Conspiracy Cabal

A broken test tube, a dead lab worker, a Russian anti-plague institute, and a flood of alarming posts online. It sounds like the opening scene of a thriller.

Yet there really was a young scientist who died after working at a facility that studied dangerous pathogens, there really was a quarantine response, and there really were questions about what authorities knew and when they knew it.This week on Conspiracy Cabal, Rich and Nick examine a story that exploded across social media after a laboratory worker in Siberia died following a sudden illness. Was it a...

Brendan Nugent has been charged over the alleged attack on independent federal MP Helen Haines outside her electorate office in Wangaratta.

Police allege the incident was targeted, while investigators continue to examine the motive behind the attack.

Nugent has not entered a plea, and the matter remains before the courts. Questions have since emerged about Nugent's background, his online activity, and whether warning signs were missed prior to the alleged attack.

Others have pointed to reports of mental health concerns and prior interactions with authorities, though no clear motive has...

Senator Jordon Steele-John is under-fire for alleged mistreatment of women, which he denies. However, the story also points to an alleged cover up by The Greens, and a secret dossier on how to handle the allegations against Steele-John.

The Greens have denied any existence of a secret dossier.

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]

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Alex Jones has said plenty of strange things, but few have travelled further than his claim that chemicals in the water are changing the sexuality of animals, and of people too. It sounds absurd. Yet there’s a real pesticide, a real scientist’s frog research, and real restrictions in Australia on where that chemical can be sprayed. Nothing makes a conspiracy go off like a sex scandal, so this week the Cabal goes there.

Rich and Nick are joined by the Cabal’s newest member, former investigative journalist Bension Siebert, who worked with Rich on the po...

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...

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]

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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...

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.

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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]...

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...

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 Ni...

Yeah, maybe we're all cooked?

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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 P...

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...

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...

Will the former Premier be forced to face the music ahead of misconduct relating to Victoria's Big Build?

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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/pr...

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...

Go to JB right now and grab a drone, cause if you do, you could head into a secure airbase!

For the record, don't do that.

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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 co...

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 indu...

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...

Russia has been tracking unidentified aerial phenomena since before the term existed. The Soviet military ran a classified investigation called Program SETKA from 1978 to 1990 - twelve years, thousands of filed reports, senior military personnel as witnesses - and when the USSR collapsed and the files were briefly, partially opened, what came out was strange enough that the Russian government quietly closed them again.

That was 1993. Nobody in the western press followed up. And Putin, who knows where every other body is buried, has never once been asked about it on the record.

So...

Jacinta Allan has resigned as Victorian premier. What does this mean for a building sector royal commission?

As well, Anthony Fauci faces questions and gives some rogue answers.

Join Rich Baker and Dr Nick Coatsworth as they suss it all out.

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...

On the night of October 21, 1978, a 20-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich radioed Melbourne air traffic control to report an unidentified aircraft pacing him over Bass Strait. He described a long shape with a green light, an engine that didn't sound like a normal aircraft, and then, seventeen seconds of unexplained metallic scraping. Then nothing. No wreckage. No body. No confirmed radar trace.

The Department of Transport's official finding, filed years later, was "reason for disappearance: unknown."

Forty-eight years on, that stretch of water between Victoria and Tasmania has become one of the most argued-over...

Barnaby goes BANG on his dog. Or maybe there wasn't a dog??

Also, a US senator dies, but then another one doesn't? Or maybe not. Who knows ffs.

Join Rich Baker and Dr Nick Coatsworth as they suss it all out.

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...

Every morning at the Gerson clinic in Tijuana, patients wake up and drink juice. Then they drink more juice. Then they have a coffee enema. Then more juice. Thirteen glasses before dinner, every day, for weeks - at a cost that runs to thirty thousand dollars a month. The people doing it are not gullible. He also prescribed coffee enemas and carrot juice to cancer patients, charged them a significant amount of money, and kept his own records in a way that made independent verification essentially impossible. Both of those things are true, and the wellness industry has spent s...

One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts is in the spotlight after his chemtrails take, alrighty Malcolm go off?

Plus, some more UFO gear from Trump and a whole heap of new smoking data drops. HUFF IT UP!

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories- it examines 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...

The murder of Andres Escobar rocked Colombia. Plus, did Australia try to bribe their way to a world cup?

In 1994, Colombia entered the World Cup tipped as one of the favorites to win it all. But after a shocking own-goal by beloved defender Andrés Escobar led to their early exit, the national tragedy turned fatal. Just days after returning home to Medellín, Andrés was gunned down in a nightclub parking lot. It remains one of the darkest and most scrutinized moments in sporting history, exposing a terrifying intersection of athletic passion, high-stakes gambling, and...

Donny's on the phone, and FIFA is listening! What's the DJ? No red card? Yes sir no problem sir.

Half of Australia can't pay for a flat white because Telstra went down, Beijing is just "testing the waters," right?

Hosted by Rich Baker and Dr Nick Coatsworth, the Conspiracy Cabal is on the hunt for the kernel of truth.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories - it examines them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story...

Are bikies running the Labor government? And how big is the CFMEU influence?

For years, the Big Build has been promoted as the largest infrastructure investment in Victorian history. But behind the billions of dollars in public spending, allegations have emerged of intimidation, organised crime infiltration, corruption, and extraordinary failures of oversight. For decades, rumours about the influence of the CFMEU circulated throughout the construction industry.

