Disturbing History - The Smithsonian's Strange Phenomena Files

Episode Date: July 12, 2026

There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, ordinary Americans mailed in the impossible. Flesh that fell from a clear sky onto a Kentucky farmwife making soap. A swarm of insects wide as the state of California. A booming like cannon fire off the Carolina coast with no ship and no storm anywhere in sight.Somebody at the Smithsonian had to open those letters and decide which was a lie, which was an honest mistake, and which one needed a drawer. This episode is the story of what happened when serious, credentialed people sat down and tried to file the parts of nature that refuse to behave.I come at this as a Bigfoot guy, and I'll say up front what I always say.You hear it at every campfire, that there are Sasquatch specimens hidden somewhere in the Smithsonian, and I can't confirm that because nobody's ever shown me the evidence. But the rumor sticks for a reason, and the reason is stranger and more true than the rumor itself. The Smithsonian really did become the place America sent its impossibilities, and the cabinet of curiosities is real. It's just that what's actually in the drawers isn't what the campfire says.We walk through the whole cabinet. Joseph Henry's army of volunteer weather-watchers and the anomalies they were told to log. The night in eighteen thirty-three when the sky came apart and a Yale professor crowdsourced the truth out of it. The century science spent insisting stones don't fall from the sky, right up until they did. The Kentucky meat shower and its four dueling verdicts, including one nobody wants to picture. Martha, the last passenger pigeon on Earth, shipped to Washington in a three-hundred-pound block of ice. The Rocky Mountain locust, the most numerous creature this continent ever produced, gone inside a generation and nobody's fully sure why.The Carrington Event, ball lightning, the Seneca guns the government still shrugs at, and Charles Fort, the man who built a rival cabinet out of everything the scientists threw away.And at the end, the real Bigfoot in the Smithsonian. Not a creature. A primatologist named John Napier who risked his reputation to take the witnesses seriously, and an anthropologist named Grover Krantz whose own skeleton stands in a museum case to this day, posed with his dog, exactly where he asked to be. The disturbing part of this episode was never that monsters exist. It's that nature makes enough strange behavior on its own that serious people have spent lifetimes trying to catalog the impossible, and the file is still open.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner, of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, people mailed in the impossible. The mail came in by the sack. Not one or two letters. Sacks. Canvas bags stuffed with folded paper. Some of it on good stationary and some of it on the back of a feed store receipt. All of it addressed to a scientific institution that had, foolishly or bravely, told the country to write in. And so the country wrote, A woman in Kentucky reported that flesh had fallen out of a clear sky onto her yard while she stirred a kettle of soap. A farmer in Nebraska described a cloud of insects so vast it took the better part of a week to pass over his fields, and it ate everything. The crops, the wooden handles of the tools, the wool off the sheep's backs.

Men along the Carolina coast wrote about a booming out over the water like heavy cannon on a bright still day, with no ship anywhere and no storm within a hundred miles. A whole region of the country woke one November night to find the sky on fire. 10,000 streaks of light an hour. And half the people who saw it were certain the world was ending. Somebody in that building had to open those letters. Somebody had to read them and decide. Which of these is a lie?

Which is an honest mistake? Which is a man who's been drinking? And which one God help us might actually be true and might need a drawer. That's the story tonight. A filing story. The story of what happens when serious people working for a government-backed institution sit down and try to organize the parts of nature that refuse to behave. I've spent close to 40 years chasing one particular impossible thing.

Bigfoot, Sasquatch. Whatever you want to call the large, hairy bipedal something that keeps turning up in the corner of people's stories in the deep woods. I take it seriously. I've had my own experiences with it. One is a kid in North Georgia, and three out in Washington State just a few short years ago. And I've talked to enough sober, credible witnesses over the years to know that a lot of people are seeing something they can't explain. And here's the thing you hear constantly in my world. You sit around long enough at any Bigfoot campfire and somebody will lean in and tell you, with total confidence, that there are specimens in the Smithsonian, bones, a body, something they pulled out of a cave or a river,

bank a hundred years ago and quietly locked away because the truth was too disruptive, too dangerous, too much for the public to handle. I want to be honest with you about that claim. I can't confirm it. I've never seen the evidence for it. Nobody has ever shown me a document, a photograph, a catalog number, a chain of custody, anything that would move it from rumor to fact. I know exactly what the difference is between a story that gets repeated until it feels true, and a thing you can actually put on a table. Right now, the hidden Sasquatch in the Smithsonian is a story. A good one.

Maybe even a true one. But I don't build my life on maybe's. Here's what got me, though, when I started pulling on this thread. The reason the rumor even sticks, the reason it feels plausible to so many otherwise reasonable people, is that the Smithsonian really did become the place where America sent its impossible things. That part's true.

For decades, if you saw something that broke the rules, the address you reached for was in Washington. The institution really did catalog rains of flesh and swarms that blotted out the sun and sounds nobody could source. The cabinet of curiosities is real. It's just that the curiosities in the drawers aren't what the campfire says they are. They're stranger, because they're real. That's the uncomfortable idea I want to sit with tonight. The disturbing thing here isn't that monsters are hiding in a museum basement. The disturbing thing is that nature, all on its own, without a single monster, produces so much genuinely bizarre behavior that generations of careful, credentialed, buttoned-up scientists have had to sit down and try to file the unfilable. They built a whole apparatus for it, and the boundary they kept bumping into, the line between folklore and science,

