{"podcast":{"title":"Disturbing History","slug":"disturbing-history-7341005","podcast_index_feed_id":7341005,"rss_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/show/6628223/episodes/feed","website_url":"https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/disturbing-history--6628223","image_url":"https://d3wo5wojvuv7l.cloudfront.net/t_rss_itunes_square_1400/images.spreaker.com/original/f42011dc1c8c8130e84fb37f20a9046e.jpg","author":"Paranormal World Productions LLC","episode_count":106,"summary":"Disturbing History is a dark history podcast uncovering the strange, sinister, and little-known stories the past tried to bury. Each week, we explore unsolved mysteries, secret societies, forgotten crimes, eerie folklore, lost civilizations, historical conspiracies, and disturbing events that never made it into your high school textbook .Hosted by author, investigator, and storyteller Brian King-Sharp, Disturbing History dives deep into: Unsolved historical mysteries Secret societies and hidden power structures Dark folklore and urban legends Lost colonies and vanished civilizations True crime cases buried by time Historical conspiracies and cover-ups Paranormal events rooted in real history Through immersive storytelling and investigative research, we uncover the shadowy corners of the past — the uncomfortable truths, forgotten tragedies, and disturbing secrets that shaped our world.If you’re fascinated by dark history, obsessed with unexplained events, or drawn to stories that blur the line between fact and legend, this podcast is for you. Because the past isn’t always dead. Sometimes it’s just been buried. Follow Disturbing History and turn on automatic downloads for weekly dee…","last_synced_at":"2026-06-05T14:19:19.361689+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005"},"episode":{"title":"The CIA Acoustic Kitty Project","slug":"the-cia-acoustic-kitty-project","published_at":"2026-03-06T14:25:02+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-cia-acoustic-kitty-project","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005","url":"https://www.spreaker.com/episode/the-cia-acoustic-kitty-project--70506998","audio_url":"https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/70506998/dhkittyfinal3_6.mp3","summary":"In the early nineteen sixties, at the height of Cold War paranoia, the CIA's Technical Services Division conceived and built one of the strangest intelligence programs in American history. They called it Acoustic Kitty. The idea was straightforward in the most disturbing possible way: surgically implant a microphone, a radio transmitter, and a battery inside a living cat, thread an antenna along its spine, and deploy it near Soviet officials having conversations in public parks. A cat wandering up to a park bench raises no suspicion. Nobody looks twice. It was, in theory, the perfect surveillance platform.It cost an estimated twenty million dollars. It took years to develop. It required major surgery on multiple animals and the combined effort of CIA engineers, veterinarians, and behavioral specialists working under complete secrecy. And on its first real operational deployment — near the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC — the cat walked into the street and was struck by a taxi. In this episode of Disturbing History, we trace the full arc of Acoustic Kitty from its origins in the CIA's anything-goes Technical Services culture to its spectacular and absurd failure, and we ask the harder question that the punchline usually obscures: what kind of institution produces this? The program wasn't the work of lunatics. It was approved, funded, and executed by serious, intelligent, technically sophisticated people who genuinely believed they were doing what the Cold War required. That's the real disturbance here — not the failure, but the trying. We also cover the role of Victor Marchetti, the former CIA executive who risked his career and his freedom to bring this story to the public in the early nineteen seventies, and we look at what the eventually declassified CIA documents…","meta_description":"In the early nineteen sixties, at the height of Cold War paranoia, the CIA's Technical Services Division conceived and built one of the strangest intellig…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":4664,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/disturbing-history-7341005/episodes/the-cia-acoustic-kitty-project/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/disturbing-history-7341005/the-cia-acoustic-kitty-project.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}