The X-Files Mystery That Actually Happened

The Village Where People Slept for Days and How a DNA Test Solved a 73-Year-Old Missing Child Case.

What would you do if people in your town simply... fell asleep without warning?

In this edition of The Box of Oddities, Kat and Jethro investigate one of the strangest medical mysteries of the modern era: the "sleeping village" of Kalachi, Kazakhstan, where healthy adults and children suddenly collapsed into days-long sleep, vivid hallucinations, and memory loss. Was it a virus, radiation from abandoned uranium mines, or something even stranger?

Then, in honor of Independence Day, we take a quick tour of the world's newest nations and discover just how young some countries really are.

Finally, an incredible true story that sounds almost impossible: a six-year-old boy kidnapped from a California park in 1951 is finally identified and reunited with his family more than seventy years later—all because a niece became curious about the results of a consumer DNA test.

Mysterious illnesses, forgotten nations, astonishing reunions, and the wonderfully weird true stories that make the world far stranger than fiction... it's another unforgettable trip inside The Box of Oddities. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices