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The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups: The 100 Most Terrifying Conspiracies of All Time
Jon E. Lewis explores the 100 most terrifying cover-ups of all time, from the invention of Jesus' divinity to Bush and Blair's real agenda in invading Iraq. The book provides each cover-up with a plausibility rating.
541 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
221 people are currently reading
1116 people want to read
About the author
Jon E. Lewis
130 books42 followersJon E. Lewis is a historian and writer, whose books on history and military history are sold worldwide. He is also editor of many The Mammoth Book of anthologies, including the bestselling On the Edge and Endurance and Adventure.
He holds graduate and postgraduate degrees in history. His work has appeared in New Statesman, the Independent, Time Out and the Guardian. He lives in Herefordshire with his partner and children.
From: Constable & Robinson
He holds graduate and postgraduate degrees in history. His work has appeared in New Statesman, the Independent, Time Out and the Guardian. He lives in Herefordshire with his partner and children.
From: Constable & Robinson
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews
June 18, 2009
I have a long held fascination for conspiracy theories although I must say that I don't actually believe most of them! This book collects masses of the major conspiracies and discusses them utilising a lot of publicly available information and comment. the book is well written for this type, it is often informative and in my opinion incredibly funny in places. If you have even a passing interest in conspiracy theory you should check it out. The chapter on Montauk was just hilarious. OK so are there any stories in the book that hold a grain of truth in my opinion? Yes there are, notably the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Waco Siege. As a child I used to be taken in by all the alien abduction stories and UFO sightings, now I'm definitely not sure. I mean just think for a moment, we are now in an age where most of the population have a camera on their mobile phone, so why are there hardly any new UFO photos? Anyway it's time for me to go now I have a dinner appointment in a secret moonbase constructed from the Titanic with Elvis Presley, Adolf Hitler, Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe:-)
January 2, 2013
As long as you don't take this too seriously, this is a very entertaining A-Z of all the major cover-ups and conspiracies. The world is apparently full of aliend, secret societies after world-domination, CIA/FBI plots and assassinations, and our own Royal Family are allegedly 12' tall lizard aliens in human disguise. A lot of the topics I'd never heard of before, some tempted me into looking for more info, but on the whole I read the book with tongue firmly in cheek.
September 19, 2009
Covers everything: alien abductions, JFK, Princess Diana, Roswell, secret societies, 9-11... This book lays out the evidence and then ranks the conspiracy on a scale of 10 (probably true) to 0 (no, the British Royal Family are not actually giant lizards biding their time to take over the earth). Great for a long plane ride!
April 23, 2018
Does what it says on the tin.
February 26, 2019
Found this book interesting, although I got bored of some of the conspiracies, as well I felt like I had to force my way through it
July 2, 2019
Great poop book! Csnt wait for my next bathroom book!
December 5, 2025
Winter afternoons in Kolkata slip in quietly, pale gold light sliding across the cracked balconies of South Calcutta apartments, the air cool enough for a shawl but still laced with the smell of steaming khichuri from the kitchen. You sit by the window with the ceiling fan off for once, a steel tumbler of steaming tea balanced on the sill, and open a true-crime book that feels exactly right for this hour when the city slows down and the past feels close enough to touch.
And there’s a particular pleasure in picking up Jon E. Lewis’s ‘The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups’ on such an afternoon. And it’s not exactly the pleasure of “learning the truth,” because honestly, what even ‘is’ truth once you’ve waded through a hundred conspiracies in a row?
It’s more like walking into a house lined with mirrors, each one showing you a version of the world where the shadows are a little longer, the official statements sound a little thinner, and history itself keeps side-eyeing you.
Lewis doesn’t write like a man trying to convert you; he writes like a man who has spent too many nights falling down rabbit holes and wants company.
The book is “mammoth” not only in page count but also in vibe—sprawling, messy, breathless, like a friend who says, “Okay, hear me out,” and you know immediately that reason has left the building. Except Lewis keeps surprisingly close to documented events, witness accounts, declassified files, and that jittery zone where official narratives begin to look slightly undercooked.
The postmodern joy of this book lies in its refusal to give you a stable center. You’re constantly being tugged between the recorded, the suppressed, the whispered, and the impossible.
And because Lewis structures each conspiracy like a compact narrative—crisp, punchy, oddly intimate—you find yourself experiencing history not as a timeline but as a fractal: forked, glitching, shimmering with possibilities. Every chapter feels like peeling wallpaper off a room you thought you knew, only to discover a second wall beneath it, and then a third, and then something that looks suspiciously like a secret door.
