Category: Fact Checking

As the U.S. Department of Justice continued to release files related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in December 2025, a rumor took hold on social media that the White House had started to manage the X account of the Department of Justice. 

One X user claimed the change in account management was to protect President Donald Trump, whose name appeared multiple times in Epstein-related documents the DOJ released in December 2025 (archived):

The post amassed 1.6 million views and nearly 100,000 likes as of this writing. Other X accounts made the same claim, with some arguing that the White House handling the Justice Department’s social media presence would be a break from the agency’s long-standing independence from the chief executive.

The rumor stemmed from a Dec. 23, 2025, report by Axios, a reputable news outlet. In the report, Axios said, “The White House has begun managing the DOJ’s account on X, an effort to finish out the year and the Epstein file disclosure requirements set by Congress.”

In addition, the report read, “The account is also taking on a sharper tone that has more of a rapid-response campaign edge and less of the stodgy just-the-facts tone associated with the department.”

Snopes was unable to independently verify whether the claim the White House was managing the DOJ account was true or not. As such, we have not rated it.

A White House official denied the claim was true. “DOJ is still running the account,” the official said in an email.

Snopes reached out to Axios to inquire about the details of their report. We will update this story if we receive a response.

A review of the DOJ X account, which uses the handle @TheJusticeDept and has the gray checkmark badge X uses to identify government accounts, revealed one example of the account using a “sharper” tone of the type noted in the Axios report. In response to someone asking why the DOJ would “publicly release something that’s fake,” the DOJ account called the user a “dope” (archived):

That user was referring to a disputed letter purportedly from Epstein to fellow convicted sex offender Larry Nassar, which the DOJ account called “FAKE” in a Dec. 23 X post (archived).

For further reading, Snopes has covered many rumors about the contents of Epstein-related files the DOJ released in late 2025 including one purportedly linking Trump to a 14-year-old girl.

For years, social media users have repeated a claim that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak “prints” his own $2 bills and spends them “100% legally.” The rumor is often paired with an interview clip in which Wozniak describes using a printer and says that the ink is “still wet.”

One Threads post (archived), featuring a video in which Wozniak describes using $2 bills from perforated pads, read, “Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak prints his own $2 bills, 100% legal.”

View on Threads 

Versions of the claim have also circulated across social media platforms, including X, Reddit, Pinterest and YouTube.

The claim is a mixture of true and false information. It’s true that Wozniak has told some version of this story for years and often leans into it in interviews — sometimes trolling audiences with humorous lines about “suspicious” serial numbers or the ink still being wet. But it’s false that he prints his own $2 bills. 

What he has actually described doing is legally buying uncut sheets of genuine $2 notes from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, then having a print shop bind and perforate them into tear-off pads. Counterfeiting U.S. money is a serious federal crime, but buying real currency sheets and turning them into novelty pads is not.

Wozniak has recounted the $2-bill story for years, and the clip circulating in December 2025 traces to a segment of “The Engadget Show,” titled, “Woz’s $2 bill sheets.”

In the interview, Wozniak says:

Yeah, basically I got a printer in my hometown of Los Gatos, California, to make these pads for me. I got them the supplies from a higher-quality printer, and they’re perforated so you can tear them off like Green Stamps. I don’t know if it’s the right president. The serial numbers are very suspicious, but you can still smell the ink. So don’t touch it because it’s a little wet.

He added: “They meet the specs of the U.S. government, so by law, these are legal tender. I have been spending them. You can get arrested for them, you cannot get convicted because you’re in the right.”

In an archived post on Wozniak’s official website, he shared the truth behind the story in response to an email inquiry. The email read: “Reading through the letters section, I saw a reference to a Secret Service interrogation, but nowhere else on your site could I find a description of the incident. Would you mind relating it again (or giving me a pointer to where the story resides)?”

“I have tons of $2 bill stories that will make a whole chapter in my book someday. My $2 bills are real and legit but unusual,” Wozniak wrote, explaining:

You can purchase $1, $2, and now $5 bills from the Bureau of Printing and Engraving on sheets. The sheets come in sizes of 4, 16, and 32 bills each. I buy such sheets of $2 bills. I carry large sheets, folded in my pocket, and sometimes pull out scissors and cut a few off to pay for something in a store. It’s just for comedy, as the $2 bills cost nearly $3 each when purchased on sheets. They cost even more at coin stores.

“I take the sheets of 4 bills and have a printer, located through friends, gum them into pads, like stationery pads. The printer then perforates them between the bills, so that I can tear a bill or two away,” he added, admitting that the bills are not self-produced but are legitimate currency purchased from the U.S. government.

For those interested, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing offers uncut currency sheets for purchase on its official website:

(www.usmint.gov)

We have previously investigated other claims involving dollar bills. For instance, in 2022 we fact-checked a rumor that picking up folded dollar bills from the ground could be life-threatening because of the presence of powder inside containing fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Musk reposted post that said, ‘Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people’

March 14, 2025

The post, originally shared by another user, read, “Stalin, Mao and Hitler didn’t murder million …

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For years, a rumor circulated online that the late, convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein owned a painting of former President Bill Clinton in a blue dress. 

The image resurfaced on social media after the U.S. Department of Justice released the first installment of additional Epstein files following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated the release of these documents.  

The image and its alleged connection to Epstein had spread on Reddit, Facebook and X.

A photo of the painting of Clinton hanging on a wall was, indeed, included in the Epstein files (see page 17 and download EFTA00000862.pdf). As such, we have rated this claim true. 

It was unclear whether Epstein owned a copy of the portrait or the original painting. The original was painted by Australian-American artist Petrina Ryan-Kield with oil on canvas, as Snopes first reported in 2019. 

As of this writing, prints of the painting, titled “Parsing Bill,” were available to purchase from the prominent online art gallery Saatchi. A photograph also showed Ryan-Kield standing next to the work at the 2012 Tribeca Ball, an annual art exhibit run by the New York Academy of Art and a popular event for New York socialites.

In a 2019 interview with Snopes, Ryan-Kield told us she did not know who, ultimately, ended up with her original painting. Here’s what she said in an email: 

In 2012, as a grad student at the New York Academy of Art, I painted pictures of Presidents Clinton and Bush as part of my Master’s thesis. When the school put on a fundraiser at the Tribeca Ball that year, they sold my painting to one of the attendees. I had no idea who the buyer was at the time. As with most of my paintings, I had completely lost track of this piece when it was sold seven years ago. So it was a complete surprise to me to learn yesterday that it wound up in Epstein’s home.

Ryan-Kield told Artnet News that Clinton’s attire in the painting is a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s blue dress, a central part of the media circus around his affair with his former intern, who later became an anti-cyberbullying activist. According to ArtNet, Ryan-Kield said the painting, which was part of a series of works she made, was supposed to be about “how opposition parties caricature presidents.” 

Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sexually trafficking minors. His ties to people like Clinton and U.S. President Donald Trump have been under renewed scrutiny amid Congress’ investigation into the handling of the Epstein case.

In late December 2025, the conservative non-profit group Turning Point USA (TPUSA) held its yearly conference in Phoenix, Arizona. During the event, TPSUA CEO Erika Kirk, the wife of the organization’s slain co-founder, Charlie Kirk, brought a special guest on stage — the rapper Nicki Minaj. 

The viral appearance sparked intense discussion on platforms like X, with some fans expressing surprise about Minaj’s appearance at a pointedly political event. Some detractors, however, didn’t seem surprised. They claimed that Minaj’s husband was a registered sex offender and often compared those actions to long-standing accusations of sexual misconduct brought against U.S. President Donald Trump. 

Snopes investigated the claim about Minaj’s husband and found it was true.

According to People magazine, Minaj met her now-husband, Kenneth Petty, while both were attending LaGuardia High School in New York City. After briefly dating, the two reportedly parted ways and did not reconnect until 2018. They married in October 2019 and had a child together the following year. 

Snopes checked the national sex offender registry for Petty’s name. We found results in both California and New York state. Petty was convicted on a charge of attempted first-degree rape in April 1995, according to the New York registry. He was 16 at the time of the crime, the same age as his victim. 

According to a 2021 New York Times article, the victim claimed Petty “had raped her after leading her into a home at knife point.” That story detailed the victim’s lawsuit against Minaj and Petty for allegedly harassing and attempting to intimidate her with the goal of recanting her accusation. 

In 2022, the BBC reported that Petty had been sentenced to one year of house arrest for not informing authorities when he moved to California to live with Minaj in 2019, something required by law because he is a registered sex offender. After initially pleading not guilty to the registration charge in 2020, Petty changed his plea.

According to People magazine, Petty also pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter for killing a man in 2002. He reportedly was sentenced to 10 years in prison, ultimately serving seven before his release in 2013.

Sources

The Pyramids of Giza. The Pharos of Alexandria. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicanarnassus. These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, celebrated for millennia as the greatest architectural achievements of antiquity. Sadly, today only one of the original wonders – the Pyramids of Giza – are still standing, the rest having long ago crumbled to ruins. But while one can still visit many of these ruins and ponder their former magnificence, one ancient wonder remains frustratingly elusive: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Despite more than a century of searching, no trace of this enigmatic structure has ever been found. So what were the Hanging Gardens? What made them so special? Did they actually exist – and, if so, what happened to them? Let’s find out as we delve into the history and mystery of the missing Seventh Wonder.

The classic legend of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon tells that they were constructed by King Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 603-562 B.C.E. (And for those of you who paid attention in Sunday school, yes: this is the same Nebuchadnezzar who sacked Jerusalem and forced the Israelites into bondage). As the story goes, Nebuchadnezzar’s wife, princess Amytis of the ancient Persian kingdom of Media, found the sun-baked landscape of Mesopotamia depressing and longed for the lush forest and mountains of her homeland. So, in order to cheer her up, her husband constructed an oasis in the middle of the desert – an artificial mountain of brick and stone covered in hundreds of trees and other plants. But while this is the most common account, a rival story attributes the construction of the gardens to Queen Semiramis, a semi-mythical figure who supposedly ruled the Assyrian Empire during the late 9th Century B.C.E. Thus, several sources instead refer to the structure as the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis.

Whatever the case, the only evidence of the Gardens’ existence comes from the writings of seven ancient historians – all of whom wrote their accounts centuries after the Gardens were supposedly built. The oldest and most credible of these is Berossus of Kos, a priest of the Babylonian god Marduk who in 280 B.C.E. composed a guide to Mesopotamia and its culture titled Babyloniaca. Unfortunately, the original text has been lost, though it was extensively quoted by later writers like 1st Century C.E. Roman-Jewish historian Josephus:

“At his palace he had knolls made of stone which he shaped like mountains and planted with all kinds of trees. Furthermore, he had a so-called pensile paradise planted because his wife, who came from Media, longed for such, which was the custom in her homeland…within his palace he erected lofty stone terraces, in which he closely reproduced mountain scenery, completing the resemblance by planting them with all manner of tress and constructing the so-called Hanging Garden.”

It is interesting to note here that the modern term “paradise” is thought to derive from the walled gardens constructed in the region – specifically the old Persian pairi-daeza, meaning “to build a walled enclosure.”

Furthermore, the term “pensile” in Josephus’s account is derived from the ancient Greek word kremastos. This was originally translated as “hanging”, implying that the garden beds were suspended – for example, by a system of ropes. Today, however, scholars typically interpret the word’s meaning as closer to overhanging, evoking a more practical structure of stepped, overhanging terraces. Indeed, the next commonly cited account of the Gardens, by 1st Century Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, describes their construction as follows:

“The park extended four plethra on each side, and since the approach to the garden sloped like a hillside and the several parts of the structure rose from another tier on tier, the appearance of the whole resembled that of a theatre. When the ascending terraces had been built, there had been constructed beneath them galleries which carried the entire weight of the planted garden and rose lists by lists one above the other along the approach; and the uppermost gallery, which was fifty cubits high, bore the highest surface of the park, which was made level with the circuit wall of the battlements of the city. Furthermore, the walls, which had been constructed at great expense, were twenty-two feet thick, while the passageway between the two walls was ten feet wide. The roofs of the galleries were covered over with beams of stone between sixteen foot long, inclusive of the overlap, and four feet wide.”

For the curious, a plethron – plural plethra – was an ancient Greek unit of measurement composed of 100 podes or Greek Feet – themselves equivalent to between 296 and 324 millimetres. 600 podes made up one stadium – plural stadia – while 5000 podes made up one milion or Greek Mile. The cubit, meanwhile, was an ancient unit of measurement equivalent to the distance between one’s elbow and the tip of one’s fingers. Standard cubits were typically based on the measurements of a particular king, and thus varied by region and time period. At the time of the Gardens’ supposed construction, the Mesopotamian Cubit measured around 533 millimetres. Thus, according to Diodorus’s account, the Gardens measured 120 metres to a side – an area of around 1/10 of a square kilometre or 3.5 acres.

In addition to the Gardens’ general construction, Diodorus also describes how the terraces were waterproofed and irrigated:

“The roof above these beams had first a layer of reeds laid in great quantities of bitumen, over this two courses of baked brick bonded by cement, and as a third later a covering of lead, to the end that the moisture of the soil might not penetrate beneath. On all this again the earth had been piled to a depth sufficient for the roots of the largest trees; and the ground, when levelled off, was thickly planted with trees of every kind that, by their great size or any other charm, could give pleasure to the beholder. And since the galleries, each projecting beyond another, all received the light, they contained many royal lodges of every description; and there was one gallery which contained openings leading from the topmost surface and machines for supplying the gardens with water, the machines raising the water in great abundance from the river although no one outside could see it being done.”

Such waterproofing would have been essential to the Gardens’ operation, since stone as a building material was difficult to come by in Mesopotamia. Therefore, most structures were made out of sun-baked mud bricks. These were resilient enough to withstand the region’s infrequent rains, but under the vast flow of water needed to keep such a giant horticultural construction irrigated would have quickly dissolved away. Therefore, the Hanging Gardens were likely to have been one of the few structures in Babylon to make use of large stone slabs – a vital clue for archaeologists searching for their remains today.

As for the irrigation “machines” described by Diodorus, these are but one of the enduring mysteries surrounding the Hanging Gardens. Based on the accounts of Diodorus and others, archaeologists have long suspected that these machines were a form of Archimedean screw, a spiral ramp mounted inside a tube which, when rotated, can efficiently scoop up and raise water over large distances. While such screws were traditionally thought to have been invented around the 3rd Century B.C.E, a cuneiform tablet dating from the reign of Assyrian king Sennacherib, who ruled from 704-681 B.C.E, appears to describe the casting of Archimedean screws in bronze – pushing back the origins of these devices by 500 years. Another possibility is that the machines were a form of noria, a bucket-covered wheel driven by oxen or donkeys used throughout the middle east to raise water into irrigation canals. However, the earliest recorded use of noria dates from the 1st Century B.C.E, suggesting once again that these devices may be far older than originally thought.

