The Conspiracy Podcast

An off-duty firefighter was on his way to spend the day with his brothers when he heard the news that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. What he chose to do next became one of the most enduring stories of that entire day. Sponsored and Produced by The Conspiracy Podcast Your Host, Eric Racheff To Donate to the Tunnel to Towers Foundation, please visit www.t2t.org Direct Channel Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5A3YsZkbstxMfUHHk4zb9t Direct Channel Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9-11-stories/id6811119815

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Part 4 of the 9/11 Series, this episode turns to the Pentagon, the hijackers themselves, and Osama bin Laden — three of the most examined and most disputed threads connected to September 11th. Hosts Eric , Sean , and Jorge begin with the official record on American Airlines Flight 77: the impact at 9:37 AM, the recovered flight data and cockpit voice recorders, and the DNA identification of everyone aboard. They then work through the specific questions that have followed the Pentagon attack for twenty-five years — the limited wreckage visible in early photographs, the size of the entry hole, the small number of security camera frames ever released, and Donald Rumsfeld's September 10th statement about $2.3 trillion in untracked Pentagon transactions. From there turn to the 19 hijackers themselves: how they were identified within days through passenger manifests and financial records, the intact passport recovered near the World Trade Center, reports that some hijackers were later identified alive by family members overseas, and the flying ability of Hani Hanjour, the pilot accused of executing the Pentagon's final approach. The episode closes on Osama bin Laden — his fatwas against the United States, his ties to the 1998 embassy bombings and the USS Cole, his connection to the CIA-backed mujahideen of the Soviet-Afghan War, and his own shifting public statements about September 11th in the years that followed. New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered," The Conspiracy Podcast's series marking the 25th anniversary of September 11th, release every Tuesday through September 28th. Follow on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Join the Patreon at patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast for early access and exclusive After Hours content.

He spent years warning that this exact building was still a target — and running drills nobody wanted to do because of it. When the moment actually came, everything he'd built paid off in ways nobody could have predicted. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

Two strangers on the same floor of the North Tower, ninety flights between them and the street below. What happened between the moment they found each other and the moment the building came down. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast The first two episodes of this series told the story of the September 11th attacks. This episode turns to what's still argued about the World Trade Center collapse twenty-five years later, examining the physical evidence, the official NIST investigation, and the theories that have circulated since 2001. Sean, Eric , and Jorge work through NIST's official findings on the collapse of the Twin Towers — how the aircraft impacts stripped away fireproofing, why the structural failure took the shape it did, and the engineering behind it. They also examine the specific claims that have defined 9/11 conspiracy theories for two decades: reports of molten metal found in the wreckage weeks after the collapse, the speed at which the towers came down, the free-fall acceleration debate, and whether NIST's own data holds up against them. The episode then turns to World Trade Center Building 7 — a 47-story skyscraper that was never struck by an aircraft and collapsed that evening regardless. Building 7's collapse remains one of the most debated open questions connected to 9/11. The hosts cover NIST's official explanation, the competing University of Alaska Fairbanks engineering study that challenges it, and developer Larry Silverstein's "pull it" comment from a 2002 PBS interview, weighing what he has said the phrase meant against how it's been interpreted by skeptics since. The episode closes on the financial side of that day — the World Trade Center lease Silverstein signed six weeks before the attacks, and the insurance settlement that followed, both frequently cited in 9/11 truth movement discussions. New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered," The Conspiracy Podcast's series marking the 25th anniversary of September 11th, release every Tuesday through September 28th. Follow on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Join the Patreon at patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast for early access and exclusive After Hours content.

