Conspiracy Theories
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95 free Conspiracy Theories trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
48 free conspiracy trivia questions with answers, covering the theories everyone has heard of and the real conspiracies that make people believe them. The famous ones are all here: the faked moon landing, the JFK assassination, Area 51 and Roswell, the Illuminati, chemtrails, the New World Order, Paul is dead, Pizzagate, QAnon and the Denver airport. The second half is where it gets interesting. Some of these questions are about documented, declassified conspiracies: MKUltra, Operation Northwoods, the Tuskegee study, the Gulf of Tonkin, Watergate's Deep Throat. Others are hoaxes with a traceable origin, like the Protocols forgery, the Philadelphia Experiment, the Majestic 12 papers the FBI called bogus, and the German city that jokingly does not exist. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia before publishing and each question links to its source, so you can settle arguments afterwards. Difficulty runs from easy to hard, and nothing here endorses a theory: the questions are about who claimed what, when, and how it was debunked.
30 of 95 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hoax theories claim NASA staged the Moon landings, but which human spaceflight program really achieved them?
Apollo
Apollo veteran Buzz Aldrin, then 72, punched a hoax believer who ambushed him at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2002 and called him a liar; prosecutors declined to charge the astronaut.
Q 02During Britain's 2020 lockdown, arsonists burned phone masts over fears of which technology, falsely blamed for spreading COVID-19?
5G
5G fears saw phone masts set alight across Britain in April 2020 after viral posts tied the signals to the virus; networks counted 20 suspected arson attacks over the Easter weekend, one on a mast serving a Birmingham emergency hospital.
Q 03Which ancient idea of Earth's shape has made a social-media comeback since the 2010s?
Flat Earth
Flat Earth believers test the idea themselves in the 2018 documentary Behind the Curve: their own experiments keep returning the results a globe would give, and they set those results aside.
Q 04Which secretive US Air Force base in Nevada anchors UFO folklore?
Area 51
Area 51 was built in the 1950s to test the U-2 spy plane, whose flights at unheard-of heights set off a wave of UFO reports; the CIA did not publicly acknowledge the base until 2013.
Q 05Which 18th-century Bavarian secret society is often falsely linked to a global-domination plot?
Illuminati
The Illuminati were founded on 1 May 1776 by law professor Adam Weishaupt and banned by Bavaria's government within a decade; the legend of their secret rule has outlived the real order by more than two centuries.
Q 06A famous hoax theory claims which musician died in 1966 and was replaced by a look-alike?
Paul McCartney
Paul McCartney's 'death' went global in October 1969, after a caller fed supposed clues to Detroit DJ Russ Gibb live on air; McCartney later spoofed the rumour by titling a 1993 live album Paul Is Live.
Q 07Which major US airport draws theories about secret bunkers and symbolic murals?
Denver
Denver's airport is fronted by a 32-foot blue mustang with glowing red eyes, nicknamed Blucifer, which killed its sculptor when a section fell on him; the airport has since embraced the lore, even installing a talking gargoyle.
Q 08Alaska's HAARP research programme is often falsely accused of controlling what global phenomenon?
The weather
The weather forms far below the ionosphere that HAARP studies, as its scientists keep pointing out; since the University of Alaska took the site over in 2015 it has held open houses where anyone can tour it.
Q 09What term describes belief in a secret elite plotting a totalitarian global government?
New World Order
The New World Order theory holds that a secretive elite is steering the world toward a totalitarian one-world government; it surged in the 1990s after George H. W. Bush used the phrase in 1990 and 1991 speeches.
Q 10The 1934 'Surgeon's Photograph', later exposed as a toy submarine with a sculpted head, claimed to show which creature?
Loch Ness Monster
The Loch Ness Monster's most famous portrait was staged by a big-game hunter out for revenge on the newspaper that had mocked his fake monster footprints; the plot only came out sixty years later, when a conspirator confessed.
Q 11Which CIA program, begun in 1953, dosed unwitting subjects with LSD in mind-control experiments?
Project MKUltra
Project MKUltra's files were ordered destroyed by CIA director Richard Helms in 1973, but some 20,000 documents survived because they had been misfiled in a financial records building, and they surfaced in 1977.
Q 12The 1947 incident near Roswell, New Mexico, is famously associated with theories of what kind of crash?
Alien spacecraft
Roswell lore holds that an alien spacecraft crashed in 1947; the debris was from a Project Mogul balloon train built to detect Soviet nuclear tests, and the Army's 'weather balloon' line covered that secret program.
Q 13What false 2016 conspiracy theory linked a Washington restaurant to a child-trafficking ring run by Democrats?
Q 21Which public health measure, first tried in Grand Rapids in 1945, do theorists call mind control?