The next two commonly cited accounts of the Hanging Gardens come from Roman historians Quintus Curtius Rufus and Strabo, the latter of whom confirms the dimensions and irrigation methods described by Diodorus:

“Babylon, too, lies in a plain; and the circuit of its wall is 385 stadia. The thickness of its wall is 32 feet; the height thereof between the towers if fifty cubits; that of the towers is sixty cubits; and the passage on top of the wall is such that four-horse chariots can easily pass one another; and it is on this account that this and the hanging garden are called one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The garden is quadrangular in shape, and each side is four plethora in length. It consists of arched vaults, which are situated, one after another, on checkered, cube-like foundations. The checkered foundations, which are hollowed out, are covered so deep with earth that they admit of the largest of trees, and have been constructed of baked brick and asphalt – the foundations themselves and the vaults and the arches. The agent to the uppermost terrace-roofs is made by a stairway; and alongside these stairs there were screws, through which the water was continually conducted up into the garden from the Euphrates by those appointed for this purpose, for the river, a stadium in width, flows through the middle of the city; and the garden is on the bank of the river.”

And finally, we come to the writings of Greek scientist Philo of Byzantium, who in 250 B.C.E. further elaborated on the sophisticated structural and hydraulic engineering of the Gardens:

“The whole mass is supported on stone columns, so that the entire underlying space is occupied by carved column bases. The columns carry beams set at very narrow intervals. The beams are palm trunks, for this type of wood – unlike all others – does not rot and, when it is damp and subjected to heavy pressure, it curves upwards. Moreover it does itself give nourishment to the root branches and fibres, since it admits extraneous matter into its folds and crevices. This structure supports an extensive and deep mass of earth, in which are planted broad-leaved trees of the sort that are commonly found in gardens, a wide variety of flowers of all species and, in brief, everything that is most agreeable to the eye and conducive to the enjoyment of pleasure….Streams of water emerging from elevated sources flow partly in a straight line down sloping channels, and are early forced upwards through bends and spirals to gush out higher up, being impelled though the twists of these devices by mechanical forces….This is a work of art of royal luxury, and its most striking feature is that the labour of cultivation is suspended above the heads of the spectators.”

Yet despite these lavish descriptions by Greek and Roman writers, contemporary Babylonian records do not mention the Hanging Gardens at all. This is especially strange given that Mesopotamian rulers were obsessed with recording lists of their achievements. Indeed, one set of cuneiform clay tablets called the Topography of Babylon describes the features of Nebuchadnezzar’s capital city in exhaustive detail, from giant constructions like walls, gates, and temples to the names of individual streets. Yet nowhere in this list does anything resembling a massive walled garden appear. Even stranger is the fact that such gardens were common throughout Mesopotamian history, with well-documented examples being constructed by rulers such as Tiglath Pileser at Nineveh in the 12th Century B.C.E, Assurnasirpal II at Nimrud in the 9th, and Martuk-Aplaiddina at Babylon in the 8th. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of later descriptions makes it impossible to dismiss the existence of the Gardens outright, forcing historians to look for other, more tangible evidence.

But while Babylon was one of the largest and most famous cities in the ancient world, its ruins remained buried and unexplored until 1899, when German archaeologist Robert Koldewey began his excavations of the site – located some 80 kilometres south of modern Baghdad. Over the course of 14 years, Koldewey uncovered many of the city’s major architectural features, including its outer walls, the lavishly decorated Ishtar Gate, and the remains of the Ziggurat of Martuk – the temple which some have speculated inspired the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. While excavating the city’s southern citadel, Koldewey discovered a large basement containing 14 rooms with stone arches and strange holes in the floor. As the Hanging Gardens were one of the few sites in Babylon known to use stone in its construction, Koldewey concluded that he had at last discovered the location, and that the holes were for chain pumps that raised water from the basement to the roof. However, later archaeologists disputed Koldewey’s conclusions arguing that the site was located too far away from the Euphrates river to be practically irrigated. Furthermore, clay tablets discovered in the ruins suggest that the building was actually used as an administrative centre and storehouse. And despite more than a century of excavation, no other structure matching the descriptions of Josephus, Diodorus, Strabo and others has been discovered on the Babylon site.

So what, then, happened to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Sadly, the simplest explanation is that they never existed at all, and were simply invented by Greek and Roman writers as a romantic ideal of a Middle Eastern pleasure garden. Alternatively, some scholars suggest that the Gardens did exist but were destroyed by an earthquake in the Second Century B.C.E. Stripped of the protection of their elaborate stone and asphalt waterproofing, the largely mud-brick ruins then slowly eroded into oblivion. Or it may be that the ruins simply haven’t been found yet. After all, the Babylon site is enormous – covering 8.5 square kilometres – but only a small proportion of it has been thoroughly excavated. Furthermore, the River Euphrates has shifted significantly westward since the time of Nebuchadnezzar II, raising the possibility that the ruins of the Gardens may lay beneath its waters. Another, more disturbing possibility is that the ruins were bulldozed in 1987 along with large swaths of ancient Babylon when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein attempted to build a theme-park reconstruction of the ancient city on the site – and this is why we can’t have nice things…

All that said, some scholars now believe that the Hanging Gardens did indeed exist, just not in Babylon. While reexamining ancient Babylonian texts in 2013, Oxford University scholar Stephanie Dalley discovered that they had been mistranslated. Based on her own translations, Dalley began to suspect that the accounts of Josephus, Strabo and others actually refer to earlier gardens located in the city of Nineveh, 480 kilometres from Babylon. These gardens, built by Assyrian king Sennacherib between 704 and 681 B.C.E, are well-documented, being depicted in several carvings on the walls of the royal palace. Furthermore, the ruins of the Jerwan aqueduct, which carried water 50 kilometres from the mountains to Nineveh, bear the following inscription:

“Sennacherib king of the world . .. Over a great distance I had a watercourse directed to the environs of Nineveh, joining together the waters . . . Over steep-sided valleys I spanned an aqueduct of white limestone blocks. I made those waters flow over it . . .”

Carved depictions of these Gardens also adorn the walls of the palace, while extensive remains of irrigation equipment – including the 50-kilometre-long Jerwan aqueduct – have been uncovered around the Nineveh site.

This theory helps explain many of the inconsistencies in traditional accounts of the Gardens. For example, of the six main accounts we have covered, only those of Josephus – and by extension Berossus – definitively name Nebuchadnezzar II as the Gardens’ builder; all subsequent writers simply refer to an unnamed “Syrian King”. Thus it is possible that the achievements of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar simply became conflated over time. This is supported by the fact that many of the classic accounts of the Hanging Gardens are ultimately derived from observations made during the Persian campaign of Alexander the Great. Prior to their victory over the Achaemenid Empire of King Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C.E, Alexander and his army camped for four days near the aqueduct of Jerwan outside Nineveh. This would have given the historians and other scholars travelling with the army a chance to examine the ruins and write up detailed descriptions, which were later copied and misattributed to Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar. Interestingly, this mix-up may have been due to a simple misunderstanding of the Akkadian language. The word Babylon translates to “Gate of the Gods,” and was applied to a number of ancient Mesopotamian cities. Thus, while Nineveh might have been a Babylon, it was not the Babylon familiar to the Greeks and Romans, resulting in a misunderstanding that has persisted for millennia.

The Nineveh theory also helps to explain a glaring inconsistency in the writings of Herodotus, the famous Greek historian from the 5th Century B.C.E. Despite being the only Greek chronicler believed to have actually visited Babylon, nowhere in his accounts does Herodotus mention anything resembling the Hanging Gardens – further suggesting that they were actually located elsewhere. Then again, Herodotus may not have actually visited Babylon – and even if he did, many of his accounts of other historic sites are strangely incomplete. For example, his detailed descriptions of the Pyramids of Giza do not once mention the Great Sphinx.

Yet despite this compelling evidence, the Nineveh theory remains only one of many possible explanations for the fate of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The whole truth cannot be known without either consulting Doctor Emmit Brown or with more concrete archaeological evidence – evidence that has become increasingly difficult to obtain due to the turbulent political situation in Iraq. In addition to Saddam Hussein’s 1987 vandalism of Babylon, in 2016 the great Maskhi Gate of Nineveh, along with hundreds of artefacts in the nearby Mosul Museum, were destroyed by the fundamentalist group ISIL as blasphemous idols. Such destructive acts, and the fact that so grand a structure as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon could have disappeared entirely, serve as sobering reminders of the fragility of the ancient past, how much human history may have been lost forever, and how much nothing any of us do matters because we’ll all be forgotten in due time, likely without even a single reference to use ever existing, if you think about it, putting our lives below the likes of some random garden that someone made at some point…

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On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the United States the greatest industrial power in the world, but its geographic isolation from both Germany and Japan made it nearly invulnerable to enemy attack. While the U-boats of the German Kriegsmarine scored impressive victories against Allied shipping early in the war, by 1943 the sheer volume of merchant vessels being churned out by American shipyards plus advancements in antisubmarine technology and tactics had all but secured Allied supremacy over the Atlantic. After that, the only way America could be attacked was from the air – something no existing German aircraft was capable of. This, however, did not stop the Nazis from trying, and throughout the war German engineers came up with a variety of ambitious designs for a so-called Amerikabomber – an aircraft capable of flying 6,000 kilometres from Germany to New York City and taking the fight to the enemy. While most of these designs consisted of giant, multi-engined bombers, one proposal stood out among the rest. Impressively prophetic, this design was so fantastically advanced that a vehicle of its type would not be successfully flown for another four decades. This is the story of Silbervogel, the Nazi space shuttle that never was.

Since the earliest days of science fiction, most writers assumed that future spacecraft would be similar to sailing ships or other aircraft: large reusable vehicles that could fly to and from space multiple times before needing to be repaired or overhauled. Though theoretically this approach permits enormous cost savings over single-use spacecraft, in practice the added complexity of designing a reusable spaceplane nearly always outweighs these savings. Consequently, over the past 60 years, most astronauts have travelled into space aboard simple, single-use ballistic capsules. However, this has not deterred designers from trying to crack the problem of reusable spacecraft, and among the first to tackle this challenge was a German engineer named Eugen Sänger.

Born 1905 in the town of Pressnitz in what is now the Czech Republic, Sänger initially pursued studies in civil engineering at the Technical Universities of Graz and Vienna in Austria. However, during his studies Sänger read the influential book By Rocket to Planetary Space by pioneering rocketry theorist Hermann Oberth and, like many young engineers of his day, was inspired to change his field of study to aeronautics. Around this time he also joined the Society for Space Travel, which counted among its members Oberth and a young Wernher von Braun – future father of the V2 ballistic missile and the Saturn V moon rocket.

Befitting his new-found passion, Sänger attempted to write his thesis on the subject of rocket flight, but this was rejected by the University as too fanciful. He finally graduated in 1929 after submitting a more mundane thesis on the statics of wing trusses. In 1936, Sänger published his rejected thesis as a book titled Rocket Flight Engineering, in which he laid out a unique concept for achieving high-speed, long-distance flight using a rocket-powered spaceplane. Rather than entering orbit, Sänger’s proposed spaceplane would climb up to just above the atmosphere and descend on a ballistic trajectory. The flat fuselage of the craft would be specially designed to generate lift, causing it to “skip” off the atmosphere like a stone skipping across a pond. Due to atmospheric drag, each skip would be progressively shorter than the last, but if the velocity and and reentry angle were properly calculated, such a craft could theoretically travel halfway around the world in mere minutes. Today, this type of flight profile is referred to as non-ballistic atmospheric entry or boost-glide.

These ideas caught the attention of the Reich Air Ministry, who saw Sänger’s rocket glider as a potential means of attacking the continental United States from Germany. In 1936, the Ministry established a laboratory near Braunschweig in Lower Saxony where Sänger could develop the 100-tonne thrust rocket engine needed to make his futuristic spacecraft possible. Here he worked alongside a team of technicians and mathematician Irene Bredt, whom Sänger would later marry in 1951. Together, Sänger and Bredt worked out many of the theoretical problems with boost-glide flight, including the ideal shape for the spacecraft’s lifting-body fuselage and the massive frictional and compression heating the vehicle would encounter as it reentered the atmosphere. They also pioneered one of the key developments in rocket engine design: regenerative cooling. The burning propellants in a rocket engine produce extremely high temperatures which easily can melt ordinary aerospace materials like aluminium. While combustion chambers and nozzles can be built of more heat-resistant materials like steel, these add weight to the engine’s structure, reducing its performance. Sanger and Bredt’s solution was to circulate the fuel through a double-walled chamber and nozzle wall prior to injecting it into the engine. This simultaneously wicked away combustion heat and pre-pressurized the fuel, allowing the engine to be be made far lighter and more efficient. This basic design is used in nearly all liquid-fuelled rocket engines to this day.

On December 3, 1941, Sänger presented his final proposal to the Air Ministry. Dubbed Silbervogel or “Silver Bird”, Sänger’s space plane looked like something straight out of science fiction. 28 metres long and weighing 10 tonnes, the craft featured a wide, streamlined hull with a flat bottom for skipping over the atmosphere, stubby wings, and a small twin tail. The majority of the internal volume was devoted to tanks of kerosene and liquid oxygen propellant to feed the single rocket engine, leading only minimal space for the pilot and weapons payload. The craft was to be launched horizontally on a 3-kilometre track using a rocket sled, whose cluster of six liquid-fuelled engines would accelerate it to nearly 2,000 kilometres per hour in only 10 seconds. Once airborne, Silbervogel would fire its own engine for 168 seconds, reaching a speed of 21,800 kilometres per hour – nearly 18 times the speed of sound – and an altitude of 145 kilometres, well above where most consider space to have begun. The aircraft would then enter the boost-glide phase, skipping its way across the Atlantic Ocean towards the United States. Once over New York or another target city, the pilot would open the bomb bay doors and release his 4,000 kilogram payload, his extreme speed and altitude making him invulnerable to enemy aircraft. As Nazi Germany never came close to developing an atomic bomb, for maximum destructive effect this payload would likely have been a “dirty bomb” composed of radioactive material wrapped around a conventional explosive core – and for more on this, please check out our previous video How Close Did the Nazis Actually Come to Building an Atomic Bomb?

As there was no way for Silbervogel to turn around and head back to Germany, Sänger proposed that it continue gliding over the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean where it would land on an island occupied by Germany’s ally Japan – a total journey of up to 24,000 kilometres.

