Haunted Cosmos - High Strangeness on the High Seas

Episode Date: March 22, 2023

Join us as we dive the deep places of God's spoken world—a world that isn't just stuff.In this episode, Brian and Ben discuss stories of high strangeness in the oceans of the world. Sea mo...nsters, disappearing islands, light wheels—and a whole lot more. Oh, and you may just find out where the lost island of Atlantis is currently located. Enjoy the show! We're glad you're here.Love Haunted Cosmos? Get access to our exclusive show, The Dusty Tome, early ad-free access to main episodes, monthly AMA's, and livestreams with Ben and Brian by becoming a patron of the show: https://www.patreon.com/c/HauntedCosmosBuy the Haunted Cosmos book: https://www.newchristendompress.com/cosmos PS: It's also available as an audiobook!Support the show

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Starting point is 00:00:20 Her Majesty's Ship, Datalus, October 11th, sir, in reply to your letter of this day's date requiring information as to the truth of a statement published in the Times newspaper, of a sea serpent of extraordinary dimensions, having been seen from Her Majesty's Ship Daedalus, under my command, on her passage from the East Indies, I have the honor to acquaint you for the information of my Lord's commissioners of the Admiralty that at 5 o'clock p.m. on the 6th of August last, in latitude 24 degrees, 44 minutes south, and longitude 9 degrees, 22 minutes east. The weather dark and cloudy, wind fresh from the northwest, with a long ocean swell from the southwest.
Starting point is 00:01:02 The ship on the port tack heading northeast by north, something very unusual was seen by Mr. Sartoris, midshipman, rapidly approaching the ship from before the beam. The circumstance was immediately reported by him to the officer of the watch, Lieutenant Edgar Drummond, with whom and Mr. William Barrett the master, I was at the time walking the quarter deck, the ship's company were at supper. On our attention being called to the object, it was discovered to be an enormous serpent,
Starting point is 00:01:32 with head and shoulders kept about four feet constantly above the surface of the sea, and as nearly as we could approximate by comparing it with the length of what our main top sail yard would show in the water, there was at the very least 60 feet of the animal on the water's surface, no portion of which was, to our perception, used in propelling it through the water, either by vertical or horizontal undulation. It passed rapidly, but so close under our Lee quarter that had it been a man of my acquaintance, I should have easily recognized the features with the naked eye.
Starting point is 00:02:05 And it did not, neither in approaching the ship or after it had passed our wake, deviate in the slightest degree from its course to the southwest, which it held on at the pace from 12 to 15 miles per hour, apparently on some determined purpose. The diameter of the serpent was about 15 or 16 inches behind the head, which was, without any doubt, that of a snake. And it was never during the 20 minutes that it continued in sight of our glasses once below the surface of the water.
Starting point is 00:02:33 Its color, a dark brown, with yellowish white about the throat. It had no fins, but something like the mane of a horse, or rather a bunch of seaweed, washed about its back. It was seen by the quartermaster, the boatswins mate, and the man at the wheel, in addition to myself and officers above mentioned. I'm having drawings of the serpent made from a sketch taken immediately after it was seen, which I hope to have ready for transmission to my lord's commissioner of the admiralty by tomorrow's post. Captain's report, Peter McQuay, HMS, Daedalus.
Starting point is 00:03:06 They say that the sea takes hold of a man like a beautiful woman. It consumes his passion and causes his heart to burn with desire. I think if we're honest with ourselves, every man would, admit that when standing on the shore of some ocean where all he sees as a blank horizon in front of him, there's a sudden urge within to go and find the end of that horizon. There's mystery there, challenge, glory, unknown, and uncharted lands to be found. There's danger and fear of what could lie beneath the waves, which are themselves wrought with terror in one moment, an invitation in another, what lies beneath in the darkest cracks of the earth. Some say that monsters are there,
Starting point is 00:03:46 horrors of unknown scale, ship eaters, soul stealers, grotesque beasts that no man upon meeting them has escaped from. The sea monster has permeated all of human culture, all of human history. Fiction? Perhaps. Perhaps not. About 5% of the world's ocean floor has been mapped, meaning 95% of the bottom of the world is foreign, alien ground to us. What surprises lurk there that we've yet to fathom? What monsters might make their home there? Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish hook or press down his tongue with a cord? Can you put a rope in his nose or pierce his jaw with a hook?
Starting point is 00:04:28 Will he make many supplications to you? Or will he speak to you soft words? Will he make a covenant with you? Will you take him for a servant forever? Will you play with him as with a bird? Or will you bind him for your maidens? Will the traders bargain over him? Will they divide him among the merchants?
Starting point is 00:04:45 Can you fill his skin with harpoons or his head with fishing spears? Lay your hand on him. Remember the battle. You will not do it again. Round his teeth, there is terror. His strong scales are his pride. Shut up as with a tight seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them.
Starting point is 00:05:04 They are joined one to another. They clasp each other and cannot be separated. His sneezes flash forth light and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning torches. sparks a fire leap forth. Out of his nostrils, smoke goes forth as from a boiling pot and burning rushes. His breath kindles coals,
Starting point is 00:05:23 and a flame goes forth from his mouth. In his neck lodges strength and dismay leaps before him. The folds of his flesh are joined together, firm on him and immovable. The sword that reaches him cannot avail, nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin. He regards iron as straw,
Starting point is 00:05:40 bronze as rotten wood. The arrows cannot make him flee. Sling stones are turned in, to stubble for him. Clubs are regarded as stubble. He laughs at the rattling of the javelin. His underparts are like sharp pot-shirts. He spreads out like a threshing sledge on the mire. He makes the depths boil like a pot. He makes the sea like a jar of ointment. Behind him, he makes a wake to shine. One would think the deep to be gray-haired. Nothing on earth is like him. One made without fear. He looks on everything that is high. He is king over all the sons of pride.
Starting point is 00:06:15 Job chapter 41. Welcome to the haunted cosmos podcast. I'm your host, Ben Garrett. I am joined here by my good friend. Mr. Brian Sovey, say hello to the people. Mr. Garrett, it is so good to haunt the cosmos with you right now. Or should I say say hello to the people? That was a clear serpent joke if I have ever heard one, sir.
Starting point is 00:06:45 Thank you. Thank you, thank you for that introduction. Ben, it is good to finally be here with you after all these months of let's be honest, gloriously unhinged conversations around the office coffee maker. We could wax eloquent. Instead, let's get right to it. What are we talking about today? Yeah. Hey, today we're excited to talk about high strangeness on the high seas. That's the general topic. We have plumbed the depths of the internet. Reddit's best posts. Dang. Wikipedia's darkest pages. Well, but not really.
Starting point is 00:07:17 But not really. Yeah, not dark in a moral sense. Let's be clear. In the obscurity sense. Let's be clear. And we have found some really wild and we think very interesting stories about everything from sea serpents and dragons to disappearing islands and weird sounds in the ocean. And then we've also, we're going to be talking about a lot of topics that are sort of adjacently related to that, that certainly are relevant and play into the conversation.
Starting point is 00:07:43 But all of this. And really, this whole project of a show in general is predicated on the idea of mystery. Yeah. And so before we get into sea monsters and Atlantis and all that stuff. Atlantis. Yes. I want to ask you, Brian, mostly because I'm curious, if you had to choose, would you rather maintain mystery about something or would you rather have the mystery solved?
