Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 125 - Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, All Faciane

Episode Date: November 4, 2021

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When you're moving fast, you need to get your message across clearly the first time. That's why you need Grammarly, the all-in-one writing tool that gives real-time suggestions on grammar, punctuation, and tone. Upgrade to Grammarly Premium for advanced features, like conciseness suggestions, tone adjustments, vocabulary suggestions, and even full sentence rewrites. Go to grammarly.com slash podcast to sign up for a free account and get 20% off Grammarly Premium when you're ready to upgrade. That's grammarly.com slash podcast. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chilluminati podcast episode ooh. It's 124, 125. Last episode was a mini-sub compilation because we were doing the live show, boy.

I'm gonna have to update my project file now. Thank you to everyone who came to the live show. That was awesome. Yeah, thank you guys. That was insane. It was like going back to 2019 for two nights. And our bodies, or at least mine, was not prepared for a week like that. No, my body is still crying. We're all still crying. You guys got up to crazy stuff.

I was doing great until my sunglasses got stolen. Oh, yeah. Oh, that sucks. That was the worst way to end the show on that particular night. I feel like we talked to the man who did it for like a good 10 minutes. He came back to the scene of the crime to check out his victim. Why would he come over and tell us that he was chasing the guy down and that he was going to call us back if he caught him?

That doesn't even make sense. Just in case he's a listener. Shout outs to that guy and his dog. Bless. Yeah, thank you guys for the live show. That was so fucking fun. It was such a good time over in LA. We'll be doing more live shows in the future,

so just keep your ears and eyes peeled for that stuff. But the one thing we're doing this very moment that never ends is what, Alex? That's right. We are doing the show. The story. I was trying to pitch you to paint. I know what you're trying to do. Oh, okay.

I thought you got confused because you did say it was a rough week for you, so I wasn't sure you were following the queue. This was a great week for me. Don't worry. The show in which we are currently doing. We are doing the show. The Chalumanati podcast. This story begins with a dirty old house.

Yeah, but it's a surprise, but it's not. It's not that house. It's my house this time. Sorry. That was a joke in poor taste, but in my house on my computer, a browser is open and on that browser on a mysterious website. If you look at the URL and you checked the URL, do you know what it says? It says patreon.com slash Chalumanati pod where you can join up with us.

And you can help us make episodes just like this each and every week. And you can get all kinds of great free stuff in return from us that we make, that we love, from artists that we have now hung out with personally in real life thanks to experiences in our own life last week. Good vibes all around. And honestly, we got the best team in the biz. So come over to patreon.com slash Chalumanati pod. Sign up now.

Keep us afloat for paltry dollars out of your pocket. Paltry. Paltry dollars. But that is what I call another joke in poor taste. So now back to my dirty house. In my house, in the back row of a dusty bookshelf lies a book I've gone to more than once on this show for material with a particular kind of strangeness impossible to create on purpose with the knowledge and history

that we have today in our own time in the year 2021. And so I must say that this, my good friends, are strange stories, amazing facts from a reader's digest in 1976 brought to you across time and space by my own dearly departed grandmother who ordered this book in the 70s for us to perform live today on the show. So Grandma Angie, this one's for you wherever you are. This bud is for you from the Budweiser commercial. She always loved Budweiser.

Anyway, are you guys ready to get into this? So much that you peeled that onion back in a way that I was not prepared for. That's what I have a visual image of what your grandmother looked like sitting in a rocking chair with like magazines about crazy shit all around her. But Budweiser can next door with a freshly open one cracked hanging in her left hand. She's ready to go. She loved the Lakers.

That's basically those are the readers digest of the Lakers. So that's, you know, so shout outs to her. This first story, all these stories today are from strange stories, amazing facts from readers digest in 1976. And then we're going to follow back up on them with new information from 2021 to see how the mystery. I wonder if they're like things that are very obvious by today's standards. I'd like to imagine the way this episode was originally going to go was Alex

was going to produce a bunch of old mysteries and never touch on whether they've ever been revisited or not. That's almost exactly what I was going to do, but the book was like too good at like being a real peer reviewed book. So I had to like switch up my thing at the last second to deal with the fact that there was actual access to information. Those people were better informed in 1976 than I realized. Anyway, this first segment is called British California.

Okay. On a summer day in San Francisco, California, I take you all the way back to 1936, which at the time of writing was only 40 years ago. A story. Wow. And that's like, which is now the 1781. Yeah. Yeah, like, like, yeah, like exactly.

Oh my God, it's the 80s. Oh my God. The 80s were 40 years ago. If anyone was ever born in the 80s, God, that'd be crazy. If you were born in the 80s. Don't say that. That would be so awkward for you to hear this come out of your friend's mouth. If anyone was ever born in the 80s, all of us in this room.

If you were. It would be crazy if you were on a family trip with my, with my, with my family to Nantes Berry Farm the other day. And we realized that no one in the family was under 30 anymore. And we were just like, huh. Yeah. It's one of those realizations that kind of just hit randomly. Yeah.

You want a mini donut? I was like, yeah. Anyway. Anyway. Yeah. So in 1936, which was 40 years before this article was written, a store clerk named barrel shin was out on the shore, having a picnic just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.

When he happened to find a strange brass plate about five inches by eight inches with a jagged hole near the bottom covered in grime and dirt under a rock nearby. And at first he was excited. He was like, what the hell is this? I found it while I was at lunch. He took it home. He was going to see what he found. But by the time he got home, I guess in 19,

he had other 1936 stuff on his mind. So he just turn on the radio shows and cook dinner while smoking cigarettes. He tossed in the garage and it sat there for eight months in his garage until it was 1937. And he found it again. And he was like, oh, shit. Oh, yeah. And he got soap and water and he started to wash off this like ragged ass brass plate. And the stuff that he read on the plate, it was not,

it was not the foundation of a new religion. It wasn't. Dude, imagine for a moment, God threw out a plan B. Yeah. Just in case Mormonism hadn't worked. He's like bronze plate. Yeah. And just kind of huck that out there.

