Man convinced he's worked out US military patterns based on pizza orders

Conspiracy theories fall across a broad spectrum ranging from clearly insane to unsettlingly plausible.

The Earth, for example, is absolutely not flat, so we can comfortably put that in the ‘clearly insane’ bracket. But then there’s the Covid lab leak theory which, having started out as a widely laughed-off conspiracy theory, now seems likely to have some truth to it.

Some of them, though, mostly come off as a bit of fun, as is the case with the suggestion that US military action can be predicted with pizzas.

It isn’t a tea leaves kind of situation. Nobody’s looking at the orientation of pepperoni slices and suggesting their positioning maps to some tactical realities. Instead, it’s around orders and their frequency to particular places.

On X social media account Pentagon Pizza Report, an unnamed software engineer tracks Google’s data for pizzeries near the Arlington military complex. The data, which is anonymised, is an aggregation of ‘timeline’ and ‘location history’ data from phones that can track how often visits are made to certain establishments.

The X account posts regularly to point out spikes in pizzeria visits, with followers then speculating on how those visits might correlate to activity at the Pentagon.

Of course, the 200,000 people following the X account largely have to make do with acknowledging that sometimes people eat pizza and some nights are busier than others. Now and then, however, the tracker finds a correlation between pizzeria activity and the likelihood that Pentagon staff and leaders are up late working on military strategies.

The account noted that, on 12 June 2025 at around 7pm local time, there was a rush of pizzeria activity near the Pentagon. An hour later, Israel launched its attack on Iranian nuclear bases. Of course, that was Israel’s initial action, but it was done with support from the US who later joined the attacks.

Coincidence? Probably. A means to figure out what the US Army might be up to? Potentially. A bit of fun? Absolutely.

Someone claiming to be the account’s founder told the Washington Post: “I think a large reason for the rapid growth is the OSINT [open source intelligence] community sharing my reports the past few weeks, which is super cool.

“There also seems to be a lot of Crypto traders very interested in my reports which I didn’t really expect.”

They continued: “I think people have all sorts of different assumptions about the kind of guy that sits and stares at Google Maps data all day long.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if most people follow for the same reason I made the account,” he wrote on the Bluesky chat. “It’s stupid, it’s funny, but you can’t help but feel there’s also something there.”