It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 7

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here,

and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Spooky Week! A week where we are not really any spookier, honestly, than the average things happening, because everything happening is terrifying, and, like, ghosts and ghouls are a lot more fun. Anyway, hang up.

In this podcast, don't listen. Go watch Herbert West Reanimator. Have some fun. But if you decide to keep listening to podcasts for some reason we have a bunch of spooky content for you this week how was that how was that introduction sophie spooky scary garrison yeah get going do your thing yeah my thing so yeah we're doing we're doing spooky spooky week which is very excited about but yeah every everyone i've told about spooky week they're like oh so it's just

a regular week for for the show like yeah pretty much no no it's more fun but it is in a few ways it is actually going to be more fun because the the the the spooky spooky mind bending come on harrison commit to the goddamn yeah yeah spooky mind bendingbending tales. Spooky, come on Harrison. Commit to the goddamn bit. Yeah, spooky mind-bending tales actually do have some more fun than just the solely depressing ones. I mean, this was the first theme week that we all agreed upon months ago. This was the first theme week, yeah. Can we do something around spookiness near Halloween? And everybody unanimously said yes.

Yes. This is the first theme week. We have been promising nut week coming up eventually. It will happen. We won't talk about things that made us nut or will we talk about the legumes? Mostly legumes.

Okay, that's fair. But anyway, we should start off our first our first spooky tale um so i'm going i'm going to tell a very very spooky tale of a of an entire french town going going mad over the course of a single week oh yeah probably probably with the help of psychoactive drugs and a certain three-letter agency. You know what I think we're going to get to do, Garrison? Uh-huh, my racist French accent! I did get a few messages for that.

You can't be racist against the French. They're like the British or Americans. I did get a few messages saying that your French accent was very racist to the French. There is a certain number. It's like the Germans. There's a certain number of genocides after which people get to make fun of your country, and it's not racist. And that number is, let's say, three. Honestly, the worst part of this story is that we're probably doing critical support for France. I mean, in a way.

Well, we'll see. Honestly, I'm going to be kind of more critical support to the CIA by the end of this one. Hopefully. Yeah, that is the most critical support can be. So anyway, our very spooky tale

begins in 1951 in a small, charming French village called Pont Saint-Esprit, which is how I'm going to say it. Pont Saint-Esprit! Yeah, there you go. There we go. So not much happened in this little picturesque little town on the south side of France. You know, on the day we start, it's just like a regular summer day. People are going about their routine, going to their jobs. Kids are playing in the street, enjoying some delicious freshly baked bread.

But suddenly, strange things begin happening. And I'm going to start off with some of the more mild, mild, mild effects here. So on August 15th, first dozens, then hundreds of people began first just complaining of nausea uh you know and some people with some like stomach and abdominal pain oh yeah they're coming up yeah less often less often noted there was a few instances like vomiting and diarrhea um i believe about 30 percent of people had diarrhea that is that is weirder thing. That's a lot of diarrhea. Yeah, that is on like a town-wide basis. 30, sorry.

Yeah, that's a significant strain on the sewage system. 30% of the people affected, which is going to be like a few hundred. If I was taking drugs with a group of friends and a third of them had diarrhea, I would say we might need to go to a hospital this is a sign that we have taken someone that perhaps what we got was tainted there is there is yeah we'll be talking about what actually what the actual drugs being used here are going to be but unless we were taking like emanatas or something where that's not an uncommon side effect but yeah yeah first first nausea a little a little bit of vomiting, stomach pains,

cramping, um, hospitals began reporting people experiencing alternating warm and cold waves over their entire body. Uh, the British medical journal recalls abundant sweating and a disagreeable odor. Um, which I'm guessing the odor is just cause there's all those sweating people in the same

cramped hospital room in the summer, in the summer heat, yeah. So anyway. And they're French, so. A lot of escargot sweats, that's all I'm saying. I don't want to get more messages saying that I have to stop the racism. By saying that, he's going to do it more. By the way, do we know that the diarrhea was the result of whatever substance,

or maybe it's just the wine shits. Again, French. We don't. There's no way to tell. There's no way to know. So, yeah. Patients began complaining about weird pains and pressure around their neck. Which, yeah.

And one of the most reported symptoms was insomnia. In some cases lasting several days. Quoting the British Medical Journal, the first symptoms appeared after a latent period of six to 48 hours. The digestive disorders quickly became worse, with burning sensations throughout the entire digestive tract. Some experienced sensations of burning at the anus. A state of giddiness persisted.

I mean, who's not giddy when your anus is burning? Am I right? I do. This is like the clear sign that there's some psychoactive jump going on because your anus is burning, and yet you're very giddy. And you're psyched. You are on board.

It's like that sign from that, what is that, from Rejected by, what's that cartoonist? My anus is bleeding but like you're down you know you're down for it yeah yeah you're you're you're 110 percent was that a john millennia impression no no no it's uh who did rejected um that was bad it wasn't a john lenny impression sophie okay that's just your poisoned millennial brain. Don Hertzfeld. Yeah, great artist. Yeah, great artist.

So, these pale and limp patients, still quoting the British Medical Journal, these pale and limp patients showed inconspicuous trembling of the extremities, and they complained of disorders of the visual accommodation, and especially being unable to read. So, this is the more mild. This could be a long one here.

So for many people affected, this is where the symptoms stopped. After suffering from insomnia for a while with mild disorders of the visual accommodation and, you know, and stomach pains and, like, weird, like, neck things, after they were able to sleep, that was the sign of their recovery. It's like the ability to sleep again after the insomnia wore off. But in around 50 of the cases reported, the effects were much more intense. I'm going to continue from the medical journal first

and then get into some of the more colorful reporting around the incident. Quoting the medical journal again, vivid visual hallucinations appeared. In particular, themes of visions of animals and of flames. All of these visions were fleeting and variable. In many of the patients, they were followed by dreamy delirium. Yeah, that's about right. That's actually a pretty good description of like LSA, LSD, those kind of like that.