between the crank letter and the discovery is a lot blurrier and a lot more frightening than either the believers or the skeptics want to admit. Let me show you how it started. The Smithsonian opened its doors in 1846, funded by a strange bequest from an Englishman named James Smithson who had never once set foot in the United States and left his fortune to a country he'd never seen, to build an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. Nobody entirely understood why. He just did it. The first man to run the place was a physicist named Joseph Henry, and Henry walked in with a mission that tells you everything about what this institution was going to become. He wanted to solve the weather. In 1846, that meant something specific. There was no

forecast. A storm arrived when it arrived, and if it killed your crop or sank your ship, that was between you and the sky. Nobody knew that storms moved in predictable directions across the continent. Nobody had ever seen the weather as a single connected system, because no one human being could stand in enough places at once. Henry's answer was to build an army of ordinary people. By 1849, one year in, he had 150 volunteer observers scattered across the country, and within a decade, that network had grown to more than 600, reaching up into Canada and down through Mexico and into the Caribbean. He sent them instructions. He sent them standard He even sent some of them the instruments, the barometers and rain gauges and wind vines,

all built to his specifications, so the numbers coming back would actually mean the same thing. Every month, these people mailed in their readings. Temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, cloud cover, rainfall. By 1856, the Smithsonian was drowning in over 500,000 separate weather observations a year, and Henry had to hire a professor named James Coffin, just to wrestle the the flood of paper into tables and charts. Now here's the part that got me. The observers weren't only told to record the ordinary. Henry's instructions asked them to note what the records called the casual phenomena, the odd stuff, thunderstorms and hurricanes and tornadoes, sure,

but also earthquakes, meteors, the aurora, anything strange in the sky or under the ground. He was, in effect, deputizing 600 citizens across a continent to be witnessed. to the anomalous and to send it in the mail. So the founding project of the nation's great scientific institution was, in its bones, a crowdsourced record of citizen reports about weird things people saw. That's the real origin story here, not a laboratory, a mailbox. And it went further than paper. Because once you've got 600 curious, observant people scattered across a continent,

all in the habit of mailing things to Washington, They don't only mail you their weather. They mail you what they find. A naturalist named Spencer Baird, who ran much of the collecting side of the institution, cultivated exactly that instinct, and the same network of weather watchers became the pipeline for the Smithsonian's first great natural history collections. The observer sent in birds and eggs and bones and pressed plants and pickled oddities, boxes of the strange and the dead and the unclassified,

and the museum grew fat on it. The physical cabinet of curiosities and the paper archive of anomalies came out of the same route, which is a lot of ordinary Americans deciding that the odd thing in their hand, or the odd thing in their sky, belonged in Washington where somebody who knew better could sort it out. So when a Bigfoot researcher tells you there are specimens hidden in the Smithsonian, understand that the whole institution was, from birth, a machine designed to pull specimens out of the countryside and into its drawers, That's why the rumor breathes.

The machinery for it is real. The question was always just what got fed into it. And it worked. It worked well enough that in 1870, the federal government took the whole apparatus over and turned it into what would eventually become the National Weather Service. Henry gave his monster away to the Army Signal Service, and it grew up to save countless lives. But the shape of the thing,

the idea that you gather thousands of ordinary observations from ordinary, people. And let the pattern emerge from the pile, that's the machine. And that machine had already had one spectacular test run, 13 years before the Smithsonian even existed. On the night of November 12th into the 13th, 1833, the sky over North America came apart. It was the Leonids. We know that now. Every year in mid-November, the earth passes through a trail of dust and grit shed by a comet. and most years you get a nice little sprinkle of shooting stars. But every 33 years or so, the comet swings back around and refreshes the trail, and the earth plows straight through the thick of it, and the sky fills up.

1833 was the worst of it, or the best, depending on where you were standing and what you believed. Observers in Boston estimated something like 72,000 meteors an hour. Modern reconstructions run the peak as high as 150,000 an hour. That's dozens of streaks of fire every single second, from horizon to horizon hour after hour, all radiating out from one point in the constellation, Leo, like sparks blown off a wheel. People lost their minds, and I don't say that to be cruel about them. You're in a farmhouse in 1833. No electric light, no science section in the newspaper.

No way on earth to know what you're looking at. You wake up because your room is lit like noon. You go outside and your neighbors are already in the road, and the whole firmament, as one of them put it, seems to be a blaze. A lot of them fell to their knees. Preachers pulled out the book of Revelation and read the line about the stars of heaven falling to the earth. And a great many people were genuinely certain that this was the end, that judgment had come.

I don't think God was signing anything in the sky that night, but I understand the instinct completely, because when a human being confront something enormous and inexplicable, the mind reaches for the biggest available frame. And for most of them, the biggest available frame was the divine. That's not stupidity. That's the software running out of options. But not everybody knelt.

A professor at Yale named Denison Olmsted looked up at the same fire and did something that, to me, is one of the quiet, heroic acts in the history of science. He decided to treat it as data. He put a notice in newspapers all across the country, and the notice asked people, ordinary people, to write to him. Tell me the time you first saw it. Tell me the point it seemed to come from. Tell me anything you observed.

He wanted the facts, gathered with as much precision as possible, from as many eyes as he could reach. And they wrote back. From every corner of the country, letters came pouring in to a single professor, and out of that pile of citizen reports, Olmsted worked something out that nobody had ever proven. He noticed that everybody, no matter where they stood,

saw the meteors radiating from the same fixed point among the stars. And a fixed radiant point can't be an atmospheric event. Weather doesn't work that way. Weather is local. This thing was coming from out there, from beyond the air, from space. The stars weren't falling. The earth was moving through a cloud of something ancient, and burning as it went.

