Haunted Cosmos - Lab Leaks, Biowar, & Weaponized Ticks

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Ever heard of the Aral Sea? I thought not.What if we told you that the third-largest lake in the world was turned into a poisonous desert in less than a generation, all by the malicious misuse of biochemical weaponry?Yeah, it’s crazy. But the raging nations are capable of much when power and profit are in their grasp.Buckle up for this episode. It is about to get weird.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!Want to keep nefarious fairy Bigfoots away and also avoid icky seed oils, preservatives, artificial colorants, and other nasties in your daily shower routine? Then check out the vast array of homemade soaps from our friends at Indigo Sundries Soap Co.! Go to http://indigosundriessoap.com to learn more—and as our gift to you, use code HAUNTEDCOSMOS for 10% off your whole order!This episode is sponsored by New Dominion Design Co. Visit their website here and learn more!http://newdominiondesignco.com/This episode is also sponsored by Stonecrop Wealth Advisors! Go to this link to check out their special offers to Haunted Cosmos listeners today.https://stonecropadvisors.com/hauntedcosmosThis episode is also sponsored by the King's Ridge Elderberries! Check them out here and use code HAUNTED for 10% off your first order!https://tkrfarm.com/This episode is sponsored by Squirrelly Joe's Coffee! Visit their website here to get your first bag free!  Share Coffee. Serve Humbly. Live faithfully.https://www.squirrellyjoes.com/hauntedcosmosDesignButter offers mobile, web, and product design for a fixed monthly fee. Check out their services here: https://www.designbutter.com/Finally, this episode is sponsored by Gray Toad Tallow. Visit their website here and use COSMOS15 at checkout for 15% off your order.https://graytoadtallow.com/Support the show

This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap Company, Design Butter, New Dominion Design Company, gray-toed tallow, the Kings Ridge Elderberry, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, Stonecrop Wealth Advisors, and our supporters at supercast.com. It has identified the cause of the mysterious flu virus. Coronavirus. Coronavirus. The death toll now has risen.

It was early April in the Year of Our Lord 1915. The Great War ravaged Europe, feigning flames of hatred that would linger like smoke for years to come. The first truly modern war. It painted the hills and meadows of France, Germany, and Belgium red with rivers of blood. Bullets flew incessantly in those days, and storms of artillery rained down like deafening tornadoes until the world itself was made new, made less indifferent by the force of it all. Young men died, an entire generation lost. And with their deaths, Christendom began its final hemorrhage in the West.

At this time of early spring, the western borders of Belgium were being constantly pushed here and there by the Allied powers from their French stronghold and the central powers pouring out of the German bulwark. France, with her soldiers arrayed in the bright colors of a more gentlemanly time, was suffering. It was still early in the war, but she could already feel the cold drafts blowing in from multiple chinks in her armor. She had not even tasted the hell of Redun or the forsaken fields of the Somme yet, but she already felt crippled. Thus it was that she called up legions of reserves from within her own country, as well as other reservists from Algeria across the Med, to reinforce the line in Belgium. They arrived to the north and western town of Iprra about one week into April. From there, they took a short train ride to the small village of Langemark.

One can imagine how they felt as they disembarked and looked on the fullness of what one man can do to an end up. another behind the cloak of militarized vendetta, ruin upon ruin. Buildings crumbled in roads heaved up by the machinations of war, a city and tatters, woe to the bloody city. The men were solemn and sad. Many knew that by arriving there they arrived at the beginning of their own deaths. Yet still, duty called them up to courage, and so they walked through the town to meet the trenches that would house them.

They climbed down into those trenches and walked through the muddy maze towards the front line. There they waited for doom. Some two weeks later, on April 22nd that doom finally came. But at scope far outpaced those few precious French souls living in the ground. The day was especially warm and sunny, if not for the existential dread facing down both sides of the world represented there, separated by a no-man's land only a few hundred yards wide, it would have been the ideal day for any Belgian farming village. With the sunrise, though, came the steady stream of deafening gunfire in our time.

In two weeks, not an inch had been gained by either allied or central powers. Langmark and the larger Epra were a stalemate, but the fighting raged on ceaselessly nonetheless. The sound of gunfire would occasionally be interrupted by the screams of a soldier who had poked his head above the ground only to be horrifically injured or maimed, but not immediately killed. The day wore on like this, just as the other ones before it had, until later in the afternoon. It was at that point that something changed. The wind shifted. It had been blowing south for days, but suddenly it turned and began blowing west from behind the German lines.

With this change came a far more noticeable change. The Germans stopped firing. As this new breeze kissed the haggard faces of the newly minted French and Algerian forces, they relished the first moment of true stillness they had tasted since they arrived weeks prior. Some, especially brave among them, poked their head. heads up to see what had come over the Germans. They didn't see their camp burning by some act of God or nature. They didn't see their trenches inexplicably abandoned like they hoped for. They didn't see anything different at all, save the fact that they were now no longer shooting. Many minutes went by

like this, minutes of unprecedented and quiet. It was long enough for some of the younger Frenchmen to tempt themselves with the idea that somehow the war was over and they had won. But that dream was squashed down in a moment as they watched a new devilry rise up from the German trench. Clouds of greenish yellow and then bluish silvery smoke streamed from a trench line four miles wide and at the very front of the German position. A new trench further forward than the French had noticed before. It coalesced into a heavy cloud that moved still silently across the field of no man's land, riding the wind that had refreshed the weary men only a moment before. With nowhere to go, the French waited to endure this new thing.

A thing they took to be some kind of fog and nothing more. It rose up like a great wall of some ancient city before them, and each man felt some sense of threat rise up in his heart with it. Dirty faces stared upwards from the trenches, eyes bleach white against their filthy skin, and they looked like worshippers terrified before an awful god. When the wave of cloud finally hit, the coughing and choking and heaving fits began right away. Mounds of young men doubled over one another as they sought to wrench their own guts out of their mouths.

Desperate coughs and desperate screams. It was no fog or smoke. These men had freely inhaled a thick plume of pure chlorine gas and now suffered the torturous pain of poison that felt like needles filling their lungs. There was no escape. And just as the wailing cries of agony reached a new, crescendo, the German lines began to sing with a fresh barrage of gun and artillery fire to drown it out. It was the beginning of the second battle of Iprra, but it was also so much more than that.

April 22nd, 1915 marked the first time chemical weapons were used in a field of battle on the earth. It was a turning point in the severity of man's wrath and cruelty, and it opened a Pandora's box that, as history tells us, has led to particularly heinous evil. Why is this? Why do we recoil at the thought of chemical weapons in a theater of war? Aren't all the arts and weapons of war a horror? Aren't they all meant to maim, kill, conquer, and destroy? Perhaps it is the despair it inspires.

What do you do if the enemy's weapon is in the very air you're forced to breathe? Maybe it calls to mind images of blood-stained men walking through cloudy killing fields and wearing masks that make them look like something less than human. What more horror can be imagined than to watch such a creature find you writhing on the ground in unstoppable pain before mercilessly killing you then and there, or even more mercilessly, leaving you to suffer the long death of a poison gas? How can something as natural and unassuming as chlorine or some other gas be turned and twisted and forged anew until it's an instrument of such brutal death?

I imagine some ancient people asked similar questions about bronze and iron, when they first witness the sword's terrible work. But the sword doesn't seem to measure up in the realm of horror, to a gas cloud of death drifting towards you with inexorable and unstoppable finality. There's something different. What if we're so instinctively repulsed by chemical weapons and biological terror because they're so unknown and invisible and in most cases entirely off limits to the average man? I would not argue that simply knowing them better would make us less wary of their danger, but I would argue that their innate mystery certainly doesn't help. They're dangerous, as unpredictable as the ocean and the weather, for they're made of the same stuff.

They're wild things, treacherous things, but they are things nonetheless. Are chemicals and biological terrors not also categories in this world that man is supposed to subdue and rule over? Can it just be as simple as a lack of understanding and a bad start with their introduction in war that answers for our hatred of them? Maybe. But maybe not. What happens when a man grabs the reins of a bull he can't ride? What happens when pride quiets the disquiet in a man's heart? What happens when godless men pursue their dominion with a curiosity unfettered by truth and hope and love and faith? The opening story was an example of what happens when the use of these weapons and methods go well. Goes at least according to the design and

intent of their makers. But what happens when it goes wrong? What happens when they go wrong even according to their makers? There once was a body of water east of the Caspian named the Aral Sea. In the 1960s, it was the third largest lake in the world, providing sustenance and industry to Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan. Today, it is one of the world's largest inmost barren deserts, with just a thin and shriveled line of water remaining on its western side. What could turn such a massive water into a lifeless plane over the course of a few decades, you ask? Well, my friends, that is quite the story. In 1988, workers on a sandy island in the Aral Sea greeted the sunrise with a tiresome shore.

They hauled dozens of monkeys, 100 various kinds in total, out onto a 10-acre field of dust. There, the workers lashed them by their collars and leashes to posts that had been anchored with concrete deep in the earth. The monkeys fought hard against the rough treatment of the men and screeched their high-pitched yelp over and over again. For the men, the lower-level guards, it all felt too much. The freshly risen sun blinded them and heated up the air so quickly. The pounding of their legs by the monkeys made them cringe, and the rising volume of their collective shouts gave them all headaches when combined with the fiery sun. The sensory overload was real. They took out their frustrations on the monkeys, not worrying about an extra kick here and there as they finally finished tethering them all

up to their stakes. Stakes like pagan pillars in the desert promising doom to all who worship at them. Almost a mile away, a cluster of men in hazmat suits stood with clipboards in one hand and binoculars in another. After the guards cleared the field, they eagerly watched as a bright light flashed up in the sky at the end of the row of poles, the end closest to the sea. Once the light faded away, A thick cloud of jaundice yellow began to fall to the earth with a heavy slowness. It seemed almost graceful, almost pleasant, but the hazmat scientists knew better. The wind that had begun the previous night took the cloud and thinned it out, pushing it hard to the ground and drawing it quickly down the row of poles

until the little monkey figures were covered in its shroud. Even from such a great distance, they could hear the shrill cries of the animals grow louder and louder. In the fray, the monkeys yanked frantically at their collars and leashes. Their lungs burned with such an intense rage inside of them. Many crumbled to the ground, hoping they could crunch themselves up into a tight ball that no longer needed the luxury of breathing. It was a brutal scene. Little did they know that all of them were already dead,

and that the worst was yet to come. Once the cloud fully dispersed, the hazmats came and took the now crippled and suffering animals back to their cages in the facility. There, they waited and suffered all the more as each monkey developed and subsequently died from various diseases. Cue fever, brucellosis, glanders, and plague.

