Case File #0071

Aug 31, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A 'shooting star' is not a star at all but a small piece of space rock or dust burning up high in the atmosphere.

      TRUE. The streak of light is a meteor — a meteoroid heated to incandescence by friction with the air.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Shooting stars are real stars falling out of the sky, and each one leaves a gap in the night sky where the star used to be.

      FALSE. The stars remain in place; what falls is a tiny meteoroid burning up, far closer than any star.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Most meteors that create a visible streak are tiny, often no larger than a grain of sand.

      TRUE. Even a dust-sized particle can produce a bright flash as it vaporises.

  2. Round 2 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun at about four light-years, is bright enough to spot with the naked eye.

      FALSE. Proxima Centauri is a dim red dwarf, far too faint to see without a telescope despite being closest.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hubble Space Telescope orbits Earth and has been returning astronomical observations since 1990.

      TRUE. Launched aboard the shuttle in 1990, it has been serviced by astronauts and still operates.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A light-year measures distance, not time — specifically how far light travels over the course of one year.

      TRUE. Despite the word 'year,' it's a unit of distance, roughly 9.5 trillion kilometers.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Coffee's use as a brewed drink is strongly associated with its early spread through the Arabian Peninsula.

      TRUE. Brewed coffee culture took strong early root in Arabia, spreading through its ports and cities.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Espresso is made from a special species of coffee bean that is grown only at high altitudes in Italy.

      FALSE. Espresso is a brewing method using pressurized hot water; it is not a bean, and coffee is not commercially grown in Italy.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Coffee 'beans' are actually the seeds found inside the fruit of the coffee plant, often called cherries.

      TRUE. Each coffee 'bean' is a seed from inside a small red fruit, so 'bean' is really a seed.

  4. Round 4 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth above sea level, reaching roughly 8,849 metres.

      TRUE. Everest's summit is the highest land elevation measured from sea level.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa and a free-standing volcano rising from surrounding plains.

      TRUE. Kilimanjaro is Africa's tallest peak and famously stands alone rather than in a range.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Mount Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain on Earth when measured from its base to its summit.

      FALSE. Measured base-to-summit, Hawaii's Mauna Kea is tallest; Everest is highest above sea level.

  5. Round 5 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Wright brothers made the first sustained, powered, controlled airplane flights in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

      TRUE — their December 1903 flights are recognized as the first of their kind.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Before building aircraft, the Wright brothers ran a bicycle sales and repair shop in Dayton, Ohio.

      TRUE — their bicycle business funded and informed their aeronautical experiments.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Wright brothers' very first flight lasted well over an hour and covered more than thirty miles.

      FALSE — the first flight lasted about twelve seconds and covered roughly 120 feet, not miles.

  6. Round 6 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A rainbow always shows exactly seven distinct colour bands, a count fixed by the physics of how light splits.

      FALSE. A rainbow is a continuous spectrum with no fixed number of bands; 'seven colours' is a naming convention, not physics.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A rainbow is actually a full circle of light; from the ground the horizon simply hides its lower half, so we see only an arc.

      TRUE. A rainbow is a complete circle — pilots and skydivers sometimes see the whole ring.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In the fainter secondary rainbow that can appear above the main one, the order of the colours is reversed.

      TRUE. The outer bow of a double rainbow runs its colours in reverse, from a second internal reflection.

  7. Round 7 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Trees can trade nutrients and pass warning signals to one another through underground fungal networks linking their roots.

      TRUE — symbiotic fungi form networks that shuttle carbon, nutrients, and stress signals between connected trees.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The oldest known individual trees, bristlecone pines, have lived for more than 4,000 years.

      TRUE — some Great Basin bristlecone pines are over 4,800 years old, among the oldest living non-clonal organisms.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A tree's age can be read from its rings, and the rings on the shaded north side are always spaced about twice as wide as those on the south.

      FALSE — ring width tracks each year's growing conditions, not a fixed compass ratio; there's no reliable 2-to-1 north-south rule.

