof Palme, MH370, the Voynich manuscript).
  • A claim under contest where evidence is gathering (the Wuhan lab leak, Saudi 9/11 ties).
  • A claim against consensus with significant believers (the moon-landing hoax, chemtrails). We explain why people believe; we don't endorse the claim.
  • An urban legend or creepypasta repeated as fact (the Russian Sleep Experiment, Slender Man, Black-Eyed Children).

Open the article. We'll tell you where the evidence lands.

The red line

One kind of "mystery" we never publish: claims that frame ethnic or religious groups as the hidden cause of world events. These include Rothschild-as-ethnic-conspiracy, the "great replacement", ZOG, "cultural Marxism" in its Nazi usage, and blood libel. We may write about them as historical hate-discourse — we do not publish them as hypotheses. See the policy.

Credit

The original five-level visual logic for sorting conspiracies came from tofology's "Conspiracy Chart". We folded four bands into one to keep the editorial work inside the articles.