Childhood should be fun. Don't let bed wetting spoil that.

Dry nights give maximum protection. So kids can go to bed where we free.

Have a dry night sleep. And wake up awesome!

Awesome days start with dry nights. Search dry nights for a free sample.

On these many episodes will be exploring the strangest viral phenomena of the world wide web.

I'm your host, Chalceweber Smith, and this is American History.

Heather Donovan, Josh Morelennard, and Michael Williams disappeared in 1994 while shooting a documentary film project in the Black Hills area near Birketsville.

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 do.

This is one of the most interesting things that filmmakers had been allowed to show this found footage of three college students who disappeared without a trace, who had 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.

That's what really inspired us with Blair Witch. I had a UFO club when I was a kid, and there was this whole general neurosis I think people had, and also a fast nation with wanting to believe in that stuff.

We were kids, after you watched that show, you would be sitting there for the TV, you would be like, holy moly, bigfoot.

You said she'd be bigfoot running, you're like, oh, and the Loch Ness monster is real, and the UFOs are real.

The Blair Witch project would be the first horror film to be invited to screen at the Sundance Film Festival, and would go on to gross $250 million worldwide on a budget of just 60 grand, making it one of the most successful independent films ever made.

But how did their team possibly pull off creating both a film and an entire complicated mystery that was real enough for so many people to believe, including not just this 10-year-old,

but also my parents, and so many other grown-ass people. They manufactured an urban legend. They made an entire mythology, a bloody backstory rich and fragmented enough to feel authentic, though it was entirely made up by film students at the University of Central Florida, director Daniel Mirich in Eduardo Sanchez.

Not only that, but their marketing team also facilitated the spread of the urban legend. The lore was presented in another fake documentary that premiered the same night as the film itself, but on the Sci-Fi channel, complete with interviews with the missing students professors from police officers involved with the missing persons' case, with grieving family members, even an interview with a real pagan, and fabricated news reports and anchors detailing the search, old books and journal entries, all adding up to a kind of

...