Though decades ahead of its time, Sänger’s technically-dense, 900-page proposal failed to impress the Air Ministry, who filed it away and decided to focus on simpler, more conventional technology for the Amerikabomber. The Braunschweig team was disbanded, and Sänger was reassigned to the German Gliding Research Institute in Darmstadt. There he carried out research on ramjets engines and worked on the design of the Skoda-Kauba P14 ramjet interceptor, one of many hastily-conceived “emergency fighters” developed in the final days of the war in a desperate attempt to stem the tide of Allied bombers. In 1944 Sänger and Bredt submitted an edited version of the 1941 Silbervogel proposal to the Air Ministry under the title A Rocket Drive for Long Range Bombers, but once again it was rejected.

In the end, four major designs were submitted to the Amerikabomber program, all conventional multi-engined bombers: the Messerschmitt Me 264, the Focke-Wulf Ta 400, the Junkers Ju 390, and the Heinkel He 277. Of these, only the Messerschmitt and Junkers entries were actually built, with the Junkers Ju 390 ultimately being selected for production. However, only two prototypes were ever completed, and none entered service before the end of the war.

Several other schemes were proposed to attack America from Germany, including the unusual Huckepack or “piggyback” concept. This involved mounting a modified Dornier Do-217 light bomber on the back of a Heinkel He 117 heavy bomber, which would carry its passenger as far as possible before releasing it and returning to Germany. The light bomber would then fly the rest of the way to the target then ditch in the ocean, where a U-boat would be waiting to rescue the crew. While the plan was seriously considered, a lack of fuel and the loss of the Luftwaffe air base at Bordeaux prevented a full-scale test flight. Furthermore, the Kriegsmarine refused to spare any U-boats, effectively killing the project.

Meanwhile, Wernher von Braun and his team of rocket engineers at Peenemünde in northern Germany proposed a supersized version of their infamous V2 ballistic missile that would be capable of reaching North America. Dubbed the A10 or Amerika Rakete, the rocket would have measured 14 metres tall, weighed over 14 tons, and been able to cover a distance of 5,000 kilometres in around 35 minutes.
As guidance systems at the time were not sophisticated enough to provide the desired accuracy at such ranges, the craft was designed to be manned, with the unfortunate pilot using radio beacons mounted aboard U-boats to guide the 1-tonne warhead on its final, suicidal descent. In 1943, Otto Lafferenz, director of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront labour organization, also submitted a proposal for launching ordinary V2s from U-boats off the American coast. Codenamed Projekt Schwimmweste or “Project Life Jacket”, Lafferenz’s proposal involved the construction of a 500-ton watertight canister to be towed behind a U-boat, which would contain one rocket and tanks for its alcohol and liquid oxygen propellants. When close to the target, the U-boat crew would flood compartments in the rear of the canister to make it float upright, then fuel and launch the rocket. The canister would then be scuttled, and the U-boat would return to base. Though one prototype launch canister was completed, the concept, like the A10 Amerika Rakete, and Eugen Sänger’s Silbervogel, was never tested before the war came to an end. Nonetheless, these concepts proved prophetic, presaging the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles of today.

But for all the advanced concepts it incorporated, Silbervogel would most likely never have worked as-designed. Post-war analysis revealed that Sänger and Bredt severely underestimated the heat load their craft would encounter on reentry, meaning that Silbervogel – and its unfortunate test pilot – would likely have burned up on the first atmospheric skip. The problem could theoretically have been solved by thickening the heat shield, but this would have reduced the useful bomb load to practically nothing, rendering the aircraft useless as a weapon. Nonetheless, the design would prove hugely influential on the field of spacecraft design.

After the war, Eugen Sänger and Irene Bredt moved to France, where in 1949 they founded the Fédération Astronautique. In 1954 they returned to Germany, where Sänger directed jet engine research in Stuttgart and consulted for Junkers aircraft before dying in 1964 at the age of 59. It was while living in France that the Sängers survived a botched kidnapping attempt by Soviet agents. After occupying the Peenemünde research facility, Red Army troops discovered a copy of Sänger and Bredt’s Silbervogel proposal. The idea intrigued Soviet leader Josef Stalin, who dispatched his son Vasily and engineer Grigori Tokaty to convince the Sängers to come to the Soviet Union. However, the two would-be agents were unsuccessful – as were NKVD agents sent to take the couple by force.

Despite lacking Sänger’s expertise, in 1946 the Soviets set up a design bureau under the direction of mathematician Mstislav Keldysh to develop their own spaceplane. Realizing that the sheer volume of propellant needed to feed a liquid rocket engine would have given Silbervogel a negligible useful bomb load, Keldysh instead fitted his design with more efficient ramjets, creating a vehicle capable of carrying a practical nuclear weapon over a range of 12,000 kilometres. However, Keldysh estimated that the design would not be ready until the late 1950s, by which point it would likely be rendered obsolete by simpler intercontinental ballistic missiles. As a result, the “Keldysh Bomber” was quietly shelved.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, Sänger’s ideas were gaining traction thanks to one Major-General Walter Dornberger. The military head of the V2 ballistic missile program, after the war Dornberger, along with many German rocket scientists, was brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. After developing ballistic missiles for the United States Air Force, Dornberger worked in the private aerospace sector, becoming Vice President of Bell Aircraft and consulting for North American Aircraft and Boeing. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Dornberger attempted to sell the United States military on the concept of a boost-glide spaceplane like Sänger’s Silbervogel, which he dubbed the “Antipodal Bomber”. Following the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957, the Air Force finally approved Dornberger’s concept under the designation X-20 Dyna-Soar – short for “Dynamic Soarer.” Other names included “Rocket Bomber” or “RoBo”, “Bomber Missile” or “BoMi”, “Brass Bell”, and “Hypersonic Strategic Weapons System.”

Measuring 11 metres long with a 6 metre wingspan, the dart-shaped, flat-bottomed Dyna-Soar was designed to be launched into space atop a modified Titan II ballistic missile. While boost-glide missions were possible, the craft was also capable of reaching orbit like the later Space Shuttle. Once in orbit, the single pilot could carry out a variety of missions, such as orbital bombardment of enemy targets, orbital reconnaissance with cameras and other sensors stored in a small equipment bay, or rendezvousing with and repairing satellites in orbit. Uniquely among spacecraft of the era, the Dyna-Soar’s aerodynamic, lifting-body shape would have allowed it to very efficiently change its orbital inclination by briefly dipping into the atmosphere. To protect the craft against the heat of reentry, it was built of high-temperature nickel superalloys, while its stubby wings and wire-brush skids would have allowed it to glide to a runway landing like a regular aircraft.

In April 1960, seven astronauts were secretly selected for the Dyna-Soar program – including one Neil Armstrong, later the first man to walk on the moon. However, the project soon began running into problems – the biggest being what the X-20 was even for. As rocket and guidance technology continued to improve, it quickly became clear that nuclear bombardment could be more easily and cheaply carried out using ballistic missiles – and orbital reconnaissance using unmanned spy satellites – than with a complex manned spaceplane. This, combined with confusion over what booster to use, Department of Defense budget cuts, and a government decree placing all manned spaceflight under the purview of NASA, led to the project being cancelled in 1963. It was not until April 12, 1981 that the first successful winged spacecraft – the Space Shuttle Columbia – was launched into orbit, finally making Eugen Sänger’s prophetic vision a reality. But it was only a partial realization, for due to a long list of design compromises the Space Shuttle was never able to achieve the massive cost savings promised by reusable spacecraft. Thus, following the Shuttle’s retirement in 2011, the world returned to using reliable, relatively inexpensive ballistic capsules to get into space. But as the ongoing development of new spaceplanes like the Boeing X-37 and the SNC Dream Chaser demonstrate, the dream of reliable, reusable, winged spaceflight is still alive and well, and future astronauts may yet glide-rather than plummet – back to earth.

Expand for References

In December 2025, a story about humans adapting to accommodate nature spread around social media. The story, which was widely shared on Facebook (archived) and Instagram (archived), told the story of an English town that supposedly canceled its New Year’s Eve firework display to allow a walrus named Thor to rest in the town without disturbance. A similar story was shared on Facebook (archived) months earlier and was popular on Reddit (archived) about three years prior.

The story was true.

One of the Facebook posts provided references for the claim, including a BBC News article apparently titled “Town Cancels Fireworks to Protect Walrus.” This is a real BBC News article, albeit with the headline, “Scarborough’s New Year fireworks cancelled to protect walrus.” The article confirmed the basics of the story as shared on social media: In 2022, the English town of Scarborough canceled a New Year’s Eve fireworks display at the last minute over fears it could cause distress to a walrus, Thor, discovered “taking a break” in the town.

A photographer for Getty Images snapped several photos of Thor while it rested in Scarborough’s harbor, drawing crowds to catch a glimpse of it. A local news report corroborated the BBC’s version of events, as did articles from the marine animal rescue group that helped protect the walrus, the Smithsonian Magazine and The Guardian.

But those details were just the tip of the iceberg that was the Arctic mammal’s journey around the coastline of the United Kingdom.

Thor began his adventure having been spotted in France and the Netherlands in November 2022 — already a newsworthy occurrence due to how rare it is to spot a walrus in Western Europe. By early December, Thor had made his way to a resting place near Southampton in southern England.

“Walrus travel long distances and have rest stops to recover and regain energy before moving on again,” wrote British Divers Marine Life Rescue, a marine life rescue group, at the time. “Every time it is disturbed by people being too close or noisy will impact its chance of survival.” Since 1988, U.K. law has protected walruses from “intentional disturbance while occupying a structure or place used for shelter or protection.” Walrus sightings are rare in the U.K., but not unprecedented; two visited the U.K. in 2021.

BDMLR was already monitoring the walrus after it appeared in southern England. So when Thor next appeared in the English town of Scarborough late into the evening on Dec. 30, 2022, locals conservation groups called BDMLR to help with the response to the walrus’ arrival. And that was where BDMLR’s detailed account of Thor’s visit to Scarborough began.

BDLMR’s first step was securing the area to give the walrus space from people. After just a few hours of sleeping at its chosen spot around the town’s harbor, the walrus woke up and moved towards the water, as if it was about to keep its stay short and swim off again. Instead, Thor found a new, more comfortable place to rest not far from the first and fell right back asleep in the new spot.

Thor’s presence in Scarborough began drawing attention after sunrise the next morning. BDLMR wrote of the day that transpired:

At all times the crowd was at least 350 thick, at one point seemingly over 500 people were there with more bodies continually appearing from all avenues, roads, and even bus trips. It is estimated several thousand people were in attendance over the whole day though likely far more. Thor continued to sleep, having an occasional reposition and brief look around. It was noticed during the night that he was agitated by a few noisy vehicles passing with bright lights. This led us to consider the New Years Eve firework display due to be held in close proximity to Thor’s location, and the New Years Day annual dip. The NYD Dip would continue to monitor the ongoing situation and would put plans in place to ensure all parties safety if the Walrus was still resting on the harbour. BDMLR HQ spoke with the local Council & Liaison Officers who explained the situation regarding fireworks to all council members who without reservation agreed the firework display would likely cause stress and alarm to the Walrus, and therefore was cancelled without hesitation. This was an incredible step forward for animal welfare which has been tremendously backed by the public, official parties, and the media. 

Ultimately, such precautions to protect the newest local celebrity were unnecessary. “By 4pm Thor was becoming slightly more active, and at 4.30pm he sat up, turned around, and promptly slid off into the harbour,” BDLMR wrote. “A cheer erupted from the crowd, while BDMLR Medics scrambled with radios to track which direction he went.”

Thor exited the harbor that day and a few days later booked an overnight stay at the town of Blyth, which is about 70 miles north of Scarborough. In late February, Thor stopped in Iceland before continuing his journey elsewhere.

A photo of Thor lounging on the Scarborough harbor later won a runner-up award in the urban wildlife category of the British Wildlife Photography Awards. It’s not easy to get someone’s good side while they sleep, but Thor seemed to be quite the photogenic muse.

In the lead-up to Christmas 2025, a purported risqué song in the style of 1940s or 1950s “oldies” tunes spread online. Its lyrics, including “when Santa came down my chimney,” were so outrageous that the song was allegedly banned when it was first released, according to TikTok and X users.

For example, on Dec. 15, 2025, a TikTok user shared a popular video reacting to the song as it played (archived):

The user appeared to be shocked while listening to the lyrics, which were heavy with sexual innuendo:

When Santa came down my chimney
And he gave me a Christmas tree
I grabbed his yule log and I licked his candy cane
Oh, Christmas will never be the same

Other TikTok users posted similar videos of themselves reacting to the song with shocked expressions, garnering hundreds of thousands of likes. Some said the song was released in the 1940s, while others claimed it was from the 1970s. Someone else said the song was banned in the 1950s. Meanwhile, Snopes readers searched our website and emailed us to ask if the song was real. 

The song, however, was fabricated. It came from the YouTube account Sus Records, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create “songs that never were.” The account’s description said its videos were “hilarious AI-generated song parodies:”

Bringing Back the Songs that Never Were! Step back in time (and into the future) with hilarious AI-generated song parodies that sound like they came straight off the radio — from the 1940s swing era to the 2000s pop hits. Every track is an original AI creation that blends vintage style, clever wordplay, and laugh-out-loud lyrics.

Indeed, the account posted the song with an AI-generated image depicting a young blond woman hugging Santa Claus. Both had uncannily smooth features and Santa was missing a hand, further confirming the song and image were made with AI. The caption below the video attributed the song to Helen DeSack, an artist who never existed, according to Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing searches. (The non-existent artist’s name itself was a risqué joke.)

In addition, a note below the video indicated it was digitally generated or altered:

How this was made

Altered or synthetic content

Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated. Learn more

Sus Records attributed other songs with more or less explicitly sexual lyrics to DeSack, including “I’m a Horny Little Lady” and “Nobody’s as Big as You.”

For background, here is why we alert readers to rumors created by sources that call their output humorous or satirical.

For years, a rumor has circulated online that the first snow globe was invented by accident. According to the story, a Viennese technician supposedly tried to make a brighter lightbulb and noticed the swirling particles in a water-filled glass sphere looked like falling snow.

One Reddit post (archived) on the topic read: “snow globes were accidentally invented by a medical tool repair man. He was trying to make a brighter light bulb for operating rooms, so he tried using a water filled glass with reflective particles to do this. The effect looked like snow to him which is how he got the idea for snow globes.” 

TIL that snow globes were accidentally invented by a medical tool repair man. He was trying to make a brighter light bulb for operating rooms, so he tried using a water filled glass with reflective particles to do this. The effect looked like snow to him which is how he got the idea for snow globes.
by intodayilearned

Versions of the story have been repeated in popular history articles and travel blogs, and also spread across social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Reddit and X. Snopes previously investigated this claim in December 2020.

