Unexplained: Based on the 'world's spookiest podcast'

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Richard MacLean Smith:A good friend of mine is a real heavy conspiracy theorist with a particular interest in UFOs and esoteric ideas and we had actually planned to make a show together. It was going to be a podcast, which I guess you could say for the time was a more traditional approach — essentially two guys talking about strange and weird things.But we couldn’t ever seem to find the time to get together and as the months went by I started to think on my own a bit more about the show and what it should be.At the time I was listening a lot to the usual suspects like This American Life, Serial, that sort of thing and then my girlfriend recommended Lore to me, and it was a bit of a game changer — aside from being an incredible show, it was the moment I realized I could actually do the thing on my own. I used to be a musician and know how to record a bit, I had all the equipment, basically everything I needed. But more than that, it made me see what the show could be, that it could in my own small way be a real piece of art. Slender Man siedzi w lesie, dzieci spotykają kosmitów, matki wyrzucają noworodki przez okna, staruszki wkurzone wojną przywołują demony, a ja jestem zirytowana. And then on top of that all, the music kind of brings it all together, and although neither of these elements are particularly novel in their own right, something about the way they all come together makes the show what it is.

The first history of the boy/man who remembered being shot down in combat and dying was the only 3 or 4 star in this book, IMHO.The Introduction is 1 star. It was the most ridiculous and lengthy circumvent for modern "me" experience with podcast and other horror, occult, alien drama? Sincerely, I don't know. It was on par with watching a 1/2 hour of TMZ if you didn't know what media was or came from another planet. Or didn't know enough about Earth modern entertainment. As if you thought Snoop Dog might be an animal species. In other words, I couldn't even connote 2/3rds of what he was discussing at length about his career, life experience. Ha, funnily enough, they have never been less interesting (without fail they always end up being more interesting in one way or another), but, and it has only happened once, I did start a story that half way through I realized didn’t quite fit my three criteria. In the end, I had to work quite hard to smooth it out as it felt too late to start a different one. It actually ended up being one of my favorites — it was the story of the Russian submarine K-219, which I think having looked into, we can well assume was rammed by a US submarine. But I was really heartbroken by the story of the young Russian sailor — Sergei Preminin – who lost his life saving the other men so it was important to find a way to get the story to work to include that. I think I just about managed to get away with it, and it gave me an excuse to read some Lovecraft at the end, so it was all fine. This book fell into neither trap. The selected stories were fascinating, covering both classic incidents and ones that even I hadn't heard of; even the ones I had heard of had lots of new information that I was reading about for the first time. As I've said previously, I'm not usually into UFOs as much as I am ghosts and cryptids and other paranormal elements -- this book had me absolutely hooked on a straight-up UFO story, because it was so engaging and such an interesting case. Following each meticulously researched story was a lot of really interesting information, speculation, and context. The incidents were put into their social context; there was a lot of philosophising that asked questions about the nature of such things, about why we might be drawn to them, about what could have potentially caused them and why we might be open to them. Especially fascinating was the discussion regarding the internet's role in such things; the book went into detail about creepypasta and the rise of internet folklore, and it's the first time I've seen this subject touched upon in a book like this and I was thrilled, considering that's one of the subjects I'm fascinated by. There were lots of interesting things to say about it. All That We See: The Ariel School mystery, where a large group of schoolchildren witnessed the landing of a UFO and the alien beings piloting it. I had never heard of this incident before, and it was fascinating and incredibly unnerving. It's one of those accounts where I really cannot think of a rational explanation for what those children saw -- especially as their accounts have remained consistent throughout, and some of the children still show genuine trauma from the incident even as grown adults. Very unnerving.

I’ve really enjoyed doing the show how I‘ve done it so far, but I feel like it needs to evolve somewhat to keep me and the listeners interested; so, you may see something a bit more ambitious in the next season. I won’t say too much, but the basic premise will be [that] instead of doing tenshort individual stories, I’m going to take one and make that the whole season. I’m not quite sure if it will work, but that’s the plan for now[.] This is 1000 words to say what 100 would do. And at times what 10 done WELL would suffice even more.Unexplained is a haunting story-based podcast in which host and creator Richard MacLean Smith explores a different unexplained mystery each week - often to terrifying effect. Smith:As I mentioned above, I think partly it’s the way I have attempted,[when]possible, to reveal the story of the events as they unfolded in real time, but also that on the one hand I don’t approach the subject with any kind of hysteria, but then on the other I don’t dismiss anything out of hand either – I just tell the story with all the facts that we have to go on.The point being that many, if not all of the people who are featured in the episodes, I think, aren’t trying to mislead anyone; I think they saw what they saw, or heard what they heard, whether there is anything ‘unnatural’ or untoward about what has happened is not for me to decide. I think this tone is important to the show also. I skipped almost the whole chapter about UFO’s because I found it quite boring.... even though the Welsh village named in the book as being home to more than 14 UFO sightings is only 8 miles from my house.