Starting point is 00:08:08 Man, Ben, that's a great question because it really is at the heart of this project, right? Right. we're taking up lots of mysteries and supernatural, mysterious phenomena and stories. And in a sense, like, you can try to distill them all down and get to the bottom and explain every last nuance. And I don't necessarily want to do that or even have the hubris, I think, to think that's possible, you know, when it comes to these things. But there is a guiding principle behind a show like this from one of my favorite verses in the Old Testament that I think is relevant. it's in Proverbs 252
Starting point is 00:08:44 where King Solomon tells us that it is the glory of God to conceal things but the glory of kings is to search things out. It is such a good... That's such a cool. Because it's like you picture God out there
Starting point is 00:08:58 when he's creating this world. He is out there concealing mysteries and truths and glories under every rock and in every corner of the world. You go out and you find out that there's this
Starting point is 00:09:12 element called silicon that you can turn into a chip that can power a smartphone. And there are all these mysteries that God is hidden in the world. And there is this instinct that is just deeply human to go and figure those things out. And that's apparently the glory of kings. So to answer your question, I want to search them out. And I know at the end of the day, there's still going to be aspects where you back up and you go, I do, I have no idea what's going on here. Yeah. But. But, but, you know, But I am glad to know that there is a God behind all of it who is architecting these mysteries, writing this story, and it's a good story. Yeah, I think for me it's a mixture of both.
Starting point is 00:09:52 I think that there's a lot of enjoyment and fun to be had and trying to find an answer to something that is interesting to you and it's curious. But then it's sanctifying for us to find the end of our knowledge, the end of the possibility where we can't investigate further. And then to practice being content with that, where we sit back and we're like, you know what, it actually is really cool to still have mystery in the world. It reminds me of in orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, when he talks about how the sun rises the same every single day,
Starting point is 00:10:24 because God delights in that. He says, do it again. It's this almost childish vitality where God is like, that's beautiful, do it again. And I think that we could all learn something from that same principle and apply it to stuff like this, where we love speculating and investigating and asking questions, but then we also are always adoring the fact that we can't know everything. Yep. And enjoy the mystery. We read an excerpt from Job 41 in the cold open.
Starting point is 00:10:51 We also looked at this account of an insane sea serpent. I got to ask you, my brother in Christ, also my pastor. Yeah. What do you think about Leviathan? So I think that there are two basic directions you can go with something like Leviathan in the Bible. And one of them I really don't like. and that really don't like direction is to just try to come up with mundane explanations for all these things.
Starting point is 00:11:16 You're like, Job is just poetically describing a crocodile. Yeah. There's no such thing as dragons. I'm like, but there literally are, though, and crocodiles don't sneeze lightning. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:30 And fire. So leave me alone. I take door number two. It's a dragon. It's a dragon. It's a dragon. Rehab, Leviathan. There's dragon words in the Bible.
Starting point is 00:11:39 and they're not just all metaphors. Yeah. Dragons are real. Dragons are real. Fun fact, in a lot of the prophets, when it has this apocalyptic language about the city of Jerusalem and in the wilderness, it says that it's going to be made
Starting point is 00:11:53 into a haunt of jackals. Yeah. The word jackal is one of those Hebrew words for dragons. I think that it's Rehab, but it could be a different one. I think it's a different one. I'm going to look at it because I knew this when we first started outlining and then I forgot.
Starting point is 00:12:08 And it's the difference between in the Hebrew, there's a word that means jackals. And then there's the word, then there's the word tanon. Okay, so it is tanon. It's tanon. Yes. Yeah, it's tanon. Which is the Hebrew word for the Canaanite, the mythological Canaanite being that was a six-headed dragon. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 00:12:32 So it was a demon, obviously. In Tannen, same word. for what part of Exodus? Exodus 7. In what scene are we talking about? When Aaron throws down the staff and it becomes the six-headed dragon, which is an image obviously of God using the pagan fallen angels to his own purposes. And then the Egyptians throwing down their staves,
Starting point is 00:12:56 creating three other dragons and then Tannen consuming them and going back into Aaron's staff. The first wizarding battle that is known in history, and it was absolutely based. Wow. It's just, I mean, it's, what do you say to such glorious? I don't know. What can you even say to that? So, yeah, I think in Job and these other places in Scripture,
Starting point is 00:13:20 that there are such things in the world that God made as dragons. There are different varieties of them. And I think that there is such thing as sea dragons. And you know what? Here I stand. I can do no other. I will stand. contramundum on this. Actually, if you really dig, the accounts of sea dragons and sea serpents,
Starting point is 00:13:43 they aren't really that isolated. No. There's a lot of them. One of my favorites is the Straunze Beast. Oh. Yeah. So the Straunze Beast, some villagers in 1808 after a wild storm were walking the island shore. Orkney Islands. Yes, yes, Orkney Islands. And they came across this massive lump of of flesh. This thing was 55 feet long and it was very, very wide. So you can imagine how heavy this is. It was laying there dead.
Starting point is 00:14:16 They said that it had three pairs of legs and it had a long neck that had a horse's main type of flesh on it. Yeah. It would hang down its neck and then its tail was used to propel itself through the water supposedly. Yeah. Now we have
Starting point is 00:14:32 scientists will say that we had dinosaurs that lived the oceans in the prehistoric era that looked just like this, you could easily say that this is a type of dragon. It's fascinating to me as well, so you picture like these villagers, and it said that the people who measured it, one was a carpenter and then two farmers. Can you just picture like you're this little island off the coast of Scotland? You're all these blue-collar farmers, carpenters.
Starting point is 00:14:59 There's got to be lots of people who build boats and do shipping because you're on an island. Your life depends on it. And all of a sudden, everybody's just gathered around. this giant globster, this lump of decaying flesh that you're like, what is that? These are people who are familiar with the ocean. They know what their island, like the sorts of things. It was after a storm the day before. This was the 25th of the September, 1808.
Starting point is 00:15:24 There'd been a storm the night before. And the details, this is not like a, I saw this thing really quickly out of the corner of my eye one time. And it was right before the sun was going down. and I had been drinking heavily. No, they were like, look, when you stroked the skin in one direction from head to tail, it was smooth. And they said that it was rough when they stroked it from tail to head. So like moving through the water. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:50 Like the skin of a shark, I imagine, maybe similar to that kind of bristling. The denticles or whatever. But like it's stomach, they said its stomach contents were red. its fins were edged with bristles. It had a row of bristles down its back that glowed dark, it glowed in the dark when wet. Oh my gosh.
Starting point is 00:16:12 And that when they dissected it. I mean, they had some face time with this thing. They dissected it and its stomach contents were red. So this is like a highly detailed. Yeah. Multiple sketches. We should put in the show notes one of the sketches. Yeah, we should.
Starting point is 00:16:28 But let's lay the scene. Yeah. You're not a modern. Okay, which is to say you're not completely ignorant of the ways of the land that you live on. We are not normal people. When it storms, we don't know what to expect the next day. When the wind comes from the east, we don't know what that means. You know what I'm saying?
Starting point is 00:16:48 These people did. They knew that. They had lived here for generations, probably most of them. This is 1808. This is not 2000. No. This is actually a long time ago. So they stumble upon this scene.
Starting point is 00:17:01 shores that they've studied for their whole lives. Craftsmen, honest, working people, more of them come out to see because they know that this is strange, but they don't know what it is. They're studying it, they're opening its stomach contents, it smells, it reeks. The ocean waves are crashing on it, probably moving it and making it much harder to deal with
Starting point is 00:17:22 because they don't want it to just go back out to sea. They want to study this thing because they understood that they lived in a world of discovery. As they draw sketches, they really understand that this creature is something new, at least to them. And it's lonely. And they study it. And then centuries later, after all of that has come and gone,
Starting point is 00:17:43 people began to move away from their homelands and misunderstand the signs of nature and the places where they live. They don't know the land anymore. The smart, white-coated scientists come on the scene and they say, oh, well, you know what? You know what sometimes it's here. Basking sharks are sometimes here It had to have been a basking shark
Starting point is 00:18:06 Even though Basking sharks, at least to my knowledge, don't have six legs They don't even have one leg They don't even have one leg Have you ever seen a, have you ever met a one leg? Unless you count a dorsal fin as a leg Get out of here. Get out.
Starting point is 00:18:21 Does it have glowing bristles? Doesn't have glowing bristles. Doesn't have a mane Also does not get anywhere close to 55 feet long. No, no. It was not a basking shark. It just was not. It just was not a basking shark.
