On these many episodes, we'll be exploring the strangest viral phenomena of the World Wide Web.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Sm Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

Heather Donnevue, Josh Moore-Leonard, and Michael Williams

disappeared in 1994 while shooting a documentary film project

in the Black Hills area near Berkittsville.

The three student filmmakers are still missing.

After 20 years, I can still remember the aggressive curiosity, the sort of excited confusion of just

how in the world a couple young filmmakers had been allowed to show this found footage

of three college students who disappeared without a trace, who'd been terrorized by someone or

something in the woods and likely killed out there. As an obsessive fan of America's Most

Wanted, I thought that surely it would compromise the investigation into their whereabouts,

into their possible murder. I was 10 years old in 1999, when the rumors began about the Blair Witch

project, with a viral marketing campaign unlike anything that came before or anything that would

be able to come after. The internet looked a lot different 20 years ago. It was not yet the omniscient,

all-encompassing information bank that it is today. It was easier then to pull a fast one on

the entire nation, the entire world, and it was one of the most exciting things that ever happened

in my childhood. It made me question the nature of reality itself.

And it certainly helped inspire me all these years later to investigate the stories we come

to believe, especially urban legends, and why we are as wonderfully gullible as we are when

it comes to a good story.

You know, that's what really inspired us with Blair Witch, you know, and I had a UFO club when I was a kid, and, you know, there was just this kind of whole, this general neurosis, I think, people had, and also a fascination with wanting to believe in that stuff. You know, we remember when we were kids, you know, after you watch that show, you would be sitting there in front of the TV, you'd be like, holy moly, Bigfoot is real.

You see that shit?

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