Historical In Joke / SCP Foundation

The SCP Foundation has several of these, though usually not used as a joke:

Main Series

• The explosion of Mount St. Helens was caused by an SCP-076 containment breach.
• All recorded instances of Spontaneous Combustion were caused by a viral SCP.
• SCP-089 apparently is responsible for the Great New Orleans Fire of 1788, the Taiping Rebellion, and the Bhola Cyclone.
• SCP-101 indirectly caused the fame of the hijacker D. B. Cooper. His corpse was found next to SCP-101 and this discovery has been classified, which explains why everyone thought that Cooper managed to disappear with the money he stole.
• SCP-169 is what created “The Bloop”.
• Both the image and the redactions clue that SCP-435 was responsible for Castle Bravo, the largest American nuclear detonation.
• SCP-453 caused the Great Neapolitan Earthquake.
• SCP-627 is a more obvious example than most. Look at the blacked out names and the corresponding dates, and remember Hiroshima.
• Kitty Genovese's murder weapon was an SCP.
• SCP-687 apparently caused the Cleveland Torso Murders.
• The 2009 North Korean nuclear test is implied to be the consequence of an experiment on SCP-800.
• SCP-873 was the cause of The Tunguska Event. Or maybe it was created by the event. Or both at the same time. It's hard to say with weird temporal anomalies like that.
• SCP-1051 arrived on earth in Roswell and was recovered from a certain air base in Nevada. Part of its containment involved intentionally spreading misinformation about everything the base is associated with, from experiments on aliens and their ships to The Men in Black, to disguise the SCP's true nature.
• SCP-1084 tells what became of Ambrose Bierce after he disappeared in Mexico in 1913. He was killed by people in a small village after acting like a jackass, and his final words were about how nobody would remember them— this came true.
• The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. was caused by an unknown Roman (successfully) attempting to contain SCP-1120 before it could spread any further than Herculaneum.
• A mining crew encountering SCP-1179 led to the Centralia, Pennsylvania coal seam fire.
• SCP-1372 is the real reason Magellan never made it back to Spain.
• The identity of SCP-1447-2 is heavily obscured, but if you read carefully enough and have enough knowledge, you'll realize that he is Steve Jobs, who apparently went to Tibet in 1985 and created his own Tulpa, all the while another Steve Jobs replaced him in public.
• Played with for SCP-1485. It's a portal to a world similar to the Foundation's, but with no anomalies or Foundation equivalent. It bears an estimated 99.98% similarity to their world, with the .02% historical difference believed to be caused by [REDACTED] (which in-universe is the absence of SCP objects). This sort of lampshades how similar the worlds are despite the number of SCPs that have impacted history.
• Out of the three hundred people that have died on Mount Everest, at least a hundred of them were due to getting caught in SCP-1529’s eyes
• SCP-1570 is implied to be indirectly responsible for San Francisco, Austin, and Las Vegas' trends toward partying and counterculture, as well as Burning Man's exposure. It's also the source of the infamous picture of Cowboy fans in assless chaps (and flaunting it) partying on the street as a shocked woman walks past.
• The Boxing Day Tsunami:
  • SCP-1574 is implied to have some connection to the Boxing Day Tsunami, despite being on the other side of the world. It may or may not have been caused by aliens from its home planet who had come looking for it.
  • The Boxing Day Tsunami itself has been caused by no less than three different SCPs, including an 001 Proposal, SCP-090, SCP-1574, and even an asteroid brought down by the Foundation. It got to the point that "things what caused teh INDIAN OCEAN TSUNAMI" is specifically listed as an overdone cliche.
• Roman Emperor Septimius Severus was apparently a talking lion.
• An instance of SCP-1901-2 is heavily implied to have broken up The Beatles after being used as a Replacement Goldfish for the late Paul McCartney.
• According to the black-boxed names at the end of the article, SCP-1959 seems to be either Aleksei Ledovsky, Andrei Mitkov or Sergei Shiborin, legendary "lost Cosmonauts" rumored to have been killed in experimental Soviet space flight experiments.
• SCP-2090: Professional basketball player Tim Duncan is actually a god-like being and the sport of basketball is actually a ritual created by the Foundation to prevent him from accessing his powers too soon, done thanks to Foundation messages from the future. Even a throwaway line about "turning a hurricane on him" to get Duncan into the sport is actually a reference to real-life as revealed in the comments: Bluedanoob — "Duncan started out as a swimmer and only began playing basketball in ninth grade after Hurricane Hugo destroyed the only Olympic-sized pool on his home of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands." (the future messages have Duncan "The Devastator" appearing on the shore of California with "blood in the water")
• The statues of the Terracotta Army, SCP-2101-1, are possessed by thousands of soldiers working together to contain the malicious spirit of their emperor, Qin Shi Huang.
• The person history knows as Tupac Shakur is really an eldritch entity with a heart of gold that decided to blend in with humanity and take up rap as a pastime, leading to his famed musical record. Upon his supposed death, Tupac has since been fighting crime and anomalies from beyond the material world as part of an elaborate plot to take down the Scarlet King.
