The Smithsonian's Strange Phenomena Files
About this episode
This episode explores the strange phenomena reported to the Smithsonian and the efforts to categorize them.
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…
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