Alfred Redl rose to head the counterintelligence arm of Austria-Hungary’s General Staff, hunting spies for the empire. Yet for roughly a decade he was also feeding secrets to Russia, and he’s believed to have sacrificed his own agents to protect himself. In 1913, postal censors intercepted envelopes containing nothing but cash, and the trail led back to Redl. Drawing on Fitzroy Maclean’s Take Nine Spies, Sean and I dig into one of the twentieth century’s most famous espionage cases: how a spy catcher became the spy, what he is believed to have given away, and where historians still disagree about his motives and the damage he did.

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Necromancy, sorcery, astrology, alchemy, prophecy — practices humanity has turned to for millennia to try to bend the unseen world to its will. Based on Robert Masello's book Raising Hell: A Concise History of the Black Arts and Those Who Dared to Practice Them, Sean and I trace the occult arts from ancient Babylon to the present day, and the people throughout history who risked everything — their reputations, their freedom, some would say their souls — to practice them.

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Over 300,000 foreign soldiers fought in the Vietnam War as a paid force — not volunteers, not draftees, but mercenaries hired by Washington for a price tag that would total roughly $5 billion over eight years. It's one of the least-discussed financial arrangements of the entire war, and the ally in question isn't who most people would guess. We lay out exactly how the deal worked, and what it meant for the country that took it.

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From Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest to dragons across Europe and Asia, gargoyles, thunderbirds, and sea monsters reported in waters worldwide — this episode surveys cryptid sightings and folklore from around the globe. We're not asking you to believe every account; we're asking what these stories have in common, where the evidence holds up, and where it doesn't. Part of our ongoing look at the unexplained, Fool Me Twice.

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Philadelphia has a disturbing history: Gary Heidnik and Harrison "Marty" Graham were both convicted in 1988, within a year of each other, for horrific crimes against women committed in the same city. Now, decades later, the ongoing Eugene Horsch investigation — tied to his late father R.C. Horsch's own disturbing writings and admissions — has drawn comparisons in local reporting to that same dark history.A clarification up front: Heidnik and Graham are convicted killers — their guilt is legal fact. R.C. Horsch died without ever being charged with anything connected to his writings. Eugene Horsch has not been charged in connection with any deaths; the investigation remains active and unresolved. We're examining a pattern across a city's history, not asserting equivalence between an unproven case and two settled convictions.

People have reported losing hours they can't account for. Others describe time slowing to a crawl during moments of crisis, or speeding up without explanation. We look at two very different lenses on this phenomenon: Jenny Randles' Time Storms, which frames these experiences as a possible unexplained atmospheric phenomenon tied to time slips and missing time, and Dr. Steve Taylor's more clinically grounded research into "time expansion experiences" — documented cases of subjective time dilation during accidents and deep meditation. One paranormal, one psychological — same underlying mystery.

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From Japan to the Pacific Islands to the Americas — Part 2 of our series on human sacrifice and ritual death across history, weighing documented evidence against myth and colonial-era retellings.

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James Bond isn't just spy fiction — creator Ian Fleming spent WWII in Britain's real Naval Intelligence Division, and decades of Cold War-era films picked up threads from real espionage and real geopolitics along the way.

Sean and I are joined by special guest Doc Rock to dig into two very different Bond eras — Licence to Kill (1989) and A View to a Kill (1985) — tracing the villains, the settings, and the strange real-world echoes underneath them: money laundering fronts, Cold War tech paranoia, and even unexpected threads back to Hemingway and Kennedy. We're not claiming Bond predicted anything — just looking at where fiction and reality happen to rhyme.

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