For the monkeys, it was hell. For the guards and scientists, though, it was just another day on Vosresdina Island in the Aral Sea, the island of Soviet chemical and biological war, the island that would grow until there was no more sea. In Geneva, Switzerland, from 1969 to 1971, the proper use of biochemical weapons in war was debated by world leaders. Following the exponential losses of World Wars 1 and 2, this pseudo-League of Nations was naturally determined to develop new rules of engagement that would lessen the macabre brutality with which great wars were fought. By April 10th of 1972, the agreement reached by the convention was ready for signature.

This Biological Weapons Convention boasted what it and its constituent members felt to be a distinctly humanitarian commitment to reject biochemical weapons of all kinds. Specifically by signing, the signatories committed to prohibit the production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and use of biochemical weapons full stop. Each signatory vowed to enforce this commitment by law in whatever land their government presided over. Among the signatories was the state representatives from the then sovereign Soviet Union. However, even as Soviet diplomats and leaders signed the commitment, their scientists and engineers were hard at work constructing what would become the largest and most cutting-edge biochemical weapons research establishment the world has ever seen, at least that we know of.

In 1936, a man named Yvonne Velikinov led the first ever military expedition, to a small island in the Aral Sea named Vosrejdina. What made this expedition so exciting for the budding and soon-to-be Soviet Union was its sole focus on biological and chemical warfare testing. Russia had not been immune to Germany's battlefield sorcery in World War I, and so was keen to throw their own hat into the ring of airborne death and torture. Villikinov hoped to find in this small island in the middle of the sea in the middle of nowhere the foundations for a covert facility that would go on to leave its unmistakable mark on the world.

Vosresdina made perfect sense for this. It was virtually uninhabited already, boasting only the peppered docks of poor fishermen from bordering countries who did not even live there full-time. It was utterly flat, dusty, and nearly barren. It appeared to the early Soviets, and they were right, that all that naturally grew there was a certain species of grass. It blanketed the species of span of the island and housed within its tiny forest a population of lizards and creeping insects. That, as far as can be found, was the entire ecosystem of Vosrejdina Island before the weapons and testing began. By the end of that first year, the grass and the lizards would be eradicated from the island, never to return. From that initial trip, development and quick expansion of

facilities on the island began. By 1948, Vosrejina cemented. itself is the focal point of the most secretive and high-level biochemical weapons testing and manufacturing taking place in the Soviet Union and therefore the entire world. Contained in its grounds were massive stores of anthrax, plague, smallpox, brucellosis, and tularemia, and with each annual testing season, more of these stores were added. The Soviet biochemical killing machine was being perfected, while the rest of the world was trying to get their feet under them as regards this new technology. But with such monumental feats of research in such a volatile field, the Soviets were taking great ethical risks upon themselves,

though perhaps they as a regime did not see that as worth consideration. In 1972, the same year the Soviet Union signed the Biochemical Weapons Convention, two fishermen from Uzbekistan were floating along the surface of the Aral Sea on their way back to the shore. It had been a long day in the water with relatively little to show for all their efforts. They didn't understand why the fish population seemed to grow thinner and thinner each year. They understood even less why the fish that did remain seemed so small and sickly. Despite this, fishing was their livelihood and barring some act of God, it always would be. They therefore thought it best to let their minds wander elsewhere whenever these questions floated to the surface. The summer heat beating down on

their backs was only lessened by a sweet wind blowing to the west. That wind continued, even into the beginning of the sunset, a thing that the men looked forward to every day for its unmatched beauty. With the wind to their backs, they rode steadily on, but looked ever westward to watch the sun paint the sky, all of its myriad colors before the night fell. Suddenly, though, the wind changed dramatically. They felt their eyes began to water as they were hit in the face now by a steady eastward breeze that kept growing in strength. Soon it too was a beating wind they had to row into to stay straight, but they still looked to the sunset, braving the call of wind that cut coming at them and squinted their eyes to see the majesty. But the majesty was no longer there. What met their

gaze now was a brown wall of cloud rushing towards them. Sandstorms were rare in the Aral Sea, though the men were near enough to Vosrazegnia Island to think that maybe a dust cloud had been whipped up there. But still, they knew that the dirt on Vosrazegdina did not look that shade of brown. They covered their faces as the cloud approached and prepared to look through densely squinted eyes until the dust passed over them. However, as it hit them with the wind, they found that it was not dust at all. They could see right through it. It didn't bite at their skin or mount any extra resistance at all. It was just differently colored air. They rode on unfazed for a while, But eventually the tickles in their throats were too much to bear, and the men began to cough.

The cough became whooping and crazed. The cough became a choke and a desperation just as the men arrived at the shore. They did not know when, but the cloud had passed away from them while they were still some distance from the docks. A few days later, the fishermen, citizens of the Soviet Union, succumbed and died of plague. The plague, as Soviet records admit, came from Vosrazegnia. It had been released during a test when the wind was moving west, and though the test was stopped after the wind turned, the scientists knew that people would likely be affected when the wind turned. Nothing was done. The families were not notified of the fault of Vos Rijdina.

The records were buried under a mountain of other reports. Either that or again, they didn't try to hide it, and it was a simple case of nobody caring. And somehow, this is nowhere close to the most tragic biochemical incident suffered by the land, around Vosrazegina. Before the deaths of those two fishermen, sometime in the 1960s, Soviet governors from other ministries within the regime

thought that the Aero Sea could be used to increase the agricultural yield of the bordering countries. These state planners had grandiose visions of rolling cotton fields all over the formerly desert soil of Uzbekistan. And all they had to do to achieve it,

they thought, was reroute a portion of the Amudarya River into man-made irrigation canals. The Amudarya was the southern inlet river to the Aral Sea. It had fed the sea and followed more or less the same course for generations before the Soviet agricultural project. Given its reputation for such constancy, nobody expected a slight deviation of its flow to completely change the geography of the river and region.

But that is just what happened. After only a few years passed, the Amu Daria was completely stunted from going into the Aral Sea at all. All the changes in fluid stress on the walls of the river made it coil into a loop at its end, terminating completely at the Soviet canals well before the sea's delta. As this happened, and especially after it was complete, the Aero Sea started to see its water levels drop dramatically. By the middle of the 60s, up to 14 cubic miles of water would be gone from the sea annually. The rate of loss increased until by the 1980s, the sea level was dropping by three feet each year. From 1960 to 1998, the Aero Sea's surface area dropped by over 60% and its volume dropped by over 80%.

This was too dramatic and quick a change to be reversed by man's schemes. The damage was done. By 2010, the Aero Sea was utterly unrecognizable, shrunken to a husk of its former self and leaving a new and especially arid desert in its wake. But dryness was not all the danger faced by those near the new desert. Despite the geographic crisis, the rerouting of the river did actually turn Uzbekistan from a dust bowl to a cotton bowl for a while. The soil became fertile for perhaps the first time in history, and Uzbekistan's usefulness became known worldwide as a premium supplier of cotton. But soon, the soil was dried up of what little nutrients it had.

The cotton yields dropped like the arrow's water level and little profit was left after all the effort of making it productive. That didn't stop the Soviets, though. They began to use banned agrochemical fertilizers to jumpstart the soil. These chemicals were and are incredibly toxic and carcinogenic. The local Uzbekistan's, the farmers and their families who actually did the work the Soviets designed the land for, became addicted to the substances and succumbed to their ill-fated side effects in massive waves of death. And that's only the downside of the irrigation project. What the Soviets also failed to consider, or again, did not care about, was the residual effects of the biochemical weapons testing on the new desert landscape that formed when the Aral Sea vanished.

The desert was a toxic wasteland, post-apocalyptic in its ability to kill you, whose deposits of anthrax and plague run deep underground after the many years of testing and production that took place on Vosrazegnia. Every year, as winds came down from the mountains far away and battered the land from the land from the world. the West, the poison dirt and sand gets kicked up into billowing clouds of death that roll through the villages on what used to be the coast. There's no surprise, therefore, that those villages report some of the highest cancer rate per capita in the history of the world. All this for an edge, for a profit, for a sense of safety in a changing and secretive world that fell down as if from heaven after the war. All of this brought on by a twisted counterfeit of the good dominion man is supposed to exercise over the world. It's made us wonder, are there other cautionary tales

to be told in this dreadful arena? Has man twisted nature to his craven ends? Join us in this episode of Haunted Cosmos, where we will walk into the labyrinth of man's imagination, seeing what other horrors he has made in league with the darkness. Welcome everybody to this episode, this high energy episode of Haunted Cosmos. We're locked in. We're excited to be here. We're welcome. We're talking about some of the most gruesome biochemical crimes against humanity that anyone could ever imagine and that have actually happened. Brian, welcome. Dude, so naturally, we spent the two minutes before hitting record on this introduction, making ethnic jokes to our, what did you call them ethnically curious?

It's ethnically ambiguous editor. Yeah, but curious is a funnier word. And we were really entertaining ourselves. Martina McGrath. Guys, I'm super excited for this episode. So it is not a pleasant one. It's another one of those like, what are the demons up to in league with the people? Now look, I'm just going to stop you right there.

It's bad. We did that episode in this season, places you can't go and people that went there anyway. And we hear you. We heard your feedback and we get it. We get it. Okay. We really do. This is not that.

Hey, if you could just put it on here and enhance for a second. We get it. You hated that episode. Yeah. It was a terrible episode. We might strike it from the record, pretend like it never happened. Like we might memory hole that episode like teaser, Founchy. But.

Yes. This episode is not that. It does talk about some particularly gruesome incidents, just like many of our other episodes. But we are going to try to tie it into a broader topic that we'll get into shortly. But before that, I think it's worth saying first and foremost that my wife and I were talking about Martina McBride the other day. Not as Martina McBride. But the actual like famous person. The actual country artist woman, Martina McBride.

