What is your podcast about?
How do I suggest a story?
Why can’t I leave a comment on the website?
Where do you get your research material?
How can you use any wiki as a primary source?
A buzzing noise?
What’s up with the sound effects and music?
Whose voice is that in the intro track?
How did you meet each other?
Why did you start the podcast?
Why am I not seeing new episodes in my podcast player?

What is your podcast about?
Unsolved Mysteries. Anything from cryptids to unsolved murders to weird noises. Though we joke about solving mysteries, we know that the reality is, in our hour(ish)-long format, that’s impossible. In fact, our goal is to provide a primer in each mystery for our listeners. If one of them interests you, we provide links so you can see what we found, and dig even deeper. There are a lot of formats for unsolved mystery podcasts out there, some take months to examine a specific case in depth (looking at you, Serial). We prefer to give ourselves the opportunity to investigate as many mysteries as possible.

How do I suggest a story?
Email us at [email protected], send us a message on Facebook, tweet @thinkinsideways, send us a message on Reddit, leave a comment on our website or iTunes, experiment with telepathy and think it really loud at us, or make friends with the chupacabra and have him deliver it.

Why can’t I leave a comment on the website?
We used to allow comments on our website but unfortunately it became a place for people to leave crass and rude comments anonymously, forcing us to disable them. Once again a small group of people ruined it for everyone else. You are more than welcome however to head over to our Facebook page or Facebook group to talk about episodes.

Where do you get your research material?
The Internet, the library (yes, the actual library), and occasionally a documentary film. While there can be tons of “information” out there about a story we find that a lot of it is parroted from one website to the next. That means getting creative in how we search things out. Sometimes we find a treasure trove, other times we find only little clues.

That is one of the reasons we don’t list everything we referenced on the website, who wants to read an eight page article just for the tiny little detail we discovered on page seven?

How can you use any Wiki as a primary research source?
Simple answer, we don’t, unless you mean primary, as in “first”. When researching a topic, it’s always helpful to get a quick overview of the case. Wikis are great for that, as well as for directing research to more in-depth sources. From there, we can quickly research other aspects linked to the case, and follow all the other trails we can find. And, since we’re aiming to be a primer in the topics we cover, we often direct people there as an easy starting spot, too. We have never, and will never, “just read the wiki” and go. If you want to see the additional research we did, we always post links on the website.

A buzzing noise?
That buzzing noise was the bane of Steve’s existence for 6 months and we spent a lot of time trying to identify what was causing it. We discovered it was a faulty piece of equipment. We replaced it and the buzz went away, but unfortunately that sound was embedded into the audio file that had already been recorded and we didn’t know how to get rid of it which is why we called these first 26 episodes the lost 26. Then listener James came along and did a bang up job of fixing them for us, we don’t sound exactly the same but trust us, it’s much better than it used to be.

Whose voice is that in the intro track?
We have been asked quite a few times who it is that is doing the voices in the intro of the podcast; thankfully they’re not us. Most of the voices were taken from online emulator sources, but sadly it’s been so long, we can’t remember who they are. Here is what our introduction says and our belated reconstruction of who we know/think the voices are:

Original Intro Track
Thinking Sideways (AT&T voice emulator, now retired)
I don’t understand (from Ally McBeal maybe?)
Does not compute (Robot B-9)
You never know (from Ally McBeal maybe?)
Insufficient data to formulate a reply (K-9, Dr. Who)
What!?! (unknown emulator)
Stories of things we simply don’t know the answers to (AT&T voice emulator, now retired)

Current Intro Track
Thinking Sideways (AT&T voice emulator, now retired)
I don’t get it (John Heard in Big)
I brought the aliens (Alan Rickman, Marvin the paranoid android)
You must unlearn what you have learned (Yoda)
I don’t know (Jack Webb, Dragnet)
Stories of things we simply don’t know the answers to (AT&T voice emulator, now retired)

How did you meet each other?
Joe and Steve have known each other for years. They were discussing a mystery at their local watering hole when Devin, who had by chance stopped into the same establishment, chimed in with her thoughts. Over the course of several months we kept running into each other and talking about the unexplained.

Why did you start the podcast?
It was Devin’s idea actually. None of us really remember how it came up in conversation but one day the idea struck her and we all thought it was a good one. It took a while to get things up and running because podcasts are strangely complicated to produce. With some trial and error, we figured it out and have been putting them out ever since.

Why am I not seeing new episodes in my podcast player?
Our feed (that thing that lets your podcast app find us) moved a few months ago and we sent out a notification to all of the podcast apps that carry us. Unfortunately not every player switched over to the new feed so you need to take a few steps to fix it on your end. Unsubscribe from the podcast in your player then do a search for it. You will see the show with all of the episodes you missed, subscribe to that one and you’ll be good to go!