And That's Why We Drink - E208 Creepy Coats and a Party Lemon

Episode Date: January 31, 2021

Lindas and tigers and bears... oh my! Episode 208 is brought to you by plain water, Em's bougie childhood and Xiinön's birth story. On the paranormal side of things, Em takes us back to the 80s for a UFO sighting from Japan Airlines flight 1628, a plane that was carrying some very Christine-specific cargo. Then Christine covers the dark and controversial case of the murder of Trang Ho by her Harvard roommate Sinedu Tadesse. We also learned a new phrase and it's, "please don't violate our airspace"... and that's why we drink! Get your tickets to our new virtual live show here! onlocationlive.com/atwwd And submit your scariest experiences to [e-mail] for your chance to be featured! Please consider supporting the companies that support us! Get $75 off your first order at Burrow.com/DRINKCalm is offering 40% off a Calm Premium subscription at CALM.COM/DRINKGo to ZOLA.com/DRINK today and use promo code SAVE50 to get 50% off your save the dates!Go to HelloFresh.com/drink10 and use code drink10 for 10 free meals, including free shipping!Use coupon code DRINK for $10 off your first box at fabfitfun.comDesign like a pro with Canva Pro! Get a FREE 45-day extended trial when you go to Canva.me/atwwd

hello and welcome to and that's why we drink was that helpful no i am christine and today i'm wearing my hat last week emma was wearing their hat from our friend lizzie, which yours says pantsless burrito. But also everybody commented like, who's going to tell Em that that actually means ass and like donkey in Spanish, which I was like, that's a good point because like burro means donkey. I mean, I know what it means.

So you're a pantsless asshole. Okay, that actually fits a lot better. I literally am not wearing pants right now. Just so. Oh, yeah. I mean, I didn't think you were. If you were, I'd be concerned. And I fits a lot better. I literally am not wearing pants right now. Just so. Oh, yeah. I mean, I didn't think you were. If you were, I'd be concerned. And I am a burro.

So I'm not, who's shocked? You're a burrito. What about your hat? So I'm wearing my hat, which is surfer rojo, which in, remember when I, when I read it, I said, oh, it sounds like I'm on my period. Like I'm surfing the red wave. And Lizzie literally put a little clip art of someone surfing on a menstrual pad I like and earlier even though I'm zoom hysterical that you're calling it a clip art by the way because there's no way that was a

clip art okay so before you got on even I were chatting and I was like there's no way like Microsoft put this in their clip art like expansion so I don't know like how either she has and then i was like maybe it's a hidden skill lizzie has of like creating really strange clip art which i feel like that's a really important skill to to it's one of those skills where like you don't know how powerful you are until someone desperately needs you and yeah until until you have a really sudden use for this skill that you've been hiding next time we need to like embroider hats with weird logos, we're going to have to hire her to be like a little designer or something. Which actually knowing us will probably happen sooner than we think. I'm going to have to use her for my escape rooms one day and be like, I'm going to need someone surfing a maxi pad, please.

Thank you. Well, I've got that already. You can just borrow my hat. So I'm very pleased about this. I can just wear this to signal to everyone that I am on the the rag as they say as offensive people say well i mean that is a probably a nice indicator for others just just so they know just like oh you need extra chocolate today step back yeah is what it says to everybody and i'll listen by the way so you will yeah yeah yeah so anyway m hello why do you drink this week a lot of people were like oh

it was so nostalgic for you to say that last week so i'm gonna try to bring us back to our roots and what do you drink and why do you today i drink water which like by the way they're not a sponsor of ours but if you sure would like to be water no no sorry but the cup that i'm drinking out of is a silly pint i like fucking love them so uh what's that oh it's like wiggly yeah you have them i i know you have them because i gave them to you for your bachelorette party so you oh yes i do that's right yeah they're definitely not in my cabinet yet uh no they're the if you don't know silly s-i-l-i by the way but they're um they're the silicone cups so if you drop them they don't break and all that and i don't think you ever gave me those for my bachelorette party.

Because we had a solo. I'm like, I definitely would not have. They were the pink ones. They were the pink ones. They were definitely in your old cupboard. No, no. I have little plastic ones that say. No, no.

They have plastic ones that say bridal or something about bridal party. And then I'm the bride. But they're plastic. You went cheap. Cheapo. Don't buy yourself any silly pints then, because I'm on my way with a purchase for you. Yeah, I'm like, I've never even held one of those.

I don't, I think I would remember. Oh no, well, they also make wine glass ones. So like, it's, so like if you drop them, they don't shower. It's literally just silicone. So it's all wiggly waggly, but. I literally just went into a recesses of my brain to look at the photos from that bachelor party. I was like, solo cup, solo cup. Yeah, no, I solo cup yeah no i don't think okay don't get yourself on them because

it'll be a future president for me but you can also get like your own designs on them so this one's from fredericksburg oh that's very cute yeah so anyway they also have glow in the dark ones which i have like three of them in my cupboard of course you do they really glow you probably bought them for me and then kept them is what I'm imagining happened. That could be it. But anyway, I'm drinking water out of a silly pint. And why do I drink? Well, because I texted you a few things last night in the middle of. Let me pretend like you didn't just say that because I want to actually preface. I didn't know if this was going to be part of this segment.

But it could be. It could be. Everybody just stop listening. And now listen again. Hey, I've been wondering, do you have an idea for a creepy coat? Yeah. Creepy coat or creepy coat?

Creepy coat. You know, creepy coat. Yeah. I do know. Definitely. You do know. I texted Chrissy in the middle of the night and I was like,

next time we're speaking, let me know all about, ask me about. 4.23 a.m. my time. Ask me on the show tomorrow about my idea for a capital C creepy capital C coat. You know what? And I said, okay. Also before that, I was going to say the reason why I drink is the other thing I texted you,

which is I'm 100% sure that I'm in love with Tiana Paris. Okay. Because that actually came in a weird time because I have a new love too, that I'm like actually really, really, really sweating over who yes how did you know well you tell yours first I don't want to I don't want to okay well if anyone's watching WandaVision the second I laid eyes on Tiana Paris I was like uh-oh I'm in trouble especially the second I laid eyes I went oh my gosh oh I sent I sent Christine a plethora of photos of Tiana Paris last night, too. Wow.

She is unmatched. And also, the wild part is I started WandaVision 90% to stare at Lizzie Olsen the whole time. And now I've got two people to look at. Oh, my goodness. But no, I'm in love with her. If you don't know yet she's uh the new captain marvel which is ironic because i just broke up with brie larson in my mind and now i'm in love with the new captain marvel so you just have a thing for the cape neither of them have capes that's the craziest

part i like i just make up bullshit about i actually kind of read that as like a like the trope like oh the cape aka super you have a thing for the superheroes the superheroes yeah well you do but uh yeah so i guess out with the old and with the new sorry miss brie but tiana paris is my new love this picture she can't be stopped i think we finally are just like smitten with one of the same people and i don't even know who she is she could punch me in the face and i'd say thank you can i have some more um sorry who who are you in love with okay this is like okay tell me i'm gonna tell you is it me oh my god i can see yes surprise blaze is packing up his belongings as we speak i'll get my plane ticket ready finally we can we can announce it

uh no natalie morale natalie morales I don't know that. Who is she? My God. What's she on or in? So I only know her from, so she might recognize her. Oh, I kind of recognize her. She was in, um, God, it's a Netflix show that I watched a while ago. And then I watched it again because I was like smitten with her. Dude.

She's, girl. I'm usually attracted to men, but I was watching smitten with her dude she's I girl I'm usually attracted to men but I was watching this and going like she's she's got a Rosario Dawson vibe to her or like uh yes yes or uh yeah yeah yep I mean she's beautiful it's been a long time since I've been like really really actually uh aggressively smitten with somebody I was like looking at her Instagram like oh my god it's probably it's a problem I had to like stop looking at her Instagram because I was like this is really ridiculous like you're married um and it's really convenient that boys just started actually listening to the podcast for the first time in three years so this is gonna be he sensed it his

spidey senses were like what is going on but I'm pretty sure I already told him this because I couldn't stop talking about it but man I'm i'm i it's i have a i have a man crush right now which like it's a toxic one because like he's like personality wise i don't know if i vibe with it but we've been watching a lot of below deck and there's a chef on there named adam who's just a cutie pie he's just a cutie and uh but so we've been watching a lot of blow deck and i out loud said like i get it he's like so handsome and beautiful and then i was like why did i say that but then i was like why did i say that but then i was like you know what this is the year of not giving a fuck about who you're

attracted to it's all a specter man it's all a spectrum which is ironic because tiana paris's version of captain marvel later becomes spectrum ironic it's all a spectrum it's all a spectrum uh okay okay let me show you another picture. Please do. Oh, yeah, she's a cutie pie. Okay, I get it. That picture did it more for me than the other one. Oh, my God. It's really bad. So I need to stop.

Is she why you drink? Because you can't hold her at night? Is that why? Well, okay. So then Warner Brothers reached out on email and was like, oh, we're going to send you this fun box of stuff for an upcoming movie starring her. And I was like, ah! so i did a little unboxing video and it has um i was about to say it has jude law oh my god christine uh it has denzel washington and some other um fun

people uh rami malik but yeah so she's in it so i've just so like re-enter she re-entered my brain is i guess what i'm saying yesterday it's almost like now is the moment. The universe held off for a while. Now wants you to re-love her. To talk about it on air. Great. So anyway, that wasn't even why I drink. But when you reminded me of the photos you sent me last night, I was like, oh, yeah, I'm also in love.

So that's a problem. Anyway, well, I'm happy for you. Yeah, good for us and our partners who are going to be pissed. Well, to answer your question about why I drink, beyond Miss Paris slash future Miss Schultz, the creepy coat. So I have for a long time, I'll just say this real quick because I want to ask why you drink also. But I for a long time have been secretly in love with like patches, like jacket patches. Oh, yeah. Love patches. a long time have been secretly in love with like patches like jacket oh yeah love patches and i've just never had like i don't i still don't have like a jacket that's like worthy of like patching

up and stuff and i was always like i don't know like maybe i'm like too old for that now or like maybe that's not like my vibe or maybe i would look weird wearing that but i've just got says the person wearing literal fucking fish on their feet. Says, oh, that might be too weird for me. It might be too weird for me because at least people expect fish on my feet. People don't expect me to like do something. They'd be like, are you having a quarter life crisis or something? Yeah.

Yeah. It might look like I'm like, like with fish flops, there's guaranteed zero real style behind it. But like with a jacket with patches it's like oh were you trying are you trying right i guess yeah and i don't and i'm kind of scared of that but i've just seen too many patches i like now and they all happen to be like paranormal themed yes and so i was like fuck it i'm just gonna when i find the right coat that will be the universe telling me it's my moment and i'm just gonna get all the fucking patches and i'm gonna call my creepy coat and that's and yes so now i'm i'm drinking because i'm i'm excited

i'm manifesting this creepy coat coming my way so oh my gosh wait that's so exciting i have a bunch of patches too and i've i have denim jackets but i've never like committed to which jacket to put them on so i have a big pile of them i have and i have a mothman i have a big foot um they're all like paranormal for some reason so we can both have creepy coats also my big thing is like i have such a struggle with like if i find the right coat it's like oh i already found the right coat without patches on it and i like how it looks like now am i gonna ruin it by putting patches all over it so then i like get in my own head of like like should i damage something that already looks great or potentially damage it or do i find something kind of gross and amp it up like i

don't know how it's like i feel like it's a reflection because i'm the same way and i feel like it's a reflection of me with stickers when i was little because i was just so scared to like put them on like i was obsessed with stickers but then i was like well i don't want to commit to putting them on something and then never and so then i just had a fucking box of stickers that's like okay now i just have these stickers that i never got to use and you know well because there's always like that one popular girl who fucking knew interior design by eight and like knew how to like put the stickers on the journal so it all looked beautiful but then when I would put stickers on it would just look like a fucking mess and they would get like hair stuck to them and I was like

now I'm that girl again who I'm always that weird German girl covered in hair well that's that's my big fear when it comes to like, like I have the sticker phobia with patches. I'm like, what if I don't know how to place these? Like, yeah, totally. And then you're committing and Geminis don't like that feeling of committing. And I also not only do I fuck up the jacket, I fuck up the patches. Like I have to rebuy them and the jacket. I need to like special. I need to collect a bunch and then give them to someone who knows what they're fucking doing and just say like give it to me when it's done okay creepy coat

status creepy coat anyway what are you drinking and why do you drink well i mean i'm drinking water also um out of my favorite cup which like blaze always makes fun of me but it's this random cup your car cup yes my car cup how do you know about my car cup? Because you don't shut up about it, Christine. Blaze always makes fun of me. So I had this cup. I bought my car from Carvana, which is just like a website where you don't have to talk to humans to buy a car. So that's where I bought my car like a few years ago.

Very much a used car, but I was very excited and proud. It was my first car I ever bought. And with the car, I love free shit. With the car, they gave me this like water cup or this like tumbler I don't know what it's called plastic tumbler and it just says Carvana um and I just developed like this weird like I would only drink water out of it and if I was using this cup I would drink like all the water and I'm very bad at drinking like I used to go days without ever drinking water or like weeks without drinking water. And so finally I had this cup and then one day I dropped it in the driveway and it like splintered into a million pieces. And I was devastated.

And Blaze was like, look here on Amazon, it's the exact same cup. And I was like, no, it isn't. That's not a Carvana cup. And so I went on the Carvana like customer service site and said like, where can I buy a cup? And they were like, here's an actual link to buy the cup because I guess you can just instead of buying a car just buy a cup with the brand I like how they were someone at customer service that day was like holy shit this person wants a fucking this is the first person to ever ask us for our yeah like like tech tech office put up a link to buy this cup I guess because one person wants it and so I ordered it

and it's like my prized possession i'm a huge weirdo but i love my cup my car cup um leave it to christine to get weirdly attached to something that makes no sense and also the only reason i know about it is because i was with you like the day after it shattered and you were like in a deep depression about it and i was like what is your fucking deal and i looked like spongebob when he was out of the water because I was like and you were like what's wrong and Blaze was like Christine won't drink water out of any I'm like a child like she needs her sippy cup or else she won't drink her water the Carvana cup is your fishbowl and Sandy Cheeks is planetarium or terrarium or whatever it is yes it is and anyway so I'm drinking water out of my cup thank you for asking

and I'm drinking water we're both so boring this week but I'm drinking water out of my cup thank you for asking and i'm drinking water we're both so boring this week but i'm drinking water because i'm in a place with winter for the first time in like six years or five years i don't know are you feeling dry yes and i'm like crusty sorry that's gross but my skin is always very dry because i a have dry skin and b never drink water and so i'm trying to force myself to actually drink water because like wine definitely does the opposite for your water intake. I can gather that. Yeah.