No, this is the brass plate. This is like plan D. This is brass plate. I thought he said brass. Oh, brass. Yeah. This is like the, if the world is coming to a close, maybe one day somebody will find this.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, he washed it up and what he read on it, it was nuts enough that he ended up sending the thing to Dr. Herbert Bolton. Remember that name from UC Berkeley, which then kicked off a crazy chain of events that reverberated throughout the archaeological world. So get ready for this.

Here's what it says. Jesse, if you would be so kind to read this, I'm going to go ahead and copy paste this into the zoom chat here for you. Oh, all caps. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Be it known unto all men by these presents.

I think that's June. June 17th, 1579 by the grace of God and the name of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth of England and her successors. Forever I take possession of this kingdom, whose king and people freely resigned their right and title in the whole land. Unto Her Majesty's keeping now named by me and to be known unto all men as Nova Albion. Francis Drake.

So you got it. Francis. Uncharted begins. This is the beginning of the first game, dude. Exactly. And almost immediately, Dr. Bolton, who gets this information, makes an announcement to the California Historical Society,

which went like this. This is a short one. This is for Mathis to read. Dr. Michael Bolton. Yeah. Yeah. You have to sing it like Michael Bolton. What a fantastic voice he has.

Yeah. No, no. Sorry. Who said this? This is Dr. Herbert Bolton from UC Berkeley. Dr. Michael Herbert Bolton. I feel like he just sounds like a nerd. Here it is.

Recovered at last after a lapse of 357. Who is this character? This is her Dr. Herbert Bolton. That's who this is. Everybody named Herbert Bolton. This voice. Here it is. Here it is.

Recovered at last after a lapse of 357. Who is this character? This is her Dr. Herbert Bolton. That's who this is. Dr. Herbert Braz. California's choicest archaeological treasure. The word for it is, is I visualize the very short round headed man with like a little thin

mustache who knows very clearly. How does that guy's name? Yes, Master. What the hell is that guy's name? He's a guy. Yeah, but he's a person. He's a real guy. Daniel Radcliffe.

Yeah. encing movie? No. He gets popped, and it becomes hot. Someone who's seen a movie will know this. Any Hour Services has a team of technicians that can take care of any plumbing, electrical or air conditioning needs you might have around your house. Got a drain that's clogged?

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Drive steady in the classy Camry all-wheel drive or turn up the traction in the beefed up tundra. Because Toyota's got an iron grip on driving excitement. Find those wheels at Toyota.com. Toyota, let's go places. You filming? We watched Mathis. We made Mathis watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

So now we get to... Yeah, I know we're about to interrupt here, but we got to watch two movies while I was with you guys. The first one on Monday, when I landed, or Sunday when I landed, we watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is a masterpiece. I agree with you. 10 out of 10.

Fantastic movie, well shot, well paced. Then we watched Jupiter Ascending as the follow-up, and that movie is a fucking mess. You mean this is perfect? Great double feature. Basically the same movie. I wish there were more statues of Cain Wise. That's his name, right? Yeah.

Cain Wise. The Likentint Genome-Geneered. Yeah, you got it. He was a soldier, right? Soldier that lost his wings after turning on it. Half-way wolf, half-man. Right, Likentint. And he turned on his people and bit them or something.

Yeah, he bit and entitled. He tried to bite and title. Right, he bit and title, that's what it was. And he lost his, they took his wings and his friend, who as a bee, as bee DNA in him, who's named Stinger, played by Sean Bean, he lives on Earth. And did you know? Wait, he had bee DNA in him? I did not.

That's why his name was Stinger. I did not process that part. Oh yeah, you missed that one. Genome-Geneered. He's Genome-Geneered with bee. We got Genome-Geneered. All right. Why they would be like...

Make him a bee. Of course. I like Mila Kunis supposed to be the main character. She just ends up being the MacGuffin, going from like capture to capture, what Kain Wise has to save her. Yes. All while... All while people should be calling her Jupe.

Here's the thing. Remember, nobody does. Here's the thing. Out of the two movies we saw, one of them is a seminal work of art, and the other is the one you're talking about. I know. It's a problem, dude. It's a great movie because you're still talking about it.

It's hard to talk about close encounters with the third kind because it's real slow. It's basically like a, what if aliens did actually come and he tried to keep to as much of the research at the time as possible about alien encounters. So it was a slow build and I loved it. Meanwhile, what Jupiter is sending is like, and then the green stone was placed under the bridge. Literally. Yeah.

All right. Take it away, Alex. We've got to continue. No worries. No worries. Now, I know that this plate sounds like it's already... You heard about the plate and then you're like, oh, that's fake. But the idea that this happened is not a crazy notion because according to what people already

believe from Francis Drake's notes, Francis Drake did end up in California in 1579 while he was on the run from Spain after he like looped around South America and he was trying to escape through the Northwest Passage. So he was looking for the Northwest Passage to escape the Spanish fleet, but apparently instead he landed in California near San Francisco and the local tribes, which I think were the Miwok, welcomed them as gods and freely offered them the entire Californian seaboard, which Drake proceeded to claim by ordering... Is that his declaration of him being king?

Yeah. That's literally what this text says from this plate, proceeded to claim the whole land by ordering a post made of brass nailed to a stake and dubbing it New Albion, which is exactly what he does because Albion is England. And while this seemed perfect, absolutely perfect at first, it was the little details that were causing people problems. So first of all, the official account mentions the area where the plate was posted as having, quote, white banks and cliffs.