Movies always get it wrong because you're not usually not like you're not seeing some sort of like visual like cartoon world. It's these kind of like fleeting impressions of visions and things in the corner of your eyes. Yeah, it's a pretty good description. Especially on lower, like it is unclear what exactly they were on because there definitely can be the more cartoon elements. Oh, I mean, you can get full open-eyed hallucinations, like especially the Shogun chemicals will do that. But I don't get it so much with like LSD, LSA. And LSA, if you want to shit yourself, eat some Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds. Get them from Home Depot and have yourself a horrible night.

seats. Get them from Home Depot and have yourself a horrible night. So, the delirium seemed to be systematized with animal hallucinations and self-accusation. Those weird, weird terms from the medical journal. Self-accusations. Yeah, I think they're trying to get

at ego death, but they don't have terms for it yet. Either that or that like sometimes you're hallucinating you get like overcome like guilt like oh i did this terrible thing or yeah yeah yeah everybody's angry at me or whatever like continuing from the medical journal uh so self-accusation and and it was sometimes mystical or macabre uh in some cases terrifying visions were followed by fugues which is a an old term for like fugues it says fugues yeah fugues it's pronounced fugue yeah it's like it's like it's like extreme it's extreme

disassociation yeah yeah you're kind of zombified a little bit yeah and two and two patients threw themselves out the window um oh boy yeah the delirium was of a confusal kind which could be interpreted for some moments by a strong stimulation. Every attempt at restraint increased the agitation. Well, yeah, that is how restraining people... I've had to restrain a number of people, and it does not calm anyone down. People don't like to be restrained. Especially when you're tripping hard.

Yeah, this sounds like a real bad time. Not the thing to do. In severe cases, muscular spasms appeared. The duration of these periods of delirium was varied. They lasted several hours in some patients, and in others they persisted overnight. So we're going to get a little bit darker, and then we're going to have more fun. We observed four fatal cases three men and one woman three of these people were old and in bad health uh one of the men was only 25 years

old and had been in good health previously they died in a muscular spasm in a state of cardiovascular collapse i think this is probably mostly due to how the doctors were handling these patients yeah that sounds right i mean obviously your your blood pressure and whatnot can elevate when you're yeah hallucinating, but I think it also has a lot to do with the way they were being handled. Yeah, you're right. The disorder has developed more quickly in children, but also left them more quickly.

An interesting feature of some of the cases was that the delirium was the first sign to be noted. So, people came up on different ways, right? Some of them first had weird body feelings, some of them first started just seeing stuff. One other interesting tidbit that we're not going to spend much time talking

about, but like around two weeks after this initial incident, some symptoms started to reappear, either through like a secondary poisoning, or it was like some kind of like acid flashback. Yeah, it must have, because I've done a fuckload of acid, I've never had a flashback. I did at one point, I must because I've done a fuckload of acid. I've never had a flashback.

I did at one point. I mean I have like done some damage and so I have permanent tracers, but it's not like – my guess is they got – I think the idea that there are like acid flashbacks that are vivid hallucinations has been pretty heavily debunked. My guess is they got redosed. Yeah, I don't know. I might fight you, but on the acid – It could be PTSD. Yeah. My guess is they got redosed. Yeah, I don't know. I might fight you, but on the acid – It could be that it was traumatic enough that they're dealing with PTSD and kind of that's what's happening. I don't know.

And I think – I definitely have seen enough reports that would see acid flashbacks definitely actually being a thing in some cases, especially in the early days of studying these types of drugs in the 60s. The CIA reported a lot of stuff around acid flashbacks, around the people that they tortured. But I guess if it's tied to torture, that could just be PTSD stuff. It could be PTSD. It's also – I mean one thing you have to know, and I don't know what kind of dose these people are getting. The CIA would dose people. They were sometimes giving people doses people do not take. Like you do not take that much acid recreationally.

Yeah, like hundreds or thousands or millions of hits. Yeah. Ridiculous amounts. Ridic yeah, like hundreds or thousands or millions of hits. Yeah, ridiculous amounts. Ridiculous, irresponsible doses, yeah. So now we're going to get to some of the more fun descriptions here, which we can actually kind of, based on our experiences, can actually kind of see what was actually going on in these people's heads. So basically, we had at least dozens and dozens of people tripping very, very hard.

The local postman was doing his rounds on his bicycle when he was suddenly overwhelmed by nausea and wild hallucinations quoting him it was terrible i had the sense i had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms yeah that guy had some other stuff going on yeah because the very first acid trip was on a bicycle. When Heinrich Hoffman made it and dosed himself, he started coming up, I believe it was in Amsterdam, riding his bicycle. It was just like, well, this is lovely.

I've made something cool. Why was the postman riding a bicycle to deliver packages and mail? Because they're in France. Because it's France. We do not have the vehicles! It's the 1950s, it's not... The wheel only came to France in 1924.

I mean, that's... I'm sorry, Postman. So yeah, the mailman fell off his bike and was taken to a hospital in a nearby town. He was put in a straitjacket and he shared a room with three teenagers who were also tripping. And the teenagers were chained to their beds to keep them under control.

It sounds horrible! I can see having flashbacks to this, to being chained to a bed while tripping. Yeah, that's a bad thing to do. Some of my friends tried to get out the window. They were thrashing wildly, screaming in the sound of the metal beds and jumping

up and down. The noise was terrible. I would prefer to die than go through that again. Yeah, that sounds fucking terrible. This sounds like the worst acid trip you could go on. Yeah, that sounds like about the worst way you could have a trip go. It sounds awful. Yeah. So back in the French town, a little girl screamed as she was being chased by man-eating tigers.

Oh my goodness. A woman sobbed about how her children had been ground into sausages. Oh, great. Oh no. So graphic and specific. Yeah. A large man fatted off a terrific beast by smashing his furniture and using the wood as weapons. Good for you, buddy.

Good for you. A husband and wife ran around chasing each other with knives. Again, probably something else going on there. My guess is we're not just talking the acid in that. Because I have, again, been on acid a lot around knives and other weapons. I have never chased someone around with knives on acid. That's a couple who was on the verge of a knife chase before the acid. I think the important part here is that in 1951 in this French town, acid wasn't a thing yet.

Hallucinogenic drugs weren't a thing. Even mushrooms weren't popular around this time. No one knew what the hell was going on. They just think that they're just basically losing their minds like they're like there's there's no other explanation for what's happening to them can we just say that the most uh shocking thing that has come out so far is that when robert was on acid he wasn't chasing people with knives that seemed like it's honest like depending on your acid trip you wouldn't want to chase someone with a knife like it's not that's not the kind of headspace you're in we would we would like during this i don't sober yeah we would we would take a bunch of drugs and grab my ak-47 and hike

out into the woods and we would shoot down a fir tree and we would drag it back to a clearing and we would bury it standing up and we would drape it in pig intestines and put a pig's heart on it and then we cover it in gasoline and light it with firecrackers and dance around it like the pagans of old. But there was nothing aggressive about that. No, you very rarely would want to hurt somebody on acid in my experience. Like you generally

are way more compassionate in a lot of ways. But if you have no idea what acid is and you're just in the 1950s and you're losing your mind and you're seeing weird things then yeah I can see how this would maybe cause some other types of behavior to happen you just think that like God is angry at you

yeah because like they're not dosing themselves either they're being dosed right so they don't it's very different where like you're deciding to go on a trip versus this is happening to you and you have no decision I think for basically anyone in this position the the logical assumption would be, oh, the devil has taken over our town and our minds have, we have been infested with demons.