That's the model. That's the whole template that Joseph Henry would industrialize a decade and a half later at the Smithsonian. You take an event so strange that half the witnesses think it's the apocalypse and instead of dismissing it and instead of worshipping it,

you ask the witnesses to write it down and you read every letter and you let the truth assemble itself out of the crowd. The believers and the skeptics both got it wrong that night. The apocalypse crowd was wrong, but so was anyone in the educated establishment who wanted to wave it off as mass hysteria or bad eyesight. The witnesses were right. Something real and physical and cosmic had happened over

their heads, and the only way anybody figured out what was by taking the ordinary witnesses seriously enough to collect them. The witnesses keep being partly right. That's the thread that runs through every drawer in this cabinet, and it's going to come back, over and over. Now for the thing that scientists themselves got humiliatingly wrong because it sets up everything else. Stones don't fall from the sky. For a long stretch of the 18th century, that was the educated position. The learned view. If a peasant came running into town swearing that a rock had dropped out of the heavens, smoking and hot, the reasonable, sophisticated scientific response was to smile and explain that the poor fellow was mistaken. Rocks come from the ground. Everyone knows that.

There's nothing up there to drop a rock. The reports were folklore, superstition, the kind of thing simple country people believed. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Museums were known to throw meteorite specimens out of their collections, embarrassed to be holding a peasant's rock. The witnesses were saying over and over across centuries and countries

that stones fell from the sky. And the institutions were saying over and over that the witnesses were fools. But once again, the witnesses were right. The thing that finally broke, it happened in France, in a town called Legle,

in the spring of 1803. A shower of stones came down over the countryside, and this time there were hundreds of witnesses across a wide area, all describing the same thing at the same time. The French Academy of Sciences, which had been among the skeptics, sent a young physicist named Jean-Batiste Biot to investigate.

and Biot didn't just collect the rocks. He collected the people. He mapped where every stone landed. He interviewed the witnesses across the whole zone, cross-referenced their accounts, and demonstrated that the pattern on the ground and the testimony in the air could only mean one thing. These stones had a single origin, high up,

and they had spread out as they fell. They came from beyond the earth. That's the same method again. That's Legal in 1803 and the Leonids in 18303, doing the exact same trick. You take the despised, dismissed folklore report, and you honor it by investigating it properly, and it turns out the peasants were the ones telling the truth,

and the academy was the one asleep. And what did the Smithsonian do with meteorites, once they were real? It built one of the greatest collections of them on the planet. The very thing science had been throwing in the trash a generation earlier, became a treasure, cataloged and studied and kept in trade. The Impossible Rock got its drawer. I keep coming back to this one because of what it does to my confidence.

It's a warning shot across the bow of anybody, believer or skeptic, who's too sure. The skeptics were the establishment. They had the credentials, the institutions, the consensus, the smug certainty. And they were wrong for a hundred years about a thing that was falling on people's heads. The lesson isn't that every wild report is true. most of them aren't.

The lesson is that the label folklore isn't a verdict. It's a holding cell. And sometimes what's in the cell is innocent. The sky wasn't done with the file cabinet. It had one more trick, and this one arrived while Joseph Henry's observers were still at their posts, pens in hand, logging the casual phenomena they'd been told to watch for.

Aurora's. Odd lights. The strange stuff overhead. In late August and the first days of September, September 1859, they got the strangest light of all. An English amateur astronomer named Richard Carrington was in his private observatory near London one morning, doing what he did most mornings, carefully sketching the dark spots on the face of the sun. And as he watched, two points of blinding white light erupted across the sunspots and burned for about five minutes and then faded. He'd just witnessed something no human being had ever confirmed before. A solar

flare in white light with his own eyes. He didn't know what he was looking at. He couldn't have. But roughly a day later, the rest of it arrived. A vast cloud of charged particles that the sun had flung off along with that flare slammed into the Earth's magnetic field, and it set off the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded, before or since. And the whole planet lit up. The Aurora, the northern lights, which normally you have to go up near the Arctic to see, came poor. roaring down toward the equator. People saw it in Cuba, in the Bahamas, in Honolulu, in the Caribbean, where the Aurora simply doesn't go. It was so bright in places that people got out of bed and started their morning chores because they were sure the sun was rising. Birds woke up and started

singing at midnight. A reporter in San Francisco wrote that the red glare over the houses and streets was positively awful, like the light of the worst fire he could imagine. in the middle of the night with no fire. Now, in 1859, that would have been a beautiful, frightening curiosity and nothing more except for one thing. Humanity had just, for the first time in its history, strung a nervous system across the continents. The telegraph.

Thousands of miles of wire, the exact same wire Joseph Henry was using to move his weather reports into Washington, and a long metal wire strung across the landscape as a perfect antenna for the electric current. A solar storm shoves through the ground and the air. So the storm got into the wires. Telegraph systems failed all over the world at once. Sparks jumped off the keys.

Operators were shocked. One of them badly enough in Washington that a witness described an arc of fire leaping from the man's head to his equipment. The paper tape in the machines caught fire from the sparks and burned in the offices. And then the strangest detail of the whole thing, the one that still gets me. In Boston and in Portland, Maine, operators discovered that they could unhook their batteries entirely,

disconnect their own power source completely, and keep sending messages down the line anyway. The wires now carrying the current of the storm itself. The sky had grabbed the machine and was working it. We call it the Carrington event now, and here's why it belongs in this cabinet, and not just in a science lecture. Every ordinary person who saw that blood-red Aurora at the equator

was a witness to a thing they had no framework for, and a great many of them, once again, reached for the end of the world, and they were partly right to be afraid, just wrong about the reason. Because we now understand exactly what it was, and we understand something they couldn't have. If a storm that size hit the earth today, it wouldn't just send some telegraph paper. It would go through the grid,

the satellites, the power lines, the global electronics that our entire lives now run on. All of it is just a much bigger, much more fragile version of those telegraph wires. And one good Carrington event could knock a modern nation flat for months or years. The strange light in the sky in 1859 was a preview. The file on it is open, and it's not open because we don't understand it. It's open because we're waiting for it to happen again, and we know it will. That's the Aurora. But the sky has a smaller, closer, more intimate light that science had an even harder time admitting was real.