But if you look at the shore near the Golden Gate Bridge where Mr. Shan was having his picnic, that's just not what's there. It's a totally different environment than that. And also, according to experts, while Drake did allegedly land on June 17th, like this plate says, he didn't make his deal with the Miwok until the 26th. So the date on the plate, like, didn't really make sense. So also some scientific tests revealed that the zinc content was impossibly high for something typical of that time and that it seemed to show signs of fire being used to hasten the

aging process, which is often a thing they do with forgeries. And the language of the lettering used isn't completely accurate to the time period, according to some people, with lots more common versions being used instead of the expected old fashioned ones. And then the things that are old fashioned, if you see the quote, it's kind of written in like an older form of English, it seems like, right? The one that really sticks out, which is using her H-E-R-R spelling, which is like what they use in this plate every time, which Jesse read, that was never used by Drake for any

reason, according to experts, right? However, Dr. Bolton, Dr. Herbert Bolton, Michael Bolton did refute lots of these claims saying that according to official accounts, the plaque was said to have been engraved with quote, the day and year of our arrival, which would make sense if why they'd write the day they got there instead of the day they made the deal. And he also found that according to further tests that the brass was indeed determined to be ancient and that plant cells in the hole, like the little jagged hole near the bottom, were mineralized in a way that did hint at the plate possibly being out a long

time in the open air, more than original tests made it seem. And then I have a quote for Jesse to read here from a report about a further investigation into the lettering itself that was done. So that's right here. Each individual groove for the lettering was examined under the microscope at magnifications of fifty to two hundred diameters because in the cause of fraud, there is always the chance of finding a hidden area which would disclose a fresh corrosion free surface. No indication or clue of artificial patination of any kind was found.

Right. So this is starting to look a little better for Bolton. And he also found that Drake had, in fact, used the H-E-R-R spelling in a prospectus for lands, which he wrote, which refuted pretty much all the criticisms except for the one about the white banks and cliffs, just because that's just they just aren't there. That there's nothing you can't there's nothing that can be done about that. But then something amazing happened. Apparently, a little after the story hit the news, there was another guy who was a chauffeur

called William Caldera, who came forward saying that four years before this guy found the plate, he'd actually found the exact same plate near the place in Northern California, which is called Drake's Bay, because it is believed to be the bay where Drake stopped. Right. So he says he found it there. And then he took it thinking that he was going to be able to sell it because his boss that he was driving for was like, that's rare. And so he was like, you know, keep it.

But then he just decided to fuck it, whatever. And he fucking ditched it near Golden Gate Bridge. He just threw it out. Oh, he threw it away into the into the ocean near Golden Gate Bridge. And that's exactly where Mr. Shin found it. So at the end of that article in 1976, they're saying, you know what, maybe it was the fucking real plate of Drake and that the whole story actually does line up.

But that was 1976. So first of all, that's fucking crazy because I did not know that about Francis Drake. I did not know that he allegedly came to California and like chilled out for a little bit and basically bought America for England. I mean, idea me there. I had no idea what falls into the category of legend versus like reality. You know what I mean? I mean, this is this is notes like from him and his crew.

Like there is this is a real like the fact that he came is not really like disputed. Yeah, it's not really disputed. I had I just had no idea that that happened. It just seems so great. It's like almost like having to swallow that like the Egyptians came over here or something. You know what I mean? It seems like that's fucking crazy. Like they would set up a colony protected by the US government.

Because it's so much it's so much earlier than the 13 colonies. It's like hundreds of years before like, you know, like the the people started to come this way from the east. Do you know what I mean? Sure. So it's just nuts. But it's 2021 now. So I hopped on Wikipedia for like five seconds. And I can tell you that there is a little bit more to this story.

Thanks to a 10 year effort by four researchers called Edward Vonderporten, Raymond Aker, Robert W. Allen and James M. Spitz, who published their own story in something called California History in 2002. They tell about this is amazing. OK, this is absolutely incredible. There's a couple guys who are part of a fraternity of California history nerds called E. Clampus Vitus or ECV. And they actually made the plate to be found by another member of the ECV, Dr. Herbert Bolton,

who was known among the group to be like a huge nerd about Francis Drake and the plate. He would even tell his students to go look for this plate. He was like obsessed with it and like wanted to find it. And so other people in the fucking group were like, let's just make it and like, let's fuck with them. Yeah, let's fuck with them. According to them, the plate was cut by a dock worker in San Francisco at a shipyard with a modern guillotine shear and then a guy who is an appraiser, an art critic and an inventor

named George Clark hammered the letters by hand with a simple cold chisel. And apparently on the back of the fucking plate, they actually painted ECV on the back in black light paint, like on the back of the actual plate. So amazing. Then apparently after they hit it in Drake's Bay, something happened, which they did not intend, which was that the guy William Caldera, the fucking chauffeur guy, found it and took it. And they had no idea what the fuck happened to it. And then he fucking threw it away.

And then years later, Barrel Shin finds it and shows it to a friend of his who just happens to be a student at UC Berkeley and who the fuck finds out about it. Other than the fucking crazy ass Drake nerd who's telling all his students to be on the lookout for the fucking Drake plate. So this guy suddenly out of nowhere thinks his fucking dreams are coming true. He makes all these announcements in the newspaper and he gets this guy chickering to fund him for twenty five hundred dollars to buy the plate, which is about in twenty twenty one money. That's like forty five thousand dollars.

And then Shin, the guy who found the plate by the bridge disappeared for a few days to quote unquote check with his uncle, whatever that means. And that caused Bolton's partner who's financing it to like panic and up his offer by a thousand more dollars just to see if it would help him get the plate. So now he has paid sixty three thousand dollars in in twenty twenty one money to get access to this plate. And now because of all the media attention around them finding this, both of these guys who paid for this, their whole entire professional reputation is hinging on these plates being legit. So now the fucking original guys who just made this to mess with

their buddy are like in like a fucking farcical situation where they're like, fuck, if we come forward with this, we have like now ruined this man's life. We have like destroyed his livelihood if we come forward with this. So instead of just coming out and saying it, they tried to like hint to him that it was fake. First, they made a perfect duplicate. They made a perfect duplicate of it and showed it to him. And they were like, we made this down at the docks with the guy. I made this. Look, it looks exactly the fucking same. And he was like, I don't care. This is the real one. And that's the fake one. And they're like, fuck. So then man, so then they sixty three thousand dollars in getting them out is going to

be hard. Dude, yeah. And then they're like, shit. So what do we do next? They publish a fake letter from a made up company called Consolidated Brass and Novelty Company. And they offer a quote, special line of brass plates guaranteed to make your hometown famous. So that was something that they published to like hint to him that it was fake. And that's not real. And then literally when that didn't work, they were like, what the fuck can we do? So they published a literal pamphlet now called Ye Preposterous Book of Brass. It's like literally a list of all the things that are fucking wrong about this plate, all the errors. They're even in the thing. They're saying, look on the back for the ECV written in fluorescent paint. Straight up say quote,

we should now reclaim the plate as the rightful property of our ancient order. But Bolton was like, fuck you guys, this thing is real. You can't convince me otherwise. And so now attention is so high on this that this guy, Robert Gordon Sproul, who is the head of UC Berkeley, forces Bolton. He's like, listen, you need to get this plate authenticated. We know this guy, Colin Fink. He's a professor here. He is a specialist in electrochemistry. But guess what fucking happens? This guy goes in, he fucking checks it out. And he's like, that shit is fucking real. Okay, you know what this is doing for me? This whole story is telling me that even those people who are like, I've gotten it checked out. It's real. Yeah.

