I'm Lauren Orton, and this is One Strange Thing, the show where we search the nation's news archives, for stories that can't quite be explained.

Well, it's 2025 strangers, and we think that everyone who listens to this podcast will agree.

We should all be flying by now.

We were promised that, weren't we?

Not planes.

We are familiar with planes, thank you, but a more personal approach.

It is what the movies promised us back in the 1980s and 1990s, skateboards hovering across America's streets, cars speeding along airways full of sky traffic, and jet packs that would blast us through the clouds.

The future might be uncertain, yes, but it was kind of a given that we'd be blasting our way across it,

like shining super-powered turbo birds, the kind that we deserve to be.

And yet, here we sit, very earthbound, and in gridlock

traffic on the freeway. Life is unfair, isn't it? The funny thing is, though, that technology

has advanced, just not in the neat, clean ways that we imagined.

Cars aren't sailing through the skies just yet.

But flying skateboards, they do actually exist.

Still, they're not quite the same idea as was popularized and backed the future, too,

when a young Michael J. Fox swooped across a futuristic 2015 landscape on a Leida's Air skateboard that didn't even need wheels. According to interesting engineering, what we currently

have on offer are electromagnetic and superconductor hoverboards, both of which are limited

by very specific conditions under which they operate, controlled

environments basically.

Per the website, there are, quote, other designs that use jet engines and drone propellers

that look exciting, but nothing has appeared yet that can be mass marketed.

And that is really the point, right?

...