Like what else are you going to assume? You're not going to be like, oh, this drug that's just barely been invented and that nobody really knows about yet, except for weird nerds. It must be some version of that that I've taken accidentally. No, you're going to assume like demons are in your blood so one interesting tidbit before we before we go on break um even some of the local animals had been affected by whatever poisoned the town um there there was a what there was one dog in particular that kept chewing on rocks until its teeth chipped away i don't like this. And ducks were behaving very odd.

It's described that they were walking around erect and upright like penguins in a line. What? And they're just like very weird behavior from ducks. That's the scariest thing I've heard so far. That kind of makes me want to dose our ducks scarcely. We're not wasting acid on the ducks. No.

I mean, there's a lot of things you could give ducks we're not we're not giving ducks acid that's not happening about giving ducks drugs is they're all monsters that is true they are monsters and rapists yeah every one of them yeah all of the male ducks so anyway a reoccurring theme was that people were running around wildly and being very fearful of like monst monster animals and encroaching flames. Sounds like the ducks were having a good time, though. The ducks were having a great time. Doing their ministry of silly walk shit. Like, I don't know what all these people are bummed about.

This is rad. Okay, so when you first said that, I heard dogs and I was like, that is the most terrifying thing I've ever heard. Ducks is much funnier. It's like ducks standing like very upright like penguins walking around in a line. I think ducks might enjoy it. I think dogs are a little too aware of what's going on.

Well, Garrison did say dog, the stone thing was about the dog. Yeah, but the penguin scary thing Yeah, I just don't know that the dogs enjoy it because like I've seen dogs accidentally eat large amounts of pot and whatnot.

And they are not happy. They get weird. They are. They're pretty scared. They're not having a good time. They're pretty scared. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you know what is also very spooky? Capitalism. Yeah, capitalism and all of these spooky advertisements to sell you things. Advertisements are also a form of mind control speaking of the cia in the 50s anyway profoundly damaging we are back from the spooky advertisements yeah anyway um so i think another another reoccurring factor for why a lot of these people have very similar types of experiences around snakes, which we'll talk about later, and flames,

is with this many people tripping, and no one knows what tripping is, I think it's really easy for an idea or a fear to spread from one person to another while they're tripping. With this many people, I think if someone says something, it's going to start happening to someone else, and it's kind of this cascading effect where they all develop this very similar fear.

It's because it's almost like being spread like an infection. So there was one man convinced that red snakes were devouring his brain, and he jumped out a window. Oh, no. Did he live through this? He did live. Yeah, I'm guessing a lot of these – it's like France in the 50s, so I'm guessing most of these buildings are not super high up. They're not super high up, no, no. They're like falling a foot or two.

Although here, we have another one. Another man reportedly leapt from a window yelling, look everyone, I'm a dragonfly. The man broke both legs. Aw. Wow. But he stood up and continued running fucking rad king sigma sigma behavior yeah absolute absolute sigma we're adding this is a new kind of man new kind of dude just dropped the rarest kind of man look everyone i'm a dragonfly. Breaks both legs and keeps running.

Look, based on the information you've provided us, I can't say he's not a dragonfly. No, he is an absolute, absolute king. Oh, good for him. I hope he had a great life. Yeah. Another one saw his heart escape through his feet and beseeched a doctor to try to put it back into place. Yeah, you don't want to have that happen.

That doesn't sound fun. You want to keep that somewhere around the middle of your body. Someone sprinted down the lane, claiming that he was being chased by bandits with donkey ears. Okay, fair enough. At a nearby river, a man was convinced that he was a circus tightrope walker and attempted to balance his way across the cables of a suspension bridge. How did he do? Oh, no. It doesn't say.

The report does not tell you. Sounds like he did great. Yeah, like he was right. Yeah, he's not in the death report. Yeah. So clearly he lived through it. Therefore. Another person did try to die in the river.

He tried to jump into the river only to be saved by his friends. And he was screaming, I am dead. I i am dead and my head is made of copper and i have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me such a weird description of like tripping and saying like my head is made of copper i'm trying to think of like what was going on. What, like what, what series of events did, did he spiral down in his brain to have that sentence? I just, I'm not quite sure. It's,

it's, it's definitely, I can definitely see it happening. I just, I just can, I'm trying to think like what exactly what, what happened to get to that point. It's real,

real interesting. I think some of these are hard because again, it's like these people just think, literally think they're going insane. Yeah. Or that like this stuff is just actually happening to them like you like when you're tripping on acid you already kind of have the feeling that you there is moments where you feel like this is like this is like never gonna end even though even though you know you know you're on acid these people don't know that right like these people don't have the reassurance they're like no i took acid i'm on a drug this is gonna going to be over. Eight hours or so. It's going to be.

They think this is going to last forever, right? Like they think this is just the world now. Like this is just one of those. Robert Anton Wilson, who is a thinker I enjoy a lot, writes a lot about how to calm people down when they've taken too much. And most of his advice is around talking about like, OK, well, how long ago did you take it? Hey, well, that the good news is that this is going to end here.

You know, it's only going to last this long. Like you're through this point. Oh, this is the this is going to end here. It's only going to last this long. You're through this point. Oh, this is the second hour freakies. And by the third hour, you'll be fine again and enjoying it. It's all about keeping in people's minds like this is going to pass. So yeah, you're right. This is the fucking worst way to take drugs. All right.

So local newspapers and also like national newspapers described this as among the stricken, a delirium rose. Patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies. People throwing themselves from rooftops, men and women throwing their clothes off and running in the streets naked. And children complaining their stomachs were infested with coils and snakes. Which, I mean, half of that sounds like, yeah, that's like a normal good time just running around the streets naked on acid.

Other half's like, yeah, that doesn't seem pleasant with coils and snakes in your stomach. But also, like, flowers blossoming from your body. I can understand

that kind of sensation. But, like, it definitely wasn't all horrible and, like, nightmarish. We already mentioned the giddy people with burning anuses.

But for, like, the full-on tripping folks, according to the Newdy people with burning anuses um but for like the full-on tripping folks according to the new york times there was reports of people like hearing heavenly choruses and seeing you know bright colors the world looked beautiful to them apparently the head of the farming co-op wrote hundreds of pages of like enlightened tripping poetry that that guy must be sick of shit because knowing nothing he starts tripping poetry. See, that guy must be sick of shit, because knowing nothing, he starts tripping, not knowing he's tripping, it's just like, time to make some fucking

art. You know what this head state is good for? Writing some shit. He just went to his cabinet and wrote poetry. That's fucking awesome. That's a guy, I'll bet he handled just everything that life threw at him well. Like, that says a lot about you when you're like, oh, demons have infiltrated my brain.