  8. Round 8 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'avocado' traces back, through Spanish, to a word in the Nahuatl language of central Mexico.

      TRUE. Spanish 'aguacate' adapted the Nahuatl 'ahuacatl', which English then reshaped into 'avocado'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'muscle' comes from the Latin 'musculus', literally 'little mouse', from the way a flexing muscle seemed to ripple like a small animal.

      TRUE. Romans thought a moving muscle under the skin resembled a scurrying mouse.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The expression 'OK' originated solely as a shortening of 'Old Kinderhook', a US president's nickname, with no earlier written use.

      FALSE. 'OK' first appeared in 1839 as a jokey misspelling standing for 'oll korrect'; the Old Kinderhook campaign later reinforced it but did not create it.

  9. Round 9 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Bamboo flowers and produces seeds every single year, just like most common garden plants.

      FALSE. Many bamboo species flower only once every several decades, sometimes in synchronised events across entire regions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Some bamboo species can grow nearly a metre in a single day, making them among the fastest-growing plants on Earth.

      TRUE. Certain species set growth records of close to a metre per day under ideal conditions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Bamboo is technically a grass, closely related to wheat, rice and lawn grasses.

      TRUE. Despite its woody, tree-like size, bamboo belongs to the grass family Poaceae.

  10. Round 10 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Dolphins are fish and breathe underwater through gills, like other marine animals.

      FALSE. Dolphins are air-breathing mammals that must surface to breathe through a blowhole, not gills.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A dolphin sleeps with one half of its brain at a time, keeping one eye open and surfacing to breathe.

      TRUE. This 'unihemispheric' sleep lets it rest while staying alert enough to surface for air.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Dolphins use signature whistles that act like individual names, identifying themselves and calling to specific others.

      TRUE. Each dolphin develops a personal whistle others use to address it.

← All past cases

Baloney — spot the fabricated fact before the timer runs out

Each round is three short statements, two of them true and one invented. Baloney is a free daily game about catching a plausible lie you do not have the knowledge to refute. No account, no install, ten rounds a day.

What the game actually asks you to do

Every UTC day, Baloney deals the same ten rounds to everyone. Each round is three short statements on a single topic, and exactly one of the three is a fabrication written by the people who made the game. You read all three and tap the one you believe is invented. A thirty-second timer runs on each round, and if it expires without a tap the round is scored as a miss — a detective who cannot decide has been fooled.

The moment you tap, the round resolves in place. The invention is stamped FAKE, the other two are stamped TRUE, and all three carry a one-line explanation of the real story, so a round never leaves a false claim sitting in your head without the correction next to it. The fabrication also reports what share of that day's players fell for it.

Ten rounds is a run of at most about five minutes, and usually less, since a round ends the moment you commit. Then you get a score out of ten, a verdict band, and your streak. A perfect ten is "Baloney Immune"; eight or nine is "Certified Skeptic"; six or seven is "Sharp Nose"; four or five is "Occasionally Fooled"; two or three is "Easily Fooled"; zero or one is "Believes Everything". There is nothing to install, no account and no email address.

Why this is not a trivia game

The distinction is the whole point of the format. Trivia asks whether you know a fact. Baloney asks whether you can smell a lie. You are never asked what is true — you are asked to catch what is false — and those turn out to be different muscles. Someone who would fail every general-knowledge quiz can still be an excellent fake-spotter, because nothing in the game requires recall.

That is also why the game is not easier on the subjects you know. A fabricated claim about a topic you are confident in gets less scrutiny than a claim about a topic you know is foreign to you; expertise is exactly the camouflage a good lie hides behind.

The design also closes off the cheapest shortcut. In every round the two true statements are chosen to sound improbable — they are the ones that provoke "that can't be real". So the feeling of disbelief is not evidence. Two of the three statements earn that reaction honestly, and only one deserves it.

