Unexplained History

A little girl seems to pass between the books in an Elizabethan scholar's study. That is the vision Edward Kelley reports, and John Dee preserves it alongside prayers, questions, and instructions he believes come from angels.

The first of our six Halloween episodes follows Dee's early experiments, the ritual apparatus built around them, and the voices that begin reaching into ordinary life. This first half of his story ends as Dee commits his household to a journey away from England. The final segment examines what the surviving evidence can establish.

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On January 7, 1948, witnesses at Godman Field near Fort Knox watched a bright object they could not identify. A passing flight of Kentucky Air National Guard Mustangs was asked to investigate. Captain Thomas Mantell continued climbing after the other pilots turned back. His aircraft crashed near Franklin, Kentucky.

This episode reconstructs the tower statements, follows the pursuit and accident investigation, and examines the Air Force's changing explanations. Contemporary documents and Edward Ruppelt's later investigation reveal how a fatal flight became one of the earliest defining cases in American UFO history.

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In late nineteen forty-eight, pilots, security personnel, and scientists reported brilliant green fireballs over New Mexico. The reports reached officials responsible for some of America's most sensitive atomic installations. Meteor expert Lincoln LaPaz investigated, witnessed a fireball himself, and brought his findings to a secret conference at Los Alamos.

The Air Force eventually built Project Twinkle to obtain photographs, trajectories, and other measurements. This episode follows the sightings across the atomic Southwest, reconstructs the investigation from surviving records, and examines why the program left so much unsettled.

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This special Unexplained History broadcast follows biological warfare from its disputed Bronze Age beginnings through medieval sieges, colonial smallpox, Japan's Unit 731, Western programs, and the treaty intended to end them. The second half investigates the Soviet biological weapons system, the Aralsk smallpox outbreak, the Sverdlovsk anthrax disaster, defectors, inspections, and accidents at Russian research facilities.

We close with the October 2026 death of an Irkutsk anti-plague institute employee and the evidence behind reports of pneumonic plague. The October 10 WHO bulletin reports no evidence of ongoing transmission on the information provided, while the cause of the death remains unknown and...

On a July afternoon in nineteen forty-seven, the Army air field at Roswell announced possession of a flying disc. Within hours, officers at Fort Worth presented wreckage they identified as a balloon and radar target. The reversal became one of the most durable mysteries of the twentieth century.

This episode reconstructs the first day's surviving record before following the people, interviews, books, and disputed papers that made Roswell a story about alien bodies and a secret government. It examines what the photographs and contemporary reports can establish, and where the evidence still leaves room for argument.

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A new claim says the Zodiac Killer's shortest name cipher points to a man once investigated in the murder of Elizabeth Short. The proposal joins two notorious unsolved cases, a cipher, a possible alias, and a set of newly published technical arguments.

This episode follows the original letters, the two Zodiac ciphers that really were solved, and the thirteen symbols that still invite competing readings. It examines what the new theory adds, what the documents establish, and what evidence would be needed before any name could be called an answer.

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In March nineteen sixty-two, the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff sent Defense Secretary Robert McNamara a memorandum about pretexts for military intervention in Cuba. Its annex proposed a manufactured attack on a ship, a campaign of terror blamed on Cuba, and a simulated civilian-airliner shootdown. These were preliminary proposals, not operations carried out.

This episode follows the paper from Operation Mongoose to the Joint Chiefs and then to its public release decades later. It asks how a plan like this reached the top of the military, what the political leadership actually authorized, and what the surviving documents...

A stained shawl has been presented as the object that finally reveals Jack the Ripper. A published forensic study found mitochondrial DNA profiles compatible with descendants of Catherine Eddowes and Aaron Kosminski. The finding is real enough to examine. The leap from a textile to a named murderer is much harder.

This episode follows Eddowes through the surviving inquest, traces the shawl's claimed journey, and asks what the science actually establishes. The final assessment tests the provenance, contamination history, statistics, and the older police suspicions without naming a killer the evidence cannot identify.

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In September twenty twenty-six, a team studying Tutankhamun's tomb reported new geophysical anomalies north of its known rooms. Their proposed plan revives a remarkable idea: the famous royal burial may occupy only the outer part of a larger tomb made for Nefertiti.

The search has already produced hopeful scans, conflicting scans and a published negative radar study. We follow the images and measurements back to their sources, then ask what the new work can establish, what it cannot, and what a careful physical test might reveal.