Guess I'm going to hang out in my cabin and write some poems. Hundreds of pages. Wow. Like, I can hardly write shit on acid. I cannot imagine trying to write shit on acid. I cannot imagine trying to write poetry. I mean, I've done a lot of creative stuff on acid. Creative stuff, yeah. I just feel like specifically reading and typing can be hard at certain points.

If you're coming down, it can be easier. It's not really good for writing. It's good for ideas that you later can flesh out into writing. Yeah. Yeah. So unfortunately, you know, because this was, you know, no one was going on. Many people were taken to local asylums in straight jackets and tied onto beds, making things undoubtedly worse for people tripping. It's one of those things I can't even be angry at them because like they don't know what's going on.

You have no idea what's happening. They don't know what's going on. Like nobody does. The whole like every attempt at restraint increase the agitation line is like horrifying from the concept of like you're tripping. You don't know what's going on. People are tying you down to beds, making you feel like you're even more stuck in this permanent state of delirium. It's just – it's the worst nightmare. Yeah, all of this is horrible.

Yeah, all of this is horrible. The mayor of the town said, like, I've seen healthy men and women suddenly become terrorized, ripping their bedsheets, hiding themselves beneath their blankets to escape the hallucinations. So, yeah, if you don't know what's going on, pretty scary. Except for the poetry guy. Good for him. Yeah. Good for him. Yeah, making the best of it. So, by the time the effects had subsided for everyone affected, which was around, like, a few days after the initial reported, like, nausea, like, you know, it didn't affect everyone at the same time.

You know, some people got dosed later on. It's unclear what exactly – because this is the 50s, we didn't have a great idea of the exact timeline of events of, like, when the first effects were felt effects were felt and how all the stuff was spaced out. But this whole incident lasted around a few days for everyone totaled. It was reported that anywhere between 300 to 500 people had felt the effects. Around

50 feeling very, very extreme open-eye hallucinations of objects that aren't even there. Very extreme hallucinations. And four people did die in connection to the poisoning um at least four people died it's again it's unclear for exact numbers for a lot of this stuff yeah um an investigation into the sudden outbreak of the madness was promptly underway uh town officials wanted to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible yeah Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you would want to figure out what was happening here. Yeah.

And the blame fell onto a single batch of bread. What? So among the common denominator, among those affected, that they all allegedly consumed bread from one specific baker. Yep, that's how it works. He was accused of using

ergot-contaminated rye flour, and he was arrested and temporarily imprisoned. Also, a nearby miller that he got the flour from was also arrested and given some of the blame. The funny part is that around this time, the French government had a very top-down grain distribution system

that rigidly controlled everything about where the grains were milled, where they were sent, and what bakers could use which flour. So bakers had no choice in what type of flour to use or what type of grain they could use in baking. It was all decided by other people. Yeah, because France, bread is like a real

big deal in France. It's pretty important, yeah. For the record, just like ergot poisoning, there are a lot of cases of different dancing manias and whatnot in medieval Europe where whole towns will be, everyone will start dancing or hallucinating.

They always came down as these people assumed apocryphalist stories about demon possessions or whatnot. Now, a lot of the suspicion is like, oh yeah, some ergot got into the pot. No, yeah. Everybody was just kind of tripping. Ergot poisoning, it seems like one of the rougher trips to go on.

It's not super clean. No, I mean, I've done LSA, which I think is similar. It's similar to ergot in a few ways, yeah. Yeah, they're tryptamines that are really rough, and it's, I would not, don't do LSA. No Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds for the pod?

If you're going to take LSA, then actually synthesize it out of Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds, which is a felony. It is a felony. But you can just buy Hawaiian baby wood rose seeds and eat them, and you will have maybe the worst trip of your life. Great advice from the pod. So yeah, on the rye and ergot topic, the past growing season was especially wet,

and ergot fungi did grow across the country's rye fields. But the amount of ergot on the rye and the amount of rye used in baking was thought to not be enough to induce any type of poisoning. In fact, the last time ergot poisoning had struck France was back

in 1816. So almost like a century and a half before this incident. Not about a century if it's the 50s, right? A little less than a century. No, so the last incident was 1816. This was 1950. Oh, I thought you said 1860. No, no. Okay, gotcha,

gotcha, gotcha. So, a century and a half ago, and no other towns and no other part of France was affected by anything similar to this. So, the Urgot thing is kind of iffy. But the Urgot explanation was the only thing that doctors

and investigators could come to, due to their limited knowledge around brain-altering substances and just pressure from town officials to get to the bottom of this so that they had something to blame and people could move on. But as a result, not much evidence really backs up the Ergot claim, and a lot of experts today kind of deem it bunk. Yeah, and there's a bunch of like um there's this thing kai keon that the greeks would take that was like this greek hallucinatory thing that they think it

was because they were putting grain and wine and it might have been ergot poisoned but also like people enjoyed it and so there's a lot of debate over whether or not it could have been ergot but i don't know um i don't know what else. Is there other theories about what it might have been if it wasn't ergot? Oh, Rob. Oh, yes, there is. Oh, boy. Is it the CIA? Is it the CIA garrison? We're going to get to it. So, yeah, it doesn't really make much sense that the high amounts of ergot rye would only be in one batch of grain using a single batch of bread from just one bakery in one small town.

Doesn't really make sense. Other explanations that people have come to includes like mercury poisoning and overuse of other fungicides. These have been mostly disproven. Yeah, that doesn't seem like mercury poisoning. No, but there's... Speaking as a guy who likes to drink some mercury,

you know. Oh boy. Merk on. So yeah, so there's a lot of other theories around like fungicides being used, but those have been kind of disproven by some people, but others still point to them as possible explanations. But, but, there is one other theory that we will focus on that features two of my favorite things. Okay.

LSD and the 1950s CIA. Because if you're going to pick a CIA, the 1950s one, they had the most fun. Oh my god. Right? And you know who else has a lot of fun, Garrison? Who? And is also the 1950s CIA is the best. They had the most fun. They had the most fun. Oh, my God. Right? And you know who else has a lot of fun, Garrison? Who? Who would that be? And is also the 1950s CIA.

Whomst? Our sponsors. Oh, really? Good for them. Yeah, it could happen here. It's sponsored only by the 50s CIA. Only the one from the 50s. Yeah.

When you order any of our products, they will come to your house and inject you with 7,000 hits of LSD. Hey, free! Hey! That sounds like a great deal, honestly. You're saving a lot of money. You are saving, yeah, that is a lot of free acid. A lot of acid for the amount of money you're spending. Look, that's a lifestyle, you won't do more acid, that's for sure. No, that's acid for life. You won't do it again. Yeah, you might, probably you won't have to do any expenses ever again. Yeah, yeah.