Yes. And someone out there can correct me. I am too lazy to Google this. Martina McBride to me, in terms of a name, sounds like the absolute peak of female country artist from the early 2000s. Like it's the best country artist female name that you can imagine. I bet her kitchen was turkey themed. Oh, absolutely.

You know what I mean? She had like a bathroom that was like a patriotic. themed bathroom. Yeah, but here's the thing. I don't think she was actually that big. She had that one, she had a few songs that were really popular. What was one of them? Um, well, I always thought it was suds in the bucket and, and, in the clothes hanging out, but then our martina, McBride. Yeah, but then he told me that that actually wasn't one of her songs. She did have some, anyway, in the comments, if you're a big Martina McBride fan. Yeah. And again, the white woman version, not the Mexican editor version. Um, let us know if she was actually really big. Yeah, we need to know. Yeah.

Also, tell us who you like better. Do you like the famous country artist, Martina McBride, or the haunted cosmos editor named Martin that we call Martina McBride on the show. Hey, I know my answer. Because I know my- Country art. I'm kidding.

Hey, say it on three. One, two, three. Mexican editor. Okay, we want. Yeah. Hey, Martin, I love you. He's sitting right there. He's seriously king.

Guys, this episode, we've got, it's one of those episodes that I had and the idea for it while walking. because I like to walk. I like to roam the neighborhoods, do a couple miles a day. And I was walking around and I realized. Tell them what you actually like doing while you walk. Yeah, I listen to audiobooks. But which audio books?

I'm getting there. I'm getting there. I listen to audiobooks. I particularly like, you know, military thrillers. So I'm reading. And by that I mean listening to. I cannot emphasize this enough. I listen to like a lot of Tom Clancy, you know, Jack Ryan's series.

And there's an episode in, there that ties in with this theme. Great, a great episode. I mean book. There's a title in that lineup. But then I was listening to the far less serious, terminalist series. Because Tom Clancy's like the, like the, he's wearing a tuxedo and he's like,

yeah, you know, it's like the tiger ones. It's the winnie the poo. It's like the winning the poo with the tucks is Tom Clancy, which is saying a lot about Jack Carr, by the way. Jack Carr is like a bro with tribal hats. Who wrote? The barbed wire. All the guys in the office were like, dude, terminal list, man. Like, it's terminal.

You got to listen to Terminalist. You got to read terminal list. So I'm reading it. They had another episode that tied in with a theme. And it was like a light bulb, but I went, wait a second. Not only is this true, it reminds me of the ayahuasca kind of episode where people have been searching for ways to take evil dominion over the world, like twisting the materials and resources God has put in the world to evil.

and wicked ends. Yeah. And I realized, like, this is true. The Soviet unions did it. America's done it. The Germans have done it. Like, people have been at this for a long time, trying to make chemical or biological agents that are basically, like, when you look

at what they really are, they are doomsday divide. Like, they are, they're weapons of mass destruction. The type of thing that could end the human civilization, some of these biological agents in particular. So I thought, what better show to talk about this on than Haunted Cosmos? because there are two things that are certain about this topic. Number one, people are sinning and they're up to some bad stuff. But number two, demons are definitely involved.

Yeah, yeah. The world is the cosmos is haunted by sin, man's sin, and the curse that came, you know, from that sin. And also haunted by genuinely evil entities and unclean spirits and unclean forces that are primordial, that are smart, that are in the midst of being completely annihilated by Jesus Christ and done away with. but they are also because of that especially desperate. You know, there's some, there's some proverb about like the caged or the, the tiger that's caught in a trap is like the most dangerous tiger or something like that. I don't know if that's Chinese. Wow.

I don't know if that's even a saying. Maybe I just came up with it. Yeah. I almost did a Confucius accent. I know you did. It would have been very offensive. YouTube commenters have two opinions about our ethnic accents. One, funniest thing I've ever heard.

You guys are so clever, so handsome. Love it. Wow. So smart. Immediately bought the book. Honey Cosmos doing your duty in the world. It's not just stuff when I heard you do them. And then there's another opinion of those same accents. And they're basically like, wow, you guys are the worst people who've ever lived. You should be sent to prison. And you,

you owe an apology to the entire island of Japan. To that I say, oh, no, I do not. Oh, I will apologize to absolutely nobody. And to become a worse. Anyway, I was trying to say, Go on. You know, the bear, the wolf, the tiger, whatever that's caught in a trap is the most dangerous one. It has nothing to lose, right? In the same way, you can think of the forces of darkness like that right now. They're caught in a trap that will end in their utter demise. Christ won. He dealt the death blow on the cross and with his resurrection and ascension. And yet, they're still in the world. They still are active. And so they're very desperate. And that makes them genuinely dangerous. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah. And so there's like, there's like, there's a lot of forces at play here. There's a lot of big ideas that we could discuss. There's a lot of things like man's dominion being inevitable, not whether but which, and what happens when he exercises improper dominion? And then what happens when he does that in league with demons? But I think before we dive too deep into that, there is one, at least one housekeeping. Like housekeeping thing. Yeah, housekeeping thing that we do need to discuss. Let's bring that up now. And then we can move

on to the fun stuff. Yeah. So we have one of the best supporter communities of any podcast in the history of mankind. I'll just, let me put it that way. The best. Yeah, so we've had a very dedicated group of patrons that have made this show possible, helped us to continue to expand it, make it better, bring on, you know, full-time guys like Martina McBride. Yeah. Country artist and legend slash video. Slash Mexican editor. To, uh, join our team and we, we continue to work hard to make it the best we possibly can. Um, and so we have this great patron community. Every week, we release a show called the Dusty Tome for our patrons exclusively that Ben does. It's kind of like a lore type show, scripted monologues, you know, music and thing. It's, it's moody. It's glorious. It's

amazing. We talk about Haitian zombies. All kinds of stuff. It's a great, like, you know, you draw a bath, you pour a glass of wine. Yeah. And you listen to the dusty tone. That's right. You put your, your bathing cap on. You get your little, like, the brush on a stick that nobody really uses except at movies when they're doing this. And then you just, you know, you listen to Ben's dulcet tones fill your bathroom. If it's like a Hatfields and McCoy movie. You listen to like just Ben accompany you in your bath is what you just said. And let's move on.

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Oh, well, were you actually thinking about how God gave us amazing small native berries called elder berries that actually carry all kinds of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants and antiviral compounds that our bodies crave? and that Trevor and Autumn at the King's Ridge grow and produce the freshest elderberries and elderberry syrup known to mankind. Okay, so I'm guessing you were talking about that. But did you also know that they're running a special for haunted cosmonauts? That's right. If you use code haunted, all caps haunted, you can get 10% off your first order at tkrfarm.com. Dude, absolutely the best news I've heard today.

Brian, I got bad news. The other day, I was using one of the big box soap products to wash myself, and I got this weird urge to go buy a Stanley cup and fill it with iced coffee. And it started to feel a little cold in the house. I just wanted to wrap myself up in like a heavy wool blanket. And then also, I started Googling ticket prices to Taylor Swift concerts. Ben, what are you doing? Don't you know that these big box soap companies just jam all their soaps full of hormone-disrupting

chemicals, they're probably turning you into a girl. Well, I know that now, but what am I supposed to do about it? Ben, you ignorant normie, all you've needed to do is go to indigo sundry soap.com and support a great Christian family business that's making all sorts of soaps that are completely free of hormone disrupting chemicals and other nasties. Okay, I am literally going to indigo sundry soap.com right now. Tell me what to buy. Ben, what I would recommend doing is clicking on bundles and then selecting the best one for you.

You could get the men six pack. You could get my favorite, the clay bundle. Ooh, I like the pipe and jug bundle. That seems cool. Or a men six pack, because that'll make me feel like I have something that I actually don't. So true, King. And you know what else I heard? Because they're such good friends of the show,

Indigo Sundry's Soap Company is offering 10% off your order if you just use all caps, discount code, haunted cosmos, no spaces. Wait, Brian, you're going way too fast. I didn't get all that. Is that information in the show description? Ben, you ignorant normie. It's always in the show description. Okay, so I'm going to go to indigosundry soap.com.

I'm going to pick the men's six-pack bundle, and I'm going to use code Haunted Cosmos at checkout, all caps, no spaces. And if I forgot all that, it's in the description of the show. Of course, Ben. And if you just do that, then you will stop wanting to do all of those girly things, and maybe you'll, I don't know, maybe want to buy a classic car to restore or something dignified.

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Link in the description below. I'm a poet. Didn't even know it. We have actually launched a brand new patron platform that we think is going to help us better, provide an even better experience for our patrons and also just long-term help us to continue to grow and support the show. So we'd encourage you to check that out. We've got multiple tiers of support there with different rewards. You can go to haunted caught. It's www.w.hontedcosmos.com.com. Very thorough. Very, very, very. Hey, pop quiz. Do you know

what WWW stands for? It's World Wide Web. World Wide Web, okay. Do you know what URL stands for? You are a loser. No. Uniform resource located. I think we have determined who the loser was.

But I think we can all agree that it's Brian for knowing what URL stands for. Hey, do you know what USB stands for? Actually, no. Bus, something about bus. Universal serial bus. Okay, I knew bus was in there because we straight busing.

So, Ha, Ha, Ha, Ha, Bycosmos.substubrcast.com and go sign up to support the show. One change that we're rolling out with this up. We're coming to the tail end of this season, season four of haunted cosmos. And we're actually going back to our roots somewhat with season five in how we're going to release the series. So you guys know we do like 10 episodes typically is what we've done. We do a chunk of episodes in a season.

And then we will take a break for about, you know, month and a half, two months while we continue to produce the season and release some different stuff between the seasons to get to tide you over. What we're going to do is actually we're going to be recording the entire season ahead this coming season, season five, which is main what we did basically was season one. We recorded more than half of it before we released any episode. And so we're going to, we're doing that to make it even better for our patrons. And I think it's at the top two tiers out of So like 67 point, whatever, you know, what is that, 66. 66.66.