So I'm in a winter spot. It's very cold. 530 in the morning. Gio has to go pee. It is like 17 degrees out and it's not a fun time. But it's kind of cool for a minute. I'm sure by next month, they'll be like, get me out of here. Well, now it's cute when it snows. i'm sure by next month they'll be like get me out of here well we're now it's cute when it snows i'm like oh we're enjoying our winter right now

but i have this like weird la winter where it's like it hits 40 or 50 at night for five minutes and then it goes back to like the 60s or 70s but like um i have this weird issue where after so many years of living in la, once it gets cold, I know that our winter is so short. And not only is it so short, but it instantly goes to fucking blazing hot. That like, even though I'm trying to appreciate it, I have like this weird paranoia of like, oh my God, is tomorrow the day it's fucking hot? Is tomorrow the day it's fucking hot?

So I can't, so I can't just relax and chill out enjoy the yeah our very first uh when we first moved to la and we were here through the boston university program we had like an orientation where basically one of the professors taught us about la and one of the only takeaways i have from that is when they said once it hits february that's the rainy season where it rains once and people freak out and then it gets cold and then like a month later it's the hottest it'll ever be all over again for another 11 months and yeah truly it's like a place of extremes I was like oh my gosh that sounds terrible but there's no way that they mean that there's no way there's no way and then the first time we were there we were were here in January, February.

By like March 1st, it feels like you're in hell again. And so I was like, fuck. So now every time it gets cold, I'm just waiting for the day that I'm miserable. I enjoy sweater weather. Yes. Sweater weather. Sweater weather. And I do like my layers and my comfy clothes.

So I am enjoying that, especially because I don't need to leave the house. So I don't need to look presentable. So I just wear fuzzy clothes all the time um so I guess I'm drinking for cold but that's all it's not very interesting so sorry I talked about it for 10 minutes um anyway that's all I've got I'm drinking I'm drinking with you though and that like I wish I got to experience the cold for longer than five seconds. It's like I'm not I don't hate it yet. I think I'll hate it when it's so gloomy that like I think I hated it more when I worked outside of home and had to drive into work at like 6am every day back in the day or go to school

that I did not like when I'm at home. It's easier because you don't have to like leave the house. You can just stay cozy. That's true. So I don't know. Listen, I will always find a reason to complain as you all know. So here we are complaining. Listen, we'll always find a reason to complain, as you all know. So here we are, complaining. Welcome. We have a show literally called And That's Why We Drink. And why? Don't ask, because you're going to get a lot of answers.

More answers than you wanted. So my story this week, by the way, I hope you're excited because it's a UFO tale. I'm always excited. And now I'm even're excited because it's a UFO tale. I'm always excited. And now I'm even more excited. I was going to say I'm excited, but then you said UFO and my pitch just like automatically increased. I'm very excited. You went up an octave.

I love it. Wait, okay. Sorry. Before we do this, I know there was one thing we had to mention, which is that we were on Let's Not Meet. We did share stories on Let's Not Meet and we never mentioned it. And I was just, I wanted to throw that out there as part of the intro no we were definitely part of let's not meet and uh andrew was very kind to us and had us on actually the the reason we even got on was because there was an exchange on twitter

again yeah which uh is just proof that like if you wanted ask for it and see what happens well it's funny because somebody wrote i want you guys to be on let's not meet and then literally two hours later was like just kidding i just found the episode where christ to be on Let's Not Meet. And then literally two hours later, it was like, just kidding. I just found the episode where Christine is on Let's Not Meet. But then we were like, well, we'll do it again. Yeah, or someone said something like, oh, no, Christine's been on there. We should get Em. And then within seconds, I was like, OK. And then Andrew DM'd us.

So I mean, it worked out really well. So technology makes it easy nowadays to do these fun crossovers. So anyway, thank you, Andrew. That was a blast. And it was also the week that My Favorite Murder mentioned Let's Not Me on their podcast, which obviously was huge. So I was like, shit, man, he's blowing up. So check them out.

It's a great show. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I knew we were going to forget. No, no, that's totally fine. So my story today is a UFO story, and it is the japan airlines flight 1628 um so this is in uh 1986 and this is uh this took place november 17th and basically there was a japanese boeing 747 and it was a cargo aircraft that was en route from Paris to Narita International Airport. It was near Tokyo, and it was the cargo was carrying was a bunch of wine. Oh, God. Oh, my God. You don't prepare me for that. And also a stowaway named Christine. That's all the wine disappeared and they think it was a ufo christine who was negative five

all of a sudden was hammered that was good math though thank you look i'm really good with the negatives so yes it was the wine specifically was called beaujolais it's from france boujolais yeah that's one of my favorites selena and i always drink that when we can save up the money because it's like 15 or 20 bucks. So it's pricey. In my world, it's pricey because I drink a whole bottle of it at once. But it's like, yeah, 20 bucks.

But it's good. Well, there you go. So it was literally carrying Beaujolais? Beaujolais? Beaujolais, yeah. That's at least how Selene and I say it. I don't know if that's actually correct. I like how it sounds a little bougie.

It does. It's almost like it feels like you're i drank it in florida too so it was very um non-bougie experience drinking it uh buying it at like a mini mart but it's it's good it's good stuff well fun fact japan is the number one export for boujolais and actually in 2019 i think around 5 million bottles were exported from japan so that's about 50 of the total exported volume too so holy shit they're into that boujolais french wine i guess japan is into it so uh this is an excerpt by the way i don't know if i want to i'm gonna say it i didn't want to give anything away so i just just wanted to double check. But in 1995, so years, years later, there was an excerpt by a MUFON member named Jay Harper. He wrote an article called Alaska UFO Mothership Revisited.

And this is an excerpt from it saying, The captain boarded the plane before dawn in Iceland with two other members of the flight crew. So there was a co-pilot and a flight engineer. And the takeoff weight from Iceland was at its max. So there was nothing else that the plane could carry. I think it was like almost 800,000 pounds or something. Oh, boy. And they're in the air for about four hours.

And that's where the story kind of takes place. So on the flight's leg to Anchorage at 511 at night over eastern Alaska, the crew sees two UFOs on their left. All three members see the UFOs following them. So the co-pilot, the flight engineer, and Captain Tarouchi, Tarouchi? Tarouchi? Who, by the way, he's like an ex-fighter pilot with like thousands and thousands of hours of flight experience. So if he says he's seeing a UFO,

I'm kind of inclined to believe him. Yeah, it's not his first time in the skies. He's not like, what's that? Not his first rodeo. That makes it more somehow believable in a way. This is a quote from Captain Tarachi of the experience. They were flying parallel and then suddenly approached very close. The things were flying as if there was no such thing as gravity.

It sped up, then stopped, then flew at our speed in our direction so that to us it appeared to be standing still. So it was just staying perfectly. Oh, that's creepy. Yeah. Like a helicopter. Yeah. The next instant it changed course. In other words, the flying object had overcome gravity.

So it's just defying physics left and right. Keeping in tune with them. Okay, I'm not going to say that. It's not pretty. Oh, Elphaba. it down okay i'm not gonna it's not pretty oh elphaba so a year not even a year later only two months later after the incident happened in november 86 january 87 the new york times was writing about it and tarouchi said that two of the lights were very small to me it sounds big but i guess if you're a captain in an airplane this is small that the two of the lights were really small they were no larger than eight feet wide but the third light appeared to be on

an aircraft and really big okay yeah eight feet does sound big but i guess yeah you're right maybe not it sounds big when i'm thinking of like standing next to it but not looking out a window when it's taller than you so he also said the lights that he saw were yellow, amber, and green, but they were not red because, not because, but he would have remembered if they were red because red is the international color for an aircraft beacon. And so he would have noticed if it was red, but he remembers it being yellow, amber, and green. Okay. The co-pilot named Takanori Tamafuji, very fun name, compared the lights to like christmas lights but with a salmon color yeah you know that sounds like florida like salmon colored christmas lights yeah flamingo lights um and he said i remember red or orange and white landing light and weak green blinking apparently

the co-pilot also said that he remembers the lights fading kind of like um you know how if you have these days lights have different settings and you can do like the pulsing the slow pulse he remembers lights doing that he says that they remember he remembers them becoming stronger and then weaker and stronger and then weaker which is different from strobe lights which move really fast so okay that was how he remembers it of like they weren't strobe lights they were really like undulating is the word he used undulating yeah uh the lights were moving in unison as if they were two aircrafts with quote very good formation so like super synchronized which is just the worst just the it's somehow i don't know why but that makes it so much creepier

any anything where two items are able to synchronize freaks me out because i'm like you shouldn't be that in tune like what about our friendship lamps that's what i bought us precious but also creepy so like very creepy imagine if you're from the 1100s and that happened that'd be creepy you know well i think a lot of things would be. I think my surfing on a menstrual pad would be creepy if you were from the 1100s. This podcast, they'd be like, what? We'd be already on a stake somewhere. Don't worry. But I'm going to switch your.

I figured out you could change the color coding of these friendship lamps. I'm going to turn to your salmon tonight and see what happens. Oh, I love that. If you call Mufon your Mufon friends. Have you been seeing me change it a lot or no no because i it said you need to update it by the way all you all i just logged into our like friendship lamp i finally set it up and it was like linda is part of your family and i went linda and m was like yeah i bought her a friendship lamp and synced it to mine so now she's in our

like family our group chat via friendship lamp which is hysterical so apparently you can get different lights that all sync up to like different things so you can have different relationships with different lamps but i found out that because when you got us friendship lamps you got them as a set and so they have a different factory setting yeah that's my favorite thing is that i bought us a set and then emma was like here mom you can have your own well i didn't know that there was a factory setting where like ours were the only ones linked to each other so i thought like oh you got me one that's a great idea i'll save that for my mom and so for christmas i got her lamp thinking that her and i could have our own lamp relationship you and i could have our own lamp

relationship share our relationship with other people it's apparently it's like a group chat and so now anytime that christine or i do mean something for each other, my mom's going to see her light glow. Which is actually how it should be. Every time we think of each other, she's like, yep, I'm important. So I think that's actually pretty spot on. I'm inserting myself into the narrative. But yeah, so sorry about that. Remember that time she wanted to fly to LA to just be a guest on the podcast and we were like two weeks in and you were like wait what this woman really I gotta give her credit uh in terms of confidence uh

also like tell me this is not the bougiest thing you've ever heard in your life she I think of for those of you who are new welcome but my mother is like kind of a combination of like Kris Jenner and Moira Rose and so you'll meet oh that's a great oh and uh lucille blue and lucille great trio it's like if all three of them just had like the most alien child the most interesting characteristics all put together but um so i'm not even 29 yet my mother's already planning my 30th birthday and uh because we made a deal a long time ago she would plan my 30th birthday and uh because we made a deal a long time ago she would plan my 30th and I would plan her 60th and they happen to happen in the same year which happens to be 2022 which is our lucky number so it's like a big deal to only us but she

literally has been texting me it's so interesting that like I must have just changed a lot since the last time I lived under her roof and she knew everything about me. Because the things that she's sending me are like things that are just like not my cup of tea. Like what? Like Christine, she literally said like, so I'm looking at this one company and you can rent a tiger. Do you want a tiger at your birthday party? What? Is that what you are into? Like, what do you mean?

No, but I think I used to like because I lived under her roof I just like didn't know any better and like I just thought that was a normal ask and like now I'm just like sorry that was a normal ask under your roof can I rent a tiger I think it was what is going on am I like losing it I think I was just used to like like you know how you leave your home when you get older and then you're like oh that wasn't normal i think i yeah i mean i thought i knew that but i guess i don't actually know it because you seem to know it on a different level i think i think my mom was just always like i mean i never got anything like a fucking tiger for a birthday but i think like her i think it's we kind of have that same personality trait of like, look at the most fucking ridiculous

things possible and like, and then narrow it down once you figure out like where their interests lie. And so I think she was really starting fucking broad with like, do you want a tiger? I love that you were like, my mom never actually gave me a tiger. And I'm like, she's literally offering to get you a tiger right now. I know. But before people think uh it was like super silver spoons and like i just am used to zoos at my house i just like i'm used to her

asking really wild lavish okay i have a question this is my level of like of like bougie whateverness yeah did you ever get a bouncy castle rented for you no but, but I do think I was, I think if I asked, maybe it would have been on the table. But I, you know what's really fucking bougie? And to be fair, like, we have grown out of this lifestyle. I'm not this type of person.

But I remember, like, my mom really wanted to throw me, like, a huge birthday party when I was a little kid. I remember her saying something about, like, wanting to, like, have a clown at a birthday party. And like, I feel like she like made a joke about pony rides. I don't remember. But I had ponies. I'm kind of scared there might have been a pony ride situation. I don't know. That was my next question. I was like ponies are above bouncy house in my book. I certainly never got a bouncy house. The sad thing is I don't even remember it. I was so young. Like I like I don't think memory had started traumatized i mean i don't

know i was probably like yo this isn't a fucking tiger i don't even want it so yeah where's my tiger um but but also my so my mom's was asking like all these wild questions were like i literally i want a superhero party like i had last year or like I want to like go to an escape room like a slumber party a slumber party I literally had all I wanted for my 20th birthday was to have a sleepover with my friends on seven dollar Walmart mattresses that's what I wanted and my mother's out here like do you want a tiger and I'm like I respect the fact that you're really trying to gauge my interest like to the fullest extent but like we can we can really rein it in here but i can

see the connection though i feel like you're very extra like i feel like you would do that for your child someday like you would i mean not a tiger because we all know now that's very inhumane but oh yeah uh i think uh you would definitely like go all out and rent like the amityville house or some shit i feel like you would for sure well so i think the reason the tiger thing happened because like yes my mother is very bougie and i by the way like want to like take the moment to say like i'm very aware of the privilege that's there and that like i'm very lucky that i grew up with a mom who could provide me with truly whatever i wanted tigers if i fucking wanted them i think my mom's also very lucky that she got a kid who doesn't want any of that shit.

I was gonna say, actually, that's an interesting combo. Yeah. But at the same time, I do think I have to give her credit in that like that's how my wanting to give people really wild presents came about.

