Every time the world gets tense, the same question spreads: is something big about to happen? And every time, people reach for open-source crisis signals, public data that might reveal what governments are not saying. Pizza places near the Pentagon. Unofficial DEFCON trackers. Refueling tankers on flight trackers. Betting odds on prediction markets.
Here is the honest summary up front: none of these are warnings, a few contain weak signal, and the most useful public signals are the boring official ones nobody memes about. This post goes through the famous ones, what each actually measures, and how to read them without fooling yourself.
What to keep in mind throughout:
- No single public signal predicts anything reliably. The famous stories are survivors; the misses are forgotten.
- Most viral indicators measure proxies, like how crowded a restaurant looks, not the thing itself.
- The real early warnings that exist in public, such as embassy advisories, are published openly and are rarely viral.
The Pentagon pizza index
The theory: when a crisis is brewing, Pentagon staff work late, order pizza, and nearby pizza places get busy. The lore goes back decades. A Washington-area Domino’s franchise owner, Frank Meeks, told reporters about delivery surges before the invasions of Grenada and Panama, and in 1990 told the Los Angeles Times about an unusual CIA order the night before Iraq invaded Kuwait.
The modern version watches a different proxy. Since August 2024, an account called Pentagon Pizza Report has posted the public busyness data Google Maps shows for pizza places near the Pentagon, and dashboards such as PizzINT chart the same thing. The idea went viral during the June 2025 Israel–Iran strikes. The Department of Defense, for its part, told Newsweek in 2025 that the theory does not hold, noting the Pentagon has its own late-night food vendors.
Note what the data actually is: how crowded a handful of restaurants look to Google, compared to a typical hour. Not orders, not deliveries, not anything from inside the building. Busy evenings happen because of sports, weather and slow kitchens. We track a version of this on World Monitor because it is a fun artifact of internet culture, and our Pentagon pizza index page documents the full history, the method and the reasons not to take it seriously.
Unofficial DEFCON trackers
DEFCON is the US military’s five-step readiness scale, from 5 (normal) down to 1 (maximum). The single most important fact about it: the current level is not published. Past changes, like DEFCON 3 during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and after the September 11 attacks, became public afterwards through officials’ accounts and declassified records.
So every website showing “today’s DEFCON level” is showing an estimate, whatever its design implies. Some derive it from news keywords, some from vibes, and ours, transparently, from pizza data. Our DEFCON page explains the real scale, its publicly known history, and exactly what our unofficial number measures, which is the right standard to hold any tracker to: if a site will not tell you what goes into its number, treat the number as decoration.
Flight trackers and plane-spotting
This family has the most genuine signal in it. Military aircraft with transponders on are visible to anyone on flight-tracking sites, and hobbyists watch them closely. Surges of aerial refueling tankers heading toward a region, cargo flights into specific bases, or a rare aircraft appearing somewhere unusual all generate attention, and sometimes they precede announced operations. In June 2025, large tanker movements across the Atlantic were widely reported in the days before US strikes on Iran.
The limits are real, though. Militaries know they are watched: aircraft can fly with transponders off, and visible movements can be routine exercises, scheduled rotations or deliberate signaling. Single sightings of “doomsday plane” types spark speculation several times a year, and have repeatedly turned out, per later reporting, to be scheduled missions. Watched over weeks, these patterns are informative; read as alarms, they mostly produce false ones.
Prediction markets
Prediction markets let people bet on outcomes, and the odds aggregate what bettors believe. They are a useful temperature check, and they move fast. But they move on rumor exactly as fast as on fact, and on thin markets a few large bets can swing the number. Treat them as a summary of current sentiment, not as insider knowledge leaking out.
The boring signals that actually mean something
The strange thing about the viral indicators is that genuinely informative public signals exist, and nobody memes about them:
- Travel advisories and embassy notices. When the US State Department raises a country to “do not travel”, or orders non-essential embassy staff to leave a region, that is a real institutional judgment, published openly at travel.state.gov. Departures of embassy staff preceded several recent escalations.
- Airspace closures and notices to airmen. Countries close airspace and airlines reroute before and during hostilities. These notices are public, and flight-tracking sites make the reroutes visible.
- Official hazard feeds. For natural events, USGS earthquake alerts and National Weather Service warnings are the signal, published within minutes. No proxy needed.
A practical habit: when a viral indicator spikes, check whether any of the boring signals moved too. Advisory unchanged, airspace open, carriers where they were last month: the pizza place was probably just busy.
How to read any crisis signal
- Ask what it physically measures. Google busyness is crowd level at a restaurant. A tracker number is its inputs, nothing more.
- Ask for the base rate. How often does this spike, and how often did anything follow? For most viral indicators, nobody has checked, which is itself the answer.
- Prefer convergence. One signal is noise; several independent ones moving together, including official ones, deserve attention.
- Remember the direction of the logic. Signals can say something might be happening. They cannot say that nothing is.
We built World Monitor around that convergence idea: the live map puts news, conflict zones and hazards on one screen, and the OVERVIEW tab shows theater posture next to the curiosities covered here, clearly labeled as the estimates they are. For how this fits into following a conflict day to day, see our guide to tracking a war live.
FAQ
Is the Pentagon pizza index real?
The busyness data is real; the predictive power is unproven. The Department of Defense has said the theory does not hold. It is best read as internet culture with a long newsroom pedigree, which is exactly how our pizza index page treats it.
What DEFCON level are we at right now?
Nobody outside the US government can tell you, because the level is not published. Any site showing a current level, including ours, is showing an unofficial estimate. Our DEFCON page explains what is publicly known.
Did pizza orders really predict the invasion of Kuwait?
One franchise owner told the Los Angeles Times in 1990 that the CIA ordered an unusual 21 pizzas the night before. It is a great anecdote, reported at the time, and it is one data point from one vendor. That is the whole evidence base.
What should I actually check when things feel tense?
State Department travel advisories, reported embassy staff movements, airspace notices, and a sober live map or expert source. If those are quiet, the viral indicator is probably just a busy Tuesday.
The short version
Open-source crisis signals are fun, occasionally informative, and never warnings. Measure them by what they physically track, check the boring official signals before reacting, and let convergence, not a single spike, change your mind.