• The portal to SCP-2264-B/"Alagadda" was created by Henry Percy, the 9th Earl of Northumberland while he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Other figures from Elizabethan England, such as Elizabeth I's advisor and noted occultist John Dee, may have also assisted in the portal's creation. The recovered Document 2264-0037 implies that Christopher Marlowe wrote The Hanged King’s Tragedy.
• It's implied that the ongoing Roman hatred of Carthage was at least partially caused by Romans crossing SCP-2513 from south to north. The effect reverses if the person crosses the bridge from north to south.
• SCP-2600 was created by Atari for the US Army as a war simulation project.
• Nikola Tesla successfully invented his Death Ray, SCP-2700. He also traveled to help a Dimensional Traveler in his scientific venture (and to secretly complete his death ray), and ended up creating a universal-scale bomb when one of his peers sabotaged his creation because it was a weapon of war.
• Richard Milhous Nixon was a normal Californian senator up until a night in 1951 where a secret society performed a ritual on him that split him into two Richard Nixons. One, SCP-2736-1, was kept in the Foundation’s custody while SCP-2736-2 became the 37th president.
• George Washington died in 1755 under General Braddock’s army. He was replaced with SCP-2776, a Schizo Tech android, completely unaware of his true nature, let alone that his wife Martha was his mechanic.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis was caused by an SCP-3148 infection.
• Manifestations of SCP-3166 began with the publication of the infamous Garfield comics from the week of Hallowe’en 1989, none of which can be attributed to any illustrator.
• According to SCP-3288, Leopold I of the Holy Roman Empire was an amateur Sarkicist who used genetic engineering to make sure the Habsburgs would always have "pure blood" despite their inbreeding. It worked...very well.
• SCP-3391: The Bronze Age Collapse was caused by a war between the Proto-Sarkics and the ancestors of the Church of the Broken God.
• SCP-3490 is apparently connected to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
• SCP-3780 pretty much boils down to "The Foundation shot J.F.K.". While Lee Harvey Oswald did indeed make the killing shot, the time period is cluttered with temporal anomalies to a ridiculous degree, all of which involve Oswald being thwarted. Thus, the 23rd-century-era Foundation continuously has to go back in time to counter the anomalous interventions and cement the fact that Oswald shot Kennedy.
• Fidel Castro survived so many assassination attempts that the Foundation concludes he's a SCP (SCP-3874) and speculates about the real nature of his powers. It turns out he's just an insanely lucky but non-supernatural person.
• The extended logs for SCP-3922 suggest that every serious-sounding discussion of a non-existent work (e.g. Goncharov, the book discussed in House of Leaves) is due to SCP-2747 destroying the original.
• SCP-4128 influenced Jerry Siegel to create Superman, including telling Siegel that he came from an alien planet.
• SCP-4352: The Brothers Grimm were members of a Foundation predecessor known as "The Warning Bell", and they wrote Little Red Riding Hood in order to contain SCP-4352 (which just so happens to be The Big Bad Wolf).
• Dr. Bright hijacked George W. Bush's brain-dead body to prevent SCP-4444 (who cohabited the body of Al Gore) from winning in 2000.
• SCP-4481 is the wreckage of the Excelsior, an Alternate History's counterpart to the Space Shuttle Challenger, "the single worst astronautical disaster in history." This timeline saw PBS and NASA settle on the idea of sending Big Bird (SCP-4481-A) onboard, never getting around to the Teacher In Space Project.
• The bread and butter of SCP-4890, Dr. Wondertainment’s Guide to History. SCP-4890-1 asserts the following:
  • The Cretaceous period included Velocihonktor clownus… a goddamn clown raptor.
  • Julius Caesar never was assassinated, secretly establishing businesses such as the Caesars Palace casino/hotel and the Little Caesars pizza chain.
  • The Hindenburg Disaster had a death toll of 57, 21 of which were clowns that stowed aboard to avoid the fare.
  • The Battle of Stalingrad utilized anomalous weaponry including molecular fission cannons, flesh bombs and grown conventional weaponry.
  • The Egyptians building the Pyramids of Giza included genetically modified superhumans.
  - SCP-4890-1 concluded with “Better than saying it was aliens, right?”
  • A Serpent’s Hand member smoking in the Library of Alexandria was the reason the building burnt to the ground.
  • A whale was present at the Boston Tea Party, drinking the tea from the harbor’s waters.
• SCP-4924 apparently gained its anomalous properties in the decade following the Great Molasses Flood.
• Donald Trump, AKA SCP-5004-B, was convinced to run for the Presidency by the Foundation in order to contain SCP-5004-A.
• Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt didn't drown, he got abducted by SCP-5007.
• SCP-6822 is the white flag that was used to enact the 1914 Christmas truce of World War One.
• SCP-6861 was a Tyrannosaurus disguised (using a Perception Filter) as Abraham Lincoln. He was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, who was not only a Confederate sympathizer, but also a Spinosaurus in disguise.

