19 Conspiracy Theories, Ranked by How Close They Are to True

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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,…