Episode
The Smithsonian's Strange Phenomena Files
- Podcast
- Disturbing History
- Published
- Jul 12, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3667
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-smithsonian-s-strange-phenomena-files--72939759
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Summary
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 gen…