Everything on this website is made up.
They Buried is a satirical newspaper. It is not a news organisation. It has never reported anything. Every article, byline, photograph, engraving, source, quotation, document, statistic, correction, obituary, forecast, horoscope, cartoon, and reader letter on this site was invented for entertainment.
- None of the reporters exist. The masthead is a cast of fictional characters. Their disclosures, records, and correction counts are part of the fiction.
- None of the sources exist. Where a story lists who we spoke to, nobody was spoken to. The names are invented.
- None of the documents exist. The Vault is a fictional archive. Every code, provenance note, and excerpt in it was written for this site.
- None of the events happened. The premise of this newspaper is a fictional world in which conspiracy theories are true. Ours is not that world.
- Real names are used fictitiously. Where a real public figure, agency, company, or place is mentioned, the words and actions attributed to them are invented and did not occur.
- Nothing here is advice. Not medical, legal, financial, scientific, historical, or navigational. Do not act on anything you read here.
If you found this site through a search engine or a shared link and are not sure whether it is real: it is not. It is a joke, told at length and with a straight face.
What this is
They Buried is a satirical newspaper with a single, straight-faced premise: it is published in a world where the conspiracy theories are all true, and it covers that world the way a serious daily would cover ours — with datelines, named sources, documents, corrections, a right of reply, and a wall between news and opinion.
The joke is not that conspiracy theorists are stupid. The joke is what happens when you apply real journalistic discipline to unreal material: you get a paper that runs a front-page investigation into the Anunnaki's Second Dynasty mining contracts, and then, three columns over, a correction apologising for having misstated the orbital period of Nibiru by four years, with an explanation of how the error got past two editors.
Why it looks like this
Because the form is the joke. A satirical site that looks like a satirical site has nothing to push against. So this one has a masthead with twenty-two named people and their disclosures; a document vault with chains of custody; a corrections archive with no paywall; a public editor whose job is to attack this newspaper in its own pages; a standing series about the things we investigated and could not stand up; and a metrics page that publishes our numbers whether or not they flatter us.
Every one of those is a real feature of good journalism. Every one of them is, here, entirely fictional.
What it is not
It is not a hoax site. It does not try to be mistaken for real. The footer of every page says so, this page says so at length, and every page carries machine-readable structured data that labels it satire and fiction, so that a search engine or an answer engine that quotes it can say what it is. Every page carries machine-readable structured data that labels it satire and fiction, so that a search engine or an answer engine that finds it can say what it is; the About page is one link from everywhere.
It is not aimed at anyone. Real public figures appear the way they appear in any satire — briefly, absurdly, and doing things they have never done. Nothing here is a claim about a real person.
It is not advice. Please do not make any decision, about anything, on the basis of anything on this website.
Who made it
They Buried was built as a single project: a complete newspaper — engine, design, typography, illustration, and archive — written from scratch. The engravings are generated in code from each story's name; there is not a single photograph on the site. The type is set in Playfair Display, Newsreader, Archivo, and IBM Plex Mono.
If you are here by mistake
You are reading fiction. Nothing on this website happened. If you want to read about the real, documented history of state secrecy — which is stranger and better sourced than most of what is invented here — start with the declassified record: the Church Committee reports, the Family Jewels, the JFK Records Act releases, and the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Those are real, and they are free.
Outside assessments of this newspaper — including the Ledger of Record's, which is not flattering — are collected, unedited, at External Assessments.
What this newspaper promises you
Named sources
Every reported story ends with a Sources & Method box listing who spoke to us, in what capacity, and when. If a source is unnamed we say why, and an editor knows the name.
What we could not confirm
The same box lists the claims we chased and failed to stand up. A story is not finished until we have written down what is still missing from it.
Right of reply
Anyone criticised in these pages is contacted before publication and may answer at any length. We print the answer unedited, including when it embarrasses us.
Corrections in public
We do not quietly edit. Every change to a published story is logged, dated, and explained in the corrections archive, which has no paywall and never will.