Yeah, no, I see the connection. Yeah. And the only, the reason that I think she brought the tigers is because for my 28th birthday, when I was saying that I won my superhero party, I told her, by the way, do you know, there's a company out there where like,

you can like rent puppies. Oh, yes, I remember this. And you can like, apparently, there's like a handler comes with you. And like, it's basically for your birthday, you get like, five hours of a basket of puppies, and someone comes with them to like, clean up the pee and poo and all that, but basically get to to cuddle puppies and then they go somewhere else afterwards. And I was like, that sounds like a fantastic business plan. Like why haven't we just like really as a generation looked into that more? Oh, Nickelodeon used to have puppy days and they would bring puppies to like, we had like full days. Colleges have like, colleges during exam week have puppy days.

Exactly. I think our generation hardcore leaned into puppy days. i think the company also had like uh they would bring paperwork like if you fell in love with one and you went you can adopt them yeah adopt or foster i think it's a great thing and so my mom heard like animal rentals and then really went over the fucking top but so uh i i was like yo i just wanted like a little golden retriever puppy to just like sit on me for a couple hours. That was it. So anyway, I'm probably giving people a really bad look at like my upbringing. No, we both had weird upbringings. I mean, we had weird upbringings in different ways.

So I think people are used to it. And we all know Linda. We're not surprised by Linda's behavior at this point. I'm telling you, Moira Rose, Kris Jenner, Lucille Bluth. They're just like, oh, you want a tiger? Okay. But like, again, also, like, thank God that's not my cup of tea. I just wanted a fucking puppy.

And if it wasn't available, I understood. It was probably with like a much smarter college student who needed it. Smarter college student? During exam week. But no, so anyway, I don't know how we got on that topic. I don't either. I think you said, do you want to know something bougie hmm so i guess so oh because we were talking about the lamps what lamps oh the friendship lamps because i said linda showed up

and she inserted herself remember when she wanted to fly to la to be on the show yes that was i mean that was like just a very so i said i was gonna turn your friendship lamp into salmon color so you could call mufon that's all it was a very it was a very small uh taste that she wanted to insert herself last week everyone got a bear a bear update this week they get a linda update that's just how it goes here bears and tigers so now we all lions and tigers and bears oh my linda's hold on linda's and tigers and bears. Oh, my. Linda's. Hold on. Linda's and tigers and bears. Bear and Linda would put on a bonanza. My mother, when I was like, do I get a bridal shower?

She's like, do you expect me to pay for something like that? So like that is not how my mother behaves. But my father would definitely be on board with like a pretty bonkers situation. He would probably make it a little bit off. Like everything would be like off brand or like something from Germany. That's like, instead of an iPhone or an iPod when I was little, he got me an eye river.

So like, instead of, instead of Kirkland blueberries, you will, instead of like just real, like fresh blueberries, you got Kirkland. Yes,

exactly. Yeah. So I think, I think Linda would need to like be the head honcho and like monitor well uh just for those listening if you are interested in all of the wild adventures of linda be prepared for the next year and a half because my 30th birthday is not even around the corner and i have to deal with requests like that coming in and rejecting them at full stops so amped i'm gonna text her separately be like hit me up because i

am ready to plan christine will be like 10 tigers make them no i watch tiger king man i'm i don't even eat meat um but yeah no my mom texted me the other day said did you know you're turning 30 this year and i was like yeah she's like that's old and i was like screw you lady so don't worry my experience is worse than yours i don't get any i'll give you uh updates about the weird things my mom requests and thank you so that's where well that's where we'll end up and also you will be involved at some point so just be ready yes oh my gosh good luck editing that down to sorry everybody sorry to you well this is just sorry to you editing it no it's fine we'll leave it in okay too late uh oh yeah lights and ufos do you

remember that yes i do so the lights were moving in unison as if oh because we were talking about synchronized and the lamps yeah yeah creepy creepy creepy coat uh he okay so the captain also compared the clarity of the lights to seeing head-on traffic but he couldn't see the total shape so he was like this wasn't something i'd like blinked and it went away like this was something that was in my fucking face he said that he even dimmed his own lights in the cockpit to make sure that he wasn't seeing a reflection from something else um but the objects followed him for 400 miles oh dear uh he said that he tried to get a picture of the lights and And this, by the way, speaking of our parents, sounds like them trying to take a picture.

This is a quote from him. I thought perhaps it was one of those things called a UFO and taking a photo might help to identify the object later. The area in which the plane was flying was unchanged, but the lights were still moving strangely. The lens kept adjusting and could never get a real focus. I changed autofocus to manual focus and pressed the shutter, but this time the shutter would not close. Then our aircraft began to vibrate and I gave up. He's like, there are priorities here.

The plane is vibrating. Oh, God. So six minutes later, the captain reported this to FAA air controllers in Anchorage, and the controllers could only see the captain's plane. They were like we don't know what it is that's next to you we can't see it and so the UFO soon after though appeared on the FAA Air Force and cockpit radars radars sorry but it only showed up for a short while but they were able to see it just show up on do you wonder if if the if the UFOs like heard like

oh we can't see anything and then then they were like, here we are. That's the Christine mind thinking there of they're always listening. They're always listening. Yes, that's my very paranoid brain of do you think they are playing with all of us? I don't know. That's what it sounds like. It does sound like it was like, oh, you want to see us? Intentional.

Okay, here we are. It seems like they have control over whether they're able to be spotted on radar or not which is why would they turn it on that's an interesting note but hold on to that because that's okay i'm holding on tight so uh the captain also told the ufo told uh faa that the ufo was staying with him and the controllers uh told him to take action if necessary which i don't know what you're gonna do with a plane full of wine and just like take action and necessary, which I don't know what you're going to do with a plane full of wine and just like take action. And it's vibrating. You're like, this is going to be real messy.

So Captain Sorocchi, he decreased the plane's altitude by 31,000 feet, but the lights followed him perfectly all the way down. That's not good for me. I'm not into that. Captain Sorocchi then heard random vhf or very

high frequency radio static and he had never heard that before in his entire airline career um he described them this was his quote of how the static sounded he said it's some kind of jamming it was just a weird noise like zaza andah, zah. And I was like, okay, bear. Okay, bear. I almost said, okay, dad. That sounds like my eye river malfunctioning. The first day I got it. I couldn't take a picture with it, and it sounded like zah, zah.

It's not supposed to. It's not a camera, dad. He then turned the, this was what I think is pretty genius. So then the captain decided that he was going to turn the plane around in a full circle to see if the lights would follow him or if he would pass it or if it would if he would if he would lose if he would lose it from the window like when he's looking out if he's turning and it's following him that's kind of creepy and it did follow him no um air traffic control couldn't see anything when the plane originally turned around, but within five minutes, they were able to see UFOs side by side with each other next to the plane following it for 10 minutes. Ew, this is horrible, Em.

I'm scared. The lights kept, and then all of a sudden they heard, A-con. Slim shape. Convict. Oh, my God. And then, oh, the beautiful, no wonder there were pulsating lights it was like my whole high school homecoming dance floor it was just it was just the club on a happy hour get over it in florida some salmon lights the salmon like we were just in key west get over it

sexy key west dance club yeah uh so the lights uh the club, they kept in speed as the jet moved again. And basically when the jet was about 80 miles north of Anchorage, all of a sudden the lights vanished. Oh, I wonder why. I also wonder why. This is a very long quote, but this is I mean, I just literally told you the whole story, but this quote is the exact report from Captain Tarachi, which I feel like should be heard. There's also some little details in here. So this is the whole experience according to Captain Tarachi.

The distance from the lights was far enough from us and we felt no immediate danger. I thought perhaps it was a UFO and the lights were still moving strangely. danger i thought perhaps it was a ufo and the lights were still moving strangely most unexpectedly two spaceships appeared directly in front of the plane shooting off lights the spaceships which he called it a spaceship the spaceships fired jets to quote kill the inertia of their high speed maneuver after this the ships appeared as if they were stopped in one place in front of us and at the time one ship was above the other then three to seven seconds later okay a fire like from jet engines stopped and became a small circle of lights as they began to fly level at the same speed as we were so it's almost like it shot itself off then it halted then it had these little lights and it was defying gravity the whole time i just feel like they're always showing off these spaceships they really are flashy with it aren't

they right i mean it's just trying to fly in and land uh next to my apartment for my 30th birthday obviously linda called the ufo rental company oh my mom called uh the international space station and faa and said like look we need a crash landing on this 30th you i need a real fucking light show you hear me oh my god so uh where am i so from the middle of the body of the ship uh from the middle of the body uh a ship sparked an occasional stream of lights like a charcoal fire from right to left from left to right its shape was square flying 500 feet to a thousand feet in front of us its size was about the same size and the body of a dc8 jet with numerous exhaust pipes so this thing wasn't tiny like this was like a big fucking jet right right

um the inside cockpit shined brightly and i felt the warmth of the u UFO's thrusters on my face. Whoa, okay. So like from your own fucking plane, you can feel the heat. It is impossible for any man-made machine to make a sudden appearance in front of a jumbo jet that's flying 910 kilometers per hour and to move along in a formation paralleling our aircraft. But we did not feel threatened or in danger.

Honestly, we were simply astounded. I have no idea why they came so close to us. There was a pale white flat light in the direction where the ships flew away. So they almost like left the trail. Oh my god. I'm nervous about this wine being skunked in the downstairs compartment. Now that it's all been heated up by the thrusters. I'll take it.

If it's not suitable for sale, I'll take it. But it seems like it might get skunked. You'll test it all. Yeah, I'll try it. Right. I'll be controlled. If it's not suitable for sale, I'll take it. But it seems like it might get skunked. You'll test it all. Yeah, I'll try it. Right. I'll be controlled. Don't worry. Just drop all the barrels.

Just have them hit. Tell Linda to reroute the UFO this way. Bring the barrels to Kentucky. Christine's going to handle it. I'm ready. So then after those little spaceships vanished, the crew noticed a much larger disc-shaped craft with a pale ring of light now tailing them matching their speed and their distance and their altitude so it's

gotten worse now great so uh the anchorage uh air traffic center couldn't see they couldn't see it so they set their radar scope to 25 nautical miles they broadened their range and all of a sudden they could see it this was a quote from the anchorage center saying then there was on the screen a large green round object had appeared seven or eight miles away we arrived at the sky above the eelson air force base in fairbanks and it was a clear night we were just above the bright city lights and we checked the pale white light behind us. There was a silhouette of a gigantic spaceship and we got away quickly. Oh my gosh.

That is freaky deaky. Basically, as they were coming into this town, Fairbanks, and the lights from the city were kind of getting closer and closer. It was showing more and more of this UFO behind them. It was like the glow was helping them see what the hell was following them and it was this massive fucking ufo to a point where uh captain tarachi even called it the mothership oh i like how earlier he was like it might have been one of those things they call ufo and now he's like it's the mothership like where did he get this lingo all of a sudden he went speaking of mothership now linda is walking herself off of the bridge of the UFO. She's like, mothership?

Who called for me? The Linda ship? Excuse me. So it's so big that Captain Taraji is even saying that it was, quote, twice the size of an aircraft carrier. And just for context. Jesus, that's huge. For context, an aircraft carrier and just for um context jesus that's huge for a context an aircraft carrier holds 64 aircrafts holy crap and it said it was twice the size of an aircraft

carrier so it must have just completely blanketed the sky in my opinion yeah and i and i hate that it's like so care of precision controlled yeah you know what i mean like it's so massive but it can just like to the exact also something Also something that massive, like halting itself in space like that, like going from super fast to just not moving. Like, yeah, it just like doesn't abide by gravity. No, no, that's not how this works. Tarachi actually later made a drawing of it. And the official documents say that it's walnut shaped. if you look at it it literally is the shape of a fucking lemon it's literally like it's got these big bulges oh my baby it's this big bulges above and below with a wide brim and like two little knots i mean it's literally

a fucking lemon what if that literally was what if lemon that was lemon's entrance onto this planet came to earth yeah and he was like oh's entrance onto this planet. Came to Earth, yeah. And he was like, oh, nothing here is this big. I need to shrink up. And he went too far. He like... He mummified. Yeah, exactly.

He ant-manned himself. And then he like rolled under a bed. It's like... It's like... Wait a minute. On Ancient Aliens when they're like, is this shrunken head? The shrunken head of an alien? It's like, no, but maybe if it's lemon.

Well, anyway, it's literally lemon bringing Linda to Earth, I think. It was following the line. I don't understand what's confusing about any of this. It all makes sense all of a sudden. It really is. It was literally a big ass lemon following all the wine. Just trying to get a hold of an entire plane. Are you actually the captain of this ship?

I'm confused. I was waiting for you to finally put the pieces together yes i'm like wait come back so according to the flight engineer this ufo was absolutely quote absolutely different to the first ones uh which had the clusters of undulating lights so the radar at the airport nearby failed to even register this massive object. Probably it was like too big to even, they probably thought that was just like the default sky. The clouds, yeah, like something massive. The default sky. You know what I mean. So FAA investigators actually deemed the crew, basically their radars weren't picking it up. And this was when FAA decided that they were actually going to like do an investigation

because air traffic control was even offering military intervention. The captain actually said, no, I don't want the military involved because he had heard of this other incident called the Mantell incident, which we should cover at some point, where apparently there was a pilot that was pursuing a UFOfo and taking action and he died oh shit oh i don't know any more than that but i could look into that but basically he heard about that and he was like uh i don't want to pursue this fucking ufo so like don't bring the military into it i don't want someone else to accidentally die so enough people can't explain this that the faa does a thorough investigation they deemed the crew

quote normal professional rational and did not have a drug or alcohol involvement they hadn't drunk like half the wine in the all of the wine was still there they didn't replace it with water like teenagers do it was still there was just in their bellies instead of bottles so anyway the investigation led to um i guess the official reason that they had an investigation of people asses because there was, quote, a violation of airspace. OK. Which I feel like I could use that the next time someone has negative vibes. I can be like, you're a violation of my airspace.