In short, the story is based on real events but is only partially accurate. While it’s true that Erwin Perzy, an Austrian surgical instruments mechanic, accidentally created one of the early snow globes around 1900, the first written description of snow globe dates back to the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition.

What the story gets right about Perzy

The story is based on real events. Erwin Perzy III, a spokesperson for the multigenerational family snow globe business, described how Erwin Perzy I, his grandfather, experimented with a water-filled glass globe to increase a bulb’s light output. He added substances meant to reflect light, and one of them (described by the family as semolina) sank slowly and reminded him of snowfall. After that, he put a small model church inside the globe, creating a recognizable early “snow globe” design.

Similarly, Erwin Perzy III told Smithsonian Magazine how his grandfather “invented this by mistake, because he wanted to make something different” and that “the improvement of the electric light bulb” was his intention. A thesis by Anne Hilker, an art law and decorative arts scholar at Mount Mary University, titled “A biography of the American snow globe: from memory to mass production, from souvenir to sign,” underscored that the first snow globe patent was issued to Erwin Perzy I.

Snow globes existed before Perzy

But the “first snow globe” framing leaves out a key piece of historical context. Long before Perzy’s experiments, an official U.S. government report on exhibits at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878 described novelty paperweights made from “hollow balls filled with water” that included a small figure inside: a man holding an umbrella. It also noted that the balls contained a white powder that, when the object was inverted, fell to imitate a snowstorm. 

(HathiTrust)

Hilker called it “the first written description of a snow globe.” Apart from that 1878 written reference, there’s also a physical example that predates Perzy: an Eiffel Tower “snow weight” linked to the 1889 Paris Exposition, held in the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass collection and viewable via Google Arts & Culture.

(Google Arts & Culture)

Therefore, even if Perzy’s “snowfall” discovery was accidental and helped launch a famous snow globe maker, the idea of a glass sphere filled with water that produces a snow-like swirl appears in the historical record earlier than his work.

In sum …

All in all, there is solid support for the claim that Perzy’s snow globe grew out of experiments to improve surgical lighting and that, according to his family, the “snow” effect was discovered by accident. But it is not accurate to describe that moment as the invention of the first snow globe. Similar water-filled glass paperweights containing white powder that swirled when turned over were described in connection with the 1878 Paris Universal Exposition, decades before Perzy’s early-1900s snow globes.

For related reading, we’ve also investigated claims that some snow globes contain ethylene glycol — an antifreeze ingredient that can be dangerous to pets.

Sources

“On September 15th, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them. Air Jordans from Nike.”

This is a quote from arguably one of the single most successful ad campaigns of all time- the initial release of the Air Jordan sneaker line. A brand that is worth billions to parent company Nike today and has, in its 40 years of existence, accomplished something very few items of clothing from the late 20th century has ever really managed- remaining stylish and something fashion conscious people actually want to wear decades later.
Part of the appeal of the shoe, at least initially and as noted in Nike’s own ad copy quoted previously, is that the shoe was banned by the NBA… Though the ad never mentions why the suggestion is that perhaps the shoe was too good or gave His Airness some kind of unfair advantage on the court. As it turns out, the shoe was never banned, but one that looked very similar was and Nike have gone to a not insignificant effort to bury this fact as it kind of ruins the narrative if you know the truth. But as we’re all about the messy details, let’s dive into this fiasco shall we?

Okay so first let’s tell the story as Nike likes to, at least in their advertising copy. Nike has long implied that Michael Jordan was initially banned from wearing a pair of special Nike shoes made exclusively for him in NBA games, and allegedly MJ was being fined $5,000 per game he wore the shoe. A fine the company happily paid because you literally cannot buy that kind of advertising, even though we guess they sort of did.

But as noted in the intro, the suggestion being made is that the shoe gave Jordan some kind of advantage on the court, which is absolutely a thing and there have been several bits of sporting equipment banned from organised competition for that exact reason.
For example consider the LZR Racer swimsuit which was banned after it was deemed the suit gave anyone wearing it an objective, measurable advantage in the water to the point literally over 90% of podium-placing Olympians at the Beijing games in 2008 wore one. For anyone curious about the numbers, the suit was shown to boost performance by around 1-2%, which may not sound like a lot, but remember that swimming records are measured to the hundredths of a second. As an idea of how much this suit improved performance, when Olympians wearing it started to dominate rumours began to circulate that the Olympic pool was too short. In reality the suit was just really, really good, with its efficiency lying in the fact it totally covered the athletes body in a new type of fabric designed to minimise the drag caused by their inefficient human skin.

When it was eventually discovered that it was the suit that had resulted in the literally record-breaking performance by near enough every athlete wearing it, the official governing body of international swimming, FINA, had it and suits made using a similar technology banned from competition. Deeming that wearing it went against “the spirit of the sport” where ideally, skill and natural talent should be the deciding factor in victory. Not equipment. For anyone wondering why they couldn’t just let every athlete wear one instead The fact a single LZR Racer suit cost upwards of $70,000 and took a team of people almost an hour to help the athlete into, probably helped inform that decision.
Back to the world of shoes and Nike, you have the Nike Alphafly’s, a running shoe that was similarly banned for providing the athlete wearing them with an objective, numerical advantage over someone of roughly equal skill, talent and build wearing an inferior, less cool shoe. With experiments funded by Nike concluding that the Alphafly provided athletes with a 4% boost to their “running efficiency” and a further 3% boost to their overall speed while in motion. Again, in a sport where records are measured in hundredth’s of a second, this is a big deal. As for how the shoe worked, Nike spent millions developing it and the exact science behind it is, according to Nike, closely guarded secret (though it’s possible this is just part of the marketing), but the simplified version is that the shoe has a larger than average midsole which provides superior cushioning to a regular running shoe as well as a “trio of carbon plates” in the base that minimises the energy lost when a runner’s foot hits the ground.

Similar to the LZR suit, the shoe was banned when World Athletics released new guidelines dictating the kind of footwear athletes could wear after Eliud Kipchoge ran a sub two hour marathon in 2019 and it was deemed his shoe was, at least partially, responsible. The specific part of the ruling that affected the Alphafly being a rule limiting the thickness of a shoe’s midsole and limiting the number of carbon plates a running shoe could contain to one. In response, Nike just made a new shoe that adhered to those regulations called the Vaporfly which was subsequently worn by the winners of “31 of 36 major marathons” that very year.

As you’ve probably surmised, this sort of thing is pretty common in organised competition with the governing bodies of various sports having to decide on what does and does not constitute an unfair advantage or go against “the spirit of the sport” and athletes and those who provide their equipment trying to figure out how to bend those rules to their own advantage as much as they’re technically allowed to.

With this in mind, it’s believable that the shoe Michael Jordan was wearing gave him some sort of unseen advantage, we mean, we just told you about a Nike shoe that was banned for literally that reason. And we’re sure Nike absolutely loved all of the speculation in the press about this being the case, but the truth is far more mundane. The shoe just didn’t match Jordan’s Chicago Bulls uniform.

You see, at the time in the NBA there was a rule that while players were allowed to wear whatever shoes they felt most comfortable in, they did have to match the rest of their uniform or be predominantly white. A requirement known informally as the 51% rule. Now on the surface the very specific number would suggest that the NBA were very particular about this but the truth is that they were rather lenient and it served as more of a guideline. They just didn’t want a player to look too out of place alongside the rest of their team and were happy to allow exceptions if it made sense, aesthetically. For example players for the Celtics would frequently wear bright green shoes without issue because, well, their uniform was green and the shoes matched that.

The same could not be said for Jordan when he rocked up wearing a pair of jet black Nikes with red accents for a Chicago Bulls preseason game. Which admittedly, did sort of stand out against Jordan’s uniform, though it’s mostly because he’s wearing them with a pair of crisp, Colgate-white socks, rather than otherwise not matching. Whatever the case the NBA weren’t happy and sent Jordan a letter informing him that he’d be fined if he continued to wear shoes with that colour scheme.

Right away you might notice a few, shall we say, discrepancies between that paragraph and the way Nike would tell the story in ads. The first is that Jordan was wearing the shoes in a pre-season game where the atmosphere is decidedly more relaxed than in regular season games. The second is that you’ll notice we said that the NBA sent Jordan a letter informing him that he would be fined, not that he had been fined. Which is where things start to get, as mentioned in the intro, a little muddy.

We know that His Airness was warned by the NBA against wearing a shoe that clashed with his uniform because Nike framed that letter and even used it in some of their advertising material, but it’s not really clear if the NBA ever actually followed through on this threat or if it was just, as the letter stated, a warning.

We say this because if Jordan was specifically warned against wearing his black and red Nikes in a game, he seems to have listened as there’s no photographic evidence of Jordan wearing that shoe in a game during his Rookie year save for a handful from the aforementioned pre-season game that resulted in the warning and a couple from the 1985 NBA Dunk Contest. For which regular rules on uniform are relaxed anyway.

In addition to there being no proof Jordan wore a shoe that would get him fined, there’s also no evidence of Nike paying any such fine during the same period. Which is, odd, right? Like Nike literally used the letter the NBA sent Jordan as part of its marketing but to date have never shown any proof that Jordan was ever fined or that they paid it.
Admittedly Jordan himself once claimed in a 2014 interview with ESPN that he was fined and that Nike paid it for him, but there aren’t records of either thing happening for this particular shoe.

The only known case Jordan was fined for wearing a certain shoe was the Concord Air Jordan 11’s in 1995. In response Jordan called Nike and asked for a pair of shoes that did adhere to uniform rules, with the only pair they had on hand being some Nike Air Flight Ones. The problem was that this shoe was the signature of another player, Penny Hardaway, and the shoes bore a small tag with Penny’s logo on it. Jordan cut this logo off before each and every game. As far as we can tell, this is the only time Jordan wore another player’s shoes in a game and is the only time we can be reasonably sure that he was actually fined. It’s unclear if Nike paid these fines, though given Nike would want to keep their most valuable brand asset happy, and the fine was a drop in the bucket compared to what they were paying Jordan and what they were making off the whole deal, seems likely enough they may have covered it for him.

But going back to the original shoe and advertising, it would seem then that the whole thing was a very clever bit of marketing on Nike’s part and we have to admit, they really capitalised on what was ultimately routine disciplinary action nobody would have heard or cared about if not for them. Years later Nike were still playing up to the supposed infamy of the Air Jordan, censoring the shoe in ads and as noted, using the initial warning Jordan was sent in advertising.

And here’s the most bizarre part of all of this- Michael Jordan wasn’t even wearing Air Jordans in that game!

To be clear, Michael Jordan absolutely wore Air Jordans throughout his career, he’d have been stupid not to, they literally had his name on them and he was being paid boatloads of money to do so. However, for his rookie year at that point, Jordan wasn’t wearing the shoe that would become synonymous with his name. But one that looked a hell of a lot like it.

The Nike Air Ship.

Now the Air Ship is a sort of forgotten relic of sneaker history, being understandably overshadowed by the megalith that is the Air Jordan brand. This said, in recent years Nike has “retroed” the shoe, releasing an updated version that sold quite well. Though not as well as re-releases of the original Air Jordan 1s, which is weird considering the original Air Jordans were just modified Air Ships.

You see, MJ inked the deal that would result in the Air Jordan brand in 1984 on literally the day that year’s NBA pre-season began, October 26th. While the brand had been working with Jordan to design the shoe that would eventually become synonymous with him, it wasn’t finished and Nike weren’t exactly keen on having Jordan go out and play in a shoe without their branding while they figured it all out. Especially after just paying him two and half million dollars for the privilege of having him exclusively represent their brand.

So the company had its design team cobble together a Frankenstein’s monster of a shoe using a pair of Air Ships as a base that were customised extensively to Jordan’s own taste. This included lower ankle height as well as soles that were less cushioned, with the soles of Jordan’s personal pair being fashioned from the Air Ship upper sole and the, at the time, prototype mid/outer sole of the still-in-production Jordans. Perhaps the most noteworthy feature of the shoes though were their colour, black and red with white accents. Meaning yes, it’s this shoe the NBA initially took issue with.

So how was Nike able to claim that the shoes the NBA complained about were Air Jordans and not a one-of-a-kind custom job made exclusively for Jordan? Well part of the reason why is that the two shoes looked very similar, sneakerheads might scoff at such a statement but Air Jordans were basically Air Ships modified to suit Jordan’s playstyle and the only pictures that existed of the prototypes he wore in that pre-season game or the first half of his rookie season weren’t exactly the highest quality. Today with the benefit of modern technology the differences are obvious, at least if you know what to look for, but keep in mind most people saw MJ wearing his custom Pre-Jordans on a grainy CRT television in a smoky bar or in a black and white photo in a newspaper.

To better sell that the shoes Jordan were wearing were indeed Air Jordans, or at least a prototype version, Nike would additionally print the words Air Jordan onto the heel. Though this wasn’t always the case with some versions instead having the words Nike Air on the heel and at least one pair that simply had the word Air on them. In the end the company decided on the Air Jordan name emblazoned across the ankle. With later versions sometimes incorporating a stylised silhouette of Jordan dubbed the Jumpman onto some aspect of their design, usually the tongue. As an aside, this logo was based on a photo spread Jordan did for LIFE magazine, for which he was dunking a basketball, or at least pictured to be doing so. He was also wearing New Balance shoes at the time, meaning technically, the logo for the Air Jordan is showing Jordan wearing a rival company’s shoes…

In any event, Jordan reportedly mostly made the switch to actual Air Jordan’s in November of 1984 when the shoe’s design was finalised.

Speaking of which, exactly how many jury-rigged Air Jordans Nike made for the man himself isn’t clear, though we do know that they made 25 of the initial black and red shoe that drew the ire of the NBA. These shoes are considered by many sneaker collectors to be the single most important shoe ever made and a handful are known to exist in private hands, though nobody is really sure where the rest are or whether they even still exist anywhere but a landfill.

Jordan was known to frequently give away shoes and other such things after games because, we mean, it’s not like he wasn’t able to get more and making your fans happy is always a good thing for any public figure, so every now and again prototype Jordans do show up at auctions and the like, with, for example, a pair Jordans gifted to a ball boy in 1984 selling for almost $1.5 million in 2021. This pair were revealed to indeed be a one of the custom jobs Nike made for Jordan which is why the price was so high. It’s arguable they’re literally one of a kind. Plus, they were signed, and for some reason a prominent person scribbling their name in ink on an object tends to make it worth more money.
This is, of course, all a drop in the bucket compared to what the man himself made from the brand, with Jordan reportedly still earning millions in royalties from sales of the shoe each and every year to this day. It’s good to be like Mike.