This week, Richard Baker and Dr. Nick Coatsworth are joined by award-winning investigative journalist Nick McKenzie to separate political rhetoric from documented evidence as they examine the...

Geelong is the place to go for many things, but UFOs? Well, apparently so. Plus, more World Cup match-fixing controversy (Sepp are you there?) and some Aussies have been charged with spying on behalf of the Russians. What is this, 1979?

Hosted by Rich Baker and Dr Nick Coatsworth, the Conspiracy Cabal is on the hunt for the kernel of truth.

Contact the show at [email protected].

The Conspiracy Cabal doesn't promote conspiracy theories - it examines them. We search for the kernel of truth in every story, exploring how...

Released in 1939, it transformed Judy Garland into an international star and became a defining piece of Hollywood history. But behind the Technicolor magic was a production marked by exhausting schedules, dangerous working conditions, and an industry that abused women and children.

For decades, stories surrounding the film have grown into something much darker.

Because when a movie is surrounded by on-set injuries, cast members who suffer extraordinary personal tragedies, urban legends that refuse to die, and one of Hollywood's greatest stars spends a lifetime battling the consequences of childhood fame, people begin to...

Your weekly conspiracy update, tuck in folks this is a good one.

This week, Bill Gates' links to Jeffrey Epstein are back in the spotlight, we look at the bizarre alleged abduction during Brazil v Scotland at the World Cup, and Richard Baker shares the story of the time he and Nick McKenzie were sued after an investigation into organised crime.

Some stories are backed by evidence. Others are fuelled by speculation. We sort through the facts, the claims, and the questions that keep these conspiracies alive.

Contact the show...

On 31 August 1997, Princess Diana died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel. The official investigation concluded that the driver was intoxicated, driving at excessive speed, and attempting to evade pursuing photographers. Multiple inquiries in both France and the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion. The case was closed.

But for millions of people, it never really ended.

Because when the most photographed woman in the world dies under extraordinary circumstances, after publicly challenging powerful institutions, while involved in relationships that generated global headlines, a simple explanation can start to feel insufficient. Especially...

In 1977, a US Senate hearing confirmed that the American military had been secretly seeding clouds over Vietnam for a decade. The program was called Operation Popeye. Its existence had been classified. Its goal was to extend the monsoon season and flood enemy supply lines. It worked. And when it came out, the government's position was essentially: yes, we did that, and no, we won't be discussing what else we've done since.

So what does it mean when the most outlandish-sounding theory has a declassified paper trail — and the official line is still that there's nothing to se...

Bill Gates bug goes BITE and now you can't eat a souva??

Between 2010 and 2022, the CDC identified more than 110,000 suspected cases of alpha-gal syndrome in the United States, with estimates suggesting the real number could be closer to 450,000. People developing a potentially life-threatening allergy to red meat after a tick bite, and never knowing why. And the lone star tick is spreading north, fast.

Rich and Nick go through what the science says, what the conspiracy says back, and review the new Spielberg film Disclosure Day.

Join Rich Baker and...

On April 8th, 1994, an electrician arrived at a Seattle mansion to install a security system and found the body of the most famous musician on the planet. He'd been there for three days. Seattle Police ruled it suicide before the week was out. Thirty years later, a peer-reviewed forensic paper published in an international journal says they got it wrong.

So what does it mean when the official story has more holes in it than the investigation that produced it?

In this episode, Richard Baker and Dr. Nick Coatsworth go through what the evidence...

TRUMPY, look at you go big fella dropping some unreal UFO, UAP gear for us to go through. Thank you our orange friend, thank you.

On May 8th, the Pentagon quietly uploaded 162 declassified files to a new government website. No press conference. No briefing. Just a link. Two weeks later they did it again. 51 videos, audio recordings, infrared footage of a 2022 formation over Iran. Objects doing things that, in the official documents, get described as "not matching any known Chinese or Russian platforms." The government's own office says most of it is probably drones and balloons...

The $7 billion crime industry. The excise rate that built it. The health department that knew — and kept raising the tax anyway. The global protocol to combat illicit tobacco that 100 countries signed, and Australia quietly ignored. The enforcement agency with no enforcement powers, led by someone with no law enforcement experience. The smoking rate data that nobody's measuring — or maybe nobody wants to see.

The thing is — some of this is documented. Australia's illicit tobacco market, once a niche customs headache, now accounts for an estimated 75–80% of all tobacco consumed in the country. Firebombings have terrorised suburban shopfron...

The meeting. The man. The tape that wasn't supposed to exist.

Chris Koch isn't someone who went looking for Robert Booth Nichols. But Nichols — the self-described "government facilitator" tied to the CIA, arms dealing, organised crime, and the suspicious death of journalist Danny Casolaro — has a way of finding people. And once you're in his orbit, you don't leave unchanged.

Koch, a man who has faced charges and served prison time in his own right, joins Rich and Nick for a bonus conversation about what happened when those two worlds collided — and what Nichols showed...

The lab leak. The five-eyes suppression. The gain-of-function funding trail. The Beagle experiments. The suppressed treatments. The modellers whose predictions shaped policy but whose data no one could check. The social media companies that quietly moved the goalposts on what counted as misinformation - and who told them to.

The thing is - some of this is now documented. The lab leak hypothesis, once treated as a dangerous fringe idea, is now the assessed position of multiple US intelligence agencies. Emails obtained through FOIA requests showed senior scientists privately voicing concerns they publicly dismissed. Gain-of-function research...