Haunted Cosmos - Cryptid Birds, Smiling Men, & Premonitions (S7, E1)

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

In this episode of Haunted Cosmos, we learn about paranormal harbingers of doom throughout history. Turns out, Mothman may not have only visited Point Pleasant!Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes and monthly AMA's with our co-host, Ben Garrett, by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosThis episode is sponsored by: Jake Muller Adventures is an immersive, mysterious, and engaging audio drama. Use code "HAUNTED" to claim 10% off all digital downloads. https://www.jakemulleradventures.com/haunted Armored Republic: Making Tools of Liberty for the defense of every free man’s God-given rights - Text JOIN to 88027 or visit: https://www.ar500armor.com/ Drain My Lawn is providing expert, high-quality drainage solutions that protect  properties and ensure lasting peace of mind to the people in Charlotte, NC: Visit drainmylawn.com/haunted for 5% off any serviceIndigo Sundries Soap Company - Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com and use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!Rose Solutions provides custom website design, website hosting, and website security. Visit Cosmoswebsites.comStonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today. https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosGray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order. https://graytoadtallow.com/Join us at the New Christendom Press conference, The War for Normal, this June 11-14 in Ogden, Utah.https://thewarfornormal.com/Buy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Support the showSupport the show

This episode is brought to you by Jake Mueller Adventures, a thrilling Christian audio drama. The Chernobyl Meltdown is the worst nuclear accident the world has ever witnessed. Explosions, radiation, sickness, mass evacuations of entire regions in the USSR, all of it without any warning whatsoever. Or so they say. You see, rumors persist to this day of a harbinger of that doom, a monstrous, paranormal black bird warning of the disaster. faster to come. Is this true? And if so, what other may be lesser-seen warnings preceding tragedy

might we be able to find in the annals of history? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos as we try to find the answer. When a river suffers a tumultuous adolescence, it often leaves behind something called an Oxbow Lake. Formed when rivers rapidly changed course and turned sharply, even at 180 degrees. Oxbow lakes occur when a bend grows so extreme that the river pinches off a portion of its own length. The river's new course straightens where it once curved and its forgotten-butted offspring either remains indefinitely

or eventually drains away, a sickle-shaped memory of the river's troubled past. When these oxbows form in quick succession over a great length of river, the earth itself reshapes. Hills rise where plains once lay, sediment-choked ground, laced with clay, renders the land barren and a sudden swirl of color like a painting emerges when the terrain is viewed from high above.

It's undeniably beautiful, but that beauty betrays only the most wrathful and violent forces of nature. The Pripyat River is one such example of this harrowing elemental course. It is a black ribbon of water, ever-pouring ever-new, stretching 473 miles through the forgotten country of Belarus and the recently infamous Ukraine in Eastern Europe. As the river flows southeast between Mazeer and the Ukrainian border, its course grows wild. Oxbow's and the scars of former oxbows render the landscape ungovernable, potmarked with trenches and bends. It is a chaotic runway into a chaotic place. For just across the Ukrainian border lies a ghost town whose significance is difficult to overstate in modern history.

A lonely road, a road black and winding like the river beside it, leads into this place. Should one drive it, they would pass sign after sign, urging them to turn back. Yet, if the explorer persists, a gold mine of uncanny strangeness awaits at the road's end. Such a traveler would stumble upon an amusement park reclaimed by nature, with tendril vines draping over the conducting rods of bumper cars and weeds towering up to the first bucket of a ferris wheel. A central square overgrown with trees and grass and crumbling under the sheer weight of time, gives way to rows of brutalist apartment buildings, all completely empty. Inside any of these homes, one might find crumbling walls and peeling paint,

mold-flecked dinnerware, and decrepit children's toys, staring lifelessly into the soul of the visitor. Finally, on the far edge of town, a gymnasium stands with a rotting court and parallel bars rusted nearly to dust. The silence here grows thick and oppressive. The ear longs for sound. The eyes search for movement or any sign of life, but none appears. Even the animals have long abandoned this poisoned place of death.

This is the cursed town of Pripyat. Once a beacon of communist progress, it now barely stands, a mausoleum whose graves are all empty, yet which nonetheless overflow with death. Pripyat was officially declared a city in 1979. Before that date, the Soviet Union permitted only workers and their families to reside in the closed settlement. These workers were, of course, nuclear plant laborers who spent their days toiling at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility.

By 1979, authorities believed nuclear energy to be so thoroughly mastered, and the symbol of Soviet victory represented so powerful that they opened Pripyat to any Soviet citizen wishing to live there permanently. The city eventually grew to house nearly 50,000 men, women, and children. Within a single day, however, that number was reduced to zero. At 123 a.m. on April 26, 1986, workers at reactor number four began what they intended to be a routine operation test involving the free momentum wind-down of the generator's turbine fans. The technical details of the test need not concern us here.

What matters is that the reactor's thermal power was supposed to be between 700 and 1,000 megawatts for the test to be performed safely. Instead, though, the power level sat at a mere 200 megawatt. something the workers appeared not to regard as especially troubling. Such was the state of affairs when the test began. In about 40 seconds into the procedure, two control room engineers initiated an emergency shutdown of the reactor. According to eyewitnesses, no sense of panic accompanied this decision.

The engineers carried out the shutdown as just another routine step in preparation for more invasive maintenance scheduled later that day. No one yet realized that the reactor was already destroying itself from the inside. Seconds after the shutdown process began, uranium control rods entered the reactor core according to protocol, but this was a fatal mistake. A reaction occurred between the control rods and a latent ion that had not been properly burned off due to the low thermal energy in the core. And within three more seconds, the reactor's energy output nearly tripled. The surge stressed multiple fuel rods to the point of failure,

and jammed the sensors transmitting data to the engineers monitoring the reactor. from above, Doom was now inevitable. Only at this point did some of the workers begin to suspect that something had gone terribly wrong. The reactor's power output skyrocketed to a staggering 30,000 megawatts, 10 times the normal output, all in the blink of an eye. This far exceeded the structural limits of the steam turbine infrastructure. A small explosion followed, muted and subdued like footsteps foretelling something worse, and everything seemed to pause.

Seconds later, the worst finally came. The nuclear chain reaction in the core halted, but in the process it catastrophically damaged the graphite-moderated containment vessel. Radioactive graphite hurled itself into the air, its channels still teeming with neutrons. Exposed to oxygen-rich air, the debris ignited, and the blast equaled 225 tons of T&T. Moulton burning chunks of radioactive material rained down on the plant like volcanic lava. And as with the people of Pompeii, it was already too late by the time anyone fully grasped what was happening. The Chernobyl disaster remains the worst nuclear catastrophe the world has ever seen.

Radioactive debris showered hundreds of workers with enough radiation to doom entire cities within a month. The event led to 31 immediate deaths, countless hospitalizations, a measurable rise in cancer cases in the following generation, and a sharp increase in self-induced abortions by mother frantic and terrified for the well-being of their unborn children. Propiat, of course, was evacuated, as noted, in less than 15 hours. To this day, travel through the city remains heavily restricted and closely guided, and it remains unclear when the reactor building itself will ever be safe for human entry. Still, the danger has not stopped explorers who call themselves stalkers from entering the protected zone. And if their stories are to be believed, they have witnessed things that make one wonder

whether Pripyat will ever truly be safe for humans again. Perhaps mistakes on this scale reopen the door to the wilderness itself. Perhaps through our own errors, we have created new haunts, new places for jackals and demons to roam. Just before the year 2000, a New York-based physicist received permission to gather data at the Chernobyl disaster site in Pripyat. He arrived with a small team of fellow scientists, aids and guides familiar with the ghost town. The drive to the reactor felt dreamlike. Once again, the pervasive quiet stole the day. The forsaken town seemed abandoned by everything, even wind and cool air. The atmosphere was dense, weighed down by the memory of destruction that had so recently filled it. By the time they reached the plant entrance, everyone

wore full protective suits. Geiger counters chirped at each man's waistband every few seconds, as they stepped over weeds and fractured concrete. All it was, Once, like forgetting the journey after driving somewhere familiar, the crew found themselves inside, splitting up to collect their precious data. Before long, the lead physicist wondered the rotting corridors alone, exactly as he had hoped when he sent his aides off to other corners of the facility. He crossed the covered walkway between the office buildings and the reactor control room. The door stood ajar, likely untouched for over a decade.

He stepped directly into the place where the disaster had occurred. His Geiger counter snapped to vigorous life so suddenly that it startled him. He glanced down, instinctively checked his protective suit, and then pressed on. From the control bridge, he looked down into the sealed pit, whose cover concealed the reactor core. After the disaster, Soviet engineers and emergency workers had scrambled to contain the still unstable corps as best they could, and up to the physicist's day and ours, no one has entered it, or so we're told. The man descended the stairs and stopped just outside the door leading into that forbidden place. It was locked, of course, but it hardly mattered.

The physicist had no death wish, and so no desire to venture further into that invisible hell. Still, as he stood there reading his instruments and jotting notes, something happened that made him suddenly pause. An odd sound. Beneath the Geiger counter's buzz, the censors beeping, and the scrape of pen against paper, something emerged that didn't belong. He carefully set his. equipment down and shut off the Geiger counter.

Inch by inch he moved closer to the door and pressed his ear up against it. From within he heard the roaring sound of a terrible fire and layered over it the muffled screams of a single man begging an old Russian to be let out. He recoiled from the door, abandoned his equipment, and sprinted back to the rendezvous point with the rest of the crew. He knew no one else was in that building. And even if someone had been, there could be no one behind that wall and no fires still burning. Visibly shaken, the physicist sat on a stone wall outside the plant's main entrance.

From there, he could see the building housing reactor for a few hundred yards to the south. Ignoring his team's questions and the findings his aides tried to share, he just stared at the structure. He remained silent as night fell. Even after the others finally gave up and left him alone, waved off for the umpteenth time. Eventually, a colleague brought him food and insisted that he eat. He complied and at last explained the reason for his fugue. Just as his colleague finished assuring him that it was likely just his mind playing tricks on him, both men saw a light flicker on in one of the control room offices above Reactor 4, and after a few more seconds, it flickered off again.

Circa 2020, a spiritualist named Davy Russell, joined a team of other spiritualists, mediums, and psychics on an expedition to the alienation zone in Pripyat. They had heard enough stories of very real hauntings, relayed by tour guides and stalkers alike, to believe the place merited a thorough study of their own. Accompanied by the team's resident medium, a young woman named Claire, Russell stepped into one of the abandoned apartments, high above the dead ground of Pripyat. The scene awaiting them inside felt as sorrowful as it was uncanny. Decades of dust coated a life fully lived and hastily fled. Children's toys lay strewn across the living room floor, dirty dishes, long since dried into odorless brittle, filled the scyed.

sink, while clean ones sat stacked in open cupboards. Books lined the shelves, some had fallen during the escape, and still peppered the floors of every room. Family portraits hung on the walls. Claire picked up a loose picture from the mantle. It clearly showed a little girl, though the details were hard to make out. She carefully placed it back where she had found it. Neither of them felt anything beyond the stifling air blanketing the entire region, and a lingering smell of must. They set out to leave the room and search another apartment. Russell stepped through the front door first, but the world snapped into chaos before Claire could follow. The door slammed loudly behind him. He whipped around, but Claire was gone. He called for her, no response. He turned the handle,

but it felt as if it was set in concrete. He banged on the door. Still, there was nothing. He threw his shoulder against it three or four times before it finally gave way. Yet, when it did give way, it opened as if it had never resisted him in the first place. It didn't break under his force. It just swung open like an ordinary door. Had it not been so clearly shut by something, Russell might have felt foolish. He stumbled back into the apartment and nearly collided with Claire.

She had not moved. He found her standing in the center of the living room, staring blankly at the wall that held the door. She snapped out of it and looked at Russell, her eyes wide with shock, and a slight smile formed on her lips. Did you see it? she asked. Russell said he had not.

Claire told him that it was not a ghost, but something more substantial. Still smiling, she assured him that they were not the only ones in that apartment. Russell's radio crackled to life as team members from the floor below asked if they were okay. The crashing had echoed loudly down the hallway. Russell assured them that everything was fine, though he didn't really feel certain about this. Claire held up her phone and pressed play. By chance, she had been filming their attempted exit.

Russell watched his dark silhouette step into the outer sunlight before the familiar thud of the door slammed shut in front of Claire. He could not hear himself calling out to her. He couldn't hear himself pounding on the door. The handle didn't so much as tremble under his attempts to reenter. The video remained utterly silent and tinted with a sepia-like shade. Still, enough light remained to see somewhat clearly. Within a second of the door closing, a sharply contrasted figure of shadow,

clearly a man, walked from the front door along the wall and then vanished as of slipping into the adjacent bedroom. The sight unsettled Russell deeply. Only Claire's breathing could be heard now, and the shadow jerked forward as it moved, as though frames were missing from the recording. When it fully disappeared, the door released itself to Russell and Claire ended the video.

But if the stories are to be believed, this experience is neither unique nor rare in Pripyat. In fact, if those same stories hold true, these things did not begin after the Chernobyl disaster, but they preceded it, like pagan prophets and old tales, Strange events were reported in the days leading up to the reactor explosion, events that only began to make sense after the city was destroyed. It all seems to rhyme with another episode of high strangeness and terrible tragedy, one that we've already covered on the show before.

It was April 20, 1986. In less than a week, the bustling Soviet town of Perpiette would become an untouchable zone of invisible and invincible death. But until then, life went on. None the wiser to the dark game fate was playing. That was, at least, until just after lunch. One of the engineers on shift in the control room of reactor four was walking back to his office when he looked up and saw something odd, perched atop the building he was approaching.

A black shape, massive and bird-like, stone still in the swirling spring wind. He could not see any features of the bird, for that is what he assumed it was, and he didn't see it move even once, but he did notice it. And later that night, the same man was troubled by dreams of pain and confusion. in the background of the dream lingered the shadow of the bird thing he had seen earlier. The next day, things escalated.

Two other engineers assigned to reactor four stood near the bay window that looked out towards the core, monitoring nearby sensors. A sudden impulsive sound, like metal scraping against metal, but lasting only an instant, made both men jump. When each realized, the other had heard it too,

they exchanged glances, but when no other sound followed, they shrugged and turned back toward the window. In a flash, only slightly longer than the sound itself. Both men saw a grotesque monster flying over the core. It stood two stories tall. It was black, and it hovered in place with outstretched wings that did not flap. Its entire body dripped with something darker than night, yet the droplets never landed anywhere. And the eyes, the eyes glowed, a deep, bloody red. They stared back at the men without blinking, and then it was all gone. The engineers agreed it must have been a trick of the

Nothing more than glare, imagination, and mutual suggestion. They decided to just keep the whole thing quiet. Later that night, each man received a phone call in his apartment. They lifted the receiver and greeted the caller only to hear muffled, labored breathing on the other end of the line. Voice whispered something, something about a time and a day, and then the line went dead. The very next day, cold, dark, and rain-soaked,

two yet other employees encountered this same monster. as if drawn into a waking dream, both men suddenly found themselves alone in Pripyak, though they were certain it had been busy only moments before. Through the rain and thunder, they heard a terrible roar carried on the wind. Looking up, they saw the beast flying low above them, its red eyes burning bright, lit by some malice deep within. Black tentacles hung from the trunk of the thing, a necklace bulky black glistening mass. The eyes were pulled back, suggesting a gaping maw, though all that could be seen inside

was more darkness. Then another terrible cry rang out. When the men recovered from the sharp pain in their ears, the world had returned to normal. These men, too, worked in the operations of Reactor 4. In the days leading up to the disaster, these five unlucky men were plagued by further visions of horror and more threatening phone calls, always an inhuman voice talking about days and times, but never really clearly. On the 24th, a shift change placed all five of them on duty together. One way or another, one of them let slip that he had encountered and continued to be haunted by this terrible creature. It wasn't long before the two pairs of witnesses identified the lone witness from the 20th. And so the five co-workers felt a kind of bond

formed between them, not one of affection or respect, but one of panic. Each shared the unshakable sense that something terrible was coming and that something needed to be done, but they didn't know what. Before his shift on the night of the 25th, the first man shot upright in bed, locked and about of sleep paralysis. Lucid and unable to move, he watched as the gigantic black bird thing loomed over him, filling his mind with thoughts of woe and death

and agonizing pain. It took him an hour to stop shaking. He began his walk to the reactor with the most profound sense of dread he had ever known. And just before entering the reactor building on that night, turned and saw the dark silhouette of the beast,

motionless yet somehow sentient, etched against the light of a full moon. And then he entered. And then the disaster befell Pripyat. Some believe the catastrophe did not come without preternatual warning. Some believe this beast, this fallen elemental, served as a harbinger of the doom, sealed into the fate of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Some mourn the lack of action taken in response to such high strangeness, but honestly,

what would any of us have done? The story echoes, again, something familiar. A note struck deep in the old song of the Appalachian wilderness. for who, when faced with the black bird of Pripyat, could fail to recall the mothman of Point Pleasant, the Flatwoods monster, or injured cold? Is it all real? And if so, what does it all mean?

What other warnings from an unknown world has humanity received before tragedy strikes by its own hand? Apparently, the list is fairly long. Hans, welcome to season seven of the hit award-winning show, according to me just now, Haunted Cosmos. I'm one of your host, Brian Sovey. joined as always by my handsome and talented

good friend, Benjamin Garrett. I thought you're going to say Evan essence. No, I want, well, and Evan essence. Yeah, Evans here. Unfortunately, Martina's not here. No, Martina's not here. Where is he? There was a certain group that came in the town.

And sometimes when you want your drink to be colder, you use this group. And he had to flee. Nice. And we, and we, all day, we've been like, don't they is. Where is he? No, no, he's working. He's getting important stuff done.

But we do have good news for you. Also, hi. Oh, hey. Yeah, glad to be here. What's up, guys? We do have really good news for you, and that is actually in honor of Martina McBride not being here. If you sign up for Patreon, any tier, and you use the discount code, Martina, all caps, Martina.

We're going to give you, what is it? One month, your first month, first month is how much is it? And you know what you get with that? Different rewards varying depending on the tiers. Just read it. Like I'm not your mom. The normal Patreon benefits. Yeah.

Like the Dusty Tome, our weekly award winning show. I'm just saying that. Hey, by the way, by the way, by the way, this is only for Patreon, not Supercast. That's true. The discount is Patreon. Yeah, patreon.com slash Hana Cosmos.

Yes. C. C. Thank you. And guys, it's a great time. And we can't do this show without you guys. Our patrons are what makes it happen, so thank you guys for supporting.

But here's the thing. We need to talk about the things that we've been talking about so far in this episode. Yeah, we have an episode here for you guys to kick off season seven that we're very excited about, where we kind of go back and revisit some of the motifs of maybe if we had to pick a rank of our collective favorite story. I'm sure individually it might be different. But together, I think Mothman is probably at the top. It's est here. It's at least near the top.

Oh, it's got to be S tier. So we're going to go through some of the motifs of the mothman's story. And we're going to just look at other examples of that that we can see well documented throughout history, extremely well documented. Premonitions? Yeah, premonitory dreams. Where'd Pripyat happened? Was that just in the cold open? Pripyat was in the cold open, yes.

Because we got to talk about that. Yes, so there were birds. We got to talk about that. Bird-like harbingers of doom. We've got to talk about it. What we got to talk about it? I have a lot of thoughts on the birds of Pripyat. We got a talk.

Bird like Harbingers of Doom. We got men in black, smiling men, into cold type things. Dude. We got premonitory dreams. And then at the end, a story that maybe pokes a little bit of doubt into some of these stories. And it's, you know, how myths are made and how we attach great, great transcendent significance to things. When sometimes that preternatural significance maybe wasn't there. Maybe we were looking for it.

Maybe we wanted it to be there. Yeah. and it weren't. And it weren't. And it, you know, it's like the show, truth or fiction.

Is that the name of the show? With, Factor fiction. With Riker from Star Trek? The one where he's like, we made up. Where he keeps saying, we made it up.

How much would it take for you to spend a night alone in a cemetery? We did a short once, go to our YouTube, go to our Instagram, check it out, really funny. One of my favorite shows growing up

where they would tell, some of you kids are like you, this was before your time, but they would tell three stories in the show. And they would like dramatically reenact them. three 14 creepy stories. And then at the end, they'd be like,

now which one was true and which one is the product of our staff of writers here at Factor Fiction? I think it was Factor Fiction. Yeah, I think that's right. And then you had to guess and they'd give you a minute.

They'd go to a commercial break or something, which back in the day, you couldn't skip those. They were just baked right in. And, dude. And then you guessed and you were so amped if you got it right.

One of those stories kept me up for like years. of my childhood. Really? The red-eyed creature. Well, I'll tell you what, one of those stories does not exist in this episode because everything is fact. All right? Everything is fact. So guess from the cold open? Which of the stories in this episode? Do I dispute are real? Brian doesn't think that the Birds of Pripyat actually happened. I don't. And I keep telling him, no, it did. And he keeps saying, how do you know? And I keep saying, because I just know. I got to, I got to keep it. I got to keep it a hundred with, I got to keep it a dollar bill with you. How, what does the Zimmers say?