You'll survive. You'll just be a very different person by the end of the experience. Yeah, you won't survive. Your body will. Someone else will be inhabiting it at the end of that trip. Someone else will wake up. So speaking of waking up, here's all the products. So 1950s CIA.

Wild time. Wild time. Great time. In 2009, Hank P. Albarelli, an American writer and journalist, released a book called A Terrible Mistake, which focuses on the suspicious death of a CIA scientist named Frank Olson, who worked on the CIA mind control experiments during the late 40s and early 50s. While researching the book, Albarelli claims to have come across a number of old CIA and White House documents referencing the Ponce St. Desprez incident,

and he claims that the village was the target of a CIA experiment on the mass effects of LSD, and that around the time that Frank Olson wanted to sever his ties with the army and CIA, Frank started talking about his participation in the experiment, which may have led to the government offing Olsen. So I know that is a lot, and it is slightly more than just a speculation. We're going to get into the evidence here shortly. But by now, it's pretty well known that throughout the 40s, 50s, and 60s, both the US Army and the CIA tried to use hallucinogenic drugs, such as LSD, as both an offensive weapon and as a way to make psychic super soldiers. Programs like MKUltra, MKNaomi,

Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke. Project Bluebird? Lots of these things were trying to find different ways of using LSD for offensive and defensive means. Some of the interest was promoted by, was prompted by reports of the Soviet Union doing experiments with drugs around the same time, also stuff around psychic powers and hypnosis.

This was very popular around this time for lots of different intelligence agencies. But so Al Borelli uncovered a report from 1949 by the director of the Ed Wood Arsenal, which was where many U.S. government LSD experiments were carried out. And this report stated that the army should do everything possible to launch so-called field experiments using this drug. And later in his 2009 book, Albrecht claims that he found references to a government document with the label RE, Pont Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files SO, SPAN, SLASH, FRANCE, OPERATION FILE, INCLUSIVE,

OLSON, INTEL FILES, HAND CARRY TO BELLEN. TELL HIM TO SEE TO IT THAT THESE ARE BURIED. This document does exist. We do have this label on this document. But the actual contents of the document are gone. This is just a label that is being referenced as a piece of thing.

We just know there was a thing with this title. Great. Oh, boy. So the document label references Frank Olson and David Bellin. So Bellin was the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, created by the White House in the mid-'70s to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the Central Intelligence Agency.

So, Albrecht believes that the French town LSD incident, which is like the Ponce Saint-Esprit, which is the name of the town, and the F. Olson files mentioned in the document would definitely show that if the document hadn't been buried, as it was said in

the label, the CIA, it would show that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople by dosing them with what he thinks was LSD. Now, there is also a bit more to it than that. Using FOIAs, he got a hold of another CIA document, a two-page report from 1954, detailing a conversation between a CIA agent and a representative of the Sandoz Chemical Company. So, the Sandoz base was the place where Albert Hoffman invented LSD in 1938.

And it was only a few hundred kilometers away from Pont Saint-Esprit, the town where this happened. So, the chemical company was actually pretty close, relatively to, like, Europe. And it was also the only place where lsd was being made at the time and they were providing both the army and the cia with a lot of

a lot of asset but i mean they're also giving it like they're also giving it to universities they gave lots to timothy leary initially they sure did they were they were they give quite a lot to tim leary they were they were giving it out to a lot of different universities and research people, including the US government. So, the CIA agent wrote in this report that he was detailing a dinner he had with this representative

of the chemical company. And he reported that after having several drinks, the scientist started talking about the Pont Saint-Esprit incident. The Sandoz official blurted talking about the Pont Saint-Esprit incident. The Sandoz official blurted out, the Pont Saint-Esprit secret was that it was not the bread at all, continued the Sandoz official. For weeks, the French tied up our

laboratories with analysis of the bread. It was not the grain ergot. It was a diethyl laminate. Sorry, it's the last part of the LSD name. Yeah, diethyl acid. Yeah, the diethylamin LSD name. Yeah, diethyl acid. Yeah, the diethylaminide-like compound. Yeah, the surgic diethyl acid is what LSD stands for. So yeah, the scientist said that it was basically an LSD-like compound.

So that was a report to detail a dinner that a CIA agent had with this scientist. And that document was uncovered. It was from, like, the 50s. Now, this next part has a little bit less proof to it, because there's no documents backing this up, but Albarelli also claims that during his digging, two former CIA researchers reached out to him and revealed some details, some possible details, of the method of the poisoning. They told him that the village was subjected to an air blitz of pulverized LSD. Holy shit.

What? The acid bombed him? I'm sorry, that's fucking based. To force the tense people into taking the substance through the air. According to the researchers, this manner of distribution proved mostly unsuccessful, forcing the CIA to move on to phase two, which was contaminating local food.

So apparently, if the air blitz was a thing, it didn't work super well. Yeah, that's a bummer. Yeah, I know. Although, actually... I was about to have sophie buy us a plane we will talk about this later but um the cia did uh do more air blitzing um of of acid in new york city actually they would ride around in cars um in like poorer and poorer more like multicultural areas um shooting lsSD out of the back of the car

to see what would happen to people. I mean, take out the racism, and that really is a dream job. Just driving around cities, air-dosing people with acid at random, smoking cigarettes, probably. Oh, my God. So with the conclusion drawn

that it was one of the town's bakeries being the source of the poisoning, Albrecht says it was possible that LSD was put in or onto the bread. Um, so yeah. And, uh, also, uh, lots

of the scientists disp- uh, lots of the scientists dispatched to investigate the poisoning after it took place were actually from the Sandoz Chemical Company. Um, they studied the situation for, like, two or three weeks, um, and gave the explanation that would later be kind of disproven that it was ergot poisoning, which they told the town officials and the British Medical Journal. What no one knew at the time was that one,

the existence of LSD in the first place, and two, that Sandoz was the company making it and giving these drugs to the US Army and to the CIA. And apparently Albert Hoffman himself went to the town to investigate this incident. So yeah, one last thing on the physical evidence side of things. Al Borelli also found an undated White House document that appeared to be part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission, containing the names of two French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct references to the, quote, Ponte Saint-Esprit incident. Also, the document linked a former CIA biological warfare expert and the chief of the Fort Derrick's

Special Operations Division. So those are all places that they were experimenting with a similar kind of thing. We have mentioned the Rockefeller Commission a few times now. If you remember, the names Frank Olson, the guy, one of the CIA researchers on LSD, and David Bellin, where they were on the label of that missing document. So Bellin was the executive director of the White House Commission to investigate the CIA's abuses and crimes, which was called the Rockefeller Commission. It was formed by President Ford in 1975 to investigate abuses and other activities by the CIA and a few other intelligence agencies that were operating within the states.