Wait, I love that. Excuse me, you're actually violating my airspace? Especially after quarantine, we're all going to need our own airspace to be very clear i mean is that not like so uh predictive of like social distancing of like yes get out of my airspace you're violating my airspace i love so anyway now maybe post-covid we'll have a shirt that says that i actually eva can you write that down i love that quote i love it i almost wrote it down myself i was like why would i do that when we have an eva we have an eva um eva eva write that down can you make sure to write something about violating our airspace um so she probably wrote it down when she first heard it and was like yeah guys i get how this works so during the investigation captain surachi was based in

anchorage and actually became a sort of a celebrity in town because of the sighting. And only a month later, actually, Japan Airlines grounded him and moved him to an office job because they found out he was talking to reporters. Oh my god, that's not very nice. Which makes it shady, though, because they were like, we're literally gonna it's almost like that the cop who knows too much all of a sudden gets the desk job. Desk duty. Yeah. You know, so it's eerie that they're

like we don't want you to be talking to people about too close to the truth yeah so the month after that he ends up telling f the faa anyway that he thinks the mothership intentionally stayed in the darkest side of the sky and like kept because he kept seeing it but not being able to really see it because they'll he can only see it through like the glow of the lights but he can never get a real full image of what this thing was and so he thinks they were intentionally in the dark because they didn't want to be seen oh i just got which which brings up your point of like do you think like they popped up when all of a sudden they got mentioned it's like so it's it's like well did they want to be hidden or did they like playing this game of like oh we'll show

ourselves briefly but because you think that they would know that they've been seen at some point right like i think we're all under the i think we've given aliens the stereotype that they have the power to read our minds at all times true true and if we see it we know it sees us seeing it so maybe they don't have that power which i refuse to believe they're just like i don't know we power, which I refuse to believe. Maybe they're just like, I don't know. We're just lost. And we're like, they're reading my mind. Yeah, that's entirely possible that we're giving them ridiculous parameters. And they're like, we're just like you.

But for some reason, I have a feeling that, well, because you hear about those stories where people are like, I saw it. And suddenly it like zoomed toward me. I feel like you hear those stories where they do read your mind. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know yeah i don't know i don't know so uh anyway the captain himself says he thinks that they wanted to be seen uh this is another quote but he thinks the ufo wanted to hide while looking at them in the fort 747 because they had quote in front of the sunset invisible for any movement we made

so it was always keeping Captain Taraji's plane. It was almost like they were intentionally backlighting themselves so that they could always see Captain Taraji, but Captain Taraji could never see them. Ugh, so creepy. He did also tell the FAA and official documents that he hopes, quote, we humans will meet them in the near future. No, thanks.

No, thank you, Cap. I'm going to love you guys from afar, but you're violating my airspace and I'd like you to step back. We'll talk about you on the podcast, but just tune in from space, please. Yeah, from the safety of our microphones, but that's it.

So don't come any closer. When asked why UFOs would be interested at all and even interacting with him, Captain Taraji said, and I quote, we were carrying Beaujolais, a very famous wine. Oh, my God. They are on to me. They're like, this alien must be.

Oh, my God. Wait, I just realized something. What? It was fucking Xenon. How do we not make that connection? She borrowed daddy's jag to get all the way to the fanciest wine that she could find. She's like, excuse me. She was like, excuse me.

There's apparently like 770,000 pounds of this wine here. It's my birthday month and I would love to have a little sippy sip. Excuse the lights. We're having a little bit of a party limo situation. A party limo. I love it's a party lemon. Hang on. I have to write a lot of this down eva can you write all of this down please this is truly and that's why we drink fucking fever dream this is chaos driving a a lemon to the wine and also driving a lemon yeah i follow so far i follow everyone else has slowly lowered the volume

on this podcast and by slowly i mean halted it fucking press pause everyone's like partner everyone's partner or roommate who's like yeah okay fine i'll listen to one episode is like really and you're like they're like no i promise they don't always talk like they don't always scream except for you'd be lying because that's all that we do we'd be lying lions tigers and bears oh linda's tiger and bears i can't get it together okay anyway this is xenon this is the story of how xenon came to earth by the way i don't know how we didn't figure out it was her birth story like earlier but here it is beautiful some people obviously dispute this ufo claim me included the second you said xenon i began to dispute it

the second i said lemon don't kid yourself but there was a and so in 1987 there was uh one article written by this like skeptic journalist named philip j glass and i feel like i've mentioned him before i don't know if he's as big as i'm putting him in my mind but i feel like philip j glass was like kind of on every fucking case to dispute aliens but so this is a quote from him about why he thinks that this story is not true so philip said quote astronomical calculations of that night show that when the pilot claimed to see the ufo jupiter was extremely bright and was visible precisely where the pilot reported he saw the ufo mars was just below and

to the right of jupiter and may explain the initial report that he saw two lights this is not the first time that an experienced pilot has mistaken a bright celestial body for a ufo nor will it be the last i think that the japanese pilot first of all why do we have to say the japanese pilot the pilot i think that the pilot should have been a little more skeptical when the United Airliner and the Air Force plane reported seeing nothing. Yeah. You know what? The second he said the Japanese pilot, it's like when people say a female pilot. Yeah.

What's the qualifier for? What are you trying to say here? Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I'm not on Philip's side right now. No, Phil, you're just step, sit down. Phil. I'm really mad at Phil right now. He, but yeah, so he basically said like, they were actually just planets.

And this is not the first time a pilot has mistaken that as a UFO. Okay. One of the times that that actually has also happened, just a fun fact, in World War II, there was a big chaos because a bunch of b-29 pilots that were in the pacific they were flying at night and reported this mysterious ball of fire and they thought it was like long range aircraft that was going to try to shoot at them and then they ended up finding out it was venus were they shooting at venus they were they were literally oh can you imagine later they were like sorry reporting to your officer and being like um so awkward so can we still write off all those bullets yeah yeah do we get more ammo how does

this work they literally for a long time we're shooting at fucking venus being like i don't get it they won't back down oh geez uh so anyway the anchorage News, they also said, according to Philip J. Klass, the- I thought it was Glass. Klass with a K. Oh, I thought you said Glass, which Philip Glass is like a composer. So I was like, if this is the same guy, he needs to stick to one fucking lane. Oh, no. Anytime I think of Glass, I think of George Glass, which was Jan Brady's fake boyfriend.

That always makes me laugh. That's right. George Glass. Yeah. Okay. So Klass. Klass. Like knockoff, like the knockoff Klass. Like K. brady's fake boyfriend that always makes me laugh that's right george class yeah um okay so class class like knock off like the knockoff class like k like with a k instead of a c got it um so anchorage daily news says that according to class the pilot never reported seeing jupiter or mars

even though they were clearly visible in fact when the co-pilot was asked if he could distinguish the lights as being different from a star he said no oh so that makes it seem like a credible dispute of like well you couldn't even tell when we were giving you a test on it yeah you couldn't even tell the difference so how can we trust that you didn't know what it was i guess my question is like then why i mean i have a lot of questions but i'm maybe i'll get to them but like if it's on the okay first of all it was seen on the radar briefly right so like what were they seeing then if they saw two and then also like i get that oh the light looks like something uh right out of this out of space but also if you're feeling like it's stopping and you see

jets and you feel the heat i mean this is all just really specific yeah and i guess uh well let me let me say this first so other skeptics have said that the ufos could have been optical illusions caused by ice crystals and i guess sometimes like maybe if it's like a reflection off of a cloud it almost looks like a thick actual object. So a radar could have maybe picked it up. I'm not really sure. I'm not sure. I'm just trying to guess off of like a reflection plus clouds.

Something could have looked like something else. Other people, though, say that Captain Srirashi already established himself as a UFO believer in the past, which makes him look biased because he had logged several other sightings before. But to the point that you're making, the event wasn't just witnessed by him who's a believer it was all three crew members who said that they had this experience and that the radar did pick up signals of something at around eight miles away and the radar display did show a color strength i guess based it's called like an echo but based on the strength of the signal of something else next to you it goes from either like green all the way up up to red for a really strong signal sure i guess also fun fact planes use this to for potential upcoming turbulence

that's how they're able to say like oh we're gonna get a little bit of turbulence in a little bit so just be prepared for that they can see it through like this like echo radar or whatever. Which like, I sure wish they gave like portable versions of that to. Absolutely. To the people sitting on the plane. So if I saw a big ass red dot coming my way, I would know to pray versus like. Yeah, but can you imagine like everybody on the plane suddenly sees a red dot coming at them? It would be fucking chaos. I mean, it would be.

I would be so many klonopin deep i would be i would be using like the phone on the back of the plane to be like at least you could you could phone oh i wonder if like i wonder how many people don't actually know what we're talking about when we say oh yeah they're like phone on the plane i'm like for candy crush no like the ones where you put your credit card in it never mind um yikes okay that makes me old uh but wow yeah i i'm glad actually nobody has radar ability because if you saw that your neighbor holding one of those and there's like a red blinking dot coming at you like uh-uh yeah it wouldn't be cute for my psyche but it could i could properly time my anti-anxiety meds though oh when when do i take that ambien oh right now that's why you take it the second the engine starts going and then you're fine okay you're clear do you need me to give you

another lesson before our next tour i thought i thought we've gone through this multiple times christine no i i lost all of my lessons because you would always go up to the delta first fucking class whatever and even i would sit at a coffee it is not my fault that a year into us touring i was like well what are your guys reward numbers and you're like i don't have one and i was like you could have literally been getting rewards miles on every single flight we took and probably been up there with me sorry that i'm savvy and frugal okay my my mother with the fucking ponies at a birthday i'm telling you she should have taught you this early she should have and i think she did and i wasn't listening because she was furious at me when she found out that

it took me so long to like get up i found out i was up there and you were not and was like what and i'm like i tried to tell them i said get a rewards number i'll plug it in when i book our flights also my delta thing my dad see speaking of which my mom and dad got me one in 1992 so i was like six months old and they got me one in 1992 so i was like six months old and they got me one because they were like i have a feeling she'll need this someday and like that's a genius move though if you have a baby just set them up now it's true it literally says like a member for 29 years and i'm like that's really creepy but i guess it's true me and eva is like three months and also here's a because there's a shitty fucking muffin for you to split between the two yeah and it's like minor parent christine schieffer has signed them up

because they refuse to do it themselves yeah okay so i'm not gonna stand by and get shit on for that i do miss me and eva's uh encounters at the airport because we would always for some reason find each other before we ran into you at the airport. And I'd be like, she's probably up in her fucking lounge. I was. Because they have free mimosas. And I'm a cheapskate. Okay. So anyway.

My mom's having a heart attack somewhere. Like, I did not raise you like this. And Linda's somewhere like, I think my children got switched at birth. I pray to God my mom does not listen to this episode. I'm roasting her. She's going to freak out. That's it. No more exotic animals for you.

Only ponies from now on. Only ponies. Well, also, never mind. I won't. We won't derail anymore. But so the radar, the echo turbulence thing, it shows a really strong radar is red and a really weak one is green and all three of them remember seeing that the ufo blip was green so it's good that they can all confirm each other's stories but it's also interesting that something that

fucking massive which should have definitely showed up as red but then there's the counter argument of like well if it's defying physics, it could also like it could also go against our own technology and it could be in like a stealth mode and hiding itself. Like anything's possible. Yeah. So anyway, so Captain Tarachi disagreed with class's opinion, obviously, and said it wasn't a weather phenomenon. It wasn't a star.

It moved with us. And ultimately, the Air force just kind of deemed this as like random clutter and just kind of swept under the carpet space junk your random clutter but also you're violating my airspace yeah hey listen one man's space junk is another man's uh random aggressive ufo following following you through the skies chasing your wine so chasing your wine so captain tarouchi was instated as a pilot later but he did report a second ufo in the same space years later so it's depending on what side you're on it's like oh see it came back or it's like oh so now you're you're seeing it there's more ice crystals yeah exactly so basically in the same area uh he

was later smile uh he was later flying a similar route and he radioed to um air traffic control please record this irregular lights looks like a spaceship this is like pilot who cried ufo like that's exactly you have to be really careful with these calls now because you already have a rep like a bad rap for for this kind of sighting it's like you gotta really you gotta really be ready to defend your case here so this time there was no unexplained radar and others on board could not confirm that they saw a ufo and officials said that it was just village lights bouncing off of ice crystals so it was more ice crystals like you said maybe it's good they gave him desk duty now i'm like i don't know if i want this man to find my wine around if he's like i think he is sneaking the wine hang on a second yeah something's going on uh so basically what ended up happening to him is he's probably like

81 now and he retired in kanto north kanto japan and one article a few years ago said that he lives with his wife and doesn't talk about the ufo if he can avoid it oh because he said i spoke to a doctor he said it was just an illusion but his wife is like the perfect uh catering wife and was quoted saying you saw something you just weren't meant to see so oh that's a great way of putting it though yeah so she's just super supportive because it is true like you weren't meant to see the reflection of ice crystals you weren't meant to see natural phenomena and your eyes just caught it in the wrong moment or you saw an alien and you weren't fucking supposed to and guess what no one was ready for it and they don't believe you so it didn't help so the faa did an in-depth report of flight 1628 and it has in this report it has primary references

interviews written records photos drawings recordings a chronology of the events the printout of anchorages uh air traffic that night and it has the faa form 3112 which is the inspection and surveillance record and you can actually buy all of this you can see the report yourself um but the fa charges about 200 bucks for the complete package come on but guess who's a member of mufon and bro i so i wanted to what's your discount well no so like i have access to like remember you can like uh i talked about last episode where you can basically look through the log of like any reported ufo yeah and see everything so i tried to go i tried to use mufon and look up this it was november 17th 1986 in alaska so i looked it up but remember last episode i also told you that mufon like is not

on top of their tech is on angelfire.web or whatever. I mean, literally something from 1986 that hasn't been reported. And it's like apparently a big case. So it's really, I don't know if it's outdated or it's just not well organized. I don't know what the deal is, but I've tried looking it up. It's not in MUFON's records. But I will say I looked up for all of 1986 in Alaskaaska there were two hits and one of them actually was on november 17th oh so what's what's interesting for me with my check with my fact checking

it's interesting that the only other ufo sighting happened to be on the same day they have put it on the wrong year or is it just a different completely different story this is a completely different story but it almost kind of confirms that like something was going on that day in alaska and he saw it another time didn't the guy see it another time maybe not the same day but in the same spot he said he's that's kind of he did but there was like no real evidence of it at least the the that flight 1628 it was like yeah we can't explain it that's kind of weird yeah but so there was two hits for all of 1986 in alaska both of them happen to be in november which is weird yeah one of them happen to be the same day that flight 1628 happened and this is the the information that

someone logged i don't know if i'm allowed to read it but i'm gonna do it um so this is the report for november 17th that's on mufon's site i was driving north uh when i noticed a glowing ball floating above the water in the inlet i thought that it may have been a helicopter spotlight but it was very foggy and it was much lighter in a different color it only followed at the same speed as my vehicle i was mostly amazed at what i was seeing it was something that I had never seen before. It glowed a yellowish white color. Salmon-y? No.

I don't know. A really, really rotten, bad salmon. You can't eat that if your salmon looks like that. A Dijon, actually. A Dijon mustard, maybe. I was mostly amazed at what I was seeing. It glowed a yellowish white color that illuminated the surroundings of my vehicle. I believe the fog also enhanced the effect.