Starting point is 00:18:36 And this is the thing. We moderns, because we can instantly open our phones and give ourselves the illusion of omniscience, where we can instantly, we feel like we can instantly find out anything immediately from our pockets, which is crazy. I mean, in ancient, they had to think and categorize things differently in their brains and store information differently because they didn't have this external brain in their hand, that they could look stuff up. But what it's done is it's given us this illusion of omniscience.
Starting point is 00:19:06 Here's the thing. I think the estimates are somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 new species are discovered every year. Every year. On the planet we live in. What that means is that we have no idea what's out there. We just don't know. Again, 5% of the ocean floors have been mapped. That means that another way of saying that, if you got 5% on a test, my brother in Christ, you failed.
Starting point is 00:19:29 You did a bad job. You got enough. It's like, I'm Baron Spanky, and this is four. Yeah, you're Barron Spanky, not Aaron Manky. I was not paying attention to the test. And I, anyway, I had to work that in. The connected, the connectivity of our world, the globalism that we think in terms of, makes us think that the world is actually much smaller than it is.
Starting point is 00:19:53 And there's a sense in which you're, you know, a small world. That's crazy. And yeah, yeah, yeah. But also the world is big. Yeah, the world is big. And it's mostly oceans. It's full of mysteries. And it's mostly oceans that we haven't mapped yet.
Starting point is 00:20:05 Yep. So actually, the majority of the world is something that we just don't know. We don't know. And we think like, oh, we cover every service. You know, we have boats everywhere. No, we have highly concentrated shipping lanes. Yep. Even air traffic that's 30,000 feet above the ocean, very often concentrated, like, lines
Starting point is 00:20:22 of travel that we know. And so, you know, think about the fact that there's a garbage patch that's like the size of, I don't know, Nebraska or something stupid, out in the middle of one of these oceans, and it's a blip. Right, yeah. It's just a blip on the radar. In comparison. You know, and we did that.
Starting point is 00:20:38 Like, wow. Yes. We're so, humans are powerful. Now, one way that we can see that this is not a new phenomenon, this fascination with the ocean, and that there, you know, the antiquity of these myths and stories from the ancient times would would be the story of the Carta Marina. The Carta, you probably familiar, that means map. This was a map that was created in Rome just about 500 years ago between 1527 and 1539.
Starting point is 00:21:08 Carta Marina means map of the sea, and it was drawn by a gentleman named Olaas Magnus. He was a diplomat to Rome from the Swedish government. So he was charged with creating this first highly detailed map of northern Europe, and that would include, of course, large swaths of the ocean. You got a coastlines right relationship of different regions to one another across the oceans. So he was drawing from sources that were very broad, including things like Ptolemy's map in Geography. I don't know how to pronounce that. Geography is what we're going to go with. And the work of astronomer Jacob Ziegler.
Starting point is 00:21:47 So he produced this piece, this map that has perplexed laymen and historians for decades. If you look at this thing, you'll see that the detail is ridiculously impressive. In the sense that even today, the coastlands that he indicated, they hold up pretty well. If you think about the way, I mean, we're mapping these things with satellite imagery. Yep, GPS. GPS technology. And so we can obviously get things very precise using those technologies. Think of how you would have to go about making a map of the coastland from the ground.
Starting point is 00:22:22 from the ground just as a guy. Yeah, it was art. It was more art than science. Yeah. Beautiful, beautiful work of art, but still impressive detail. And it's held up well in some parts of it. But throughout the seas, he depicted various monsters and strange fish. And people blame this today on his use of descriptions of sea conditions from sailors,
Starting point is 00:22:48 from these seasoned sailors that had, he was saying, hey, tell me about this region, tell me about this place and his own observations. So moderns have debunked this, you know, for his reliance on eyewitnesses and these uneducated, like, oh, the sailor, did, how many PhDs did he have? Yeah, exactly. Did he have 2020 vision that day? A cartography. Scholars, of course, dismiss all of his monstrous depictions.
Starting point is 00:23:17 But here's the question. And I think that it's a fair question. why do we assume that everybody who's telling these stories is just unreliable or a drunkard or a liar? Couldn't it be possible that at this time, especially before humans had really in the numbers that we do today traverse these regions of the ocean, that our heavy sea traffic has driven certain creatures away from our normal areas of traffic. maybe these men, these sailors, actually saw things. He has a quote that includes a description on sea monsters in particular. He says, quote,
Starting point is 00:23:59 There are monstrous fish on the coasts or sea of Norway of unusual names, though they are reputed a kind of whales who show their cruelty at first fight and make men afraid to see them. And if men look long on them, they will fright and amaze them. Their forms are horrible. Their heads square, all set with prickles, and they have sharp and long horns around the,
Starting point is 00:24:19 about. One of these sea monsters will drown easily. Many great ships provided with many strong mariners, Olaas, Magnus from a treatise concerning the northern peoples. So here's the question. Is all of that just made up scared sailors telling sea stories or, you know, trying to impress people with their sea stories? Or are these kinds of stories which run throughout the world, across cultures, across times, across places, could there be something to them? I obviously think that there is something to them. You know what? I take it all back. It's all made up. It's all made up. I'm just kidding.
Starting point is 00:24:59 We're done with this. We're done doing this. The stupid podcast. We're going to rename this, Cosmos. It's not haunted. The stuff. We're going to rename it particles. Uninteresting globules. Yes, yes, yes. No, I think that there are something to these accounts. some people will also try to say that Olaas was just being you know, artful with his depiction of the seas
Starting point is 00:25:23 and he was trying to include things to make it interesting because it was unknown. He was just trying to get clicks. Here's the thing. He came from a region of the world. He was trying to get clicks. That actually just landed. I'm sorry.
Starting point is 00:25:34 That's pretty good. Here's the thing, though. He came from a region of the world that had, even from ancient times, some of the greatest skill in seafaring. they were sailors, they lived on the water, they came from Vikings, and Vikings were expert sailors. So it's not really like Olaeus looked at a map of the sea and thought, hmm, that's completely unknown to me. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:58 Hey, can we buy like a thousand dollar map car in Marina for the wall? Yes, 100%. That's New Christenim Press. Okay, just charge it to the account. I will do that right now while we record. Yeah. Select size, biggest you have. next size 10 feet by 100 feet. Yes, that's what I want. I want to be able to dive in and wrestle
Starting point is 00:26:20 Leviathan. Anyway, I apologize. Continue. There's a good example, though, of what I'm talking about, where these aren't just crazy stories made up by random drunks that sailed around. Yeah. They really do cross-cultures. In 1641, sailor John Jocelyn produced a work called an account of two voyages to New England. And in it he documented his siting of what later became known as the Gloucester Sea Serpent. It was sited off the coast of Cape Ann in Massachusetts, and Jocelyn recorded a massive snake that, quote, lay quailed up like a cable upon the rock at Cape Ann. In the next three years, another sighting of the beast would be seen near Lynn, Massachusetts. This siding would provide an estimated length of 89 feet.
Starting point is 00:27:08 89 feet. For context, it's huge. The biggest schoolbuzz. that the U.S. produces is 45 feet long, so pretty much double the length of a school bus the U.C. The sightings of the Gloucester Serpent continued to be recorded for decades after. Even up until 1819, when the Linnean Society of New England published a study recounting thousands, thousands of local sightings of this monster. There even came a time when people spotted smaller versions of the same monster that were crawling around on the beach, and these snakes were covered in the monster. in bumps. They were black and they were covered in bumps. Kind of gross something.
Starting point is 00:27:46 Local lore agreed that these snakes must be the offspring of the larger creature. Told to be thin in comparison to its length, locals told of noticing what appeared to be a spear or harpoon, some sort of sharp object sticking out of the beast's head. The failed attempt maybe of a brave seaman to save himself or to win himself glory by killing it. The serpent has even been featured in Bernard Whoval. Women's famous cryptotoology work in the wake of C-survids. Now, because it had a massive horn sticking out of its head, do you want to know what the intelligentsia said it must be? I'm in a guess.