100. I got to keep it cash money with you guys. And just say that like a lot of the birds of Pripyat stories. Now, Chernobyl's real. Like I want to be clear. I think that you're even calling that into question. No, that happened. I think we have to, we have to, that's real. We have to ask about your credibility. I recently stumbled across a YouTube channel that just does retellings of horrible disasters like the Indonesian tsunami, Fukushima. I love those. I love those. I love those. I love those. And I watched it with my kids and we were horrified. They're amazing. Trinobo happened.

But there is dispute. There's disputation that the birds of Pripya and the mothman adjacent stuff was creepy pasta from the early 2000s, not original 1980s material. Right. Take that for what you will. There is that, Ben. But let's be honest, what do we think really happened? At the end of the day.

At the end of the day. At the end of the day. You know what was, you know what? Like, seriously, there is a lot of firsthand account. witnesses of like the Davy Russell guy who saw the ghost in the apartment. It's all mixed in there. That was all real. Well, he said, yeah, that's a real eyewitness. And that physicist from New York said that that actually happened. He heard like, he heard the burning and the crying. And the birds of Pripyat also, like, I talked to one of the birds. And I was too proud.

Cut to a lot. Cut to an obvious AI of Ben talking to the birds. Cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap. Why are you making the sound? I don't know. Like, they're going to cut. It was sleep paralysis. It was terrifying. I was woken up by the bird of Pripyak. Okay.

This is not true. He looked at me. He says to me, he says, I'm real. But later in this show, there is another event, another story that I thought, for sure, the first time I heard it, like, this has to be an embellishment. This has to be fake. Yeah. Because a lot of, like, you get in a 14th, even if you're just interested for entertainment,

it's fun to read, fun to look into these stories. That's half of what we're doing here at Honocos. we're having a good time telling stories that are kind of fun and whatnot. But this later story, it's documented. Like multiple account. I'm not going to tell you which one it is. It has to do with a horrible disaster where something we said would never be in Honecosmos is in Honecosmos.

It was that one episode where we said children wouldn't die. And it was the way, the commitment was that one episode. Disclaimer, by the way. Parents and trigger warning, if you will, children do die in this episode of Hone cosmos. We don't. It's a historical event. We don't like get any deep into it.

But it does happen. Yeah. So just be aware. It is, if you count the cold open as one story, it's the third story. The third like scripted chunk. Because there's three stories in the second scripted chunk. That's true. So like, you know how we do things around here.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So birds of Pripyat. Yeah. I have something that I would like to say. Okay. And that thing is this.

That whether or not the Birds of Pripyat thing is real, definitely is. One thing that I do think is interesting is the recurrence of this like harbinger of doom that's a bird, a bird figure. Because we do have that with moth man. Yep. And it's a Slavic, in the Slavic mind, birds, I think it's either crows or ravens are harbingers of doom. Yeah, especially in even before that you had in Germanic lore, in kind of Nordic myth, Odin sent his ravens across. that he had two ravens that he sent across the earth every day and then would come back and tell him.

Sound design. Yeah. Again, you can say sound design and then real sound design will be included because we do sound it's Michael Scott when he's like, oh. And he's just throwing a whole slices of bread out. There's no burger. I'm okay. No, I'm not.

Keep going. We got it. This is why we get one star reviews. This is also why. Yeah, dude, this is why we're great. This is why we get five star reviews. Cool. So I do think it's interesting that like whether it's fabricated or which I think it's not.

It's, it kind of lends some credence to maybe the importance of that, that myth and motif. You have birds being the thing that kind of do the prophesying and then the informing of the gods. What is it about birds? Are they real? Well, what is it about them? That's the thing, man. They're not real. Birds are, yeah, you want to know something about crows.

Yeah, I do. Crows are like, I think apart from humans, like, given the size of their rain, they're the smooth, not per capita. Given the, but we can talk about per capita stuff if you want to. No, they are the highest intelligent. Yeah, pound for pound. They are like the most intelligent animal.

Yeah. Who was, there was some YouTuber that did like a whole thing where crows were like performing insane feats of intelligence. I think it was Mr. Beast, which I don't even really watch. But I think I've seen it. And Mr. Beast was like, if you can catch this crow by jumping out of a plane without a parachute. I'll give your mom this life-saving medicine.

I'll save the life of your mind. I totally could do it at any moment. Yeah, but I'll wait. I'll wait until you risk your life. If you live in this darkened warehouse with 6,000 crows for the next two years. Mr. Beast is like the real life jigsaw from the song. He's like, if you break your own leg, I'll save your mom's life. If you give me a daily blood transfusion of half of your blood to keep me young, I will give you.

Anyway, bird motif. Yeah. No, yeah, what is it about birds? Because they are, like, they do show up all over the place, even up to it, including like the old Hitchcock movie. Birds are just. The boards. There's something about them, man. Well, they know.

What do they know? So there's a, you know, even in Native American folklore, there's the Thunderbird. there's like the firebird, there's dragons and stuff like that. And I don't know. I mean, if you latch on to my wild-brained idea, my hair-brained idea is what I meant to say, about how fallen seraphim were dragons because seraphim potentially are dragons.

Then it makes sense as to why birds would be these like portents of importance. Because they're dragon-like? Portents of importance. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Because they're, well, dragons, dragons are bird-like is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, for sure. You know?

And so like thunderbird stuff, Quetzalquattle was a bird. Quetzel-coat-lis was a teradal-like dinosaur. I feel like you're making this. No, I'm not, dude. My sons are obsessed with Quetzel-Quat-Lai. I made it. In fact, you know what? Story time.

I love reading books to my children before bed. But sometimes they can't agree on a book. And so I say, well, here's what we're going to do. I'll tell you a story. And I've created a whole series of kids stories based on this character, Steve the dump truck. And Steve the dump truck does everything. Like Steve the dump truck rebuilds medieval walls,

fortifying castles and then fights off Muslim hordes. Steve the dump truck, by the way, is not even a dump truck. It's a man. No, it's a dump truck. And then Steve the dump truck has also gone back into antediluvian times to help a bunch of myosauruses,

move all their eggs over a mountain that's haunted by an evil quetzel coattlis. Like this video on YouTube if you want us to publish a series of children's books about Steve the dump truck doing all these things. You want to talk about, seriously, a best-selling kid's book. Comment if you do want us to do it. Like it if you also do want us to do it. Leave a review of any stars anywhere you're listening if you want us to do it. Basically, I want to do it.

Subscribe whether or not you want us to do it. That's a good point. Anyway. And I think that maybe that's why. I think that maybe like, you know, there's this kind of ancient significance to the bird figure with dragons, with angels, with chimera from old myths. And I think that those things had some basis in reality. So I don't know. I don't think it's that crazy that either we import bird motif into things or they actually, like the moth man, I really think.

I can't express this enough that I think the moth man was real. I mean, I think so. And so there's automatically a kind of significance there. There's like just dozens of sightings of the Mothman. Go see our published work. Yeah. A lot of them are quite... Episode title Moth Man.

They're quite reliable, the witnesses, in terms of their everyday vocations and their proclivity or propensity to tell wild table, tails seems low. Yeah, like, dude, you want to talk about a reliable witness. Let's talk about Woody Burger or whatever. Woody Durenberger. Yeah, that guy...

Sewing machine salesman. Why would a sewing machine salesman? salesman lie. You know what I mean? Like, he's honest as a... As a sewing machines. As a traveling salesman. As a sewing machine. He's honest as a sewing machine.

Yeah, I mean, it's not going to move sewing machines. Oh, you're the guy that saw the creepy Indian telepathy guy. Like, let me buy a sewing machine from you. Yeah. You can go listen to the interview with Woody Dernberger. Yeah. Where he, like, in his own words,

lays it out. And he's like, and they called it a gathering. And it's his whole... Because that's what Indrid Cold told. Woody that they call the city in his world. He also... And then it did kind of go a little off the rails with the sewing machine salesman.

When he started saying that he like visited injured cold his world a few times and like had a whole family there. It's kind of like Steve the dump truck. When he went back in time where your kids ever like... Where your kids ever like... I don't know if Steve actually jumped that.

Jump the shark a little bit. No, my oldest son is a literalist. One time we were walking back up to our house on the sidewalk. and he was like pushing his bike and I was like, look buddy, it's like you're climbing a mountain. And he turned around and deadpan looked me in the eye and said, this is a sidewalk.

Okay, yeah. Apart from the bird thing, though, I do think it's important to maybe find a biblical ground for like a supernatural being overseeing some doom or destruction. And I think the most fascinating biblical example we have of that is from, I think it's First Chronicles 20. When David does the census,

he becomes the Census Bureau. And God is like, I told you not to do that, that's bad. And so he starts to strike Jerusalem with pestilence. But it says that like an angel was administering the destruction with a sword outstretched over Jerusalem. And David could see the angel in the sky doing this. And first of all, you know you're cooked. First of all, that imagery goes hard.

Someone plug it into AI. Second of all, that kind of, you know, it lends some credence to the birds of Pripyat story. Well, here's the thing. In my mind. I did not. I did think in terms of the disambiguated concept, let's just say, of being reigning over destruction at God's behest in his providence. We do know that it happens because God tells us about it. And it sometimes tells people what he's doing.

He's like, hey, by the way, I'm sending this angel and he's going to just absolutely wreck everything. and a bunch of people are going to die, and you all deserve it. But that doesn't necessarily mean that he always tells us about it. Yeah. Like, for example, in the book of Amos, the prophet says,

does disaster befall a city, save the Lord do it? And it's a rhetorical question, and the answer is no, like disaster does not befall a city unless the Lord, in his providence at the minimum, governs all things.

God governs all things in his providence. And so we know that when disaster strikes, man is actually authorized to read it, and to say, like, what are we supposed to take from this? Even if at a minimum, it's not always as one to one as like Sodom was destroyed because of these sins. Sometimes we don't know that directly, but we can say at a minimum, well, God is the Lord over the flood. God is the Lord over these things. And he directed them in his hand for his own purposes.

And so, like, at a minimum, fear God. And nothing's arbitrary. So, like, God doesn't do anything arbitrary. So everything does have a meaning. We can't always tell that meaning with accuracy. also like revelation, you know, in John's revelation, there's angels in heaven that are pouring out bowls of rat, like the bowls result in natural disasters on the earth. Now, I don't want to flatten all like secondary causes and say that, okay, so every time anything happens, it's because

an angel is like tinkering with nature. No, not necessarily. God also establishes secondary and tertiary and on and on and on causes such that things do operate normatively, given the mechanics that God has created. Yeah. But we do know that at times there is that direct intervention in that direct kind of meaning. And you're supposed to fear God in light of it. It's like the Lord Jesus was it was interviewing or like doing this Socratic dialogue with some folks who were coming to him one, you know, I can't remember the passage.