So the Rockefeller Commission revealed not only – the reason why we know about MKUltra was because of the Rockefeller Commission. This is how we know this was a thing. So it not only revealed stuff about programs about MKUltra was because of the Rockefeller Commission. This is how we know this was a thing. So it not only revealed stuff about programs around MKUltra, but it also revealed the details of the CIA dosing their own scientist, Frank Olson, with LSD and possibly killing him. There's also a Netflix series about this called Woodward, which I haven't actually watched yet, so I don't know how good or accurate it is.

But they did make a series a few years ago about the death of Frank Olson and all of the weird, sketchy stuff surrounding both his job and his death. We do love the CIA, folks. Uh-huh. The commission also

concluded that the head of the CIA's LSD program, Dr. Sidney Goatlieb, destroyed all of the drug program's records in 1973 to hide the details of possibly illegal actions, and he was personally involved in the torture of Frank Olson. 20 years after Mr. Olson's death and 10 years after the LSD experiments were halted, Dr. Goatlieb ordered the destruction of all the records of the program, including a total of 152 separate files. This came shortly after other reports that records were being destroyed by Richard Helms, the then director of Central Intelligence. So it's undoubtedly true that the CIA was up to some shit involving LSD around the exact time period of this french town incident yeah you're certain

it's certainly not like you're not coming out of nowhere suggesting the cia may have dosed all these people no but they did it to a bunch of folks if they didn't do it here they'd done similar shit so it's also it's also worth mentioning at this point that like this is like the point where the cia is also running this like enormous heroin network out of france as like basically they have this whole they have this deal with the french where they're like okay so the french mob can like basically move all the heroin they want in exchange they'll like stop the communists from taking control of the point of marseilles and so this is this is all also going on like at the same time that they're doing the lsd stuff it's great yeah so

there's some historians that think the lsd stuff it's great yeah so there's some historians that think the lsd theory does not hold enough water um stephen caplan it's a u.s historian specializing in the french food history and the author of the 2008 book cursed bread which follows this incident um he says that he is uh i have numerous objections to this paltry evidence that this that this against the cia first all, it's clinically incoherent. LSD takes effect in just a few hours, where the inhibitors showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. Furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive elements

or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople. So to both those claims, I say they're not necessarily true. It's unclear how soon the delirious effects took place. For some people, they were the first effect felt. So the whole thing about the effects only taking effect after 36 hours, that's not necessarily true. And also, LSD can definitely have nauseating or digestive effects. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

So that's not – yeah. But there were other types of symptoms that are not common for what we think of as modern LSD. Oh, yeah, absolutely. psychoactive drugs that's unclear what they were all actually being dosed with yeah who the fuck knows what they were being given and who the fuck knows what the actual like dose amount was yeah we have no idea and it's also you know i think it's leery was the origin of the phrase that like the things that determine what happens on a trip are set setting and dose so your mindset where you take it and who you take it around and the dose and uh the fact that these are somewhat unique symptoms could be to the fact that like other people taking

acid have never taken it this way where your whole town is all dosed at once without knowing what acid is so Kaplan's other objections revolve around the delivery system he says it's absurd this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting it in the bread

as for pulverized to get for ingestion through the air, that technology wasn't even possible at the time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half-destroyed by the U.S. Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War. It makes no sense. And to that I say, that makes it

the perfect town for the CIA to fuck with? Yeah, I mean, the CIA does... Yeah, like... They generally would choose to dose someone with acid because it sounded funny. Like, they didn't give a shit. I think the fact that this town was already kind of, like, only half inhabited

and half destroyed by the Second World War makes it the perfect town to fuck with. And also, the CIA and the government very much did have the means to try to distribute stuff via the air because we can see other documents around the time of them doing this to specific areas of

New York City. They also tried to poison the entire New York subway with LSD in the 50s but that was shut down by higher ups in the Central Intelligence Agency Unfortunately, god what a time that would have been But Kaplan isn't sure or gots the responsible either um he says that ergot contamination would not have worked because it

doesn't make sense that only one sack of grain would have been affected um and he says if it was ergot the the effects would have been way more widespread yeah that does sounds he rules out lsd in the grounds of the symptoms that people suffered, although similar, don't quite fit what we modernly think of as a drug. Also, I don't think Kaplan's ever taken LSD, so I don't think he actually knows what he's talking about. I think he's right about it probably not being ergot, but I don't think he knows much about LSD.

Yeah, he also points out that LSD probably wouldn't have survived the fierce temperatures of the baker's oven, although Al Borrelli counters that LSD could have been added after the fact to the surface of the bread. Sure, yeah, you could just drop it on. You could just drop it on with liquid blotters, which would also explain how the effects

were so different from person to person, because one person may be having a whole drop of LSD, where some may only have a tiny little speck of moist liquid. For sure. So that can explain some things. But, you know, this is still pretty much a mystery you know it's very clear it's it's very much very well could have been some kind of hidden lsd cia

experiment um or the cia could have just been you know interested in studying what happened in the town since they were also doing studies into psychoactive substances at the time um it could be either or um and that's where it's spooky because you'll never know so yes that is that is the spooky incident of a french town basically thinking that they lost their minds and then you know they you love to see it do we i think it's funny it is a little funny it is definitely a little funny um it. It is a great example of the worst way to trip. Yeah, that's pretty high up there. Anyway, critical support to the CIA for dosing random people with acid.

Always one of my favorite sets of stories. You'll love to see it. So yeah, tune in tomorrow for more spooky tales. For another spooky story. And you can follow the spooky social media that poisons your brain at HappenHerePod.

HappenHerePod and CoolZone Media, which, yes, Twitter will poison your brain. It is just as spooky. Goodbye. Way more spooky. Way worse for your brain than surprise CIA acid, to be honest. The acid wears off. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast i'm so close to clicking leave meeting every time that that bullshit comes up. It's like, yes, I consent. That's why I'm fucking here. All right, Sophie, we're starting with that line from Daniel. Welcome to spooky week on It Could Happen Here. Today, we are discussing a truly spooky topic, one that everyone is just really gonna hate.

And we're talking about esoteric keckism and meme magic. So, Chatelet, my brothers and sisters, come along on a ride. Chatelet. We read a whole book for this. Oh. At least I did. You read a book just for this. I would say that all of the books I read from age

19 to 22 prepared me for this. Have I been preparing you for this? Yeah, the books I read while I was doing psychedelics twice a week all really were good background on this subject. That is true. You want to kick us off?