Starting point is 00:28:25 I would like for you to guess. It's got a large horn sticking out of its head. I think it was the planet Venus. Yeah, that's literally what they said. No, I'm kidding. They said it was the planet Mercury. Did they really? They had the audacity.
Starting point is 00:28:39 No, what did they say? The gall. The gall. To say this thing was a narwhal. Come, an 100 foot long narwhal. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, guys. Like, how errant can you get?
Starting point is 00:28:51 What a swamp gas explanation. These guys are real killjoys, all right? They're just like, it's a narwhal. Actually, it must be a narwhal. Actually spelled A, C-K-S-H-U-A-L-L-L-L-Y. Actually. I'm a literal in cell living in my mom's basement,
Starting point is 00:29:10 making peanut butter sculptures. with my cryptozoology PhD, and I think that was a narwhal. For sure, you should listen to me. I have life experience. Trust the science. Here's the thing, Ben. I think it's funny that Americans will literally do anything other than use the metric system, including measuring things in the number of school buses it is long.
Starting point is 00:29:27 So true. So true. My favorite was there was a news broadcast that said dog-e-sized pothole on the local road. And there's this, they put this, like, cute little lab in this pot. They're like, see, it's the size of a medium-sized lab. Take that, King George. Although there are only two types of countries. There are those who use the metric system and those who have been to the moon.
Starting point is 00:29:51 Have we been to the moon? Oh, my gosh. I can't believe that we just said. We might actually have a fight about it. Okay. Anyway. So look, here's the point. You're right.
Starting point is 00:30:03 So many of these stories get dismissed as, you know, sailors that are drunk or they're just exaggerating. You know, we've all heard our uncles tall. tale of that 80,000 foot long marlin that he had off the coast of Florida. Totally caught. It got away, you know? I had it, though. But that's dumb, okay? Here's our scholarly explanation.
Starting point is 00:30:26 That's, you're dumb. That's just, you're done. Here's the thing, you're boring. You're dumb. Not all sailors are just like pathological virus. That's not how it works. And when, so think about this. Think about this with me, Ben, just for a moment here.
Starting point is 00:30:40 A lot of these men, so. So take our opening story, our cold open from the datalus. We've got people giving these eyewitness testimonies who are, they have everything to lose and very little to gain from telling these stories. Because many of them are being entrusted by large corporations like the Dutch and East India trading company that owns the ships, which are very valuable, put in charge of the souls of dozens of men, a huge amount of money in cargo, and trusted to make these decisions and be men of, you know, intelligence and judgment. Integrity. integrity who will tell the truth and not literally pirate your stuff and steal it or or run it onto a shoal and and these are the kinds of men over and over in history that give us highly detailed detailed accounts of some of these things and so to me I think that one of the things
Starting point is 00:31:29 that shows in a lot of these conversations is just that we have bad imagination and we are moderns who just want to boil everything down to stuff we already know yeah we want a boring world because we're a boring people. To get cognitive closure as quickly as possible. Now, to circle it back to something that we mentioned earlier, we were talking about how every particle in the entire universe is at war. Yeah. Between good and evil. Yeah. If you think about the Carta Marina, that story that you told about Olaeus Magnus, he was drawing a huge cluster of sea serpents around an area of the world that was very pagan for a very long time. Yeah. Now, if you tie that in with ideas of Leviathan and Tannen these dragon sea creatures, I think that a case could be made that many of the fallen angels were dragons.
Starting point is 00:32:23 I'm with you. I think you could, like, and I'm talking from scripture, not just being weird. Yeah. I think that you can really make a good case that a lot of angels are dragons. And so a lot of the fallen angels are dragons. So I think that some of these sea monsters are genuinely demonic things. maybe not all of them. Maybe some are just natural phenomena, but absolutely.
Starting point is 00:32:42 I think that there's a case to be made. Yeah, I think that you can really make that case. And to me, it would make sense that something that is demonic would flock to a location that has been steeped in demonic pagan lore. Yeah, it's like we as moderns and archaeologists, we dig up these ancient Canaanites and we think like, oh, they're just worshipping made up, God that's all made up, made up, made up. People just invent religions left and right. But then you're like, well, hang on because they'll describe religious encounters with demon gods where they sacrifice to demon gods. It was like a fish demon and all these different, you know, goats and goat demons and all these different descriptions of these ancient gods. Number 17, goat demons.
Starting point is 00:33:25 Yeah. God literally says. He's like, there you go. Stop worshipping the ghosts. So rather than saying all of it's made up, which is a very North American, modern sort of materialist way of thinking, the reality is that, the powers have enslaved, the powers and principalities have long enslaved many regions of peoples to demonic idolatrous false worship. For example, in ancient Egypt, those Egyptian magicians seemed to genuinely be able to do things that were magical. Yeah. That seemed to have spiritual
Starting point is 00:33:59 power behind them. Exactly. Right. So we look at that, we're like, you know, even if you, I think the Prince of Egypt movie, didn't they have? That's the one with Moses, right? I get that one mixed up with the Joseph one. No, it's the Moses one and the Exodus. And they show the magicians doing like fake stuff. Yeah, like illusions. Slight of hand.
Starting point is 00:34:18 They're basically slight of hand magicians. No, that's not what the Bible says. It's not what it was. That's not what it presents. So I think it's interesting, Ben, and I think this is the direction you're kind of leading us here is that you could look at something like the UAP phenomenon. Yes. This is a United. United Airlines phenomenon.
Starting point is 00:34:35 This is unidentified aerial phenomena or USOs. Or identified submerged. Yes, exactly. Yes. And if you look at a map of where we tend to see these, you know, quote unquote, we're going to do episodes in this, but alien stuff. Yeah. Very concentrated in materialist North America.
Starting point is 00:34:53 Yeah. By miles away, North America is the most reported signings of UAPs. So wouldn't it make sense, and I'm just going to tease this, because we're going to talk in length about it later, but wouldn't it make sense that, the country that has become dominated by materialist thinking, that it's not nothing spiritual, it's just molecules in motion,
Starting point is 00:35:12 that we would all of a sudden start getting visitors from other planets who are telling us things like just love one another and get along in this kind of universalist sort of false religion. And that feeds the materialist worldview. Because we're not alone in the universe. We're not special. We're not set apart. It's all in the ransom.
Starting point is 00:35:35 trilogy, first of all. It's all in a, the Bible. It's all in the Bible. And the Ransom Trilies. Another example of that kind of same line of thinking. Light wheels. Let's talk about light wheels. My guy. We're locked in. My guy. Light wheels. All right. So tell the listeners what light wheels are, Ben. This is a quick thing and it's really, really weird. But it's a great display. Brian's dancing. I was picturing the sound design under this. Yeah. It's a great display of worldviews. and demonic versus heavenly forces being at war. So you have this phenomena called light wheels.
Starting point is 00:36:12 And this still happens today. It still happens today, but it started long ago, where people who would spend a lot of time on the sea would start to see spinning wheels of light that sat on the water surface. And I'm not talking about a sunset or sunlight that's being blown around, you know, the water is being blown around by the wind,
Starting point is 00:36:32 and the sunlight is getting captured in it. And it's giving this effect. No, no, no. It's almost like tangible life that you could reach out and grab. Moderns say that it's bioluminescent, plankton or bioluminescent algae. But that doesn't fit the bill of what these people are talking about. No one who calls it that has actually seen it. And the people that have seen it say that it is definitely not that, as they've seen pictures. Now, when it happened in the past, it would be recorded as up to 550 yards in diameter.
Starting point is 00:37:03 It's huge. Insanely huge. You know, more five football. In the words of Eric Khan. That's huge. That's huge. That's huge. And spinning at a rate of 80 miles an hour.
Starting point is 00:37:14 So it's not slow. If wind were to produce that in water, the wind would have to be at least triple. Dang. 80 miles an hour. And that just doesn't happen often. The point that I'm getting at is this. Eastern sailors, when they saw it, that were more steeped in a pagan religion, specifically Chinese sailors when they saw it would call them Buddha's wheels.