The book covers everything from political assassinations to vanished civilizations, from MK-Ultra to UFO encounters, from corporate skulduggery to church secrets, and Lewis maintains a tone that teeters on the edge between the scholarly and the cheeky. It’s not dry, not credulous, not mocking—more like wading into a swamp with a good pair of boots and just enough skepticism to survive the creatures lurking under the water. Which, metaphorically speaking, is how one should encounter any conspiracy literature: half open-minded, half “bro, relax.”
The best part? Lewis has no interest in being The Oracle. He often frames events through contradictions — official versions versus leaks, eyewitness accounts versus redacted reports, history books versus fringe researchers. He wants readers to see how stories mutate, how power edits, how memory resists, how archives lie by omission.
There’s something beautifully postmodern about that: the recognition that history is less a monolith and more a palimpsest written over a hundred times, with the earlier layers still bleeding through.
And honestly, the pacing is wild. You jump from the moon landing to JFK to the Illuminati to Big Pharma to Princess Diana’s crash — it’s like riding a conspiracy-themed roller coaster designed by someone who definitely drank too much coffee.
But the speed also mirrors how people actually encounter conspiracies in the age of the internet: one hyperlink, one late-night video, one “wait, what?” at a time. Lewis’s structure mimics the digital consciousness of our era long before social media turned conspiracy theorizing into a hobby performed between lipstick tutorials and cooking videos.
What keeps the book from collapsing under its own intensity is Lewis’s narrative restraint. He doesn’t go full tinfoil-hat-mode; he also doesn’t turn into a skeptic-snark-machine. He walks this deliciously ambiguous line.
There are moments where he nudges you to question state power, institutional authority, media motives — and moments where he gently reminds you that humans are meaning-making machines who connect dots that were never meant to touch. The dance between paranoia and pattern recognition becomes the real plot.
And somewhere in this dance, the book becomes unexpectedly emotional. Many conspiracies aren’t about aliens or secret societies at all — they’re about grief.
A leader dies. A plane crashes. A movement collapses. A scientific discovery is suppressed. Conspiracy theories rush in not because people are gullible but because people hate randomness. They cannot stand the idea of meaningless tragedy. They prefer malevolence to chaos, a villain to a void.
Lewis highlights this again and again: how conspiracy theories are often just coping mechanisms wearing trench coats.
Reading the book today, in a world where misinformation spreads like monsoon humidity and every WhatsApp group has at least one uncle who sends “forwarded as received” with religious fervour, you realize how prophetic Lewis was. He wasn’t simply cataloguing conspiracies — he was tracing the psychology behind them.
The human hunger for alternatives to official stories. The thrill of forbidden knowledge. The way power structures create their own shadows. The way doubt becomes a kind of literacy.
And because Lewis includes conspiracies that were later proven ‘‘true’’, the book complicates the easy dismissiveness people sometimes bring to the genre. Governments ‘have’ lied. Corporations ‘have’ covered up harm. Intelligence agencies ‘have’ run wild experiments.
History is full of “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be conspiracy facts. That’s what gives the book its intoxicating edge: you’re constantly balancing between the plausible and the absurd, the documented and the dreamlike, the known and the unknowable.
In a weird way, ‘The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups’ becomes less about the conspiracies themselves and more about the texture of uncertainty. It trains your brain to sit comfortably in ambiguity — very postmodern, very “the center cannot hold,” very “reality is a collage, not a photograph.”
The pleasure of reading it is the pleasure of losing your footing, just enough to feel alive.
And yes, some entries are absolutely bonkers. Some feel like they escaped from late-night radio. Some feel heartbreakingly real. Some read like failed sci-fi pitches. But that’s the charm: the book treats them all with equal curiosity, like artifacts in a museum of human anxiety and imagination.
By the end, you’re not paranoid — you’re reflective. You start seeing conspiracies less as threats and more as symptoms of eras. Mirrors of collective fears. Codes embedded in the margins of culture.
And maybe, on a quiet evening, you’ll find yourself rereading a chapter and thinking, “Okay but what if…?”
And that’s the book’s real success: it doesn’t want believers. It wants thinkers. Restless, skeptical, playful thinkers.
And maybe also people who enjoy a good late-night existential spiral. But in the fun way.
Recommended.
