Disturbing History

What if everything we've been told about dinosaurs was a lie? Were these prehistoric giants real, or is the entire dinosaur industry built on fabricated fossils, museum replicas, and a carefully constructed scientific hoax? This week on Disturbing History, Brian investigates one of the internet's strangest and increasingly popular conspiracy theories: Dinosaurs never existed. From a remarkably pre...

In 1958, scientist Charles David Keeling began measuring carbon dioxide levels high atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. The atmosphere contained approximately 316 parts per million of CO2. By May 2026, that number had climbed to 432. What happened in between, and what does it mean for our planet? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian tackles three of the most debated questions in modern scienc...

Five mass extinctions. Billions of years of evolution. Entire species wiped from existence. And one disturbing question: Are we living through the next one? In 1796, a young French anatomist named Georges Cuvier examined the fossilized remains of mammoths and mastodons and reached a conclusion that challenged everything scientists thought they knew about the natural world: entire species could dis...

For more than four decades, one of America's most terrifying serial killers hid in plain sight. He was a burglar, a serial rapist, a murderer—and for six years, a sworn police officer. His name was Joseph James DeAngelo, but the world would come to know him as the Golden State Killer. On April 24, 2018, police arrested the 72-year-old former officer after a groundbreaking DNA investigation finally...

You'd never confess to a crime you didn't commit, right? Out of the first 375 people in the United States cleared by DNA evidence after a conviction, 102 of them had. In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian looks at how an innocent person ends up in an interrogation room saying the words, who built the room, and what it did to a long list of real people whose names belong in the record. The e...

The Hills Have Eyes: The Terrifying Legend Behind the Horror MovieIn episode three of our Spooky Season series exploring the true stories behind Hollywood’s most terrifying horror movies, Brian investigates the disturbing legend that inspired Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic, The Hills Have Eyes. For nearly 300 years, the story of Sawney Bean and his murderous Scottish cannibal clan has haunted gene...

What do Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse have in common? They all died at 27, becoming part of one of music history's most haunting legends: The 27 Club. But is there really a deadly curse, or does the truth reveal something far more disturbing? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian  investigates the mysterious deaths, unanswered question...

In 2013, Time branded millennials “The Me Me Me Generation.” The accusations were familiar: lazy, entitled, and obsessed with themselves. Yet teenage drinking, smoking, pregnancy, and fighting were all declining, while young adults faced rising student debt and a difficult path to homeownership. The complaints about the next generation were nothing new. The world they were inheriting deserved a cl...

What if our universe contains entire dimensions of space that we cannot see, touch, or detect? What if those hidden dimensions exist all around us, occupying the very rooms we live in? And could they explain some of humanity's greatest mysteries, from unexplained disappearances and paranormal encounters to UFOs, Sasquatch, and even telepathy? In this episode of Disturbing History, Brian takes a de...

The 2000s began with America preparing for a disaster that never happened: Y2K. But while the country worried about computer failures, a far more dangerous threat was already taking shape. What followed was a decade of extraordinary technological breakthroughs, devastating national tragedies, government failures, economic collapse, and a generation blamed for problems it didn't create. In this six...

What if the terrifying premise behind A Nightmare on Elm Street wasn't entirely fiction? What if people really were going to sleep, experiencing horrifying nightmares, and dying before they could wake up? In the fall of 1980, a Hmong refugee named Vang Xiong endured three terrifying nights in a Chicago apartment. First came a dream of a cat sitting on his chest, suffocating him. The following nigh...

On the night of August 21, 1986, a small crater lake in the highlands of northwest Cameroon released something close to a quarter of a cubic mile of carbon dioxide in a matter of minutes. The gas was heavier than air. It poured over the rim of the crater, ran down the valleys the way water would have, and passed through the villages of Nyos, Cha and Subum while people were finishing supper or alre...