Cannot even be trusted. But we don't know. We don't know if it's real still to this day. People still aren't really 100% sure that a lot of the chemical test, the black light to the back of it. I have no idea. There's no record of it anywhere. What the fuck? I know people still aren't because I don't think you can just get access to this thing because check this out. There are pictures of this thing in textbooks. People have given facsimiles of this thing to Queen Elizabeth. Like this is what Drake made. No one can say for sure whether the plate is real or not anymore because regardless of whether the information is good, both sides now have so much invested like ammo. Like a fucking expert was like, it's real. Like both sides are just like,

look, there's a fucking expert saying it's real. There's an expert saying it's fake. Like I don't know. That's bonkers, man. That's insane. Oh my God. Just put a black light to the back of it. Like I don't even know where is that. Let's just not assume that Francis Drake had black light paint in 1500 and whatever. I don't think he did. I'm just going to take a guess. I'm positive he did not. But this is also one of those things where if you put a black light to it and you're invested in it being real, you're like, oh, I can't find it. You know, that kind of stuff. Or like maybe ECV stands for something else and it's a coincidence. But like honest, or maybe they got the real plate and they put their mark on it to try and discredit it. You know,

there's a million things it could be now. And it's just so funny to me that these guys started a prank and it just like maybe just got like way too out of hand and that that prank happened in the 30s. And now it's almost 100 years later and we're still like, what the fuck? Queen Elizabeth has copies of this thing that they made. Like think about that. That's insane. That's insane. Strange stories, comma, amazing facts. That's one. Thank you for bookending it with that right there. Really? Cherry on top. Yeah, that's one of the stories. It's a Maricino Cheney in my mouth. Cherry, not Cheney. Whoa, what? I don't know who Maricino Cheney is. Maricino Cheney. Shoot you in the face. Kisses you on the lips. All right. This next story is called

The Slow Train to Izmir. Okay. So here we go. This one's kind of similar, kind of not. I kind of, this is kind of like if other stuff that I've done is the Justice League, this is the Justice Society. That's what this episode is. For somebody who's not a DC fan, what's the difference? The X-Men from the year 2020 and the X-Men from the year 1963. Got it. There you go. Actually works well. Thank you. So back in, so back in 1958, an archaeologist called James Melart, Mayart. It's M-E-L-L-A-A-R-T. So I'm going to say Melart. That's what I'm going to say for the rest of this. Was sitting on a train from Istanbul, Turkey to Izmir, where he suddenly realized that he was kind of idly staring at this young girl who's sitting across from him. He was

like looking at her hand and she had a bracelet on and he was like, why is that, like why am I staring, like what is up with me? Why am I staring at this bracelet? Like what the fuck is wrong with me? And he suddenly realized, oh my God, that's like a thousand year old bracelet and it looks like it's made of fucking gold. Like that's why it looks weird. So he's like, hey, hey, hey, hey, I'm Dr. Melart. I'm like, he's like an eminent archaeologist in Turkey at this time. He's like on a dig in a coil. What is it called? Coil, you techie or whatever. It's like the big Turkey, like old ancient site. I don't know the name of it. It's not like a natural word for me to pronounce. I apologize. But he was like one of the head guys at that. And he's like, hi, I'm this guy.

Who are you? How the fuck did you get this? Like what the hell is going on? Why are you wearing this like priceless jewelry on this train? And she's like, hi, I have a collection of stuff hidden at my house. And he's like, what? And she's like, yeah, it's right. It's over. Like when we get off the train, if you want to come check it out, you can like come see the rest of it. And he's like, uh, fuck, yes, I want to go see it. So he follows this chick and he finds when he gets to her house, he finds people kind of like pulling out a priceless collection of artifacts from like this unassuming just like chest of drawers. And he's sitting there just gobsmacked because what they are pulling out is literally stuff like to him and what he knows about with Turkish history

to him is like on the level of like King Tut's tomb level artifacts. Like he's getting mind rocked by the stuff that's coming out of this chest of drawers. And the girl said that she was Greek. And she said that the collection had been found during the Greek occupation after World War One and that it had come from a secret excavation at a small lakeside village in Greece called Dorak, I think or in Turkey, maybe I'm not sure where Dorak is. And strangely, while they would not let him photograph it out of fear of their own safety from like the government and people who might be interested in this collection of relics, they did let him stay over for a couple days until he was able to like take very detailed notes, sketch everything, make rubbings of all the

hieroglyphics, noting all the little details that he could see to like identify the items and stuff like that. And what he concluded was that these pieces were all over 4500 years old and that they implied the existence of a warrior ruled seafaring city near Homer's Troy, which rivaled Homer's Troy in both wealth and influence, enough so that the those that information would bring into question the way that we understand the politics of that era at the time. So a very earth shaking idea that there was this extra city there next to Troy, right? So that's what he's like dealing with. It's Jeep four by four season. Make your next adventure epic and hurry in now for great deals. Now well qualified returning FC ALSCs get a low mileage lease on the 2023 Jeep Grand Cherokee

