Conspiracy theories spread like wildfire. One outlandish claim, a cryptic comment, or even a clumsy misquote can spark an avalanche of speculation. Add a pinch of public distrust and the lightning speed of social media, and suddenly, a fringe idea becomes a global obsession.
While researchers have shown that fake news often travels faster than facts and that our biases can make even the wildest stories seem convincing, sometimes, the most unbelievable theories are true. And that’s what keeps people hooked.
This article dives into the internet’s most gripping conspiracy theories, from pop culture legends and scientific rabbit holes to high-stakes political plots that refuse to fade.
The Craziest Conspiracy Theories That Refuse To Die
Princess Diana Murder Conspiracy
On August 31, 1997, the BBC announced that Diana, the beloved Princess of Wales, had died in a tragic car accident.
Two years before her death, Princess Diana gave a Panorama interview exposing her and Prince Charles’ extramarital affairs. According to the CBC, after the interview was released, the Queen urged them to get a divorce, while the princess was stripped of her title and royal security. Her sudden death after a series of public feuds with the British royal family led many to suspect foul play.
The most popular conspiracy is that her drunk driver, Henri Paul, was sent by MI6 to assassinate Diana and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed. This claim was made by Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed (per The Independent), and former MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson (per The The Telegraph)
According to Al-Fayed, Diana was pregnant and about to get engaged to Dodi, so Prince Philip ordered the assassination to stop her from marrying a Muslim.
Gregory Martin, in his book, "Diana: The Last Days,“ also suggested that Paul's body fluid samples may have been switched before analysis to make it appear like he was drunk.
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The princess’s friends claimed that she had concerns about being spied on and murdered.
In a documentary by English investigative journalist Mark William-Thomas, her friend, Roberto Devorik said “She had the premonition she would be killed or die…not in a natural way...She would say, 'I think they are going to kill me. I am going to finish in an accident — helicopter, plane, or car crash.’"
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Official Story
The French police investigated Diana’s death and concluded that it had been caused by the drunk driver, as reported by the BBC. In 2004, the British Metropolitan Police established another official inquiry into the allegations of conspiracy to murder the princess.
According to the New York Times, the $7 million inquiry, dubbed Operation Paget, involved fourteen investigators with high-level British intelligence access who interviewed 300 witnesses and analysed over 600 pieces of evidence over three years.
The 871-page public report also concluded that the accident was caused by Henri Paul’s dangerous driving under the influence of alcohol and prescription drugs. The injuries were fatal because nobody in the car was wearing a seat belt when they crashed into a pillar.
Tupac is Alive
Nearly three decades after his murder, theories are still rife that Tupac Shakur did not die from his gunshot injuries on September 13, 1996. The theories seemed plausible because Tupac Shakur had survived an earlier shooting in 1994.
Barely two months after his death, Tupac Shakur’s record label started to create publicity for his posthumous album by leveraging the air of mystery around the murder.
The album was promoted under his nickname ‘Makaveli’, an ode to Niccolò Machiavelli, an author who promoted the idea of faking his death to confuse his enemies. The promotional posters also had the ominous tagline “Listen very carefully“.
The music video for the album’s lead single, Hail Mary, also showed Tupac’s grave being split open by lightning as he rose from the dead to kill his enemies.
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Some fans claim that his music's lyrics left clues to the hoax. They anticipated that he would return seven years after the accident, which aligns with his album title, The 7 Day Theory.
When he didn’t return in 2003 as anticipated, the theories shifted to claims that he was living in Cuba, Glasgow, or on a secluded island with other celebrities who had faked their deaths.
To add to the intrigue, for 27 years after Tupac’s death, no suspect was named in the murder. During this time, there were various claims that he had been sighted in nearly ten places from California to Sweden and Malaysia. Kim Kardashian lent her voice to the rumours with an Instagram post about one of the sightings.
Mirror reported that Michael Nice, a British conspiracy theorist, claimed to have helped Tupac escape from Los Angeles through Barbados to Cuba with the help of the country’s former president, Fidel Castro.
Suge Knight, the founder of Tupac’s record label, Death Row, said in an interview with BBC, “With Pac, you never know...When I left that hospital me and ‘Pac was laughing and joking. I don't see how someone can go from doing well to doing bad.”
Tupac isn't the only celebrity whose death has generated conspiracy theories. Fans have also claimed that stars like Notorious B.I.G., Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley, and Bob Marley faked their deaths to start a new life in obscure locations.
Even more interesting, there are rumours spun off The Beatles song lyrics claiming that Paul McCartney had died in a car crash in 1966, but the band has secretly replaced him with the winner of a lookalike contest since then.
