America's Strangest History

Around 2010, strange comments started appearing all over the internet, on food blogs, news articles, obituaries and recipe forums, all praising the world-famous key lime pie at a long-closed restaurant called Kutchie's Key West Café. For nearly a decade they spread across the web like a digital ghost story. Who wrote them, and why were they everywhere?

Between the 1970s and the 1990s, tens of thousands of American children, mostly boys, disappeared, and most were written off as runaways. Buried in FBI memos, Congressional investigations and federal case files is a disturbing pattern: multi-state networks moving children along interstate corridors faster than local police could respond. These are the files nobody talks about.

In June 2010, seven-year-old Kyron Horman smiled for a photo at his school science fair in Portland, Oregon, and then vanished without a trace. What followed was the largest search operation in Oregon history and one of the most complex missing-child investigations in America. Fifteen years later, the case is still open.

Decades before Jeffrey Epstein's island made headlines, an 800-acre private island in Lake Michigan owned by millionaire Francis Shelden was tied to one of the earliest documented exploitation networks in U.S. history. Investigators uncovered flight logs, donor records and a charity called Brother Paul's Children's Mission. Before warrants could be served, Shelden fled the country, and the case faded from memory.

The follow-up to our deep dive on the Finders. Across four decades and several countries, from Nebraska's Franklin scandal to Belgium's Marc Dutroux to Jeffrey Epstein, the same things keep happening: investigations derailed, witnesses silenced, evidence sealed and powerful names scrubbed from the record. Coincidence, or something systemic?

During the Cold War, the CIA ran programs that went far beyond espionage. Project MKOFTEN, a little-known offshoot of the agency's mind control research, reached into the occult, witchcraft and ritual magic. Did the U.S. government really study black magic and supernatural forces as tools of national security?

In 1987 a three-year-old girl at the Presidio of San Francisco pointed at a man in an Army store and said he was a bad man. The man was Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, a military intelligence officer with an above-top-secret clearance, co-author of the Pentagon paper From PSYOP to MindWar, and founder of the Temple of Set. At least 58 children at the Presidio daycare showed signs of abuse, three agencies investigated, the building burned on the autumnal equinox, and nobody was ever convicted.

Twelve American military specialists allegedly boarded an extraterrestrial craft in 1965 and vanished for thirteen years, bound for a world orbiting Zeta Reticuli. Thousands of leaked pages describe training curricula, packing manifests, medical protocols and debrief transcripts. Either the most elaborate intelligence hoax ever crafted, or the greatest secret in U.S. history.

On November 8, 1965, the most powerful female journalist in America was found dead in her Manhattan townhouse, in the wrong bedroom, fully dressed, with an unprescribed drug in her blood and no drinking glass in the room. Dorothy Kilgallen had covered the Jack Ruby trial from the defense table, obtained his secret Warren Commission testimony, traced his ties to Carlos Marcello, and told people she was about to blow the Kennedy assassination open. Her file was never found.

February 1932. A man lies face down in the snow on the Eagle River with seven bullet holes in him, still holding his rifle. It took 48 days, 30 men, 133 dogs and the first airplane ever used in a Canadian manhunt to put him there. Nobody in the western Arctic recognized his face, and when scientists exhumed him 75 years later, DNA eliminated every named suspect. His identity is still unknown.