And there’s a particular pleasure in picking up Jon E. Lewis’s ‘The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups’ on such an afternoon. And it’s not exactly the pleasure of “learning the truth,” because honestly, what even ‘is’ truth once you’ve waded through a hundred conspiracies in a row?
It’s more like walking into a house lined with mirrors, each one showing you a version of the world where the shadows are a little longer, the official statements sound a little thinner, and history itself keeps side-eyeing you.
Lewis doesn’t write like a man trying to convert you; he writes like a man who has spent too many nights falling down rabbit holes and wants company.
The book is “mammoth” not only in page count but also in vibe—sprawling, messy, breathless, like a friend who says, “Okay, hear me out,” and you know immediately that reason has left the building. Except Lewis keeps surprisingly close to documented events, witness accounts, declassified files, and that jittery zone where official narratives begin to look slightly undercooked.
The postmodern joy of this book lies in its refusal to give you a stable center. You’re constantly being tugged between the recorded, the suppressed, the whispered, and the impossible.
And because Lewis structures each conspiracy like a compact narrative—crisp, punchy, oddly intimate—you find yourself experiencing history not as a timeline but as a fractal: forked, glitching, shimmering with possibilities. Every chapter feels like peeling wallpaper off a room you thought you knew, only to discover a second wall beneath it, and then a third, and then something that looks suspiciously like a secret door.
The book covers everything from political assassinations to vanished civilizations, from MK-Ultra to UFO encounters, from corporate skulduggery to church secrets, and Lewis maintains a tone that teeters on the edge between the scholarly and the cheeky. It’s not dry, not credulous, not mocking—more like wading into a swamp with a good pair of boots and just enough skepticism to survive the creatures lurking under the water. Which, metaphorically speaking, is how one should encounter any conspiracy literature: half open-minded, half “bro, relax.”
The best part? Lewis has no interest in being The Oracle. He often frames events through contradictions — official versions versus leaks, eyewitness accounts versus redacted reports, history books versus fringe researchers. He wants readers to see how stories mutate, how power edits, how memory resists, how archives lie by omission.
There’s something beautifully postmodern about that: the recognition that history is less a monolith and more a palimpsest written over a hundred times, with the earlier layers still bleeding through.
And honestly, the pacing is wild. You jump from the moon landing to JFK to the Illuminati to Big Pharma to Princess Diana’s crash — it’s like riding a conspiracy-themed roller coaster designed by someone who definitely drank too much coffee.
But the speed also mirrors how people actually encounter conspiracies in the age of the internet: one hyperlink, one late-night video, one “wait, what?” at a time. Lewis’s structure mimics the digital consciousness of our era long before social media turned conspiracy theorizing into a hobby performed between lipstick tutorials and cooking videos.
What keeps the book from collapsing under its own intensity is Lewis’s narrative restraint. He doesn’t go full tinfoil-hat-mode; he also doesn’t turn into a skeptic-snark-machine. He walks this deliciously ambiguous line.
There are moments where he nudges you to question state power, institutional authority, media motives — and moments where he gently reminds you that humans are meaning-making machines who connect dots that were never meant to touch. The dance between paranoia and pattern recognition becomes the real plot.
And somewhere in this dance, the book becomes unexpectedly emotional. Many conspiracies aren’t about aliens or secret societies at all — they’re about grief.
A leader dies. A plane crashes. A movement collapses. A scientific discovery is suppressed. Conspiracy theories rush in not because people are gullible but because people hate randomness. They cannot stand the idea of meaningless tragedy. They prefer malevolence to chaos, a villain to a void.
Lewis highlights this again and again: how conspiracy theories are often just coping mechanisms wearing trench coats.
Reading the book today, in a world where misinformation spreads like monsoon humidity and every WhatsApp group has at least one uncle who sends “forwarded as received” with religious fervour, you realize how prophetic Lewis was. He wasn’t simply cataloguing conspiracies — he was tracing the psychology behind them.
The human hunger for alternatives to official stories. The thrill of forbidden knowledge. The way power structures create their own shadows. The way doubt becomes a kind of literacy.
And because Lewis includes conspiracies that were later proven ‘‘true’’, the book complicates the easy dismissiveness people sometimes bring to the genre. Governments ‘have’ lied. Corporations ‘have’ covered up harm. Intelligence agencies ‘have’ run wild experiments.
History is full of “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be conspiracy facts. That’s what gives the book its intoxicating edge: you’re constantly balancing between the plausible and the absurd, the documented and the dreamlike, the known and the unknowable.
