Trivia / Cuarto Milenio

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • There is an oddly popular belief that Jiménez has (or used to have) the Catchphrase "curious/unsettling at the least". In reality, while he does use a lot of similar expressions, he has never really used that one in a significant way.
  • Enrique de Vicente's meme line "I'm not saying it is a conspiracy... but it is a conspiracy" used to be so popular that people often believed De Vicente really said it. Actually, it is a parody of a similar line from Ancient Aliens that was born on the Internet.
• Colbert Bump: A lot of things, people and works have suddenly gained popularity after being featured in Cuarto Milenio. Musician Silberius de Ura, known by his experimental paleo-music, was one of those.
• Creator Couple: The show is fronted by the husband-wife duo of Iker Jiménez and Carmen Porter.
• Executive Meddling: According to Santiago Camacho, an "executive disagreement" was the reason he had to leave the show. This has never been clarified, with all sorts of wild rumors going around, but the most serious thesis seems to be the change of mother company in June 2018, when the show stopped being produced by Cuarzo Producciones and was instead bought by Alma Producciones Digitales. Although Alma was owned by Jiménez himself, he would have been forced to co-produce with Mediaset, which didn't want Camacho to overshadow their Radioset radio programs with his successful podcast Días Extraños, with the resultant tension causing or at least contributing to Camacho's departure.
• Fan Community Nickname: Milenarios, as in the word Milenio.
• Follow the Leader:
  • Rival network Antena 3 tried its luck with a similar program named El Arca Secreta ("The Secret Ark") in 2007, which was even conducted by an usual Cuarto Milenio guest (journalist and novelist Javier Sierra), but it was very short-lived.
  • In 2014, 13 TV did the same with Detrás de la verdad ("Behind the truth"), an investigation show that included two usual Milenio guests in the form of journalist Francisco Pérez Abellán and forensics doctor José Cabrera. This one managed to last three whole years, and was only cancelled due to the channel's overreaction to a controversy within its broadcast.
  • Even although some producers would never admit it, it's no secret that several science and investigation TV shows in Spain were launched thanks to Cuarto Milenio's success.
  • Around 2020, Pablo Motos from popular talk show El Hormiguero started closing its episodes with a heart-to-heart monologue to the camera about various themes, strikingly similar in kind and tone to Jiménez's trademark closing monologues in Cuarto Milenio. It's been speculated the inspirations were right there.
• God Never Said That:
  • A spectacular confusion happened in November 2020, when Jiménez gave a speech that newsletters immediately misinterpreted as him claiming he would move away from the show's mystery topics. It caused such a chaos that Jiménez had to deny it several times.
  • The news about Carmen Porter earning her own TV show in 2022 were bombastically misinterpreted by press as Porter being divorcing Jiménez. They were forced to clarify that it wasn't so, but Jiménez commented he still finds people asking him what went wrong between them.
• Hostility on the Set: Apparently, Santiago Camacho's departure from the program (explained above in Executive Meddling) was not placid at all, and his friendship with Jiménez became strained. Camacho has since done a couple of podcasts with his successor in Cuarto Milenio, Pablo Fuente, but he has not reunited with the old team yet.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: A long-time rumor claimed that Carmen Porter pressed for Juan Jesús Vallejo to be fired in 2010 due to their legendary arguments in Milenio 3. This was later deconfirmed, as it was revealed Vallejo married a Colombian woman and left in order to move to her country, from where he did a couple of works for Cuarto Milenio in 2014 and 2018, but it failed to completely dispel the rumor.
• The Production Curse: In July 2021, the program ran a reportage about The Omen and its famous curse. A day later, the film's director Richard Donner died. It was noted by Jiménez, who tweeted somberly, "these coincidences... so curious."
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
  • Santiago Vázquez, an eccentric paranormal journalist who worked in Cuarto Milenio for a few seasons, was kicked out discreetly but dishonourably from the show in 2014. Popular theories back then had him expelled for an infamous episode where he hilariously pretended to be contacted by spirits (complete with bizarre calls to Jesus and other absurd lines), which Jiménez ended up confirming himself in the podcast Dos en la noche years later. There were also rumors that Vázquez had drinking problems, which were similarly supported by an independent interview where he complained about his firing while clearly wasted.
  • Legendary guest Dr. José Cabrera had already become less usual since 2013 due to his participations in other TV shows, which he got in no small part thanks to the exposure gained in Cuarto Milenio. However, he caught fire in February 2016 by a leaked audio in which he sided with a negligent school in a bullying suicide case (although to be fair, his true statements were greatly twisted by the press), after which he was forced to apologize and suddenly stopped appearing in TV altogether, with subsequent rumors that he had been blacklisted for the incident. It was later revealed he withdrew voluntarily to spare his TV shows the scandal, though, and after a few years he resumed doing sporadic appearances, eventually returning to Cuarto Milenio in 2021.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Apparently, Luis Mariano Fernández, another journalist whom Jiménez co-wrote a book with early in their careers, was going to be part of the program's staff at its beginning.
  • The program originally had a duration of 75 minutes and was meant to remain so, but it was maxed up to two full hours due to its popularity and ratings.
  • The spinoff Cuarto Milenio Zoom was originally conceived for only three episodes, but again, its popularity got it expanded to 18 episodes.