A field guide to the biggest questions humanity asks — consciousness, lost history, intelligence operations, and the nature of reality.
Every entry is a self-contained investigation. Every connection has a reason. Read one below, or follow it into the graph.
In 1954, Aldous Huxley swallowed four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, sat down in his garden in Los Angeles, and wrote what would become one of the most…
9 connectionsMindIn October 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Carl Gustav Jung was traveling alone on a train through the Swiss countryside when he experienced a waking vision.…
9 connectionsMindThere is something it is like to be you. Right now, reading these words, there is an experience happening — light hitting your eyes, meaning forming in your…
14 connectionsMindDaniel Clement Dennett (1942--2024) was the most formidable materialist philosopher of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. For over five…
4 connectionsMindIn the winter of 1619, Rene Descartes -- a 23-year-old French soldier and mathematician -- locked himself in a heated room (poele) in southern Germany and…
4 connectionsMindYou are, right now, having an experience. Light enters your eyes. Electrical signals traverse your neurons. Neurotransmitters cross synaptic gaps. All of this…
5 connectionsMind"Death is nothing to us." With that declaration, Epicurus (341-270 BCE) distilled an entire metaphysics into an ethical principle. If the soul is made of…
3 connectionsMindWhat if matter is not the foundation of reality? What if consciousness is? Idealism is the philosophical position that mind, experience, or spirit is more…
7 connectionsMindImmanuel Kant (1724--1804) never traveled more than ten miles from his hometown of Konigsberg, Prussia. He lived a life of rigid routine -- his daily afternoon…
4 connectionsMindMaterialism is the philosophical position that everything that exists is physical. There is no soul, no immaterial mind, no ghostly substance hiding behind the…
7 connectionsMindHere is the problem, stated as plainly as possible: we live in a universe made of matter. Matter, as physics describes it, is mindless — particles bouncing off…
4 connectionsMindIn 1992, the ethnobotanist and lecturer Terence McKenna published Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, a book that argued something…
8 connectionsMindImagine prisoners chained in a cave since birth. Their legs and necks are fixed so that they can see only the wall directly in front of them. Behind them and…
8 connectionsMindOn December 3, 1992, a clinical psychologist named D. Corydon Hammond stood before an audience of therapists at the Fourth Annual Eastern Regional Conference…
6 connectionsMindIn approximately 530 BC, on the southern coast of what is now Italy, in the prosperous Greek colonial city of Croton (now the modern Italian city of Crotone,…
8 connectionsMindAround 300 BCE, Zeno of Citium began teaching in the Stoa Poikile — the "Painted Porch" — in the Athenian agora. He had arrived in Athens as a shipwrecked…
3 connectionsMindIn 1995, philosopher David Chalmers drew a line through the study of the mind. On one side he placed the "easy problems" — explaining how the brain processes…
4 connectionsIn 1968, a Swiss hotelier and convicted fraudster named Erich von Däniken published a book he had written on prison stationery between stretches of his…
7 connectionsOriginsIt is the most famous place that may never have existed. A civilization of immense power and sophistication, destroyed in a single day and night, swallowed by…
9 connectionsOriginsIn 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt visited a hilltop in southeastern Turkey that local farmers had been plowing around for generations. The…
6 connectionsOriginsIn October 1994, a German archaeologist named Klaus Schmidt walked onto a limestone hill in southeastern Turkey that local farmers had complained about for…
12 connectionsOriginsIn the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, three stones rest in the foundation of the Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek. They were quarried approximately two kilometers away…
9 connectionsOriginsThere is a moment in the education of every mathematician — usually early, usually unexpected — when the subject stops feeling like a human invention and…
12 connectionsOriginsOn November 12, 1980, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft passed within 124,000 kilometers of Saturn's cloud tops and transmitted the first high-resolution images of…
7 connectionsOriginsIt is the youngest lost civilization in the conspiracy canon — not buried under twelve thousand years of sediment and myth like atlantis, not pushed back into…
7 connectionsOriginsIn November 1773, a Scottish traveler named James Bruce arrived in Marseille after a six-year expedition through Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia. He had been…
8 connectionsOriginsIn 1460, a monk named Leonardo da Pistoia brought a Greek manuscript to Cosimo de' Medici in Florence. Cosimo had spent decades — and a fortune — funding…
