Historical documentaries · On YouTube
The Obscura Files reopens the disasters, crimes, mysteries and near-misses that rarely make the textbooks, and follows each one back to the moment it turned.
One file at a time.
Selected from the archive
No. 0121946 · Los Alamos, New Mexico
In 1946, physicist Louis Slotin held two halves of a plutonium sphere apart at Los Alamos with the blade of a screwdriver. When it slipped, the core went supercritical. The accident, the nine days that followed, and the safety changes it forced.
No. 0111971 · Peruvian Amazon
On Christmas Eve 1971, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell from a disintegrating airliner over the Peruvian Amazon. She was the only survivor of LANSA Flight 508, and spent eleven days finding her way out of the rainforest alone.
No. 0101628 · Stockholm, Sweden
Weeks before her maiden voyage in 1628, Sweden's newest warship nearly capsized during a stability test. The Vasa sailed anyway, and sank in full view of Stockholm. Why did she go to sea, and why was no one punished?
No. 0091967 · Cape Kennedy, Florida
During a routine countdown test on January 27, 1967, fire broke out inside Apollo 1's pure-oxygen cabin, and Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee could not open the hatch. The final minutes, the investigation, and the redesign that followed.
No. 0081912 · North Atlantic
As Titanic sank, nearly thirty men balanced through a freezing night on the overturned hull of Collapsible B, deciding whether anyone else could climb aboard without rolling it over. Drawn from inquiry testimony and survivors' accounts.
No. 0071909 · Cherry, Illinois
In November 1909, a fire trapped hundreds of men inside the Cherry Mine in northern Illinois. Twelve rescuers died trying to reach them. Twenty-one miners survived seven days behind a makeshift wall deep underground.
No. 0061925 · Sand Cave, Kentucky
In January 1925, a 27-pound rock pinned Floyd Collins's ankle sixty feet underground in Sand Cave, Kentucky. The rescue attempt became one of America's first great media spectacles, and one of its first great tragedies.
The approach
History is full of small decisions with enormous consequences. We go looking for them.
A screwdriver used as a spacer. A failed stability test, quietly set aside. A mine's ventilation reversed at the worst possible moment. Each documentary follows a single event closely, from the people inside it to the record it left behind.
About the channelEach story starts from documented accounts wherever they exist: inquiry testimony, contemporary reporting, museum and archive records. Where possible, the main sources are listed in each video's description.
Most of these events hinge on a warning ignored, a design flaw, or a choice made under pressure. We trace what led there and what followed.
The firemen below Titanic's waterline. A teenager alone in the Amazon. The rescuers who went down into the Cherry Mine. Every file is about the people it happened to.
Support the channel
The best way to support The Obscura Files is the simplest: watch, subscribe, and pass a documentary along to someone who'd find it as strange as you did.
Want to do a little more? You can also support the channel directly on Buy Me a Coffee
