The Truth Is WeirderHome

Sources

Every episode of The Truth Is Weirder is fact-checked before it airs. Below is the full list of sources and evidence behind each episode, drawn from our internal accuracy reports. Where a claim is genuinely contested, we say so on the show.

Ep 1: Frozen in Time? (Pompeii)

  • Pliny the Younger, two letters to the historian Tacitus (Letters 6.16 and 6.20, c. 107 CE), the eyewitness account of the eruption
  • Giuseppe Fiorelli's plaster-cast technique, first documented 5 February 1863
  • Pompeii Sites / Pompeii Archaeological Park (official site), for the plaster casts, the 2018 Regio V charcoal-inscription press release (dated around 17 October), and the official statement supporting the traditional August date
  • USGS (United States Geological Survey), definition of a "Plinian" eruption, named after Pliny
  • PMC / US National Institutes of Health (NIH)
  • Smithsonian
  • A 2022 scholarly monograph on the eruption date arguing that August has the strongest written backing (Foss)

Ep 2: Put the Horns Away (Viking Helmets)

  • National Museum of Denmark, on the absence of any horned Viking war helmet in the archaeological record
  • British Museum
  • Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, for the Gjermundbu helmet (found 1943 at Gjermundbu, Ringerike, Norway; dated c. 950 to 975 AD; the only near-complete Viking-age helmet)
  • Smithsonian / Science coverage of the Veksø radiocarbon dating
  • Wikipedia
  • The scholarly essay "The Invention of the Viking Horned Helmet" (Roberta Frank)
  • Carl Emil Doepler, costume designer for Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" at the 1876 Bayreuth premiere, widely credited with popularising the horned-Viking image
  • The Veksø helmets, National Museum of Denmark, a ceremonial Bronze-Age pair from a bog on Zealand, radiocarbon dated c. 857 to 907 BC

Ep 3: Little Boney: Was Napoleon Actually Tiny?

  • Britannica
  • History.com
  • HowStuffWorks
  • National Geographic
  • The Public Domain Review ("Little Boney")
  • National Portrait Gallery, Gillray Napoleon collection
  • Encyclopedia.com
  • Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University (BYU)
  • HistoryHit
  • The contemporary French record of "5 pieds 2 pouces," attributed to Napoleon's household at his death on Saint Helena in 1821, including his physician Antommarchi (the French pouce being about 2.7 cm versus the British inch of 2.54 cm, converting to roughly 5 ft 6 to 5 ft 7)
  • James Gillray, British caricaturist, "Little Boney" cartoons from around 1803

Ep 4: Can You Really See the Great Wall From Space?

  • UNESCO World Heritage and Britannica, for the wall itself
  • BBC Sky at Night Magazine (the wall is only about 9 m wide at its widest and the same colour as the surrounding land)
  • Scientific American (the "single human hair from a few kilometres away" analogy)
  • NASA
  • Snopes
  • HowStuffWorks
  • Live Science / Space.com
  • Wikipedia, "Artificial structures visible from space"
  • Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut (Shenzhou 5, October 2003), who reported he could not see the Great Wall
  • An ESA astronaut aboard the ISS (Alexander Gerst), who said naked-eye viewing was "next to impossible," managing it only with an 800 mm telephoto lens
  • Ripley's Believe It or Not! feature (1932) and Richard Halliburton's "Second Book of Marvels" (1938), both printing the "visible from space / the Moon" claim before spaceflight
  • A 1754 letter by William Stukeley, the earliest traced version of the claim

Ep 5: Thumbs Down: Did It Really Mean Kill Him?

  • Wikipedia: "Pollice verso," "Pollice Verso (Gérôme)," and "Gladiator"
  • Penelope / University of Chicago, Encyclopaedia Romana
  • The American Journal of Philology, "Pollice Verso" (vol. 13, 1892), a real 1890s scholarly dispute over the gesture
  • Time magazine
  • UNRV Roman History
  • Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Phoenix Art Museum
  • Artnet News
  • romanempiretimes.com and spokenpast.com
  • Juvenal, "Satires" (c. early 2nd century AD), which refers to the crowd turning a thumb ("verso pollice") but never says which way
  • Pliny the Elder, who mentions "pressing thumbs" ("pollices premere") as a gesture of goodwill
  • Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting "Pollice Verso," which fixed the modern thumbs-down image
  • Modern scholarship (the "hidden thumb equals mercy" reading and the supporting Roman appliqué medallion from Nîmes, southern France), reported via Time, romanempiretimes.com and spokenpast.com

Ep 6: The Flat-Earth Prank: Who Really Made It Up?

