Disturbing History

In 1794, hundreds of armed farmers marched on the Pennsylvania home of a federal tax collector, setting off a violent confrontation that would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion. What began as resistance to a whiskey tax would ignite a struggle between Appalachian communities and the federal government that lasted generations.

In the first installment of Dark Appalachia, a new Disturbing History series, Brian uncovers 150 years of rebellion, moonshining, corruption, and bloodshed in the Appalachian Mountains. From George Washington's military response to the Whiskey Rebellion to the deadly battles between moonshiners and federal revenuers, discover how illegal whiskey became...

On one of the most isolated islands on Earth, an ancient Polynesian civilization carved nearly 1,000 enormous stone statues and somehow transported them across miles of rugged volcanic terrain. For centuries, the mysterious moai of Easter Island have fueled theories about lost civilizations, environmental destruction, and a society that supposedly destroyed itself.But what if the story we've been told is wrong?

This week on Disturbing History, Brian investigates the remarkable history of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), separating archaeological evidence from centuries of speculation. How did the islanders move statues weighing more than 80 tons? What really happened to the...

What if everything we've been told about dinosaurs was a lie? Were these prehistoric giants real, or is the entire dinosaur industry built on fabricated fossils, museum replicas, and a carefully constructed scientific hoax? This week on Disturbing History, Brian investigates one of the internet's strangest and increasingly popular conspiracy theories: Dinosaurs never existed.

From a remarkably preserved 110-million-year-old dinosaur discovered in an Alberta oil sands mine to fossil discoveries dating back centuries, Brian examines the evidence behind these ancient creatures and the claims made by those who insist they're nothing more than an elaborate deception. Were dinosaur...

In 1958, scientist Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide levels high atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. The atmosphere contained approximately 316 parts per million of CO2. By May 2026, that number had climbed to 432. What happened in between, and what does it mean for our planet?

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian tackles three of the most debated questions in modern science: Is the Earth really getting warmer? Are sea levels actually rising? And are humans responsible? From the earliest discoveries of greenhouse gases to decades of climate research, Brian examines the scientific evidence, the controversies, and the predictions...

Five mass extinctions. Billions of years of evolution. Entire species wiped from existence. And one disturbing question: Are we living through the next one? In 1796, a young French anatomist named Georges Cuvier examined the fossilized remains of mammoths and mastodons and reached a conclusion that challenged everything scientists thought they knew about the natural world: entire species could disappear forever. 

Even Thomas Jefferson resisted the idea, holding out hope that living mammoths might still roam the unexplored American wilderness.More than two centuries later, we know Cuvier was right. The history of life on Earth is filled with c...

For more than four decades, one of America's most terrifying serial killers hid in plain sight. He was a burglar, a serial rapist, a murderer—and for six years, a sworn police officer. His name was Joseph James DeAngelo, but the world would come to know him as the Golden State Killer.

On April 24, 2018, police arrested the 72-year-old former officer after a groundbreaking DNA investigation finally connected him to a horrifying series of crimes that had haunted California since the 1970s.

Left alone in an interrogation room, DeAngelo began speaking to himself about a mysterious figure na...

You'd never confess to a crime you didn't commit, right? Out of the first 375 people in the United States cleared by DNA evidence after a conviction, 102 of them had.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian looks at how an innocent person ends up in an interrogation room saying the words, who built the room, and what it did to a long list of real people whose names belong in the record.

The episode opens with Peter Reilly, an 18-year-old in Canaan, Connecticut, who came home from a church meeting in September 1973 and found his mother...

The Hills Have Eyes: The Terrifying Legend Behind the Horror MovieIn episode three of our Spooky Season series exploring the true stories behind Hollywood’s most terrifying horror movies, Brian investigates the disturbing legend that inspired Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes.

For nearly 300 years, the story of Sawney Bean and his murderous Scottish cannibal clan has haunted generations. According to legend, Bean and his family lived in a remote coastal cave, ambushing, murdering, and devouring more than 1,000 unsuspecting travelers before being discovered and executed. But did any of it actually happen?

Brian trac...

What do Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse have in common? They all died at 27, becoming part of one of music history's most haunting legends: The 27 Club. But is there really a deadly curse, or does the truth reveal something far more disturbing?

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  investigates the mysterious deaths, unanswered questions, and decades of controversy surrounding rock music's most infamous club. From Brian Jones's suspicious drowning and Jimi Hendrix's disputed final hours to Jim Morrison's death in Paris without an autopsy, each case reveals a different t...