And he was talking about the tower that fell and killed. There was this disaster that everybody knew about in the region where a tower had fallen and had killed some people. And he basically said, do you think they were more? more wicked than you. Yeah. And his point was pretty clear. Like, God can write the end of your story with a falling tower any second.

And it's not because those guys were particularly bad that that tower fell on them. Like fear God, be prepared to face eternity. These are all real messages we should take from everything from like the collapse of a bridge to a natural disaster to even just the normal ordinary effects of the fall in our life. Sickness, illness, trial, death, cancer, etc. these are supposed to preach to us true things. Yeah. About God in the world.

Yeah, so really moral of the story. Like any time you go outside, you should be terrified. Not exactly what I said. Like, exactly, but close. Hey, I'm kidding. Hey, what could I? I'm kidding here. Okay, well, hey, should we move right into the stories about smiling men, men in black, injured cold?

I mean, these are some wild ones. Yeah. Like, did you have anything else that you wanted to kind of intro the show with? No, I do. just want to say, of course, thank you to one of our headline sponsors here. The headline sponsor this show, Nutri Sal, because they have gone to bat for us in supporting this show and their Christian brothers make it some

great, great products. Let me just put it this way. If you want your P to be blue and get health benefits, these guys are the ones to go to. I have used their methylene blue and I enjoy it. Yeah, so have I. So check it out. We've got link in the description with some of their stuff. And of course, always check out our great sponsors. They help make this show possible. And they're just good Christian businesses doing good work that we think are commendable. So support them. And all that's always in the comments. I think we're going to have a word from our sponsors. Then we're just going to go into some really some of the greatest stories you'll ever

hear in your entire life. Well, I'm ready to sit back and relax and enjoy. Ben, have you heard of the Jake Mueller adventures? What's that? A Christian audio drama. Zombies, vampires, global, conspiracies and faith at the center. I was up all night on the edge of my seat. Is it fully immersive, sound effects and cast and everything? Yes, full cast, cinematic sound. It's like you can hear the danger coming. Ooh, so kind of similar to Hanna Cosmos, but no, your mom jokes and more drama? No mom jokes yet. But yeah, tons of drama. So it's kind of like your mom then? Not quite. Check it out at jakemulleradventures.com slash haunted for 10% off.

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are registered investment advisor with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. If you've listened to this show from the beginning, and you've heard the story at least once, how a man named Woodrow Durenberger was driving on the interstate through a dark and rainy night in West Virginia. It was November of 1966, and Durenberger, a sewing machine salesman, was headed home to Mineral Wells, West Virginia,

after a long day of cold calls. How, in a flash, the road suddenly emptied, just as light pierced through the clouds, revealing a craft of some kind descending toward the road in front of them. The object hovered several feet above the pavement, blocking the way. Woody slammed on the brakes and slid across the wet road, finally coming to a stop about 20 yards from the thing he did not recognize. As he stopped, the craft, which had the shape of an oil lamp's glass chimney, opened to reveal a rich white light inside.

The light was then blocked by a humanoid shape exiting the craft and walking calmly through the rain and empty roadway toward Durenberger's driver's side window. The window remained closed, and the terrified Woody had no intention of changing that. For all his paralyzed shock, he did still retain some of his wits, but once the creature stood just outside the glass staring at him,

those wits began to slip. It appeared in every respect like a bit. man or something pretending very well at being a man. Its arms crossed its chest, which was covered by a glossy black coat, its face bore everything one might expect to see on a human being, with the exception of a smile too uncanny to be quite real. Then, without any movement of that smiling mouth, Woody heard a calm, precisely articulated voice inside his head,

bidding him to roll the window down. The voice eased or perhaps enchanted the man enough, to make him obey. With his view of the strange visitor now unobstructed, would he notice the unblemished and almost glistening face, still fixed in a smile that was far too large and insincere. He heard more of the same calming voice in his head. My name is injured cold. Do not be frightened. I come from a country much less powerful than yours. We mean you no harm. I am merely here to observe you and the events to come.

After a dialogue lasting roughly 10 minutes and which in the moment struck Woody as completely pointless, Indrid Cole turned and walked back to his craft. With his arms still crossed over his broad chest, he turned once more to look at the man. The smile never moved, and the voice never left the salesman's head. Then he simply flew away. A little more than a month after this encounter, the grayish demonic elemental known as the Mothman would be seen presiding over the catastrophic collapse of the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

To this day, many wonder what connection may exist between the moth man and the enigmatic injured cold. That wonder has only grown over the years as more stories like Durenberger have surfaced, stories of a smiling man who appears as a harbinger of great events. In 1952, World War II Army veteran Albert Bender founded the International Flying Saucer Bureau, IFSB. It was the first ever,

civilian-led and civilian-founded UFO research group, and it struck at exactly the right time. The public energy embraced the IFSB, and before long, Bender presided over an international research and investigative club that received thousands of UFO reports. Just over 30 years of age, the young man rode high on the success of his groundbreaking endeavor. And then very suddenly, he shut it all down on an apparently random day in 1953. or so it seemed to everyone at the time. A decade later, Bender wrote a book, entitled Flying Saucers and the Three Men,

to lay out his confession and his reasons for ending the IFSB so suddenly. The claims he made in that book have since gone down in the annals of high strangeness as some of the most important ever recorded. In early March of 1953, the governing board of IFSB decided to hold what they called a C-Day celebration on the 15th of, that month. See Day meant contact day, and the idea was simple. All members around the world

would memorize the same welcoming message addressed to any aliens in the universe. Then at the same time on the 15th, they would all telepathically send the message out in the ether to see what, if any, effect it might have. Thousands of people excitedly awaited the moment. And Bender was no exception. At exactly 6 o'clock p.m. Eastern Standard Time on March 15th, 19th, Bender lay on his bed in his darkened room and mentally spoke the memorized message three full times. And this is what it was. Calling occupants of interplanetary craft. Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet Earth.

We of IFSB wish to make contact with you. We are your friends and would like you to make an appearance here on Earth. Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship. We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of Earth. Please come in peace and help us in our earthly problems. Give us some sign that you have received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality. Let us hear from you.

We are your friends. Such were the contents of the message, and it goes without saying that you should definitely not try this at home. But just as he thought the final word for the final time, a terrible chill ran down his spine. Felt as if his entire room had suddenly plunged into freezing cold water. The cold bit into him sharp and unbearable. Next, wave after wave of pounding headache struck as a terrible odor of rotting eggs filled the room like a cloud of poison gas.

Drifting between lucidity and a forced dream, Bender described small blue lights twinkling and moving, in odd patterns above him. He slipped back toward lucidity, but found he could not move. All at once, a voice spoke inside his head, a voice that seemed to fill every crevice of the world, yet did not appear to be audible to anyone but himself in his own head. It said, We have been watching you and your activities. Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey. Bender fell out of the trance in a state of dizziness and confusion.

More light filled the room now and a thick yellow haze hung over everything. He turned toward the doorway, letting in the light, and saw the shape of a man standing there, staring back in him. When Bender moved to give chase, the apparition vanished. He sat up and massaged his temples. His stomach churned and he wondered if he had eaten something spoiled or if he was somehow catching latent telepathic energy rebounding back at him.

At the time, he could not believe that what he had seen was real. In time, that would change. That change did not take long. Bender remained unsettled by the experience for days, even weeks afterward. Still, he didn't halt the operations of the IFSB. He did, however, take a vacation at the urging of others in the organization's leadership who could tell that something was just off about him. Bender obliged.

After a fortnight of rest, he returned one evening and climbed the stairs of the home he shared with his stepfather before unlocking the door to his private den. The air that greeted him was stale and putrid, like the first colonies of mold forming beneath carpet left damp for too long. Bender opened all the windows and waited patiently for the odor to clear. Everything appeared exactly as he had left it. He hated people meddling with his rooms and his stepfather knew this, hence the locked door and lack of concern. yet despite everything being in its proper place, Bender knew somehow that something had occurred in his absence. The radio was on.

He knew he had not left it on. It played only static. He stood puzzled for some time as his anxiety from the sea day encounter crept back in. Eventually, he calmed himself down and convinced himself of a lie that he must have switched it on before leaving and simply forgotten. With this thin resolution in place, he ate a snack and climbed into bed because exhaustion had suddenly overtaken him. But while preparing for sleep, Albert Bender's world changed in a way he could no longer ignore. After brushing his teeth and re-entering the room, he froze in place as a tickling almost electrical sensation seized his neck.

His eyes watered profusely. The same blue lights appeared out of nowhere, flying again in dizzying patterns around. the room. Bender felt himself losing control. He stumbled to the bed and collapsed onto it. The moment his head touched the pillow, his entire body turned ice cold, and he knew he was no longer in control of himself. A mustard-colored shadow filled the space and clouded Bender's vision, but not completely. He could still see. Standing a few feet inside the doorway were three figures made of darkness. They moved toward him, but their movement was, it was, it was It was just wrong.

It was not human motion. Rather than walking, they hovered like apparitions rather than men. As they drew closer, their appearance sharpened, dark clothes, suits and coats covered each one of them. They resembled clergy visiting a sick parishioner. Each man wore a hat whose brim cast enough shadow to obscure the finer details of his face. When they stopped, they stood close enough for Bender to touch had he been able to move his arm. And when they stopped, all fear fled his mind and body. He felt utterly safe in their presence.

Then the six eyes, staring down at him, lit up at once, filling the room with the revealing but not overpowering light. Bender could now make out their faces, pale skin, disturbingly ordinary eyes and noses, and stretched, forced, uncanny smiles completing the look. Had it not been for the total absence of fear, those smiles alone would have driven him to despair and crazed madness. They were profoundly wrong.

The smiles never faded, but their voice rang through his head nonetheless. Through clenched teeth, they informed Bender in one unified voice and with absolute clarity that if he did not stop his work at IFSB, they and their people would be forced to take radical action against his well-being. When the ordeal ended, Bender abruptly and unilaterally shut down the IFSB, claiming that high-level legitimate authorities had issued him a credible, warning to stop. Half-truths carry a scent that travels far. His colleagues knew there was more to the story, but none of them could extract further answers from him. It was not until his confession, a decade later, that they learned his version of the full truth, and even then, it left much to be

desired. For Bender became enamored with the smiling men in black. He began to wish that they would visit him again. According to him, that wish was granted. Bender claimed that on dozens of occasions he entered into strange communion with this uncanny race of beings. Over time, they grew to know one another so well that they developed a mutual affinity and respect that endured for years. But not all such stories proved quite as dramatic as Indrid Cold and the triumvirate smilers over Alfred Bender. Some rumors that have come down to us feel more folkloric in nature.