15 connectionsOriginsThere is a idea so persistent that it has survived the invention of seismology, the mapping of the Earth's core, satellite imagery of every square meter of the…
9 connectionsOriginsIn 1182, a French poet named Chretien de Troyes sat down to write a romance for his patron, Philip of Alsace, Count of Flanders. The poem he produced —…
6 connectionsOriginsIn 1929, during the conversion of the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul into a museum, a Turkish historian named Halil Edhem was going through a stack of materials in…
8 connectionsOriginsApproximately twelve thousand eight hundred years ago, the Earth, which had been emerging from the depths of the last glacial maximum and slowly warming for…
8 connectionsOn the morning of Saturday, December 16, 2017, The New York Times published a front-page article titled "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's…
11 connectionsCosmosIn the summer of 1955, a small team of Lockheed engineers and CIA officers drove into the Nevada desert along an unmarked road, past the last town, past the…
8 connectionsCosmosIn December 1984, a Los Angeles television producer and UFO researcher named Jaime Shandera opened his mailbox and found a plain envelope with no return…
6 connectionsCosmosOn a spring day in 1976, a book appeared on the shelves of American bookstores that proposed, with meticulous footnotes and an air of absolute conviction, that…
5 connectionsCosmosIn the summer of 1994, Terry Sherman and his wife Gwen bought a 480-acre cattle ranch in the Uintah Basin of northeastern Utah, on the banks of the Uinta River…
8 connectionsCosmosIn the summer of 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch at Fuller Lodge in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with Edward Teller, Herbert York, and Emil…
6 connectionsCosmosOn July 20, 1969, an estimated 600 million people watched a grainy, ghostly television image of Neil Armstrong descending a ladder onto the surface of the…
7 connectionsCosmosIn the first week of July 1947, something fell out of the sky and struck the high desert of southeastern New Mexico. Whatever it was scattered debris across a…
8 connectionsCosmosOn December 16, 2017, the New York Times published an article that should have ended the world as we knew it. Written by Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal, and…
13 connectionsIn the summer of 2000, a man with a hidden camera walked through the gates of one of the most exclusive private retreats on Earth. He moved through groves of…
6 connectionsPowerOn November 22, 2003, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched on the Georgian parliament building in Tbilisi, carrying long-stemmed red roses. At their head…
6 connectionsPowerOn April 17, 1965, between fifteen and twenty-five thousand people marched on Washington, D.C. to protest the escalation of the Vietnam War. The march was…
17 connectionsPowerYou land at Denver International Airport, walk off the jet bridge, and the first thing you see is a horse. Not a real horse — a thirty-two-foot-tall,…
5 connectionsPowerOn the morning of Easter Sunday, March 31, 1929, ten young women stepped out of the Plaza Hotel in midtown Manhattan, walked the few blocks to Fifth Avenue,…
11 connectionsPowerOn June 24, 1717 — the Feast of St. John the Baptist — four London lodges met at the Goose and Gridiron Ale House near St Paul's Cathedral and formed the Grand…
14 connectionsPowerIn 1928, Edward Bernays — nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of modern public relations — published a book called Propaganda. Its opening paragraph is…
23 connectionsPowerIn April 2017, Klaus Schwab — the German-born economist who had founded the European Management Forum at the Swiss alpine resort of Davos in January 1971,…
8 connectionsPowerOn March 4, 2001 — exactly six months and seven days before September 11 — the Fox television network aired the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin-off of…
8 connectionsPowerIn 1798, John Robison — professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and fellow of the Royal Society — published Proofs of a Conspiracy…
19 connectionsPowerOn the evening of November 2, 2004, the American people went to the polls to choose between two candidates for the presidency of the United States. One was…
8 connectionsPowerOn a September night in 1970, in a basement flat at 22 Lansdowne Crescent in London's Notting Hill, Jimi Hendrix choked to death on his own vomit. He was…
4 connectionsPowerOn May 29, 1954, sixty-one men from eleven Western countries arrived at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, a quiet suburb of Arnhem in the eastern…
12 connectionsPowerIn 2010, the historian Richard Dolan introduced a concept that had been circling the edges of UFO research, classified aerospace speculation, and deep politics…
11 connectionsPowerIn 2002, at the age of eighty-seven, David Rockefeller — grandson of the founder of Standard Oil, longtime chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, chairman of…