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In September nineteen fifty, the United States military carried out six simulated biological attacks on the San Francisco Bay Area. A Navy vessel released Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii from offshore while military teams measured how the living aerosol moved through the city.

Days later, Stanford Hospital recorded an extraordinary cluster of Serratia infections. One patient, Edward Nevin, died. This episode reconstructs the operation, the secret report, the hospital outbreak, the congressional reckoning and the Nevin family's lawsuit. It also asks the question that secrecy made almost impossible to answer: did the test cause the death that followed...

In two thousand twenty-four, a Norwegian government scientist reportedly tested a secret microwave-emitting apparatus on himself. He was said to have developed neurological symptoms resembling some anomalous health incidents, the official name for the experiences widely known as Havana Syndrome.

The story sounds like a decisive experiment. It is not. This episode places the Norwegian report beside the original cases in Cuba, the recorded sound, medical studies, intelligence assessments, pulsed-radio-frequency research and a separate device reportedly acquired by the United States. The result is a sharper answer to two very different questions: whether directed energy could affect a...

In 1942, a Pennsylvania dentist proposed attacking Japan with bats carrying tiny incendiaries. His idea reached the White House and became a real military research program, complete with refrigerated bats, experimental carriers and tests at American airfields.

The project produced one unforgettable accident. But the fire at Carlsbad was only part of the story. Unexplained History follows the proposal from cave entrances to weapons trials, then examines what the surviving evidence establishes about the damage, the engineering and the claim that an atomic bomb displaced an almost finished alternative.

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On September 16, 1994, dozens of children at Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they had seen something extraordinary beyond their playground. Silver objects. Small figures. Eyes they struggled to describe. Their teachers had been inside.

Before Harvard psychiatrist John Mack arrived, the story had already passed through parents, a headmaster, a television camera, and a collection of drawings. Unexplained History follows that early trail, examines three surviving drawing reproductions, and returns to the witnesses as adults.

The final segment brings the records together to ask what the accounts establish, how the interviews were conducted, and whether believing...

Majestic Twelve is the most durable alleged UFO cover-up in modern American history. Its papers describe a secret committee formed after a crash in nineteen forty-seven and briefed to President-elect Eisenhower.

We follow the files from an anonymous roll of film to the National Archives, FBI, and a congressional inquiry. For most of the journey, the documents appear to form a hidden record. Then the paper trail becomes the evidence.

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🎧 Unexplained History explores the myths, mysteries, and misunderstood moments that shaped our...

MH370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard. Its final radio message sounded routine. Then its identifying radar signal disappeared, a second track led back across Malaysia, and a satellite continued recording exchanges long after anyone heard from the cockpit.

Twelve years later, Ocean Infinity has completed another phase of seabed searching. Malaysia has extended the agreement through June 2027, with 7,428.54 square kilometres still to be completed within the designated area. How did the investigation arrive at this stretch of ocean, and what has the latest effort changed?

Unexplained History follows the flight records, satellite analysis...

John Bell died on a Tennessee farm in eighteen twenty after months of illness. According to America's most famous haunting story, his family found a mysterious vial beside his medicine, tested its contents on a cat, and heard an invisible voice confess to poisoning him.

But the detailed accusation did not appear in a surviving full account until decades after Bell was buried. Earlier records describe a talking voice, crowds of visitors, and suspicions of ventriloquism, yet tell a very different story about what the spirit wanted.

This episode separates a real death from the murder...

In nineteen thirty, archaeologists uncovered the lower half of a colossal statue of Ramesses II at Hermopolis Magna. The king's head and torso were gone. Ninety-four years later, an Egyptian-American team found them buried upside down only metres away, with traces of ancient blue and yellow paint still visible.

But finding the missing half was only the beginning. The monument had been repaired, altered, quarried, and possibly recut from an older pharaoh before it disappeared beneath the temple floor.

This episode follows Ramesses the Great, the lost city of Thoth, and the painstaking reconstruction that raised...

Unexplained History follows the evidence behind Black Triangles: Strange Reports From a Dark Sky. This episode separates witness accounts, documented history, official records, likely explanations, and the details still left unresolved.

Black Triangles: Strange Reports From a Dark Sky

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🎧 Unexplained History explores the myths, mysteries, and misunderstood moments that shaped our world. Hosted by Tom Mackenzie and Don Masterson. New episodes every week.
Follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen — and uncover the stories history tried to forge...