I then felt as if I had fallen asleep, but I was a few miles down the road from where I was driving. And when I looked at the ocean to see the object, it had disappeared. I never told anyone until a couple years ago. I never felt compelled to share my experience, but recently have had very strong thoughts about it. And the other strange thing is a loss of time during the sighting it seemed that i had been sleeping and woke up 20 minutes later but i never did i didn't fall asleep but the time somehow went by hope this helps hope this it does you kind of stranger so that was that happened on the same day it doesn't sound like they were same day same this was the exact same time on the same day. It doesn't sound like they were. Same day, same, this was the exact same time.

Oh, the same year too. I thought this just happened to be the same day, like on a different year. No, I think that's why I kept, I think that's why I kept repeating it because I felt like you weren't giving me the reaction I wanted. No, I thought you just meant like another November 16th, but I didn't realize like literally that day. So it was November 17th, 1986. And so through MUFON, I just looked up all of 1986 in Alaska. Wow, that is weird.

Okay. And the only two hits in Alaska were of 1986 were both in November. That is weird. I see what you're saying now. Although you could say like, well, Jupiter was really strong that day. Maybe this person also saw the reflection. But you're right that it is really weird that two people would have a sighting on the same day in the same place. And the other other one because i said there were two hits one was definitely on the

same day as 1628 and the other one that just said november 1986 is also probably from the same day because this is their story this is from excuse me wasilla alaska still feels like yesterday i was nine years old my mother had put us to bed but i'm a night owl and i've always loved the stars i was watching out the bedroom window watching a big orange star orange salmon orange we're getting closer um well i thought it was a star as it got closer it was really hot giving off the heat of a sun almost like how he felt the ufo thrusters the next thing i remember i was on a metal table okay now we've crossed the line not strapped down but i couldn't move a bit as if i was being

restrained and the surrounding they they were surrounding the table i was screaming and all of a sudden my voice wasn't coming out of my mouth but it was inside my head and it was so loud that i stopped they had mouths but they didn't use them to communicate. They were talking to me inside my head. They proceeded to poke and prod me through my belly button and between my toes. Oh, they seem to be trying to soothe me by stroking my forehead like my mother did when I didn't feel good. I don't recall how I got back in my bed. But when I opened my eyes, I was drenched as if I had jumped in a pool.

I immediately ran to my mother's room and began to tell her what had happened she was quite freaked out but did believe me which is nice that is nice we still talk about it from time to time but we've always wondered what happened i was recently watching the history channel and i saw an episode of the japan airline flight over anchorage in 1986 and i was got chills and i was frozen in shock I looked at my husband and said, that's the UFO that took me. So... Literal ultimate goose cam. I do not know what to do with myself right now. So Flight 1628 wasn't mentioned on MUFON site, but the only two reports for all of 1986 in Alaska both happened on the same day, allegedly.

I'm really afraid see this is i don't even like to look at like alien stuffers because it's like i feel like the second i notice it it's like they're gonna take me on a table and put something in my bed like i don't know i don't like i don't like i feel like the more i think about it the more likely it is to happen well anyway there you have it on uh japanese airlines flight 1628 and also a lot of wildly thick tangents this this day so wildly thick boys they weren't just little little uh little moments they were experiences so they weren't little spirals they were giant tornadoes tunnels funnels yes tunnels and funnels there you go um that is wild okay i'm i'm so scared of aliens

dude i'm so scared of them i know i'm so scared i know and i don't blame you aggressively i one time went to a um akashic record reading before i even knew what it was and before i had like obviously taken any courses in it and they told me that I was part of the okay I've never said this on the podcast because goodbye what are you about to say I don't know if I've told you but uh they said oh you have a connection to the Lemurians is that what they're no no sorry not the Lemurians sorry that was the wrong one that was when the Pleiadians okay that's even creepier because I don't know what that is okay let me and they were like oh does that mean anything to you and i was like kind of but i don't know why and then i looked it up and i was like i've looked this up in like high school for some reason but then i got really freaked out

because she kept describing like how some people are part of pleiadian star system i got really freaked out but then i took ended up taking akashic record reading classes but anyway so she said i was part of the pleiadian star seed or something so if anyone knows what that means hit me up because i was too if you're also part pleiadian uh according to your ancestry account let me know if you're 23 and me lets me know that you're a pleiadian well yeah maybe we're related i wonder does it have to do anything with like the theory that like aliens help build the egyptian pyramids i don't know because i've also heard that's like a very problematic theory because it doesn't give credit to um actual civilizations who like did actually do really intense work um so i've definitely heard that that's not like a great argument i don't think that's actually the

same thing though i'm pretty sure this is the idea that like they lived on a different star system and then some of them like reincarnated on earth like they're different interesting people this is why i never told on the show i'm like i'm gonna sound so looney tunes and there's gonna be someone listening for the first time going okay this is way weirder than spotify led me to believe you're on you talk about a lemon all the fucking time there's really nothing that could shock me at this point so well if anyone knows who the like about the pleiadians they like pleiades is where they come from i think anyway it doesn't matter okay okay freaky stuff though i just it's something about it freaks me out if anything i'm just jealous that i'm not part alien maybe you are maybe i am i

don't know i'll do another akashic reading for you and maybe you owe me about 20 christine i do owe you a lot yeah i uh we'll do one maybe we can do them i can do it over zoom maybe i know i say this every time but you have to you have to ask me i'm not allowed to offer it that's christine i ask you every single time we talk about it but you never say it like hey do you have time tomorrow afternoon to do like okay i'll just say it on the show and then it's never like i'll set an agenda an alarm to regularly text you that and then the day you say yes it will be the day that we do okay you can maybe ask eva to schedule it for us and then it'll be official see eva right and finally force eva to even write down that i'm free all of my life okay and then

figure it out with christine let me know write Write down that I'm always at the doctor's, but anytime I'm not, we can do one. Eva, if Christine's asking, I'm actually not available. I'm washing my hair. I'm busy. You're wildly busy all the time. Yeah. Okay. Well, I have a story for you today, and that's very disturbing and problematic in a lot of

ways. So I just want to warn everybody, this is a toughie, but it's also really fascinating and touches on a lot of issues, modern-day issues that still apply. Oh, shit. Okay. And I will also add that the name for one of these, the people involved, is Ethiopian, and I watched YouTube. I tried everywhere to find the pronunciation. Everybody who does a episode or

there's it's not very common of a story but anybody who covers it says i don't really know how to pronounce this so there's really no uh clear clarity online as to how to say this so i apologize if i'm mispronouncing it um but the way i've uh have been saying it is seen a do s-i-n-e-d-u sena do or sena do s-e-i sorry s-i-n sin and then edu maybe sena do sena do yeah i don't know my my gut instinct is to say sena do but that's the american and me yeah i've been waffling between sena do and sena do so i'm not sure but then uh her last name is Tedes uh so this is uh also takes place in the well not the 80s I guess in the 90s but it takes place May 28th 1995 and we're just gonna dive right into the story so buckle up okay what can you give a trigger warning for what content it is yes um and I I do often hesitate to give trigger warnings because I feel like pretty much every story I cover deserves a trigger warning.

And then I end up saying it for some stories and not for others. Is there anything that is different? I mean, not really. Okay. I don't know if this was like specifically child or animal abuse. No, I can't even do animal stuff anymore it's really bad how like ridiculous it's a suicidal a suicide story uh stabbing so like basically most stories i cover which is really sure kind of fucked up but but no that's i mean it's i i i'm sure that's quite a struggle you deal with all the time that there's like always something pretty dark that's gonna get covered

it's tough because some people say like well you should give trigger warnings and i'm like i know but i feel like there's an umbrella trigger warning over the whole show because almost every story has some form of like either sexual assault or suicide or i mean and or children or i mean it's it's hard to kind of nail down every single story's right warnings but yes thank you for asking suicide definitely um and stabbing i guess is the other one which obviously both deserve a warning um and you know just mental health issues in general so um this takes place in 1995 at Harvard. Oh, okay. Okay. Harvard. Are you sure? I tried.

Harvard. That's my Midwest accent. 26-year-old Tao Nguyen woke up to a site that would be burned in her memory forever. She was visiting Harvard, specifically at the Dunster House, which was a dormitory,

and had been staying over with her friend Trang Ho, who was a junioritory and had been staying over with her friend trang ho who was a junior at harvard and so tau had come to help trang move out for the summer i'm sorry tau had yeah trang was moving out of the dorm and her friend tau had come to help her move out and was just staying a couple nights so tau wakes up to a horrific sight 8 a.m tau wakes up to a horrific sight. 8 a.m., Tao wakes up to the sight of her friend Trang being stabbed by her roommate, Sinadou Tadesse. Whoa. Who is another junior at Harvard.

Tao later told the Herald, quote, I heard the screaming and I opened my eyes. According to Tao, Sinadou was looking, quote, crazy as she wordlessly stabbed her friend and then obviously trying to like react and intervene as quickly as possible tau also got swiped by the knife herself trying to grab it from c to do and got injured in the struggle but thankfully survived she escaped and fled into the dormitory's courtyard where another harvard junior later explained that to the Harvard Crimson newspaper, I woke up at 830 to hear a girl out in Dunster Courtyard shrieking, someone's killed my friend.

Someone's killed my friend. It went on for three or four minutes. So Tao fled the scene and Sina Du had stabbed her roommate Trang a total of 45 times with a hunting knife oh my god why did that make it worse i don't know there's something like really hands-on and terrible about this story a hunting knife feels really intentional i think like it's like yeah it's not like a spur of the moment let me grab a knife from the kitchen it's like no i've got a butcher block yeah exactly it's meant to fuck you up like no one's going hunting at harvard as far as i'm concerned like that's just not an activity on the roster usually it's not an elective i don't think

so anyway i mean harvard has probably some pretty weird electives but i'm not sure that's one of them but yeah so cena do had stabbed her 45 times with a hunting knife that she had actually bought specifically for this murder so you're right it wasn't something she had on hand she had purchased a hunting knife presumably for to murder her roommate right cena do then barricaded herself in the bathroom and hanged herself from the shower rod yeah wow it's just really upsetting this whole story um according to a salon article called satan goes to harvard quote the crime was stunning not only because it was savage but because because, as a Harvard official commented at the time, there was no apparent reason for it. So now we're going to rewind and tell the story leading up to what the fuck happened on that morning.

So Sina Du and Trang were both biology majors at Harvard in a course. It was like a pre-med course basically both uh aiming for med school both of them dreamed of becoming doctors so they could help others they were also both admitted to harvard on full scholarships sinadu tedes was born on september 25th 1975 in addis ababa ethiopia and had grown up in a pretty well-off family i mean i didn't get any intel as far as, like, how many tigers they would rent and, like, whether that was an option. Oh, my gosh. By the way, like, let's take the moment to say, like, I am still so embarrassed that I even brought that story up. Oh, come on.

I'm wearing my trashy classy shirt because I embraced it. So you don't have to apologize for the things you say. Let me just do a disclaimer real quick and be, like, I'm very aware that, like, every parent is problematic in some way. And mine chooses to make lavish requests like that. But then I will say she does get educated. I don't. She walked away from that conversation knowing that animal abuse is a real fucking thing. And, like, Tiger King.

No, we love Linda. I don't want anyone thinking that, I like I'm also just like a. I don't think any of us think that you. I don't know. Use tigers. I don't. I know. I just don't want people to think that I like I heard it and took it as like a serious request

or like thought of it as like a real potential. You did have pony rides at your children's at your own birthday party. Thank God. Thank God I blocked it from my memory. So I don't have to feel that one's not on me. I didn't choose that. I mean, at 29, I'm like, I'm jealous retroactively. I never went to a birthday with a pony ride.

Or maybe I did. And I was probably just jealous then too. Gosh. Well, no, I'm, I'm, it's funny you mentioned it because in that exact moment, I was like, oh, I really hate that I even brought it up because I just feel so stupid. But anyway. No, come on. People know you.

People know us. Okay. they don't think you're literally renting tigers if i ever rented a tiger it would be to secretly like help them escape and then bring them back to to the wild or something i don't know okay now you're going too far because people are going to say they're not meant for the wild and by the wild i mean to dr doolittle and who would feed them steaks and we would eat steaks together. And that would be in the first episode of the podcast. I literally talked about how my stepmom bought a bear from a catalog. So I don't think anybody's sitting here going, wow, M must be terrible.

That's true. My stepmom literally ordered a bear and it arrived and she kept it in the playroom. So I don't think this is is you know next level for me i know i have both our mothers have ordered animals off the internet that's or at least yeah no i i appreciate that i'm just always a parent of the people think that i'm not for the cause and uh m's m's one of the people you know and wants to be one of the people i do and if i'm not one of the people i'm certainly uh looking through the window and wishing i was there so yeah emma and i are just definitely not invited to be part of

the people we're just on the outskirts um anyway sorry so she was raised uh in ethiopia in a relatively well-off family but the time that she lived in ethiopia was kind of wrought with chaos and murder and violence uh it was ethiopia's red terror which was a violent political repression campaign of the derg which was the provisional military government of ethiopia against other marxist lenist groups in ethiopia so there was a lot of mass murder atrocities uh corpses were dragged to families doorsteps by soldiers who would then force the bereaved family to pay for the bullet so that they would have the body back yeah oh fuck that yeah it's it's just like really really dark times wow so uh it was

a regime in which quote the murderers had the power so that's kind of the social political environment that she grew up in um as part of the resistance group, Sinadu's father had been thrown in jail for two years when she was seven, and he was kept as a political prisoner for a while. However, during that time, her dad recalled that Sinadu was very cheerful, would visit her, sorry, would visit her dad, would visit him in prison with her mother, who was a nurse. And when she was little, Sinadu didn't really have many friends. She was kind of ostracized by people at her Catholic girl school, as well as her own family members as a child. So she was kind of just on the outskirts. And to escape, she would devote herself to her studies. And she worked so hard at her academics that she was admitted to the prestigious International Community School,

where she graduated as valedictorian. And this was huge because it gave her kind of the opportunity to leave and go to an american university okay not the american university that's where i went it's nothing like harvard don't worry um so she actually got uh she was accepted by 24 different american colleges wow uh wow yeah what does that mean harvard jesus christ yeah but she decided to go with harvard on a full scholarship so like okay must be nice wow congrats congratulations that that was em and i were literally like we could see harvard from our apartments and we were so far removed from it like intellectually when my when i got into boston university i found out in the same i found out in the admissions

office with my mom because we went to go look at apartments in case i got in and we decided to stop at bu and they told me i got in and my mom looked at me and went wow how did that happen so like yeah harvard and i were just that let's just put it this way i didn't even try applying to harvard we weren't invited to apply to har ever by anybody. Yeah, that's not that wasn't even on the table. Not even not on the radar. No. So she was accepted on a full scholarship to Harvard and a former teacher described her as the pearl of her school, her high school. However, this kind of became problematic, which seems to happen to a lot of people who start at a school like harvard after being kind of the best at their high school and being the pearl or the special one they go to a place like harvard and it's sort of a wake-up call like

everybody is top of their class you're you're one of many you're not the special right now as special as you were in high school anymore and so i guess she had a little bit of a shock culture shock in that way um she struggled to keep up academically at first and she was extremely isolated so she grew up pretty isolated but at least like had her family and uh you know knew her high school classmates and that kind of thing but she showed up at harvard and felt completely isolated and actually she became so desperately lonely that she got to the point where she started sending letters to strangers like from the phone book and she would just write letters randomly to people in the phone book and pleaded with them to befriend her

which is just really heartbreaking yeah that's really sad and yeah and this is also part of why the story is just very dark is like you just see what's building up to the murder suicide. And it's like, somebody should have done something or stepped in at some point. The behavior was off early on. Yeah. And like, it was just so many cries for help and nobody did anything. Cries for help. Yes.