And that one's called ball lightning. For centuries people reported it. A glowing sphere, sometimes the size of a grapefruit and sometimes the size of a beach ball. Appearing during thunderstorms, drifting slowly through the air, floating down a chimney or in through an open window, moving across a room past terrified people, sometimes vanishing quietly and sometimes ending in a bang. Sailors reported it. Farmers reported it. And for a very long time, the scientific establishment did,

with ball lightning exactly what it had done with meteorites. It said the witnesses were mistaken. It said they were seeing after images, or hallucinating, or lying. Because the physics didn't allow for a stable glowing ball to just drift around a room. So obviously the ball wasn't there, and the witness was defective. Sound familiar? It's the meteorite argument all over again. The theory has no room for it. Therefore, the person who saw it is wrong. And once again, the sheer weight of the reports wore the

resistance down. There are simply too many accounts, from too many sober people across too many centuries, describing the same specific thing. Ball lightning is taken seriously, now. It's a genuine field of study. There are competing theories about what actually generates it. Vaporized silicon from soil struck by ordinary lightning, pockets of charged plasma, and no single explanation has won the argument yet. But the thing itself has been dragged across the line, out of folklore, and into science, on the backs of the witnesses who kept insisting they'd seen a ball of light come down the chimney and float across the parlor, even when every credentialed person in the room told them it was impossible. Two lights in the sky, one at the scale of a

planet, one at the scale of a living room. Both of them dismissed, then believed. And that's the pattern hardening into a rule. The single strangest drawer in the whole cabinet, though, isn't a light or a stone. It's a rain, the one that made me laugh out loud and then made me a little queasy. The day it rained meat. March 3rd, 1876, Bath County, Kentucky, near a little spot called Olympia Springs. A farmer's wife, a woman married to a man named Alan Crouch, was standing outside on a clear, bright, cloudless morning, working a kettle, making soap, and chunks of raw meat began to fall out of the sky around her. Flakes and pieces of what looked like fresh red meat, some of them small like snowflakes, and some of them as broad as four inches across, dropping down

out of a sky with not a cloud in it. It came down over a strip of ground about 100 yards long and 50 yards wide. And then, after a few minutes, it stopped. This is where it gets good, and where the old cop in me perks up. The neighbors came out the next day to see for themselves, and they found the meat stuck on the fences and scattered across the grass, most pieces a couple inches across, one of them bigger. And here's the detail I love. The detail that tells you these were practical people and not delicate ones. Two of the men picked up pieces and tasted them. Right there, Standing in a field that had just rained flesh, two Kentucky men put it in their mouths and gave their considered opinion, which was that it tasted like either mutton or venison.

That's chain of custody, 19th century style. And it got better because somebody had the sense to preserve samples. They bottled pieces in alcohol and mailed them off to laboratories in three different states. The scientific establishment of the day, the doctors and the microscopists and the natural scientists, They wanted a look. One physician, a man named Castenbein, writing in the Louisville Medical News, came up with an explanation that's somehow both perfectly scientific and completely revolting. He examined a sample.

He set fire to a piece of it. He noted that it smelled of rancid mutton. And he concluded that the whole shower was vulture vomit. Buzzards. A flock of vultures flying very high, feeding on some carcass. And then, all at once, startled. or threatened, disgorging their stomachs mid-flight. Because that's what vultures do. When a vulture is frightened, it projectile vomits to lighten itself for a fast escape.

And if a whole flock did it together at altitude, the wind would scatter the results down over a farm. The variety of the tissue, the muscle and the fat, and the connective bits all mixed together, he argued, could only be explained by half-digested carrion coming back up out of a bird. But not everybody bought the buzzards. Another investigator, a man named Brandeis, looked at a sample and decided it wasn't meat at all. He thought it was a thing called Nostok, a kind of bacteria that lies dormant and dry on the ground and then swells up into a translucent flesh-colored jelly when it gets wet. People had mistaken Nostok for fallen flesh before. The problem, the fatal problem with that theory, is that it hadn't rained. The sky was

clear all day. There was no water to swell anything up, and Nostok doesn't fall from a cloudless heaven. And then a couple of actual histologists, men who studied tissue under microscopes for a living, examined the specimens and came back with the most sobering verdict of all. They said it was lung tissue and cartilage, consistent with a horse, or in the words of one of them, possibly a human infant. So there's your file. One incident. Four expert opinions. Vulture vomit, Swamp jelly, horse lung, human infant, all of them credentialed. None of them able to close the case, and that's the honest scientific record on the Great Kentucky Meat Shower, which is to say there isn't one.

It never got solved. In 2004, an art professor cleaning out a storage collection at a university in Lexington found an old glass vial, still full of alcohol, with a faded label that said Olympia Springs. It was one of the original samples. It had survived, sealed in a jar, for 128 years. They tried to run modern testing on it, and the results came back inconclusive, too degraded, too contaminated by age to give up its secret. So the thing is still sitting in a museum in Kentucky, a piece of a mystery that fell out of a clear sky in 1876,

and to this day, nobody can tell you for certain what it is. The Vulture Theory is the one most scientists lean on now. It's the least insane option, and vultures genuinely do this. And that's probably the answer. Probably. But that word probably is carrying a lot of weight in a story where the alternatives on the table included the lung of a human child reining onto a farmwife's yard.