Bonus Facts:

• According to Michael Jordan’s daughter, Jasmine, he wouldn’t let his kids wear anything but Jordans around the house with her recalling that she would constantly bug her dad to buy her a pair of light up Skechers or Heelys (the shoe with wheels in the heel) and he would always say no. According to her the one time someone relented and bought her a pair, the next day she found them in the trash and a clean pair of Jordans in their place.
• Nowadays the NBA has no real formal rules about the kind of shoe a player can wear, allowing them to better express themselves and stand out on the court. Unlike certain other sports like baseball, and in academics history textbook writers, they have realized it’s important to allow the characters in your story to have their personalities if you want to keep people engaged in the story you’re telling. Amusingly in basketball, this has led to a number of informal rules devised by the players themselves, such as it generally being considered bad form to wear another player’s signature kicks when playing against them. Though some players deliberately flout this as a form of pre-game psychological warfare.

Expand for References

In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his first words from the lunar surface are not “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, but “I take this step for my country, for my people, and for the Marxist-Leninist way of life, knowing that today is but one small step on a journey that will someday take us all to the stars.” From this shocking left turn in the historical timeline, the series diverges into alternative, supercharged version of the Space Race where neither side backed down or cut its space exploration budget, leading to the establishment of a permanent moon base in the 1970s, an orbiting space hotel in the 1990s, and a manned mission to Mars by the end of the century.

Given the astounding success and cultural impact of the Apollo lunar landing missions, it is easy to forget that the Space Race was, well, a race. But is the alternative timeline of For All Mankind realistic? Could the Soviets really have won the race to the moon? As was often the case throughout the space race, the Soviet approach to landing on the moon was in many ways very similar to NASA’s, but in others very different and sometimes even superior. But a combination of factors including lack of resources, political meddling, unfortunate design decisions, bad luck, and the untimely loss of a key technical figure ultimately conspired to cripple the Soviet lunar programme, allowing NASA to pull ahead and win the race to the moon. Here now is the largely forgotten story of the doomed Soviet moonshot.

In 1961, the year cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the earth, the Soviet Government made a series of public announcements about landing a man on the moon and establishing a permanent moon base. However, little work was done in this direction – at least at first. Sergei Korolev, chief designer of the OKB-1 design bureau, was far more interested in orbital space stations and manned missions to Mars and Venus. Such missions would require a launch vehicle with massive payload capacity in excess of 75 tons, so as early as 1959 Korolev had commissioned studies on a super-heavy booster that would eventually become the Soviet counterpart to the American Saturn V: the N-1. In May of 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced his country’s intention to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. But the Soviet response to this challenge was underwhelming. That same month, the Kremlin granted Korolev a small amount of funding to start N-1 development between 1961 and 1963, with the first launch anticipated sometime in 1963 or 1964. Keen to accelerate the project, in November Korolev appealed to the Strategic Missile Forces of the Soviet Army, pitching the N-1 as a super-heavy intercontinental ballistic missile or ICBM capable of launching massive nuclear weapons like the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba tested the previous October – or up to 17 smaller warheads. However, the military saw little practical utility in the massive N-1, which could not be launched from a protected silo and was thus extremely vulnerable to an American first strike.

With the N-1 project mired in Soviet bureaucracy, Korolev proposed an alternate lunar mission based on the Earth Orbit Rendezvous profile. Instead of launching a lunar spacecraft all at once using one massive booster, the components would be launched aboard multiple smaller boosters and assembled in earth orbit before setting off from the moon. A similar mission profile was extensively investigated by NASA in the early days of the Apollo Programme, being heavily favoured by future designer of the Saturn V rocket, Wernher von Braun – and for more on this, please check out our previous video ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ – How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon. Korolev’s proposed lunar spacecraft, known as the Soyuz A-B-C Circumlunar Complex, would be assembled from three modules derived from the multi-role Soyuz capsule then in development: the 2-man Soyuz 7K, and the unmanned Soyuz 9K booster and Soyuz 11K tanker. Each component would be launched using the Soyuz rocket, a development of the reliable R7 booster which had already launched Sputnik 1, Yuri Gagarin, and dozens of other payloads into space. Once the complex was assembled, the Soyuz 9K booster would fire, sending the whole assembly on a 7-8 day circumlunar mission. The manned 7K spacecraft would be fitted with cameras and other instruments, allowing the crew to study the lunar surface as they flew by.

In September 1963, Korolev developed an ambitious scheme for achieving a manned lunar landing, which involved three launches of the much larger N-1 rocket. After the spacecraft was assembled in earth orbit, a trans-lunar injection rocket stage would fire and send it towards the moon. 200 metres above the surface, a braking stage would fire to slow the assembly down before detaching, allowing the 5 ton spacecraft to descend the rest of the way, guided by a radio beacon aboard a robotic lunokhod rover landed ahead of time. Then, using variable-thrust descent engines, the spacecraft would make a soft landing on a set of tubular landing legs. On completion of the mission, a powerful ascent engine would propel the crew aboard their Soyuz L1 away from the surface and back towards the earth.

However, like the Americans, Korolev soon realized that his Earth Orbit Rendezvous scheme was extremely risky. For it to succeed, the multiple required launches and dockings would have to be conducted in extremely rapid succession, or else the three spacecraft modules would run out of consumables like oxygen and rocket propellant before they were ready to depart for the moon. Consequently, Korolev eventually opted for a version of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous or LOR approach also selected by NASA, in which a lightweight lander was used to ferry cosmonauts between the main spacecraft and the lunar surface.

Meanwhile, engineer Vladimir Chelomey, head of the rival OKB-52 design bureau, proposed a simpler mission profile using the single-man LK-1 capsule. This spacecraft would be launched directly on a lunar flyby mission using a UR-500 booster, assembled from a cluster of four UR-200 or SS-10 intercontinental ballistic missiles. This plan was later changed to use the brand-new UR-500 heavy booster design developed by Valentin Glushko, the Soviet Union’s chief designer of rocket engines. This design would eventually become the Proton family of rockets, still used to this day. Both Korolev and Chelomey aggressively lobbied for a manned lunar mission, but were largely met with apathy from the Kremlin. Finally, in August 1964 – more than three years after the United States announced Project Apollo – the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued Decree 655-268 – On Work on the Exploration of the Moon and Mastery of Space – officially greenlighting a manned lunar program. The effort was divided into two parallel projects: one headed by Chelomey with the goal of achieving a manned lunar flyby by the end of 1966, and the other directed by Korolev with the goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of 1967. However, following a coup in October 1964 that saw Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev deposed and replaced by Leonid Brezhnev, both projects were centralized under Korolev at OKB-1. For the flyby mission, Chelomey’s LK-1 was replaced with Korolev’s 2-man Soyuz 7K-L1 Zond or “probe” capsule, launched on a cislunar trajectory by Chelomey and Glushko’s UR-500 or Proton booster. Meanwhile, for the lunar landing mission, Korolev modified the N-1 design to increase its maximum payload capacity to 95 tons, allowing a 2-man Soyuz 7K-L3 or TOK capsule and 1-man LK lunar lander to be sent directly to the moon in a single launch.

But almost immediately, the various chief designers began to butt heads over the design of the N-1’s propulsion system. Korolev favoured conventional kerosene and liquid oxygen propellants, which were safer and provided higher specific impulse, while Valentin Glushko favoured a combination of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine fuel and nitrogen tetroxide or red fuming nitric acid oxidizer. These propellants, used in the American Titan II ICBM and several of Glushko’s previous missile designs like the R-16, are hypergolic, meaning they ignite on contact with each other. This eliminated the need for igniters and other components, making the engines simpler, lighter, and more reliable – but also greatly increased the risk of accidental fires and explosions – and for more on this, please check out our previous video When Dropping a Wrench Almost Caused Armageddon as well as Catastrophe: the Soviet Space Program’s Darkest Day over on our sister channel Highlight History. In testing, Glushko’s proposed hypergolic engine, the RD-270, achieved higher specific impulse than the Rocketdyne F-1 first-stage engines used on NASA’s Saturn V, but also encountered the same fundamental problem that plagued its American counterpart: combustion instability, uncontrolled vibration that could potentially shake an engine apart and destroy the rocket. This problem nearly killed the F-1 and the entire Apollo Programme until, at the last moment, Rocketdyne engineers devised a system of metal baffles on the propellant injector plates that finally brought the instability under control. Glushko faced the same daunting task, only without the benefit of a 4-year head start. For this and many other reasons, Korolev pushed aggressively for the adoption of more conventional kerosene/LOX engines.

The bitter rivalry between Korolev and Glushko also had a personal dimension. In 1938, at the height Stalin’s Great Purge, Korolev was arrested by the NKVD secret police, tortured, and convicted of various trumped-up charges, spending six years in a Gulag labour camp in Kolyma, Siberia, before being brought back West in 1939 to design aircraft for the Soviet war effort. Among the many figures who denounced Korolev to the Soviet authorities was Valentin Glushko – whom Korolev never forgave. With the two men at loggerheads and the N-1 project at a standstill, in 1962, a special government committee was formed to resolve the matter. While the committee ultimately sided with Korolev, Glushko refused to work with him or with kerosene/LOX engines and quit the project, returning to OKB 456 and going on to design a several successful heavy-lift rockets including the Proton, Zenit, and Energia.

Having lost Glushko, Korolev instead brought in jet engine designer Nikolai Kuznetsov from the OKB-276 design bureau to design the N-1’s propulsion system. Recognizing that large, powerful rocket engines like Glushko’s RD-270 were too prone to combustion instability, Kuznetsov instead proposed the smaller, more reliable NK-15 engines, each producing 1,735 kilonewtons or 394,000 pounds of thrust. However, achieving the thrust needed to launch the massive N-1 and its 95 ton payload to the moon required the use of no fewer than 30 NK-15 engines in the N-1’s first stage. To squeeze even more performance out of the first stage, Korolev and Kuznetsov split the engines into an inner ring of six and and an outer ring of 24 with a gap between them. Air was admitted into this gap through slots higher up on the stage to produce a modest thrust augmentation effect. This design also allowed the exhaust plume to adjust itself to the varying pressure as the rocket rose through the atmosphere, effectively producing a crude version of a so-called “aerospike nozzle.” However, keeping 30 engines running simultaneously required a fiendishly complicated fuel delivery and control system – a major achilles heel that would ultimately doom the entire project.

Finalized in October 1965, the N-1 stood 105 metres tall, had a first stage diameter of 17 metres, and a loaded mass of 2,750 metric tonnes – around 95% as large as the American Saturn V – yet each of its rocket stages produced more thrust and total impulse than the equivalent Saturn V stages. Indeed, with a total thrust of 45,400 kilonewtons or 10.2 million pounds, the N-1’s Blok A first stage stood as the most powerful rocket stage to ever fly until the first full-up test flight of the SpaceX Starship on April 20, 2023. Whereas the Saturn V had three stages – the S-IC, S-II, and S-IVB – the N-1 had four: the Blok A, B, V, and G. The first three stages were used to lift the payload into earth orbit, while the fourth Blok G stage was used to perform the Translunar Injection or TLI burn and send the spacecraft and its crew towards the moon.

However, all four stages of the N-1 were fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen while the Saturn V used liquid hydrogen and oxygen in its S-II and S-IVB upper stages, giving it a significant advantage in specific impulse. Further, the structural design of the N-1 was very inefficient, the propellant being stored in spherical tanks housed beneath conical fuselage sections. The Saturn V, by contrast, used cylindrical tanks with domed ends and shared bulkheads for the fuel and oxidizer, giving it a much larger propellant mass fraction. Consequently, despite its more powerful rocket stages, the N-1 could carry 95 tonnes of payload into low earth orbit compared to 119 tonnes for the Saturn V. Another notable difference between the two rockets was the guidance system; while the Saturn V used gimballed engine nozzles to steer, the N-1 used differential throttling of the engines as well as a set of fold-out grid fins on the first stage. Finally, while the Saturn V was assembled vertically in the Vertical Assembly Building or VAB at Cape Canaveral and rolled out to the launch pad using a special tracked Crawler-Transporter, the N-1, like all Soviet rockets, was assembled and transported horizontally before being erected onto the launch pad.

At the same time, however, the payload the N-1 was designed to carry was much more efficient than the American Apollo spacecraft. As covered in our aforementioned previous video ‘A Voice in the Wilderness’ – How NASA Learned to Land on the Moon, the Apollo Command-Service Module or CSM was originally conceived prior to the announcement of the Apollo Programme as a general-purpose spacecraft for a variety of roles such as ferrying crews to and from space stations as well as lunar flights. A three-man crew was selected to allow the spacecraft’s instruments to be continuously monitored in three eight-hour watches, while the size of the spacecraft and volume of consumables stored aboard were sized based on a 14-day mission – the maximum anticipated duration of a lunar mission. However, at the time of the spacecraft’s design, lunar missions were still seen as a far-off possibility, and little thought was given as to how the Apollo capsule would actually land on the moon. But when, in May 1961, the U.S. Government announced its intention to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, the Apollo design found itself hastily pressed into service as America’s first lunar spacecraft. However, the spacecraft retained many design features which made it less than optimal for this role. For example, it was divided into two sections: the conical Command Module, which contained the crew cabin, heat shield, parachutes, and everything else needed to get the crew safely through the earth’s atmosphere and down to the ground at the end of the mission; and the cylindrical Service Module, which held the orbital maneuvering engine, thruster quads, fuel and oxygen tanks, communications gear, and all other equipment required for the rest of the mission. The conical shape of the Command Module was chosen for stability and controllability during reentry, but this shape, combined with the need to fit large amounts of critical equipment into a small space, left the astronauts with only 6 cubic metres of usable living space. Furthermore, the CSM’s electrical systems were powered by a set of hydrogen fuel cells which required large tanks of hydrogen and oxygen, further increasing its size and mass. These and various other design decisions resulted in a spacecraft weighing nearly 29 metric tons.

The Soyuz spacecraft, by contrast, followed a different design philosophy. Unlike Apollo, Soyuz comprised three modules. During launch and reentry, the 2 or 3-man crew sat in a cramped, hemispherical Descent Module, which contained only the equipment needed for those phases of the mission. This module was connected to a larger Instrument Module which, like the Apollo Service Module, contained the orbital maneuvering engine, fuel and oxygen tanks, manoeuvring thrusters, communications gear, and other mission-critical equipment. However, instead of fuel cells, the Soyuz was powered by fold-out solar panels, making the Instrument Module significantly lighter and more compact. Finally, upon reaching space, the cosmonauts could leave the Descent Module and enter the spherical orbital module mounted at the front of the spacecraft, which contained all the equipment not required for launch and reentry, including scientific experiments, rendezvous and docking gear, communications equipment, and a space toilet. These various design decisions resulted in a spacecraft with a full 9 cubic metres of living space and weighing only 5,000 kilograms – only as much as the Apollo Command Module alone!

But the Soyuz LOK could only get the cosmonauts to lunar orbit; to reach the lunar surface, they needed another vehicle: the Lunniy Korabl or “lunar craft”. While superficially similar to the Apollo Lunar Module or LM, the LK was in many ways substantially different. For example, while the Apollo LM was designed to carry two astronauts to and from the lunar surface, the LK only had room for one cosmonaut. Consequently, at 6 metres and 6,525 kilograms, it was only 85% as tall and 42% as heavy as its American counterpart. Unlike the LM, the LK also had no docking port or tunnel to allow cosmonauts to transfer over from the Soyuz. Instead, the top of the LK was fitted with the simple and rugged Kontakt docking system, consisting of a grid of 108 hexagonal holes. A matching hexagonal probe on the Soyuz LOK allowed the two spacecraft to dock without having to be precisely aligned. Once this was accomplished, one cosmonaut would don a Krechet lunar spacesuit, depressurize the Soyuz, and perform an EVA or “spacewalk” over to the LK. Once aboard, he would undock from the Soyuz and fire the Blok D rocket stage attached to the bottom of the LK, propelling him towards the lunar surface. At an altitude of 4 kilometres, the Blok D would fire again, slowing the LK to a speed of 100 metres per second before detaching. The LK’s Blok E engine would then fire, further slowing its descent. This stage actually consisted of two rocket engines: a main, one-chamber 11D411 engine and a backup two-chamber 11D412 – both burning a hypergolic mix of unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide. This gave the LK a useful degree of redundancy; by contrast, if the ascent engine on the American Lunar Module failed, the astronauts would be doomed. However, due to the craft’s small size, the LK carried only enough fuel for 50 seconds of engine operation, giving the cosmonaut very little margin for error.

Throughout the descent, the LK would be automatically guided by its Planeta landing system, which used an array of four doppler radar antennae to measure the vehicle’s altitude and rate of descent. Further, ahead of the manned missions, the Soviets planned to land an unmanned LK-R spacecraft and a pair of robotic lunokhod rovers at the chosen landing sites. The rovers would carry radio beacons to further guide the LK to a landing while the LK-R provided the cosmonaut with a backup means of reaching lunar orbit if his spacecraft was damaged on landing. The lunokhods would also be fitted with manual controls to help transport the cosmonaut to the LK-R in an emergency or assist with general research and exploration work on the lunar system.

A major challenge which arose during the LK’s development was the design of its landing gear – the Lunnyi Posadochnyi Agregat or LPA. While three legs was the simplest and lightest configuration, it was also the least stable. Its designers thus opted for four legs – just like the American Lunar Module – but to further ensure a solid, stable landing, they also added a set of upwards-firing solid rocket motors that would fire just before touchdown, pressing the LK into the lunar surface and preventing it from bouncing or tipping over.

Having safely landed, the cosmonaut would depressurize the LK’s cabin, open the hatch, and climb down a short ladder to the lunar surface. Due to the spacecraft’s small size, it had only enough consumables for a brief 4-hour stay on the lunar surface, while the Krechet spacesuit only had an endurance of 1.5 hours. Further, there was little capacity for scientific instruments. For the first few landing missions, the cosmonaut could do little more than plant the Soviet flag, take some pictures, collect a few rock samples, and deploy a very limited array of scientific experiments before climbing back aboard the LK and blasting back into lunar orbit. Unlike the Apollo Lunar Module, which had separate descent and ascent rocket engines, the LK used the same Blok E stage to launch the cabin into lunar orbit, the LPU landing gear serving as a launch pad. Once in orbit, the cosmonaut would rendezvous and dock with the Soyuz LOK, spacewalk back over to rejoin his comrade, and jettison the LK before firing the Soyuz’s engine and returning to earth. Later plans called for a larger LK lander capable of carrying two cosmonauts as well as the establishment of a permanent moon base called Zvezda, comprising nine inflatable modules delivered separately and linked together on the lunar surface.

The design of the N-1, Soyuz LOK, and LK were finalized and ready for testing when the Soviet space program suddenly suffered a devastating blow. In December 1965, Chief Designer Sergei Korolev was diagnosed with a bleeding polyp in his large intestine and admitted to hospital for surgery. However, Korolev’s heart, weakened by his years in the Gulag, gave out during the procedure, and on January 14, 1966 he died without regaining consciousness. The Soviet space program had lost its main guiding light – a loss from which the lunar landing effort would never recover. Following Korolev’s death, his role at OKB-1 was taken over by his deputy, Vasily Mishin, who unfortunately lacked his former boss’s engineering genius and political astuteness. Nonetheless, work on the lunar programme continued. On November 28, 1966, the first unscrewed test flight of the Soyuz spaceflight was conducted under the designation Kosmos 133. While the launch was successful, the capsule’s attitude control system malfunctioned, sending it into an uncontrolled spin. After two days controllers finally succeeded in carrying out retrofire, but when it was determined that the spacecraft would likely land in China, it was self-destructed. A second unmanned spacecraft, designated Soyuz 7K-OK No.1, was supposed to rendezvous with Kosmos 133, but it was destroyed when its launch vehicle exploded on the launch pad. A third unmanned test flight, Kosmos 140, was conducted on February 7, 1967. After a largely uneventful orbital mission, the capsule descended at a higher-than-expected rate that would have been lethal to any human occupants before crashing through the ice of the frozen Aral Sea and sinking in 10 metres of water. Nonetheless, the mission was deemed a success and approval was given for the first manned test flight. This mission, Soyuz 1, was flown on April 27, 1967 by cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. However, due to dozens of unresolved design flaws and political pressure for the flight to coincide with the anniversary of Vladimir Lenin’s birthday, the mission was plagued with problems and ended in Komarov’s death as his parachutes failed to deploy and his spacecraft slammed into the ground at 140 kilometres per hour – and for more on this, please check out our previous video The Most Disastrous Space Mission Ever Executed.
Following extensive modifications, the Soyuz space capsule was successfully tested during the Soyuz 3 mission, launched on October 26, 1968 and commanded by Georgy Beregovoy. Soyuz 3 was supposed to rendezvous and dock with the unmanned Soyuz 2 – demonstrating the capability that would be needed for manned lunar landing flight – but due to technical issues Beregovoy failed to achieve a successful docking. This would not be achieved until January 14, 1969 during the dual flight of Soyuz 4 and 5. After successfully docking, cosmonauts Aleksei Yeliseyev and Yevgeny Khrunov donned spacesuits and spacewalked from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4, commanded by Vladimir Shatalov. Soyuz 5 commander Boris Volynov then returned to earth alone.

Meanwhile, with the American Apollo Program gathering momentum, the Soviets focused their efforts on achieving a manned circumlunar mission. To test the space worthiness of the Soyuz 7K-L1 lunar flyby spacecraft, a series of unmanned versions were launched on free return trajectories around the moon. The first of these missions, Zond 4, was launched on March 2, 1968. However, the spacecraft’s guidance system failed on reentry and it was self-destructed to prevent it landing outside Soviet territory. On September 14, 1968, Zond 5 carried two Russian tortoises and a variety of biological samples around the moon to test the effects of cosmic radiation. Eight days later the spacecraft reentered the atmosphere and splashed down in the Indian Ocean, where it and its occupants were successfully recovered. Amusingly, the Zond 5 mission also saw the execution of an elaborate space prank, as Soviet cosmonaut Pavel Popovich later revealed:

“In the late 1960s we were getting ready for a flight around the moon. At the time we sent to the moon the so-called probes, the very same Soyuz spacecraft, but with no crews in them. Each one of such probes was to fly around the moon and return to Mother Earth. A major problem was for the probes to land. Of all probes only one landed safely. When we realized we would never make it to the moon, we decided to engage in a little bit of hooliganism. We asked our engineers to link the an-the-probe receiver to the transmitter with a jumper wire. Moon flight missions were then controlled from a command centre in Yevpatoria, in the Crimea.

When the probe was on its path round the moon, I was at the centre. So I took the mike and said: “The flight is proceeding according to normal’ we’re approaching the surface…” Second later my report – as if from outer space – was received on Earth, including the Americans. The U.S. space advisor Frank Bowman got a phone call from President Nixon, who asked “Why is Popovich reporting from the moon?” My joke caused real turmoil. In about a month’s time Frank came to the USSR, and I was instructed to meet him at the airport. Hardly had he walked out of his plane when he shook his fist at me and said: “Hey, you space hooligan!””

This was followed on November 10 by Zond 6, which carried a similar biological payload as well as various physics experiments. This was intended to be the final test flight before a manned circumlunar mission, but following reentry Zond 6’s parachutes failed and the spacecraft crashed to earth. One month later, Apollo 8 made the first manned flight to the moon, dashing the Soviets’ hopes of pulling ahead in the space race. And while two more successful Zond missions were flown on August 7, 1969, and October 20, 1970, by this time the Americans had already successfully landed men on the moon, eliminating any propaganda value these flights might have had.

Yet despite the Americans having all but won the space race, the Soviet lunar program carried on for a few more years. On November 24, 1970, the Soviets launched Kosmos 379 – an unmanned orbital test of the LK lunar lander. The mission was a success and was followed by Kosmos 398 on February 26, 1971, and Kosmos 434 on August 12, 1971, both of which confirmed the soundness of the LK design.

Meanwhile, development work was underway on the massive N-1 rocket that would carry the Soyuz LOK and LK to the moon. On November 25, 1967, the Soviets rolled a full-scale mockup of the N1, the Facilities Systems Logistic Test and Training Vehicle 1M1, out to the newly-constructed launch pad 110R at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to perform various handling and pad integration tests. This rollout was photographed by U.S. reconnaissance satellites, and may have convinced NASA officials to move up their timeline and launch Apollo 8 around the moon in December 1968. Indeed, the Soviets were planning to conduct the first N-1 launch by early 1968 and the first manned lunar flyby by the end of that year, but due to various technical difficulties the first N-1 launch did not take place until February 21, 1969. Unfortunately, the extreme complexity of the 30-engine first stage came back to haunt the designers when, a few seconds after liftoff, an electrical fault caused the automatic engine control system, known as KORD, to shut down to engines. This resulted in severe oscillations that broke several components loose and started a fuel leak and internal fire that prompted KORD to shut down the entire first stage 68 seconds into the flight. As a result, the rocket crashed to the ground just 52 kilometres from the launch pad.

The next test took place on July 3, 1969 – just two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11. Shortly after the rocket cleared the launch tower, the first stage suffered an explosion and all but one engine shut down, causing the massive rocket to pitch over and drop back onto the launch pad. The 2,300 tonnes of propellant aboard ignited, triggering a massive blast with an explosive yield of nearly 7 kilotons of TNT – half the power of the Little Boy atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion obliterated the launch pad, flung debris as far as 10 kilometres, shattered windows across Baikonur, and could be seen as far as 35 kilometres away. The failure was eventually traced to a liquid oxygen turbo pump for engine #8 which had exploded shortly after liftoff.

Pad 110R took 18 months to rebuild, and it was not until June 26, 1971 that another N-1 could be launched. But once again, the test ended in failure as the rocket began to roll uncontrollably, twisting itself apart and crashing just a few kilometres from the launch pad. For the fourth launch, conducted on November 23, 1972, the N-1 was fitted with a brand-new control system which used dedicated steering engines rather than varying the thrust of the main engines. At first, these modifications appeared to have worked, and liftoff and initial climb went smoothly. However, when, at T+90 seconds, the first stage centre engine cluster was automatically shut down, the abrupt loss of thrust created a hydraulic shock wave that caused multiple propellant feed lines to burst, starting a fire in the first stage, causing the rocket to break up and crash at T+110 seconds. In the wake of these failures, the N-1 program was temporarily suspended. A fifth test launch was tentatively scheduled for August 1974, but by this time political interest in a manned moon landing had all but evaporated, and in May 1974 the N-1 and the entire Soviet manned lunar program was finally cancelled. The whole project was officially classified and the remaining N-1 boosters and launch hardware at Baikonur dismantled in an effort to pass off the whole effort as a deliberate hoax designed to deceive the Americans. It was not until the late 1980s, when Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev instituted his policy of Glasnost or “openness”, that the existence of a Soviet manned lunar project was officially admitted.

As we have seen, due to a combination of a late start, political infighting, faulty designs, and plain bad luck, the Soviets were nowhere near placing a man on or even around the moon by the end of the 1960s. But had they succeeded in catching up with the Americans, who would they have sent? In 1966, the Soviets formed two groups of astronauts for lunar missions: the first would conduct qualification flights of the Soyuz LOK and LK lander in orbit and perform trans-lunar missions aboard Zond spacecraft launched by Proton rockets; while the second would actually land on the lunar surface. The first group was commanded by Vladimir Komarov and included first man in space Yuri Gagarin as well as Andriyan Nikolayev, Valery Bykovsky, Yevgeny Khrunov, Vladislav Volvov, Valery Kubasov, Vitaly Sevastyanov, Georgy Grechko, and Viktor Gorbatko. However, following Komarov’s tragic death aboard Soyuz 1, Gagarin was removed from the group and officially grounded for political reasons – and for more on this and Gagarin’s extraordinary life and career, please check out our previous video The Mysterious Death of Yuri Gagarin.

Meanwhile, the second group of cosmonauts was commanded by Alexei Leonov and included Pavel Popovich, Pavel Belyayev, Boris Volynov, Pyotre Klimuk, Oleg Makarov, Anatoli Voronov, Nikolai Rukavishnikov, and Yuri Artyukhin. As the most senior cosmonaut who, during the Voskhod 2 mission on March 18, 1965, and performed history’s first EVA or “spacewalk”, Leonov was the clear front-runner for the first cosmonaut to walk on the moon – so in this respect For All Mankind’s alternate history scenario is accurate.

By the time the manner lunar program was cancelled, the Soviets had already shifted their focus to other projects including the establishment of long-duration orbital space stations. The first of these, Salyut 1, was launched on April 19, 1971, and became history’s first occupied space habitat. This was followed by five more Salyut stations, of which three – Salyut 2, 3, and 5 – were actually top-secret military Almaz stations equipped with sophisticated espionage gear and even guns – and for more on this, please check out our previous video Has Anyone Ever Fired a Gun in Space? Plus: Space Cannons and the Guns Designed for Astronauts. The Salyut program was followed by the Mir space station, which operated from 1986 to 2001, and the Zarya and Zvezda modules of the International Space Station. The Soviet space program also carried out extensive explorations of the solar system using unmanned probes, including the Venera program which, in the 1970s, succeeded in landing on and taking pictures of the surface of Venus – the first time a human craft visited another planet.

But while the Soviet manned lunar program was largely a failure, it did leave one lasting legacy: the Soyuz spacecraft, which despite its initial teething problems soon proved itself to be an extraordinarily robust and reliable machine, with one of the best safety records of any space vehicle in history. Indeed, from the retirement of NASA’s space shuttle in 2011 to the first crewed flight of SpaceX’s Dragon capsule on May 30, 202, the Soyuz was the only means for astronauts and cosmonauts to get to and from space. It also inspired the design of China’s first manned spacecraft, the Shenzhou, which made its first crewed flight in October 2003. So while the Soviets never succeeded in landing a man on the moon, their efforts did, as Alexei Leonov’s fictional quote states, make one small step on a journey that has led mankind to the stars.

Expand for References

The release of files related to the case of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in December 2025 sparked a rumor that U.S. President Donald Trump had been a passenger on Epstein’s jet “many more times than had previously been reported.” 

For example, on Dec. 23, left-leaning publication Meidas Touch shared a post on Facebook citing an alleged email from an assistant U.S. attorney who said Trump had flown on Epstein’s jet at least eight times between 1993 and 1996 (archived): 

The post included an apparent screen capture of that email, showing the name of the email’s sender and its recipient had been redacted. 

The claim was true. Snope identified the email in question in two separate batches of documents published on the Department of Justice website as part of the Epstein file release compelled by Congress in late 2025.

According to the document, an assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York whose name was redacted sent the email on Jan. 7, 2020 — with about one year left during Trump’s first presidential term. The name of the recipient also was blacked out. The prosecutor said the SDNY had received flight records containing “more than 100 pages of very small script” the day before. A review of those records revealed Trump was “listed as a passenger [on Epstein’s jet] on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996,” the email said:

(U.S. Department of Justice)

On at least four of these eight occasions, Epstein’s assistant Ghislaine Maxwell also was a passenger, according to the email. At the time of the email, the SDNY was investigating Maxwell for assisting Epstein in his sexual abuse of minor girls. In 2021, she was found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The email went on to say Trump had once flown alone with Epstein and a 20-year-old person whose name was redacted. 

“On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case,” the email read. 

The assistant U.S. attorney said at the end of the email the team in charge of investigating Maxwell at the SDNY “didn’t want any of this to be a surprise down the road.”

Snopes has investigated several rumors that started with, or were fueled by, the DOJ’s release of the Epstein files, including the allegation that Trump once said a young female had “pert nipples” and another that a document linked Trump to a 14-year-old girl.

Many doctors agree with the Food and Drug Administration’s recent decision to remove the black box warnings on at least some forms of hormone therapy used to treat the symptoms of menopause. But in making the announcement, health officials misleadingly suggested that women could take the drugs for long-term benefits to the heart and brain. Menopausal hormone therapy is not currently recommended for those uses.

On Nov. 10, the FDA announced it would be removing the black box warnings for increased risk of cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and probable dementia on all hormone treatments for menopause. Such products include a variety of formulations of estrogen, often with another hormone, that work to alleviate symptoms such as hot flashes, night sweats and vaginal dryness, which can be severe in some women. 

The warnings were first applied in 2003, following the results of a large randomized controlled trial that was part of the Women’s Health Initiative. This study, funded by the National Institutes of Health to better understand how to prevent disease in older women, was widely misinterpreted as finding that risks of menopausal hormone therapy, or MHT, outweighed benefits for managing menopause symptoms. Use of MHT plummeted.

In the intervening years, it has become clear that certain forms of MHT, such as oral pills that act systemically, or throughout the body, do have some risks, but can be safely used to treat symptoms in most women without risk factors when started within 10 years of menopause. This is when symptoms are most likely anyway. Other forms of MHT, such as vaginal estrogen, pose little if any risk. Menopause is when a woman stops menstruating; a woman is considered postmenopausal once she has gone a year without a period.

Medical groups such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have long recommended MHT after considering an individual’s risks and benefits and have petitioned the FDA to remove the black box warnings for low-dose vaginal estrogen. They do not, however, advocate the use of hormones for overall health when a woman does not have any symptoms, due to a lack of convincing evidence.

In making their black box announcement, FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. misleadingly extolled the benefits of MHT in preventing cardiovascular disease and dementia.

“Hormone replacement therapy has been found to reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease and mortality by as much as 50%, Alzheimer’s disease by 35%,” Kennedy said near the beginning of the Nov. 10 press conference announcing the change.

“By a large body of evidence, there are now recognized to be profound long-term health benefits that few people, even physicians, know about,” Makary later said of hormone therapy, calling it “life-saving.”

“What are we doing not offering women this potentially powerful treatment? With few exceptions, there may be no other medication in the modern era that can improve the health outcomes of women on a population level than hormone replacement therapy,” he added.

Kennedy and Makary made similar claims in a variety of subsequent appearances, including Kennedy’s citation of the same figures in a Dec. 2 Cabinet meeting.

Experts told us their statements don’t reflect the full scientific literature on the topic.

“The totality of the data do not support a preventive benefit of hormone therapy for these diseases,” Dr. Nanette Santoro, a menopause researcher at the University of Colorado Anschutz, told us. “One must selectively pull out specific numbers from specific studies to come up with a miraculous reduction in risks.”

No guidelines, neither from ACOG, the Menopause Society, the International Menopause Society nor the Endocrine Society, she noted, recommend hormone therapy to prevent cardiovascular disease or dementia.

Makary and Kennedy also downplayed risks of systemic MHT, implying that breast cancer risks are not borne out by the data. This is misleading and does not tell the full story.

“They’ve systematically cherry-picked things that show benefit and that diminish risk,” Dr. Martha Hickey, a menopause clinician and researcher at the University of Melbourne, told us.

“Providers should always have a nuanced conversation about the risks and benefits of systemic hormone therapy with their patients. Each woman is different, and this conversation needs to be tailored to the needs and priorities of each woman,” Rebecca Thurston, a menopause researcher at the University of Pittsburgh who focuses on cardiovascular and neurocognitive health, told us. She emphasized that MHT is highly effective for hot flashes and night sweats and can also prevent menopause-associated bone density declines but is not recommended for the prevention of heart disease and dementia “based on the highest quality science.”

The FDA did not respond to a request for comment.

Cherry-Picked Dementia Benefits

In touting the benefits of MHT, Makary and Kennedy repeatedly claimed that hormone therapy has been found to lower the risk of Alzheimer’s disease by 35% and reduce cognitive decline by 64%. The numbers were also cited in an HHS fact sheet.

Both reflect findings in individual scientific studies, but they are cherry-picked and not representative of the overall literature.

Pauline Maki, a menopause and cognition researcher at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, explained in a series of social media posts that the 35% figure is “misleading and inaccurate in light of what we now understand.” It comes from a 1996 case control study of a single retirement community in Laguna Hills, California.

The study looked at how often women with an Alzheimer’s disease or dementia diagnosis on their death certificate had self-reported using hormone therapy, compared with those who did not have such diagnoses noted. It found that women with Alzheimer’s were less likely to have said they used hormones, with hormone use associated with a 35% lower risk of the disease.

While that might sound pretty good, Maki said, this doesn’t prove that it’s the hormones that made the difference, as other factors associated with hormone use could be driving the result instead.

There are also much larger and more recent case control studies that Makary and Kennedy did not mention. While the cited Laguna Hills study drew from a population of around 9,000 and involved fewer than 1,500 women who died 30 or more years ago, three population-wide case control studies have been published in the past six years, each with 60,000 or more participants.

“When you look at those studies, a very, very different result emerges,” Maki said in a video post. “Far from reducing the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, those studies found zero evidence for a reduction, and in fact, found an elevated risk.”

Maki said that women should not be concerned about increasing their dementia risk if they are using hormones to alleviate menopause symptoms. “But if you use it for primary prevention, particularly long term, there’s no evidence of benefit,” and there could be potential harm, she said.

The second study Kennedy and Makary have cited is a 2005 Danish follow-up study of 343 women who had previously been in a randomized controlled trial and had received hormone therapy or placebo years earlier. Researchers administered a cognitive screening test and found that while there was no difference in the average scores among those who ever took hormones versus those who never did, the subset of women who took hormone therapy for two to three years had a 64% lower risk of testing positive for cognitive impairment.

Maki told us that the study had a better design in terms of exposure to hormone therapy, but was “weak in its measure of cognitive impairment and is weak methodologically as only a subset of women in the original study participated in this follow-up.” She said it was odd to highlight either this paper or the Laguna Hills paper given all the other studies that have been conducted on the subject over the past 20 years.

When randomized controlled studies have been done, they have failed to find that hormone therapy has cognitive benefits in recently postmenopausal women. Four such trials have found no effects — good or bad — on cognition.

One randomized controlled trial — the WHI Memory Study — found that at 18 years of follow-up, women were 26% less likely to die of dementia if they had taken one type of an oral estrogen-only therapy. These women had all had hysterectomies, allowing them to take systemic estrogen without progesterone. (In women with intact uteruses, progesterone or a synthetic form called progestin needs to be added because estrogen on its own can increase the risk of uterine cancer.)

But the absolute benefit was very small, and the authors said the result should be interpreted with “particular caution.” The same trial found earlier that a combined estrogen and progestin therapy more than doubled the risk of probable dementia in postmenopausal women 65 years and older.

Some scientists have hypothesized that the timing of MHT matters, such that hormone therapy might benefit the brain if given early in the menopause transition or before disease sets in — and then shift to being neutral or harmful later. But as the Menopause Society’s 2022 position statement on MHT explains, the concept has not “been definitively supported” in randomized controlled trials.

Based on “good and consistent scientific evidence” — the highest graded recommendations — the society concluded that “[i]n the absence of more definitive findings, hormone therapy is not recommended at any age to prevent or treat a decline in cognitive function or dementia.”

Possible Cardiovascular Benefits in Some Women Uncertain

Makary and Kennedy have frequently claimed that hormone therapy dramatically cuts the risk of heart disease, casting it as a clear and definitive finding.

While there is some evidence of a cardiovascular benefit when MHT is started within 10 years of menopause or before the age of 60, this remains a hypothesis that has not yet been confirmed in trials.

“Until we have that next trial that would answer these questions, we can’t make these very large sweeping claims,” Dr. Chrisandra Shufelt, a women’s health internist at the Mayo Clinic in Florida who has studied the impact of hormones on cardiovascular disease, told us.

Both health officials have specifically said that hormone therapy slashes cardiovascular disease risk by 50%. HHS has used the same statistic in its press release and fact sheet.

The study often cited for this, however, is a 1991 review that specified that those findings pertained to oral estrogen-only hormone therapy — the kind given to women without uteruses — and needed to be confirmed in a randomized controlled trial.

Indeed, the review predates findings from the 2002 and 2004 WHI studies, which were specifically done to test whether hormone therapy actually did prevent cardiovascular disease in primarily healthy postmenopausal women.

“There’s observational data and there’s lots of it,” Marcia Stefanick, a WHI investigator and chronic disease prevention researcher at Stanford University, told us, noting that’s why the WHI study was done in the first place. “We know that the women who are using menopausal hormones were very different from the women who weren’t,” she explained, adding that they were “less obese, less likely to smoke, more physically active, more highly educated, less likely to eat high fat diets and have salt in their diet.”

At the time, hormones were commonly prescribed for prevention and were recommended by medical societies for that purpose.

“What piqued our interest in the late 80s and early 90s was that hormone therapy was increasingly being used for other indications — that is, prevention of cardiovascular disease in particular,” Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the study from its inception until his retirement in 2014, told us. He emphasized that he was speaking to us in his personal capacity and not on behalf of the WHI investigators nor his former employer, the NIH.

Surprising many, when the WHI study testing MHT with oral estrogen and progestin was stopped after five years in 2002, it did not identify cardioprotective effects — and in fact the medications appeared to increase risk for the group as a whole. Nor did the oral estrogen-only part of the study find heart benefits when it halted in 2004. (A separate trial known as HERS similarly found no cardiovascular benefit with MHT in women with existing coronary disease, with an increased risk of blood clots, contrary to earlier observational studies.)

When later stratified by age, and after longer follow-up, the WHI results suggested that the cardiovascular risks of hormone therapy are generally lower in younger women closer to menopause and higher in older women starting therapy 10 years or more after menopause. These risks dissipated over time, and were more evident in women taking combined therapy. For younger women 50 through 59 years of age taking estrogen alone after 13 years of follow-up, the study pointed to a reduced risk of heart attack and coronary heart disease.

“If you look at the estrogen and progestin trial, there’s no benefit for younger women at any point for anything,” Stefanick noted. “It’s only in the estrogen-only trial, and those are women who had a hysterectomy.”

In trying to understand why the observational studies diverged from the trial data, these subanalyses, combined with other studies, including in monkeys, led to the so-called “timing hypothesis.” It proposes that estrogen has beneficial effects on the heart if given early and before plaques have formed in arteries, but is neutral or can be harmful later in life when women have established plaques.

As several guidelines document, there is wide agreement that timing affects the cardiovascular risk of hormone therapy — and that oral MHT is safe in most younger postmenopausal women who have bothersome symptoms. But there is far less agreement that this means MHT is preventing cardiovascular events in these women and that hormones should be given for the purpose of preventing heart disease.

Yet another WHI subanalysis published this year found that among the subset of younger women with moderate or severe hot flashes and night sweats in the trials, both estrogen-alone and combined MHT reduced symptoms without changing atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk. But for postmenopausal women age 70 and older with these symptoms, that risk was increased in both cases.

The WHI studies tested just one dosage of a particular oral estrogen and progestin, and it is unclear if the results apply to other dosages, types or modes of delivery. While Makary and others have emphasized that newer products may have reduced risk, by the same token, it hasn’t been shown that they would necessarily show any cardiovascular disease benefit.

“Most of us do believe it’s safer, but being safe is not the same as being beneficial,” Stefanick said, speaking of transdermal estrogen, a systemic product that is widely considered safer for the heart than oral formulations since it bypasses the liver. She added that she was not aware of any evidence of transdermal formulations showing heart disease benefits.

Makary has also referenced a 48% decline in fatal heart attacks with MHT, pointing in the press conference to a review published in Circulation. The 2023 review, which Shufelt co-wrote, was describing a subgroup finding in a 2015 Cochrane systematic review. It notably did not back the use of hormones to prevent heart attacks, and stated that it is “appropriate that no medical societies” recommend MHT for that purpose.

While the overall finding of the Cochrane review was that MHT did not protect against mortality or cardiovascular disease, when broken down by timing of therapy, a subanalysis found there was a 30% risk reduction of death from any cause and a 48% reduced risk of coronary heart disease (defined as cardiovascular deaths and nonfatal heart attacks) in women starting hormone therapy less than 10 years after menopause. 

