Unexplained History

In 1942, a Pennsylvania dentist proposed attacking Japan with bats carrying tiny incendiaries. His idea reached the White House and became a real military research program, complete with refrigerated bats, experimental carriers and tests at American airfields.

The project produced one unforgettable accident. But the fire at Carlsbad was only part of the story. Unexplained History follows the proposal from cave entrances to weapons trials, then examines what the surviving evidence establishes about the damage, the engineering and the claim that an atomic bomb displaced an almost finished alternative.

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 September 16, 1994, dozens of children at Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe, said they had seen something extraordinary beyond their playground. Silver objects. Small figures. Eyes they struggled to describe. Their teachers had been inside.

Before Harvard psychiatrist John Mack arrived, the story had already passed through parents, a headmaster, a television camera, and a collection of drawings. Unexplained History follows that early trail, examines three surviving drawing reproductions, and returns to the witnesses as adults.

The final segment brings the records together to ask what the accounts establish, how the interviews were conducted, and whether believing a witness requires accepting the witness's explanation.

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.

Majestic Twelve is the most durable alleged UFO cover-up in modern American history. Its papers describe a secret committee formed after a crash in nineteen forty-seven and briefed to President-elect Eisenhower.

We follow the files from an anonymous roll of film to the National Archives, FBI, and a congressional inquiry. For most of the journey, the documents appear to form a hidden record. Then the paper trail becomes the evidence.

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.

MH370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing with 239 people aboard. Its final radio message sounded routine. Then its identifying radar signal disappeared, a second track led back across Malaysia, and a satellite continued recording exchanges long after anyone heard from the cockpit.

Twelve years later, Ocean Infinity has completed another phase of seabed searching. Malaysia has extended the agreement through June 2027, with 7,428.54 square kilometres still to be completed within the designated area. How did the investigation arrive at this stretch of ocean, and what has the latest effort changed?

Unexplained History follows the flight records, satellite analysis, recovered aircraft parts, drift experiments, and deep-ocean searches in the order their clues emerged. The final segment brings those records together to examine what the new search ruled out, what remains open, and what the next expedition would need to find.

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.

John Bell died on a Tennessee farm in eighteen twenty after months of illness. According to America's most famous haunting story, his family found a mysterious vial beside his medicine, tested its contents on a cat, and heard an invisible voice confess to poisoning him.

But the detailed accusation did not appear in a surviving full account until decades after Bell was buried. Earlier records describe a talking voice, crowds of visitors, and suspicions of ventriloquism, yet tell a very different story about what the spirit wanted.

This episode separates a real death from the murder legend built around it, tracing the case from an eyewitness journal and a forgotten newspaper report to a missing family manuscript, a speculative arsenic theory, and the limits of what the archives can honestly 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.

In nineteen thirty, archaeologists uncovered the lower half of a colossal statue of Ramesses II at Hermopolis Magna. The king's head and torso were gone. Ninety-four years later, an Egyptian-American team found them buried upside down only metres away, with traces of ancient blue and yellow paint still visible.

But finding the missing half was only the beginning. The monument had been repaired, altered, quarried, and possibly recut from an older pharaoh before it disappeared beneath the temple floor.

This episode follows Ramesses the Great, the lost city of Thoth, and the painstaking reconstruction that raised a forty-tonne king after more than three thousand years.

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.

Unexplained History follows the evidence behind Black Triangles: Strange Reports From a Dark Sky. This episode separates witness accounts, documented history, official records, likely explanations, and the details still left unresolved.

Black Triangles: Strange Reports From a Dark Sky

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.

Before Roswell, before flying saucers, and even before the Wright brothers, Americans were already looking up at the night sky and reporting strange craft, glowing lights, secret pilots, impossible machines, and visitors from Mars.

In this episode of Unexplained History, we investigate the mysterious airship wave of 1896 and 1897 — a forgotten panic that swept from California to Texas through newspapers, rumors, eyewitness accounts, and small-town legend. From the glowing lights over Sacramento to the bizarre Aurora, Texas crash story of a dead “Martian” pilot buried in a local cemetery, this is the story of how America learned to turn strange lights in the sky into a mystery about technology, secrecy, and the future.

Was there really a hidden inventor flying across the country before powered flight officially existed? Was Aurora an early UFO crash case? Or was the entire panic powered by newspaper sensationalism, tall tales, and a country desperate to glimpse tomorrow?

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.

For decades, one astonishing claim has haunted the world of ancient mysteries: the Dogon people of Mali supposedly knew about Sirius B — a tiny, dense companion star invisible to the naked eye — before modern astronomy could explain it.
Was this sacred knowledge preserved through ancient tradition? Evidence of visitors from the stars? Or did a complex Dogon cosmology become transformed through translation, colonial fieldwork, and the ancient-astronaut boom of the 1970s?

In this episode of Unexplained History, we follow the trail from the cliffs of Mali to nineteenth-century observatories, French anthropologists’ notebooks, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, and the deeper question behind the legend: what happens when a living tradition is turned into proof for someone else’s theory?

The Dogon Sirius story may not reveal alien contact — but it does reveal something just as strange about belief, wonder, and the mysteries we bring with us when we look up at the stars.

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 1974, a Florida family discovered a polished steel sphere in the burned grass near their Fort George Island home. It was heavy, seamless, strangely balanced, and according to the Betz family, it seemed to move on its own, respond to music, and behave as if something inside it was alive.

Soon, the mysterious object attracted newspaper attention, a U.S. Navy inspection, UFO researchers, and speculation that it might be alien technology, military hardware, or a device from somewhere far stranger. But as the claims were tested and the source trail widened, the Betz sphere began to look less like a message from another world — and more like an industrial object with one of the strangest accidental journeys in unexplained history.

In this episode of Unexplained History, we investigate the Betz mystery sphere, the UFO fever surrounding it, the Navy’s findings, the ball check valve explanation, and the bizarre Volkswagen bus story that may finally explain how a metal ball became one of America’s strangest artifact legends.

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.