Because these are ten very different chapters, I'll review each one briefly on its own, to avoid this becoming a huge wall of text that doesn't make much sense: Unexplained is a bi-weekly podcast about strange and mysterious real life events that continue to evade explanation. Smith:So as you may know, I just finished my first season and will look to bring season two out a little later in the year — partly for a breather, but also I think it’s better suited to the darker months of the year[.] I really should read more ‘local’ books about my area. You often forget what a plethora of history and mythology can exist in an area you live in, and it was truely delightful to read some stories based solely around the region I have lived and grown up in for over 30 years (minus a year I spent living in Manchester). It’s made me fall in love with Teesside all over again. This is a mixture of various supernatural stories, ideal for this time of year. There’s reincarnation, UFOs and possession. All of the tales are unexplained, a little bit creepy, and the author goes into great depth about the history behind the mythology, and provides a very comprehensive analysis. It’s clearly well researched and told with enthusiasm for the subject. I just found that at times the writing style was a little dry and hard going. Sometimes the attention to detail also detracted from the storytelling rather than enhance it, and I found it difficult to really get into - which was a shame as the potential and passion is clearly there.I don’t know why I feel unable to award this more than 3 stars, because essentially it is a very informative and well written book - but I think that’s where the problem lies, it’s a little too well written. Apologies for going wanky, but there is a quote by philosopher Roger Scruton…which goes something like, “The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation,” and that’s one of the principles I’ve built the show on. Through each carefully crafted story, Unexplained ventures into the space between what we think of as real and what is not, examining the nature of reality, truth and the human condition; where sometimes belief can be as concrete as ‘reality,’ whatever that is…

Usually books like this don't really bring much to the table. They go over the same old facts, and the only real difference (and therefore the level of enjoyment) is determined by how much detail there is. Sometimes a book will have come across another source, or a lesser-known story, and the writing will be engaging, and that's good! But it doesn't really bring anything new to the discussion. On the flip side, some books will lean too heavy on pet theories and only look at the evidence from that specific theory, and while sometimes that can be ignored, other times it's a bit much. Many of those vintage programs were stunningly effective for that reason, but I definitely wasn’t spoiled for choice—the art form was also pretty much dead until the emergence and subsequent explosion of podcasts as a medium for storytelling over the past decade-plus, providing artists a new venue to create horrors and pump them directly into our earholes.

Unexplained Podcast’s tracks

Every Story is a Ghost Story: An account of the poltergeist haunting of Hannath Hall, which was a case I had no idea about! This is a rare thing for me now, so I read it with much fascination. It's a good, creepy, solid poltergeist story, and a good choice for the final chapter. There's a lot of discussion on the nature of hauntings, what it means to be haunted, the different expectations and experiences of such things, how everything could be said to be haunted... nice and eerie. Then we get the pontificating at the end. This is what I was here for. This was the thing I wanted. Smith was going to look at, say, reincarnation (chapter one) and ask what reincarnation stories tell us about what it is to be human. Instead, I got a piece of prose that jumps all around the place asking what it is to possess a body and whether we'll be able one day to upload our brains to computers. What that has to do with reincarnation I don't know but each chapter end was similar, looking at vague bits of science or news tangentially related to the topic instead of trying to grapple with what the topic means about us as humans. It was, frankly, disappointing. Out of the Trees and on into Dark: The story of the UFO sighting at an RAF base in Suffolk, England. I had some vague knowledge of this, but because UFOs aren't my main thing, I didn't really know that much about it and nor did I think I would be that interested. I was totally wrong. The detail in this account is phenomenal, and the atmosphere is beyond eerie. The fact that there seems to be no rational explanation for the sightings (that lasted several days) and the fact that most of the witnesses were reasonable military men who are unlikely to mistake aircraft for UFOs... it really is a strange case.