Strange History

Psychic spies, unreadable books and the eye on the dollar: the odd corners of the past, checked against the documents and told straight.

• War of the Worlds, 1938: Did America Really Panic? Orson Welles's Martian invasion made headlines as a nationwide panic. The ratings, the hospitals and the listener mail tell a much smaller story.
• Houdini Versus the Mediums Harry Houdini once staged séances himself. Then he spent his last six years exposing mediums, from a Boston parlor to a hearing room in Congress.
• The Dancing Plague of 1518 In July 1518 one woman began dancing in a Strasbourg street. Within a month, hundreds had joined her, and the city's cure made it worse.
• The Miracle of the Sun: What the Crowd Saw at Fátima In 1917 tens of thousands watched the sun spin over a Portuguese field. Their testimony, read closely, explains more than it proves.
• The Voynich Manuscript: The Book Nobody Can Read A fifteenth-century book in an unknown script has beaten codebreakers for a century. Here is what is known, and why every solution fails.
• Project Stargate: When the U.S. Government Paid Psychic Spies For two decades and about $20 million, American intelligence tested remote viewing. The declassified files tell a stranger story than the myth.
• The Eye on the Dollar Bill Is Not What You Think The pyramid and floating eye came from a 1782 committee, a Christian symbol and a Roman poet, not from the Freemasons or the Illuminati.