Starting point is 00:37:39 So Buddha, who's not a deity, but he's achieved the highest form. You know, he's achieved nirvana. So to them, he's basically a deity. He's the ultimate good. And they called it Buddha's wheels. But in the Christian West, without hesitation, the sailors commonly call them Satan's carousels. Dang. So you have this polarization
Starting point is 00:38:02 Where these pagan religions are looking at them They're like, oh wow, that's so good. It's a God. Yeah. And you're seeing these Christian cultures looking at it and saying, That is evil inherently. Did they know something? We don't.
Starting point is 00:38:16 It's interesting if you read accounts of angels and like take Ezekiel. It's like glinting metal and flashing lights. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the biblical, an illustration, a realistic illustration of biblical angels and you start to realize, Angels do appear in human form in a Bible common. Yeah, sure.
Starting point is 00:38:33 But they also appear as crazy lion-faced, multi-headed, many-eyed, six-wingish seraphim and cherubim with flaming swords and flashing lights and they just sound like these... And then they show up and they're like, do not be afraid. Do not worship me. You not worship me. We both worship the living God. And then you're like, I just peed. I'm actually terrified.
Starting point is 00:38:58 I pooped. I just complied. The thing is, the thing is, the thing is. What are you going to say? I shouldn't. No, it's actually, it is interesting to see how people interpret. They tell the story. They tell the story.
Starting point is 00:39:15 They say, this is that. And they fit it in. They try to, they say this is, they harmonize it with the story of the world. We're always doing that. Materialists are. Everyone does. Yeah, they're harmonizing the stories and these accounts and their own perceptions through the lens of their stories, which is why a lot of even materialists, I recently
Starting point is 00:39:35 even heard a story of a woman who's like, I'm a materialist, I was a doctor, like I'm a medical doctor. Yeah. And then she had some kind of strange spiritual encounter. And it was so compelling to her that she was like, I'm no longer that anymore. She's not a Christian. Right, right, right, right. But it changed her perception of the story.
Starting point is 00:39:54 And so I think it's interesting to see that in North America, a lot of the time the demonic strategy is to present like scientific post-millennialist sort of things. Like we can reach utopia through scientific endeavor and transhumanism and that kind of thing. Whereas other eight cultures that are still highly overtly spiritual, the demonic strategy is far different. It's like possession and weird demon stuff. And I hope one of the things that you're that you're getting from us is that when we say spiritual experience or some sort of encounter, it's not something that's like, oh, your mom told you that when she was a kid, she saw a ghost out of the corner of her eye, and when she looked over there, it was gone.
Starting point is 00:40:32 No, we're talking about things that in the opening story, those sailors looked at that serpent for 20 minutes. 20 minutes, yeah. 20 minutes. You know, keep going. So my point is, these spiritual encounters, when we really get a window into the war, the cosmic war that's going on, they oftentimes do have physical, tangible manifestations. to them. So we shouldn't be surprised at that. Now, there's a really good example of this, actually,
Starting point is 00:41:01 and it kind of ties in that geography principle that I was talking about earlier, where some demonic beings would flock to a pagan demonic land. The place, pre-Christian place or an unchristianized place. Yeah, Brian, can you tell us about the Cherokee Uctana? Yeah, the Cherokee Uctana? This is a fascinating story, and these permeates legends of North American and South American and Central American native peoples in pre-Christian times. So the Cherokee tribe lived in the southeastern, what's today the southeastern United States. They had legends and tales of a river serpent called the Uctana, or Uctana. I don't know how to pronounce it.
Starting point is 00:41:41 I don't speak Cherokee. I just said it wrong really. I only speak Ojibway. So anyway, I don't really. Makaday. Anyway, they told the story of this river serpent with four horns and dragonish wings. and you can read about this. There's an anthropologist named James Mooney,
Starting point is 00:41:57 sorry, James Mooney, who observed the Cherokee tribe in western North Carolina and described the Uctana in his 1992 book, history, myths, and sacred formulas of the Cherokees. And he wrote, quote, Those who know say that the Uctana is a great snake, as large round as a tree trunk, with horns on its head, in a bright, blazing crest like a diamond upon its forehead,
Starting point is 00:42:21 and scales glittering like sparks of fire. The blazing diamond is called the Ulan Suti, means transparent. And he who can win it may become the greatest wonder worker of the tribe. Still, it is worth a man's life to attempt it, for whoever is seen by the Uctana is so dazed by the bright light that he runs toward the snake instead of trying to escape. So at the time of Muni, end quote, by the way,
Starting point is 00:42:48 at the time of Muni's study, the tribe was a, assertive in saying that they were still in possession of the only known Uctana diamond that was successfully retrieved by a Cherokee warrior decades earlier. And however, since Mooney was not a part of their tribe, he's a white guy. He's like, they said, you're not allowed to see it. You can't come in. There's similar things that Skinwalker Ranch here in Utah where there's a whole canyon that they don't allow white people to go in, non-tribe members to go.
Starting point is 00:43:18 So the monsters, though, what's interesting, is that in many of these tales, these monsters are often not just merely, they don't present them merely as physical creatures. Yes. There's an element where they're born out of anger and envy and malice, and they're like Western iterations
Starting point is 00:43:37 of what you see in ancient Greek legends, like the Tulcos, demon monster born out of human will. You see this in the golem, in the, what's the other one? I can't remember the other one actually. There's a lot of these kinds of, And we'll probably have a whole episode on Tolkos.
Starting point is 00:43:53 Because you get into that with AI and stuff too. Which is, dude, we got to do one on the demon AI. We got to do one on lobe. Bro, be careful of Roco's basilis. I wouldn't look up AI lobe.
Starting point is 00:44:06 Just like in all seriousness. Don't actually. Unless you got a tough stomach. But anyway, you see that they're tying these things in. Now, yes, the Cherokee were a pagan people. We shouldn't expect them to be, you know,
Starting point is 00:44:19 up front all. the time. You know, maybe they're trying to make themselves seem more glorious to this white anthropologist. Sure, maybe. The fact is, though, that this was something that all of them universally believed was true. I mean, they held to it and they said, no, no, no, I've seen this before. I've seen one of these things. And it's terrifying. Yeah. You don't ever want to see it. So we shouldn't just write that off and say, uh, whatever. They were probably tripping on some psychedelics or something. Yes. We should be, we should actually say, No, that's possible because these are a demonic pagan people that need Christ.
Starting point is 00:44:55 So they're going to be oppressed by demons. Yeah. This isn't weird. And especially when they're saying that these things aren't born out of peace and love and kindness. They're born out of anger, malice, and envy. Yeah, we don't show up and evangelize the false gospel of modern materialism and say, all of your ancient legends are completely made up nonsense. No, we come in and we say, I absolutely believe that you or your forefathers had
Starting point is 00:45:20 genuinely spiritual and demonic experiences. Let me tell you the truth about where these creatures come from. I believe you. Yeah, I believe you. Let me tell you the truth about the embattled cosmos that you live in. Let me tell you about the creator. And what you'll find is that often, there was an interesting book. I can't remember the name of it right now, but it was a missions book.
Starting point is 00:45:41 And it was noting how every culture had kind of a doorway, it seemed, where they, even where they had lots of lesser gods and things created. A lot of them had a doorway for the idea of a, like a father or like an ultimate creator of all things. And so Paul did this of the Ariopagus, Acts 17, where he walked in and he said, look, you have this idol to the unknown God, this monument to the unknown God. What is unknown to you, I declare. Yeah. And he told them. He said, he didn't come in and say all of the Greek and Roman gods don't exist.
Starting point is 00:46:17 Caesar. or fake. He said, I'll tell you the truth about the real true, ultimate creator of all things. Yeah. He's Lord over the powers and the principalities put them to open shame. And hey, it's no wonder that these demon gods are terrorizing you. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:46:35 Because the God that they tried to defeat Jesus Christ put them to open shame. Yeah. So they're going to do what they can to make their mark by terrorizing what they see as lesser beings, which is humanity. And Christ would say, no, no, no, those aren't lesser beings. Those are my people.
