America’s Strangest History

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 fa...

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 agenc...

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...

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.

In 1987 two men were arrested in Tallahassee with six children. Within days the evidence was seized, the headlines faded and the case all but disappeared. Decades later, declassified FBI documents and FOIA releases reopened the mystery: who were the Finders, who was Marion Pettie, and why did the story go silent?

On November 2, 2000, someone logged onto a small internet forum and described, in technical detail, a machine that could move a human being through time. Over four months and 151 posts he called himself John Titor, a soldier from 2036 sent back to retrieve a 1975 IBM 5100 with a hidden function almost nobody knew existed. Then he typed one last sentence and vanished. Four years later, an IBM engin...

In 1982 a twelve-year-old paperboy vanished from West Des Moines, Iowa. No body, no note. Four decades later the evidence points toward a hidden network behind legitimate institutions, with patterns that echo the Franklin scandal, the Finders investigation and the Epstein files. This is Noreen Gosch's decades-long search for answers.

In July 1996 a family of four German tourists drove a rented minivan into the most remote corner of Death Valley and never came out. Ninety-one days later a ranger spotted the van buried in sand in Anvil Spring Canyon, and the largest search in the park's history found exactly one beer bottle. Thirteen years on, a volunteer with eight months of experience asked the question 250 professionals never...

Ponce de Leon never searched for it, yet he became the most famous name attached to a magic spring that nobody has found in 500 years. From a 1521 arrow wound in Florida to a Soviet scientist who promised 150 years and died at 65, to the Silicon Valley fortunes being spent on the same hunt today, this is the story of the oldest obsession money can buy. Three empires, one refusal to die.

In 1972 a convicted child predator took seven-year-old Steven Stayner off a Merced, California street and raised him under a fake name for seven years. Steven came home a hero. His older brother Cary did not, and by 1999 he was the Yosemite Killer. This is the story of one family, two brothers, and every system that failed them along the way.

A rusting radar tower on the tip of Long Island became the center of America's wildest conspiracy: time tunnels, a mind-control chair, an army of stolen boys, and a monster summoned in 1983. John separates the Preston Nichols legend from the documented record and then turns to the real programs, from Project PANDORA to MKULTRA, that make the story impossible to walk away from clean.

In 2007 a Defense Intelligence Agency physicist stood in a Utah ranch kitchen and watched an impossible machine hover in midair for thirty seconds. The U.S. government's answer was $22 million and a secret program almost nobody was supposed to know existed. This is the real story of Skinwalker Ranch and AAWSAP: the Sherman family, Robert Bigelow's NIDS, the DIA's 38 classified reports on stargates...

Between 1978 and 1988, at least seven women were stabbed to death along the New Hampshire-Vermont border, and an eighth. 22-year-old Jane Boroski, seven months pregnant, survived 27 stab wounds and gave police a description of her attacker, his Jeep Wagoneer, and his plate. He was never found. Nearly five decades later, with a deathbed confession, a disputed suspect, and a cold-case unit searching...

Since the 1960s, a division inside the University of Virginia's medical school has quietly built a database of more than 2,500 cases of young children who describe verifiable details of lives they never lived, beginning with founder Ian Stevenson and continuing under Dr. Jim Tucker today. From a Louisiana toddler's nightmares of a burning WWII fighter plane to birthmarks matching the wounds of the...

In October 1964, ten months after the JFK assassination, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Georgetown painter, ex-wife of a senior CIA officer, and President Kennedy's secret lover, was shot to death on the C&O Canal towpath behind her home. Within hours, the CIA's chief of counterintelligence was inside her locked house hunting for her diary; the diary was later burned, and in 1988 the FBI destroyed its fi...

An internet body count claims eight scientists tied to UFO research are dead or missing and one of them is a retired two-star general who ran the Air Force Research Laboratory before walking out his front door into the dark, leaving behind his phone, his glasses, and his heart monitor, but not his revolver. The believers call it a pattern; the families say most of the list is ordinary grief being...

In May 1993, three eight-year-old boys were found bound in a drainage ditch in West Memphis, Arkansas and within a year, three teenagers were convicted on a contradiction-riddled confession and testimony about satanic ritual. Eighteen years later, as the physical evidence unraveled, Arkansas released all three on Alford pleas: guilty on paper while maintaining their innocence. This is how the case...

In 1960, the CIA created a covert program called Operation 40 to overthrow Fidel Castro and its members kept surfacing for decades, from the Bay of Pigs to the Watergate break-in. When researcher John Greenewald filed a FOIA request for the program's files, the agency released just seven pages and declared the very existence of anything more classified. This is the story of the program the CIA sti...

In November 1961, Michael Rockefeller, son of Nelson Rockefeller and heir to America's most powerful family.. swam toward the shore of Dutch New Guinea and was never seen again. The official cause of death is drowning. The documentary record, drawn from Dutch colonial files, missionary accounts, and villagers who were there, tells a very different story, one that three institutions quietly agreed...

In 1972, U.S. intelligence officials sat in a candlelit room with Britain's most famous witch — and something calling itself Caxuulikom answered back. This is the story of the Collins Elite, the secret Pentagon group that believed UFOs weren't alien spacecraft. They were demons. From rocket scientist Jack Parsons and his Babalon Working ritual, to Operation Often, to the séance that convin...