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Long-form documentaries from The Obscura Files, newest first. Every file opens on YouTube.
12 files
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.
No. 0051911 · New York City
A minute-by-minute account of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, following the four possible escape routes from the ninth floor of the Asch Building, why each one failed or barely worked, and the trial and reforms that followed.
No. 004Ancient Rome
A single day in the life of a Roman legionary: the marching loads, the fortified camp built every night, the discipline, and the shield wall in battle, drawing on what Polybius, Vegetius and Tacitus recorded.
No. 0031912 · North Atlantic
Sixty feet below the first-class decks, Titanic's firemen and trimmers worked in coal dust and furnace heat. The heat, the shifts, the hierarchy and the collision itself, as described by men who were there, including Leading Fireman Frederick Barrett.
No. 0021873–1889 · Kansas and Michigan
Sixteen years after the Bender family vanished from Kansas, two women were arrested in Michigan and accused of being Kate Bender and her mother. Part 2 follows the manhunt, the bounty, and a wrongful arrest.
No. 0011873 · Labette County, Kansas
In 1873, travelers who stopped at a small roadside inn in Labette County, Kansas began to disappear. Part 1 of the Bloody Benders: the family, the inn, and the search party that finally uncovered what had happened.
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