International SCP

• SCP-ES-061 is the reason Omega Mart exists, as an overindulgent coverup for one of ES-061's test results getting leaked on the internet.
• In a similar way to the Marianas Trench, SCP-ES-165 is the Olympus Mons in Mars, and contains the corpses of several hundred meters.
• SCP-CN-2965 is Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, and posits that all the near-death accidents that he experienced during his childhood were caused by time travellers who mistook him for Adolf Hitler.

Other SCPs

• SCP-157-ARC is the bullet that killed J.F.K. (and was used in many other historic shootings, like the "shot heard around the world" at Lexington), but due to its low quality the page is now only preserved for archival purposes.
• Zig-zagged with SCP-1841-EX - Franz Liszt, infamous for a rabid fanbase in a time where most musical composers didn't warrant a following that would put the screaming crowds of Beatles fans to shame, was thought to have some kind of memetic or magic effect that caused such hysteria in his fans. The Foundation eventually realised it was just mundane fan obsession, but not until after they'd assassinated almost every famously dead musician in the 20th century.

Tales and Miscellaneous

• Some geological formations, such as the Marianas Trench and the Gulf of California, are the result of SCPs. In fact, their status as geological formations is fabricated by the Foundation and used to cover up any suspicions.
• Everything in Spring Cleaning is a historical or mythological allusion, even the reference to how the attic could eventually be used for a game of squash.
• "List of Common Anomalous Misconceptions" is a tale set in the Vanguard timeline of SCP-6500, where the Veil falls at a later date than the Broken Masquerade. With that in mind, it sets up a lot of these as regular civilization struggles to get their records back in order:
  • Gamers Against Weed participated in the War on Drugs.
  • Louis XIV constantly bragged about being related to over 500 sun deities, SCP-179 included. This is, of course, a huge lie.
  • The Satanic Panic being a Foundation psyop (the containment procedures for SCP-6237, a mass-produced demonology guide) is referenced again.
  • The Industrial Revolution did not come naturally; a group of mystics sacrificed a god of industry to provoke it.
  • Donald Trump's infamous hairdo is a Betelgeusian alien.
  • The letter thorn had to be taken out of the English language because it caused migraines in native speakers.
  • Mark Z. Danielewski has the ability to traverse narrative layers, and has done so in the past. It's noted, however, that House of Leaves has nothing to do with this.
  • The Illuminati's most popular depictions are a psyop by the Foundation and Disney working together.
  • The moon landing was indeed fake, being a Foundation psyop to fight flat Earthers. However, so many people fell for it that it became real.
  • The modern disdain of the portrayal of Time Travel in Back to the Future was likely intentional, as the series was filmed with orders from the Foundation to use incorrect information.
  • Capcom beat Atari (or Arcadia, as the Foundationverse knows them by) to the punch in anomalous video gaming.
  • SCP-169's species might have dug out the Marianas Trench and then teleported to become Olympus Mons, but given the ambiguous canon, that information could also be a psyop covering for the recovered document.
  • Thomas Edison stole from himself in neighboring dimensions and timelines, not other workers.
  • Subverted with the Large Hadron Collider; all conspiracies theories about it creating dimensional tears, etc. are patently false and are indeed mundane equipment failures.

---