Before Roswell, before flying saucers, and even before the Wright brothers, Americans were already looking up at the night sky and reporting strange craft, glowing lights, secret pilots, impossible machines, and visitors from Mars.

In this episode of Unexplained History, we investigate the mysterious airship wave of 1896 and 1897 — a forgotten panic that swept from California to Texas through newspapers, rumors, eyewitness accounts, and small-town legend. From the glowing lights over Sacramento to the bizarre Aurora, Texas crash story of a dead “Martian” pilot buried in a local cemetery, this is the story of how America learned to turn strang...

For decades, one astonishing claim has haunted the world of ancient mysteries: the Dogon people of Mali supposedly knew about Sirius B — a tiny, dense companion star invisible to the naked eye — before modern astronomy could explain it.
Was this sacred knowledge preserved through ancient tradition? Evidence of visitors from the stars? Or did a complex Dogon cosmology become transformed through translation, colonial fieldwork, and the ancient-astronaut boom of the 1970s?

In this episode of Unexplained History, we follow the trail from the cliffs of Mali to nineteenth-century observatories, French anthropologists’ notebooks, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery...

In 1974, a Florida family discovered a polished steel sphere in the burned grass near their Fort George Island home. It was heavy, seamless, strangely balanced, and according to the Betz family, it seemed to move on its own, respond to music, and behave as if something inside it was alive.

Soon, the mysterious object attracted newspaper attention, a U.S. Navy inspection, UFO researchers, and speculation that it might be alien technology, military hardware, or a device from somewhere far stranger. But as the claims were tested and the source trail widened, the Betz sphere began to look...

Before D-Day, the Allies built an army that was never meant to fight — only to be seen, heard, intercepted, and believed.

Known as the Ghost Army, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops used inflatable tanks, fake radio traffic, sound trucks, borrowed insignia, and carefully staged rumors to make German intelligence believe American forces were massing where they were not.

Their mission was not to destroy the enemy directly, but to distort what the enemy thought was real. For decades, their work remained classified.

Now their strange story reveals one of World War Two’s most unse...

In 1864, a French newspaper published a stunning report from the American frontier: oil prospectors had drilled into a gigantic meteorite and found a tiny humanoid body sealed inside a stone sarcophagus. Its face was knife-like. Its arms were too long. Its tomb was carved with the planets — and Mars was drawn larger than all the rest.

The story spread across Europe and America, blurring the line between science, journalism, satire, and belief. But was the Colorado Martian a genuine mystery, a forgotten alien encounter, or one of the strangest media hoaxes of the nineteenth century?

In th...

In 1990, Italy admitted the existence of Operation Gladio: a secret Cold War stay-behind network built to resist a Soviet invasion that never came. But when hidden weapons caches, intelligence links, and decades of political violence came into view, Europe was forced to ask a darker question: had secret armies created to defend democracy become a threat inside democracy itself?

This episode of Unexplained History investigates the documented reality of Gladio, the European Parliament’s alarm over clandestine networks outside democratic control, and the unresolved allegations connecting Cold War security structures to Italy’s Years of Lead, the Piazza Font...

In July 1952, radar operators at Washington National Airport saw something impossible: unidentified targets moving through the skies near the White House, the Capitol, and the Pentagon. Pilots reported strange lights. Air Force jets were scrambled. Newspapers exploded with headlines about “saucers over Washington.” But were these objects alien craft, secret military technology, radar ghosts caused by strange weather, or something even more unsettling — a Cold War panic powerful enough to make the government manage public belief? This episode of Unexplained History investigates the 1952 Washington UFO flap, the radar contacts, fighter interceptions, Project Blue Book, the Pentagon press conference, and the CIA-ba...

A Benedictine priest claimed he helped build the impossible: a machine that could photograph history itself. Father Pellegrino Ernetti said the Chronovisor revealed lost speeches, vanished plays, ancient Rome, and even the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

But when the alleged evidence is examined — the famous names, the missing machine, the mysterious photograph, the lost text, and the Vatican secrecy surrounding it — the story begins to fracture.

Was the Chronovisor a suppressed scientific miracle, a religious hoax, or something stranger: a twentieth-century legend about humanity’s desperate need to turn faith, memory, and history into proof?

B...

In 1979, an American Vela nuclear-detection satellite recorded a mysterious double flash over the remote southern ocean — the kind of signal it was built to recognize as an atmospheric nuclear test. But no country admitted responsibility.