  • Wikipedia: "Myth of the flat Earth," "Inventing the Flat Earth," "De sphaera mundi," and "Earth's circumference"
  • History.com
  • Ripley's
  • The Vatican Observatory
  • Haverford College (historian Darin Hayton)
  • The American Physical Society
  • IFLScience
  • Encyclopedia.com
  • History for Atheists
  • Jeffrey Burton Russell, "Inventing the Flat Earth" (1991), which found only about five genuine medieval flat-earthers
  • Eratosthenes (c. 240 BC), who measured the Earth's size using a stick and shadow angles between two cities
  • Bede, who wrote of a spherical Earth
  • Sacrobosco, "De sphaera mundi" / "On the Sphere of the World" (c. 1230), the standard university astronomy textbook for about 400 years
  • Washington Irving, "A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus" (1828), which invented the flat-Earth confrontation scene
  • The 19th-century "conflict thesis" (referenced in spirit as the reason the myth spread, its authors deliberately not named in the script)

Ep 7: The Great Unwashed: Did Nobody in the Middle Ages Wash?

  • World History Encyclopedia (Medieval Hygiene)
  • Medievalists.net
  • Resilience.org
  • National Geographic ("handwashing power play")
  • Cleveland Museum of Art ("The Art of Handwashing")
  • Brewminate ("When Cleanliness Was Dangerous")
  • GLINT Open Access ("Debunking a Modern Myth")
  • JSTOR Daily
  • Perini Journal
  • Today I Found Out
  • Britannica and Wikipedia ("Middle Ages," "Public bathing")
  • Tastes of History ("Dispelling Some Myths")
  • Journal of Military and Veterans' Health (JMVH), on the history of syphilis
  • Erasmus of Rotterdam, writing in the 1520s, who recorded that the bathhouses near where he lived nearly all closed within about 25 years

Ep 8: Even Einstein Flunked: The Nicest Lie in School

  • Time magazine ("20 Things You Need to Know About Einstein")
  • Snopes
  • todayifoundout.com
  • theeconomyofmeaning.com
  • Wikipedia ("Albert Einstein")
  • Britannica
  • Mental Floss
  • Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography (cited via Time)
  • Einstein's own 1935 reply to a Ripley's clipping, "I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus," documented by Time magazine and biographers, with the quote text also recorded in quotation collections
  • The documented reversal of the 1 to 6 grading scale at Einstein's Swiss school in Aarau (around 1896), the likely origin of the misread report card

Ep 9: The Pharaoh's Curse: Who Actually Died?

  • Wikipedia (Howard Carter; 5th Earl of Carnarvon)
  • History.com
  • The Lancet ("The death of Lord Carnarvon"; and a letter on Aspergillus mould)
  • The British Medical Journal (BMJ), 2002 historical cohort study "The mummy's curse" (Monash University, Australia), which found no significant difference in survival for those exposed to the tomb
  • HowStuffWorks
  • National Geographic ("King Tut Curse Caused by Tomb Toxins?")
  • Britannica
  • Electric Literature ("Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Helped Invent the Curse of the Mummy")
  • All About History
  • Big Think
  • TheCollector
  • Howard Carter's discovery of the intact tomb in November 1922 (funded by Lord Carnarvon) and his "wonderful things" line
  • Arthur Conan Doyle's "elementals" comments, reported in the press (Daily Express, April 1923)

Ep 10: Wrong Fire: The Salem Witches Weren't Burned

  • Britannica
  • History.com
  • Smithsonian Magazine
  • Snopes
  • HowStuffWorks
  • The Salem Witch Museum (including the Proctor's Ledge site)
  • The History of Massachusetts Blog
  • The University of Virginia Gallows Hill Project, which confirmed the real execution site as Proctor's Ledge in 2016 (memorial dedicated 2017)
  • Wikipedia ("Witch trials in England")
  • Records of the Salem Witch Trials (salem.lib.virginia.edu), the surviving 1692 court records, sentences and executions, none of which say "burned"
  • National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
  • americanhistorycentral.com
  • The 1692 court records themselves, including a witness reference to "the house below the hill" used to locate the site

Spotted something? Put us on trial.

We check every claim before it airs, but history is an argument, not a stone tablet. If you think we've got something wrong, if you can point us to a stronger source, or if you simply read the same evidence a different way, we want to hear it. That's the whole spirit of the show.

Send it through and we may take it up in series two, crediting the person who raised it. Good-faith challenges welcome from historians, teachers, and sharp-eyed kids alike.

Email a challenge or a different view →