In a weird way, ‘The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups’ becomes less about the conspiracies themselves and more about the texture of uncertainty. It trains your brain to sit comfortably in ambiguity — very postmodern, very “the center cannot hold,” very “reality is a collage, not a photograph.”
The pleasure of reading it is the pleasure of losing your footing, just enough to feel alive.
And yes, some entries are absolutely bonkers. Some feel like they escaped from late-night radio. Some feel heartbreakingly real. Some read like failed sci-fi pitches. But that’s the charm: the book treats them all with equal curiosity, like artifacts in a museum of human anxiety and imagination.
By the end, you’re not paranoid — you’re reflective. You start seeing conspiracies less as threats and more as symptoms of eras. Mirrors of collective fears. Codes embedded in the margins of culture.
And maybe, on a quiet evening, you’ll find yourself rereading a chapter and thinking, “Okay but what if…?”
And that’s the book’s real success: it doesn’t want believers. It wants thinkers. Restless, skeptical, playful thinkers.
And maybe also people who enjoy a good late-night existential spiral. But in the fun way.
Recommended.
February 8, 2018
Heard on audiobook. Mostly brief synopses of conspiracies that range from the reasonably plausible to the bat-s&@t crazy. There were some I’d never heard of & a few new ideas.
March 27, 2018
I like conspiracies when I can get the condensed version. I want the quick notes of them so I can just appease my curiousness about them. This book definitely gives the quick notes on these. It even gives a nice "Alert Level" rating at the end of each to give a suggestion on how potentially threatening it could be. For these, this book was great.
What wasn't so great was all the quick assumptions that were the writers views on the validity of the threat that took up, in some cases, more space than the conspiracy itself. Many conspiracies also seemed to be repeats under a new name and the writer clearly believes that a select few persons, which he names, is behind them all. The other thing that bugged me was the small, tight typeset that was used.
Not a bad read, not great either.
What wasn't so great was all the quick assumptions that were the writers views on the validity of the threat that took up, in some cases, more space than the conspiracy itself. Many conspiracies also seemed to be repeats under a new name and the writer clearly believes that a select few persons, which he names, is behind them all. The other thing that bugged me was the small, tight typeset that was used.
Not a bad read, not great either.
March 18, 2013
I do like expanding my knowledge of things to include what cover-ups and conspiracies there are around accepted versions of historical events. This book is good for a one or two page summary on the background of such conspiracies and then provides a credibility rating, of which you then provide your own credibility as often the ones that seem most credible are the ones with the lowest credibility mark by Lewis but the ones that are least credible are the ones he gives most praise.
The benefit to this book is that it is an index of cover-ups however if you already had that list you would be just as safe googling for background information.
The benefit to this book is that it is an index of cover-ups however if you already had that list you would be just as safe googling for background information.
January 19, 2016
Any book with the word "conspiracy" on the title naturally looks bad. But this book provides a fine line between whether or not the fish is aware that it's wet. There's no way a reader could take the conclusions seriously only if he/she reads the authenticity gauge at the end of each theory by heart. And it's not even a coincidence that I'm watching The Manchurian Candidate on TV right now. lol. But I must say that the Oxfordian theorists shouldn't be throwing tantrums at the Marlovians when Shakespeare indeed bore an uncanny resemblance with Christopher Marlowe by the tip of the nose (sarcastic laugh).
March 7, 2019
There wasn't really a plot for my book which I loved. It was mini conspiracies all in one book. It had many well-known ones and ones that I didn’t know. I liked the aspect of having many different ones which to made me made the book easy to read. Also, I enjoyed how short mostly every conspiracy were. One major thing I didn’t like as much is that there was a rating system. I was lukewarm on the idea. It was a cool thing to have but at the same time for me, it just created more questions. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes true crime or conspiracies.
October 20, 2013
This book is ideal for an introduction to conspiracy theory. Entries are concise...about two - five pages. Each is followed by a bibliography of books for further reading about those theories of interest. Also included are occasional documents relative to the conspiracy...an unique feature. One drawback is that the author makes sardonic comments. It frequently appears that he is saying "Ha, ha...wink,wink" about the issue. I found this quite puerile.
July 9, 2017
This was awesome! Not only was the author as accurate as he could be, he also was really funny. I also like the conspiracy theories themselves and how ridiculous they are. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to have a quick laugh and have their BS radar built-up.
December 29, 2010
So.Much.Fun.
April 24, 2012
I think that some people will believe anything, but there are some you have to question and a person should make up his or her own mind up.