Starting point is 00:46:51 So he wants to defend you. Now, to me, the peak example of this kind of thing in terms of ocean mystery. I'm ready for it. Is Atlantis. Disappearing islands. Did you just say Atlantis?
Starting point is 00:47:04 Atlantis. Atlantis. This Greek myth, and then other eastern and actually far western myths of disappearing lands. Yeah. In Plato's 4th century BC works, Critias and Tamaus, a pagan tale is told regarding the formation of a beautiful island, sitting away from the pillars of Hercules in the Atlantic Ocean.
Starting point is 00:47:30 In this tale, Poseidon was given this land when the Hellenic deities of old divided it into fiefdoms for one another. According to the tale, the god of the sea fell in love with Cleito, who bore him five pairs of male twins. While the eldest of these 10 brothers, Atlas, was given the crown of the ocean and this paradise land that Poseidon was forming, his brothers were given lesser realms to govern as well. The island flourished under Poseidon's power and lordship, being advanced in technology beyond any other civilization and ruling over many men in a large territory, even stretching to the mainland known as Greece. The island is said to have been made into concentric circles of land for protection, like layers in a cake that's been squished down onto the tabletop.
Starting point is 00:48:21 Each ring was surrounded by a large wall that was made of red and black and white rock and covered in preciousness. According to Plato, speaking as his character, Critus, this island was involved in a brutal war, 9,000 years before Plato's time, between those outside the pillars of Hercules and those within. With help from the Athenians, the lands occupied by Atlantis within the pillars were liberated, and the island dwellers were driven back.
Starting point is 00:48:51 Destruction followed, as Critias tells us, quote. But afterwards, there occurred violent earthquakes and floods, and in a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth. In the island of Atlantis, like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea and those places, parts is impassable and impenetrable because there is a shoal of mud in the way. And this was caused by the subsidence of the island.
Starting point is 00:49:22 Atlantis confirmed. I'm not going to lie. And people at this point, if you're still listening to this and you're like, and you're not like, I'm out of haunted cosmos. Guys, just wait, please. These people are unhinged. They just both agree that they know where Atlantis is. Listen.
Starting point is 00:49:45 Oh, yeah. Listen. Listen. When I first discovered this, this theory, and I've long been interested in this kind of stuff, I've read, you know, I've read different takes on Atlantis and whatnot. But I was, like, I don't want to say 100%. I was about 99.3% convinced that this is where the origin of the Atlantis tales, including that description that you just heard, came from. Yeah. Same.
Starting point is 00:50:16 Okay. First of all, before I even heard of this thing, and we're about to get into it, I wanted to believe. We wanted to believe. I was like, hey, man, this is cool. You're like, come on. Come on. And like, we believe in an anti-deluvian and post-deluvian world. Yes.
Starting point is 00:50:31 Can you just real quick? Yeah. Explain what you mean by that. So we believe that they're in what we could call catastrophism, which is that there was a catastrophic event in history. It's historical that took. that took place right around, I don't know, Genesis 9, Genesis 8, Genesis 9, where the world was flooded and decreated because of... Oh my gosh.
Starting point is 00:50:54 Because of problems that were satan-y. We'll get there. We'll get there. We'll get there when we get there. We get there when we get there. Mr. Incredible's been. But yeah, and then God flooded the world, and then he remade the world with like this Noah, Noah figures, Second Adam kind of figure.
Starting point is 00:51:11 I don't mean Second Adam is incredible. Christ, but like he took the world back down to a family and then rebuilt the world again. So when we go out into the world and we discover, and I'm talking about from North American Native tribes through Aboriginal peoples to European peoples, to Chinese and Asian peoples, to Russia. I mean, to the lizard people in Antarctica. One of the oldest writings that we know of to the lizard people in the hollow earth under Antarctica. When we talk to all of these reputable lizard people sources, what we find, no, do we find? We find, we find, we find, we find a, catastrophic, floody sort of decreation.
Starting point is 00:51:48 Yep, yep, floodmits. So, all right. I have two words for you, recot structure. The recot. Take us there. Guys, okay, you have got to look this up. Because what I'm about to say isn't going to quite do it justice. We'll link a video in the show notes that is mind blowing. Yeah. But this, this thing is called the recot structure. It's located. Bear with me. Bear with me. I'm bearing with you. In the middle of the Sahara Desert. Okay. And it is Atlantis.
Starting point is 00:52:18 The way that you sold that could have convinced anyone. It's where Atlantis was. Listen. And it's in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Before I start giving some details, let me lay some more groundwork. Just in terms of what Plato's already said. Yeah. So Plato got this story from his ancestor so long,
Starting point is 00:52:38 who was a Greek philosopher six generations before Plato or so. something like that. Yeah. Plato got this story passed down from Solon, and they both agreed that Atlantis was historical, that it happened. Yeah, they were not making up a myth. No.
Starting point is 00:52:53 They both intended to convey history. Plato was not trying to be metaphorical and fictional here. Solon had traveled to Alexandria during his lifetime, which at the time was the pinnacle of history and record in the entire ancient world. And when he went there, he saw this wall that had a hieroglyph about some island that was cataclysmically destroyed 9,000 years before. And so he asked the Egyptian priest, hey, can you explain this to me? The Egyptian priest tells him the story of Atlantis that there was this great, advanced technological island 9,000 years earlier. And it had fallen in a single day because it had overstepped its bounds.
Starting point is 00:53:36 Or maybe it was overwhelmed by a global flood. Maybe it was ruled by a demon. Maybe it was ruled by a demon god named Poseidon. And showed that he was better than Poseidon. Yes, maybe it was ruled by Poseidon and his Nephilim sons. He went there. So anyway, they consider this history. All right.
Starting point is 00:53:57 Now, the supposed date, according to Solon, had occurred, like I said, 9,000 years earlier. Regardless of whether you are a global flood enjoyer, which every Christian is, which is weird to say, because it was massive judgment. You've got to be global floodbacks. Yeah, or some like, lame, lame, dumb atheist. This does, this date coincides with a cataclysmic event called the Younger Dryest Climate Disaster. What's important is not that they were right in calling it that or that their details are right, the atheist I mean. Rather, it means that there was a huge event that took place that changed the climate of the globe forever, forever since.
Starting point is 00:54:39 Now, the way that Plato describes Atlantis is concentric circles of land. So there's the central island, and then there's a ring of water, like a moat. And then there's another ring of land around that. It's like a bulls, it's like a target that you'd shoot at. There's another ring of land, another moat of water, last ring of land, and then a last ring of water. And these rings are fed by some massive source of water on all sides. so you think like a like a bull's eye target and it's an island. This looks exactly like the recot structure in the northern Sahara.
Starting point is 00:55:17 Yes. Scientists do not know how this structure was formed. They do not know if it was manmade or if it was natural, though they have a very hard time proving that it was natural. Yeah, they have some theories, but they're unsubstantiated. They're just mere conjecture. And frankly, they're unsatisfying. They're unsatisfying.
Starting point is 00:55:37 for a fact, because this was the most obvious thing, was like, oh, this is an impact site for a meteor. It's not an impact site. They know that it is not that. They're very confident. And even if you look at it, it doesn't look like it would have been formed because it's got like, yeah, it's got the ridges. It's got concentric ridges. It's got a concentric circles. Not a bowl. Not a big, you know, bomb shaped bowl. Yeah. When you throw a rock at the sand on the beach, it doesn't ripple like the water does. So true. And this recots structure has ripples. Plato records that the outer circle is 14.5 miles in diameter. This coincides exactly with the racquet structure. Yep. I mean, it is to the T if you take an average diameter. Plato says that the mountains of Atlantis were celebrated. Brian, Brian, Brian, Bram, blah, right?
Starting point is 00:56:26 Whoa, whoa, whoa. Brian, my guy, are there mountains in the Sahara? Hang on. Let me tell you something about the Sahara. Yes, there are, Ben. there not only are their mountains, they fit the exact description of Playao's location in geography. I mean, this is insane.