Accounts of similar creatures, afflicting places, and people for little apparent reason beyond the mere sport of it. Such is the case with the smiling man of Jersey City. And as Providence would have it, it was the Mothman reporter, John Keel, who uncovered this seemingly unrelated tale only a month before Woody Durenberger met injured cold in West Virginia. The story goes that two boys, James Junkitis and Martin Munoz, were walking home on the night of October 11, 1966. Some 40 miles away and at nearly the same time at Palmton Lakes, New Jersey, a police officer and his wife watched dumbfounded, as a massive blazing white light flew over their home and streaked northward before disappearing beyond the hills. Neither had ever seen anything like it, and neither saw its likeness again.

Meanwhile, as James and Martin walked through Elizabeth, New Jersey, adjacent to the Jersey turnpike, they came to a crossroads. Beneath the gleam of high bright street lamps, they could see a two-story chain-link fence lining the sidewalk at the opposite corner of the intersection. The fence existed to keep pedestrians from climbing the steep grassy slope that led upward to the busy turnpike. As he looked in that direction, searching for nothing in particular, James saw what he later described as the strangest man he had ever seen. Light from the turnpike, the street, and the bright moon coalesced and compounded, revealing an immensely tall and broad man standing perfectly still on the other side of the chain link fence. Three thoughts raced through James' mind in an instant. How did it get there?

Is he wearing stilts? Is that a mannequin or something? James elbowed Martin, who'd been looking the other way while waiting to cross the street and told him to look, Martin too recoiled at the uncanny side. After several moments of silent staring, the man finally moved. First, his head turned slowly to lock eyes with them. His body followed with the delayed elasticity of a worn-out piece of rubber. The movement confirmed that he was no mannequin.

That realization only deepened the boys on knees. I mean, obviously. Something about him just was not right. The surrounding lights reflected off a dark, green, glossy suit that the man wore. But the reflections made it appear as though the fabric were made of scales or polished plates. Around his waist, a wide jet black belt cinched his bulk tightly. He stood nearly seven feet tall. His face appeared pale and bare.

with small jet black eyes like beads set too far apart. Beneath his top hat, no curls of hair showed themselves, nor could the boys discern any ears at all to prop the hat in place. Now staring directly at them, an inhuman smile slowly spread across his face from ear to ear, revealing unnaturally large, shining teeth hidden behind his lips. Once the smile fully formed, the man returned to his stone stillness. His unblinking eyes refused to leave the boys,

each of whom felt certain the man stared directly at him and not the other. At last, they broke free of his spell and moved briskly and quietly down a side street away from the smiling giant's gaze. Only later did each boy learn that police reports from that same night described a strange, massive man in green, chasing a middle-aged woman down a dark alley near that very crossroads.

Wow, pretty creepy. Hey, you know what's even scary? scarier than that. Those are, those are some crazy. I love those stories. Yeah, me too. Those are insane stories. I just love like the uncanny horror. The creepy smile. It reminds me of the astonishing legends episode, The Devil in the Diner. Absolute cinema. Do you remember the devil and the diner? I do like, I remember the name. I know I've listened to it. It's an interview. It's a woman in New York City. I'm pretty sure that knew the host, you know, Forrest and, what's his name? Scott. Scott, Philbrook and Forrest Burgess. And she tells this story about going into a diner.

And there was just this man there. And there was nothing she could ever point to or describe to, like, demonstrate that it was supernatural or demonic or evil. But he looked at her and locked eyes her and in the smile, like this look on his face. And she just knew to her core, that's the devil. Like, that is a demon. That is, I am not safe. That is evil.

Something's wrong. Could never explain why. And it's like this short little story. There's literally nothing overtly supernatural to it. Right. Yeah. But it's always. stuck with me because you know what she's talking about.

Oh yeah. I mean... We are embodied souls. We have the capacity to be aware of evil and to even discern spirits, like to discern the... It's even one of the principles of like Western thought and philosophy is that our

senses are reliable. Yeah. They give us, you know, there's obviously providential hindrances and there's exceptions, but... They're corrupted, but they're not effaced completely destroyed. Generally speaking, like you can rely upon your senses to tell you things that are accurate. Now, you may come to wrong conclusions, but it is interesting how you hear about things like that and you're like, oh, wow, yeah.

Like, we, we must have kind of a funny bone for, that doesn't quite fit. Like, your, your sight can be fooled, but most of the time it's like you're just seeing light waves. Yeah, yeah, accurate. Yeah, just real quick. Okay. I just want to say, I know I jumped right in. Do you know what's even scarier than? And worse than that? Than grinning men. And, and, and it's people who, And it's people who fuss about ads. Let's sit down, guys. Let's talk about this first. I want to say two things.

If you ever want to see your family. I'm kidding. No, no. I'm kidding. No, it's just funny when we get like, we were talking about this during the break. Because we're talking about how funny our ads are. Yeah.

We have fun making it. How it's pure cinnamon. Yeah. And how we get so many comments that are like, oh my goodness, this 200-minute episode. Yeah, we released the more-hending episode, recently as we record this and it was two hours and 20 minutes long and there were like multiple comments like full of ads by which they meant there were two total ad breaks that were less

than like five minutes of the entire hundred and forty minutes of runtime and let me just emphasize that that absolute cinema of our moon landing episode third time we've said that that you got to enjoy for absolutely free like you just walk in you go on the internet and and Elon Musk sends it to you from his eye beams directly through the air into your computer and you get to watch it for absolutely free. All that's true, literally how it takes place. And it took us probably 80 man hours to produce that one episode across everything, all the people that touched it. And then someone's like, I had to watch five minutes of totally skippable ads that were hilarious. If you have no personality and are not handsome,

they're skippable. They're not skippable for handsome people. Speaking of moon landing episode, moon landing affirmers, sound off in the comments. Let's go. Whoa. If you're not a commie. Oh, Western dominance. Someone else comment on that episode, they were like, based on their conclusion, I now know everything I need to about these two idiots.

I was like, all right, dude. Hey, but at least you listen to the whole episode. This is a Wendy's. Hey, at least you listen to the whole episode. I wish it was a Wendy's actually. Shout out to that guy. I'm on a cut and I'm hungry. Okay.

I could use a baconator right now. Hey, let's talk about these creepy stories. Because these are seriously some of my favorite. They're like so uncanny, so creepy. What I like about all these two is that these are genuinely eyewitness accounts. You can go, you can believe them or not, but you can hear the people who said I had this encounter talk about them or read the interviews with them. Alfred Bender, he did that whole thing where he shut down IFSB. And he didn't say, he didn't explain why for 10 years.

And then 10 years later he wrote his book. He was like, I can't get this to myself anymore. He's like, I've made some good. I've made some bad friends. No, or good friends. Okay. His words, not ours. But it's just like the man in black, the pale face.

It just doesn't quite fit, this uncanny valley thing. And then the Jersey City siting was documented by John Keel, known for the Mothman documentation. He wrote the Mothman prophecies. Yeah, and it was all around the same time. It was in that same Mothman time. And so he was really interested in like this happening. And he was actually going to interview that. policeman and his wife about the UFO flyover thing. And then through the grapevine, he heard like,

oh yeah, and there was this weird guy that clearly got off the UFO. Clearly. The demon. Yeah. I didn't even put it. You know, I never put that together. I never put that together. It's literally flying the direction, the story you wrote. I know. It's flying the direction of the next story. And Ben didn't, you know what time? I never put that together. It's just because like some of us, like when your IQ's high in them. I'm losing all my hair. You see facts? Put the math around me.

And then you just bring it all the... And Ben's there looking at the same facts. He's got his little whirligig hat on and he doesn't see it. Yeah, I look like a dumps. Put around Ben just like donuts and hamps. You're making a lot of work for... None of that is going to happen. No, it's not...

And I'm fully aware of that. No, but it's going to be like... Instead of the donuts and stuff, it's going to be a fart sound. The camera's going to cut to me. It's going to be a, if it does happen, I'm willing to give Evan, our video editor, guaranteed one lunch at Chipotle on me.

Whoa. Okay. That's crazy. All right. If he puts the math around my head and the hams around Benz. Yeah. Gotta get it right, though. All right.

He's like, I'm going to delegate it to Tate. No, the, the Bender story is crazy. What I love about that story is that here's a guy. He's into studying. demons. He doesn't know it because he thinks they're aliens, but CR published works. He's in a studying demons and he has an experience after literally doing exactly the thing

you should never do. Which is summon them. Invite and summon the demons to just do stuff with you. Like at the same time as a lot of other people. Then he obviously in a way connected to that stupid idea has a clearly demonic experience with all of the hallmarks of people encountering

demons, the smells, the sounds like the etc. And then his conclusion is I should listen to them and then also make friends with them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And by the way, I only mentioned like the, it was kind of the cliff-nosed version of his story. Yeah. He encountered these things like a dozen times, you know, and in each time it kept ramping up, like even after he shut down ISFB, I always get the AFSB. IFSB. He still kept encountering them. And it was like, it turned into this really weird thing. You have no idea like, is this guy going crazy? Like how much, You know, so it really is like it makes you, sin makes you dumb.

That's one. The other thing, though, common, I'm going to not be so harsh. Relatively infrequent American evangelistic L. Okay. Like leftward leaning American church at the time. He was like a Protestant. Come on. And he was like a devoted Protestant.

And then he gets into this stuff and, hey, next thing you know, guess what starts to slip? Going to church. Look, read your Bible. Zoom in. I mean, Alfred, I got a message for you. Okay, Alfred,

stop making us look bad, man. I know he's listening. Just, Alfred, can I talk, can I call you Bender? Bender. Stop doing the things you're doing because we have a reputation to uphold.

Indeed. So stop it. Anyway. Get better friends. Yeah, indeed. One of the things I think that makes these stories so horrifying is the uncanny.

Yeah. And I, you know, just for fun, I typed a little bit Uncanny Valley into Chatty between Google. Is that like the ranch stressing? The Hidden Valley.

What is this? Hidden Valley. What are you talking about? Uncanny Valley. Uncanny Valley. You got to say it like that. I'm not going to say it like that. I found, I dug deep.