On August 20, 1949, the Washington Post put a story on its front page under the headline "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip." It said a 14-year-old from the Maryland suburbs had been freed of demonic possession after a Jesuit read the rite of exorcism over him 20 to 30 times, and that the boy had screamed, cursed and spoken Latin he had never been taught. A Georgetown unde...

In September 2024 a documentary filmmaker named Ky Dickens released the first episode of a podcast called The Telepathy Tapes. By the first week of January 2025 it had passed Joe Rogan on Spotify's U.S. chart. Its claim is that children and young adults who can't speak, most of them diagnosed with autism, are reading the minds of their parents and teachers and meeting each other in a place they ca...

This episode asks a simple question: if someone really discovered a cure for cancer, would the medical industry suppress it? Brian begins with a clear disclaimer that he is not a doctor and is making no medical claims, then looks at the history behind one of the most persistent conspiracy theories in modern medicine. The episode briefly examines Brown’s Gas, Yull Brown’s 1977 welding patent, and e...

On July 16, 1990, Time magazine put a group of young adults on its cover beneath the word “twentysomething” and asked whether they were laid back, late blooming, or simply lost. The story said they struggled to make decisions, would rather hike the Himalayas than climb the corporate ladder, and had no anthems, no heroes, and an attention span as short as one click of the remote. Those young adults...

Listener discretion is advised. This episode contains descriptions of real-life violence and death, including the shooting deaths of a fourteen-year-old boy, his mother, and a federal law enforcement officer. It also includes direct quotations expressing racist and extremist beliefs. Some listeners may find this material disturbing or offensive. On August 22, 1992, an FBI sniper positioned roughly...

The 1980s began with 52 Americans still being held hostage in Tehran and ended with crowds tearing open the Berlin Wall. Between those two moments came one of the most turbulent, contradictory decades in modern American history. In this fourth episode of the Disturbing History decades series, Brian looks back at the decade he grew up in—beyond the neon, MTV, blockbuster movies, and nostalgia. The...

On the night of May 18, 1910, people across the world waited for Halley’s Comet to kill them. Hotels in New York opened their rooftops. Miners in Pennsylvania refused to go underground. A religious sect outside Atlanta reportedly barricaded itself inside a cave. In Chicago, people sealed their doors and windows against a poisonous gas they believed was coming from space. Then Earth passed through...

This episode discusses sexual violence against children and teenagers, torture, and murder and is not suitable for younger audiences. Listener discretion is strongly advised.  On the night of June 11, 1980, plainclothes officers who had been following a Ford Econoline van through Hollywood watched its driver approach a series of young men along Santa Monica Boulevard.  Five refused to get inside....

The 1970s opened in conflict. On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of U.S. military operations into Cambodia. Days later, four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. On May 8, construction workers attacked antiwar demonstrators in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot, one of the defining images of a country bitterly divided over Vietnam, prot...

On March 27, 1964, The New York Times published a story that would become one of the most famous examples of human indifference ever told. According to the report, 38 people in Queens watched as 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was stalked and attacked for more than half an hour, and not one of them called police or came to help. The story spread across the country and eventually helped inspire decades...

Everybody knows the line: “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” It became shorthand for an entire generation, even though the man who said it was a 24-year-old Berkeley graduate student who would turn thirty just months after the decade ended. In the second installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1960s—a decade remembered for rebellion, protest, Vietnam,...

A warning before you press play: this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and what was done to several victims, including after death. In early January 2008, police searching a dumpster and nearby van north of Atlanta found blood-soaked clothing, weapons, restraints, and evidence connected to missing hiker Meredith Emerson. The man cleaning that van was Gary Michael Hilton. What foll...

Everybody carries a version of the 1950s around in their head, and the strange thing is that a surprising amount of it is true. For millions of American families, one paycheck really could support a house, a car, and children. Homeownership climbed from roughly 44 percent before World War II to about 62 percent by 1960. Television went from a novelty to a fixture in nearly nine out of ten homes, E...