Starting point is 00:56:42 On the north side of the island, supposedly, you could look over and you could see a mountain range. Okay, so I know a lot of us pictured like an island in the middle of the Atlantic that sunk. That's not really what's described here. There's some islands, there's some mountains to the north. The Rekot structure has mountains to the north. Guess what else was described by Plato on those mountains? Please tell me.
Starting point is 00:57:03 many rivers flowing into Atlantis. Many rivers. Do you know what we see on these? Tell me what we see, satellite imagery. We see clear evidence. Clear evidence. Of river basins. River basins flowing into the racquet structure.
Starting point is 00:57:19 Erosion through these mountains on the north side of the racquet structure that would have been formed by great rivers flowing long ago. All right. Into the city, into the region. Now, I know what you're thinking. Oh, Ben. The Sahara isn't in the, The Sahara's dry.
Starting point is 00:57:35 The racquet structure is 50 plus miles away from the coast. I just took my headphones off. But if you're done, I'll put them back on. I'm done. Okay. Because, hey, guess what? If you take satellite imagery around the recot structure and you look at this massive view from the recot structure 50 plus miles to the west where there actually is a coastline.
Starting point is 00:57:56 Yeah. You'll see what looks like obvious. I mean, you don't have to be a geologist to know that this is what happened. that there was water up there and then it receded and pulled sediment back. Great waves across the land. Have you ever looked in your driveway during a rainstorm? Not only have I looked in my driveway. When I lived in England, our street flooded.
Starting point is 00:58:21 Oh, perfect. I put my wellies on and I just had the greatest time. The amount of money I'd pay to see a young brine and some wellies. It'd be no more than $15, but no less than $5. For me, it'd be no more than five, no less than one. Okay. So anyway, if you've been in your driveway during a rainstorm, and there's been some sediment or dirt that the storm washes out of your yard,
Starting point is 00:58:43 you'll see it kind of creates like ridges that look like waves of dirt, right? Do you know what I'm talking about? I know what you're talking about. I'm with you. This is obviously clear in satellite imagery of the Sahara Desert around the Rakot structure. And Plato describes that this region, you could have approached it with via ship before. There was an inlet, but that what happened is afterward, it was all choked with mud and you couldn't even get there. There was all of a sudden this great quaggy, land, marshy sort of stretch between the ocean and this place now, which perfectly fits.
Starting point is 00:59:14 Yeah. Other thing, we know that Sahara was a great, humid, rainforest-y kind of place before the desertification with the climate, this massive and a post-iluvian climate change that happened. So, you know, Al Gore was probably warning everybody about it for years before it happened. That's true. Actually, ancient Al Gore, Alice Gorus. Yeah. He was an absolute idiot. He was like, get an electric camel or the world is going to flood. Something's never changed. Al Gore sucks then, and he sucks now. He sucks. Anyway. So some of the other details about Atlantis that Plato says about the rocks. You know, you have red, black, and white rocks. In Utah, we have all of these. We have limestone, which can be very wide. It's very beautiful. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:00 Or granite can sometimes look white. And then you have sandstone, obviously red. And then you have basalt. Basalt is this, it almost looks like charred sandstone. Yeah. It's very black, beautiful. Now, when I heard about that, I was like, ah, it seems like a kind of nail on the coffin.
Starting point is 01:00:16 I don't know if like Northern Africa is going to have this. No, no, no, no, no. But guess what? They actually have all three. They do. Plentifully there. Yep. And like, you don't have to look hard.
Starting point is 01:00:26 It's just there. Ben. Ben. Brian. Ben. You got to get to the elephants at some point. Oh, dude, I forgot about the elephants. Anyway, I don't want to interrupt you. Keep going. I'm going to keep going.
Starting point is 01:00:37 So the last thing before the elephants. It also talks about the walls being full of precious metals. The leading export from the country that the racquet structure is in, which I can't remember the name of it, some African name. Yeah. Yeah. I can't either. I'll find it. The leading exports are copper and gold.
Starting point is 01:00:56 So this is a land that prides itself, actually, on being full of precious metals. So it makes sense that the ancient city would have more plentiful precious metals and would have put it all over the place to show off. It's in Mauritania. Okay. That's northwest Africa. That, I'm sure everyone knows where this. I literally did not know that was a place before I found this. Which is actually a good point.
Starting point is 01:01:19 People say, why didn't anybody know about this place? My brothers and sisters in Christ. Yes, tell us, please. It's in the middle of the Sahara Desert. Also, very difficult to get to. Impossible to see, unless you see it from above. Yeah, no one lives. No one lives. No one lives here. I mean, this is, you don't want to be here because now it's a barren wasteland.
Starting point is 01:01:35 It's a place that tries to kill you. Almost as if it had been judged by God for being so wicked and pagan and horrible. Wild. But the other thing is, shoot, what was I going to say? Well, it's, you can only see it from above. I've seen pictures from people on foot in the region. And you can't tell that what you're looking at is this giant concentric ringed structure. That is true.
Starting point is 01:01:55 Because it's 14.5 miles wide. That is true. Very big. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what you're going to say. No, well, it must not have been important. But the elephants.
Starting point is 01:02:05 Yeah, let's get to the, oh, the springs. Okay. Did you already talk about the springs? No, elephants first. Elephants first, then springs. Plato discusses the pride of Atlantis being their like war elephants. And you just go, what? And you go, that sounds cool.
Starting point is 01:02:19 You just say, K? You say Hannibal? Yeah, seriously. Over the Alps on his. Over the Alps? Right. And Caesar's like, am I joke to you? I joke to you.
Starting point is 01:02:28 So there's these elephants here. They pride themselves on the elephants on the island. Around the racquet structure, they have not only found petroglyphs depicting elephants. They've also found... Skeletal remains. Skeletal remains. Boom. Atlanta's confirmed.
Starting point is 01:02:45 Atlanta's confirmed. Now tell us about the springs. Okay. So another part of the description that Plato gives is that the center island has... a spring in the middle that Poseidon supplied, like this is what he says, that Poseidon supplied to ensure fresh water, a couple of springs, one warm, one cold, and that there was a well at the city center that provided this fresh water. And that what's interesting is that the racquet structure has such a place in the middle.
Starting point is 01:03:13 In the very middle. And what would be the central city? Yeah, what would have been a central city? And then there's also salt water if you go further out, the springs will be salty. Yes. Which is just, I mean, the number of details It's unbelievable. That map onto Plato's description with the Ricott structure.
Starting point is 01:03:34 It's ridiculous. Now, I'm going to land this plane to quote our friend, C.R. Wiley. I'm going to land this plane of what we're talking about with pagan geography. Okay. The argument that I'm going to make is that in the anti-deluvian world, you had the sons of God, which I take to be fallen. angels. They were attracted to the daughters of men, and they bred with them, and they created the race of the Nephlin, the race of giants. I think that you can make a good argument that a lot of
Starting point is 01:04:06 the ancient pagan gods, like the Greek gods, or the Roman gods, or far eastern gods, you could make the argument that those were fallen angels, who were demon gods that required the worship and the blood sacrifice of their people, and they completely twisted the proper worship God. And they also had great power. They clearly had great power because God warns Israel of worshipping these things. I mean, this is not in the Bible. God is warning Israel, stop worshiping the goat demons, stop worshipping Mulek, stop worshiping Baal. And the Egyptian gods. Now, I think that some of these, like, demi-gods that Greek myth tells us about could be Nephlin. Where there are these almost superhuman type people. Yeah. Many such cases.
Starting point is 01:04:52 Yeah, many such cases. In ancient writing. My argument is that genuinely there were, and I'm not even kidding, many such cases of cities like Atlantis that existed across the world who were ruled by demon pagan gods and were subruled by their nephalim children
Starting point is 01:05:08 to take dominion over men. I mean, it says in the story that they reigned over men even through the pillars of Gibraltar, or the pillars of Hercules, which is just the Strait of Gibraltar, even onto what is now modern Greece, some examples of this.
