My Dark Path

Once upon a time, I was in Shanghai, and I needed a birthday present for a friend.  Shanghai is a captivating city; one I love to visit. I always enjoy my time there. It’s vibrantly alive with culture, history, and commerce. For many years it was called “The Paris of the East,” due to its cosmopolitanism, and its sophistication. I love it so much that my next novel, Like Clockwork , is based in th...

Luis Ribeiro was dumped on the side of a road, his body filled with bullets. John Tillman’s high-flying, globe-trotting adventure ended with him dying alone after years in a prison cell. Leonardo Notarbartolo barely had a moment to celebrate his success before his diamond district apartment was traded for a cold, dark cage. Their heists practically stand as works of art in themselves – the product...

John Glenn. Alan Shepard. Scott Carpenter. Gordon Cooper. Gus Grissom. Deke Slayton. Wally Schirra. These are the names of the members of the Mercury Seven— America’s first astronauts, charged with the task of being the human faces of a massive collective effort to beat the Soviet Union in a race to space. And, of course, charged with the task of actually manning the rockets that could take them h...

Amid the astonishing destruction of World War II in Europe and Asia, the mainland of the United States had been spared from the ravages of this global conflict.  While several isolated attacks took place on the coasts, the dictators in Berlin & Tokyo sought super weapons to use against the US.  For Japan, one of these super weapons came in the form of the Fu-go balloon project that involved la...

The desire to know if Unidentified Flying Objects are real continues to grow in the USA and world-wide, especially with recent releases of previously classified video from the Department of Defense. One encounter yet to be explained was that of Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, whose UFO sighting left his patrol car damaged and his memory blank.  The Fort LTD still sits in a museum today in northern Min...

How does someone’s corpse get so exploited and degraded that, decades later, everyone mistakes him for a prop? After Elmer McCurdy’s death, his embalmed body was exploited as a sideshow attraction, a movie prop, and ultimately a decoration in an amusement park’s haunted house. Listen to learn more about Elmer McCurdy—a train robber who was killed in 1911 after attempting to steal $400,000 from a t...

How did a luxury international hotel brand in Taipei earn the reputation as one of the most haunted hotels in the world? Listen to learn more about  Key moments in the history of Taiwan, including its founding by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-Kuo. How the Hyatt hotel brand was founded. The history of ghost stories. MF Thomas’ personal experience at the Taipei Hyatt.  The full show notes...

Today Peenemünde is a small German town that borders the Baltic Sea. It sits amid a beautiful patchwork of farmland and national parks but the peaceful environment belies its role in the Nazi government’s development of V1 flying bomb and V2 rocket. Listen to learn more about The early visionaries of rocketry, including Hermann Oberth, Herman Potočnik, & Wernher Von Braun. The impact of the V1...

Airships became one of the most visible and popular methods of travel in the early 20th Century before the Hindenburg accident and competition from airplanes made airships almost an afterthought.  Listen to learn more about The early inventors who created the first hot air balloons and those who applied balloon technology to create airship. Count Von Zeppelin, the father of the modern airship. Lea...