Let's begin in a kind of boring place, or at least just a normal one.

One that you might walk through and never give a second thought.

And plenty of people do.

On any given day, people pass through the lobby of Forte sports medicine and orthopedics

in Carmel, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis.

They're there to treat various sports injuries, things like rupture to kill these heels, to figure

out whether a sore knee or hip needs to be replaced, normal stuff in a normal place.

But on their way to their appointments, they'll pass a display.

The display is full of x-rays, which makes sense, given the nature of the office.

But these x-rays are in a kind of strange condition.

They've been cut into round shapes, got a little hole in the middle.

They almost look like vinyl records.

And not only do they almost look like that.

They almost play like them, too.

I'm Dylan Terrace and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

Today, we are going back in time to the height of the Cold War.

In the Soviet Union, these X-rays didn't just give you a look inside the human body.

They also gave people a glimpse of the outside world, a world that had been hidden from them.

Unless you could get your hands on one of these, a bone record.

That's after this.

To get into this story, we leave Indianapolis in 2023, and we go to Moscow in the 1950s.

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