These results were largely driven by the three largest trials, Shufelt told us, and were only possible because the analysis pooled results from studies using different types of MHT, including both oral estrogen alone and combined therapy. One of the included trials is a 2012 Danish study of around 1,000 participants that was not blinded and did not use a placebo. The Cochrane review itself notes that if the Danish study is not included, the findings would not be statistically significant (see table 3). Moreover, the review found an increased risk of blood clots in veins in the younger subgroup — a fact Makary and Kennedy never mention.

The authors of the Cochrane review said in a commentary that their analysis of younger participants “should be interpreted with caution due to its post hoc nature and is therefore not adequate to make recommendations for its use to prevent cardiovascular disease in this population.”

In addition to studies looking at health outcomes, there are two smaller randomized controlled trials that have assessed whether there might be cardiovascular benefits of MHT when given to younger postmenopausal women. A 2014 study using a lower dose of estrogen failed to find any beneficial effect on atherosclerosis progression after four years.

A 2016 trial of around 650 participants found that in women within six years of menopause, MHT did appear to stall the thickening of the carotid artery. However, there was no impact on two other secondary measures of coronary atherosclerosis.

Shufelt said that it is not clear that the observed slowing of artery thickening is indicative of a cardioprotective effect. Typically, the thickness is only concerning for preclinical heart disease if it reaches a certain level, and the women still had normal thicknesses, she said. She likened the study results to slightly lowering a person’s blood pressure from an already normal pressure. 

Shufelt said the studies were important because they showed that hormone therapy doesn’t increase risk in these populations, but “we’re not there yet to say that it prevents disease.”

Incomplete Information on Breast Cancer Risk

Kennedy and Makary both have emphasized that the WHI results were misinterpreted, and use of MHT subsequently fell. This narrative is broadly correct, but the officials misled on exactly how the study was misinterpreted, downplaying statistically significant findings on breast cancer risk.

The 2002 WHI study was “not statistically significant, but it triggered a media frenzy and led to the FDA applying unscientific black box warnings to all hormone replacement therapy products in 2003,” Kennedy said during the Nov. 10 press conference.

Makary also emphasized that the WHI breast cancer results were not statistically significant. “If we don’t have statistics, then we don’t have science,” he said.

Rossouw, the former WHI project officer, called this portrayal of breast cancer risk and WHI “just dead wrong.”

The WHI was stopped around three years early in 2002 after an independent board of researchers saw that breast cancer risk had reached a level that they had decided in advance would be unacceptable. Clinical trials are required to have such a board of safety monitors. The data also showed risks of blood clots and strokes, while failing, as we’ve said, to substantiate the idea that hormone therapy could prevent cardiovascular disease. The WHI researchers concluded that, given its overall balance of risks and benefits, MHT could not be recommended to prevent chronic disease and that it would not be ethical to continue the trial.

Rossouw was the first author of the 2002 WHI paper released in conjunction with the termination of the study. This is the publication Makary and Kennedy were referring to when they cited breast cancer results that were not statistically significant. But Rossouw explained that these data were preliminary. The women stopped their treatments under the study protocol after a median of 5.6 years. The researchers published their 2002 paper based on the 5.2 years of data available at the time. “There’s a lag,” he explained. “When you stop a trial early, there’s some data that are in process that you have not yet analyzed.”

The researchers were subsequently able to analyze the data collected in the final months of the trial. “When we did the full analysis and published those data, the breast cancer risk in the estrogen-progestin trial was statistically significant,” he said. The researchers wrote in a 2003 study that they had found a 24% increase in breast cancer cases in women who were randomly assigned to receive the combined hormonal therapy.

Furthermore, as the researchers continued to follow the women for years after the trial ended, they repeatedly found a statistically significant increased risk of breast cancer for combined MHT, both at 13 years and 20 years of follow-up. The WHI ultimately showed a decreased risk of breast cancer in women who took estrogen-only therapy.

The WHI investigators wrote in a Nov. 12 response to the FDA that “combination estrogen plus progestin increased the risk of breast cancer irrespective of age and this risk became more significant over time in the trial and with longer duration of follow-up.”

Some observational studies also have found an increased risk of breast cancer associated with use of MHT. One meta-analysis published in 2019 found that taking MHT was associated with increased risk of breast cancer even among people who took it between one and four years, with increasing risk the longer people took the therapy. 

Hickey called the evidence showing an increased risk for breast cancer from combined MHT “strong and consistent.” She added that it makes mechanistic sense that hormone therapy might have some impact on breast cancer. “I think with breast cancer, there’s a very strong biological mechanism by which menopausal hormone therapy increases the growth of existing breast cancers and possibly the initiation of new breast cancers,” she said. 

In general, practice guidelines support the use of MHT for troublesome menopausal symptoms while urging doctors to inform patients about possible risks and benefits.

“Women should be counseled about the risk of breast cancer with hormone therapy, putting the data into perspective, with risk similar to that of modifiable risk factors such as two daily alcoholic beverages, obesity, and low physical activity,” the Menopause Society advises doctors, for example.

“Hormone therapy does confer some risk, and so what we don’t want to do is overgeneralize or underestimate that risk, because it potentially could be harmful to some people,” Dr. Monica Christmas, director of the menopause program at University of Chicago Medicine and associate medical director of the Menopause Society, told us.

People who have already been diagnosed with breast cancer are typically recommended to avoid systemic MHT, according to the group’s guidelines, although it may be an option in specific cases. Vaginal estrogen, which is applied topically, is an option for those experiencing vaginal symptoms.

What some people arguably misinterpreted were the implications of the WHI results for treating menopausal symptoms.

The 2002 study notably did not say that the trial showed that the risks of MHT outweighed its benefits when used to treat troublesome hot flashes and night sweats that come with menopause. Investigators, including Rossouw, stated this at the time.

However, this nuance sometimes was lost as study authors, communications officers, journalists, doctors and the lay public interpreted and communicated the WHI results. Many left with the impression that the researchers had found that the risks of MHT outweighed the benefits in general, and not just for preventing chronic disease. In 2001-2002, nearly 39% of women between ages 52 and 65 used MHT. As of 2017-2020, fewer than 5% did. 

Makary also dismissed the WHI data by saying that it only applied to an older progestin. “Today, hormone therapy is available in formulations that do not appear to carry the same increased risk of blood clots or breast cancer that was seen in earlier studies,” he wrote in a Nov. 10 viewpoint published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. There is some support for this idea, but this conclusion is not certain.

The Menopause Society guidelines say that some “but not all” of the available data suggest a lower breast cancer risk from certain hormones compared with the type tested in the WHI study. There are no data from randomized trials to tease apart whether breast cancer risks vary by hormone type.

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There is surprisingly little information documenting the history of the Christmas tree.

Decorated fir trees, instantly recognizable as a symbol of the holidays today, can be traced back to the 1800s in both the United States and United Kingdom, and even earlier in other countries. 

But it remains unclear exactly when and where the tradition began. What little historical record is available only confirms that the history of decorated trees in winter is long and complicated.

Three different theories trace the Christmas tree back to the 1400s or 1500s, while two others reach even further into the past. Some proposed explanations seem more accurate than others.

Below, we outline the big ones in chronological order:

Pre-Christian Claims

Some sources claim the Christmas tree has its origins in pre-Christian traditions and generally offer a few winter solstice celebrations that share things with modern Christmas. First is the Roman festival of Saturnalia, celebrated around the time of the winter solstice. A time of festivity for all, Saturnalia featured acts of goodwill, small gift exchanges and large feasts.

But don’t be fooled; it’s not the only solstice holiday with similarities.

Yule, a Germanic holiday celebrated in late December, shares similarities with Christmas, featuring feasts and, famously, the Yule log, which has survived to the modern day. Sources like the Saga of Haakon the Good, from 11th-century Norway, describe King Haakon I, a Catholic, ordering Yule and Christmas to be celebrated on the same date, creating a connection between the two celebrations.

Finally, Celtic traditions might also have links. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder wrote in “Natural History“ that Celtic druids used plants like mistletoe in religious ceremonies. And while mistletoe is not a tree, it is an evergreen plant, suggesting that evergreens, in general, have a long history in religious traditions.

But when searching in this era for the use of full-size trees as decorations, the results are mixed. While some articles claim Romans decorated their houses with evergreens at Saturnalia, these articles often either do not have supporting evidence or make dubious connections, like a reference to a Roman poem by Catullus that describes cypresses and laurels being used to decorate … for a wedding. Meanwhile, Pliny’s “Natural History“ does not describe any traditions associated with trees, backing up the assertion that these decorations were limited to other evergreens.

There is a reference to a decorated tree in the Old Testament itself. Jeremiah 10:3-4 reads:

For the practices of the peoples are worthless;

   they cut a tree out of the forest,

   and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel.

They adorn it with silver and gold;

   they fasten it with hammer and nails

   so it will not totter.

The passage describes people cutting “a tree out of the forest” as a “worthless” tradition, suggesting that it should not be followed. This ancient tradition violated one of the Bible’s Ten Commandments, that of idol worship (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me”).

While this passage suggests at least one ancient group decorated and worshipped trees, it’s quite a stretch to connect this particular reference to the modern Christmas tree. There’s no evidence that the in-question trees had any seasonal symbolism. 

Meanwhile, historical evidence shows that the modern use of mistletoe, holly and greenery in general to celebrate winter holidays dates back to pre-Christian times.

St. Boniface

During the early 700s, a Catholic missionary from England named Winfrid began a mission of evangelization in Germany. Today, we call him St. Boniface. His life was recorded remarkably soon after his death by a priest named Willibald, who gathered his information by speaking with many of Boniface’s followers. According to Willibald’s biography, the “Vita Bonifatii,“ while the missionary was spreading Catholicism in Hesse, now a state in Germany, he encountered a group of pagans who were worshipping a sacred tree. Willibald calls this the “Oak of Jupiter,“ although it was probably dedicated to some version of the Norse thunder god Thor rather than the Roman Jupiter. Regardless:

Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch. But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly, the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above crashed to the ground shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord. Thereupon the holy bishop took counsel with the brethren, built an oratory from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to Saint Peter the Apostle.

According to legend, after Boniface felled the Oak of Jupiter, a small fir tree sprouted in its place. Boniface explained to the pagan crowd that the fir, with its evergreen leaves representing everlasting love and its triangular shape resembling the Holy Trinity, would make a much better tree to worship. But as it turns out, the Christmas tree connection was added much later. 

Observant readers might notice that Willibald’s retelling, the earliest account of Boniface cutting down the oak, does not mention a fir tree at all. We feel comfortable ruling this origin story out entirely.

The Paradise Play

The third claim feels a little more modern and therefore a little more plausible. Meet the Paradise Play: In the mid-1800s, an Austrian linguist named Karl Julius Schroer recorded three plays from a small island village, Oberufer, near modern-day Bratislava, Slovakia. These plays, Schroer claimed, were traditionally performed around Christmastime and had been passed down for generations — the plays were already old when the Oberufer was founded by settlers emigrating from one side of Austria (Lake Constance) to the other (the border with Slovakia) in the 16th or 17th century.

According to Schroer, the Paradise Play, covering the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden, used a fir tree decorated with apples to represent the tree containing the forbidden fruit and was traditionally performed on Christmas Eve. Unfortunately, because it’s unclear when the plays were first performed, nobody can definitively say whether the tree used in the Paradise Play was later adopted as the Christmas tree, but given the timing of the two theories that follow below, this proposal feels closer to the truth than the last two.

Renaissance Guilds

This theory quickly veers into a bit of Baltic geopolitics. As The New York Times reported in 2016, the capital cities of Estonia and Latvia (Tallinn and Riga, respectively) both claim the first Christmas tree, with Riga’s claim in 1510 and Tallinn’s in 1441. Pretty cut and dry, right? Again, no.

First, the good news: Both claims follow the same story. In that story, the Brotherhood of Black Heads, a merchant’s guild active in both countries, cut down a tree, decorated it, paraded it around town and then set it on fire. (As a side note, Snopes does not recommend setting your Christmas tree on fire.)

But the bad news: A Latvian historian, Gustavs Strenga, said neither claim was that accurate. Strenga spoke with NPR (and is also quoted in the same Times article) and explained that while the celebrations involving trees did have some evidence backing them up, the Christmas-trees connection was added by 19th-century Baltic historians. That hasn’t stopped the two countries from arguing about it, though.

“I’ve been called the Grinch,“ Strenga told the Times.

German Protestants

In 1517, Martin Luther published his “95 Theses“ in Wittenberg, Germany, beginning the Protestant Reformation. Around the same time, in a nearby German-speaking area, we find evidence of decorated fir trees at Christmas. In Alsace, now a part of France, a 1521 record from the town of Selestat describes paying guards to protect the town’s fir trees in early December.

There are earlier references. A 2020 blog post explored a claim that the cathedral of Strasbourg, also in Alsace, purchased trees to celebrate the new year in 1492 and that a guild in nearby Freiburg decorated a tree with apples and cookies all the way back in 1419. However, neither Snopes nor the blog’s author could verify these earlier claims, so we’ll go with 1521.

This leads nicely back to the Protestants. One legend says that Martin Luther himself invented the Christmas tree. Like St. Boniface, he reportedly chose an evergreen to symbolize the everlasting goodness and love of God but decorated the tree with candles to symbolize the star that led the three wise men to the baby Jesus in Bethlehem. This is almost certainly apocryphal, but the story does have one element of truth: German Lutherans and other Protestant groups were early adopters of the tree.

It was likely from them that the tree spread to other areas. The German-born Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III of England, introduced the tree to the U.K., where it was further popularized by Queen Victoria.

In North America, Snopes found references to trees as early as the U.S. formation itself. One legend says the first tree was in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, in 1777. The Goethe Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spreading German culture, placed the first North American Christmas tree in Sorel, Quebec, Canada, in 1781. About a century later, U.S. President Benjamin Harrison set up the first Christmas tree in the White House in 1889.

But overall, Germany kept coming up.

Strenga, the Latvian historian, claimed the Christmas tree was a German invention, and that the merchants of the Brotherhood of Black Heads might have picked up the tradition after trading with cities in northern Germany. The settlers of Oberufer came from nearby Lake Constance, only 125 miles from Strasbourg, the largest city in Alsace. St. Boniface helped spread Christianity to the middle of Germany. And while the Romans never conquered Germany, Celtic and Germanic (later Norse) cultures that celebrated Yule did.

So, when did the Christmas tree appear? Nobody knows for sure. Who started it? That, too, is unclear. But we can at least make an educated guess on where the tree came from: somewhere in Germany.

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