Water fluoridation
Water fluoridation was denounced in the 1950s as a communist plot against American health; Dr. Strangelove later mocked the fear through a deranged general who rants that it will sap his 'precious bodily fluids'.
Q 22During the 1980s Satanic Panic, which fantasy game was accused of luring teenagers into devil worship and suicide?
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons was blamed after a student's 1979 disappearance was wrongly tied to the game, and a 1982 TV film with a young Tom Hanks dramatised the scare; the publicity only pushed sales up.
Q 23What term describes the belief that unelected officials secretly steer government policy?
Pizzagate
Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 election, falsely claiming Washington's Comet Ping Pong pizzeria hid a child-trafficking ring tied to Democrats; in December 2016 a believer fired a rifle inside the restaurant.
Q 14Which off-the-record conference, held annually since 1954, is cited by theorists as globalist plotting?
Bilderberg Meeting
The Bilderberg Meeting takes its name from the Dutch hotel that hosted the first one, called by Polish exile Józef Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands to counter growing anti-Americanism in western Europe.
Q 15Shared false memories that differ from documented history, like a misremembered book title, are called the what effect?
Mandela
The Mandela Effect, named by Fiona Broome after many people falsely recalled Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, describes shared false memories; 'Berenstein' for the Berenstain Bears is the classic example.
Q 16Which theory says Charlemagne and roughly 300 years of the Early Middle Ages are made up?
Phantom Time Hypothesis
The phantom time hypothesis, floated by Heribert Illig in 1991, says Otto III and Pope Sylvester II invented the years 614 to 911, Charlemagne included, so that their own reigns would fall on the round year 1000.
Q 17Which singer, who officially died in 1977, has been reported alive for decades by believers in a faked death?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley sightings went mainstream a decade after his death, when a Michigan woman said she had spotted him at a Burger King in Kalamazoo; believers also point to the spelling of his middle name on his Graceland gravestone.
Q 18Which airliner's disappearance in March 2014, with 239 people aboard, set off years of conspiracy theories?
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing and vanished; the first hard evidence came sixteen months later, when part of a wing washed ashore on Réunion, on the far side of the Indian Ocean.
Q 19Which 2017-born theory says a Satan-worshipping cabal controls the US and fights Trump?
QAnon
QAnon began in October 2017, when an anonymous 4chan poster signing as 'Q' claimed top-secret Q clearance and inside knowledge of the Trump administration; followers pored over the cryptic posts, which they called 'Q drops'.
Q 20Which director is falsely rumored to have secretly filmed a staged moon landing for NASA?
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick had just made 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose Moon scenes and effects fed the rumour that he shot the landing footage; a 2002 French mockumentary, Dark Side of the Moon, played the idea for laughs and may have fuelled it.
Deep state
Deep state is a translation of the Turkish 'derin devlet', a 1990s term for a hidden alliance of military and security officials in Turkey; American politics borrowed the phrase years later.
Q 24The lab leak theory of COVID-19's origin centres on a virology institute in which Chinese city?
Wuhan
Wuhan is home to both the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where coronaviruses are studied, and the Huanan market where the first known cluster appeared; that shared address is the heart of the suspicion.
Q 25Which US President was the target of the 'birther' conspiracy theory?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama, the first Black US president, was born in Hawaii; in 2011 Donald Trump became the theory's leading proponent and claimed credit for pressuring the government to publish the birth certificate.
Q 26Which 'American Stonehenge', inscribed in eight languages, was bombed in 2022?
Georgia Guidestones
The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned in 1979 by a man who gave his name only as R. C. Christian; their first line, urging humanity to stay under 500 million, drew years of vandalism and charges that the slabs were satanic.
Q 27What term describes the belief that the US government was secretly involved in the September 11 attacks?
Inside job
The 'inside job' claim spread online through Loose Change, a 2005 film made on a laptop for about $2,000 that went on to draw millions of views.
Q 28Which US Air Force study logged more than 12,000 UFO sightings between 1952 and 1969?
Project Blue Book
Project Blue Book logged 12,618 sightings and left 701 unexplained; it was shut down after the Condon Report judged that further UFO study was unlikely to yield major scientific discoveries.
Q 29Disappearances in what western Atlantic region have fuelled paranormal and alien-abduction theories?
Bermuda Triangle
The Bermuda Triangle got its name from a 1964 magazine article; Lloyd's of London and the US Coast Guard have since found that no more ships are lost there than in any other busy stretch of ocean.
Q 30Which rapper, declared dead in 1996, is the subject of long-running faked-death theories?
Tupac Shakur
Tupac Shakur died six days after a Las Vegas drive-by shooting, yet new music kept coming: an album under his alias Makaveli appeared later that year, and more posthumous albums followed.