This is what these files are full of, not comfortable answers, best available answers, with a jar in the back that won't confirm any of them. Meat isn't even the strangest thing that's fallen out of the sky, if you want to know the truth. Fish fall, frogs fall. It's documented across centuries and continents, and it's the kind of report that got a man laughed out of a room for 2,000 years

until the mechanism turned out to be almost boring. A water spout, a tornado over water, can lift the contents of a shallow pond into the sky. The fish and the frogs and the tadpoles along with the water. Carry them for miles inside the storm, and then drop them, sometimes still alive, sometimes frozen. onto a town that has no idea what it did to deserve it. There are places that get it often enough to have named it.

A town in Honduras has, by local account, a season for raining fish. Blood rain is real, too, and it terrified people for millennia. Red rain, falling like something out of a plague, staining the ground in the rooftops. For most of history, that was an omen, a sign of war or death or divine anger. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It's dust. Fine red dust from the Sahara or reddish spores in the water,

lifted high into the atmosphere and carried enormous distances, and then washed back down inside ordinary rain, turning it the color of an old wound, nature painting a horror movie with sand. And then there's the one that still isn't nailed down, the one they call Star Jelly. There's an old Welsh name for it, that translates roughly to the rot of the,

the stars. For centuries, people reported finding a translucent gelatinous goo on the ground after a meteor sighting as if the falling star had left something behind when it hit. It's been reported for hundreds of years, and science has offered a handful of decent guesses. Frog spawn, deer slink, a swelling bacteria. But there's never been one clean answer that covers every case, and it keeps turning up, and it keeps not quite matching any of the tidy explanations. You see the pattern in this whole category. A thing falls that shouldn't. People report it.

The establishment first dismisses the reporters as liars or fools. Then slowly, for most of these, an actual mechanism gets worked out, and the impossible turns out to be a rare but real quirk of the physical world. Water spouts, Saharan dust, vultures with weak stomachs. The monsters keep dissolving into meteorology. But not all the way. there's always a jar in the back that won't test conclusively. There's always a star jelly, and the reports never stop coming,

which means the cabinet never actually closes. So much for the sky. The ground has its own impossibilities, and these are the ones that genuinely bother me, because they're not tricks of the weather. They're about how much life this continent used to hold, and how fast it can vanish. There was a bird in North America called the Passenger Pigeon,

and in the early 1800s it was very possibly the most abundant bird on the face of the earth. Abundant in numbers that break your ability to picture them. The great painter and naturalist John James Audubon left an account from 1813 that I think about a lot. He was writing to Louisville when a flock came over and it didn't pass in minutes. He wrote that the air was literally filled with pigeons, that the light of noonday was blotted out as if by an eclipse, that the droppings fell like melting flakes of snow and that the sound of the wings dulled his senses.

He rode the whole rest of the day toward Louisville, and when he got there, hours later, the birds were still flying overhead in undiminished ranks, a single flock, blotting out the sun for a day. Some estimates put the passenger pigeon population at its height at somewhere near 40% of all the birds in North America, billions of them. A living river in the sky wide enough to darken a state, and in the span of a single human lifetime,

they were slaughtered into non-existence. Commercial hunting on an industrial scale, tens of thousands killed in a day, shipped out by the rail car, plus the clearing of the forests they nested in. The living river ran dry. By the turn of the century, the wild birds were essentially gone, and a fevered correspondence broke out among ornithologists and pigeon fanciers. Everyone scrambling to find any surviving birds anywhere in captivity, to put them together, to breed them, to save them. There was almost nothing left to find.

A small flock at the Cincinnati Zoo held the last of them, and then two of the last three males died, and then it was one. One bird. They named her Martha, after Martha Washington. She lived out her last four years alone in a cage, an aging celebrity, the very last individual of a species that had won. once eclipsed the sun. Visitors came to gawk. Toward the end, the zoo had to rope off her cage because people were throwing sand at her to make her move, and she couldn't move well anymore. She'd had a stroke. They built her a lower perch because she couldn't reach the old one. Martha died on the afternoon of September 1st, 1914, around 1 o'clock, and when the keepers found

her body on the floor of her cage, the whole species died with her. That's the moment the passenger pigeon went from billions to zero. And here's where the Smithsonian comes back into it, and where the cabinet gets literal. They didn't bury Martha. This was the last physical evidence that an entire species had ever existed, and it was too important to lose. So they packed her body into a 300-pound block of ice, and they put that block of ice on a fast train, and they shipped the last passenger pigeon on earth to Washington, where the Smithsonian's people carefully skinned her and mounted her as a specimen and preserved her insides as an anatomical record. She went on display for a while, and then, for years, she went into a specimen cabinet in the back,

a drawer filed away with the rest of the evidence, the last of her kind reduced to a catalogued object in the great archive of vanished things. They bring her out now and again for exhibits about extinction. Most of the time she waits in the collection, in a museum, in a drawer, which is exactly where the campfire says the Sasquatch is, except this one's real, and we're the monster in her story. The birds are heartbreaking. The insects are eerie, and I mean genuinely eerie, in a way I haven't fully shaken. There was a creature called the Rocky Mountain Locust, and in the 1870s, it produced what is by the record, the single largest concentration of animals ever documented on this planet. In the summer of 1875, a swarm of these locusts rose up out of the west and moved across the plains.

A physician and amateur meteorologist named Albert Child, who happened to be positioned to watch it, used the telegraph network to gather reports from neighboring towns. The same crowd-sourcing instinct we keep running into, calculated the size of the thing by clocking how fast it moved and how long it took to pass. His number, the one that goes down in history, is a swarm cover of the thing. 198,000 square miles. That's larger than the entire state of California. The estimates of how many individual insects that represents run from 3.5 trillion, up to 12.5 trillion, weighing something on the order of 27.5 million tons.

