Apocrypidia

What this is

This site does not tell you what is true.

It takes a claim that is circulating in public, and it follows that claim backwards — through everyone who repeated it, to whatever sits underneath. Sometimes that is a document you can go and read. Sometimes it is a sealed file nobody outside a courtroom has seen. Sometimes the trail simply stops, and there is nothing under the claim at all.

All three of those are shown, in the same way, on the same page. Where sources contradict each other, both are displayed at their own weight. Nothing is omitted for being inconvenient, and nothing is resolved on your behalf.

What the numbers mean

Every number on this site measures how far a claim can be followed. It does not measure whether the claim is true.

A claim scoring 0.90 is not more likely to be correct than one scoring 0.10. It is better attested — you can trace it further, through more hands, to something more solid. A well-sourced claim can still be wrong, and a claim with nothing behind it can still turn out to be right.

A low number means “untraceable,” never “false.” That distinction is the whole point of the site, and it is the easiest thing here to misread.

How to read a chain

Pages descend. The claim as it circulates sits at the top; the original source, if there is one, sits at the bottom. You read downward. The arrows point upward, because that is the direction the words actually travelled — out of a document, into a hearing, into a broadcast, into circulation.

The two colours

Colour says which stream a claim travelled in. It never says which is better. This is what lets a well-attested independent claim and a badly-attested institutional one sit side by side without the page quietly taking a side.

Where chains end

Four ways a trail can stop. Each is drawn as an arc beneath the last station, and each sets the ceiling for everything above it.

Most floors cannot be clicked, and that is not a defect. A sealed autopsy report has no link because it is sealed. An unnamed source has no link because they are unnamed. Where a link does appear, it means the bottom of that chain is a document you can open yourself — and where a document is public but sits behind a court system’s fee, the page says so and tells you where to ask for it.

How this is made

Claims are collected from public broadcasts, court filings, hearing records and reporting, then traced backwards source by source. Everything is kept at the point of collection and filtered later, so that a claim is never dropped for sounding implausible before its chain has been followed.

This work uses AI assistance to read and index a corpus far larger than one person could scan by hand. That is a real limitation and it is stated here rather than buried: machine reading makes mistakes, and this site is built by one person.

Two consequences are visible on the pages themselves. Quoted speech drawn from automated transcripts is marked as such, so you can see which words have been checked against an original and which have not. And where a claim’s sources are still being worked through, the page says so on its face rather than presenting an incomplete trail as a finished one.

The correct response to anything here is not to believe it. It is to follow the chain and see whether it holds.

The method, stated once

Every attestation number on the site is produced the same way, from two inputs: what stops you at the bottom of the chain, and whether the words survived the trip. This is the only place on the site that asserts anything, and it asserts only this.

Each altered hop costs a flat 0.20 off the ceiling, regardless of how much was lost at that hop. That is a blunt instrument and is stated as one, rather than dressed up as a calculation. A chain that ends well but was reworded on the way up can therefore score below a chain that ends worse but was carried verbatim.

Every quoted passage on every page carries one of three marks, so that you can see which words have been checked against an original and which have not:

• Document · verbatim The words as they appear in the document itself, obtained through a named carrier.
• As reported A reporter’s account of what a document, ruling or witness said. The words are the reporter’s.
• Transcript · unchecked Spoken words drawn from a broadcast, a live blog or an automated transcript, not yet checked against the court record.

Every station has an address. Every source has a number, a live link, and an archived copy where one exists. A page that changes says so in its revisions.

Contents

More chains in preparation — the wound record · the disputed microphone · discontinued bullet-lead analysis

Revisions

• 2026-09-04 · v1Shipped. Masthead, glossary, the two colours, the four terminations, one chain (ballistics).
• 2026-09-04 · v1.1“Position” defined concretely. “Carrier” added. Method section added: ceiling table (0.95 / 0.90 / 0.50 / 0.20, ruled 2026-09-04), flat deduction, quote-provenance marks. This list added.