6.6.6. Repeating. Yeah. Whatever. Those top two tiers are going to be able to stream the whole season on demand from the first episode released publicly. So when season five, episode one drops into the public feeds, YouTube and all the podcast feeds, our patrons will be able to watch the whole season.

Yeah. Right there on demand. Like an episode of a TV show if you were to buy the whole season. Yeah. fully edited, video and audio. And again, this is really just to, I mean, yes, it helps kind of us logistically, but it helps us do a better job. Yeah, that's part of the point.

It helps us actually give a better product to everybody, but especially give high value to our, you know, upper level patrons, because without them, we couldn't do the show. Without all the patrons, we couldn't do it. And so we're also benefiting the lower tier, the conspiracy theorist tier of our patronage by ensuring that they will still get the episodes completely ad-free. So they may not get them early, maybe like a day early or a couple days early, but they will be completely ad-free.

And so we want to make sure we're still providing value there. Yeah. So go support the show, check it out there. And I mean the lowest tiers, like, buy a latte at Starbucks, and you can chip in however much you want. It helps us keep the show going and continue to hopefully make it better every season. And we really appreciate everybody who has been supporting. what I would like to do now is smoothly transition into a story of like the horrific death of many

at the hands of the Soviet Union. Can I just say researching for this episode? I knew that the Soviet Union was very, very bad. And I had, I think, a righteous disdain for it in my heart. I didn't know it was quite this bad. You know, why didn't you read more Tom Clancy? I mean, you would know. I guess Tom Clancy vindicated. Tom Clancy and Joyers vindicated. Vintage. Like the thing about the Soviet Union, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this.

I don't mean this hyperbolicly. The Soviet Union is demonic. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Like they, communism is demonic. Communism is, to me, the high watermark of demonic

and human sinfulness in league in the 20th century. And it's almost like an acid that ate away at the foundations of Christendom. where you had the advance of the gospel in the nations for centuries and centuries in across the known world, across the world, in the West, in Europe, and going east towards Russia and just the gospel expanding, saving people, people's being lifted up from the darkness of demon worship into some of the pinnacles of human civilization to date. And then what happens? as well, Darwinism and the acid of Darwinism and eugenics, along with Enlightenment rationalism and the French Revolution.

And then you have all of these different philosophical, scientific forces that are building the foundations for an entirely alternate way of viewing the world from what Christianity had built, which was that instead of man being the image bearer of God, man is now just a highly evolved animal. instead of there being truly transcendent meaning and purpose and value that was determined by God who created all things very good and those sin corrupted God created all things very good. Instead of that, now we have this relativism of man creating his own destiny and his own purpose.

And all of these things really come together in like almost distalate form in the communism of the Soviet Union where the state replaces God and the state replaces God. and the state replaces the priestly class and the state replaces everything. And what it brought onto mankind in promise of utopia was some of the depths of human misery, the deepest depths of human mystery of misery in history.

Yeah. And you know, I'm just thinking about this now. Like these ideas that fed the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union is fascinating because it began with this kind of rote materialism, this brute materialism, from Marx, and I typed it into chat GPT, Carl Marx, as far as we know, never used any hallucinogenics or psychedelics.

We looked. Yeah, we checked. We did check. Like, what more can you want? What more can you do? But eventually, this Marxism became syncretized with Leninism. And Leninism was a little bit different because it was the Bolshevik movement. It was the Bolshevik revolution.

And so what you had with the Soviet Union at the very beginning was this Marxist Leninism. this materialist slash Bolshevik religious zealot, almost mysticism movement that came together and it created something extremely ugly, an enemy of nature. The Soviet Union was an enemy of God and an enemy of God's created nature. But it got me thinking, and we don't have to harp on this for too long because it's probably boring. Like, is the, if man had never fallen, if Adam never fell, would there ever be a philosopher that came up with the idea of Darwinism or thought of the idea of Darwinism or materialism or rationalism, not as a thing that's, that should be explored, but just as an

idea. Like, oh, someone would have thought this. Yes, that exists as an idea. I don't know, obviously. I don't know. That's too much for me. But one thing that, it's worth recognizing is that when you get into the French Enlightenment and even like the secular Renaissance humanism, not the Christian humanism of the Renaissance, the secular humanism, and then you get into materialism, like that idea in itself isn't necessarily a demonic idea, which is to say it isn't necessarily something that was like implanted in, you know, Descartes or Rousseau's mind by a demon. It could have just been their own fallen nature, being tempted to come up with these ideas and run with them far further than they ever should have.

But when you look at the fruit of what those ideas led to, when, again, it leads to institutions that are enemies of God and nature. I think that you have to admit that somewhere along the way, genuinely, the demonic forces in the world saw what was happening and they ran with it as well. Absolutely. I mean, it's such a pernicious lie. Like for a fallen man who's disconnected from God, who actually actively hates God in his fallenness, to have this idea that there is no God, that rationalism is the only thing,

that material that you can see and touch and feel is the only thing, and that empirical knowledge is the only true knowledge. Like, I'm just sorry, that idea to a fallen mind that is at enmity with God, is so attractive. Yeah, the thing that I find compelling about ascribing some of these beliefs in their development to not mirror human sin, but also the demonic, is just the way, like when you trace the themes of demonic activity, they're not just aiming to steal, kill, and destroy,

but also to deceive. I mean, they're like, they're the deceivers of the world. They're trying to deceive the nations. And so wherever you find demonic activity, it almost always develops an alternate systematic theology where it has its own doctrine of creation. If you have Marxism, Leninism, communism has its doctrine of creation, which is essentially the Big Bang theory plus a doctrine of the creation of man in evolutionary biology and abiogenesis and all these different, it has its own doctrine of sin,

Marx and Engel and Lenin. And like these were men who were obsessed with an idea of sin that was essentially saying The problem is in this group, this class of society that's oppressing another class of society. And the solution is, you know, functionally economic. We need to take away the economic power of this class and make a classless society. You know, the czars are the problem. The wealthy are the problem. It's like a doctrine of sin.

They have a doctrine of salvation and sanctification that we're going to leverage the powers of the state to usher in this revolution. this communist revolution where the people will become enlightened and awakened to the idea, to these new ideas of creation, sin, the fall, and utopia. And then their doctrine of eschatology, that the proletariat, the classes will rise up. They will throw off their overlords and they will come together into this communal state. And in this, this systematic theology, you find that when we look on these things that communism did, and many nations did, but that Soviet Russia did when it came to biological and chemical warfare,

along with a lot of their other military and intelligence apparatus kind of activity, they were attempting to sanctify the world in accordance, sanctify the people and save the world. That was what they thought they were doing. So when they wielded things like biological weapons, one example would be kind of an emergency story mode in April of

1979 in a place called Sferd-Losk which is, it sounds Russian, it is Russian. It was in the Soviet Union. In April 1979, there was another

chemical biological weapons research facility similar to the one at whatever the heck the thing is that we kept saying, the island. And they were working with anthrax and they had some sort of safety protocol failure

or intentional release, depends on who you ask. And it killed, they say 66 people, so probably like 5,000 people. And they immediately, like, people started finding out about it. And they said, oh, it was bad meat. Oh, you know, the cows, they get sick. And then the carnage. What am, what, I sound Italian. The carnis. And they said, blamed it on bad meat, which is just a completely ridiculous theory. And they, no justice, nothing, you know, covered it up. Ultimately, in the 90s, I think it was. after the fall of Soviet Union,

we have American scientists who go in and look through records and confirm and say, yeah, no, this was a, this was either a botched job or it was the Soviets, they were attempting to weaponize and develop anthrax weaponry,

and they accidentally killed a bunch of their own people. But the point is that in their view, that is an agent of sanctification. They're trying to save and sanctify the world and bring it into alignment so that people can be saved

from their Western and Christian and all these foundation ideas they'd believe that were all false, and they needed to be converted to Marxism, Leninism, and communism. That, to me, screams people, but it also screams demons. Yes.

It's the exact thing they do. They're constantly trying to deceive the nations away, I'm like, to believe a false God. Now, you said something at the beginning of that. That was really... That's the beginning of that absolute rams. No, no, no. I think that was super helpful.

But you said something at the beginning of that that Marx and Lenin saw the fundamental issue between the classes as economic. Now, here's another really pernicious lie that is a little bit tougher, oftentimes for conservative Christian Americans to spot. But that is that since especially like the 60s and 70s, American conservatism has bought into the same exact lie. Yeah. What was the name of that economist who he was like a contest? of Buckley, I think, who, and he's really famous. Amises Institute kind of guys or something different? No, it's like, Keene, Kennesian?

Friedman. Keynesian, are you talking about Keynes? Hold on, is there a Friedman? There is a Friedman who wrote about like the failure of nerve, right? Is that? No, not that guy. Ah, shoot, that's where I was looking at my phone trying to find his name. I can't remember.

Whatever. He was a prominent conservative. writer and speaker, and he was also an economist. And this guy was like, he was a counselor to presidents and to congressman. And I think that at one time he maybe was in Congress. I don't know that for sure. But the point is, one of the things that he said and firmly believed and pushed to many, many thousands of conservative Christian Americans was that the thing that would solve all of America's problems, all of her social problems, all of her problems that come from relationships. And religious pluralism where there's conflict between different churches is free and open markets.

That's what he said. Here's what we're going to do. In post-production, we're going to put up a picture of this man with his name. Yes. Right here. Yes. And you can go and you can go see that this did happen. This gentleman.

Yes. Who is named this. Maybe who's very handsome or not handsome. Yeah. Anyway. You're right. It's an opposite, an equal and opposite error. That's the same error.

Like he's saying that, oh, given enough time. man on his own, with all sorts of fundamental disagreements about the way of the world, about the God that operates at the head of the world, et cetera. If man has enough time with a free and open commerce, he will achieve basically utopia. Yeah, it's just free. All we need is now is global is free trade. And that was actually, yeah, and it was globalism. And that was actually like a conservative ideal.

