Unexplained History

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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🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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 a laboratory exposure cannot be fully excluded. Research is current through October 12. This episode distinguishes documented history, government assessments, testimony, and unresolved reporting.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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 can and cannot prove.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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 it?

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.

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 person, and whether it explains what happened to American and Canadian personnel.

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/unexplained-history--6429156/support.

🎧 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 forget.

More at The Unexplained Company

History, Mystery, True Crime, Conspiracy, Paranormal, CIA, Cold War, Ancient Aliens, Archaeology, Unsolved, Supernatural, Tom McKenzie, Audio Drama, Storytelling, Documentaries.

This episode includes AI-generated content.