Jasper Maskelyne

Jasper Maskelyne

Author: Citation Needed Media May 20, 2026 Duration: 30:23

Jasper Maskelyne (29 September 1902 – 15 March 1973) was a British stage magician in the 1930s and 1940s. He was one of an established family of stage magicians, the son of Nevil Maskelyne and a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. He is most remembered for his accounts of his work for the British military during the Second World War, in which he claimed to have created large-scale ruses, deception, and camouflage in an effort to defeat the Nazis.[1]


Ever wondered how confidently incorrect a person can become after a ten-minute internet deep dive? Citation Needed is a comedic exploration of that exact phenomenon. Each episode, the hosts from Citation Needed Media pick a topic-which could be anything from the history of a bizarre invention to the biography of a semi-forgotten public figure-and their sole source material is a single Wikipedia article. They then proceed to discuss, dissect, and wildly extrapolate from that one page, adopting the unearned authority of online experts. The result is a hilarious and often insightful collision between earnest curiosity and total improvisation, revealing just how fragile our shared understanding of culture and society can be. You’ll hear genuine attempts to parse dense, dry information immediately derailed by personal tangents, absurd hypotheticals, and the inevitable realization that the wiki text itself might be deeply flawed. It’s a podcast that celebrates the joy of learning something new while simultaneously mocking the platform where most of us go to do it. The conversations are loose, funny, and surprisingly informative, not because the hosts are actual experts, but because they’re so willing to follow a strange fact down a rabbit hole and see what they find. Tune in for a unique blend of casual research and comedic commentary that holds a mirror to our own online habits.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Citation Needed
Podcast Episodes
Ghost Ships [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 32:56
A ghost ship, also known as a phantom ship, is a vessel with no living crew aboard; it may be a fictional ghostly vessel, such as the Flying Dutchman, or a physical derelict found adrift with its crew missing or dead, li…
Bonus Army [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:20
The Bonus Army was a group of 43,000 demonstrators – 17,000 veterans of U.S. involvement in World War I, their families, and affiliated groups – who gathered in Washington, D.C., in mid-1932 to demand early cash redempti…
Chrome Tab Cleanout [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:23
Tom cleans out his unrelated chrome tabs on interesting wikipedia articles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_ironing https://woodcarvingillustrated.com/deep-sea-jack-o-lanterns/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_t…
Pizzagate [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:03
So we actually recorded this last week on Monday so one of the last paragraphs of the episode has outdated info in it. The Pizzagate guy was killed by police during a traffic stop after allegedly pulling out a gun and po…
Pythagoras [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 38:33
Pythagoras of Samos[a] (Ancient Greek: Πυθαγόρας; c. 570 – c. 495 BC)[b], often known mononymously as Pythagoras, was an ancient Ionian Greek philosopher, polymath, and the eponymous founder of Pythagoreanism. His politi…
The Host's Fictional Bios [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:53
This episode was inspired by our tall tales episode. We each take a crack a writing another host's fictional bio. This was supposed to be a Christmas Episode but was delayed.
The Holy Prepuce (Foreskin) and Other Relics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 32:26
The Holy Prepuce, or Holy Foreskin (Latin præputium or prepucium), is one of several relics attributed to Jesus, consisting of the foreskin removed during the circumcision of Jesus. At various points in history, a number…
Snarky Restaurant Reviews [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 37:30
Two mean reviews. One from the Sydney Morning Herald on Coco Roco...and the other from the New York Times on Guy's American Kitchen & Bar.
Pong [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 35:18
Pong is a table tennis–themed twitch arcade sports video game, featuring simple two-dimensional graphics, manufactured by Atari and originally released on 29 November 1972. It is one of the earliest arcade video games; i…
Competitive Eating, Takeru Kobayashi, and Joey Chestnut [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:39
Competitive eating, or speed eating, is a sport in which participants compete against each other to eat large quantities of food, usually in a short time period. Contests are typically eight to ten minutes long, although…