In 2013, Time branded millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.” The accusations were familiar: lazy, entitled, and obsessed with themselves. Yet teenage drinking, smoking, pregnancy, and fighting were all declining, while young adults faced rising student debt and a difficult path to homeownership. The complaints about the next generation were nothing new. The world they were inheriting deserved a closer look.

In the seventh installment of Disturbing History’s journey through American life, Brian revisits the 2010s—the decade when his own generation became the adults doing the complaining. The economy recovered, smartphones transformed everyday life, and scientific discoveries pushed t...

What if our universe contains entire dimensions of space that we cannot see, touch, or detect? What if those hidden dimensions exist all around us, occupying the very rooms we live in? And could they explain some of humanity's greatest mysteries, from unexplained disappearances and paranormal encounters to UFOs, Sasquatch, and even telepathy?

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian takes a deep dive into one of the most fascinating and controversial ideas in theoretical physics: the seven hidden dimensions of M-theory. Modern physics describes a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time. But M-theory...

The 2000s began with America preparing for a disaster that never happened: Y2K. But while the country worried about computer failures, a far more dangerous threat was already taking shape. What followed was a decade of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, devastating national tragedies, government failures, economic collapse, and a generation blamed for problems it didn't create.

In this sixth installment of Disturbing History's journey through American life from the 1950s to the present, we revisit the decade that changed everything. 

From the dot-com bubble and the disputed 2000 presidential election to September 11, the wars in Afghanistan and I...

What if the terrifying premise behind A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't entirely fiction? What if people really were going to sleep, experiencing horrifying nightmares, and dying before they could wake up?In the fall of 1980, a Hmong refugee named Vang Xiong endured three terrifying nights in a Chicago apartment. First came a dream of a cat sitting on his chest, suffocating him.

The following night, a massive black dog pinned him to his bed. On the third night, a pale, female spirit emerged from his kitchen, climbed onto his chest, and held him helpless for nearly fifteen...

On the night of August 21, 1986, a small crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon released something close to a quarter of a cubic mile of carbon dioxide in a matter of minutes. The gas was heavier than air. It poured over the rim of the crater, ran down the valleys the way water would have, and passed through the villages of Nyos, Cha and Subum while people were finishing supper or already asleep.

The official death toll is one thousand seven hundred and forty-six. That number is an estimate, because soldiers and relatives buried the dead before...

On August 20, 1949, the Washington Post put a story on its front page under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." It said a 14-year-old from the Maryland suburbs had been freed of demonic possession after a Jesuit read the rite of exorcism over him 20 to 30 times, and that the boy had screamed, cursed and spoken Latin he had never been taught.

A Georgetown undergraduate named William Peter Blatty read it. In 1971 he published The Exorcist, and in 1973 the film opened on 30 screens and had theaters keeping ambulances on call.

As spooky...

In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe Rogan on Spotify's U.S. chart. Its claim is that children and young adults who can't speak, most of them diagnosed with autism, are reading the minds of their parents and teachers and meeting each other in a place they call the hill.

In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  explains why he pressed play. Several guests on Sasquatch Odyssey have told him they experienced what they call mind s...

This episode asks a simple question: if someone really discovered a cure for cancer, would the medical industry suppress it? Brian begins with a clear disclaimer that he is not a doctor and is making no medical claims, then looks at the history behind one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in modern medicine.

The episode briefly examines Brown’s Gas, Yull Brown’s 1977 welding patent, and early research involving hydrogen and oxygen inhalation before turning to the larger claim of medical suppression. It starts with the infamous 2018 Goldman Sachs report that asked whether curing patients was a sust...

On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost. The story said they struggled to make decisions, would rather hike the Himalayas than climb the corporate ladder, and had no anthems, no heroes, and an attention span as short as one click of the remote. Those young adults were the same kids who had been labeled “at risk” in the 1980s. 

Now they were entering adulthood under a new set of warnings. This is the fifth episode in the Distu...

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting deaths of a fourteen-year-old boy, his mother, and a federal law enforcement officer. It also includes direct quotations expressing racist and extremist beliefs. Some listeners may find this material disturbing or offensive.

On August 22, 1992, an FBI sniper positioned roughly two hundred yards above a remote cabin in northern Idaho fired two shots. The first struck Randy Weaver as he moved near the shed where the body of his fourteen-year-old son, Sammy, had been placed after being killed the previous day...

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...