It still is, but one that's hopefully dying. But that's a conservative ideal that is almost fundamentally no different than the Marxist ideal, which says that the solution of the problem is an economic solution and nothing else. Yeah. So what you'll find in this episode, these are some themes I want you to notice as we continue telling you some of the stories related to this. And these are historical stories. Some of them are going to take you into the realm of conjecture where we're not, where there's, we think this happened. this is one of those like conspiracy type of things. But I want you to notice that,

especially by the end of this episode, I hope you see that the whole conspiracy theorist kind of thing as a slur is basically a, let me just put it this way. It's a CIA op to keep you from noticing the things that they're up to. So we're going to take you through some of these stories. And what we want you to notice is the way in which these horrific hellish tools of men, and I think in league with demons are used fundamentally as agents of salvation and sanctification in their entire view of the world to try and usher in their idea of utopia or protect their

idea of utopia in the world. And just see the results that what happens when man twists nature and when he violates even his own dominion mandate and takes it and makes it into a craven thing. to serve false gods. These are the kinds of things that happen. Ben, I wanted to talk to you about something. I'm concerned about you. What are you concerned about? Every time I see you, you have more and more indigo sundries products. I feel like you're overdoing it. Dude, give me one example. Dude, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Do you see, like, where did you even get this from? What's the problem with having some soap on hand?

Ben, we're at work right now. There's, there's, you don't want to smell good at work? There's gonna be no situation where you need Indigo Sundry soap at work. Uh, have you ever gotten sweaty in this basement? Dude, yes, every time we're filming, I look at you and I go, he's so handsome. Well, then... Well, then you're gonna need some soap so that you don't smell as bad. No, but do you see what's happening to you? Like, how are you even... Are there fair... do you have fairies that give you this?

Dude, what are you talking about her now? Have you partnered with the fay? No! I'm a stone-cold Christian who likes soap! Dude, I feel... Wait this. Is that Cumundial? Oh, not so mad about it now, are you?

Did they make liquid soap now? Yeah, you didn't know that? Dude, I didn't know that. Well, obviously I'm not as... They're a sponsor in the show. You should know that. I have duties and responsibilities. Not all of us can just be Indigo Sundrymaxing all the time.

Okay, well, since you didn't know that, I'm assuming you also didn't know that if you use their subscription plan, you'll get 10% off of your order. 10% off? 10% of their already great prices? I'm telling you! Are you kidding? Hey, Ben, can you pass me the butter? Yeah, sure, man. Do you want the white camel butter or the golden cow butter?

No, not that butter. What other butter is there? I'm talking about design butter who specialize in digital product design. Whether it's a mobile or web app, David at Design Butter can help make sure your product is best on the market. Design Better helps you identify problems your users are having and makes the experience better, which results in more sales, return customers, and a level of trust that makes your brand memorable.

Dang, design butter. I can't believe it's not actual butter. Because I'm so dang smooth. Sounds like they need ahead to design butter.com for more information. Brian, do you want to know what I've been drinking more of lately? I actually woke up this morning and thought to myself. I want to know what Ben's drinking more of lately. Coffee. Can you believe that?

Unbelievable. I thought you were in a tea. No, no. I'm into coffee now. And you know who makes the best coffee in the world? Who is it? Squirley Joe's coffee. Oh, is that that thoroughly Christian business that doesn't hate you? you and everything you believe him? Yes, not only that, but they also love their neighbor by donating

many of their proceeds to a worthy cause called Operation Underground Railroad. Man, everybody should check out Squirrely Joe's Coffee at Squirrely Joe's Coffee.com. That's right, Squirrely Joe's Coffee, share coffee, serve humbly, live faithfully. Man, Ben, I knew we were handsome, but I didn't know we were that handsome until I saw our recent Haunted Cosmos thumbnails. Yeah, your skin looks so velvety-s smooth. I mean, it's unbelievable. Chris at New Dominion Design Company did an absolutely fantastic job, not only on those thumbnails, but on our recent book cover as well. Yeah, exactly. And if you need some design work from Chris, you should go to New Dominion Designco.com, get started there, and he'll serve you right. Man, he will make you look 50% as handsome as Ben guaranteed. It was Milton

Friedman. Okay. Milton Friedman. Obviously, you have a Milton Freeman tattoo. Yeah. That's crazy. I don't really. Sorry, Milton Friedman. On that note, one of the big themes that we should just have you guys thinking of as we go forward, it's very similar to the MK Ultra episodes that we did in this way, is man will exercise dominion over the earth because that's what he's made to do. God actually put it into his nature to go out into creation and subdue and bring order and name things as he sees fit to name them.

That's man's job. and even though he fell in sin, his job didn't change, he will still do that. And what you'll see is that when you get a high institutional level, institutions are made up of people, and so they will take dominion the way that those people see fit. And when an institution is made up of people, such as the Soviet Union, for example, that are all not only godless, but openly hostile to the truth of God and the true myth of Christianity, you'll see that the dominion they take, because taking dominion is inevitable, will be one of the most disgusting things that any man could imagine in the world. And so, if you're a Christian,

maybe one of the applications of all these stories, M.K. Ultra and this together, is to take proper dominion. Like, that's actually your responsibility. You have a responsibility before God to look at what he set in your purview and order it rightly. Order it after the model of heaven. If you fail to do that, or if you think that that's not actually the job of a Christian, that Christ did all of that and he uses no means, he only just does it himself, then you're actually being irresponsible. You're abdicating one of your responsibilities, especially as a Christian man, but women too, with their children and in the home especially. So let that be an application to you. Defy the Soviet regime, defy the would-be Soviet regime that exists in the

world by taking proper dominion in your life, by taking proper dominion in your home, in your workplace, in your front yard even. And in doing that, not only will you glorify God, which in and of itself is our proper end, but you'll also defy the forces of darkness in the world that will always, as long as they exist, will always be trying to take evil dominion that destroys. And one thing that you'll find as you do this is that you will not. find yourself doing weird things with ticks. And with that said, Ben is now going to take us into one of the craziest stories that I've ever heard. It's going to make you itch. It's going to make you itch. And with that said, let's go to that story. Old Lyme, Connecticut is a charming coastal

town sitting in the corner between the Delta of the Connecticut River and its outlet in the Atlantic Ocean. It's one of those postcard towns where roads line the marine sound and household sales. can be seen drifting on the waves at any given time of day in the warmer months of the year. And before it gets to the very cold months, Old Lyme boasts one of the most vibrant and attractive autumns on this hemisphere. The type of place we all imagined to schoolchildren when we heard the story of the first Thanksgiving between Pilgrims and Mammeset. In 1975, Old Lyme was in its golden hour. The whirlwind of the world wars had given way to a flourishing economy and a boom of the nuclear family. In the quiet neighborhoods of Old Lyme, the worries of the Cold War with Russia were more whispers that fathers thought of occasionally and that mothers and children couldn't help but forget.

It was here, in the middle of a humid summer in 1975, that two children were living out their greatest adolescent days in the yards of their other neighborhood friends. The kids, of course, cared nothing for the heat. It was as though they didn't even notice it. But the mothers were a different story. They tried to balance their obligation to watch their kids play. and make sure they stayed safe with an overwhelming urge to somehow escape the heavy sun. Therefore, Polly Murray and Judith Minch, the moms of the two aforementioned kids, spent their days nursing iced lemonade on whatever front porch their kids played near.

Many July and August days passed with this wonderful routine of mom and child walking together to the same house after breakfast, where they'd spend the rest of the day, each with their own respective friends. But as the days wore on in early August, Polly and Judith started to notice something off about their kids. They seemed lethargic, oddly lethargic, as if they weren't all mentally there all the time. This realization came slow as it seemed to the mothers that the symptoms came on slowly and imperceptibly

until it was fully wrought. They took them home, thinking and hoping that a little heat exhaustion was to blame for the odd behavior, and found other symptoms that raised more alarm. Intense skin risk. ashes, swollen and painful joints, and serious headaches that refused to go away, even with a few cool glasses of water. The mothers asked around and discovered that other kids in the neighborhood were showing the same symptoms. They wondered if it could be some kind of outbreak or something.

39 children and 12 adults all came together to call upon the Connecticut Department of Health to help them get to the bottom of their issue. In response, the department issued a doctor from Yale to investigate the patients and diagnose them. Strangely, his discovery was that all the patients were suffering from some kind of early onset and fast-acting arthritis. The doctor, having never seen such a phenomenon in so many people at once, dubbed the disease the Lyme arthritis, after the town wherein the incident originated. Treatment plans were developed and treatment was begun, but nobody improved at all. Even the children who were expected to respond especially well to treatment only worsened at a very fast pace.

The doctor's confusion grew and grew until he finally had to admit that he had no idea what was happening and he had no idea how to fix it. For, you see, he had missed something. Everyone had missed something. A small but very important thing. Tick bites. Each affected individual had evidence somewhere on their body of being bitten by a very small species. cheese of tick named a deer tick. The deer tick is a nasty creature. It's no bigger than a period at the end of a sentence when thirsty, but it can gorge on blood until it's 100 times its original size. As it drinks the blood of its usually unwitting victim, it vomits blood back up and back

into the victim's wound, and the vomit carries with it a host of toxins. Now, normally, these toxins are easily dealt with by the human body, but not always. And during that summer, those people were infected with something their bodies were completely unprepared for, something unprecedented and unlooked for by all lay people in the world, something that would come to be called simply Lyme disease, a new infection, one without a cure or treatment in those days. But the question is, where did the tick get the Lyme disease from? And even before that, where did the Lyme disease come from in the first place?

At the end of World War II, in an example of spoils going to the victors, the United States secretly embarked upon a program to acquire Nazi expertise in certain fields of study that they deemed would be important in the modern world. This program was called Operation Paperclip, and it saw the forced migration on the U.S. government's dime of key upper-level Nazi scientists to the states so that they could work to improve government departments. Specifically, the U.S. was interested in getting Nazis to build up its fields of rocketry and aerospace, medicine, and weapons development. That last one, weapons development, included biochemical weapons development. For this task, the U.S. had its

sights on one man, Dr. Eric Traub. Before and during the war, Troub had been a closely trusted associate of Hitler's Third Reich. He had served as an army captain in Anatolia and had, at the request of an officer named Heinrich Himmler, journeyed himself to the far-reaching, of the Black Sea in order to find a lethal strain of the Rinderpost virus that Himmler could use and what he foresaw as a major upcoming conflict. To call Troub, a true believer in the Nazi cause would be exactly accurate. To call him a pivotal tool in the hand of the Third Reich during the war would actually be an understatement. With Troub's help, Germany pushed the boundaries of biochemical war to the absolute limit and allowed it to gain itself a genuine advantage in that

field. After the war, when Troub's efforts alone proved not enough, he was headhunted by America to do the exact same thing here, and that he did. From his headquarters at the freshly minted disease center on the infamous Plum Island in New York, Troub carry out hypersensitive experimental tests and production on some of the most dangerous substances in the world. He infected hordes of animals with hand-foot mouth disease, helped the U.S. increase its holding of anthrax, and carried out tests with a very rare strain of virus called Borrelia burgdorferi, the strain that gave rise to the mysterious outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, nearly 20 years after Troub's tenure on Plum Island.