Yeah. So in her letters, she wrote to strangers from the phone book. She wrote, year after year i became lonelier and lonelier i see friends deserting me they would take every chance to show me they did not have any love or respect for me high school turned out to be even worse if i went early or left late i would be roaming the yard or deserted hallways alone while other students roared with laughter or talked their heart out standing in groups home was not a comforting place i swallowed my pain and anguish just as my

siblings did to theirs i was so lonely but i hung on tight because i wanted to come to the states in search of a solution so finally she had gotten like what she worked so hard for and she arrives in the states and is still feeling completely isolated so it didn't like it almost made her problem worse right feeling left out wow okay so one woman actually responded to the letters and uh she wanted she was like okay like i'll reach out i'll reach back and uh talk to you but apparently she became so alarmed by the bizarre writings and recordings that cena do started sending her that she like cut off contact oh shit so that didn't last and then another woman found the letter obnoxious quote unquote and sent it which is like okay fuck you all right yeah uh and sent it to a friend who worked at harvard to review and so literally at this point

harvard has these letters and it knows that she's writing these things and does nothing wow so there's like full proof that they this early on already knew they were aware of something yeah so um although the letter was deemed to have been read by both the dean of the university and another university official nobody ever contacted sinadu about it uh never asked if she was okay nobody ever said anything to her at all and it was filed away and quickly forgotten about until suddenly it was very relevant uh down the line so no one intervened obviously nobody provided her with any sort of help that she clearly needed at this point.

And after her freshman year, Sinadu's roommate told her she would no longer be rooming with her. So sophomore year, Sinadu got a roommate by the name of Trang Ho. And this becomes the victim in the story. At age 10, so now I'm going to just give you a little background on Trang.

Trang Phuong Ho had escaped from the communist repression in vietnam on a fishing boat with her father and sister and they'd actually done this once before when trang was a baby but she had fallen overboard oh of the boat yeah and her so her parents were like her dad was like let's wait till she's older so when she was 10 they did it again and were able to escape to indonesia where she learned english and makeshift classrooms in a refugee camp. And only a few years after she arrived in the United States, this is really incredible. Boston Magazine chose her, along with Governor William Feld and a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, as one of 25 people who can save Boston. Oh, my gosh.

who can save Boston. What? Oh my gosh. Yeah, she was literally named among like old white men as one of the people who could save the city of Boston, whatever that means. That's crazy. Oh my gosh. Yeah, so what an achievement.

And she basically at the time was working as a volunteer at the Spalding Rehabilitation Center. She was tutoring Vietnamese refugees, supporting her mother and sisters by holding down two jobs while attending boston technical high school so she was among 16 000 high school seniors who applied to harvard and only two were given perfect scores by the university university's admissions committee and she was one of them wow so she was kind of in a similar boat

of like full ride to harvard big plans going to be a doctor change the world save boston save listen i didn't think it was possible for boston to be saved so that's a pretty incredible article save boston from itself i didn't even know the problems yeah and the sad thing is you know she obviously passed away and i what do you think this cardinal saved boston this right this catholic priest i don't think so right uh at least not by the time we got there so very sad but yes so she was valedictorian of her high school and in her valedictorian address she said you decide where your life is going whether you are going to make a difference or not for me i will make many differences oh so yeah she's just an incredible incredible woman at Harvard

she also had a tough time because she she faced that same issue of showing up being like listed as one of the top people in Boston and all of a sudden she's there with people who also were you know in their towns maybe we're gonna save their town I don't know but we're the same kind of caliber of student right as she was so she she had like an a minus to b plus average so she was doing okay but she was kind of struggling a bit since her freshman year at harvard she'd worked in a research laboratory at the dana farber cancer institute which is like a really top level place and she had appeared as co-author of a paper in the journal genetics so can you imagine you and i would be the biggest dumbasses at harvard it would be like a movie like dumb and

dumber but i'm worse i'm trying to think of like going to a dinner party and having to have a conversation with people oh my god where they're like and what do you do and i'd be like don't it's a it's okay we don't have to talk about it we'd be like they'd be like what magazine were you listed as the the crucial person to save the world and we'd be like well one time like buzzfeed put us on a listicle does that count like no i feel like uh i don't know sometimes my mom tunes in we were on a billboard but we had to pay for it yeah because we have like issues yeah um so basically she's fucking killing it and her professor said in one of his meetings with her that she came and said she was no longer a star but that was okay because she had gotten into a very good lab and i'm like girl you're

still a star trust me like you're just in a different caliber of people where you don't realize how much you stand out but like you stand out imagine all of those credentials and those accolades and being like i mean i'm not that great it's like you know that reminds me totally though of like of like imposter syndrome where it's just so difficult for a lot of people cough cough us to to feel like oh you're successful at something because it's like oh i'm just faking it or it's i'm not as good as all the other people in the same situation right um so it really shows you but yeah so she's in a paper called a journal called genetics as like a freshman listen and she's gonna save boston let's not forget that she's also gonna save the entire city of boston that's she's

literally a superhero isn't like it's spider-man's whole job to protect new york yeah that's right yeah so there you go incredible so this is where their stories intersect and trang sophomore year got a new roommate named cena do to death so cena do for what it's worth was incredibly fond of trang was very excited basically thought like finally i found somebody i can be friends with exactly and trang herself was pretty popular and like well liked and outgoing um and so Sina D started to become like really needy because she always kind of wanted to hang out always needed attention and so Trang started to get a little bit like I want my you're you're you're what is it infiltrating my airspace you're violating violating my airspace you're violating

my airspace if i could have said that in my freshman dorm i mean allison i i love al pal but we had a three-person dorm in a two-person dorm and it was a lot of uh and we were all very close thank god but listen i'm gonna go out there today you live with her yeah like she hasn't changed since college i feel the same way you did i'm like get out of my airspace i say that but i'm like no she was definitely the one who felt that way about me who am i kidding like i was the needy one like what's going on i i can't imagine having to live in a like a 500 square foot room with you like oh my god and for the first time ever like leaving the house and that like what you're talking about like is this normal like i was just eating pickled herrings and people were like this freaky girl covered in hair or what did i say earlier freaky german girl

something about being covered in hair i just remember her like finding you in the bathroom on the floors and stuff yeah oh that's right that was when i accidentally overdosed uh that was bad but i joke about it allison won't let me talk about it she gets reallyosed uh that was bad but I joke about it Allison won't let me talk about it she gets really upset um that was an accident it really was I had I had lost like 30 pounds on because of Crohn's disease and uh well you hadn't you didn't know you had Crohn's yet right uh I had just been diagnosed and they gave and I was like in so much pain that they gave me Percocet which uh at this point my mom didn't allow me to have Tylenol when I was little like even after wisdom teeth everything she would flush all the painkillers down the toilet and so I was like oh

okay this is just for pain and so they were like take two to three pills every four hours and I was like well I'm in a lot of pain so I took three but they didn't really account for that a I'd never taken any painkillers and b I had lost like 35 or 40 pounds and was like decrepit and so I took like three Percocets and I woke up at four in the morning and I couldn't see it was actually what it was probably I thought I was dying I was probably dying um and I crawled to the bathroom but all I could think of was like oh my god I don't want to wake Allison she has her lab tomorrow morning like I don't want to bother her and I mean it's like the ultimate bullshit move of like boundary like I was just like I don't want

to bother anybody and so she found me on the floor people pleasing yeah i was i was i tried to take my temperature but then i was like i can't see like i'd fully lost my vision i thought i was gonna go blind um and i just laid on the bathroom floor because the tile was cold on my face and i just sweated out all night and uh i really thought i was gonna die there was i couldn't hear either there was just like this high-pitched ringing in my ears and so i couldn't see to die. I couldn't hear either. There was just like this high pitched ringing in my ears. And so I couldn't see my phone. So I couldn't like call an ambulance. You know what?

Homie, that sounds like fluverda. Em, I literally tell you this every time you tell me this story. I know, but I think I'm finally hearing, while thinking of my experience, hearing your side of things. Yeah, I would always say like, hey, Em, that happened to me. And you were like, fluverda. I don't't know i tried to tell you it was the same thing or it sounded like the same thing that's why i've told you the story so many times the first half of it feels like it the second half of it really was like a really fucking gnarly cold like a really terrible terrible flu yeah well

you were sick though too like i just had i mean i was sick in a different way but i didn't have a flu anyway wow yeah because i also lost my vision and all that yeah it's really scary yeah so i uh anyway allison was so angry at me so fucking because then she ended up having to skip class and drive me to the hospital anyway and they were like wow you really fucking over ghost and i was like i didn't know i followed the instructions on the thing and so now i'm still really scared of painkillers which is probably good but like sure okay sorry that was like way off off topic but um anyway you were you were violating airspace and uh everyone was violating air i didn't want to violate her airspace is my point okay i was like i'm gonna violate my own airspace in this bathroom until she finds me on the floor and she was like she's she was like she's like you're violating my airspace now she was like what did you think i wanted to wake up to a dead

body would that have been better than you waking me up in the middle of the night to take i've never actually seen allison like really angry at me until this day and since then i'm scared of her look i've seen her mad she is a scary person to get mad yeah she she knows when she's mad and it's usually for a good reason and uh sorry Elle I love you okay thank you for taking me to the hospital sorry okay so sorry this is so off topic uh so anyway Xenadu started to feel uh Trang was starting to feel like Xenadu was being needy and it was becoming off-putting and she was like okay like you're violating my airspace and during this time sinu was also having a tough time with her academics um she got an a uh in biology where

she worked with prominent researchers at beth israel hospital um investigating the human immunodeficiency virus in monkeys you know how we all did always in college yeah um i remember that class uh and her professors explained that although cena do like trang and many other students uh discovered she wasn't an academic star anymore she was maintaining a b average with no difficulties however a b average was going to keep her out of like top medical schools it was just wasn't at the level where you would get into i don't know like a top top top rated medical school coming from Harvard. At least that's what they believed. So another senior who lived next door to Trang and Sinadu at this time said they both complained when the dorm was noisy. They spent most of their time like

by themselves studying. They would call up or bang on the door if we were talking. They were polite, but they were just really quiet. So, you know, they weren't like partiers, weren't really social with people on their floor. And in a New york times article it said when miss ho and miss tada started rooming together they certainly seemed well matched which this is also a little bit problematic in my mind but i'll read it anyway both had risen from humble circumstances miss tada in ethiopia and miss ho in vietnam which is like just because two people are from a different country yeah and grew up like with with uh in poverty or not even in poverty because uh she was really well family was well off yeah and uh the Ho family wasn't but so even more of a reason like

why are you just lumping them together because they grew up in war-torn countries like okay but that doesn't mean that they're gonna be friends yeah so a lot of this story also reflects that which i don't want to say it's the 90s but like growing up in the 90s even my mom who's like a white lady got so much flack and was always called the nanny and it was like right because she had a german accent and it was like and she was white so it was so much less bad than a lot of people have it right but even just everybody asking me if she was my nanny all the time because she had an accent like i just i know how people were in the 90s and still are but this just doesn't surprise me i guess i should say right right um so even

though sinadu was like thought the world of trang trang did not really feel the same way but she kept it to herself she was a nice girl she wasn't like mean to her or anything but tried to keep her distance so by the point where they needed to decide whether they were rooming together or not trang told sena do she had decided to room with another group of girls the following year so trang had to tell sena do i don't want to live with you next year it's always awkward been there yes yes it's always awkward but it's way more awkward in this scenario because well we know how it ends so she told sena do uh she wasn't gonna live with her she was gonna live with a different group of girls and sena do did not react well to this

so a week before the murder an anonymous note was sent to the harvard crimson newspaper along with a picture of sena do and the the note read, keep this picture. There will soon be a very juicy story involving this woman. Later, through DNA tracing, it was discovered that Sinadou had sent this picture and note herself. Wow. Yeah. Okay. So a fellow student in her physics course had seen her in the library the Tuesday before their physics exam.

And he said, you could see she was stressed out. She couldn't seem to study. And her face was very worried. But at the same time, it's like, it's Harvard finals week. I'm sure everybody looks stressed out. And like, if anything, you would like you would notice the person who didn't look like you. It wasn't me on Harvard's campus. I'd be like, yeah.

Like, who wants to get burritos? Like, it's finals week yeah you and i would have been the ones who were like god these two are fucking clowns over here do you want to get burritos is probably the most spoken phrase i said in college on a daily basis which is why i'm always amazed that we weren't friends in grad school i'm like the world really tried to keep us apart because i really don't know how on earth that didn't happen i because also i like in in grad school i made a point to like try to approach people and like ask them to like go out and get some that's how i became friends with christine maiden

because i literally was like i don't know you but do you want to go get lunch with me well you know me i'm always fucking like anxious and depressed so i try to avoid people as often as possible so i'm sure i saw you being friendly and went like red alert i'm gonna hide so that's probably precisely what happened probably um i probably knew you were very friendly and went uh-oh i'm scared and it's commitment it would have been i would have been asking you to commit to a friendship yeah i don't like that or commit to even going to get burritos which it's a lot to ask i know it to leave the house i know it. To leave the house. I know it. I know it. To put on pants, to leave the house. Okay. Anyway, so she ended up taking one of her finals, but then she got medical exemptions for the other two. And during one of the exams she was supposed to take, she actually went on a brunch date

with a fellow Ethiopian student. And later on, he realized that she had this brunch with him to say goodbye before she would take her own life. Oh, shit. So it was just that kind of behavior where you don't realize until you know hindsight's 2020 of like oh dear i now see what she why she was acting strange and all that um on the saturday when she was supposed to be taking her physics exam she was sitting in her room crying the whole time according to tau who was the visiting friend who was there to help trang move out and c to do's younger brother who was actually visiting friend who was there to help Trang move out. And Sita Du's younger brother, who was actually at Dartmouth,

still in hindsight had trouble admitting that she had anything going on. Apparently she had called him at midnight a few hours before the murder, and apparently he was probably the last person she spoke to. And he still later said like, oh no, she seemed fine, which is like, okay i guess but i don't know we'll we'll get to that yeah but so like i said to this had purchased the hunting knife in advance and that sunday morning she at 8 a.m she murdered her roommate train wow and then took her own life in the days after the murder it was generally speculated uh that to this had

resorted to violence because ho had asked not to room with her again in the fall. However, like, Sinadu's family said, no, she's the one who didn't want to room with Trang. Hmm. I don't know. It's kind of hearsay, I guess, or she said, she said. Okay. But basically, the general implication was, oh, Trang said, I don't want to room with you and cena do flipped out and killed her yeah okay that checks out that yeah yeah um so this became obviously like a huge

scandal in boston media um in an article in the new york times it was reported one student who asked not to be identified said she knew miss ho had been trying to find a different roommate next year because miss tedes would play music too loud and was inconsiderate of her privacy oh but again you never know with these things of like whether people are just like interviewed and they're like oh yeah i heard this or i knew her because they had like a lab with her or something you know what i mean like right i hesitate to trust everything that people report in the newspapers especially because later a lot of people say they were seen a dude's friend and like it's kind of like she was very clear she didn't have any friends if anything is understood about this story it's that she didn't have a friend so right so i find it sometimes hard to

believe of like how much is this being spun how much are people just kind of like wanting to be involved with the story um so it's hard it's hard to know but another report said in the new york daily news said the b Boston Globe reported that Tedes had sent a letter to Ho last month that indicated she felt abandoned, which I do believe that because she was known for sending letters to people to express her loneliness. And apparently the note said, I thought we were going to do stuff together. You'll always have a family to go to, and I'm going to have no one. So she really felt abandoned by Trang because she was like, I finally have a family to go to and i'm going to have no one so she really felt abandoned by

train because she was like i finally have a roommate a friend and then train was like nope i'm going to my other group of friends and she felt like i mean it's it's not hard to put two and two together of like i mean she was so desperate for a friend she was writing to strangers and then she finally found someone she thought she had like enough similar interests with yeah like something could happen yeah and then all of a sudden this person's like i have other people i'd rather live with i mean talk about snapping yeah yeah i mean it's that it's that classic like feeling rejected rejected yeah leading to you know with everything else obviously building up obviously it had train train was not at fault

by any means but it's sort of like no it was like a it was like a long time coming and she just happened to be the the catalyst totally the one the one to really make uh an erratic behavior presented yes exactly it was sort of like a long fuse and then finally it went off and she didn't know obviously that this would happen right because who would so she just felt completely abandoned and uh according to Sinadu's father, he was a retired high school principal back in Ethiopia. And he said his daughter never indicated that she was unhappy at Harvard or with her roommate. He said there is no friction or divorce in our family, which is an odd. I mean, I don't know. I'm like, there is in mine, but OK.

Congrats, I guess. I'm guilty of that. Yeah, what is mine, but OK. Congrats, I guess. I'm guilty of that. Yeah, what is that? Nice, humble brag, I guess. Yeah, like, congratulations. But ultimately, Trang's family understandably thought Harvard could have done more to prevent their beloved daughter's death. And in 98, they filed a lawsuit against the school,

alleging wrongful death, conscious and suffering and emotional distress they charged the university as well as the people in charge at dunster house dormitory with negligence and they felt that they had plenty of evidence that scenery was having a breakdown and could have prevented the deaths and interestingly enough which i didn't realize this apparently was not the first sign of extreme mental health issues among students affiliated not with harvard necessarily but with this dormitory so it's like seemingly cursed i mean apparently in the prior the year prior to cena do suicide three other harvard students had taken their lives two of whom lived in this dorm so literally the year before she took her own life two other people had died by suicide in that same

dorm yeah and i do wonder like i don't know if this is a specific like honors dorm maybe there's more pressure i i don't know anything about like what the specific dorm is but um this dorm seems to have some sort of yeah bad history it's like you almost like if this wasn't so fresh and like um it we you know we weren't talking about it for so long and one could say if this happened years and years and years and years and years ago it's like the recipe for like you know spooky stories coming out of it yeah yeah it's like you hear of somebody who died in a dorm and that's why it's haunted and now it's like well it keeps happening over and over again yeah it makes you wonder yeah so three people had died by suicide the year before at harvard two of them lived in the storm room or i'm sorry the stormatory

um a few months before the murder suicide a 1994 graduate of harvard who had also lived at dunster house died by suicide and a week after that a student who lived off campus was also but was affiliated with dunster house dormitory also died by suicide so this place just has a connection to a lot of dark dark events and in response to suicide suicides before c2d so the all the ones that occurred beforehand the crimson staff called for change in harvard's mental health offerings through an editorial piece in the newspaper and um in 1994 according to this plea making an appointment to see a mental health professional took 10 to 15 days on average and students who were in need of long-term therapy were often referred to outside hospitals because they didn't feel that this was

part of the university health plan so it was sort of like you didn't have many options and if you did find uh you did access it it took over two weeks sometimes to even find someone to help you which obviously with mental health concerns we know sometimes you need much more urgent two weeks two weeks is a lot of time to wait time to get help completely and at that point like clearly you're jumping through hoops so who knows if you're in a position to even have the stamina to deal with that and the health limitations so this is just really uh kind of showing the underbelly i guess of the the lacking services here shining a light at harvard shining a light on it yes yes it's almost like the issues manifesting in a really horrible horrible way

so for starters when sinadu initially arrived at harvard as a freshman harvard apparently offered nothing except for a two-hour orientation for foreign students so they just put him in a room give him a two-hour orientation said good luck good fucking luck set them on their own there wasn't a support group there wasn't like a you know special advisor or anything for people moving from outside the country it just kind of like this is i mean the the fucking orientation we got in la was probably more like here's what winter is we literally had we literally had a class called like life in la or something yes we did where like the whole semester like it was like for attendance if you if you went all the time like your attendance was basically the only thing

you were getting graded on it was just to make sure everyone was like it was a way for them to like weekly rally us together and make sure we were all like okay like hadn't like driven off the i-5 by accident yeah and like knew we had to drive a car in a los angeles yeah yeah so they didn't even have anything besides like one orientation and then they were kind of set off their own that's just a good example um and then when cena dude did try to flag her mental illnesses which she did uh she was offered therapy sessions with a doctor of education so like a phd rather than a therapist one day a month however this is pretty disturbing uh shortly before the murder suicide the doctor uh or the professor whoever was seeing her uh tried to reach her but not because he sensed anything was off but because he wanted to cancel

their next appointment, which, again, was only once a month. So you can just see that this is not going to be helpful. Yeah. Can you imagine canceling that appointment and then a few days later finding out? Not that obviously this person is to blame, but like. No, but to be like, human to human, it's very, it's interesting to be like to be like oh wow like that person really needed help that must have been like yeah the guilt alone of like um but no i the guilt alone whether or not i mean it wasn't their fault but the guilt of being like wow they needed help and i just canceled yeah and you know like i can't imagine being that person who is responsible for giving these therapy sessions they're probably overloaded with tasks because there is no real therapy offered so it's like right now they're responsible for

all these students it's not their job so like i can understand how it's just a bad system for everybody involved yeah so yeah anyway as we can probably expect harvard did not like these accusations that they were not uh doing enough for mental health. An esteemed former dean of the college named John Fox was among those who, quote, didn't appreciate the jabs at the university. And he's been quoted in response to another student who pleaded with him about receiving counseling and medication saying,

I have received my medical care from the university for over 40 years and I'm entirely satisfied. And your attacks on all things Harvard are tiresome. If you don't like it here go away whoa okay cool cool cool cool cool john cool john johnny boy and this apparently was not an unusual response in response to cena do to death says to death this is situation it's a lot of s's uh one would think that this kind of a tragedy after so many other suicides you'd think well maybe they took this time to kind of reflect and say like okay there's

a pattern there's a problem but no their response was short and accusatory the dean of the college was quoted as saying in a case of this complexity we prefer to centralize information everyone is looking for a villain and we don't want to be it so they were basically on the defense from the get-go but there is a woman named melanie thornstrom who had graduated from harvard in 87 and she was actually a professor in creative writing who ended up publishing an analysis of the murder and it was called halfway heaven diary of a harvard murder so she basically wrote a book about this murder as a harvard grad herself and is a professor of creative writing at harvard now there this is also problematic in its own way um because this is not me saying this i have not read this book but people have said that

although it does give an insight into to death uh quote thornstrom never lets you forget that she is a harvard insider and she cannot resist bringing her own experience onto the scene so that's kind of the review this book has gotten which got it we've gotten way shittier reviews on itunes that i don't like to abide by so i'm not saying that's the truth but that's just the reception it got got it um so let's see thurnstrom uh melanie thurnstrom was initially drawn to the case because she sympathized toward tedessa's kind of outcast status and it was clear she'd been suffering mentally however ironically enough cena you had actually applied to be in melanie thornstrom's creative writing class but thornstrom called said she didn't accept her into her course because her writing was boring which is like ouch we okay that's harsh but okay um nice no not really uh so it's also weirdly contrasted

because in the book thornstrom uses all of uh cena d's old journals as like her writing to reference it and say like look at her troubled soul and it's like okay but she wasn't good enough for your class until she died and now it's relevant it's a little i feel like you you've put yourself in a situation where like you don't get to use that book as part of your curriculum it's almost really and it gets worse like it gets way more um just problematic so anyway so she read the journals as part of her research into the book and this is pretty fucked up the new yorker actually sent melanie thurnstrom to ethiopia unannounced yeah and she fucking showed up on the family's doorstep oh my god what and they obviously were like utterly shocked that this like white lady just showed up and said i'm writing a

book about your daughter can i have her journals like that was what happened abso-fucking-lutely not that's just like the like the fucking gall the fucking unearned confidence to like just show up without warning to get a better story it's so fucked up um because they they could have warned the family and said do you mind if we come and visit after your daughter was just savagely you know thrown into this horrible media frenzy and died by suicide and it's just awful so uh she spent her time in ethiopia trying to get to know sena do more she dove into sena do's personal diaries which she got her hands on and um in comparison to what she had said about uh the writings that sena do had submitted for her

creative writing class she said that her journals displayed uncanny capacities for self-expression and self-analysis she left behind an extraordinary record that of an intelligent insightful strong-willed person using all those capacities to fight as hard as she could for mental health and losing it just all seems a little bit um i don't even know the right word showy like using it for your own benefit i don't know it just feels icky to me i don't know what the right word is either but you're right i. I mean, it's off-putting. Yeah. It's like not your fucking place, first of all.

No, no. And like to put the family in that position. Yeah, it's just kind of gross. Which I'm also blaming the New Yorker who sent her there. I'm not saying like, oh, this is all her fault. There are a lot of people involved in this, but. It just seems like there's a general lack of awareness for like respect yes yes yes on so many different levels like mental health like um even just grief like your family grief

yeah oh yeah like oh yeah international custom and saying like oh they're the same person because they come from two different countries oh yeah that too on that level like xenophobia yeah so um anyway the right her writings she had a lot of these spiral bound journals um they kind of revealed a lot of her deteriorating sanity she fantasized about an ideal friend she talked about her inability to obtain psychiatric care apparently so this is also this is also very kind of gross is this is what melanie thurnstrom wrote in her book after she read after she showed up at this family's door and took all their journals uh their daughter's journals she said we see that scene to do burned in a private hell of loneliness more profound than most of us can imagine she never felt loved and it seems like that she was

in fact not loved and so did not have an ability to feel love or to relate to others in even the most fundamental way. She could not feel her heart and she knew it. As she put it in her hopeless public letter, I am like a person who can't swim choking for life in a river. Oh, my God. I'm like, you just said her family didn't love her after you showed up on their doorstep and demanded her private journals. What a fucking insult of like, hey, your kid's dead. Also, let me take some of the most personal items from your home that belong to her and also you didn't love her and i'm gonna let

everybody know that you're fucking garbage and you're the reason she's incapable of love and murdered someone but look at how great i am but look at this article that's being written like i mean it's it's everything that's why i kept in that review not because i was like oh yeah i agree because i don't know i've never read it but because i was like that's an interesting angle to the rest of the story like that people are like she talks about going to harvard all the time like i don't know i thought it was an interesting angle on this um so in another entry cena do had tried to teach herself ways to make people like you uh she wrote to herself in the third person with instructions like, do not show what you really think, put on a mask, or listen to inspirational tapes. And when the tips didn't work out, she anguished about what she called her heart failure thing, and she felt, quote, dead, and it is hard to warm myself up.

So when she met Trang in the journals, you can see that she believed she'd finally found a friend, someone she could have a genuine relationship with. So when she was rejected, that was too much for her to bear and she quote-unquote snapped for lack of a better term sure um so at one point thurnstrom says she empathized with cena do saying that while at harvard she also kept diaries and said in college i was so fearful my roommates would read my diaries i wrote certain passages in ecclesiastical latin okay that's the most harvard thing i've ever fucking heard though i know i was like really i would literally if i had to like write something cornelia poella-esque agricola if i that would be my fucking journal entry over and over again literally just be like normal english except a is b and b is c and C is D. Yeah. I'd write it in pig Latin and be like,

no one will ever understand. I would just like, every letter would be a different emoji or something. Like it would be so easy to crack a code that I wrote. Sometimes I would literally write like, so I found a journal entry recently that said, die tragedy. And it was a, it was a lyric of Billy Talent. And I thought I was just really deep. And it was like, run me over with your truck or something like really emo. And then page before i wrote mom if you are reading this you should not be reading this i will know i will know if you read this and like my mom didn't read my journals because she really quite frankly wasn't that interested for obvious reasons but like that was my attempt at keeping them away i was like do not read it or i will know that you read my deep dark secret what a threat of like you better thank your lucky fucking stars i chose to let you

live and then i would i know like uh you better watch out i have control here and then i would leave it on the living room table next to my like empty taco but you would do that but the gemini and you did that on purpose hoping to lure someone in in. Probably. So you could yell at them. So she could be like, why are you writing Run Me Over With Your Truck? And I'd be like, it's my favorite song. I wish you knew that about me. It's not a phase, mom. This is who I am.