What the game refuses to make up

Most daily games show you a number about "other players" and you take it on faith. Baloney's crowd line is built so that it cannot be invented, and you can see the seams if you look for them. The "% got fooled" figure is the real share of that day's finishers who missed that exact fabrication. Until at least twenty people have finished the day, the line is omitted entirely rather than estimated — on a quiet morning you will see nothing where the number would be, which is the correct answer.

The percentile works the same way. When you finish, your score is submitted once to the day's tally, which returns the day's score distribution; "you were sharper than X% of today's detectives" is the share of players who scored at or below you, computed from that distribution. If the tally is unreachable or the crowd is still too small, that sentence is replaced by "You're one of the first on the case today." Your score, your band and your streak are arithmetic in your own browser and never wait on a network call, so a failed request costs you a crowd figure, not your result.

Two smaller honesties are worth stating plainly. Your streak and today's result are stored in your browser's local storage, not on a server, which means they do not follow you to another device and clearing your browsing data clears them. And the once-a-day lock is client-side — best-effort rather than tamper-proof. A determined player can clear storage and replay, and the archive below will answer any past case outright. The game would rather say that than imply a security it does not have.

The case pool, in numbers

The pool currently holds 150 rounds and ten are served per day, so the whole pool cycles every fifteen days — with daily play a round comes back about two weeks later. The topics and their counts: animals 22, geography 21, language 19, science 19, nature 18, space 17, history 17, food 17.

Two things are worth knowing before you play, and both are checkable rather than asserted. The first is that length is not a tell. Across the pool the fabrications average 104 characters and the true statements average 104 as well, and the fake is the longest statement in its round only about a third of the time. The supposedly "too tidy" fabrication is not measurably tidier than the facts it is hiding among.

The second is that position is not a tell. Of the 150 rounds, 52 put the fabrication in the first slot, 50 in the second and 48 in the third — against the roughly 50 apiece you would expect if position were random. The widest gap is four rounds, well inside the wobble a fair coin gives at this sample size, so no slot is worth favouring: tapping the first statement every time is worth what tapping the third is worth, which is what guessing is worth. An earlier version of this page reported a real third-slot bias — 67 rounds out of 150; the statements are no longer served in the order they were written, and that edge is gone.

The archive is what makes numbers like these verifiable instead of promotional. It lists the past month of closed cases, and each one opens fully declassified: which statement was the invention, and the truth of all three.

Practising, and what to practise on

Because past cases declassify, the archive is also the only real training ground. Reading an old case file cold — deciding before you scroll to the answer — beats replaying a round you already know, and it builds a sample bigger than ten rounds a day.

A few habits earn their keep across both.

Questions people ask

Is Baloney free, and do I need an account?
It is free and there is no account. The game is ad-supported, runs in your browser and installs nothing. Your streak and today's result are kept in your own browser, so there is nothing to sign up for and no personal details are asked for.
Are the facts in Baloney real?
Two of the three statements in every round are genuine facts. The third is a fabrication written by the game's authors, and it is always revealed and corrected in the same round it appears, so nothing false is left planted in your memory unexplained.
How long does one game take?
Ten rounds with a thirty-second timer on each, so at most about five minutes and usually less, because a round ends as soon as you tap a statement. There is no way to bank time between rounds.
Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
Yes. One set of ten rounds is served per UTC day and the same set goes to every player, with a fresh case at midnight UTC. That is what makes comparing a verdict with a friend meaningful — you both faced the identical statements.
What does "% got fooled" mean, and why is it sometimes missing?
It is the real share of that day's players who failed to catch that particular fabrication. It is hidden until at least twenty people have finished the day, and it is never estimated or filled in with a plausible-looking number — so if you are playing early or the game is quiet, the line simply is not there.
Can I play past days?
Yes, through the case archive, which lists roughly the last month of closed cases. Each past case opens fully declassified — the fabrication marked, and the truth behind all three statements — which makes it a usable practice set. Today's case stays sealed until you have played it.

Last reviewed 2026-09-17.