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The Paranoid Strain

New! Quick-ish hit! Paul is Dead?

We're back! But we're not doing UFOs yet. First, we're doing a two-parter on one of the most famous music-related conspiracies in modern history--that is, the sudden mania that gripped The Beatles fandom, who for very confusing reasons in 1969 started thinking that Paul McCartney had secretly died and been replaced with a doppelganger, whose voice also somehow was a dead ringer for the tragically dead young genius. This whole thing burned out and became an in-joke quickly enough, but its brief era of cultural mania is super-interesting and a lot of fun. We hope you agree. Happy to be back with you. The second part hits in two weeks, and then it's UFOs as far as the eye can see.

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  • 19. New! Unidentified--From the High Desert...it's time for Art Bell

    29:07||Season 6, Ep. 19
    After a little housekeeping to wrap Roswell, we kick off what will be a regular visit to the library of the greatest conspiracy and weird stuff broadcaster in history, Art Bell. We'll hear how he shaped a young Jesuit, what made him so great, and how his show featured some of the most interesting Roswell stuff of all.
  • 18. New! Unidentified--Roswell--It wasn't aliens, dummies.

    31:43||Season 6, Ep. 18
    As the episode subtitle implies, we're gonna talk about why the Roswell "aliens" were almost certainly military test dummies. While we're at it, we'll explain why that's true in spite of the fact that those dummy tests didn't happen til years after Roswell. How? By explaining what science now knows about how memory works and--more importantly--doesn't.
  • 17. New! Unidentified--Roswell: The mortician's tale, and the little alien bodies

    28:36||Season 6, Ep. 17
    Continuing our skeptical look at Roswell, this time examine the story told by town mortician Glenn Dennis--a fascinating combination of real events, confabulations, and total crap. We also look into the eyewitness reports of little--well, not green men, but kinda orange? Anyway, eyewitnesses claimed they saw little dead aliens. But they didn't. We explain.
  • 16. New! Unidentifed--So, what really happened at Roswell?

    31:01||Season 6, Ep. 16
    We're back a week late, but I hope you agree it's worth it. Having heard the pro-UFO version of Roswell last time, we now seek to learn why so many dedicated investigators have looked into this situation and decided it's sound and fury signifying nothing. We've got a couple more episodes worth of Roswell stuff in the pipeline, and I look forward to sharing more with you in a couple of weeks.
  • Unidentified--Interlude

    04:50|
    Hey. We need an extra week coming back from summer, so here's a little taster of Dana Unicorn doing something silly to tide you over. See you next week.
  • 15. New! Unidentified--The Roswell incident (as told by an expert UFO believer)

    43:26||Season 6, Ep. 15
    This time, we hear the full story of Roswell--or, at least, the full story as it's told by those who are convinced that a UFO crashed there. This is audio captured during the great 2017 Paranoid Strain road trip, and we heartily thank Dennis Balthaser for allowing us to record and share his expertise with you. While we may disagree with his conclusions, we deeply appreciate his knowledge and his presentation. Next time: The skeptics get their turn.
  • 14. New! Unidentified--The pre-UFOs that set the stage for Roswell

    30:26||Season 6, Ep. 14
    Roswell is right around the corner, but first let's consider the unidentified objects that appeared in the night skies before everybody decided they were shaped like saucers. To wit, we'll cover The War of the Worlds, the foo fighter phenomenon, a strange tale of crashed Martians in late-19th Century Texas, and much more. Next time--we go full Roswell, New Mexico.
  • 13. New! Unidentified--Where are all the aliens? (The Fermi Paradox and Drake's Equation)

    37:24||Season 6, Ep. 13
    We're fully on the UFO beat now, and addressing one of the most vexing questions asked by any scientist in the previous century--Enrico Fermi's question about aliens. That is, "Where is everybody"? We explore many solutions that have been proposed for this conundrum, and also investigate fellow scientist Frank Drake's equation that seeks to quantify exactly how likely it is that we will encounter alien life.
  • 12. New! Unidentified--The 66 trillion year-old Shabazz UFO, and the still-unidentified Oumuamua

    31:14||Season 6, Ep. 12
    As promised, we're finally talking about UFOs in the UFO series. This time, we cover the long-overdue return of the Mother Plane prophesied by the Nation of Islam, as well as the decidedly odd interstellar object discovered back in 2017, that seemed briefly as if it might be a sign of extraterrestrial intelligence, Oumuamua.