It's not a phase. This is who I am. And also, if you knew me at all, you'd know that Billy Talent is my favorite band. Yeah. Anyway. So here we go.ikes okay uh anyway so the most shocking extreme thing of all is one of the final statements in these journals that melanie thornstrom discovered which read the bad way out is suicide the good way is killing savoring their fear than suicide so you can just

see that she had like devolved into just like this is the only option left for me um so as far as i'm concerned there were several people who had a duty as a student of harvard but they had a duty to knowing that she was struggling having like evidence of these letters she was writing to strangers saying she was desperate and lonely like they i think they had a duty to to help her see something say something yeah they're responsible for her she's in their care yeah so obviously she needed help and a lot of this i want to be clear as well this is why it's problematic is because i am not at all saying this is excusable that it wasn't seen it as fault that she killed i mean i'm not saying that at all

um obviously this was not the way to go and um i just think that there were a lot of things that could have been done to hopefully prevent both of these deaths and yeah there's no excuse for murdering anyone your roommate or anyone there's no excuse so i'm not saying like well we can excuse it or explain it um there's just there's just a really sad story leading up to it that kind of sheds light onto why this happened. Right. And that clearly something needs to change or needed to change. So there's, there's a lot of argument online about this as far as like, well, she was mentally ill, but that doesn't excuse murder murder but someone should have helped her but also that doesn't give her the right so there's a lot of back and forth sure um and so part of the problem in my mind is that the two girls became

kind of one like they became kind of linked in this story as like equal victims which i do believe they're victims in different ways but trang was just like stabbed to death by her roommate like she's right i just don't think her family thought it was fair to say oh they were both equally victimized right do you know what i'm saying like no i totally get and also i mean mean, I don't. It's so hard to talk about this. It's like it's a tough spot because you want to respect the person who died and did not deserve that at all. But I also think there is space to talk about mental illness. Yes.

I know that if, you know, fingers crossed, this isn't how I go. But if someone who was mentally unstable is the cause of my death one day, I would want people to be able to like, you know, separate the situations and honor the fact that that I left. But also like that doesn't mean that someone didn't need help or two really terrible things wouldn't have happened, you know? Yes. Yes, completely. Like they're not they're not. Oh, God, now I'm forgetting the English word. You know me and my English, but they're not mutually exclusive. I'd help, but I also don't speak English very well, so. That's true. But no, like, but, like, yeah, I mean, it would, because, like, if something happened to you,

I wouldn't want to feel like I wasn't taking the time to focus on what had happened to you. But I would also be aware that, like, had there been a system in place or a better way of going about things where we paid attention to the person who needed help, then two people wouldn't be in a really dark space right now. Right, exactly. dark space right now right exactly and they're not mutually exclusive in the way that there are two tragedies here or maybe even more that intertwined but aren't necessarily like hand in hand the same thing right and aren't necessarily completely separate it's like there's just a lot of tragedy woven into this on different levels but trang herself is a murder victim here and like that you know has to be recognized as well as far as i'm concerned so yeah exactly and so i'm just going to read this quote because i think it is a good way of explaining it so in thornstrom's book she says a peculiar discourse developed on campus in

which rather than being viewed distinctly as murderer and victim the girls were recalled in one breath as if their deaths were the result of because there is the perpetrator was also a victim in a way. Right. But on different levels. So to a certain extent, I believe Harvard was to blame for what happened to senior dudes devolving mental health or at least not helping and not stepping in when they had a duty in my opinion to help um so in 1999 the London Review of Books reviewed Melanie's book and said uh the Harvard administration were just protecting their own interests basically and that it seemed like no one took interest in Sina Du because they couldn't distinguish between psychotic behavior and

ethiopian behavior so they basically were saying like well they were foreigners and people just didn't know if they were foreign or if they were psychotic it's like that is so xenophobically horrendous like i don't even know where to begin with assessing that oh my god it's like oh well we didn't know if we should like tend to murderous activity because that might just be how they shake hands in another culture. Yeah, exactly. Like, was that normal?

You guys should- If that's what you genuinely think about Ethiopians, then why on, sorry, like, why on earth did you have Ethiopians on your campus if you thought that they're just, you know, casually killing people? Probably because it looked good for numbers and diversity, you know? It's like, so you want all these people to join your school and then you're like,

anyway, good luck out there. Here's another Vietnamese student. Now you guys can get along. It's like, oh, yikes. If you really think people that you're inviting for the sake of diversity and numbers, if you really think they're more inclined to kill people and then you're still only giving them no therapy or be psychotic right at a two-hour orientation and saying good fucking luck first of all you don't get to be shocked that something like this happened and you don't get to feel sorry about it but also that's literally not how it works that's like not

even it's just it's just a ridiculously pathetic excuse and a so fucking racist that's horribly racist a pathetic defense that doesn't stand doesn't hold water at all um and so it's just pretty troubling and the same review also talks about the racism in trang's case saying the university records show that trang in a mild-mannered way seems to have sought help repeatedly to escape cena dues attentions here we go with the victim blaming ready this part really upset me had she been less sympathetic toward her increasingly disturbed roommate she would have insisted on a change of rooms long before she finally did train so she i'm sorry so she didn't fight hard enough no no she didn't yeah she was too mild-mannered

of a lady to of a girl to um so you teach people to like to you teach women to be sweet and kind and not people please and then also oh well they people please too much and they didn't they didn't they should have stood up for themselves you're not gonna like this line trang 2 was doomed by her foreignness she didn't express herself in ways who wrote this my great grandpa right like it's really gross. She didn't express herself in ways that Harvard administrators understood. She was conciliatory and agreeable, and nobody bothered to understand her situation. It's like, okay.

They couldn't understand that. I mean, it's so trouble. It's so bad. It's like, I don't even know how to begin. I mean. Oh, my God. It's so bad. It's like, I don't even know how to begin. I mean. Oh my God. That's okay. I like to think everyone gasped with us when we read that.

I like to think there's a bunch of people screaming in their cars right now. In their cars, yeah. Or like silently shaking in their office. Their cat just ran away. Like, what the fuck, mom? Wow. That is so fucking angering. And it's like so infuriating because again it's just like lumping

them together not just because they're both victims but because they're both foreign and it's like that on so many levels this is just egregiously disrespectful and so anyway this is the end i know this has gone really long but to sort of conclude um apparently there was discussion on campus about having a joint scholarship which they called, which one review called a macabre kind of political correctness because they were they only picked or only created a scholarship in Trang Ho's name. And it's now called the Trang Ho Public Service Fellowship. And then in 2000, a Crimson article noted the five-year anniversary of their deaths alongside discussion of additions to Harvard's offerings after the tragedy. so uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh to mental health offerings uh so that is the story it's like i said really it's hard to say a a um a trigger warning because it's it's it's the normal content but it's just like really the trigger warning there was like fucking ignorance and racism yes yes that too i don't even think

to add that yeah oh um and i just want to add i don't i didn't even write this in my notes which now i'm embarrassed about but um i do want to list the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline which is 1-800-273-8255 and you can talk to somebody anytime 24 7 um you can also google google a number or a website if you don't if you have phone anxiety like me and chat online um so yeah that's the story it's really dark it's really upsetting and it's not even that long ago you know 95 like and like i know that long ago i know you said this already but like quote people were different in the 90s but it's like first of all i have a lot of thoughts about that but if people were that different and we have changed that much in this amount of time

then it's embarrassing that like we could have done that so much yeah well but you know i was thinking about this yesterday because i was like wow like because if you think like oh the 90s it doesn't seem that long ago but if you think about it it was like 30 years ago and so now you think like think about the 40s versus the 70s like the amount of like social change that happened in that time period or the 70s to the 2000s like if you think about it in that I think to us it doesn't seem long ago because we were alive but if you think about it in like historical context it's like of course things were different generations were growing up like it's really different no I totally I totally get it but yeah

it's because we were alive because in my like, all the darkest things that happened were when I wasn't here yet. And it's like, oh, fuck. Em arrived on a sunbeam of light and the world changed. And I saved Boston. No. But, like, I. But, no, like, it's hard. Thanks, priest.

It's very, it's really sobering to realize, like, oh, no, I was alive during. I mean, like, it's so obvious. Like obvious like yeah i was alive when dark shit happened i mean hello millennial like every fucking year something terrible literally lived through 9-11 but like it's just it's it's so much easier to separate yourself from it when you can blame it on the fact that it was forever ago and you weren't a different generation you weren't you weren't you didn't have any control you were part of it yeah and now okay if you think about it like this the only reason that i've been kind of making this connection is that my sister's in high school now and she's only 14 years younger than me and my her high school experience compared to mine is so wildly different she has friends who are trans she has friends who are like you know all different backgrounds uh socioeconomic classes and i'm just like

this was not how i grew up this is not how my high school experience was granted i went to a different high school but it's just so cool to see like oh this is a completely different upbringing and like you know experience in school as a teenager i was just thinking about this too because my cousin was asking me about like you know being queer you know well well why didn't you come out when you were in high school? And I was like, you didn't fucking do that. Like there was no, oh, I'm just gonna go tell my I'm gonna go down the fucking stairs and tell people like I'm gay or something like you don't know. No, no, no, no. Like you waited until you graduated high school. So if you got kicked out of your

house, you were already on your way somewhere else anyway. Yeah. You didn't know anybody else. They were like, well, didn't you have, like, role models? And I was like, no. Literally, you want to know the role model I had for the gay community growing up was Rosie O'Donnell and the wife, the ex-wife of Ross on Friends. Those are the only two gay people I knew. I remember when I was six, the Ross's ex-wife on Friends was the gay conversation I had with my mom.

And it was scandalous. I I was like what does gay mean and I remember my mom giving a very short answer and like being like oh sometimes it just wasn't relevant sometimes men love men sometimes women love women and then I and then I didn't hear about it again until I was in high school and thinking like shit I think I'm the ex-wife from Friends like yeah it's all I fucking had remember that but it's it is wild when I think about it and I mean I don't want to say it like this but when you're selfishly think putting yourself in the scenario it it means more and so I do think like yeah 30 years ago like do you know how much better my fucking life would have been if I could have just come out and dated I mean like there are reasons why i didn't even have a first kiss until i was like 19 and it was because i couldn't kiss anyone

i wanted to kiss in high school i mean it's just wild that like i'm so happy for the future generations in in the queer world but also i'm so fucking jealous and you have no idea how lucky you are it's just but i feel like it's yeah And again, I want to be clear too. I'm not saying like, oh, well, it's so easy now to be, you know. No, I'm speaking specifically in my own world of like queer. I'm not even talking about like racism and all these like horrible things we've just covered. I just got into my own little tangent because I just had this conversation like 24 hours

ago where I was like, wow, the world is so different. It's just so fascinating to see like my sister and be like oh she has such a broader view of the world and an understanding of of uh social concepts because probably also increase in internet increase in like connecting with people that you wouldn't normally see in your day-to-day life and it's really uh yeah it's sobering to be like in the 90s my mom was the nanny and it was mortifying to always have to explain that she was my mother and she was divorced so we weren't allowed to go to people's houses and I lived near the quote-unquote bad part of town so no one was allowed to come over and it's just like now I'm thinking like my sister's like who gives a fuck and I'm like you're allowed to swear like I wasn't

even allowed to say hell well also I was gonna say like like your sister's generation is so much smarter than we ever were too like and maybe it's just because like you said, like, there's like, internet access and things that we didn't have at that age. But like, I feel like anytime I talk to someone that's your sister's age, they just have so much more important shit to talk about than I ever did when I was that age. And I guess it really is just like, there's so much more access to just to just learning faster and like I feel like I'm a late bloomer and learning because same so many people younger than us are just learning at you know just it's just part of life now and I feel like I'm catch playing catch up all the time so it's like part of their upbringing and we had to do it on our own almost um and that's obviously not like a blanket statement I know a lot of people are no we're just not in that position but just looking at my sister it's just like such a different i don't know experience and i think it's great um i just i have a lot of faith in i do too i know a lot of millennials have like a a little a bitterness towards gen z just because

i think we're a little jealous i'm not gonna lie i think i'm jealous for all the right reasons though like i just wish i got to be a part of that generation like no and i think we all want to be yeah i think we all want to be because looking at them i'm like damn we were i think we were the lot we were like on the edge of like socially understanding but like i think our parents no offense but i think like we got help we either held ourselves back or got held back a little bit and i think now it's so much more open and acceptable. And obviously, yeah, again, it's like, sorry not to interrupt you, but like I'm so on top of it with you. But like I feel like we were raised by, yeah, boomers.

And like even if they thought that they were like the hippies that were going to save everyone, it's like, OK, but then you gave you raised us. And like we didn't really have anyone to like to back us on all of our like our willingness for change and then gen z showed up and they're like no no everything you were thinking let's keep that going yeah it's almost like they took all our like we're just sitting here going what's a mortgage and they're like give me the tiktok i'm going to change the world and we're like okay like we're stuck i feel like we're like in uh arrested development of like we're kind of like supposed to be grown-ups but we're stuck. I feel like we're, like, in arrested development of, like, we're kind of, like, supposed to be grownups. But we're like, no, no, we want to help the teens.

Like, I feel like we're in a weird position. So, anyway, this is over three hours. I'm sorry, y'all and Eva and me for editing. But it's a – we're trying to say we think Gen Z is going to save us. 30 years ago is shockingly different than what today was and i'm so glad fingers crossed that there are less issues than less issues like that that are so blatantly horribly racist i feel like well i don't know because 2020 kind of proved the opposite but yeah well as yeah and as a as a as a as a globe hopefully we're all learning that, like, we should be fucking better than that at the very least.

Yeah. I mean, at least there are some of us who recognize it, which isn't enough. But, you know. The winning team. The winning team, as I like to call it. Yeah. Anyway. So anyway, thank you guys for listening.

Hopefully you've got some Gen Z's in your life who are helping you in your day to day just become better people so that's all I've got sorry this episode is long racism fucking sucks sorry about racism also my bad can that be the title of this episode

but yeah I don't know I mean that was a really good story it was definitely a thinker and a conversation piece for sure it's a toughie um so i hope i did it justice but no you did i think you did i think it was good i mean it's like really awkward conversations but i think they're it's good to have right i guess those are the ones to have yeah it's a good job good job christine thank you and good job to you on the creepy ufo story um if you guys want to find out more about us you can go to and that's where you drink.com or follow us at atwwd podcast or the m

schultz or x teen schieffer or ew gross with three s's not w's and uh otherwise i think we're gonna see you uh soon for listener episode maybe that already came out i don't know i don't know anymore no it comes out in two days tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow oh okay see you tomorrow for a listener's episode if you want more of this content yikes yikes and that's why we drink the amount of times we say yikes