July 7, 2014
This book tries to compile some of the best conspiracy theories. Haven't found anything that I hadn't read before.
October 8, 2014
Lots of conspiracy theories
November 2, 2015
There are some loony people out there.
November 10, 2016
Quite entertaining. Brief overview of several conspiracy theories, some of them backed up by documents and are ranked by probability.
December 15, 2022
Some of these are very familiar, some brand new (to me), but while some are certainly on serious topics, inevitably some are wacky enough to raise an eyebrow, scoff or chuckle. Or all. Fun times, if one overlooks the plausible possibility that far too many could be true. I know what people say about "conspiracy theories" and I'm not one to easily buy in to many at all, but I think the term is misunderstood, and that's been an intentional effort on the part of many, to discredit whomever puts forth a theory not welcome, popular or liked. People who buy into conspiracy theories are quacks, loons, etc., right? Bullshit. Many, yes. Many of these theories, yes. But the FACT is there have always been conspiracy theories of various sorts -- some real life, daily, others seemingly goofy such as UFOs -- until the US military finally admitted this past year that they had decades of research and evidence confirming such things. I don't find interest in that topic, but I'd love the doubters, skeptics and critics to please tell me how the whole Nixon/Kissinger thing culminating in Watergate wasn't a conspiracy theory -- on the part of some, at least. And that's not even going into real, actual conspiracies involving just them, such as their alleged deals made to get Nixon elected by staying in the Vietnam conflict, as described by many including the late Christopher Hitchens in a book on Kissinger. There are a ton of conspiracy theories that have elements of truth to full total truth while there are obvious cases of obsessive lunacy as well. Jekyll Island, Deer Island, the Lusitania, and on and on. So this book? Fun. Some crazy stuff, some plausible stuff, but a good read in all. One has to retain some perspective though, IMO. Recommended.
November 17, 2017
The more I read this book the more stupid I felt.
It seems that people just make up random garbage about random things and title it conspiracy.
A lot of the sections started like we were already in the middle of it. Like we should just already know the whole theory.
There was one sentence that stuck with me. "America it seems was full of lone nuts who somehow managed to pull off the assassinations of great men." I think that line is more compelling than all of these made up stories.
It seems that people just make up random garbage about random things and title it conspiracy.
A lot of the sections started like we were already in the middle of it. Like we should just already know the whole theory.
There was one sentence that stuck with me. "America it seems was full of lone nuts who somehow managed to pull off the assassinations of great men." I think that line is more compelling than all of these made up stories.
September 3, 2018
Whether you believe in all conspiracy theories, believe in no conspiracy theories, or are open minded, this book is for you. The book presents conspiracy theories without really corroborating, validating, or proving them. Nor does it disprove them. It simply presents them and allows you to decide.
October 29, 2021
There is some really eye opening conspiracy theories to keep your mind ticking over,I'm guilty of getting infatuated with conspiracy theories,I love looking at things from a different angle and some I always thought about for myself.
Definitely worth reading if your interested in the other side to the standard story.
Definitely worth reading if your interested in the other side to the standard story.
June 1, 2023
Despite what it says on the cover, this is quite a sensible and logical book examing all sorts of conspiracy theories. For example, the death of Princess Di. It examined all theories including a murder plot by the Royal family, but the final conclusions were that she was killed by a drunk driver and she would have probably survived if she had worn her seatbelt. Really interesting read all round.
November 28, 2019
A fairly decent read on various conspiracy theories...though it is very puzzling how the author left out some of the more famous/infamous conspiracy theories like the Rothschilds, Climate Change, Georgia Guidestones, Scientology......regardless some good info here.
December 31, 2019
Unlike it’s title, there is nothing particular in this book. You can use the book as an introduction for many cover-ups/ conspiracy theories. However some major topics have been avoided intentionally/ unintentionally. World wide web holds more dedicated websites with larger content than this book.
March 2, 2022
I did really enjoy this collection, though nearing the end my interest did start to waver so I started picking and choosing the chapters to read, whereas I started off reading it all. Overall, really interesting theories/cover ups!
December 19, 2022
This book looked great and once I started reading it I realized the information on each of the cases was really limited and some of them were not all that interesting but some of the book still had interesting information.
February 22, 2025
Thought-provoking and enthralling. Much research and work was put forth into this masterpiece. Definitely a long read, not something to consume all at once. I found it easier to read a few sections, put away for awhile and later come back. I am always a sucker for conspiracy theories.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 51 reviews