I think in Oregon we didn't care about missing children.

It's more libertarian state. Those kids were on their own.

Welcome to Your Wrong About. The show where we tell you about all the stuff you were afraid of

as a teenager and why the grown-ups were indeed wrong for telling you to fear it and perhaps also

even about other things. Never trust grown-ups. Number one.

Trust no one. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Having In Post.

I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm a writer for The New Republic and the believer in Buzzfeed.

And today we're talking about Stranger Danger, which has been a mutual obsession of ours

separately. And now it's finally two great tastes that taste great together.

Yeah, and it's something that we've touched on a lot in other episodes. Touched on, ding-ding-ding-ding.

Oh, right. I'm gonna keep doing that all episode. I'm sorry.

We need just an actual bell, but whatever.

So we're sort of tag teaming this episode in that Sarah has been reading up on the origins

of this concept and kind of how we got to the idea of Stranger Danger.

And then I looked into what it looked like when it was playing out in the 80s.

When you asked me how far back I had gone, I said 1874 and you kind of laughed and then realized

I was serious. So before we get into all this, I was going to ask what is the most shocking fact you

found? I think the most shocking thing to me were the estimates of missing and murdered children

that were publicized during the periods that we're looking at because the numbers are just

such that if you stopped and thought about it for 30 seconds, you would be like, wait a minute,

this is weird. Yeah. So in 1985 LA Times article, starting the kind of to turn the wheel toward

debunking, says, various groups of awareness that as many as 1.5 million children disappear

...