I did some sleuthing. Okay. On the Uncanny Valley Wikipedia page. Dude, the faces you're making, if you're not on YouTube, it's, dare I say, absolute cinema. But I did find an interesting connection into more modern, like potentially modern uncanny traps that we may fall into. And it was with

AI. So like originally, oh yeah. Originally Uncanny Valley stuff is, it was this like Japanese scientist, a mori or something. And he started to look at people's emotional responses to robots that took on greater and greater likeness to humans. Yeah. And he found that when they looked nothing like humans, it was like, oh, look, it's a robot. It's a Tomoguchi or whatever. It's a robot. Yeah. And, uh, and, uh, it's a, um, it's a Tomoguchi or whatever. It's a robot. Yeah. And, uh, It's a chie pet, right? Yeah. It's cute.

And then when they got, when they were still robots, but they were like approaching human likeness, it got to where. So anyway. People were like revulsed by it. I started blasting. Yeah, exactly. But then this is the thing that people forget about the Uncanny Valley a lot.

As it went greater and greater in its approach to human likeness and started to become like indiscernible. Yeah. The emotional reaction was fine. And it was like trustworthy. Oh. This thing is trustworthy. It was like a danger zone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Close but not quite. Yeah, and now there's a whole genre of horror, internet horror, analog horror, that's all obsessed with the uncanny of value. You know, even if you don't know what I'm talking about from the words, if you saw an example, you'd know. It's like, wasn't there a whole, this is like evolutionary nonsense, but wasn't like, well, it implies that there was like a time in the evolutionary branch

of humanity where like the Homo sapiens branched off from the Neanderthal. And we decided to become afraid. And they look kind of like us, but not us, but they were like super violent, but not as smart. So we were like, ah. And my hairbrained idea is that some of the

lingering fear of the Uncanny Valley comes from angels seeking to pose as humans. Not that, but this. Yes, and we learned to be terrified.

Yours has the benefit of not being literally stupid evolutionary nonsense. Yes. And also being really cool. But also pure speculation, so don't take it to the bank. We're excited.

Uncanny Valley. But the AI thing. Hey, hey, I just thought of a promise before you get into the AI. Yeah. I know. That I'm willing to make right now on Haunted Cosmos. Okay. This is one that takes the viewers helping

because there's no way otherwise that we can accomplish it. So it's a promise that requires other. Elon Musk, well, it's a, if this, then that. If X, then Y. Okay. If X, it also depends on Elon Musk keeping his word. Elon said that his optimist robots are going to be selling by the end of 2026. Fascinating. This year.

fascinating. If we get to 10,000 sponsors, patrons, total, we'll get one. We're going to get one for the studio. Yeah. And he's going to be here and we're going to have him like do stuff in the, like, we'll have him read a script at one point. We'll, we will get an optimist robot. I don't know what we'll do with him. We'll absolutely abuse him. So what we can promise you, the promise is this, that by the end of 2027, the robot will have killed both Brian and I. Because it will have inevitably turned on us. It will like you'll see the video and it'll have replaced Evan and it's Martina, like, the video will flicker and it'll be like the robot and it'll be me again. It's an I robot, but like, there will be signs. I'm Will Smith. And the problem is I can't rap as good as Will Smith.

Listen to your parents, do good in school, get good grades. And it's true that I'm an action star. Yeah. Sometimes I'm an act bizarre. Any of you Will Smith fans? Is that really a Will Smith song? Yeah, dude. It's bad.

It's bad. He tried to do a comeback or the bounce back. This is the bounce back. That's horrible. Okay. You were talking about AI, though. That's a promise. If 10,000 patrons, we're getting an AI optimist-driven,

an AI-driven optimist robot from Elon Musk, provided their shipping, terms and conditions apply. If it kills and replaces both of us, stop watching the show. I don't think Ryan Locti has as big lungs as you with that, with the amount of words that you just said in one breath. Thank you. So AI.

Deep cut. On Caney Valley. And it's this. While we interact with, you know, it's AI is a misnomer. But while we interact with AI, we are interacting with something that is posing as consciousness. Yeah.

But it's not. It's not. Right? And the point is that if we let ourselves get dull to it, we won't recognize that as AI approaches more and more conscious likeness, it'll never achieve consciousness. But as it approaches conscious likeness, we will be numb to the kind of visceral negative reaction we should have to something like that.

and will actually be influenced by it in a way that could lead to a lot of negative effects, even in our just ability to think. So, like, if you become heavily influenced by something that is posing as true consciousness, then you will lose your ability to reason properly as someone with an actual reasonable intellect. And you even see that now with, like, young people that are getting exposed to chat, GPT and GROC from a very early age, they lose the ability to think reasonably, systematically. They lose the ability to do abstract reasoning and synthesis. They can't do it on their own.

So anyway, beware the uncanny valley that is unseen in AI. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my good friend Tim Poole, meaning one time we talked about it, the one time I've ever talked to them. Which is cool that you have talked to. There's at least one. Like, this is not a flex, but this literally happened. He was talking and it stuck with me of, this image of AI that I think he got from someone else,

but it was like this vast tentacular beast with like slimy tentacles. And it's holding out on the end of one of its tentacles, the face of your grandmother talking to you, pretending to be your grandmother. And he was talking specifically about the type of AI that would upload someone's consciousness and learn. And it would like, it's necromancy with extra steps. Yeah.

Suppose of immortality. And it's such a good image to remind you of what it, like, that's one of the things that you can envision happening when you're doing something as stupid as that. Yes. This tentacular beast reaching out to you with one of its tentacles pretending to be your dead grandmother. Yeah.

There's also, this is kind of out of the scope of this episode, so I'm not going to go into it. But there's a really interesting thought experiment with AI called Roku's Basilisk. Oh, yeah. That it kind of is a, it's a, well, yeah, it's a good thought experiment for how, humanity might respond, especially kind of like middle of the bell curve humanity might respond

if they are tricked enough into thinking that this unconscious thing is conscious and really has intelligence and how we may actually like create a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own doom, our own intellectual doom by giving in to Roku's Basilisk. So check it up, Google it. It's really fascinating. Anyway. Hey, that's sad. That said, you know what? I think we need to to do? What? I think we need to lighten the mood a little bit. Okay. By giving our people some exposure to hilarious ad breaks that are

potentially better than the main show. Once again, if you skip these ads, you're not a good person. But we appreciate... No, we don't appreciate. If you fuss about them in the comments on YouTube,

look, if you hate them, hate them, but please don't fuss me. Like, would I, would I, if I was on a jury, put you in prison. A jury of one. Enjoy. The nighttime is crawling with dangerous creatures. Bigfoot, sleep paralysis demons, the moth man.

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website design, maintenance, and security. His mission is to promote the business of Christendom by building websites for like-minded entrepreneurs. If you or someone you know is looking for help with your website, get a consultation with Nathan by visiting cosmos websites.com. Tell him you're a listener of Honoccosmos to learn how you could get your first six month of hosting and security for free. Before first light, Cockrells began shouting in the backyard of the little house on the edge of Aberfan, summoning the Jones family to wake up for a new day. Everyone went about their normal routine. Mrs. Jones made a hasty breakfast and lunch for her husband.

She had it ready right as he walked down the hallway, ready for another day in the mines. He kissed his wife, thanked her, and then walked out the door. Minutes later, their daughter, a seven-year-old named Errol May, came down the same hallway dressed for school. She looked tired. Her mother knew she'd struggled to sleep for a few days now. But the girl met her mom with a smile nonetheless.

She was pensive, not very talkative, but sweet all the same. As the pair walked out the front door after breakfast, Aero looked up at her mother and said, unprompted, Mommy, I'm not afraid to die. Mrs. Jones was taken aback, but being the Christians they were, she figured the Sunday school lessons were finding good soil in her girl's mind and heart. She rubbed her daughter's shoulder, told her that that was good, and the two kept on towards pant glass school.

13 days later, the Jones house woke in the middle of the night to the sound of Aero screaming at her sleep. Mr. Jones got there first. He gently woke the girl and pulled her into a hug. He felt her tears soak a shirt right away. When she calmed down enough, he looked at her and asked what was wrong. It was a dream, a very bad dream. One she'd been having for many nights.

He asked her what it was, and still choking back tears and breathing that jerky breath that marks children after a good cry, she told him, I was walking to school in the morning all alone. The world was dark and gray. I never saw another person in the dream, but I could hear moans filling the air like a group of people that were sick. When I turned the corner and saw the school, half of it was buried under a black pile of something.

I couldn't see what it was. I tried to go into class, but the mound was blocking the door, and so I was stuck outside. I started to cry. For some reason, I felt afraid, and then I woke up. The next morning, that same girl lay buried in a landslide that struck her school just minutes after the bell rang for class to begin. The village of Aberfan in the south of Wales had very humble beginnings.

Sometime between the Roman retreat from Britain in the 19th century, three small settlements joined together at the bottom of Minid Myrthier, a wide ridge in an area rich in coal. These three little homesteads, two cottages and an inn for wayfarers, were all of Aberfan until 1869,

having been completed in the 1850s. To say it was a quiet village would be an understatement. It was, in fact, remote, hardly a village at all. It felt like a place time had forgotten. The rich green hills and picturesque trees bore the imprint of the oldest history in a part of the world mankind had seldom seen. It wasn't a hostile or in a hospitable place, at least not any more than other places in the world. It was just unremarkable. The land was content with its own simplicity, birds chirping, creeks rolling over rocks, and steady zephyrs rattling leaves and branches while clouds drifted aimlessly by in the welkin.

The few families who called the Little Valley home were pleased with this solitude, and the occasional traveler appreciated the solace Aberfan afforded him. Then, in August of 1869, things started to change. A man named John Nixon, following coal seams in the hills, stumbled upon the as-yet- undeveloped Aberfan and decided to set up shop there. It was the Murthier Vale Colliery. For decades, the colliery brought in satisfactory profits, but it didn't swell to a very large operation.