Official Story
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has public documents confirming that Tupac Shakur is deceased. In July 2023, the cold case warmed up as Duane Keith Davis became the first arrest in connection with the case.
The album cover artist, Ronald Brent, confirmed that the record label intentionally organized the publicity stunts for his posthumous album to debunk the media conspiracies.
In an interview with Crack Magazine, Brent said, “Maybe [ad-libs] and stuff was added to the album after Pac’s death to keep him feeling alive...If Pac was still alive, he couldn’t have kept quiet all these years! He would have come back by now, as he was too outspoken. The Outlawz [Tupac’s rap crew] said they smoked Pac’s ashes and I believe them.”
Flat Earth
According to the American Physical Society, by 500 BC, most ancient Greeks agreed that the Earth was spherical. Aristotle provided evidence to prove this by 322 BC, and in 240 BC, Erastothenes measured the circumference of the Earth. Nearly three thousand years later, a good number of people still insist that the Earth is flat.
Dr. Jennifer Beckett, a persuasive communications researcher at the University of Melbourne, says flat earth beliefs have become more popular because of an “increasing distrust in what we once considered to be the gatekeepers of knowledge, like academics, scientific agencies, or the government.“
According to Live Science, the contemporary flat-Earth community was founded in the 1950s. They claim that the data and images proving the Earth’s spherical shape are fake, generated as part of a conspiracy between the government and space organizations.
Official Story
Science has extensively proven the Earth’s spherical shape. Natural observations, such as the spherical shadow Earth casts during a lunar eclipse, the existence of different time zones, gravity, the way sunsets disappear from the horizon, and the way ships appear to go into the water hull-first as they move further away, also provide evidence.
With more advanced technology, satellites have taken space images of the Earth’s curved surface, and these calculations have formed the basis of technology like GPS. If Earth were flat, gravity would not work, and neither would GPS.
Holocaust Deniers
According to the United Nations (via BBC), holocaust denial is a form of antisemitism claiming that the Jewish genocide was a hoax or an exaggeration. Deniers usually claim that Hitler only deported the Jews, that there were no extermination camps, or that the number of victims is far less than the current estimate of 6 million.
Holocaust denial began as part of revisionist efforts by pro-Nazi Americans after World War II. The conspiracy theory became more popular in the 1970s.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, Holocaust denial spread through antisemitic print publications in the 90s, then moved to social media in the 2000s.
Official Story
The Holocaust is the most documented genocide in history, with over 3,000 tons of records collected for the German war criminal trials in Nuremberg.
The evidence is publicly documented by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Former Auschwitz personnel have also corroborated the evidence and denounced Holocaust denial theories.
Interesting Fact
In 1980, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust denial organization, offered a $50,000 prize to anyone who could prove that Jews were killed with gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Mel Mermelstein, a Jew who had watched his mother and sisters get led to the gas chambers, submitted the details of his experience, including the exact chamber they were held in.
The IHR refused to pay, and Mermelstein sued them. The court awarded him a $90,000 payment and made the IHR issue a letter of apology to all Auschwitz survivors for emotional distress.
Conspiracy Theories That Shockingly Turned Out To Be True
MK Ultra
Project MK Ultra was a top-secret human experimentation program conducted by the US Central Intelligence Agency between 1953 and 1973 to develop psychological torture drugs and interrogation techniques.
During the experiment, non-consenting victims were given LSD for up to 77 consecutive days. CIA director Richard Helms ordered the project documents destroyed, so we don't know the exact number of victims to date.
Official Story
Official investigations by the Frank Church congressional committee and the presidential Rockefeller Commission confirmed the details of Project MKUltra.
In his statement at the 1977 Senate Hearing, CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner admitted that at least one of the victims, Frank Olsen, jumped to his death during the experiment.
King Charles is a Descendant of Count Dracula
On a late 2022 episode of The Jonathan Ross Show (via Daily Motion), Luke Evans, the actor in the Dracula Untold movie, shared that King Charles III had told him he was related to the real-world inspiration for the ruthless blood-drinking character, Dracula.
The news immediately spread that the king comes from a lineage of vampires.
Official Story
Ancient Origins confirms that King Charles III is distantly related to Vladislav III, aka “The Impaler”, who inspired the Dracula character.
Vladislav was known for his viciousness, killing up to 100,000 people by hand through different means of torture.
There is no evidence that Vlad III habitually drank blood like the fictional Dracula, but according to NBC News, there are unconfirmed stories that he dipped his bread in the blood of his victims.
Area 51
In 2006, The Space Review revealed a 1974 memo sent to Director of Central Intelligence William Colby regarding previous instructions not to photograph the airfield of a facility called Area 51.