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your door right now get 15% off your first order at burrow.com slash podcast that's 15% off at burrow.com slash podcast and he finishes up his work and he's finally done after a couple days and he leaves in the middle of the night and he realizes that even though he knows that this girl's name is Anna Papa Stratti because she told him her name and he has her address as 217 Kazim Direk Street he really didn't know anything else about her he really only just took her word for it that that was the address because he wasn't really pay he was so excited about the fact that he was like talking about this crazy priceless bracelet that he wasn't really like paying attention to the taxi ride he wasn't really in a familiar part of town so he was just kind of stressing out

about that and so that was the first mistake and then the second mistake that he made though uh it was probably what damned him which is uh since because he was worried that his wife who was he'd only been married to her for a couple years he was worried that she would be pissed at him and embarrassed if he came out that he had like stayed in another woman's house for a few days uh when he ended up taking the stuff that he made to the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara which is where he worked and he was like one of them had guys there when he brought his stuff in and showed it to the other people there he lied and said that he he'd seen this stuff six years ago before he was married but he was bringing it forward now because now he had the

permission to do so from the people who owned it so that's what he said and it kind of fucked him because it made everything else that he said really hard to substantiate while also sticking to that story uh so finally in uh 1959 after the article about the stuff he saw finally was printed in the illustrated london news people are seeing these drawings uh and stuff and the word is like growing the turkish department of antiquities becomes super pissed immediately and they begin an investigation because in their minds this guy is like been sitting on a priceless national treasure of relics for six years that somebody found without telling them and then he instead of alerting the authorities just let these people like walk off into the night and like maybe sell

these fucking things or whatever they were going to do with them so they fucking hate him now right and it's just because he lied about like the timeline of this um and this is where things got to get really bad for him because the authorities find out pretty quickly that Anapapastrati does not exist 217 Kazim Dirac street is like a fucking warehouse and it's not a private private residence um and even though they couldn't really like pin mellar with anything because there's no evidence of anything other than like his drawings of shit the turkish media has like a fucking field day with this guy saying he falsified the date of the dorak excavation people were saying that they'd seen him at the dig site where the relics came

from in dirac with the woman like with a mysterious woman she was getting out of hand and even though he like basically proved that it was all fake news it didn't matter because he was already banned from his uh other big job that he was doing at this fucking site that i can't remember the name of i bet you i bet you if if if you google like turkey archaeology it's like the number one thing starts with a c somebody will know it um but uh yeah he couldn't work there anymore and he like lost all credibility and he continued to be kind of an archaeologist and eventually even got back into turkey to be like a like labor like an assistant on digs but he never got to like be an archaeologist in turkey again and it's super crazy and nobody ever figured out who the hell

anapapastradi was or what happened to any of the treasure if it ever existed in the first place but before we get to any modern explanation of what of what may have really happened here is the suggestion from readers digest 1976 and math is if you would be so curious about this yeah if you'd be kind to read this be so kind as to read this there we go this is from 1976 said yeah okay one theory is that melard was the bait in a cunning trap set by a smuggling gang who already had the dorak treasure hidden away and ready for sale such a gang would know that the value of their loot on the world black market would be enormously increased once it was pronounced genuine by an unsuspecting expert of melard's repute the authoritative article in the illustrated

london news provided the stamp of authenticity that could be used by the smugglers where the pieces then quietly shipped away to secret buyers all over the world if that is what really happened then the truth about anna and the vanishing fortune may have been locked away forever behind the doors of some of the world's wealthiest and most unscrupulous art dealers so yeah i mean it's not a super out there theory and i think honestly like if you assume that the treasure is real i don't think it's that crazy of a theory right i don't quite understand like how they found him or how they orchestrated him finding a woman on a train or whatever or how that all happened or why they would need to take him somewhere and all that stuff but uh you know other than that not that

bad but i did go on wikipedia in 2021 and find some more information that wasn't in the reader's digest so i did find out that in 1958 after writing to her twice with no answer trying to get permission from her to talk about this stuff with the media melard did receive a letter from anna popastrati at the british institute of archaeology where he was the deputy director so here it is here's that letter for jesse to read i'm gonna drop that in the old zoom chat right here you can read that this is from 10 18 1958 from cousin derrick kadesi it's basically cousin dereck street two two seven all right dear james here is the letter you want so much as the owner i authorize you to publish your drawings of the dorak objects which you drew

in our house you always were more interested in these old things than in me well there it is good luck and goodbye love anna popastrati my man can't take a hint yeah she wants them it's true which is maybe you know if that's really from her you know that might explain why he was trying to lie about when he was there maybe he did get busy with anna popastrati who knows uh however after some investigation it was found that the letter had more than a few similarities to uh two letters written from the typewriter of melard's own secretary who also just so happened to be his wife arlett uh so here's another little quote from you uh for you to read uh about that uh for mathis and this is coming from an investigation by susan maser at scoop dot code dot nz i love it

new zealand all right most noticeable is the use of roman cap i in letter dates instead of arabic one something just not done then or now outside oxford or cambridge scholarly circles damn and sources close to the bi a a have revealed that the anna letter was drafted and typed by the melards on bi a a's remington manual typewriter yeah so not looking so good for melard at this melard's not looking too too clean right now however other people have apparently connected the anna popastrati character with the us base at ismir or with c a a activity in the area centered around smuggling illegal art pieces out of turkey for the art black market and according to an account by a german scholar called dora jane hamlin this meant that melard was used uh like he was used to

verify high value findings from the yortan culture and that the meeting on the train was intentionally arranged by government agents or the criminals that they were chasing so maybe that lends some credence to the theory from 1976 but obviously both of these things are kind of circumstantial and melard passed away in 2012 but it's also interesting to note that in 2018 melard's son and along with like a geo archaeologist or something for his thesis like published an account where he investigated his father's apartment he found tools half finished pieces stuff that kind of altogether looked like maybe it was like a forgery workshop including prototype murals and engravings uh which melard had claimed to find on the dig

that he was banned from in 1959 in the first place so he's not looking too good so nobody knows like this is all you know based on small piece of evidence i think the truth of whether or not those relics exist at all is very much still in question and so i think the mystery is still alive today for this one i'm fascinated by where they think these came from because i would love to know where that where they're like this is where we believe these are from they say it's from the village of dirac i don't know where that village is i don't know what is the ancient oh it's in tarsus it's in turkey oh it's tarsus so is it like fridgian in design we talked a little bit about tarsus during atlantis yeah i think it's your tan

