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

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I stopped reading at chapter nine, which was about slenderman. A creature made up by the internet. Slenderman is a really interesting case study about the way the human brain works and how unreliable things like witness testimony are (people will swear down they saw slenderman, a fictional creature from the internet, which calls into question basically everything else in this book which relies on eyewitness testimony). It's also a great look at how a folklore gets constructed. I didn't trust Smith to handle any of that with any kind of delicacy so I stopped reading.

Smith:I really only have 3 criteria that a story must satisfy: one, that it has a human element at the heart of it; two, that it is actually a story and not just an event (for example, like just saying, “this person was abducted on this day, and that’s all they can remember”); and [third], that the unexplained mystery has never been sufficiently debunked. There are so many stories of this ilk flying around on the internet (where I spend a lot of time generally and researching for the show), but, surprisingly very few that are still genuinely still mystifying.Occasionally I’ll come across a story that sounds amazing (like the Fox sisters, for example,who claimed to have been psychically communicating with spirits), and you think “wow that is such a rich story, it has everything: fascinating historical context, atmospheric location, they’re sisters, etc,” but then before long, you find actually they confessed to making it up; so for me, that’s the end of the story in terms of including it in the show. I’ll still include it, but not in the context that it is one of the unexplained mysteries[.] Because of how much I enjoyed the first season of Unexplained, I reached out to the podcast’s creator, Richard MacLean Smith, to talk about the series and its future.But I sped read after that section. Because it's full of tangents about the author himself, and also strange "eyes" to almost a negation of any true questioning for the events at the same time. Yes, some suppositions but not disciplined inquiry in most of these cases. 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. As for the inspiration for the show, I am a huge fan of horror and science fiction, but also, like many people, unexplained mysteries — the more bizarre and impenetrable the better. Then, last year I was in a charity shop in Inverness and came across a book of magazines from the 80s called Unexplained. Someone had collected them and put them together and I just realised that was it right there! Weirdly, though, I’ve not used any of the stories from that series. I think many of them have been quite roundly debunked since… 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.

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. 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 having trouble trying to decide what this book was meant to be. I know it is inspired from the author's podcast which the blurb tells me is very successful. If this book was just meant to be a podcast in book form, I guess it succeeded. But I don't think it was what I was looking for. 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: