Disturbing History

The 1980s began with 52 Americans still being held hostage in Tehran and ended with crowds tearing open the Berlin Wall. Between those two moments came one of the most turbulent, contradictory decades in modern American history.

In this fourth episode of the Disturbing History decades series, Brian looks back at the decade he grew up in—beyond the neon, MTV, blockbuster movies, and nostalgia. The episode moves through the moments everyone remembers: the Miracle on Ice, Mount St. Helens, the shooting of John Lennon, the launch of MTV, the Macintosh, Live Aid, the MAS*H finale, Reagan’s pres...

On the night of May 18, 1910, people across the world waited for Halley’s Comet to kill them.Hotels in New York opened their rooftops. Miners in Pennsylvania refused to go underground. A religious sect outside Atlanta reportedly barricaded itself inside a cave.

In Chicago, people sealed their doors and windows against a poisonous gas they believed was coming from space.Then Earth passed through the comet’s tail.Nothing happened.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian explores how a scientific discovery became a worldwide panic. In February 1910, astronomers detected cyanogen in the comet’s tail—a chemic...

This episode discusses sexual violence against children and teenagers, torture, and murder and is not suitable for younger audiences. Listener discretion is strongly advised. 

On the night of June 11, 1980, plainclothes officers who had been following a Ford Econoline van through Hollywood watched its driver approach a series of young men along Santa Monica Boulevard. 

Five refused to get inside. The sixth was a 15-year-old runaway.When the van eventually stopped in a vacant lot and officers heard screams coming from inside, they moved in. Behind the door they found 33-year-old truck driver William Bonin as...

The 1970s opened in conflict.On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of U.S. military operations into Cambodia.

Days later, four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. On May 8, construction workers attacked antiwar demonstrators in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot, one of the defining images of a country bitterly divided over Vietnam, protest, and generational change.

In the third installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1970s—the decade when the young people everyone had spent years worrying about fina...

On March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According to the report, 38 people in Queens watched as 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stalked and attacked for more than half an hour, and not one of them called police or came to help.

The story spread across the country and eventually helped inspire decades of research into what became known as the bystander effect. But much of the story was wrong.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian goes back to the night...

Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-year-old Berkeley graduate student who would turn thirty just months after the decade ended.

In the second installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1960s—a decade remembered for rebellion, protest, Vietnam, assassinations, the counterculture, and the moon landing. But, as with the 1950s, the familiar photograph only tells part of the story.

The decade brought enormous change: poverty declined, college enrollment surged, Medicare b...

A warning before you press play: this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and what was done to several victims, including after death.

In early January 2008, police searching a dumpster and nearby van north of Atlanta found blood-soaked clothing, weapons, restraints, and evidence connected to missing hiker Meredith Emerson. The man cleaning that van was Gary Michael Hilton.

What followed exposed a 75-day killing spree across national forests in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida. This episode of Disturbing History examines Hilton's life, the murders of Meredith Emerson, John and Irene Bryant, and Cheryl Dunlap...

Everybody carries a version of the 1950s around in their head, and the strange thing is that a surprising amount of it is true. For millions of American families, one paycheck really could support a house, a car, and children. Homeownership climbed from roughly 44 percent before World War II to about 62 percent by 1960.

Television went from a novelty to a fixture in nearly nine out of ten homes, Elvis Presley drew an audience of roughly 60 million people on The Ed Sullivan Show, and when the polio vaccine was declared safe and effective in 1955, church bells rang across the...

On the evening of January 17, 1961, with just three days left in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a 16-minute farewell address containing one warning that would outlive nearly everything else he said in public office: America must guard against the “unwarranted influence” of the military-industrial complex.

This episode of Disturbing History examines what Eisenhower was really describing, because he was not predicting the future. 

He had spent eight years inside the system himself.Brian King-Sharp traces the rise of that system from the 1934 Nye Committee hearings, which investigated major American arms manufacturers, through the enormous industrial mobil...

Everyone knows the voice, the perm, and the happy little trees. Far fewer people know what happened to Bob Ross’s name after the cameras stopped rolling.

In this episode, we trace the remarkable and deeply complicated story of Bob Ross, from his years as an Air Force first sergeant in Alaska, where he painted souvenir gold pans to earn extra money, to the television phenomenon that made him one of the most recognizable artists in American popular culture. 

Along the way, we look at the mentor who taught him the wet-on-wet technique he would eventually mak...

On March 28, 1979, at 4:00 a.m., a relief valve at Three Mile Island opened as designed—and then failed to close. For more than two hours, operators believed it had shut because the control-room indicator showed the electrical command, not the valve’s actual position.

By the time the mistake was understood, roughly half the fuel in Unit Two had melted.The men in the control room did not know how bad it was. Neither did the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The full extent of the damage would not be confirmed until engineers lowered a camera into the reactor vessel thre...

On July 12, 1562, in the Yucatán town of Maní, Franciscan friar Diego de Landa ordered Maya books, sacred objects, and religious images gathered in front of the church and burned. The destruction came at the end of a brutal campaign in which thousands of Maya people were interrogated, many under torture, and more than 150 died.

But the story of Diego de Landa is more complicated than the fire he ordered.In this episode, Brian follows the strange trail left behind by one of the most consequential acts of cultural destruction in the history of the Americas, because the sa...

On the night of January 27, 1986, a Morton Thiokol engineer named Allan McDonald refused to sign a document saying it was safe to launch the space shuttle Challenger the next morning.

The engineers who built the shuttle's solid rocket boosters had recommended against flying in temperatures colder than 53 degrees, then reversed themselves after a 30-minute private caucus in which a vice president was told to take off his engineering hat and put on his management hat.

The launch went ahead at 11:38 a.m. in 36-degree weather, and 73 seconds later Challenger came apart on live television.

...

On December 15, 1967, ten days before Christmas, the Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed into the Ohio River during rush hour, killing 46 people. Federal investigators traced the disaster to a single cracked steel bar, eyebar 330, with a hidden flaw about one tenth of an inch deep that had been growing for four decades inside a joint no inspector could see. That's the documented story.

 The other story says a winged creature with red eyes had been warning the town for thirteen months.In this episode, Brian takes apart the Mothman legend and puts the real history back i...

78 minutes after the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building came off, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper named Charles Hanger pulled over a yellow Mercury on Interstate 35 because there was no license plate on the back bumper.

He wasn't looking for a bomber. He was running hard toward a wreck scene he'd worked in the dark the Sunday before, and he'd already been ordered to Oklahoma City and then told to turn around. Ten minutes later he had Timothy McVeigh handcuffed in the front seat of his patrol car on a tag violation and a concealed weapon...

In September 1950, a United States Navy vessel spent eight days off the San Francisco coastline spraying clouds of live bacteria into the wind, and nobody on shore was told.

The operation was called Sea-Spray, and it was designed to answer a question that terrified early Cold War planners: could an enemy attack an American city with a biological weapon delivered from a small boat, invisibly, without ever being detected? The answer, recorded in a classified document called Special Report No. 142, was yes.

Forty-three monitoring stations around the Bay measured the result, and the Army concluded that...

You clicked “I Agree.” You never clicked anything for the camera on the pole outside your kid’s school. On May 9, 2025, a deputy with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas typed “had an abortion, search for female” into a license plate reader network. 

That single search swept across 83,000 cameras connected to 6,809 law enforcement networks, including cameras in states where the conduct being investigated was legal. No warrant. No judge.

Just a login and a sentence in a search box.

In this episode, I dig into two surveillance systems most Americans barely realize they’re part...

On the morning of March 16, 1968, an American helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson dropped a smoke grenade to mark a wounded Vietnamese woman so a medic could reach her. He flew a circuit and came back a few minutes later. She was dead, and an American officer was standing over her.

Within the hour, Thompson would land his helicopter between armed American infantry and a bunker full of civilians and tell his own door gunner to open fire on Americans if they opened fire on the villagers.Almost everyone has heard of My Lai.

Almost everything most...

In June of 1780, on a hill outside what's now Lincolnton, North Carolina, more than a thousand men killed each other in fog so thick you couldn't see fifty feet. There was no British army there. There was no Continental army there.

Every man on that field was an American, and the only thing separating one side from the other was a scrap of white paper pinned to a hat or a green twig stuck in a hatband. When it was over, nobody could tell the dead apart, so they stopped trying and put them in a hole together.<...

Around 1200 BC, a king named Ammurapi dictated a letter from the port city of Ugarit describing seven enemy ships, burned towns, and an army that was somewhere else. That tablet was still sitting in the ruins more than 3,000 years later when a French archaeologist pulled it out of the ash. It's the only case in this entire episode where somebody put the emergency on the record while it was still happening.

Everywhere else, the silence is the story. In this episode we work through the civilizations that flourished for 30 generations and then simply stopped, and we look at...

Part one left the old man under an obelisk in Cleveland, ninety-seven years old, the richest human being who had ever lived, and remembered by most of America as a kindly figure who handed out dimes and beat hookworm in the South.

That reputation did not build itself. Somebody constructed it, deliberately, over decades — and it was not John D. Rockefeller Senior. He was too rigid and too contemptuous of the public to bother. It was his son.This is the part of the story that is harder to tell, because the man at the center of it wa...

In February of 1908, a reporter for Joseph Pulitzer's New York World walked into a drugstore in Freeport, Illinois, put a photograph on the counter, and finally closed a manhunt that had run for seven years. The man in the picture had died there two years earlier under the name Doctor William Levingston. He had a wife in Illinois and a wife he had never divorced back in New York, and the son he walked away from was John Davison Rockefeller, the richest man in the world.

This is part one of a two-part series, and it covers the...

A man in Zhengzhou spent eight years living in a $42-a-month rental and sending every spare yuan home to his wife so she'd feel secure. When he finally asked to see the bank account, she refused. Then she broke down and told him it was gone — roughly $94,000 of it wired to a livestreamer she'd never met, in small amounts, over several years, in exchange for having her name read out loud on camera.

The court finalized the divorce on November 20, 2025. Under Chinese law those gifts count as money already spent, so there was nothing left to recover.Almost no...

At two minutes past seven on the evening of December 21, 1988, an air traffic controller at Prestwick watched a single radar return break apart into a spray of echoes over the Solway Firth. Thirty-eight minutes out of Heathrow, at 31,000 feet, a bomb the size of a paperback had gone off in the forward cargo hold of a Boeing 747 named Clipper Maid of the Seas.

Two hundred and fifty-nine people were aboard. Eleven more were at home on a residential street in Lockerbie, four days from Christmas, when the wings came down on top of them.

This episode...

The wealth divide in America did not settle the way sediment settles. It was built, revised, briefly reversed, and then rebuilt with better engineering, and nearly every stage of it can be traced to identifiable people making documented decisions in specific years. Brian follows the paper trail, because in sixteen years of police work he learned that the interview is where people tell you what they want you to believe and the paperwork is where you find out what actually happened.

This one is a paper case.It opens in New Orleans in 1839, in the rotunda of the...

For more than two thousand years, powerful institutions have understood something that gets rediscovered in every generation: an absorbed public is a manageable public. In this episode I follow that idea from the sands of the Roman arena all the way to the phone in your pocket, and I separate what's actually documented from the conspiracy version of the story, because the truth turns out to be stranger and better supported than the myth.

We start in ancient Rome, where the grain dole and the games were openly accounted for as instruments of rule, and where a courtier...

In June of 1816, snow fell on Vermont and killing frost swept through New England in the middle of what should have been the growing season. Frost returned in July and again in August, the corn crop collapsed across the northern states, and families who grew their own food watched a year's survival vanish from the fields. Nobody in America knew why.

In this episode I trace the answer back 14 months and 10,000 miles to Mount Tambora in the Indonesian archipelago, where the largest volcanic eruption in recorded human history blew away the top mile of a mountain in April...

How many calls from unknown numbers did you get today? The one about your car's extended warranty, the text about a package that couldn't be delivered, the voice on the line claiming your grandson is in jail and needs bail money right now.

In this episode of Disturbing History, I trace how those strangers came to know so much about you, and the answer is a two-hundred-year story that starts long before the internet ever existed. We go back to the eighteen forties, when a sealed letter had stronger legal protection than your email does today and anonymity...

On the night of February twentieth, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower finished dinner at a private ranch in Palm Springs and vanished from public view. A wire service reportedly flashed that he was dead. The next morning he surfaced at church, and the White House explained everything with a chicken wing and a chipped tooth.

Seventy years later, that missing evening is still the foundation of the most durable presidential legend in American history: that Ike was driven into the Mojave Desert that night, walked into a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, and negotiated a secret treaty with beings...

He was elected President of the United States 4 times, and a whole generation of Americans grew up unable to remember anyone else in the office. In this episode of Disturbing History, we pull apart the myth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and look at what the textbooks leave out.

For more than 2 decades, Roosevelt ran the most successful concealment operation in presidential history, hiding from the public the fact that he could not walk a single step unaided, with the full cooperation of a press corps that agreed never to photograph the wheelchair and Secret Service agents who ripped...