something there's the or tan people where's the city she said she said that it that it that she thinks that it was high value findings from the your tan culture which seems to be kind of like a turkish kind of greek kind of your tan where the hell would they be they're a little north of where uh of where dorak is interesting if i google your tan culture early bronze age like yeah it's a thing there's like jars and stuff who knows turkish it's a turkish culture all i'm saying is fridgians are where most of the uh like big stories of of ancient Greece are from where everyone ends up there and that's like right in the middle of it so

that's what i'm saying like yeah i mean the real question is and the gordian not and all that stuff yeah the real question is is this shit real because i feel like we know this guy's kind of a i know we know this guy's kind of a schemer but like is he scheming on some real artifacts or was he just pulling shit out of his ass to get famous is the real question that's tough when that's anyone's muddied up by somebody who's just not that trustworthy yeah exactly um so yeah that was uh that was story two of strange strange what is it strange stories amazing facts strange stories come amazing amazing facts a great title of the book i can't believe that uh and i got one more for you guys today one more story this one's a little bit different than the other two not so

much about archaeology but still a very like fun historical story this one is called casper house's secret past uh it was wit monday the day after pentecost in 1828 nuremberg went out of nowhere a strange young man in rough peasants clothes and no older than 16 years old came stumbling up the road like a baby everyone who met him thought him to be drunk or mentally disabled in some way but strangely he was carrying a letter addressed to the captain of the fourth squadron of the sixth regiment of cavalry in nuremberg and when he told the shoemaker who found him uh he when the when the shoemaker found him he told him i want to be a soldier as my father was so the shoemaker took him straight to the captain and i want to say this was years 1828 in nuremberg

and this is i got to tell you the story that made me make this whole thing uh into an episode because i was looking for stuff that reminded me of that smelly ass dude who ate everything from last time i did a thing a french guy yeah that's really disgusting guys so this was like a similar deal to that one just like this weird sort of story and then everything because i found it in this reader's digest book that i had on my shelf and it just all spun out from there so the shoemaker takes him to the captain of the fourth squadron the sixth regiment of the cavalry and the captain immediately takes him to police station where he answered i don't know to every single question that he was asked and people at the time were guessing that maybe he

had a mental age of about three or four uh but when they gave him a pencil and paper he took it immediately and he wrote casper hauser down k a s p a r h a u s e r and so after that the captain kind of sent him to like something similar to like juvenile hall while he was like i got to just figure out what to do with them let me read this letter uh and so here's the letter it's fucking weird uh this is for jesse to read this is the letter that was with casper hauser or at least a selection from it i don't know if it's the whole letter honor captain i sent you a boy who was anxious to serve his king in the army he was left in my house on october 7th 1812 and i am only a poor day laborer i have 10 children of my own and i have have enough to do to bring

them up i have not let him out of the house since 1812 if you do not want to keep him you can kill him or hang him up the chimney damn wow so and if you remember this is 1828 so 1812 is 16 years right uh so that's a crazy time amount of time to not be let out of the house i don't know what this guy's deal is i don't know why he decided to get rid of him in this way or whatever but it was a weird enough story that the jailer at this place where casper was it's like a lodging home almost like a hostel slash jail for young people uh this guy took casper out of there and into his own home to keep a better eye on him and he began to notice some really strange things about casper hauser first for someone who is as old as he was and grown as he was his feet were soft soft soft like a

baby's feet like really soft which was super weird like he didn't even have shoes on most of the time which in 1828 was tough for a poor person to have very soft feet right like if you're a poor person in 1828 you're getting fucked up by the world around you period uh he also spent most of his time smiling innocently with no other expression and he stumbled around the house while walking like a baby trying to take his first steps is how it was described he had no problem with anybody ripping off his clothes and scrubbing his dick or any of that shit he never like really got sexually excited the jailer's wife would like do that for him and he didn't react he didn't really seem to tell the difference between men and women in any way in any meaningful way he didn't

really act different towards them either and he would get sick if he ate anything besides bread or water uh and he could only talk in broken sentences uh and all of this together kind of convinced the jailer that regardless of what was happening here with this guy the dude was not faking his like mental situation and that there was something kind of mysterious that happened to him in his past uh and if that wasn't strange enough wait till you hear the info that they finally get out of this dude uh what they finally get him talking so according to Casper before getting to Nuremberg he had only ever seen one human being in his entire life and he doesn't know who it was he said that for as long as he could remember he had lived in a six foot by four foot cell that was only five feet

high and that he had always sat or laid down on a straw bed in his shirt and leather trousers and that's all he did all the time he said that every morning when he woke up there would be a jug of water and a hunk of bread in his cell for him and uh from time to time when he drank the water the water would taste more bitter than normal and it would make him fall asleep and on those days if he fell asleep after he woke up his clothes would be clean and he would have trim nails and a haircut so that's like been his life uh and then one day yeah and then one day he says a man came and taught him to write down the name Casper Hauser and taught him to say I want to be a soldier as my father was and then carried him on his back out into the world and the light and the air from the

outside world made Casper pass out and then when he woke up he was alone on the road to Nuremberg where everybody found him so that was imagine that Skyrim meme I know right wake up exactly hello uh but yeah you're finally awake so that was the like newspaper story that basically exploded all over europe uh pictures of him were published like drawings of him and word got out and suddenly everyone was saying that he was like a dead ringer for the grand ducal family of bodin and that around the time that he was born that family had been hit with the sudden death of two babies in the direct line of succession uh and uh shortly after that became the common theory about who Casper Hauser was the current grand duke died which creates the mechanism of

succession to happen right so the the current grand duke dies and in 1830 the english earl of stanhope who just so happens to be really good friends with the guy who is now the successor to that duke applies for and becomes the guardian of Casper Hauser and immediately proclaims him to be hungarian and in no way connected to the house of bodin and also pressures the media to admit that they had always thought that Casper had been an imposter uh however a german legal scholar called Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach published a dissenting opinion in like a pamphlet or something stating that quote the crime against casper's liberty was not prompted by hatred or revenge solely by selfish interest Casper Hauser is the legitimate son of royal parents and was put out

