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In the days before the attacks, traders placed unusually large bets that United and American Airlines stock would fall. Those were the two airlines whose planes were hijacked. The 9/11 Commission found no sign that anyone had advance knowledge. A finance professor, a former Australian market regulator, and a widow who testified before the Commission all saw something different. "Follow the money." That was the advice to Bob Woodward during Watergate, and 25 years after September 11, it may be the best way into the one 9/11 theory that won't go away. This week, Rich and Nick quickly run through the five best-known 9/11 theories before following the money into the trades that regulators, academics, and families have argued about for a quarter of a century. The guys look at whether any of the theories have any kernel of truth. The intelligence failures were real, with warnings about hijacked planes flying into buildings circulating as far back as 1998. Some of this is statistics: put-to-call ratios, trading volumes up a hundredfold, and a peer-reviewed 2006 study that found the activity consistent with informed traders. Some of it is just the plain fact that al-Qaeda's plans were an open secret in parts of the intelligence world. Contact the show at [email protected]. The first listener to write in with their name and postal address gets one of the first Conspiracy Cabal tinfoil hat brewing trucker caps. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Reports in Israel are suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu received a warning about the October 7th attacks and failed to take action. As well, Manchester City faces punishment for mass cheating. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the mountains of southwest China sits a radio telescope big enough to swallow the MCG. It's built to listen to the cosmos. Meanwhile, Beijing has reportedly brought in a science-fiction writer to advise on what to do if something out there answers. That writer is Cixin Liu, author of The Three-Body Problem. His big idea, the "dark forest," says the universe is full of silent hunters, and any civilisation that reveals itself gets destroyed. So what does China think it's listening for, and why does it want the man who wrote that theory in the room? This week, Rich and Nick head into the dark forest. They start with the Three-Body Problem trilogy and move on to real telescopes, unexplained signals, and what happens to the human mind on the day disclosure stops being hypothetical. - The silence problem: Trisolarans, sophons, and decades of signals we've already sent out. If any civilisation out there is far more advanced than us, announcing ourselves may be the worst thing we could have done. Our only edge may be the one thing the aliens don't understand: treachery. - The telescope problem: FAST, the 500-metre dish with about 4,500 movable panels that can refocus without the structure ever moving. It's the most sensitive ear on the planet, and it's already picking up things nobody can fully explain. - The signal problem: Fast radio bursts flash and fade in milliseconds but reportedly carry more energy than the Sun puts out in a year. Scientists assume they're natural. Rich has other ideas. - The secrecy problem: Harry Reid's quietly funded UAP program, Luis Elizondo's resignation, and the private money from Robert Bigelow and Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Listen. Then there's Jeremy Corbell's prediction that governments will warn of an alien craft arriving in 2027, and his claim that the warning itself will be the misinformation. - The shock problem: Covid emptied the toilet-paper aisles. What would disclosure do? The guys look at "ontological shock," at how Disclosure Day handled public reaction, and at new research asking who would be hit hardest if confirmation ever came. Some of this is astrophysics: radio waves, filament structures, bursts nobody can explain. Some of it is just history. Every time a more advanced civilisation has met a less advanced one on this planet, it has gone badly for the one with less. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Lachie Neale got off, and he's now free to play in the Grand Final. Couldn't have happened to a better bloke. Also, the PM has called a hasty press conference to detail how a rogue Open AI agent hacked into Medicare. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ivan Milat was convicted of seven murders and died in a prison hospital bed in 2019, still insisting he didn't do it. Almost nobody in Australia believes him. But a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into unsolved murders and missing persons is now asking a different, more uncomfortable question: were seven enough? This week, Rich and Nick dig into the growing list of cold cases with Milat's name attached to them - from a stabbing on a beach when he was 22, to a body found after he was already behind bars - and sit down with a former NSW detective pushing for a coercive-powers commission to finally crack them. The near-miss problem: Englishman Paul Onions, a gun, a rope, a highway shootout - and the report to police that went nowhere until bodies started turning up in a state forestThe Wanda Beach problem: a 1965 double murder, a police artist's sketch, a photo of a 22-year-old Milat shown to the sitting Premier, and a resemblance nobody can quite explain awayThe ballistics problem: an 18-year-old hitchhiker, a Ruger 10/22 rifle, and free bullets that matched a gun already tied to two of Milat's known victims — with no charge ever laidThe timeline problem: a 16-year-old's murder in the Hunter Valley that happened after Milat's arrest, and what that does to the theory that he always worked aloneThe institutional problem: a 12-day turnaround letter from the NSW Homicide Squad, a cold case process that reviews old files instead of starting fresh, and why the families still waiting call it a desktop exercise Some of this is forensic - ballistics, timelines, photographs held up side by side. Some of it is just the arithmetic of a man who was, by his own family's account, capable of far worse than what he was ever tried for, working alone in a state forest for the better part of two decades before one man got away. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Dr Nick says we need to have a conversation about covid mandates (again), and Rich loses his dog mid recording. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Every Sunday morning in Benton, Arkansas, a small congregation gathers to hear a sermon from a man some of them believe is Elvis Presley. Not "sounds like him." Not "channels his spirit." Actually him — alive, aged into his eighties, and preaching under an assumed name because, as one longtime fan put it, he hopes "one day he will stand up and say who he is." Pastor Bob Joyce has said, on the record, more than once, that he is not Elvis Presley. It hasn't slowed the theory down at all. This week, part two: Rich and Nick sit back down with Greg Page to trace where the "he's still out there" theory has actually gone since 1977 — from a plane ticket that couldn't have existed to a pulpit in Arkansas that a lot of people can't stop looking at. - The sightings problem: supermarket check-out lines, a Kalamazoo bus station, a monastery in the Midwest — and why almost every "credible" sighting traces back to a book someone was trying to sell - The Bob Joyce problem: an elderly pastor whose sermons get read as coded messages to "Patriots" by some of his own congregation, a direct and repeated denial, and why that denial only seems to make believers more certain - The "Jon Burrows lives" theory: the alias-on-a-plane-ticket story, why Memphis airport had no international flights in 1977 and has never flown to Buenos Aires, and what happened when journalists tried to run the paper trail down anyway - The DNA problem: exhumation requests the family has always refused, the grave at Graceland itself, and what forensic genealogy can and can't settle when nobody agrees to a test - The economics problem: impersonators, "authenticated" late-career photos, and why an Elvis-is-alive story sells more than an Elvis-is-dead one ever will Some of this is provable — flight logs, sermon transcripts, a pastor on the record saying who he isn't. Some of it is just what people need to believe about a man who died at 42: that somewhere out there, in a small church in Arkansas, he got to grow old instead. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Yeah, maybe we're all cooked? Contact the show at [email protected] Get in touch with us: https://forms.gle/VaZB5S32KUGcuQVb6 The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the morning Elvis Presley died, someone booked a plane ticket out of Memphis under the name John Burrows — the alias he used on every hotel rooming list for the better part of two decades. It's the detail conspiracy theorists reach for first. It's also, according to the guest on this episode, one of the least mysterious things that happened that week, because what actually emptied out Graceland in the days that followed makes the fake-death theory look almost quaint by comparison. This week — part one of two — Rich Baker and Nick Coatsworth sit down with Greg Page: former Wiggle, lifelong Elvis collector, and the man who ended up owning (and later returning) the tag cut from the pajama pants Elvis was wearing when he died. The alias problem: John Burrows, a same-day plane ticket, and why a real escape plan probably wouldn't reuse a name that was already on every tour document he'd ever signedThe Graceland problem: the "Rape of Graceland" — staff who realized their paychecks had just ended looting the house and selling relics to fans at the front gate before the funeral had even happenedThe autopsy problem: three toxicologists, one pathologist, and a finding of cardiac arrhythmia from coronary artery disease — "therapeutic" drugs only, despite the enduring Dr. Nick theoryThe provenance problem: a $50,000 brooch scam run on Priscilla Presley, an ongoing estate dispute over one of Elvis's jets, and how you actually authenticate a piece of memorabilia when the market is full of fakes Some of this is provable — federal aviation records, a certified autopsy report, a chain of custody that runs back through Graceland itself. Some of it, like whether Elvis really did engineer his own disappearance, is just a story people want to be true, seven arcminutes short of anything you could call evidence. This week, Rich and Nick let Greg do most of the talking — high tea with Priscilla, a "rediscovered" pair of jeans that got shot down by Elvis's own road manager, and the moment a piece of his collection went back to Graceland because it felt too close to the day itself. Part two lands next week. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For the best part of recorded history, it was the tallest structure human beings had ever built. 2.3 million blocks of limestone, some weighing three tons, stacked with a margin of error so small it wasn't even detectable until the 19th century. Nobody has ever fully explained how it was done - or why anyone would bother getting a tomb that precise. This week we dig into Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods and the case for a lost civilization behind the Great Pyramid of Giza. No wheels, no scaffold, and an eastern face aligned to true north within 0.015 percent — tight enough that mainstream Egyptologists still don't fully agree on how it was done, let alone why it needed to be that precise. The construction problem: a 24-man haul team, 7,100 newtons of force, and the maths on laying a block every three to six minutes for 20 yearsThe precision problem: an eastern face aligned to true north within three arcminutes, and how anyone got there without modern instrumentsThe flood myth problem: why civilizations with zero contact — Sumer, the Maya, the Inca — all tell a strikingly similar story about a bearded stranger and a catastrophic delugeThe Hancock problem: a journalist who covered dictators in Somalia and Ethiopia before turning theorist, and got accused of racism by the Egyptologists he challenged Some of this is measurable, sitting in the dimensions of the pyramid itself. Some of it, whether remnant knowledge from a lost civilization explains it, or it's just very good pattern-matching on ancient numbers, may never be settled. This week, Rich Baker and Dr. Nick Coatsworth work through what the construction math actually supports, why Hancock's flood-myth argument is harder to dismiss than it sounds, and land on opposite sides of a 7-out-of-10. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Five souls. A sailing trip in the Whitsundays. A charter flight home. And then, nothing. On the evening of 9 August 1981, a Cessna 210 carrying four Sydney workmates and their pilot who were on their way back back from a holiday in the Whitsunday Passage lost contact after flying into adverse weather, with the last known contact placing it over the Barrington Tops. More than four decades on, no trace of the aircraft or its occupants has ever been found, despite extensive searches. This week we go through the last known minutes of VH-MDX. The flight had already refuelled at the Gold Coast and was tracking down the coast toward Sydney when things started going wrong. Just after passing the CRAVN waypoint, the pilot reported severe turbulence and downdrafts, and that his artificial horizon and gyroscopic direction indicator had both failed, the two instruments a pilot needs most when the ground disappears into cloud. Radar had the aircraft roughly 40 kilometres northwest of its planned track, near the Barrington Tops. The pilot then reported ice building on the airframe and difficulty holding altitude. His last transmission, at 7:39pm, put him at 5,000 feet. The instrument failure: why both the artificial horizon and heading indicator dying at once, in cloud, over mountains, at night, is about the worst combination a pilot can faceThe track that doesn't add up: how a plane on a coastal flight plan ended up dozens of kilometres inland and off course before anyone on the ground knew something was wrongForty years of searching: satellite imagery, aerial photography, magnetometer sweeps, and even chemical sampling of streams running out of the search area — and still nothingThe wreck that refuses to be found: competing theories on where MDX actually went down, why the terrain itself may be swallowing the evidence, and the amateur search teams still combing the Tops todayThe rational explanation vs. the folklore: how a straightforward, tragic weather accident became one of the enduring unsolved mysteries of Australian aviation — and what people have filled that vacuum with ever since Some of this is a matter of official record. Some of it, where MDX actually rests, genuinely isn't known. This week, Rich Baker, Dr. Nick Coatsworth and special guest Dean Frith go through the flight data, the search history, and the terrain that's kept a Cessna and five men hidden for over forty years. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will the former Premier be forced to face the music ahead of misconduct relating to Victoria's Big Build? Contact the show at [email protected] Get in touch with us: https://forms.gle/VaZB5S32KUGcuQVb6 The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thirteen months before Dallas, a phone rang in the U.S. embassy in Canberra. A man claiming to be a Polish chauffeur for the Soviet embassy said Iron Curtain countries had put $100,000 on the president's head. The Americans wrote it up, filed it, and moved on.Then the president was shot. And the same voice called back. This week we dig into one of the strangest footnotes in the declassified JFK files: an anonymous tipster in suburban Canberra who predicted an assassination over a year in advance, then rang the day after it happened to remind everyone he'd been right. Australian intelligence and the CIA spent years trying to run him down — and couldn't. No Polish national ever worked the Soviet motor pool. No plates matched. No name, no face, no paper trail. Just a voice, twice, exactly when it mattered. The first call: October 15, 1962 — a warning about a Soviet-financed hit, filed and nearly forgottenThe second call: November 23, 1963 — the same voice, back within a day of the murder, naming Moscow's moneyThe chauffeur problem: why ASIO and the CIA agreed Soviet embassies didn't hire local nationals as drivers — so who was he?The vehicle that wasn't there: a described car and plates that matched no registry, and the claim that Soviet officials kept spare plates on hand to swap on demand Some of this is documented in black and white in the National Archives. Some of it — who this man actually was — may never be known. This week, Rich Baker and Dr. Nick Coatsworth work through what the files really say, why a minor Cold War tip got flagged all the way to Helms' desk, and what it means that a mystery caller from Canberra got the timing right twice. Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the 1970s, Nestlé sent representatives into some of the poorest communities in the developing world. They wore white coats. They carried themselves like nurses. And they told new mothers, again and again, that formula was better for their babies than breast milk — knowing that once lactation stopped, that mother was a customer for as long as the baby needed feeding. There was no wreckage to point to, no single smoking document, just a pattern of behavior so consistent that Nestlé's name still hasn't fully recovered, fifty years on. Now the man auditing the food industry's sins is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — an avowed anti-vaxxer who spent decades as a litigant against corporate polluters, somehow now running the U.S. Department of Health under Trump 2.0, and somehow uniting MAGA diehards with the public-health establishment he used to fight. So is "Make America Healthy Again" a genuine reckoning with an industry that's been running the tobacco playbook with better marketing, or one more unlikely coalition that won't survive contact with a Big Mac? - RFK Jr.'s seismic and paradoxical shift: how a man who built his name suing corporations for environmental harm became Secretary of Health, and why food, not vaccines, is the fight that's actually uniting his strangest allies - The Nestlé Baby Formula scandal: the reps dressed as medical professionals, the mothers in developing nations told a lie that suited a business model, and why the damage to Nestlé's name still hasn't fully faded fifty years later - The corporate anatomy of Big Food: the handful of conglomerates — Associated British Foods, Mondelez among them — that control everything from the sugar refinery to the supermarket shelf, and what a $30-billion snack company's own sustainability report reveals when you actually read it - The tobacco and pharma parallel: unconstrained profit motive, monopoly power, no real competition — the exact conditions the hosts have already traced through Big Tobacco and Big Pharma this season, now applied to what's in your pantry - Where "big" stops being neutral: the hosts try to draw the line between ordinary corporate scale and the kind of deliberate deception that turns a company into a conspiracy Some of this is documented fact. Some is where reasonable people land on different sides. And if you want the chapters that set this one up, go back to the tobacco and pharma episodes earlier this season. Join Rich Baker and Dr Nick Coatsworth as they suss it all out. Contact the show at [email protected] Get in touch with us: https://forms.gle/VaZB5S32KUGcuQVb6 The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories — we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rapist Ralph Carr's name was suppressed for years under a loophole rule utilised by savvy lawyers. But why is this law in place, and what can be done to change it? Contact the show at [email protected]. The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories - we examine them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how conspiracies start, why they persist, and what drives people to believe them. Contact the show at [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.