Starting point is 01:05:24 I want to give you some examples. Because this is not just isolated. This is not isolated. There is a place called the Yanuguni, which is known as the Atlantis of Japan. It is a monument off Japan's coast that's thought to be a remnant of a lost continent called Moo.
Starting point is 01:05:41 It's this massive rock formation. It's completely submerged now. And it's been studied to have clean cut lines and almost massive stacks. like a massive staircase and terraces and remains of old columns and other other architecture. It does make me wonder if it was an entryway or a staircase of giants like massive giants. But that's sort of the same thing. We'll talk about giants and others.
Starting point is 01:06:07 Yeah, we will. This was found to be a man-made city in the late 1990s. So again, up until then, it was like, maybe this is natural, maybe not. In the 1990s, they confirmed that it had to be man-made because teams found carvings of geometry, animals, and people in the structure itself. Around it, they found infrastructure of old roads, old wells, old mines. Just to quickly put a nail in the already rotting soft pine coffin of the evolution myth, a lot of fuss is made about how this mad made structure that they found could be housed in 22 million year old strata. And you have to see in the notes,
Starting point is 01:06:48 Ben spelled the phrase 22 million-year-old strata like the SpongeBob, where every other letter is capitalized. 22 million-year-old strad. Anyway, continue. I just had to note that. Look, they'll make a big hoopla about that. They're like, oh, how come this, you know, 5,000-year-old city is in 22 million-year-old strata?
Starting point is 01:07:07 Well, that's because God made a mature universe with a mature earth. I'm sorry, yeah. So you're going to have folks building cities on top of rocks that if we really study them, they're going to look like they're more than 10, 10,000 years old. beside the point. We digress, but it's true. So you have this Japanese monolithic city that we have submerged remains of
Starting point is 01:07:25 off the coast of Japan clearly fits the bill of an Atlantis-type place. It was for the time that it was made had to be incredibly civilized. It had roads, it had wells, it had mines. Another option is the lost city of Dwarca. Dwarca.
Starting point is 01:07:41 This is like the Hindu version of Atlantis. Did I just say another option? I'm going to say another exam. example. Yeah, it's not, to be clear, Ben's not saying this is another place. Maybe this was was where this isn't like Skymall catalog where you get to pick your favorite. Atlantis. There was, there was Atlantis and then there was Dwarca and then there was this other one. What is it?
Starting point is 01:08:04 Tronis. Tronis, there's Yonaguni. Yes. All these are examples. So tell us about Dwarca. The Lossity of Dwarca is like the Hindu. Let me just ask you a question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:08:14 Does Dwarca maybe have some kind of, I don't know, God ruling over it, founding it. Chadme. Yes. Krishna. Krishna was thought to be the founder of the city of Dwarca, and it was this beautiful city. It far surpassed all others, both in beauty and technology. Who's to say, these demon Hindu gods were not fallen angels who bred and created their own
Starting point is 01:08:39 Nephilim that helped build this massive city? But one day, as legend says, it was swallowed up by the sea. That's the other thing. I mean, you've got to be kidding me. All these cities are said to be drowned. In Numerous, like, am I a joke to you? Yeah, Tolkien's like, guys, this is really old. Tolkien's like, I have read things from the past.
Starting point is 01:08:58 All the remains of this lost city of Dwarca that they finally found, they point to it being some of the oldest ruins in the world that anyone has ever been able to stop. Another example, yet another one, is Tronis. Now, I've heard it pronounced Tronis, but it spelled Thonis. So, whatever. Choose your own adventure. Tronis was an Egyptian city that was also highly, highly advanced.
Starting point is 01:09:26 It was supposed to be the city of the gods, and it was off the coast of the mainland in the middle of the Mediterranean. The Greeks said it had long ago been swallowed by the sea. Now, up until 2012, wild. This city of Tronis was thought to be completely mythical, completely made up. But in 2012, its remains. were found at a depth of 50 meters near Abuker Bay. It had remained hidden for over 1,200 years. Here's the thing.
Starting point is 01:09:54 It's like at this point when I read ancient legends, I just go, anything, any of the gods are all demons, but it just happened. Yes. Because we keep finding these things. We keep confirming and rematologizing the world and discovering, it's not just stuff. Dude, I'm at the point where I 100% just trust what the ancient said. When you read the ancients, you're like,
Starting point is 01:10:16 I'm not skeptical at all. I'm going to understand where they were pagans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And when they were, like, they didn't, they were not saved. They needed Christ. They needed Christ specifically to come to bind the strong man and plunder his house of the world. So that they would stop being ruled by these horrible demon gods. So, so Christ, dude, he binds the strong man, and then he goes and he plunders his house.
Starting point is 01:10:38 See, there's a cosmic reordering that happens at the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. And a lot of these ancient peoples that have been ruled by demons, eventually became Christian. Now, I think that in these cataclysmic world-changing events, you still see echoes of these things that happen in the modern day. So there was the fall of man. It changed the world completely. There was the flood.
Starting point is 01:11:00 It changed the world completely. Yeah. There was the entrance of the church age in 70 AD. It changed the world completely. Paradigms were shifted. But we still see echoes of these old world events that take place. And one modern example is a Japanese, we find ourselves
Starting point is 01:11:19 in Japan again, the Japanese legend of the Devil's Sea. You've heard of the Bermuda Triangle. This is not that. This is far worse. The Devil's Sea is where boats, planes, and people go to die inexplicably,
Starting point is 01:11:35 utterly missing with no remains. The lore says that there is an advanced underwater city there, where demons dwell. And I'm not making this up. This is what they believe is real, and they wreak havoc on the region above the waters where they live. Records from older times tell even of sightings of a dragon that lives there that would come up and devour sailors while they sailed over its realm. In 1955, massive modern ships, the largest ships of the day, both cargo and military, as well as the most modern and large planes, started disappearing here too,
Starting point is 01:12:14 utterly without a trace. These things happen and they are completely unexplained. I think that what we're concluding here is that not all of the mysteries of the deep are matters of antiquity in ancient legend. The deep places of the earth still appear to be haunted by the unknown.
Starting point is 01:12:37 Let me leave you with one last story here. Again, a recent one. Layed on me. In 2003, off the coast of Australia, there was a researching crew that was going out and tagging sharks. Specifically, they were attempting to tag great white sharks off the coast of Australia, southwestern Australia. And they would tag these sharks with these little tags that could record across time, temperature and depths.
Starting point is 01:13:00 So at any, it would log the time, you know, at this point in time, it was this temperature and at this depth underwater. Okay. Now, they tagged this female great white shark about three meters long. That's about nine feet long. and then, you know, they go back to their shore, get back on their boat, continue tagging other sharks, et cetera. Well, then about four months later, this tag was discovered on the beach somewhere.
Starting point is 01:13:25 It was someone found, they brought the tag in. They said, oh, we found your tag. Now, the tag, when it was logged into the computer, it showed that for about a third of a year after it was attached, the female Great White operated normally, swimming around exactly as they would expect. But then all of a sudden, in the, space of just a minute or two, all of a sudden, the female great white shark was plunged to a
Starting point is 01:13:50 depth of about 2,000 feet under the water in a very quick span of time, and that the ambient temperature surrounding that tag, so the measure of that temperature went from 46 degrees Fahrenheit to almost 80 degrees Fahrenheit, a 30 plus degree rise in a matter of minutes. The only explanation The only explanation that this data tells us is that this 9-foot great white shark, alpha predator, was swallowed very quickly by some extremely large animal. Took it down to 1,000 feet out. Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Haunted Cosmos.
Starting point is 01:14:43 We will see you next time. Signing off, I'm Ben, and I'm Brian. Thanks again. Did you know that patrons get access to bonus stories that didn't make it into the main episode, as well as early access to half of the season of Haunted Cosmos at a time. Support the show and get access to all kinds of great perks at patreon.com slash haunted cosmos. Want more hunted cosmos? Then make your way over to Patreon, where you can get early access to our content, as well as exclusive content, and regular dusty tomes and monthly live streams with Brian and myself.
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