No public blast site was confirmed. And the official explanation may have been stranger than the conspiracy. Was it a secret Cold War nuclear test involving Israel, South Africa, or both? Or did an aging satellite mistake a rare accident in space for one of the most dangerous events on Earth?

This episode of Unexplained History investigates the Vela Incident, the cl...

A secret machine. A future that refused to change. And a Cold War program with a name that sounded like it belonged to myth.

In this episode of Unexplained History, we investigate the legend of Project Looking Glass — a rumored temporal-viewing device allegedly used to study possible futures, test timelines, and reveal a mysterious convergence point that no scenario could avoid.

The story moves through Area 51 lore, S-four, Dan Burisch, alleged J-Rods, William Brockbrader, stargate claims, and the strange mythology surrounding December 21, 2012. But near the end, the mirror turns: there really was a Looking Glass. Not a...

Was the Emerald Tablet a lost Atlantean secret — or one of history’s most powerful occult misunderstandings?

In this episode of Unexplained History, we follow a strange trail from a modern internet alchemy manual called The Book of Aquarius to the Philosopher’s Stone, medieval laboratories, Hermes Trismegistus, Thoth, Plato’s Atlantis, Isaac Newton’s alchemical studies, and the mysterious Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean.

For centuries, seekers believed the Emerald Tablet contained the hidden key to transformation: turning base metals into gold, restoring youth, healing the body, and perhaps even defeating...

Ancient stories say giants once walked the earth — from the Nephilim and Og of Bashan to Greek Titans, Gilgamesh, Native giant traditions, and mysterious “giant skeleton” reports from American mounds. But were these legends based on real beings, exaggerated discoveries, misunderstood bones, or something even more revealing?

In this episode of Unexplained History, we follow the giant mystery from biblical texts and ancient mythology to nineteenth-century newspaper reports, mound-builder legends, and the enduring claim that the Smithsonian hid the evidence.

Along the way, the story grows larger: lost races, missing bones, forbidden archaeology, museum baseme...

A secret list of 112 popes. A mysterious manuscript that surfaced during a papal conclave in 1590. A final prophecy warning that Peter the Roman would rule during the destruction of Rome.

For centuries, the so-called Prophecy of the Popes has fascinated believers, skeptics, Catholic scholars, conspiracy theorists, and end-times watchers. Attributed to the Irish saint Malachy, the list appears to predict every pope from the 12th century to the apocalypse — with eerie accuracy before 1590, and suspiciously vague language afterward.

In this episode of Unexplained History, we investigate the origins of the prophecy, the political chaos of...

On December 29, 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and seven-year-old Colby Landrum were driving through the pine woods of East Texas when they claimed to see something impossible: a massive diamond-shaped craft hovering above the road, blasting flames from its base, and surrounded by military helicopters.

Within hours, all three witnesses began suffering strange physical symptoms. Betty Cash developed severe burns, hair loss, and illness so intense she spent weeks in hospitals. The U.S. government denied any involvement, but the witnesses were convinced they had been exposed to a secret military operation gone wrong.

Their fight led...

Babylon's Secret Gods follows one of the oldest and most seductive religious-conspiracy claims in history: that ancient Babylon preserved a hidden system of sacred knowledge that survived its own collapse and passed into later mystery cults, empire religions, and secret traditions.

Tom McKenzie and the Narrator descend into the real religious world of Babylon—its priests, temples, omens, laments, and divine figures like Ishtar and Tammuz—before tracing how later writers transformed that complexity into the sweeping theory known as the Babylon mystery religion. By the end, the episode separates Babylon's real ritual power from the late...

Explore the chilling history and enduring legacy of the Mothman. It all began on the night of November 15, 1966, when two couples encountered a massive, winged figure with glowing red eyes near the TNT site outside of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. What started as a local police report quickly spiraled into a national sensation, documented by journalist Mary Hyre and later reinterpreted as a prophetic omen by author John Keel.

In this episode, we dissect:
The Initial Wave: The surge of sightings between 1966 and 1967 that gripped...

What happens when a jingle ends and a monotone voice begins reading strings of numbers into the void? Welcome to the unsettling world of Number Stations. In this episode of Unexplained History, Tom McKenzie dives deep into the shortwave transmissions that have fascinated hobbyists and frustrated intelligence agencies for decades.

From the jaunty folk tunes of the Lincolnshire Poacher and Cherry Ripe to the relentless, industrial drone of the Russian Buzzer (UVB-76), we explore how these one-way signals became a cornerstone of Cold War espionage.We’ll examine:
Th...