Now, to cut to the chase, the connection between Plum Island, Eric Troub, and the initial outbreak of Lyme disease among those poor souls in Connecticut is a hotline. contested one. Many in the world disagree with Plum Island and Operation Paperclip being to blame for Lyme disease, and they deny that the U.S. infected its own citizens with terrible illnesses, accidentally or not. However, it's worth noting that nearly perfect coincidence of the timing. Trow was known to infect his enemies with viruses he had weaponized. He did it to Anatolia and Siberia, both during the war and soon thereafter. His name also appears as the doctor in charge on documents outlining the aerial spreading of various diseases on plant and animal life

in the land surrounding Plum Island. At the very least, he and his facility is to blame for the deaths of countless cattle and other domesticated animals in New York and Connecticut coasts. Additionally, Plum Island is no stranger to its fair share of well-documented and public mishaps. In September of 1978, an outbreak of hand-foot mouth disease occurred on the island that required. It required the same day slaughtering of thousands of cows, horses, sheep, goats, and pigs. But all of these things don't hold a candle to what is the greatest piece of evidence. Something that all but confirms the blame for Lyme disease must be placed entirely on the U.S. government and her use of Eric Trow. It is a communique stating that the scientist of Plum Island performed a test at an artillery range

on the coast of Connecticut in the 1950s, which included the wanton dumpings. of virus-infested ticks all over the surrounding land. Perhaps those 39 children and 12 parents in Connecticut who suffered from the mysterious disease were victims of this very test. If I could just go ahead and take a moment here to directly address the leaders of the free world, I'd like to do that. And just make a humble request from one of your citizens here, Brian Sovey. And can I just say on behalf of all of us, we would like you to stop.

experimenting with horrific civilization and humanity ending biological agents. Like nobody actually wants you to be biologically engineering viruses that could potentially wipe out the entirety of mankind. This is not something we requested. It's not something. I don't recall ever putting in that work order. And so I'd like to just say on behalf of all of us, please stop. And hey, we'll make it worth your while.

I will personally send you a bunch of bugs that you can eat because I know that you're all lizard people. You love it. Yeah. Grasshoppers. Cicadas do the good stuff. We'll send you a free copy of our book. Dude, to a lizard person,

a cicada is like a filet mignon. Like a waggew. Exactly. So true. This stuff is crazy because it's not, like there are conspiratorial elements to it that you have to put together. And you can't say like 100% in a court of law, I could prove X, Y, Y,

and Z, but there's so much publicly available data that we know that they're up to this kind of thing. Yeah. And so when you hear reports of like, oh, the U.S. government is dropping weaponized ticks on its own citizens. Maybe on accident, maybe on purpose, we don't really know. Yeah. Long story short, a bunch of ticks are out there. We did some stuff to them. They're filled with a virus that like no one knows the cure to. You might die. Just check yourself for tick bites. And if you have one, God help you. Because we can because we can't. Because we didn't actually figure out a way to fix it. Yeah, we just.

One of the things that we didn't talk about, but that is actually way more publicly available as just a thing that definitely happened than what we did discuss in that story, is that Plum Island did, most emphatically, send disease-laden ticks, and they sprayed them all over farms in Cuba without the knowledge of the Cuban government at some point.

Cold War, you know. Yeah, Cold War stuff, you know, classic Cuban missile crisis. More like Cuban tick crisis, am I right? Tick, more like Cuban tickle crisis. People, this is actually people dying, horrific. All right. So to the few of you that are left, and it caused like a famine. Like there was a legitimate because all the cattle started dying. It killed a bunch of

things needed to sustain life. Plum Island, bat in a thousand on being shady and terrible. This is not the only, you know, we also know that government around the world, the Soviets did this. The Chinese, when I say did in the past tense, I should just say are doing. Still. Like the Chinese do this.

We know the U.S. has done this, but it's all plausibly deniable. They'll put, I think there was like a 1975 committee on biological and warfare and that kind of thing in the Senate. So they do this kind of thing, but these are some of the blackest of black budget type of operations for governments around the world. Because many of these governments,

most of them are on record. with that treaty saying, we won't do this. Yeah, okay. We won't develop, hold, test, deploy, biological or chemical weapons. Like, and we'll talk about this more, but the, it was the biological weapons convention.

That's the thing that they signed. It was signed by like 138 countries and territories. The Soviet Union signed it, and then Russia re-ratified it when it disbanded. The U.S. signed it. China signed it. And then we're all like, oops. The three big players on doing terrible biochemical things.

Like, we'll talk about some sheep that got it from, like, hey, we're picking on, not just on the Soviets. If any Soviets are mad, like, we, obviously, this is us, the tick stuff. There's more stories in this episode about the U.S. But some of this, it brings in a question, we've talked about it a little bit. But as an example, like one of the biological agents that I know, that I'm, they're doing this with would be hemorrhagic fevers, like, Ebola. Because these are some of the most deadly diseases known to man. Hemorrhagic fevers, some of them have basically fatality rates in the 50, 80, 90 percent range. They will kill everybody. The downside of hemorrhagic fever, well, it's really an upside. But from the perspective

of the hemorrhagic fever, it's a downside. It's like its weakness is that it doesn't do well in a lot of climates, a lot of like non-jongle type climates. Ah. So, and many of them can only be transmitted via infected, um, fluids. They haven't spread via aerosol transmission like COVID does or, you know, like respiratory viruses do. Uh, if they did and if they were able to survive in the open, then they could and spread like the flu does. It could conceivably kill 90% of the world's population type of situation. It'd be like the stand.

Yeah, it would be like the stand. Yeah. And the concede of the stand is that that's what the government did, except it like changed so you couldn't develop any kind of defense against it. But we know that there are scientists who are doing, this is called like gain of function research. Yeah. Or basically it's virology research where they're trying to add by splicing in

like cancer genes or different things into these viruses, the ability for them to say now they can last in a UV environment like the sun for much longer. Or now they can spread via aerosol transmission. And now, so we know that scientists and virologists are actively working in some of these black budget global projects to try and develop essentially not only pathogens that can get out and do damage to an enemy, but they're uncontainable. Yeah.

So maybe some foreshadowing. The gain of function research thing is going to be important later on. And I want to make clear now what it actually is. And it's right there in the name. You have a virus or some kind of pathogen that over time, whether it's the adaptation of the human body or development of medicine and things like that, loses function. As in, it loses its potency. It doesn't make people sick anymore. And so this is gain of function research is human scientists taking that pathogen that has lost its function and intentionally, uh, engineering it to make it gain new function. So they're trying, they are like, dude, talk about like building a trap for yourself to fall into it. It'd be like, let's say you were in a fight with a polar bear. Yeah.

And you had to, and a polar bear is already like, it can pretty much kill you. And then you thought, but what if we gave it two heads? Yeah. What if we gave it another arm? Or it's like someone breaks into your house and they're going to, and they're there to kill you and your whole family. And you're like, I could use. this gun, or I could give my gun to the intruder to give them more function. That's what

game of function research is. How arrogant do we have to be? I'm sorry. Stop it. Get some help. Please stop doing this. We don't want, we want you to, in fact, like, in it, especially like when you're sending dollars to, I don't know, China to go do this in, I don't know, China, where they're literal, I don't know, communists. Yes. And saying like, oops. I thought they'd be chill about this. No one who does gain of function research is chill. No, we'd be very careful. Stop it.

Stop it. We go back to sweet and sour. We don't want you to do this. So they like gain of function research. It's well documented that countries are doing this. They do it like what Brian said with Ebola type viruses that are more of a blood infection. But they also do it with respiratory viruses as well.

It's genuinely frightening. And a lot of them. they're like, oh, we're going to figure out, they are cloaked under the guise of, this is medical research. We're going to figure out how to treat these illnesses by understanding them better, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, yes, there is a place for people investigating diseases and illnesses to try and cure them. And so that's a good Christian endeavor.

Christians have been engaged in that for a long, long time. But this is like the winter soldier of, of, like, illnesses. They're like, got this thing in a lab and they were like, how can we make it the dead? Let's make it a thing. And then we just let it go. What if, what if, like, if you want to cure? it like you got to figure out how to make it how to beat it. But what if we like figure out how to make it like even worse? And then from that we figure out like like if we could beat the

even worse one, then of course we could be the weaker one. You know like it really is. I mean it all it doesn't make it just like most things. It all goes back to Jurassic Park man. It really does. And our scientists were too busy. Like Jeff Goldblum was I don't know who wrote that line. It wasn't Jeff Goldblum. But they were right. Crichton, Michael Crichton. I don't, what? Also, don't you know who wrote Jurassic Park? No, I don't.

You've never read Michael Crichton? No, I've never read. What is wrong with you? They're great books. They're like the Tom Clancy. No, no, I'm talking about the script of the movie. They know, but that's from the book. The book was first?

Yes. No way, dude. Yes. I guarantee you it was one of those like they did the film and then they wrote the book. Crichton wrote the Congo. He wrote Jurassic Park. He wrote a bunch, some of the best novels you'll ever. In fact, I put it right there with Dostoevsky.

Go read it. Okay. I'm not going to do that. Anyway. Your scientists were so consumed with whether or not they could. They didn't ask to think if they should. Yeah. Yeah.

That actually is a really good question. So speaking of, and I think this can take us into our next story here from, this is an American one. And it is that some of the things that these people have been up to, again, they are so potent that they can kill the entire population of the world many times over. Yes. So in this next story, this is not going to be biological. But on the chemical side, it's the same kind of thing. Agents that if misused could literally kill their potent enough to kill the entire population of the earth multiple times. Multiple times, yes.

