The Smithsonian's Strange Phenomena Files

There's a building in Washington where, for the better part of a century, ordinary Americans mailed in the impossible. Flesh that fell from a clear sky onto a Kentucky farmwife making soap. A swarm of insects wide as the state of California. A booming like cannon fire off the Carolina coast with no ship and no storm anywhere in sight.

Somebody at the Smithsonian had to open those letters and decide which was a lie, which was an honest mistake, and which one needed a drawer. This episode is the story of what happened when serious, credentialed people...