of the way to open the succession to other heirs uh and then van Feuerbach died suddenly in 1833 and no proof is ever found of it but the heavy rumor around town is that he found proof behind Casper's lineage and then was poisoned immediately after that uh but then later that same year in 1833 according to his own account of the events Casper was lured by some stranger saying that if he followed him to the Ansbach court garden he has a bag for him that has the proof in it that proves that he's a royal child uh and he goes and he meets the guy there and the guy stabs him directly in the heart and and uh Casper is able to get home able to stumble home with the knife in his chest but he dies three days later after telling his story and apparently the grand duchess Stephanie

of botten cried hard bitter tears when she heard of his death because since her husband Carl had been able unable to produce an heir uh after they lost their kids the succession would now pass the countess of hawksburg's children and according to readers digest 1976 there was a story that the countess of hawkburg hotchburg was able to somehow switch out Stephanie's first baby with a dead peasant child possibly while she was disguised as a ghost known as the white lady which is a crazy detail and sending the true heir away with a major hennan hofer who may have even gone on the record confirming that that happened though no one can find that document today because when hennan hofer died all his personal papers were destroyed and burned uh or so the actions of the earl of

stan hope and casper's murder seemed to confirm the idea pretty hard that maybe there was some mechanism in place to keep him out of the royal succession yeah i mean even if they don't outright say it they went through some hoops to keep this man out of the way and just straight up murder that's what it seems like supposedly we don't this is all like 1976 exactly this is this like here say and like what like there's i look i know you're about to give us the 2021 version of this yeah but the entire time you're talking i can't help but think about like a large leap in logic that i obviously at the time they had no clue about right but i feel like 1776 but had to have no or not 1776 1976 yeah would have to if you're gonna spend 12 years in a dark room

yeah you're getting rickets i don't care i don't know if anyone listening to what rickets is but you're you literally your lack of vitamin d will cause your bones to go brittle the minute he stepped out of there he would like collapse and fall apart turn into jack skellington and he was just there's no that's a huge like problem with this story which makes me then question everything else this guy's saying and you and you very much should because here is what i got from wikipedia in 2021 are we about to find out that this is like all bs because i'm ready for it not okay so first of all let's talk about anselm von Feuerbach the guy who was like defending him in this pamphlet and saying that he really was the the air apparently a note was found in his legacy after

his death saying quote casper hauser is a smart scheming codger a rogue a good for nothing that ought to be killed which doesn't seem like what you'd say about someone who you think is the last heir to the house of bodin but he's also unclear whether or not casper hauser ever knew that Feuerbach ever felt this way about him so who knows but secondly let's talk about the earl of stanhope again the guy who seemed to have swooped in and kind of eliminated any question that this guy was the air right by becoming this guy's ward and i will say earl of stanhope paid for casper hauser's lodging in life until he died until casper was killed dear traction toyota's got 20 vehicles with available all-wheel drive and four-wheel drive

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our services or schedule online at anyourservices.com no one helps more homeowners than any our services however apparently at the time of his death hauser was not under his direct care anymore for almost a year because how uh because the earl of stanhope had given hauser over to a school master called yohan george mayer to take care of instead even though he kept paying for everything for him only because he had given up hope that hauser really was who he said he was because apparently the reason that stanhope thought that hauser was hungarian in the first place was because he saw that hauser had been seemingly remembering hungarian words and was going on and on for a while about saying that because this guy was like muttering all the time and just saying weird shit just to

give you an idea of how casper hauser was he was just saying weird stuff all the time and he was saying that the hungarian countess was his mother and that he was recognizing hungarian words so this dude the earl of stanhope spends all this money sends him to hungary twice to try and jog his memory which is not the same as going to hungary today in in 1828 it's a lot harder to get up and go to hungary uh only for him to completely fail at recognizing anyone anything nobody in hungary is like that guy's hungarian nobody believes that he's hungarian stanhope honestly yeah if this man is a is a con artist he's kind of genius because all he's doing is like you said he's muttering phrases he's throwing things out there yeah he's just kind of like letting words flow and whoever

hooks onto him like a medium in nowadays right who just kind of to an audience starts throwing vague things whatever they hook onto boom that's the direction he goes yes exactly so after that happens stanhope completely changes his tune hauser never leaves stanhope alone about the promise that he made to send him to england to see if anything was going to happen there that's like all hauser really wanted from stanhope anymore stanhope got to the point where he actually published a book with all his evidence against hauser uh saying that it was quote his duty openly to confess that he had been deceived so that doesn't look too good either no however there have been some dna tests uh since 1976 so let's check out the results of those in 1996

there was a german magazine called der spiegel which reported that blood from some of hauser's underwear could not have come from a hereditary prince of boden uh which doesn't look too good for kasper however six years later in 2002 there was another test of six separate other samples of kasper hauser's hair and his belongings uh all of which were tested and proved to be identical dna uh even though they were all from different sources but they did not match the sample that went in in 1996 which cast out on that 90 96 sample being legit in the first place and in this test he was considered a possible link to stefanie debohar nays's line however it wasn't an identical match and though that could be explained uh via a reasonable level of mutation

a high similarity if you know enough about this type of dna testing a high similarity still doesn't count as 100 proof as lots of people in germany probably fall into the category of people who could be an heir if you consider this level of deviation so i guess the truth is still kind of out there was kasper hauser a genius bizarre con man was he some kind of weird royal gendry ass heir that just got bopped out of nowhere by something strange or whatever either way doesn't matter still just ends up as strange stories comma amazing facts yeah i so yeah good no i i i want to go look up more about this story i didn't find anything but i did find something very similar which i think is hilarious so in 2011 so 10 years ago yeah a boy named ray uh in germany came out