And with that, let's talk about the Dugway Sheep Incident. One leg of lamb you don't want to eat. Even if you're Barney Fife or Andy Griffith. On a cold March morning in 1968, a sheriff named Fay Gillette, and yes, that is his real name, climbed into his county-issued square box. and started down the rural streets outside of Towilli, Utah, towards the far more rural dirt byways of Skull Valley. A farmer friend of his had woken him up in the morning with a frantic call. Something about sheep and snow and some other stuff, Gillette didn't quite catch. Now, he knew his friend wasn't one for unnecessary drama or overreaction,

so despite not knowing what he was going to see, he knew he needed to go see it for his friend's sake. Snow banks were rolled up on the road's shoulder like frozen waves from the ongoing winter. Living on the edge of Towillah and so close to the Stansbury Mountains lining Skull Valley, of course, guaranteed hefty snowfall. Back then, the Great Salt Lake was still very great and its effect on winter weather was nothing to be ignored. The road itself, however, was clear, at least until Gillette pulled off of it and onto the bumpy gravel tracks that would take him up into the little canyon his friend had mentioned. He knew the canyon well. He used to take his wife there when they were dating in high school for stargazing or picnicking. There were few places in Utah that offered such a clear, panoramic view of the salt flats of Skull Valley than that place. Gillette, therefore, thought pleasantly of his day as he reminisced on those simpler times and bobbed up and down the unkempt road.

His tires lost their bite a few times in the snow, but it was nothing dangerous or too much for a native-like Gillette to handle. Before long, he was parked at the gate marking the edge of his friend's ranch and then was walking up the little trail into the canyon. He still had rose-colored glasses overlaying his mind with nostalgia. He even wore an involuntary grin. But then he gained the first ridge and everything changed. He stood there looking down into a gully with the winter sun on his face and the slight smile immediately faded away into a look of confusion and then disgust. He could see his friend, scrambling. around with his farm hands below, not yet noticing the sheriff. But it wasn't his frantic

friend that gave him pause anymore. It was what his friend was so clearly frantic about. The entire gully was covered and piled high with the bodies of dead sheep. Hundreds, thousands of sheep corpses lay strewn all along the hillside. All dead together and all the victim of some unseen and overwhelmingly powerful predator. But what such things are you? exists. In 1942, a new army facility was founded in central Utah. Built up on the southern tip of Toilla County in about 85 miles west of Salt Lake City, the Dugway Proving Ground would be the perfect asset to allow army investigation into the front lines of what was fast-becoming postmodern warfare. Given the date of its founding in the context of America's military complex at the time,

it won't surprise you to know that those front lines of war were entirely made up of biochemical weapons. Dougway Proving Ground was one of America's leading facilities for the study, production, storage, and field testing of the deadliest biochemical weapons available in the world. And it was right there in the middle of the little rural county of Tuila, rural but by no means empty. From its inception, Dougway has led the charge in America for the trail of airborne nerve agent, testing, dirty bomb testing, anthrax usage and storage, and other biochemical weapons of mass destruction. And for over 20 years after its inception, it not only still led this charge, but had also gained a reputation for somehow doing all these things safely. By the 1960s, the small communities around Dugway had nearly forgotten the unease they felt when it first opened and adopted a kind

of appreciation for the facility. After all, without it, the government would probably never know any of them existed. Perhaps it would have been better for them if it had stayed that way, though, because when it comes to work like this, one mistake can ruin generations of otherwise valuable work. On March 13, 1968, two days before Gillette saw the grisly mass grave of sheep, an F4 Phantom fighter jet took off from Dougway Proving Ground and did some low passes over a cliff in the midmost of the proving ground. Each time the jet passed by the cliff, canisters attached to to its munition attachments on the wings, opened up, and sprayed out an aerated substance. That substance was the highly toxic nerve agent known as VX.

The pilot was not spraying the agent at any living thing. The only target was the side of the cliff that could absorb the nerve agent in a couple of days and make it entirely inert. But the fact remains. The F4 sprayed almost 3,000 pounds of VX over Dugway that day in order to test the efficacy of the canisters and their ability, to disperse the substance at high speeds. One wonders why they did not use a stand-in substance that was not a nerve agent,

but I suppose there's nothing quite like the real thing. After the testing was complete, the fighter jet took off on a high altitude ending to the mission that took it all the way to the Utah test range 13 miles north. But unbeknownst to the pilot of the craft, there was a problem. One of the canisters containing the VX failed to properly close after the final flyby at the cliff. As the jet climbed higher and higher, that canister steadily let more and more of the nerve agent out into the air to be carried by the winds much further away than any of the scientists intended.

The lethal weapon, so lethal that a pin-sized drop of the stuff can quickly kill a full-grown man, formed into a sheer cloud that was taken by the wind away south towards Skull Valley. As the cloud arrived there, undetected by all, it settled upon a herd of sheep about six thousand. and strong that was grazing on the foothills of the Stansbury Mountains. It left none of the sheep alive. Within days, days that saw men like Gillette and his farmer friends scrambling for answers, the grounds on the edge of Skull Valley were piled high with the dead and decomposing bodies of all 6,000 sheep. Thus it was that the Dugway sheep incident occurred, and the full truth of that test facility slowly came to light. Dougway Proving Ground never admitted fault for the death of the sheep,

and never admitted to actually using nerve agent VX on that faded flight of the F4. But it did pay over $1 million in restitution to the farmer who had lost his livelihood. What's more, it came out more recently that Dougway Proving Ground used a total of nearly half a million pounds of deadly nerve agents in open air testing over the course of 10 years in the 60s. Now, that amount of nerve agent is enough to kill the entire population of the world nearly 500. hundred times. In other words, it was enough toxin to kill three and a half trillion people. Of course, the army has assured the people of its county and country in the state of Utah that those toxins were all contained within its borders, but the sheep incident pokes a big, bright

hole in that promise and proves it false. What other incidents could have happened that we never found out about? What other terrible effects might we still reap from the biochemical seeds improperly sown by our own government. So they drop enough nerve agent to potentially kill three and a half trillion people. And this, it got even worse because later testing proved that there was only one thing big enough to absorb all of that chemical safely. Dude, what? It was your mom.

No way. You know, we made it like an hour and a half into the episode. You know, I want it. You know what? I'm going to break the fourth wall here. Okay. Brian said that joke before we pressed record. And I was like, it was so good then.

And only he in the room was laughing. There's four people in this room. Okay. There's me, Brian, Martina McBride, and then there's a mystery fourth guest that I'm not going to name yet.

Everyone was distracted, doing their job. So they didn't hear how funny it was. And Brian just on his own said this joke. I was like, this is going to, and started belly laughing. This is going to make it.

It is true, though, dude, like your mom, the immense fat reserves, allow her to absorb poison. Oh, wow. I'm so sorry, mom. And stow their way. I don't know if my mom listens to this,

so I know my dad does. So, dad, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry that Ben just did that to you in our family. Dwayne. Unbelievable. Great, massive respect. Unbelievable.

My mom, again, is very trimmed. I hope my mom doesn't want. My mom is also really pretty much. Both of our moms are in great shape. I hope she doesn't live. listen, because she's such a delicate, like she's such a sweet soul. Yeah, she doesn't. I don't want her to actually be offended.

No, she's so nice. Honor your father and mother kids. Here's the thing. Like we do. Here's the thing. I just can't believe that someone, like some general was, was like looking at this facility and they were looking at the test, like approving it or whatever. Because it's like the biggest bureaucracy, like approving everything.

They're like, yeah, we're going to like fund some new F-35s over here. Yeah, we're going to make sure we get a training regimen. We're going to dump enough nerve agent in the open air to kill three and a trillion people. Yeah, that's cool. Sounds good. We're also going to be like, make sure that we hire enough like pink-haired feminists over here for our DEI department. So it's like the little guy. Same guy made all those decisions.

The little guy. I want all of his sheep dead. And then I like to imagine the pilot as like some sort of nemesis of the farmer. He's like, I want his sheep gone. I want the sheep gone. I hate those sheep. He stole my girlfriend in ice. Cool. Now, if I could just directly for a moment address Pete Hegseth, I would like to say, Pete, I feel, I feel like I can call you Pete, right? If you could go ahead and just investigate to see if they're still doing this, you know, anything that could kill trillions of people, literally about 100 miles from where I currently live. If you could just go ahead and stop them from doing that, Pete, that'd be really good. That was, we'd appreciate it. This is an example of how entrenched in this, like, totally twisted dominion, I mean, demon. Demi. I mean, demon. Demi.

Ideals that our government has been operating under for so many decades that we say things like this And part of why you can joke about them is because to an extent it's not surprising But it's like when you learn about the mk ultra stuff you start to look into jfk and m lk and ruby ridge and waco And like these are kind of smaller i mean they're they're terrible but there's smaller incidents yeah like sheep well you mean those ones No, I mean like one family in, you know, Ruby Ridge, one family is murdered by the ATF. And you're like, wow, that's like really, really terrible. Yeah.

In Waco, you know, one commune of weird people are like wiped out for no reason. Yeah. And you're like, wow, that's really terrible. And then you're like, oh, one group of 6,000 sheep are killed. And then it's like, oh, a bunch, like thousands of Turkmen. in Turkmenistan now have cancer. Yeah. And,

like, you can, part of why you can make light of it, and it's obviously very tragic, but it's because you're like, yeah, that's part for the course. It's so,

and it's so messed up that we're there, that we're at that point. And we've just like, I mean, as a people, we are culpable to some extent, we've just kind of let it happen. Mm-hmm.

Because we've lost the will to even be Westerners anymore. Like, what founding father would, would have stood for income tax, let alone using that income tax. The testing of nerve agents that could kill the world 100 times over. Nerve agent and then be like, you know where we should drop it? On our own country. It would be one thing to drop it on an opposing country.

Even that would be very morally. We got to do something with all these ticks. Like they're getting out of control in there. Hey, I know. We enlist them. We make them worse. and then we send them back out to infect our own people.