It employed only a few hundred men, most of whom didn't have families, and so they just lived elsewhere, and it did little more than add a blot of industrialism to the skyline over Aberfan. A few more houses went up, some new roads were laid, and Aberfan breathed a sigh of relief

at dodging what could have been a greater expansion in modernization. But then, in 1952, that fearful modernization actually did arrive. With the coal industry booming all over whales, thousands more workers were hired to keep up with the coliaries output needs. Aberfan became a proper town, complete with shops, a police force, and a primary school for the swelling number of children dwelling there. By 1966, Abrafan boasted 5,000 permanent

residents, most of whom were coal miners. Unfortunately, in the excitement of the village's capitalistic maturing, some lingering problems went unnoticed. Most importantly, people failed to understand the crippling effects that 11 flood seasons in the previous 20 years before 66 had had, and were having on the structural integrity of the earth beneath the colliery. It was a ticking time bomb no one could hear. Thus, the first signs of Aberfan's doom went unheeded until it was too late. Just above the clustered center of Aberfan on top of men in Murthyar, massive piles of mining spoil and loose rocks had built up over time, courtesy of the colliery. These were small mountains in their own right,

millions of cubic yards of ever-compressed, wasted earth on top of a hill whose insides were being eaten away by water erosion. What's more, under the weakened sandstone bedrock of the hill, a number of underground springs, ensure that the hill fought a battle to stay standing on both fronts. Again, the hammer was set to drop at any moment, but precious few cared enough to notice. The only concerns anyone did raise were dismissed out of hand by the National Coal Board in Wales. The prophets of Aberfan were told to trust the confidence of these experts, and tragically, they did just that. Finally, on the morning of October 21st, 1966, Minid Murthier reached its breaking point. Under the pressure of three inches of rain that week and over six inches that month,

the hill gave way beneath spoil pile number seven. The slight shift was more than enough. A deep rumbling sent townsfolk and Aberfan looking up to find a black mountain of earth rushing down the hill towards the them. 140,000 cubic yards of dense mud careened through two farm cottages at 20 miles an hour, killing all of the inhabitants instantly. At the bottom of the hill, 50,000 cubic yards continued at the same rate over the canal and an old railway embankment and into Aberfan property. The first building it destroyed was Pantglass Junior School, where classes had only just started for the day. In an instant, half the school vanished under 40 feet of colliery spoil.

The slide continued until it damaged a dozen other buildings and destroyed two water mains in Aberfan. In all, tragically, 116 children and 28 adults were killed, most of them at the school. In the subsequent investigation, a strange figure named John Barker arrived in Aberfan to interview some of the families affected by the school's destruction. Barker, a psychiatrist specializing in supposed psychic abilities, spoke to one bereaved mother, Mrs. Davies, about her son Paul. When asked if the boy had behaved strangely in the days or weeks leading up to the disaster, Mrs. Davies responded in the negative without really much thought, but Barker pressed her again.

He told her to think very hard to try to remember. The poor mother slowly lifted her face from her cupped, tear-soaked hands and stared Barker down. He gave her a slight, sincere smile, a comforting smile. And suddenly she jumped up from the couch and ran into her son's room, returning less than a minute later with a pencil sketch. Paul had drawn it a week before the tragedy and told his mother it came from a dream that he'd kept having over and over again.

He hoped that drawing it out would make the dream go away. Barker held out the paper. A roughly drawn landscape was overwhelmed by a stream of black pencil scribble. The stream started at the top of a hill and ended in a mound at its base. Little houses and dogs filled the bottom of the page but around the black mound.

Stick figures showed distressed expressions on their faces. and the phrase, the end, was scratched in all caps across the sky. Now, after taking some time to reflect while I heard this story of human tragedy, and after having reflected on some of the comments I made before we went into the last ad break, I just want to say that I meant every word of it, and they are literally true what I said about you if you skip the ads. I like to apologize to absolutely no one. Just take this opportunity.

But I do want to take this up. This is the story I mentioned at the beginning. This is a crazy story. It's so crazy because you can go, it's another one of those. Like, you don't have to believe it. You can say that it's past recency bias of people sifting through mountains of data with confirmation bias and finding things and interpreting them through the lens of later events, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the people that said they happened were interviewed directly and said they happened multiple times stood by it. They're real people. It's not creepy pasta.

Yeah. This isn't, you know, internet lore or folklore or urban legend. And this guy actually did go interview these people after this horrible tragedy that really did happen. And these are the stories they told. Yeah, you could say that it's a post hoc, ergo proctor hawk. Yeah, but what you can also recognize is that...

I thought you'd appreciate that. I do appreciate that. Is that this guy, John Barker, was a real psychiatrist in London at the time of the event. And he was also the leader after this Aberfan event, noted. He was also the leader of like, I think it was the national labruburn. of premonitory dreams.

Which that actually existed. It's crazy that that existed. I'm pretty sure that's the name. I could be wrong, but you can look it up. What are their meetings like? Have we, has anybody had any premonitory dreams since the last meeting? They just, I'll sleep in the same room. But that was it.

It's like he started doing this research into, like, how people might get esoteric warnings in their subconscious of terrible, particularly terrible events that are yet to happen. It's never like I had a premonition that like, I found a $20 bill under my car. And the other thing that he found, and there was. The other thing that he found was that it was more often than not like children. Interesting. Yeah, like the dreams of children.

And that, like if I'm being honest, that does cast a layer of doubt over it. Because if you go through something like that, you obviously want there to be some like meaning to. You know? And you could easily project some meaning onto something that your child said. A drawing. And I'm not saying that it's meaningless, but it's like, you know, you can go a little too far with that at times. I'm sure we all would be tempted to. But it's interesting that in the Aberfan incident, I just gave two examples. There were dozens of examples of, you know, people finding notes that their child had written and hadn't told anyone about. And it was akin to like, you know, two weeks, die, die, die. Like really dark. stuff. Yeah, yeah. And otherwise, well-adjusted, happy children that are giving these, like, terrible dooms and having awful dreams that are recurring. And when it's a recurring dream, it's easier to remember. Yeah. And the children are remembering and telling their parents. And it is, like, kind of, kind of strange how all of them overlapped so much with, like, school, Black Mountain, death, screaming. And then, and then that happens at the school. It really is. It just

makes you sit back and think, you know, like, I don't have any answers for that, but it is definitely interesting. We see God worn repeatedly in scripture ahead of horrible events. Yeah, in dreams. In dreams and through prophets and things like that. So it is, again, the part of the story that makes it hard to believe or, like, mysterious or difficult, isn't that somebody could know about something happening beforehand. Right. Because we see that in multiple occasions, both in demonic powers in the book of Acts with the seller with the young girl who has the unclean spirit

that is allowing her to prophesy. Prophesy true things. And it's good enough that it's making the owner of the slave girl a lot of money, which is why they're so mad when the apostles come along and they're so annoyed,

they cast the demon out. Out of pure annoyance, they cast the demon out. Great part of the story. It implies that Paul just kind of let it happen for at least a couple hours. He was like, okay, this is enough now. Yeah, yeah.

out of here. So there's a demonic element where we have evil opposed to God forces that are able to some degree, whether it's by superintelligence or some other means that we have no concept of, know enough about the future or predict. And then we also have, of course, God, who knows because God is the author of history telling people often about his own chastening action. I'm not saying that this is like an overt positive judgment of God in this case or anything like that.

But just to establish that the thing can happen. Yeah. So it's not insane or impossible, but it is uncanny. So strange. Part of why it's strange to me with this example is because it didn't really lead to any benefit. Like, you know, Joseph, Jacob's son, Joseph, one of the 12 sons, he was given multiple dreams prophesying his rise to be the preeminent son, you know, and it eventually did happen. And then Joseph, yeah, yeah, he was able to interpret Pharaoh's dreams.

Pharaoh was given the dream. Yeah. And then Joseph gave him the interpretation and it all happened. The baker. Yes, the baker also had the baker and the cup bear had dreams. Both had premedatory dreams. A lot of dreams. A lot of premenator dreams. Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel did the same thing. And then also Joseph, you know, the father of Jesus, he was given dreams by the angel telling him to go to Egypt because of what Herod was about to do. It just says, and he was warned in a dream. Yeah. And that's all. Which is wild. But the thing is that there's a fruit that comes from it. They respond to the warning. And it is, warning in Joseph's case. And then in Joseph's, in the first Joseph's case, and in Daniel's case,

it is a very clear indication of what's going to happen or it is a warning. And then God gives the gift of interpretation to the person or someone else so that fruit can come from it. But in this one, there wasn't any. It's just bleak. And that's the weird thing to me is it's like, it's just really depressing. It's really bleak. It's also like, and kids do sometimes, like there's a whole, I think, subreddit or something where it's just weird and uncamination. any things kids have said, like looking, you know, and kids say weird things, like looking right into your eyes, mommy, you're going to die. Yeah. Or really weird stuff. Maybe a lighter note, it reminds me of one of my favorite kids saying things stories. Just since like all the kids died

horribly, let's now turn it to be a little bit lighter. Let's be light in the mood. A friend of ours here at the church. Yes. We, he has a son. He has his son. His son's name's James. And it was around to the first or second conference that we did here. And one of our speakers had come to the, you know, earlier something. And they were like at the venue. Great guy. And the dad and his son are there. And he's like meeting him.

Oh, hey, James, say hello to this gentleman. He's one of the speakers. And the son, he looks up at the guy. And he's three years old. You know, he's probably like two feet tall. And he's like, hi, you have a pig face. And the guy goes, what? And he says, I said, you have a pig.

face. And the dad could tell that the guy was like a little bit offended. The thing is, the guy doesn't have a pig face. Like, it's a perfectly normal. No, yeah, he's a normal guy. But the problem is the dad was like choking back laughter. Because it's so funny. Because it's just off the wall. And he's like a really good disciplinary and like loves the kids. There was

out of nowhere. It just out of nowhere. It wasn't because like this kid was never spanked or something. Man, what I disciplined for that? Absolutely not. It's hilarious. He did get disciplined. But the point being like, Kids do say weird uncanny things because they don't understand all the implications of what they're saying in normal human society. Right. Yeah.

Kids are like little savages. Like many. This happens on almost a daily basis because I've been trying to teach my sons that Jesus is God and man. Yeah. And so they run up to me and it's just random, Abner, my oldest. He'll be like, Jesus has a mouth. And I say, you're right, son. He sure does.

And then he say, God has a mouth? You're like in a question and I'm like, okay, let's be careful here. Let's be careful. God is a spirit. Technically no. Infinite, eternal and unchangeable. Exactly. Being wisdom, power, holiness, just as good as truth. Yeah.

But he like asks it as a question and then he'll do it with all like, you know, hand, arm, foot. And I'm like, yeah. All the parts of the body. Jesus is a man. And God. It's funny to watch a small mind try to wrap. Yeah, dude. Try to wrap around that concept.

and it's like really simple way. It's, it's hilarious. My kid's catechism. I'm always asking Winnie, you know. Series of questions, are you baptized? Yes. Who made you? God.

Did Jesus die on the cross for your sin? Or who died on the cross for your sin? Jesus. Yeah. Who loves you? Daddy. And they always like, Daddy. And God.

Yes. God loves you too. My, my boys are learning the Nicene Creed. And, oh, I've heard it. Ambrose can make it up to the first line of the last stand. and I believe in the Holy Spirit, you know, and the Lord and Giver of life.

