On April 23, 1967, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov boarded a spacecraft he knew might never bring him home.

The mission was meant to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Soviet Union. Two spacecraft. A symbolic victory. A global statement during the Cold War.

But behind the celebration were known technical failures, ignored warnings, and a political deadline that couldn't be moved.

In this episode of The Blackwood Files, we explore:

The flawed Soyuz 1 mission

Why engineers knew the spacecraft wasn't ready

Yuri Gagarin's attempt to stop the launch

The pressure of Cold War politics

And why Komarov boarded anyway

This isn't just a story about a space disaster.

It's about loyalty.
About pride.
About what happens when power refuses to listen.

Because sometimes the most dangerous moment isn't liftoff…

It's the decision made long before it.

🎧 Listen till the end.

Before dinosaurs ever walked the Earth, something far stranger ruled it.

Giant scorpions the size of wolves.
Dragonflies that hunted like birds.
Millipedes as long as snakes.

In this episode of The Blackwood Files, we travel hundreds of millions of years into Earth's past, back to a time when oxygen rich skies, endless forests, and rapid evolution created a world that feels more like a nightmare than a history lesson.

We explore:

Why insects once grew to terrifying sizes

How oxygen shaped life itself

The strange forests that became the coal we burn today

Why evolution suddenly accelerated, and then collapsed

And how Earth's deadliest mass extinction wiped almost everything out

This isn't just a story about giant insects.

It's a story about patterns.
About survival.
And about how life keeps adapting, even after the world resets itself.

Because long before humans…
long before dinosaurs…

Earth had already experimented with monsters.

🎧 Listen till the end.

In the last episode, we measured how deep the ocean really is.

This time, we go down there.

In 1960, Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh descended into the deepest known point on Earth, the Challenger Abyss inside the Mariana Trench. The engineering alone should not have worked. The pressure was enough to crush steel like paper.

And yet… they made it.

But before reaching the bottom, something went wrong.

Cracking sounds echoed through the cabin. Shockwaves rattled the vessel. And the window, one of the strongest ever built, began to fracture.

Decades later, similar incidents followed.
Unmanned submarines damaged. Robotic arms failing. Cables cut. Unexplained sounds recorded in the dark.

Were these just effects of pressure, misinterpreted data, and human imagination under stress?

Or is the deepest part of the ocean still hiding things we don't fully understand?

This episode isn't about proving monsters exist.

It's about how humans react when technology reaches its limits, and certainty disappears.

Welcome back to The Blackwood Files.