The Conspiracy Podcast

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast
September 11th, 2012 in the city of Benghazi four Americans lost their lives. In a city most listeners couldn't point to on a map, when armed militants overran a lightly guarded U.S. compound in Benghazi. By the next morning, four Americans had lost their lives — among them Christopher Stevens, a diplomat so committed to the region he'd once arrived in the country by cargo ship rather than wait for a safer route in.
The fallout stretched on for years: nine separate government investigations, a marathon congressional hearing that ran past eleven hours, and — almost by accident — the exposure of a private email server that some argue tipped the outcome of a presidential race with no real connection to Libya.
This week, Eric, Sean, and Jorge open their countdown to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 by walking through it all — the overnight siege, the frantic hunt for an ambassador who vanished inside a burning building, and a devastatingly accurate mortar barrage at dawn that claimed two more American lives. From there, the guys tackle the parts of this story that still don't add up: a debunked video-blamed-it narrative pushed on national television, a disputed order to hold back rescuers that some contractors insist was real, and a theory tying a secret CIA outpost to weapons quietly moving toward Syria. They also connect the dots on how digging into Benghazi wound up cracking open one of the most consequential email scandals in American political history.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast
In Part Two, Sean, Jorge, and Eric dive straight into the theories that have kept the Isdal Woman's case alive for over half a century.
She died in a Norwegian valley under at least eight false identities, and fifty-five years later, no one still knows who she really was. Was she a Cold War intelligence operative, her movements lining up suspiciously close to Norway's top-secret missile testing sites while the country's secret police quietly opened their own file behind the scenes? Was she connected to a Swiss banker infamous for financing Nazi sympathizers and extremist causes across decades? Was she an international fraudster running a long con across the continent, or a woman working discreetly for a clientele who had every reason to stay silent after her death? And underneath every theory sits the same unanswered question: was it suicide, or murder?
The guys also break down the forensic science that's chipped away at the mystery over the years — isotope analysis narrowing down where she may have grown up, DNA testing tracing a maternal line to a part of the world none of her fake passports ever claimed — and how a fifty-year-old cold case turned into one of the most successful true crime podcasts ever made. Tens of thousands of amateur investigators from around the world are still hunting for answers today, still combing through old sketches and hotel records, still trying to finish what Norwegian police gave up on decades ago. And even after all that science, all that attention, and all those true believers, the Isdal Woman remains buried under a name that was never hers.
Let us know your theory. Who was she, and what really happened in Ice Valley?

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast
In November 1970, a father and his two young daughters were hiking through a remote Norwegian ravine that locals had nicknamed "Death Valley" when they stumbled onto a nightmare: the burned, unrecognizable body of a woman, surrounded by personal items with every label, tag, and maker's mark deliberately removed. What followed became one of the strangest unsolved cases in modern European history.
Investigators would eventually uncover a woman who had crossed the continent under at least eight false identities, checking into hotel after hotel under invented names and fabricated Belgian hometowns, always paying cash, always wiping her own fingerprints from glasses. Hidden inside the lining of her suitcase: Deutsche Marks, disguises, and a coded notepad no one could read.
Norwegian police closed the case within months. No one has ever solved it.
Sean, Jorge, and Eric dig into the gruesome discovery, the disturbing autopsy findings, the tangled web of hotel aliases stretching across the continent, and the eyewitnesses who came forward decades later after being told, at the time, to simply forget what they'd seen. It's the foundation of one of the most bizarre disappearances of the Cold War era — and the mystery is only just getting started.
Who was the Isdal Woman?
Part Two drops next Tuesday.
Support the show and get exclusive content at patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast
Part Two. Columbus discovered America. The Liberty Bell rang out on July 4th, 1776. The defenders of the Alamo were freedom-loving heroes who chose to die rather than surrender. And Pocahontas fell in love with a brave English soldier and saved his life with the power of nature and music.
These are the stories that made it into the movies, the federal holidays, the theme parks, and the history books. They're taught to every American child as fact. And in this episode, Eric, Jorge, and Sean are asking the question nobody wants to ask: what if most of them aren't true?
From the real history of Christopher Columbus and the colonization of the Americas, to the origin of the Liberty Bell's name, to what the Texas Revolution was actually fought over, to the true story of the real woman behind the Pocahontas myth — the guys dig into who built these legends, when, and why.
Some of these myths are embellished. Some are invented. And at least one is considerably darker than the version you grew up with.
Eight American myths. Two weeks. Happy 250th America.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast
In honor of America's 250th anniversary, Eric, Jorge, and Sean are taking on some of the most famous stories in American history — and asking a simple question: are they actually true?
Paul Revere's midnight ride. Betsy Ross and the first American flag. George Washington and the cherry tree. Benjamin Franklin flying a kite in a lightning storm. These are the stories every American learns as a kid, the legends that show up on murals and coins and every Fourth of July without fail.
But what if most of them were invented? Not exaggerated — invented. By poets, booksellers, and loyal grandsons who needed a good story and weren't above making one up. The real versions are messier, stranger, and in at least one case involved two men in Europe who didn't survive trying to replicate the experiment.
The guys dig into who actually built these myths, when, and why — and what the real stories look like underneath them. Turns out 250 years of American history comes with a lot of fine print.
Part Two drops next week.