of the woods and said that he had lived alone in the forest for at least five years what and yeah okay and uh they said like he was in good health he spoke english and german he claimed not to know who he was where he came from he was like raised in the woods like a feral child and then of course it was eventually discovered that ray was actually a 21 year old dutchman who got bored with his office job and was like screw it this is this is what i'm gonna do and so he just decided to play a hoax on everyone by claiming to be a feral kid he just became like a cuckoo bird and i just know i think he just like was tired of the day-to-day grind and like decided to do a thing and he was gonna say that he was like a feral kid living a which is crazy

because at least now you could just like id people a lot even 2011 you could just id people way easier so it was very quickly they figured it out but like he was like i'm from the woods so people still do that stuff today 1960s 70s it was way easier to do that kind of crazy shit because there wasn't any internet no internet way to communicate no cell phones you could literally just disappear and start fresh yeah yeah it's it's one of those things where unfortunately for hauser a lot of what he said or did seems like lies which makes all of it potentially a lie which kind of ruins the fun you know what i mean like there's a lot of fun to the story but it's like or there's a version of the story where he's like a clueless guy who just bounces around

like a pinball between all these like game of thrones ass people and then there's another version of the story where he's like this like weird ass guy who got obsessed with the fact that people thought this about him probably after like a weird day of acting weird and then he just like stuck with it and tried to get as many free things as he could out of it well apparently it was very popular because on they were saying that you know in europe during this time during the 1800s it was like huge and then also in america was huge and i guess i'd be willing to when did manly iron mass come out oh my god when did that leonardo de caprio's finest role you know what that is a great movie 1998 no not the movie the book okay the right 16 seven way before way before

like i think like 16 1600s 1850 that's el hombre de la mascaradero oh here's the thing yeah it's after for sure the book yeah so this is like this is in the ethos of like a mysterious person locked away and it's like is the ruler of all of paris like that is in the the cultural ethos like people want that so yeah i wonder if that played a role in it or if it was based off of the idea fascinating stuff i love that that's cool yeah that story man you had me for a minute that it might be actually true but even if he's a con man that's equally as impressive because man he just played the audience like a fiddle it's not a hundred percent clear you know that's why it's so interesting like all these stories like there's like a couple ways they could all shake out and each of them are

all kind of strange and not necessarily exactly what anyone says is happening like no one involved in the story is really telling the truth a hundred percent right because even though this guy's like said all this stuff about him and that he lost faith in him and sent him to hungry and all this stuff like he's still friends with the fucking guy who succeeded based on the fact that this guy doesn't exist you know what i mean like they're still incentive for him to lie about all of that so it's just it's it's tough he got stabbed in the heart people were saying that maybe he did it to himself but like and then he that he fucked up by just like stabbing himself too hard but if that's how it went down can you imagine how poetic a death that is for the guy who pretended

to be a guy for so long and like man talk about dedication to stab yourself near or at the heart level man that takes some guts yeah good for him for going through with it thanks for bringing us those stories can i just before we wrap up shout out to alexandre duma for just nailing it can we talk about 1844 three musketeers right 1846 count of money crystal get out of that's classic two years later that man the iron man like dude is killing it how old how old is he knock out after i know that he was born in 1802 so oh my god 40s when he's dropping not even like barely yeah yeah man he's killing it now listen that gives me hope because we're we're like just about to be there we could still work be creating our greatest works right now let me just tell you right

now going through a list of his greatest works the the things that are of him there is nothing before 1841 so this man rolling up in his late 30s as like i guess i'm writing now in the 1800s just wrote like the most important stories ever and then he's just out i hope he was a rock star hope he walked on the streets in that time and people were like wanting autographs and knew who he was and he just got all the attention most likely probably just like an awful racist about this man probably unfortunately this is look i'm gonna send you guys one picture if anyone wants to google alexandre duma here you got it this is just for my boys look at this man he would be on this podcast he would be a fourth member this podcast dude look at this dude this

guy gets to be in if i if i die but bring him in yeah he gets to get your he gets to replace if he wants to possess your body for an episode i mean wow i had no idea he was Haitian that's so cool yeah dude guy looks amazing i love this man that's the that's such a good ass picture he lived pretty long too he was like 70 years old he was almost 70 before he died damn for the 1800s that's pretty nice and it was a gourmand come on don't say it alex he finished his he finished his grand dictionary to cuisine weeks before he died god bless you know that you was like i must finish this before i expire it's not it says in the wikipedia though it says it is not thought very reliable because it relies on duma's opinions

rather than fact which if you read it again it's like it be it relies on dumbass's opinions rather than fact which is just so good look he is a man i like i said he fits this podcast he's a great last name he has the look all i'm saying is shout out to my boy rip dog cranking out those bangers yeah right oh my god i wish someone would look up a picture of me in the future and be like this dude would look great on our space cast oh dude i'll give up my spot for alexander do mother can't be two alexes on the fucking pod if you get there though i'm cool with it yeah yeah i'm down to have a month alex thank you for so much for bringing those wonderful stories to the podcast hell yeah i really enjoyed all three of them keep it real weird strange stories comma

amazing facts what is it is that right yeah that's about right if you guys enjoyed everything that you did here and you want to support us directly head over to patreon.com slash lumen adipod you can get all the posters that we've put up every month and last month's october was a chilluminati themed ouija board and she also provided both the plant chat and the board separately as art so if you wanted to print them out and put them on your own board you can do so uh it's really really sick and a bunch of other stuff that's over there including mini soads which we're gonna go do right now thank you guys so much for listening so good well yeah we got some good stuff and uh we'll see you guys next week goodbye anyway me and my wife were sitting outside indulging

on our porch one night enjoying ourselves i needed to go to the bathroom so i stepped back inside and after a few moments i hear my wife go holy shit get out here so i quickly dash back outside she's looking up in the sky and i look up too and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the stop so so dear truck and a want to talk torque the tundra's forceful twin turbo v6 will blow your mind the takomas got bite and a taller suspension to claw through that terrain man you'll dig it both

toyota trucks are tough on the outside and plush on the inside with luxurious seats and a heck of an audio multimedia setup sink back and turn it up nice rev it up at toyota.com toyota let's go places