The Liminal Record Podcast

Seven Pacific Northwest legends, one a night, each checked against the paper. A Ouija board, an 1899 magazine story and a bartender all turn up in the record, and so does one real murder.

The written roundup, with links to every night: read it here.

If one of these stories reached you in person, on a tour, at a bar, from somebody's grandmother, come tell us the version you heard. Join the Liminal Record Discord.

In October 1948, a National Guard pilot named George Gorman chased a light over Fargo, North Dakota for twenty-seven minutes and could not tell you what it was. His own signed account survives, in a government file that took the Air Force sixteen weeks to close.

This episode is the audio edition of the full, sourced piece, rebuilt from the Project Sign case file. Read it on the newsletter for the complete record, witness statements, and sources.

If you want to dig through the case file yourself, or tell us what we still have wrong, that conversation runs in our Discord. The invite is permanent, and it only takes a free account to join: https://discord.gg/XTSeCRRQPP

In December 1980, American airmen chased a light into an English forest, and two nights later a lieutenant colonel walked in behind them with a tape recorder running. That recording still exists. So does his one-page memo to the British Ministry of Defence. They are the reason anyone still argues about Rendlesham Forest.

This episode does something most retellings of this case will not. It gives the ordinary explanation its full strength, and then it gives the strongest surviving counter-evidence its full strength too, and it is honest about which one is bigger. A meteor almost certainly started it. A lighthouse almost certainly drove the chase. The marks in the ground were rabbit diggings. The radiation readings were background, on a meter not built to be precise that low. The radar was called twice while it was happening and saw nothing.

Two of the three men on that first patrol wrote the word lighthouse in their own statements within days. One of them has spent the forty-five years since insisting something extraordinary met him in those trees. That is not a contradiction anyone has ever really explained, and it is not the same thing as a cover-up.

So the real mystery of Rendlesham is not the record against the witnesses. It is 1980 against 2010, and it runs through every man in this story, including the officer with the most to lose. Their base commander, who had every reason to close the case, would not: he said the lights remain unexplained. Which of those three would you believe? That argument is running in #historical-cases over at The Liminal Record Discord.

In November 1966, two young couples outside Point Pleasant, West Virginia said something with red eyes chased their car down a dark road. Thirteen months later the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River and killed forty-six people, and somewhere in the retelling the two stories became one story. Only one of them has ever had an explanation.

This episode walks the whole thing. The TNT area and why the ground itself matters. The contractor ninety miles away who saw two red points of light the same night, an hour and a half before those couples ever left town and before any newspaper printed a word. The thirteen months of reports, and the honest trouble with counting them. The tenth of an inch of corroded steel that actually brought the bridge down. And the barred owl that fits the descriptions better than anyone really wants it to.

It also does the thing this show exists to do. The bird explanations are plausible and probably account for most of the reports. Nothing physical was ever produced across all thirteen months, and nobody went back to that refuge in 1966 with a spotlight and a bird biologist to settle it while it still could have been settled. A good explanation is not the same thing as a proven one. But the gap that leaves is a gap in the record, and not a hole in the world.

Here is the part I cannot settle. The reports arrived in a rush three days after the front page, and they are said to have stopped the week the bridge came down. Pattern, or a shape we drew afterward? That argument is running in the debunked-or-explained channel of The Liminal Record Discord, where the boring explanation gets the same hearing as the interesting one. Come tell me the version of it I have not thought of.

In April 1964, a Socorro police officer broke off a car chase because something roared down into the desert beside him. What he found in that arroyo became the best-documented case the United States government ever filed and never explained. The FBI vouched for him in writing. An Army captain from White Sands cordoned the site the same night. And the one detail everybody remembers about Socorro is the detail Lonnie Zamora took back the very next day.

This episode does what almost no telling of this case does. It plays you what Zamora actually said on local radio twenty-four hours later, when the interviewer asked him directly about the two figures in white coveralls. It gives you the viewing conditions nobody mentions: two football fields, into the late sun, through sunglasses over prescription glasses. It gives you the grade the Air Force's own scientific consultant privately put on the case, which was four out of nine. And it gives you the piece of paper that changes everything, which did not surface until thirty-six years after Blue Book closed the file.

It also asks the hard question out loud rather than hinting at it, and then answers it: whether Zamora simply made the whole thing up. He is not here to be asked, and his family still lives in New Mexico, which is precisely why the question deserves a direct answer instead of an insinuation.

Here is what I cannot settle. Take the range log seriously and you have to explain an afternoon sighting against a morning schedule. Take Zamora seriously and you have to sit with a man who described two figures, then a day later would only tell you he saw something white. Most tellings pick one and skip the other. Which do you find easier to live with? That argument is running in #debunked-or-explained over at The Liminal Record's Discord, where the boring explanation gets the same hearing as the interesting one.

Six men said a light took Travis Walton off an Arizona logging road on 5 November 1975. He came back five days later. Fifty years on, four polygraphs disagree with each other, the crew boss confessed and then unconfessed, and nobody has produced the one thing that would end it.

This is a rebuilt version of the episode originally published in July. That version was scripted from text that had not been through editorial review, and it carried four statements that were incorrect, including the claim that crew boss Mike Rogers still says he saw a craft. Mike Rogers died on 6 February 2026, aged 78. The rebuild corrects that and the rest from the ground up rather than patching over it.

What is new: the 1993 re-test by the same examiner from 1975, paid for by a skeptic who wanted the case closed, which Walton passed and which the original left out entirely. The recorded 2021 call in which Rogers said the whole thing was staged, and the retraction that followed. All six crewmen named, including the three who have never spoken publicly in fifty years. And thirty seconds on what a polygraph actually measures, because the middle of this story is four of them.

Come argue about it with us in The Liminal Record's Discord, where cases get taken apart slowly and nobody is in a hurry to land anywhere: https://discord.gg/XTSeCRRQPP

On a September morning in 1994, every teacher at Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe was in a staff meeting when something came down at the edge of the playground. The only witnesses were about sixty-two children, aged six to twelve. What they described, and what they still describe thirty years later, has never been explained away or agreed upon. This is the story of what they saw, and of how honestly we can weigh it.

This is the opening episode of The Liminal Record, Audio Edition: sourced accounts of the unexplained, examined and not sold.

Come sit with us and weigh the testimony in The Liminal Record Discord community: https://discord.gg/XTSeCRRQPP

In March of 1990, Belgium scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to chase something its own radar could not explain. More than thirteen thousand people saw it. The government admitted, on the record, that it had no answer.

In 1979, a sheriff’s deputy named Val Johnson was driving a Minnesota back road when something hit his car. Forty-five years later, no one can tell you what it was.

What do we do with the things that are documented, witnessed, and still unexplained?

That question is why The Liminal Record exists, and this short episode is the best place to start. It is the story of the Record itself. What we cover, the standards every piece is held to, the promise we make about sources and honesty, and the community that is forming around these cases. If you have ever wanted a place that takes this territory seriously without selling you a verdict, this is your front door.

Press play. It runs about six minutes.

When you are done listening, two doors are open. Subscribe and every new investigation will find you the morning it publishes, free. And if you want to go deeper, join us in The Liminal Record Discord, where the case files stay open, the debate is respectful, and there is room for the story you have never told anyone: https://discord.gg/XTSeCRRQPP

Welcome to the threshold. I’m glad you found us.