It's been called the greatest concentration of animals ever recorded, and it earned a name. Albert Swarm. The people underneath it grabbed for the biggest frame they had, same as the people under the meteors. And for a lot of them, the frame was the book of Exodus. This was a plague, biblical. The wrath of an angry God visited on the sinful modern world. And I understand the reach again, because what was actually happening to them was almost worse than a plague, in the sense that it was indifferent. It wasn't aimed at them. It didn't care about them at all. It just ate. The locusts came down and stripped the fields bare, then ate the leather harnesses, the wooden

tool handles, the clothes off the lines, the wool off the living sheep. A Nebraska law was eventually passed requiring every able-bodied man between 16 and 60 to spend at least two days killing locusts or pay a fine. States offered bounties by the bushel. Farmers dragged contraptions across their fields to knock the insects into pans of poison. It was like fighting the ocean with a shot glass. An entomologist named Charles Valentine Riley, who studied these swarms got so desperate and so practical that he started publishing recipes. Eat them, he said. People have eaten locusts for thousands of years. Fry them in butter, he suggested. They've got a nutty flavor. They make a decent soup. A few settlers tried it. Most of them

said they'd sooner starve than eat the thing that was eating them. Now here's the part that raises the hair on the back of my neck, and it's not the swarm. It's what happened next. The Rocky Mountain locust went extinct. The most numerous animal ever recorded on the continent, trillion strong, a creature that darkened the sky over a region the size of California, was gone within roughly a generation. The last confirmed specimens were collected right around the turn of the century, 1902, 1904, and then there were none.

Ever again. It's, as far as we can tell, completely extinct. And that's a nightmare for a scientist. trying to file it. Nobody collected good specimens of the Rocky Mountain locust while it was around, because why would you? It was everywhere. It was like collecting a specimen of air. It was the single most common thing in the landscape, so ubiquitous that preserving one seemed as pointless as preserving a raindrop. And then it vanished so completely that scientists were left scrambling, and the best preserved remains they've managed to find, our frozen bodies dug out of glaciers, out of a place in Montana,

a literally named Grasshopper Glacier, where old swarms got caught in the ice and held. The most abundant creature on the continent, and we've got almost nothing left of it but a few bodies in a glacier. That's the disturbing thing, because it's the same lesson the passenger pigeon teaches. Abundance isn't safety, the two most staggering displays of animal life this continent ever produced. The Pigeon River and the Locust Cloud, both went to zero inside a human lifetime. And in the locusts case, we still don't fully understand how. There's a leading theory that plowing up the river valleys where they bred in the off years destroyed them. But it's a theory. The largest animal gathering and recorded history disappeared, and the file on why isn't closed.

You want to know what actually keeps me up? Not the idea that something enormous is hiding out there in the dark. It's the proof sitting right in the record that something enormous can be everywhere. in the daylight, in the trillions, counted and catalogued and eaten, and still be gone before the century turns, with nobody quite able to say why. The monster in these files isn't hiding. The monster is how fast the impossible abundance can become the impossible absence. There's a category you can't put in a drawer at all, because you can't catch it. You can only hear it. Up and down the eastern half of this country and in scattered places around the world, people report a booming, a deep, heavy concussion out of a clear sky,

like distant cannon fire or a massive door slamming somewhere underground, sometimes strong enough to rattle the plates in the cupboard and shake the pictures on the wall. And when people go looking for the source, there's nothing. No storm, no blast, no plane, no quarry, nothing. They've been reported so long and in so many places that different regions gave them different names. Along the Carolina coast and up around the lakes of New York, they're called the Seneca Guns, down in a corner of Connecticut in a valley near a town called Mootis. They're the Mootus noises.

Over in Belgium and the Netherlands, they call them mist poofers, which translates to something like fog belches. In the Delta country of what's now Bangladesh, they were the Barrasol guns. In Japan, the Umanari. In Italy, the Brontidi. same phenomenon over and over all across the world, a boom with nobody. The How Denisoni people and the Iroquois told the early settlers along those New York lakes what the booms were. They said it was the great spirit, still at work, continuing to shape the earth.

The writers got hold of it too. Washington Irving folded the booming into the world of Rip Van Winkle, playfully blaming it on ghosts bowling nine pins up in the mountains. James Fenimore Cooper wrote a whole short story about it, the Lake Gun, back in 1850, which is part of how the name Seneca Guns stuck. And here's the thing that puts it squarely in our story. This isn't folklore that science has explained away. This is folklore that science, right now, in the modern day, still can't fully explain.

I went and looked at what the United States Geological Survey actually says about the Seneca Guns. The real position of the real government. scientists. And their honest answer, more or less, is a shrug. There doesn't appear to be any agreement on what causes them. They've been happening for a century or two at least. The earth is a complex place. Perhaps someday we'll understand it. But right now we don't. That's the official word. From the government in the current era. We hear a canon that isn't there, over and over, for generations. And the best the file can say is we don't know, but it doesn't seem to be a threat. There are candidate explanations, and some of them are probably right for some

of the cases. Small, shallow earthquakes can make an audible boom. Sonic events conduct across long distances over water when the air layers line up just so, so that a distant blast arrives with no visible source. Waves hitting cliffs, methane bursting up off the sea floor, all of it plausible for some fraction of the reports. But there's no single answer that closes every case. and the noises keep coming and the drawer stays open my own first encounter with the thing I've spent a great deal of my life studying was in North Georgia when I was a kid it was a sound I never saw a thing a growl a huff the crash of a bluff charge in the brush and nothing visible to pin it to so I know in my own body the specific unease of a sound that has no source you can point at your mind hates it a site you can argue with. You can say it was a shadow, a trick of the light, but a sound with no visible cause sits in a different part of the brain, an older part, and it doesn't leave. And here's an entire category of that experience, happening to whole towns, logged by the United States