13 connectionsPowerIn January 2014, a retired congressional staffer named Mike Lofgren published an essay on Bill Moyers's website titled "Anatomy of the Deep State." Lofgren had…
36 connectionsPowerOn a cold November night in 1910, a private railway car sat waiting at a train station in Hoboken, New Jersey. The men who boarded it were under strict…
16 connectionsPowerOn May 1, 1776 — the same year as the American Declaration of Independence, a coincidence that conspiracy theorists have never stopped noting — Adam Weishaupt,…
7 connectionsPowerIn 1119, nine French knights led by Hugues de Payens presented themselves to King Baldwin II of Jerusalem with a singular offer: they would protect Christian…
8 connectionsPowerOn the evening of September 11, 1990 — a date that would acquire a second and far more terrible significance exactly eleven years later — President George…
18 connectionsPowerIn August 1921, a correspondent for The Times of London named Philip Graves sat in Constantinople with two books open side by side on his desk. One was the…
7 connectionsPowerIn 2012, a Public Policy Polling survey found that four percent of registered American voters — roughly twelve million people — believed that "lizard people"…
8 connectionsPowerOn May 15, 1911, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States, ordering the dissolution of the…
10 connectionsPowerOn the morning of June 19, 1815, a single horseman rode into the small French port of Ostend with a despatch in his saddlebag. The despatch was a brief account…
10 connectionsPowerIn 1966, Carroll Quigley — a professor of history at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and mentor to a young Bill Clinton — published a…
38 connectionsPowerOn June 24, 1947, a small group of British psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists incorporated a new institution in central London. The founding…
7 connectionsPowerOn the evening of March 13, 2013, white smoke rose from the chimney above the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. The papal conclave that had been meeting in…
8 connectionsPowerOn January 1, 1918, in a hotel room in Munich, a German occultist named Rudolf von Sebottendorff — born Adam Alfred Rudolf Glauer, a former merchant marine…
11 connectionsAt 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 — a Boeing 767 carrying 92 people — struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center between…
20 connectionsOperationsOn June 5, 1981, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report — a publication of the Centers for Disease Control that, under normal circumstances, is read only by…
7 connectionsOperationsOn a clear autumn morning in 1996, a document appeared on the website of the United States Air Force's Air University at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. It…
6 connectionsOperationsIn April 1989, after the Iran-Contra affair had been sanitized by the Tower Commission and the congressional hearings had ended with no senior official serving…
19 connectionsOperationsOn the evening of March 8, 1971, while most of America was watching the heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden…
17 connectionsOperationsIn the summer of 1955, a CIA officer named George Hunter White sat behind a two-way mirror in an apartment at 225 Chestnut Street in San Francisco's Telegraph…
8 connectionsOperationsHe was forty-nine years old when he died, and he had been one of the most decorated investigative journalists in the United States. In 1990, he had shared a…
6 connectionsOperationsIn the winter of 1993, on a remote stretch of boreal flatland near the town of Gakona, Alaska — population roughly two hundred, accessible by a single road…
8 connectionsOperationsBy the early afternoon of November 18, 1978, Congressman Leo Ryan had seen enough to know the settlement was not what it claimed to be. He had flown to the…
5 connectionsOperationsOn the night of August 4, 1962, something happened inside a modest Spanish Colonial house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los…
5 connectionsOperationsOn August 3, 1977, Senator Ted Kennedy opened a joint hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific…
24 connectionsOperationsOn March 15, 1951, the Iranian parliament — the Majlis — voted unanimously to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The vote was the culmination of a…
7 connectionsOperationsOn August 15, 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms issued a directive that would become one of the most consequential — and most illegal — orders in the history of…
6 connectionsOperationsOn September 21, 1976, at 9:35 in the morning, a car bomb detonated on Sheridan Circle in the Embassy Row district of Washington, DC — less than fourteen…
6 connectionsOperationsOn July 3, 1979, six months before any Soviet soldier crossed the Amu Darya, President Jimmy Carter signed the first of a sequence of presidential findings…
7 connectionsOperationsOn August 3, 1990, Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti stood before a joint session of the Senate Committee on the Italian Intelligence Services and the…