Taxes don't sound like Disturbing History territory, until you learn the trail of blood and power behind them. This episode traces the entire violent history of taxation in America, from the Stamp Act riots of 1765, when Boston mobs tore apart a rich man's home and tax collectors were tarred and feathered in the streets, through the Whiskey Rebellion, where George Washington personally led nearly 13,000 troops against American citizens, to the Supreme Court case where a lawyer called the income tax communism and won.

Then comes the great backfire of 1909, when Senate conservatives proposed the 16th Amendment believing it...

There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, ordinary Americans mailed in the impossible. Flesh that fell from a clear sky onto a Kentucky farmwife making soap. A swarm of insects wide as the state of California. A booming like cannon fire off the Carolina coast with no ship and no storm anywhere in sight.

Somebody at the Smithsonian had to open those letters and decide which was a lie, which was an honest mistake, and which one needed a drawer. This episode is the story of what happened when serious, credentialed people...

Some nights the well runs dry, and I do what everybody does — I sink into the couch and let Netflix babysit me for a while. That's how I ended up watching The Worst Ex Ever, and that's how I ended up staring at the story of Wade Wilson, the so-called Deadpool Killer, a man who strangled two women to death in a single day in Cape Coral, Florida, and now sits on death row with two death sentences and a fan club.

Because that's the part that put my jaw on the floor. Not the murders. The love le...

He was the mouthpiece of God to ten thousand followers. To the FBI, he was a face on the Ten Most Wanted list. And to a Nevada state trooper working a dark stretch of Interstate Fifteen, he was just a nervous man in a red Escalade with a bad paper tag and a pulse he couldn't hide.

This week I'm taking you inside the rise and ruin of the FLDS church, from its roots in the polygamy crisis of the eighteen hundreds to the isolated fortress town of Short Creek, where one man came to control every marriage...

In the winter of nineteen fourteen, a five-year-old girl named May Pierstorff stood on a train platform in Grangeville, Idaho, with fifty-three cents in postage stamps pinned to her coat. Her parents had just mailed her to her grandmother.

In this episode, I dig into one of the strangest true stories in American history, the brief window between nineteen thirteen and nineteen fifteen when poor rural families discovered that the brand new parcel post service would accept a child at the counter, weigh her like a crate of apples, and deliver her, and the federal government had never...

Before the Food and Drug Administration, before warning labels, before anyone had to prove a medicine was safe or even admit what was inside it, America ran on the bottle.

This episode opens the cabinet on the patent medicine era, the long stretch of years when a quarter and a clipped newspaper advertisement could buy a family a cure-all that promised relief from nerves, weakness, pain, sleeplessness, women's complaints, and almost anything else a body could suffer, and then it asks the only question that matters, which is what those beautiful bottles actually held. We start in a...

The word propaganda began as something holy. In sixteen twenty-two a committee of cardinals in Rome coined it to mean the spreading of the faith, and in this episode I follow that single word as it curdles across the bloodiest century human beings have ever managed to produce.

This is the story of how mass persuasion got built, who built it, and the deeply uncomfortable truth that the most murderous propaganda machine in history did not invent its methods from nothing. It borrowed them, and some of what it borrowed, it borrowed from us.

We start...

On the night of June 9, 1912, in the small railroad town of Villisca, Iowa, someone walked into the home of Josiah and Sarah Moore and killed all eight people sleeping inside. The parents. Their four children, ages 5 to 11. And two young sisters, Lena and Ina Stillinger, who had only come over after a church program for a sleepover that should have ended with them riding home.

The weapon was an axe taken from the family's own woodpile. The mirrors were covered, a lamp was left burning low with its chimney removed, a slab of bacon was found on the...

In the high desert of Nevada, about twenty miles south of the town of Lovelock, a dry limestone cave holds one of the richest archaeological records in the American West — and one of the most stubborn legends in American fringe history: red-haired, cannibal giants, supposedly eight to ten feet tall, dug out of its floor and then hidden away by the authorities.

In this episode I take a hard, evidence-first look at where that story actually comes from, and why the truth underneath it is more disturbing than any giant ever was.We trace the legend from Northern Pa...

What happens when the most powerful man in the world asks his own government a direct question and still can't get a straight answer? When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he wanted to know two things: who really killed John Kennedy, and whether the United States was sitting on proof that we aren't alone. He handed the assignment to his friend Webb Hubbell, the third-ranking official at the Justice Department, and Hubbell went looking with the access of a man who reported straight to the President. He came back with a wall.

This episode traces that wall across...