government, filed under We Don't Know. Northern Georgia, by the way, is one of the places on the list where these booms have been reported. I take a certain grim comfort in that. I've been telling you about the institution that tried to file the impossible. Now I have to tell you about the man who thought the institution was doing it wrong, on purpose, and who set out to build a rival cabinet out of everything the scientists threw away. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. His name was Charles Fort. Fort was born in Albany, New York in 1874, to a grocer father he later described as abusive. He wasn't a scientist. He was a writer, a struggling one, who at times supported himself and his wife by washing dishes and doing manual

labor, he picked up wherever he could. But he had one obsession that consumed the second half of his life. He haunted the great libraries of New York, the newspaper morgues, and the bound volumes of scientific journals, and he hunted for the reports that didn't fit. The rains of frogs, the falls of stones and blood and ice, the lights in the sky, the sounds with no source, the creatures that weren't supposed to exist. Every anomaly he found, he copied onto a little slip of paper, an inch and a half by two and a half, and he filed it in cardboard boxes and shoe boxes in his apartment.

By the end, he'd accumulated something like 40,000 of these notes, sometimes hundreds in a day. In 1919, he published what he'd built, and he called it The Book of the Damned. The title is the whole argument, and it's a good one. By the damned he wrote, I mean the excluded. His book was a procession of data that science had excluded, not disproven, not investigated and dismissed,

just quietly left out because it didn't fit the accepted picture of how the world worked, and an inconvenient fact that can't be explained is easier to ignore than to reckon with. Forts charge against organized science was that it wasn't the fearless truth-seeking machine it claimed to be, that scientists were as prone as anyone to conformity, to believing what was accepted and popular, to averting their eyes from the report that would wreck the theory. He said the excluded data was out there in the outer darkness of the ultra-respectable journals,

covered with the dust of disregard, and he had gone down into that darkness and come back with the lost data. And now, he wrote, they will march. I've got complicated feelings about Charles Fort. The theories he spun to explain his collected a night, were, in my honest opinion, nonsense. He floated ideas about a super-sargasso sea floating above the earth where lost things gathered before falling back down.

And in a later book, he wrote the line that were property. The notion that some higher intelligence owns this planet and its inhabitants like livestock. As an evidence first person, I don't buy any of it. And Fort himself was slippery about whether he even believed his own theories or was just throwing them out to needle the scientists. He didn't much care about proof. He said as much.

That's not my church. I need the rock on the table. I need the chain of custody. Fort had a shoebox full of clippings and a grudge, but the core of his complaint was correct, and the meteorite story proves it, and the Seneca guns prove it, and the Kentucky jar that can't be tested proves it.

Institutions really do bury the inconvenient. science really did throw meteorites in the trash for a century because peasants were the ones reporting them. The label folklore really is a holding cell and not a verdict, and sometimes the thing in the cell is innocent, and Fort was right to go through the pockets of everything the establishment had condemned. He was the anti-Smithsonian, where the great institution filed the anomalies it chose to accept, Fort filed the ones it chose to reject,

and both cabinets, the official, one and the outlaw one were built out of the same impulse, which is the refusal to let a strange report just disappear. His readers loved it. The book sold. He wrote three more, and he left behind a following of people. I don't consider myself one of them, because I care about proof more than Ford ever did, but I'll tell you what I do share with the man. I share the conviction that a witness deserves to be written down before he's laughed at. That's the whole ballgame. In my world and in his. So let's finally walk back to the Smithsonian and to the rumor I opened with. The Bigfoot community says there are Sasquatch specimens hidden in the Smithsonian. I told you I can't

confirm that, and I can't, and I won't pretend otherwise. But there's a real documented, verifiable Bigfoot presence in that institution, and it's stranger and more human than a hidden body in a vault. Start with a man named John Napier. Napier wasn't a friend. A few people. fringe figure. He was one of the most respected primatologists and anatomists in the world. He worked with Louis Leakey and Philip Tobias, and he was part of the team that named Homo Habalus, one of our own ancestors. He ran the primate biology program at the Smithsonian itself. And in 1973, this Smithsonian scientist did something that was, for a man of his standing, close to career suicide. He wrote a serious book about Bigfoot. He called it Bigfoot. He called it Bigfoot.

The Yeti and Sasquatch and myth and reality, and it's exactly what you'd want from a man of his training. He didn't believe, and he didn't scoff. He investigated. He interviewed the amateur researchers and the witnesses. He studied the physical evidence, such as it was, the footprint casts and the handprints. He screened the famous Patterson-Gimlin film from 1967, frame by frame, with a professional anatomist's eye. And his conclusion was mixed in a way I actually respect. He decided the film was, most likely, a hoax of some kind.

But even about that, he was careful. And on the page, he admitted that there was nothing in the film that would prove conclusively that it was a hoax. And here's the line of his that I keep in my head, because it's the truest thing anyone in a lab coat ever said about my field. He called the eyewitness testimony the lifeblood of the phenomenon, the sheer volume of it, the consistency of it across cultures and centuries. He didn't think that volume proved a crime.

creature existed. But he was scientist enough to know you couldn't just wave away thousands of people describing the same thing, and honest enough to write it down. A Smithsonian primatologist on the record, taking the witnesses seriously. That's the real Smithsonian Bigfoot connection. And it's a thousand times more interesting to me than a body in a vault, because it's true, and I can hand it to you. And then there's Grover Krantz, and I saved Krantz for the end, because his story is the one that closes the whole cabinet. Krantz was an anthropologist, a real one, a physical anthropologist at Washington State University, who published dozens of legitimate academic papers on human evolution.