Yeah. And this is one of those things where I hope that it helps us all develop an instinct of mistrust when we hear like the official narrative of some of these incidents and stories that happen. Like you should have a healthy skepticism

of your own government, but especially like the globalist, like this whole cabal of nations that is attempting to basically usher in their view of utopias. That's a really good point, actually. Like a lot of the plausible deniability that governments have is that many of these things are done in league with other nations. And as part of the globalist agenda, you can look at the World Economic Forum, the atrocities that have come as a product of the World Economic Forum.

NATO, the United Nations, before that, the League of Nations. These things were not good things. And it gave even the highest world leader in each nation the ability to say, oh, I have no idea what you're talking about because they actually don't. Yeah, they really don't. Because they aren't calling the global shots. One of the cases in point, like one of the greatest example of this sort of thing that's been going on is from very recent memory.

And you were probably all wondering, like, are they going to go there at the end of this episode? And it's like, guys, I want you to know Trump was elected. You don't have to be scared anymore. You don't have to be scared. Like Zuckerberg is taking TRT and he's fighting people and he's letting us spread disinformation on Facebook again. RFK is screaming, literally, about how, about, about, you know, how Zen is really great.

Yeah, he's like popping sins and canceling red 40. Oh, I love nicotine. And canceling red 40. You know, but when I say disinformation, again, they call, this is the kind of thing, the apparatus of these nations, they call it disinformation when we just notice, guys, it seems like you released enough nerve agent to kill three and a half trillion people over here. and it seems like you sent you sent a tiny dishonest midget scientist to China to develop a virus that was then leaked to the entire world. Who, by the way, said scientist, kind of looks like Stuart Little.

He really does. I think with that, it's time for Ben to take us into our final story, which hits close to home. We are still as a nation reeling from the effects of this final story and the truth of it. Now, you're going to have to be the judge of whether this was intentional. or just incompetence, you guys are gonna have to be the judge of that. But I do wanna say thank you for listening to this episode of Haunted Cosmos. Make sure that you check out our new supporter channel at hauntedcosmos. Dot supercast.com.

One cool feature of the new platform that we haven't told you about yet is that once you're a supporter, you're gonna be able to add all of our premium like ad-free main show, as well as the dusty tome directly to your podcast platform of choice, to listen to it natively on Spotify and Apple, a feed only our patrons can access. So you'll be able to access our content on a premium level, even at a more convenient way. Yeah, because it'll each be its own channel.

You'll have a Hana Cosmos channel and a dusty Tome channel, so it's easier to navigate through them. So with that said, guys, prepare to be angered by our final story. And we'll catch you next time on Honod Cosmos. On April 10th, 1972, the United States and China both signed the Biological Weapons Convention mentioned in the cold open of this episode,

giving their official promises to refrain from the manufacturing, storage, sale, and testing of all biochemical weaponry. Do you think that either country has kept their promise? On November 16, 2002, locals toiled about another day in the Guangdong province in China, a coastal province at the southern and eastern tip of the country. Fishing operations of all scales were hitting the water at full steam in the early morning. The smaller fishing charters would soon be done with their day's start and would embark upon the really hard work of the day, selling their halls in the markets and the big cities.

You see, most of Guangdong is traced through and through by massive tributaries off the Great Pearl River, which finds its end at the eastern beach. Since this is the case, most of the metropolitan areas in the problem, are focused on river banks and smaller river deltas. This makes the job of the fishermen at least a little bit easier since there is seldom far to travel before one finds an open market slot in a fish market. But the fact remains,

the closer you get to the heart of the Pearls Delta, the better the markets become for both buyers and sellers. And at the very center of the Delta's labyrinth, there sits the capital of the province and additionally the largest urban development in the entire world. The city of Fatsham. The morning was cool, with a constant breeze weaving through the city, which was as fast-paced

as always. Mothers haggled and bought with fishermen, who few remembered had already been awake for hours on end. The chaotic mass of sounds and smells would have sent an unexperienced tourist into a state of vertigo. But that same whirlwind for the senses was the norm, even a complacent norm, for the people there that fateful day in November. But what exactly made it fateful? Well, into the fray, there rose a growing sound of coughing.

It wasn't just one or two or a handful of people, it was hundreds of people coughing all at the same time. The cough was constant and extremely aggressive, and the number of those who had succumbed to it continued to increase until it drowned out the normal operations of that section of the market. After a while, a mass exodus began to occur all through Fat Chan of people rushing home to rest and take medicine for this terrible cough that seemed both totally spontaneous and nearly ubiquitous. Over the course of days, the Chinese government intervened to investigate the cause of the

illness. For that is what it was, and the tally of its victims was increasing exponentially. Months went by with little news of this predicament making it into the world outside of China, but it was later discovered that in that time, the strange disease spread to other provinces until the government was not confident in their ability to contain it anymore. Thus, in February of 2003, China released public statements regarding the likely spread of a new respiratory virus out of their country's borders and into the rest of the world. The World Health Organization immediately stepped in to help get things under control and slow the spread. By May of 2004, the virus had run its course.

It had claimed 774 alive, over a footprint of 30 different countries or territories. It had gone down in history as the SARS outbreak. For SARS was the name given by the WHO to the strain of respiratory coronavirus that caused this panic. Once the virus had been contained and more or less conquered by the WHO, the upper-level doctors in China realized that they were now faced with an incredible opportunity. They now had the chance to study and get ahead of a new, strain of respiratory illness. It was work that could possibly save countless lives in the future

if new strains of this virus ever tried to come back, something China was confident would eventually happen. They built new facilities and began to engage in a progressive type of research called gain of function, a research methodology that intentionally sought to mutate viruses into new strains to try and predict which future iterations may exist. For a short time, China thought it was doing this research without the knowledge of outside intelligence, but it was mistaken. The United States intelligence machine knew of China's intention to do this before the first facilities opened and was somehow up to date on all the research as the scientists were performing it. China soon learned of the U.S.'s knowledge and what they were doing, and instead of letting it create any animosity,

invited top scientists in the U.S. to join them in this cutting-edge research. Thus began a sort of golden age of viral study using gain of function methods in labs peppered around the important provinces of China. But it didn't come without costs. Gain of function research has always been viewed with an air of suspicion because of the intrinsic risk involved. If you're intentionally putting viruses through mutations in order to see what could stick in the future, you might succeed. And then what do you do? What do you do if you create a virus that's entirely new and that doesn't have any developed treatments. Do you destroy it? Do you keep it secret but still alive? As early as 2015, researchers in the lab located in Wuhan, China were publishing studies on their successful

engineering of a new and very dangerous strain of the SARS coronavirus. A similar report was published by Dr. Ralph Barak and Dr. Xi Zhang Li in the widely respected article, Nature Medicine. It stirred up a lot of excitement, both positive and negative, but nothing more came of it at the time. And then, for a few years, the news coming out of China's gain-of-function labs went quiet. That was until 2019. In August of 2019, reports surfaced, reports that were then swiftly silenced by the Chinese government, which hinted at a biosafety breach occurring in one of the labs. No further details were given before the hush order came down from the upper reaches of the government, and maybe some other institutions as well. But this seldom remembered report would prove to be the first

throws of confusion in a fast approaching time of unprecedented chaos in the hypermodern world. Of course, we all know what I'm referring to. COVID-19 came out of the Wuhan lab in China, and in a highly upscaled version of the SARS outbreak in 2003, this new coronavirus immediately started sending the world into a spiral of madness. entire countries were shut down. Streets that are otherwise known for their hustle and bustle were empty and still and quiet. Schools were closed. Work was moved to people's living rooms or basements.

Jobs deemed essential were left to deal with the influx of panicked people running to them thinking they were about to die, and many of those essential workers only reinforced the delusion. Vaccines were made and then rushed to the public. People were held hostage by their jobs or even. even their own families, forced to choose between taking a medicine they objected to or being able to feed their wives and kids. It was all apocalyptic and draconian. It was all terrible. But was there something more sinister lurking beneath the whole thing? In addition to the biosafety breach that was reported in Wuhan in the late summer of 2019, other circumstances lined

up to paint the entire COVID episode with a light of great suspicion. People began to wonder if the world had been targeted by some biochemical conspiracy, and these people, it turns out, weren't crazy to wonder about this. In October 2019, a pandemic simulation called Event 201 was held in New York. It was hosted by Johns Hopkins University, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The pandemic scenario it ran, and predicted as likely to occur, was one of a global novel coronavirus outbreak. Just two months later, a doctor named Li Wyn Lang began to warn his colleagues about a dangerous respiratory SARS virus that was leaked from a lab in Wuhan. He was silenced by Chinese authorities via methods unknown. In early 2020, Chinese authorities shut down nearly

all public information sharing about the virus and its origins. In February 2020, an Indian pre-printed report, one that was later removed from the final print, was released, which included the claim that COVID-19 was artificially engineered. In May of that year, Nobel laureate, Dr. Luke Montanair, publicly claimed that the virus was engineered as part of a bioweapons program in China. This line of thinking culminated in June of 2020 when Dr. Li Ming Yan went on Fox News to claim that the virus was not only intentionally made, but also intentionally released as a kind of biochemical attack. To this day, her remarks remain extremely controversial. This was not all, though. In early 2021, the U.S. State Department released a notice outlining their concern that

the Wuhan lab included Chinese military involvement. Then, in 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy completed their COVID investigation and determined. that the virus originated via a lab leak. Whether intentional or accidental, they didn't say. As a final factor for consideration, it's worth noting that the face and mouthpiece of COVID-19's dystopian shutdowns, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been repeatedly linked to funding gain-of-function research in China. Whether these links are true or not remains to be seen, but the picture being painted is one of mass deception and malice from top to bottom, and somehow between between both China and the US.

Of course, countless more words could be written and are being written about the conspiracy of COVID-19. What we want to do is leave you with this brief overview, this fact sheet, if you will, to give you a solid foundation from where you might ask yourself the following question. Would you really be surprised at a government that we know is evil participating in things that are evil?

And when you look at the fruit of COVID-19, The broken businesses, the familial conflict, the tragic death that really did occur, and the death that could have been avoided, the increased control that governments exercised over their citizenry, the money and power that a precious few gained. Do you wonder at all if the whole thing wasn't a bit more than an accident? 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. So go to patreon.com slash haunted cosmos and sign up now.