18 connectionsOperationsOn the afternoon of December 16, 1984, a black Zil limousine rolled up the long gravel drive to Chequers, the English country house that serves as the official…
12 connectionsOperationsOn December 2, 1946, a naval task force of a size not seen since the Pacific campaign sailed south from Norfolk, Virginia, into the Atlantic. Task Force 68,…
6 connectionsOperationsIn 1977, Carl Bernstein — half of the reporting duo that had broken the Watergate story and helped bring down a president — published a 25,000-word article in…
25 connectionsOperationsOn March 13, 1962, General Lyman Louis Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a document to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The…
13 connectionsOperationsOn May 22, 1945 — fourteen days after Germany's unconditional surrender — a thirty-three-year-old SS officer named Wernher von Braun sat in a military hospital…
16 connectionsOperationsAt 7:48 a.m. on Sunday, December 7, 1941, the first wave of 183 Japanese aircraft -- fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers, and horizontal bombers -- crossed…
6 connectionsOperationsSerge Monast was born in Quebec in 1945. He died in his apartment in the Montreal suburb of Magog on December 5, 1996, at the age of fifty-one, of a heart…
8 connectionsOperationsSometime in March 1979, a Soviet Tupolev reconnaissance aircraft went down in dense jungle in Zaire. The United States wanted the wreckage — its sensors, its…
6 connectionsOperationsOn July 5, 1987, Congressman Jack Brooks of Texas — a gravel-voiced Democrat who had been in the car behind Kennedy's limousine in Dallas and who had held the…
5 connectionsOperationsOn the morning of January 8, 1943, a maid at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan entered Room 3327 on the thirty-third floor and found the body of an elderly man…
5 connectionsOperationsAt approximately 10:50 p.m. on Monday, December 8, 1980, John Winston Ono Lennon — forty years old, former Beatle, author, artist, and the most politically…
5 connectionsOperationsOn the afternoon of February 21, 1965, approximately four hundred people gathered in the Grand Ballroom of the Audubon Ballroom, a former movie palace on…
6 connectionsOperationsAt dawn on April 17, 1961, approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles waded ashore at Playa Giron and Playa Larga, two beaches on the southern coast of Cuba in a marshy…
8 connectionsOperationsIn late July or early August of 1933 — the exact date is contested across the surviving accounts — a Morgan-affiliated bond salesman named Gerald C. MacGuire…
7 connectionsOperationsOn the night of August 30, 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Emad "Dodi" Fayed dined at the Ritz Paris, the hotel owned by Dodi's father, Mohamed Al-Fayed.…
6 connectionsOperationsAt 3:40 p.m. on August 4, 1964, President Lyndon Baines Johnson picked up the telephone in the White House and called Robert McNamara, his Secretary of…
8 connectionsOperationsOn November 3, 1986, a Lebanese magazine called Ash-Shiraa published a story that would crack open the most consequential political scandal in post-Watergate…
12 connectionsOperationsOn the morning of February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell took his seat at the United Nations Security Council, opened a folder, and spent…
7 connectionsOperationsAt 12:30 p.m. on November 22, 1963, the presidential motorcade turned left from Houston Street onto Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. President John…
13 connectionsOperationsOn the evening of April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the pulpit of Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, and delivered what would become his final…
6 connectionsOperationsOn the afternoon of August 10, 1991, a hotel housekeeper at the Sheraton in Martinsburg, West Virginia, found a freelance writer named Joseph Daniel Casolaro…
6 connectionsOperationsIn the autumn of 1955, a copy of a recently published paperback arrived at the Office of Naval Research in Washington, D.C. The book was The Case for the UFO,…
5 connectionsOperationsIn November 1969, a former Navy lieutenant named Anthony Herbert testified before a small congressional subcommittee that he had personally witnessed the…
7 connectionsOperationsAt approximately 9:14 p.m. on the evening of Monday, February 27, 1933, a theology student named Hans Flöter was walking home from the State Library in Berlin…
9 connectionsOperationsAt 12:15 a.m. on June 5, 1968, Robert Francis Kennedy stood at the podium in the Embassy Ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California. He had…
6 connectionsOperationsOn the afternoon of May 7, 1915, the RMS Lusitania — the largest, fastest, and most luxurious ocean liner in the Atlantic service — was steaming eastward…
4 connectionsOperationsOn the morning of July 26, 1972, Jean Heller of the Associated Press sat down at her desk in the Washington bureau and began writing a story that would become…
5 connectionsOperationsAt approximately 2:00 p.m. local time on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, Israeli Air Force Dassault…
4 connectionsOperationsA few minutes before 2:30 in the morning of June 17, 1972, a security guard named Frank Wills was making his rounds at the Watergate office complex in Foggy…
7 connectionsIn September 2009, Pfizer Inc. — the world's largest pharmaceutical company — pleaded guilty to a federal criminal charge of misbranding Bextra, a painkiller…
11 connectionsModernOn December 30, 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, a thirty-three-year-old ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, sent a message to a private WeChat group of fellow…
6 connectionsModernOn November 7, 2000, the United States of America discovered that it did not know how to count votes. The discovery was not metaphorical. In Palm Beach County,…
4 connectionsModernIn 1975, Senator Frank Church — the Idaho Democrat who chaired the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence…
21 connectionsModernOn October 12, 1969, a caller identifying himself as "Tom" phoned WKNR-FM in Detroit and told disc jockey Russ Gibb that Paul McCartney was dead. Not recently…
3 connectionsModernOn the evening of December 4, 2016, a twenty-eight-year-old man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove from Salisbury, North Carolina, to Washington, D.C., carrying…
9 connectionsModernOn the evening of October 28, 2017, an anonymous user posted on the /pol/ board of 4chan — the politically incorrect subforum of the anarchic imageboard that…
10 connectionsModernAt 9:35 a.m. on the morning of Friday, December 14, 2012, a twenty-year-old man named Adam Lanza shot his mother, Nancy Lanza, four times in the head with a…
4 connectionsModernAt 2:49 p.m. on April 15, 2013, two pressure cooker bombs detonated approximately twelve seconds and 210 yards apart near the finish line of the 117th Boston…
4 connectionsModernIn the summer of 2021, an anonymous user with the handle IlluminatiPirate posted a long, unsettling essay on Agora Road's Macintosh Café — a small,…
11 connectionsModernOn April 8, 1994, an electrician named Gary Smith arrived at 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East, a gray-shingled house in the Denny-Blaine neighborhood of…
4 connectionsModernAt 12:41 a.m. local time on March 8, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 — a Boeing 777-200ER, registration 9M-MRO, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members…
3 connectionsModernOn June 3, 2020, with much of the world still locked inside, businesses shuttered, economies in freefall, and more than six million COVID-19 cases confirmed…
8 connectionsModernAt 10:05 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time on Sunday, October 1, 2017, a 64-year-old man named Stephen Craig Paddock opened fire from the windows of Suite 32-135 on…
4 connectionsModernAt 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a Ryder rental truck packed with approximately 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and nitromethane — an improvised…
5 connectionsModernAt 4:19 in the morning on July 10, 2016, Seth Conrad Rich was shot twice in the back while walking home to his apartment in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of…
4 connectionsModernOn the night of September 7, 1996, Tupac Amaru Shakur — twenty-five years old, the most commercially successful and politically provocative rapper in America,…
4 connectionsModernOn the morning of February 28, 1993, seventy-six agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms arrived at a religious community called Mount Carmel…
5 connectionsModernOn the evening of July 17, 1996, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 — a Boeing 747-131, registration N93119, carrying 212 passengers and 18 crew members on a…
4 connectionsIn the autumn of 2016, a video began circulating on the internet that was, by any reasonable standard of conspiracy content, perfect. The video had been…
6 connectionsRealityOn the afternoon of December 5, 1945, five torpedo bombers lifted off from the Naval Air Station at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on a routine training mission…
6 connectionsRealityThere is a belief so apparently absurd that its very existence demands explanation. Not explanation of why it is wrong — that part is trivially easy, settled…
2 connectionsRealityIn 2009, a paranormal researcher named Fiona Broome attended Dragon Con, the massive science fiction and fantasy convention in Atlanta, and struck up a…
4 connectionsRealityYou have never experienced the past. You have never experienced the future. You have only ever experienced now. The past exists as memory — a pattern in your…
5 connectionsRealityIn 2003, the Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom published a fifteen-page paper in Philosophical Quarterly titled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" The…
10 connectionsMissing a topic? Contribute a node. Read the editorial standards. Apeirron is open source on GitHub.