Red Herring

The world lost a legend recently, and we wanted in some small way to pay tribute to the great Dolly Parton. So we’re playing you an episode from a series we had a small part in back in 2017, Dolly Parton’s America. The series kicked off with a simple question: How did the queen o ...  Show more

The greatest mysteries have a shadowy figure at the center—someone who sets things in motion and holds the key to how the story unfolds. In epidemiology, this central character is known as Patient Zero—the case at the heart of an outbreak. This hour, Radiolab digs up an episode w ...  Show more

A Cold War mystery, featuring the CIA, Howard Hughes, a sunken Soviet sub and quite possibly a sunken American sub too. With cover stories inside cover stories and weak government explanations for obvious questions, this one is a puzzle wrapped in an enigma zip-locked inside a my ...  Show more

By the 1980s, tension between the U.S. and Soviet Union was a fact of everyday life. Early '80s American pop culture was quite literally exploding with nuclear doom. But was a real crisis unfolding right under our noses? One dauntless sleuth grows determined to get to the bottom ...  Show more

This week we dive under the waves, from the Baltic Sea anomaly, to the lost city of Atlantis, all the way to the disappearance of Amelia Earhart. What mysterious things could be hidden in the depths of this world, waiting to be uncovered? 

A PhD student with a passion for whales stumbles upon something strange. An eerie sound deep beneath the ocean waves is about to rock her world. Producer Lauren Armstrong Carter Sound Designer: Jon Nicholls Story Editor: John Yorke