I don't. So I think first thing we're talking about, we're going to emphasize awareness over amplification. My goal for this is that we can all be more aware of kind of the power that images on the internet can have over influencing the actual world and talking about people who believe this to a ridiculous degree and how they actually have been able to institute change not only because of this belief just because of their dedication to

this practice because it's it's because it's a thing that exists and it has had real world ramifications and it's good to understand that that's a thing and that also maybe we can influence the way we like us use the internet to also maybe make good things happen as opposed to just being doomers all the time um hell yeah so that's kind of what i wanted to to start with many dubs to that garrison complete keck with you. Oh, God. No. Although, to be fair, the past few days, I have just been spamming the It Could Happen Here group chat with horrible nonsense around keck. It has been the most insufferable week of my life.

Horrible nonsense? Like paragraphs. Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Walls of text so big. Any actually safe working environment that cared about its employees would have fired you long ago yeah so i think the other thing that we should definitely mention is that any type of like occultism mysticism or like woo woo um has

actually does have a decent history within right-wing political ideas and specifically more extreme right-wing stuff from the past few hundred years. Most people know that the early Nazis had some mystical stuff going on. There was a lot more stuff going on behind the scenes. A lot of their favorite authors also were practicing occultists. This is a thing that goes back a while. You can even see this to some degree

with how close Christianity is to a lot of the modern right-wing states as well. A lot of what we would consider evangelical Christianity has a lot of stuff that's actually very similar to occultism. They just use different terms because occultism and magic is taboo, but it's actually the same thing. It's all like, it's interacting with the sameism they just use different terms because occultism and and like magic is taboo but

it's actually the same thing it's all like just it's inter it's interacting with the same systems just with different words so like this is this is the thing that is is not it's not just on the internet this is thing that's been going on for thousands of years in particular the past 100 years we've seen a big rise in the amount of like of occultism and mysticism specifically tied to politics yeah and there's this i mean there have been a couple of articles written just recently about the fact that a lot of like the woo-woo left the kind of um not really esoteric but kind of mainstream occulty left like the the pop occulty left has yeah has increasingly turned towards stuff like q anon and a big chunk

of it is like this this openness to like feel power in coincidences synchronicity would be the synchronicity is the term yeah and just a general open-mindedness to um maybe too many things sure uh yeah I mean it's you can see this on on on a lot of a lot of sides because. Yeah, it is definitely not just the right wing. I mean, the biggest example of this would probably be facets of QAnon the past few years have done very similar types of things. There's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes, like how Pepe operated was very similar to that, which is what we're mainly talking about today. But, you know, there is also stuff like this on the left wing, whether it be be new agey type stuff that seems to kind of mostly be bullshit. But there's other type of folk magic or indigenous traditions that have, I would say, slightly more –

Significantly more. Reasonable actually stuff going on as opposed to just new age selling books and that kind of stuff. Yeah. One of the things that also separates actual religion from religion that kind of has formed in this mematic way recently is that all of this stuff, particularly what we're talking about today, formed simultaneously with political sentiment and as and and was was crafted and in a lot of cases like they they state facts wrong specifically because they are trying to craft a political narrative alongside this like weird quasi-spiritual thing i mean and speaking of spiritualism coming to the same kind of coming to the same this is you know we're all kind of anarchisty adjacent here and one of the things that really came up around the same time as

anarchism in the 20th century was a concept called chaos magic uh which was really really tied to a lot of all really tied to a lot of like anarchist thought and anarchist kind of thinkers some of the most famous chaos magicians are like explicitly anarchist someone like grant morrison um others are like discordians which have a lot of like anarchist crossover stuff like like Robert Anton Wilson, which kind of operates in that same ocean. Because he wrote about conspiracies. He wrote about esoteric magic, but always with a really intent eye on increasing people's defenses to this kind of stuff, what we're talking about today. He was very cognizant of that. He wrote about conspiracy as an enthusiast, but also as someone who was trying to stop unchecked conspiratorial belief. Yeah. He went about that in peculiar ways, but he was an odd man.

Yeah, and the reason why I've been getting more into this type of stuff the past year has increased, and the reason why I really like chaos magic, I like it as a postmodern system of magic, of looking at how, basically, if magic is just ideas and trying to figure out how our brains can interact with the physical world,

then chaos magic introduces a lot of interesting stuff around like late stage capitalism uh because it is it's explicitly tied to to like post-modern art and post-modern thought um and the way you know brands and marketing and specifically the internet all affects our minds all this stuff gets talked about in chaos magic a lot and i really like look using that framework for things um and speaking of that kind of stuff specifically around the internet we're gonna be talking about the first thing i want to mention is like the concept of searching for something and then you're like you're and you're gonna find it whether that you know robert entom wilson and um like the illuminati trilogies has like and like and discordianism has like 23 and the law of fives

right I read that book when I was 20 and I have been like seeing 23s repeatedly at like significant moments in my life for the last 14 years or so like yeah it's it's like once you get that kind of meme implanted in your brain it can stick with you for forever and and this this happens to everything you know this happens to this happens to everyone. Once you learn about a new topic, the next day you'll see it somewhere. You'll be like, oh, you'll be like... You learn a new word and suddenly it's in a song. Yeah, and it's in all these places that you didn't see it before.

This happens all of the time with everything. This is how synchronicity works. And this is where religions come from. And this is what religions are. Yeah, throughout history. And it's because this all has its roots in why we're very good hunters we are pattern and why we're pattern recognition yeah we're pattern recognition like our brains are pattern recognizing machines that's what we're best at and it means that we're good at spotting berries and tracking deer and it also

means that we can't stop making religions we can't stop making religions and matter what we do. We can't stop making religions and cults. And if we have one too many synchronicities, we can change the entire way we view about the whole world, which can have varying degrees of effects. Sometimes if it's just a little bit, that can maybe actually be very helpful. If you join a weird cult that does messed up stuff, then it's like, yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, sometimes it ends in Burning Man and sometimes it ends in Burning Men. Oh! Drop the bomb on that one. So, first thing I want to kind of discuss before we get into the actual timeline

of how Pepe and Kekizan became a thing, I want to just do a brief overview of sigils and memes. Hell yeah. This idea of what, like, let's take the original concept of the meme which is like you know the the it's genes are genetic memes are cultural these are cultural ideas that can spread like a virus um and usually memes in the since since since the internet has become way more popular memes have become more tied to images like like memes are a much more visual thing now whereas in the 90s they

were more of just like like an idea concept but now they have like in this extra visual backing yeah so a sigil is a is a magical concept tied mostly to chaos magic which is basically an abstract concept um or or like a specific concept put into an abstract image that then gets charged and then it's going to manifest itself in your life. The reason why this works is because part of this desire gets implanted deep in your brain when you charge it through like a trance or there's different methods of charging sigils. or there's different methods of charging sigils, but you have this concept and this idea and this desire, and it gets put into you, so you're going to kind of subconsciously do things that influence it into becoming something that you can see.