The area’s heavy surveillance, restricted airspace, and secrecy created conspiracy theories that it was a location for alien spacecraft research and covert meetings with extraterrestrials.
Official Story
In declassified documents released to the National Security Archive in 2013, the CIA admitted that Area 51 was an intelligence research facility in Nevada.
But instead of alien spycraft, the facility contains Soviet MiG fighter jets from the Cold War and serves as a covert location for developing Air Force stealth operations.
In January 2019, the Las Vegas Review Journal reported that a man who attempted to drive into the base was shot dead after refusing to obey commands from security officials.
Faked Gulf of Tonkin Incident
On August 4, 1964, two days after the first attack, Lyndon B. Johnson gave a presidential speech stating that North Vietnam had attacked the US Navy destroyer USS Maddox for the second time in the Gulf of Tonkin.
President Johnson said he was now forced to “order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply,” and from then on, the US would enter the Vietnam War to “carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Vietnam.”
According to the US Naval Institute, historians had always suspected that the second attack was faked to create a pretext for the US to join the war and prevent North Vietnam’s communist victory.
Official Story
In August 1964, Robert J. Hanyok, an NSA historian, analysed the signals intelligence from that night to confirm that there was no second attack.
In his public report (via Naval History), he also discovered that nearly 90% of signals telling the true story were intentionally diverted from the White House and Pentagon during the incident.
Chilling Fact
According to an analysis by Guenter Lewy, via the University of Hawaii, about 1.35 million people died in the Vietnam War, 282,000 of whom were US soldiers.
New-Age Conspiracies Gaining Steam In 2025
COVID Bioweapon Theories
There are theories that the COVID-19 virus was released from a laboratory. Al Jazeera reported that in January 2020, Harvard law professor Francis Boyle claimed that COVID-19 was genetically engineered in collaboration with US researchers before it escaped from the BioSafety Level 4 lab in Wuhan, China.
That same month, GreatGameIndia and other websites claimed that the virus was found in a Saudi man’s lungs and shipped to the Netherlands and Canada before China stole it.
On the other hand, Igor Nulkin, Kevin Chinaett, and the Iranian supreme leader claim that the US created the virus to attack China. In a fascinating twist, the Centre for Research on Globalization claims that the disease secretly spread from the United States, not Wuhan.
Luc Montagnier, an octogenarian Nobel-winning virologist, was the only subject-matter expert supporting the lab origin theory.
Official Story
The World Health Organization convened a global study on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Independent researchers found that the disease was most likely transmitted naturally from an animal. The study also confirmed that the virus undoubtedly emerged in China.
Hunter Biden Laptop
In April 2019, John Paul Mac Isaac, the owner of a computer repair shop in Delaware, claimed that Hunter Biden, the second son of US President Joe Biden, had left a laptop in his shop.
More than one year later, the New York Post published an exposé on the President’s international corruption in Ukraine based on information from the laptop.
Social media platforms censored the article, and fifty-one former US intelligence officials published a signed letter warning that the email release “has all the classic earmarks of a
Russian information operation.”
Russian information operation.”
Official Story
CBS News reported that the FBI analyzed the laptop’s data and discovered that it was authentic and the information had not been tampered with.
According to the New York Times and Reuters, investigations by the House Oversight, Senate Homeland Security, and Finance Committees all found that President Biden had not committed any crimes according to the laptop’s content.
Anti-Vaccine Conspiracy
In February 1998, Andrew Wakefield, a deregistered British physician, published a now-retracted paper in The Lancet claiming that the essential Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine was linked to autism in children.
According to the Financial Times, his paper started the modern “anti-vax“ movement, a series of efforts actively challenging the effectiveness of vaccination.
Antivaxxers have a spectrum of theories that range from claiming that vaccines are dangerous and ineffective, to more fascinating theories about mandatory vaccination being a hoax created by the government and Big Pharma to alter DNA and control humans.
According to research in Nature Medicine, the theories gained momentum on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Official Story
In the words of the WHO, “Vaccines are very safe.” They are developed and tested under rigorous scientific guidelines before being released to the public.
While some may have brief, minor side effects, serious ones are extremely rare. According to research published in The Lancet, vaccines have saved at least 154 million lives since they were discovered, and they save 3.5 to 5 million more every year.
Researchers at UNICEF have confirmed that vaccines don't change a person’s DNA.
Chilling Fact
In 2016, the Americas became the first region to be declared free of endemic measles, as published in Eurosurveillance.
By April 2025, after a spate of campaigns against the measles vaccines, the WHO reported eleven times the number of measles cases as the previous year, with three deaths from the disease and more people at risk.