He was the first serious scientist to devote his professional energy to Bigfoot, starting back in the 1960s, and unlike Napier, Krantz went all the way. He believed. He argued that Sasquatch might be a surviving population of gigantopithecus, a giantopithecus, a giant ape known from the fossil record, and it cost him badly. His colleagues rolled their eyes. He was passed over for promotions, delayed for tenure, denied grants, treated as an embarrassment to his own department, and his Bigfoot papers were rejected by the journals.

He spent his career as the butt of the joke, and he never quit, because he thought he was right and he cared more about the question than about the mockery. Krantz got pancreatic cancer, and near the end he made it. an arrangement that tells you everything about the kind of man he was. He donated his body to the Smithsonian. He told the anthropologist who'd take it, David Hunt. I've been a teacher all my life, and I might as well go on being a teacher after I'm dead. So here, take my body. And then he added one condition. You have to keep my dogs with me. He'd loved his dogs, big Irish wolfhounds, and he wasn't going to be parted from them even in death. Hunt agreed. So when Cranes,

died in 2002. There was no funeral. His body went first to a research facility in Tennessee that studies how human remains decay so that even his decomposition could teach forensic scientists something. And then his bones, cleaned and cataloged, came to the Smithsonian, and they went into a green cabinet in the back halls of the Natural History Museum, in the same labyrinth where they keep the dinosaur bones. His dogs came with him, just as he'd asked. For a while, his skeletal just waited in that drawer, filed away like Martha, like the meteorites, like every other piece of the impossible the institution had ever taken in. And then, in 2009, they put him on display. They stood his skeleton up inside a glass case, and beside him they articulated the skeleton of his

wolfhound Clyde, posed on his hind legs with his paws up on Grover's chest, recreating an old photograph the two of them had taken in life. A man and his dog, Bones and bones together in the museum. The Bigfoot community swears there's a Sasquatch hidden somewhere in the Smithsonian, and there is, in a manner of speaking. It's not the creature. It's the man who spent his whole life looking for it, standing in a glass case with his dog.

A scientist, the institution once wanted no part of, now permanently one of its treasures. The specimen in the cabinet isn't the monster. It's the hunter. The hidden body that's actually in that, museum belongs to the guy who believed hardest and got laughed at longest and there he stands teaching after death exactly like he wanted i find that almost too perfect the rumor got the location right and the content's wrong which if you've been paying attention tonight is the exact pattern of

this whole story the witnesses keep being partly right i set out tonight to tell you a story that isn't about monsters and here's why the version without monsters is the one that actually gets under my skin Nobody in this episode needed a Sasquatch or a ghost or an alien to end up staring at something they couldn't explain. The sky rained meat on a woman making soap. It rained fire so thick that a nation fell to its knees. The most common bird on earth became one bird in a cage in Ohio, and then no birds at all. The largest gathering of animals ever counted, trillions strong, wide as a state, blinked out inside a lifetime, and we still can't fully say why. A cannon booms out of a clear sky over the same Georgia hills where I first heard something in the dark.

And the United States government's honest answer is a shrug. None of that is folklore. All of it is filed. Cataloged, preserved, argued over by serious people in good buildings with good credentials, and none of it fully closed. That's the thing I keep circling back to. We like to imagine there's a clean line between science and folklore, between the drawer that holds real specimens and the story told around the fire. There isn't.

There's just a moving edge, the frontier of what we've managed to explain, and it moves. Meteorites crossed over from folklore to science. Fish falls crossed over. The passenger pigeon crossed from unimaginable abundance to a cabinet drawer. And on the other side of that edge, right now, tonight, there's a pile of reports still waiting. The Seneca guns, the Star Jell... that won't match, the jar in Kentucky that won't test clean. And yes, out on the far edge, the thing I've chased for 40 years, still on the wrong side of the line, still folklore, still filed

under not proven, still waiting for its legal, it's one clean case that drags it across. Maybe it never crosses. I've made my peace with that possibility. I need the rock on the table, and I don't have it yet, and I won't lie to you and say I do. Not even the comfortable, lie that there's a body in a vault somewhere that would settle it all. But I'll tell you what the strange phenomena files taught me, the real lesson under all of it. The establishment has been wrong before, confidently, institutionally, credentialedly wrong for a hundred years at a stretch, about stones that were falling on people's heads the whole time. And the witnesses, the ordinary people writing their letters into a building in Washington, describing the impossible thing they saw,

have a long, documented, uncomfortable history of turning out to be partly right. So somebody keeps a cabinet. Somebody has to. Somebody reads the mail and decides which report is a lie and which is a mistake and which one gets a drawer. Because the alternative, the thing science learned the hard way with the meteorites, is that if you throw the peasants rock in the trash, you don't make it stop being a rock from space. You just lose the evidence. I spent enough years taking statements to know the order the job has to happen in.

You write the witness down first, all of it, the parts that make sense and the parts that don't. You get it on paper while it's fresh, and you keep it, and you decide later what it's worth. You don't stand in the doorway deciding in advance which people are worth listening to, because the one you wave off is the one whose account you'll need. The Smithsonian, at its best, understood that. read the mail keep the sample sort it out later judge the evidence never the witness before you've heard him keep the drawer open that's the whole moral keep the drawer open and write the witness down before you laugh at him because the sky has rained meat and the record is right here