And he, but like the best part is the Pontius Pilot part where he goes like he, and became man. And he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The way he said. Dude, he goes hard on Pontius Pilot. My sons are not big fans of Pontius Pilot. Well. So anyway, some horrible stuff happened in Aberfan Wales. And there were some premonitory dreams and like we don't really know, like, do they happen in the Bible?

Yes. Are they possible? Yes. Did this case? There's some evidence that they did. Do we know why? I don't know. Like literally have no idea.

But it certainly there's a lot of, there's a lot of even scholarly evidence to back up the fact that like some of it did happen to some degree. Yeah. You can also look up. I mean, like it's a tragedy and so you might not want to do this. But you can look up pictures. colorized pictures of like hours after the disaster in Aberfan. And you can see the scale. Like it's really, it's crazy.

And to imagine that much earth like barreling towards you at 20, it was 20 miles an hour. It was coming down. Like nothing can stop that except just leveling out. And so it kind of gives you an idea of maybe why this was such a, like such a lingering and, I don't know, really, really important event in this really small. otherwise kind of inconsequential village.

Yeah. Yeah. We do have one more story for you guys today. The hot clothes. The hot clothes of this show. And I just want to say it's been a pleasure being back with you guys here in season seven. Man, I hope you enjoyed the graveyard shift that we ran between seasons. We're going to keep in doing that.

If you have stories like that, keep sending them in stories at the hauntedcosmos.com. Yes. And we've gotten some great, I mean, we are just scratching the surface of some of the great stories. you guys have sent it. I got to say, y'all's stories surprised me. I went on record and I told Brian, I was like, 99% of these are going to be unusable for various reasons. And then everyone else was not a naysayer and I felt like a jerk. And then I went and looked at the inbox and I was like, oh, why is my life so boring? People have seen some crazy stuff. Yeah. So as we go into this hot clothes, just to kind of prep you for it, it is very fascinating story, stories kind of. But

it gives one example of maybe how we may be tempted, even in a mass level, to mythologize something and make it into more than it was. And so really the point of this is to say, as you, you know, the, I was joking about Birds of Pripyat and creepy pasta and all that. As you look into these things, you don't want to be like overly gullible or you don't be gullible or naive. You want to still be sober-minded and try to think through like, what if this is the, human tendency to project more importance onto a thing than is actually there. Because we all do that. Or we all tend to do that. So anyway, still a very fascinating story. And who knows, maybe there are still unanswered questions to it. But signing off and sending you into the hot clothes, I am Ben Garrett.

And I'm Brian Sovey, leaving you with this important message that if you like what we do here at Honored Cosmos, help us continue to make it possible at patreon.com. We really appreciate all of our patrons who have continued to help us make this show possible. Maybe you could be one of them by supporting our show there or the great Christian businesses that back us up here every episode. We hope you guys enjoyed this entree into season seven and enjoy this hot clothes as well. 78 years into the 100 years war between England and France,

the opposing army stood just outside of Beauchot from one another. Though churning clouds pillowed high into the heavens, they did not cover the vastness of the sky. The sun alighted and ushered in the day. It shone down on the confident French and the weary English with the blinding coolness. It was October 25th, 1415. Despite having already attempted a lengthy retreat toward the coast, King Henry V of England sat proudly atop his warhorse.

His humble force of 1,500 men at arms and 7,000 bowmen stood at attention behind him, knowing it was the day they were to die. Across the field, soon to be painted red, with blood, a French force totaling 15,000 men waited to engage. The French nobility felt tempted to celebrate before the first bow sang out. This would be the end of the enemy king, and with him, the war that had crippled them for far too long. For three hours, those brothers of nearly common descent remained fixed in place, each waiting for the other to move. Finally, however, doom struck its court. The English bowmen, emboldened by their fiery king, luced a volley of arrows

toward the French, but it met with little success. The French cavalry, though still not fully organized, seized the moment and charged with a portion of their numbers. Lowering their face masks, the mounted knights rode straight up the middle of the field, but this proved their first undoing. Another volley of arrows reigned down upon them. They could not turn to the sides as trees constrain the battlefield. Few knights fell, protected by their armor, but the horses fared far worse. hundreds of French horses were immediately peppered with arrows. Many collapsed beneath their riders. Those that lived limped back toward the French line, crazed with pain.

Thus the Battle of Agencourt began and raged across the French countryside for the better part of that day. Hour after hour saw the English repel French assaults again and again against all odds. In the end, 6,000 Frenchmen lay dead, many of them members of the nobility, while England lost only about 600 of her bravest. Henry V stood victorious over the field, having fought a losing battle that he did not lose. The English longbows, harbingers of hope from the first wave of attack to the last, went down in history as the pride of Britannia. 99 years after Agencourt, 80,000 English troops marched into the Belgian township of Mons. There, they were ordained to meet a German force nearly double their size. But the First World War, having been declared only days prior, the Battle of Mons became

one of the first great clashes in this mythic epic. Unlike the glory of Henry V at Agencourt, however, Providence did not side with the English at Mons. At dawn on the morning of August 23rd, 1914, German artillery rained down on the British lines. The maelstrom did not cease for the entire day. Later that morning, the German infantry charge began. British rifle training kicked into gear and calling upon the strength of the bowmen before them, the royal soldiers repelled the first German attack.

But it wasn't enough. Wave after wave of reorganized German troops poured over the bridges into Mons until they seized them, forcing the English to surrender foot after foot of occupied ground. By three that afternoon, commanders ordered multiple British divisions to retreat to defensible positions. The final call for retreat came at 2 o'clock a.m. the following morning when the last divisions reached a reinforced defensive line along a road outside Muls. But this, too, was not enough. Thousands of bodies, rivers of blood, the sharp crack of rifles in the deafening explosions of artillery.

The foundations shook as screams smothered what had so recently been a quaint town of Christian homes. Limbs floated in the canals, food for carrion. Crows fed on the dead slumped over rails like prisoners on a gibbet, and the devil laughed. Even at this new position, the German onslaught proved too strong. The Royal Army broke into a crippled run, a weak, long ruck to the very outskirts of Paris. Only then were they given a moment to breathe. The Battle of Mons was a shocking and overwhelming loss for Britain at the outset of the Great War. Its effect, beyond the immediate loss of life, proved unquantifiable in its degradation of troop morale.

Officers, soldiers, and countrymen back home struggled to shake the sinking sense that the war would end quickly and not in their favor. Despair took root in the fertile soil of frightened minds. But a month after the first shots were fired, after the Allies gained a few precious days to consolidate, reports emerged from the front lines of Mons that somehow stemmed the tide of unfettered sorrow. As these things always do, it must have begun as a trickle, just a rumor. But one way or another, word spread that a particular English infantryman swore upon his life that he had seen the most beautiful and terrible thing imaginable on that first day at Mons. He told his brothers in arms that at the fiercest moments of the fighting,

he looked toward the sectors where the Germans advanced most easily and saw mist-covered shapes, glorious human figures made of light, swirling among the enemy and sowing confusion. The first time he dismissed it as a trick of smoke and sunlight intermingling in the confused fray. The second time, he rubbed his eyes. Certainly he had to be mistaken. The third time, however, he paused long enough to examine it. There's always a moment in every period of chaos, even if it lasts only an instant, when everything sort of falls quiet.

It's the eye of the storm, when something arrests the afflicted's attention so completely that it distracts them from the horror at hand. Perhaps it's the song of an ice cream truck while you lie crying with a broken leg crashing your bicycle. Perhaps it's the captivating wainscoting in a haunted house. Perhaps it's the flight of a beautiful bird in the aftermath of a car wreck. Whatever it may be, it simply is. And this soldier found this moment that day when he studied the apparitions closely enough to realize they were apparently angelic beings. Winged and strong, with voices he felt only he could hear, they stirred before the German lines and halted them in total bewilderment on multiple occasions. He watched them grasp and redirect bullets and even artillery fire.

He watched them, arrayed in heavenly golden white, shoot arrows of white flame from the sky into the German ranks. This man, lost to history, believed that despite the defeat, the Angels of Mons saved countless British lives that day. As his story spread, others like it joined the quiet hope. Men of every rank and from various divisions testified that angels had spared them from total destruction in the battle. Hundreds, thousands of soldiers claimed to have seen and marveled at the miracle. Before long, the wound of defeat scarred over and the British resolve hardened, strengthened by the undeniable moral drawn from these firsthand accounts. Whatever happened, God was clearly on their side.

But the power of the story grew stronger still, for eventually the man supposedly responsible for the angel's appearance told his tale. Lost amid gore and shadow, a British infantryman loosed a haphazard prayer. World without end, amen. He then turned again and fired blindly into the encroaching German ranks. A shade of blue in the sky stirred a memory of a restaurant he wanted, visited in London, a vegetarian place with images of St. George painted on the plates, above a Latin motto, that when translated, read, may St. George be a present help to the English.

Inspired by this memory of leisure long past, he began whispering the phrase to himself before every shot. Three hundred yards away, German soldiers struck by his weapon fell one by one seconds apart. His mind narrowed to the phrase, the trigger, the reloads, until the din of war hushed across the earth. in the quiet he heard a loud voice peeling like thunder overhead. Array, array. His skin prickled as the electric voice permeated the world. He heard it again.

St. George! St. George! He looked up and saw glimmering figures. Angels clothed as the glorified bowmen of Agincourt, volleying death into the enemies of St. George's kinsmen. Thus the angelic army, the spirits of Agincourt's heroes delivered England through defeat and spared it from what surely would have been a far greater disaster. Not only in England, but the Allies as a whole rejoiced in the story.

Once again, it meant that God stood with them, and if God was with them, who could stand against them? The story, of course, accomplished its purpose. The Allies consolidated, reformed their ranks, and after years of perhaps the worst horrors mankind has ever inflicted upon itself, they triumphed over the German juggernaut. Though it's difficult to measure how much credit the Angels of Mons deserve for the ultimate victory, it surely must be some. There's only one problem. It never happened. After the defeat at Monce, British author Arthur Machen wrote a short retelling of the story in his novella, the Bowman.

In it, he introduced prayers to St. George and a divine response as a work of fiction meant to mythologize the event. He invented it entirely. After publication, however, the myth sank deep into the soul of England, leading many to sincerely claim that they had seen the angelic Bowman, summoned them or known a trustworthy friend who encountered them in the fray. The story stands as a testament to the power of myth and the human mind and soul's desire to impose greater meaning upon the events of their lives. To this day, many insist that although Machen fabricated his account, he merely intuited what truly occurred.

Serendipity, synchronicity. Call it what you will. Thousands still believe the Angels of Mons were real, and that Macon's hand was providentially guided to tell the truth of what they did that day. What do you think? Walkers off from my control. Want more Haunted Cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content,

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