She was the first officer in the city to radio in the attack — then spent her final hour guiding hundreds of people out of the South Tower before going back in one last time. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

For twenty-five years, one man spent his career warning the government about a threat almost nobody wanted to take seriously. Days before September 11th, he started a brand new job — one with an irony he couldn't have scripted himself. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Part two picks up right where "The Day" left off — both towers still standing, the country still trying to figure out what's happening. This episode finishes the story of September 11th, and it's a lot heavier than the headlines usually let it be. Eric, Sean and Jorge walk through the collapse of both towers minute by minute — what it actually felt like from inside, drawing on The Only Plane in the Sky, the oral history built entirely from witness accounts. But this episode isn't just about the worst parts of that morning. It's about Rick Rescorla, who ignored the "stay put" announcement and personally evacuated nearly 2,700 people from the South Tower while singing through a bullhorn, then went back in and never came out. It's about the 14 people who survived in Stairwell B because a Port Authority employee named Josephine Harris couldn't move fast — and accidentally saved everyone around her. It's about Welles Crowther, the Man in the Red Bandana, and the Coast Guard-led boatlift that moved half a million people off Manhattan by water in under nine hours, a bigger evacuation than Dunkirk. The episode also follows the chaos in Washington — Cheney in the White House bunker authorizing a shootdown order the 9/11 Commission itself later admitted has "conflicting evidence" about who actually approved it first, Ben Sliney grounding every plane in American airspace on his literal first day on the job, and the military confusion that left fighter jets 150 miles away when the Pentagon was hit. And it sets up what's coming next — the first mention of Building 7, the 47-story tower that collapsed without being hit by a plane, and a passport that survived a 500-mile-an-hour impact and a raging fire almost too cleanly to believe. This episode closes out the full account of September 11th before the series turns to what's still unresolved a quarter-century later. New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered" release every Tuesday through September 28th. Follow The Conspiracy Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Join the Patreon at patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast for early access and exclusive After Hours content

A flight attendant on American Flight 11 spent the last 23 minutes of her life on the phone, calmly telling American Airlines everything she could about the hijacking underway around her — including actual audio from that call. Part of the 9/11 Stories series from The Conspiracy Podcast, marking 25 years since the attacks.

This is the true story of Paige Farley-Hackel and Ruth and Juliana McCourt. In the pre-dawn dark at Logan Airport, two best friends say goodbye before boarding two different flights to the same reunion in California. A simple decision — a handful of frequent flyer miles — is the only thing that separates them that morning. What happens next unfolds across two towers, seventeen minutes apart.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Twenty-five years later, The Conspiracy Podcast is finally tackling it. "9/11: Unanswered" kicks off with the day itself — minute by minute, four flights, one morning that changed everything. It starts like any other Tuesday. Nineteen men move through four different airports — Portland, Boston, Newark, Washington Dulles — carrying box cutters and knives with blades under four inches, which was perfectly legal at the time. Ten of them get flagged by CAPPS, the era's passenger screening system, before they even board. Flagged, and let through anyway. Hosts Eric , Sean and Jorge pull apart exactly how that happened, working straight from the 9/11 Commission Report to keep the timeline accurate rather than relying on secondhand retellings. From there it's real time. Flight attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney calling it in from the air as it's happening. Daniel Lewin, a former Israeli special forces officer, trying to stop his own hijacker before anyone on the ground even knows what's unfolding. The first plane hits the North Tower and the world assumes it's an accident — until the second one hits live on television, and there's no more room for that assumption. Then the Pentagon. Then United 93, where the passengers find out, mid-flight, exactly what happened to the other three planes and make a decision most of them never get the chance to think twice about. The episode also follows President Bush's morning at a Florida elementary school — the seven minutes in that classroom people are still arguing about twenty-five years later — through Air Force One and into the address that ended up shaping the next two decades of American foreign policy. This one ran long. Long enough that the hosts split it into two parts rather than cut corners on any of it. Part 2 picks up exactly where this one leaves off. Later episodes in the series get into what's still unresolved after twenty-five years — the Commission's own gaps, the disputed collapse of Building 7, and the questions around the Pentagon that never fully went away. New episodes of "9/11: Unanswered" drop every Tuesday through September 28th. Patreon members get early access to every episode in the series plus the full, extended After Hours cut. www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast

This is 9/11: Unanswered. A new series walking through that day and everything that followed. Eight episodes. The timeline, the investigation, the questions that still don't have clean answers. Premieres August 25th on The Conspiracy Podcast. Follow on Spotify or Apple Podcasts to get alerted.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Join the boys as they trace Al-Qaeda's origins from the Soviet-Afghan War to the eve of September 11th, 2001. Hosts unpack how Osama bin Laden and Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam built Maktab al-Khidamat, the recruitment network that seeded al-Qaeda's formal founding in a Peshawar house in August 1988 — with just fifteen men on its original roster. The episode connects the dots most true crime and history podcasts miss: how the 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, quietly financed that attack before becoming the architect of 9/11 himself. Listeners get the full arc — bin Laden's betrayal by the Saudi monarchy during the Gulf War, his exile in Sudan, the alliance with the Taliban, the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole attack — plus a deep dive into the unsettling human details rarely covered elsewhere: the hijackers' bizarre flight school behavior (including an abandoned Cessna left on a Miami taxiway), documented drinking and strip club visits that contradict their professed extremism, and two eerie traffic stops — including one just two days before the attacks — that could have changed everything. The episode closes on the edge of history: September 10th, 2001, with nineteen men in place and no one yet knowing what the next morning would bring. This is essential setup for the show's upcoming four-part 9/11 25th anniversary series, launching later this month.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Most people, when they hear "World Trade Center," think of one date. But eight years before September 11th, the Twin Towers were already a target — and the man behind it wanted to bring down both buildings at once. On February 26, 1993, Ramzi Yousef detonated a truck bomb in the parking garage beneath the North Tower, hoping to topple it sideways into the South Tower and kill a quarter of a million people at lunchtime. He failed — but not by much. Six people died, over a thousand were injured, and roughly 50,000 people evacuated through smoke-filled stairwells in what was, at the time, the largest evacuation in American history. In this episode, Eric, Sean, and Jorge dig into the story almost nobody remembers: the co-conspirator who got caught because he wanted his $400 deposit back, the FBI informant whose secretly recorded tapes suggest the bombing could have been stopped, the now-debunked Iraq conspiracy theory that helped shape a war, and the bomb-maker who vanished into Baghdad and has never been found. They also trace the single $660 wire transfer that connects this attack to Yousef's uncle — a man named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who would return eight years later to finish what his nephew started. This is Episode 163, and the official start of the show's lead-in to the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Patreon members get early access to every episode in this series, plus exclusive bonus content not available anywhere else.

www.patreon.com/theconspiracypodcast Once the gold standard of American aviation, Boeing built its reputation on a simple promise: "If it's not Boeing, I'm not going." In this compilation, the guys trace how that promise unraveled — from the Wright Brothers' first 120-foot flight in 1903 to a company now facing federal fraud charges, congressional testimony, and a body count that refuses to stay in the "coincidence" column. The crew digs into Boeing's merger with McDonnell Douglas and the culture shift that followed, the 737 MAX's MCAS system and the two crashes that grounded a fleet worldwide, and the DOJ settlement that left victims' families fighting over scraps while executives walked away with golden parachutes. Then there's the door. The infamous mid-air blowout on an Alaska Airlines flight that sent the story right back into the headlines — and right back to a familiar name. At the center of it all is John Barnett, a 28-year Boeing quality inspector turned whistleblower, found dead in his truck mid-testimony against the company he spent decades defending. Add in a second whistleblower, Joshua Dean, gone under equally strange circumstances just weeks later, and the guys lay out every angle — corporate negligence, cover-up, and yes, the theory that somebody wanted these men silenced for good. Is this simply a case of a company too big to face real consequences? Or is something darker keeping the truth grounded? Buckle up — literally — for this one. Originally recorded in two parts in August 2024.

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.