Just like, you know, if you hear about 23, you're going to see it. Same thing for this. It's the same kind of base concept. And then Grant Morrison of Comic Book Writers, probably my favorite comic book writer he he was he's really the only person that's developed sigils more since their inception um with the concept of a hyper sigil which is taking the same idea of like wanting to influence change in the world uh via this visual medium of a sigil and instead of just having it

be like an abstract glyph that you charge a hyper sigil is an entire work of art with this express interest. So everything that you do in this is trying to get some type of real world change, and it's very, very intentional, right? A lot of art already operates like this. This is why a lot of postmodern magic is very similar just to like making art, because it's the same kind of basic idea whether that be something like you know like the matrix or you know any any type of art kind of does this already if it is good um and it it can find ways to influence reality so memes operate on this the same way and eventually people actually found that eventually people on 4chan realized that they that they were doing sigils and started using this word because it's really the same thing.

When you're altering all of these images of this frog and posting it into all these different kind of more abstract, more like ugly, obscure, kind of like weird, like surreal types of memes and you're spamming them on politicians' Twitter account, you're basically doing a group sigil and a group hyper sigil because you're all making these individual things and you're spamming them into the world. And because there's so many of them, yeah, they're going to have a real world effect. Yeah, and they're going to have a real world effect in part because of the way human brains work and in part because of the way algorithms work. Yep. if you're an impressionable kid to mistake the algorithm doing what it's designed to do which is find patterns groups of people sharing something and expand that to a larger group of people because oh if this cluster of people likes this this will probably be something that's very algorithms are great at making synchronicities because that's what they're designed to do that's what they're supposed to do that's the whole point of why they exist and that's why this is that that that's why

our because as you stated a little earlier in one one of these days on Bastards, we're going to talk about Helena Blavatsky and like the theosophy movement in more detail. And like all of the occult stuff that fed into the third – the early stage of the Third Reich. But the occult back then is very different from the kind of occult feeding into fascism now, which is heavily based around synchronicity because it's also heavily based around social media and the way memes spread. Yeah, that's why I think chaos magic has really gotten kind of a resurgence the past few years with social media and how algorithms develop

because they do mirror a lot of the concepts within chaos magic because the internet's kind of a chaotic place, but it's also, it's not just pure chaos. It is chaos within a framework of order, which is why I like the chaos star, like the actual chaos sigil. Yes, the arrows are pointing in every direction, but you can make a perfect circle around all of the arrows. It's because it's not just pure chaos.

It actually is contained within this other framework. And by the way, Garrison, when you started talking about synchchronicities and sigils i checked my phone for a second and saw that it was 5 17 on october 23rd uh five of course contains both two and three and is thus a sacred number october 23rd i shouldn't have to explain why that's significant and then 17 is a sacred number it's the 22nd it's the 22nd yeah but it's the 23rd on my phone. Why is it the 23rd on your phone? Because that's the universe, baby. That's the synchronicity. I'm living in the future, motherfuckers.

And what time is it that it's not right now? It was 517 on my phone. And the other time it is. It is 2.22 p.m. your time. I don't need to know what time it is in your default reality, Sophie. No, no, no, yeah. You are on a different dimensional plane now. And a wrong one.

We have split into two different ones. Why is mine wrong? I think this gives us a perfect opportunity for the audience to find their own synchronicities in these ads. Because who knows what's going to happen? Who knows what's going to play? Spooky ad, Brick. So look for patterns and you'll find them.

Ooh, here's some ads. I hope it's an ad for the Egyptian goddess, Mat. And we are back. We're going to now actually kind of get into some of the actual Pepe nonsense. Hell yeah. I think another important part to mention is that for a lot of people doing this online, this is like an online pattern that happens all the time.

It happens with stuff like this. It happens with Catboys. It happens with a whole bunch of stuff. Is that like stuff starts as a joke and then you do it a lot. And the repetition basically makes you do it genuinely. Yeah, like me talking about getting all of my followers to a compound in Idaho where we die fighting the FDA. Exactly. Eventually, that turns into an actual death cult.

So it starts as a joke, and then under repetition, it becomes genuine. This happens to basically almost everything on the internet. Yeah, this leads to garrison and i doing the inevitable robert evans uh behind the bastards episode episode yeah episode yeah that's a three-parter if i ever heard one you you hope so you wish what hold on what are what are cat boys this that is that is that is a different that is a different podcast you're here that is a different podcast i think yeah so glad you're here. That is a different podcast, I think. Yeah, hi. Sorry. I know I only interject briefly. Is that, are they like pre-Furries?

Is that something different entirely? No, Catboys. Kind of post-Furry. It's kind of like post-Olef. It's re-humanizing the Furries. So like the same way that- They're humans too. The same way Sonic the Hedgehog

is a re-Mickey Mouse-ification of Vegeta, Catboys are a re-humanification of furries. This is a whole process. I can explain this in great detail in a later episode. You're good. But I think we have enough to talk about already. Understood. Thank you so much. I'm going to go get my dog.

Okay, sure. my dog okay sure um would someone be willing to sacrifice their own uh mentality to describe the the rise of pepe just originally in the early 20 teens yeah so it started as this guy's comic that there was nothing particularly weird about yeah it was just it was a dude's comic he was like uh feels good man was kind of his good man he was a chill dude uh he was a chill dude yeah not a fascist comic pepe is actually pretty fun yeah comic pepe's great artist is he's like he's like a millennial slacker who doesn't really know what to do with his life after like after 9-11 after the financial crash he's just trying to kind of get by the comics fine yeah the comics fine but the art just like kind of the specifics of how

he drew pepe made him very well suited for a meme because he's expressive and he so he he shows up and starts getting spread in 4chan and you know it that kind of idea goes viral and it particularly gets attached to a lot of like the political shit on poll and the people who are like churning into gamergate and the alt-right sad pepe gets very popular smug pepe gets very popular yeah yeah and then as uh so kek is well yeah i mean that does tie into the frog shit kek is a bit late kek's a bit like later on i think we'll go over more for like how pepe is like the cartoon character got you know as soon as it becomes a meme it spreads out into all corners and the people who memed this hardest were were on fortune

so this is how pepe became yeah kind of tied to this and i think the last bullet in pepe really solidifying him as as an alt-right meme specifically was the richard spencer punch uh yeah i think that's the thing that actually was like done it's like no pepe is just this now he can't be anything else because when richard spencer was being punched he was describing what pepe was that was what's happening in that specific viral moment if you want to talk about like magical terms this is pepe getting like charged like this is the idea of like this idea getting getting charged because it is now going to be percolated to the masses in this in this moment of like pure emotion so that's when pepe really gets tied to that and i think uh hillary clinton made it very very worse yep the way she talked about this kind of stuff on her speeches basically gave gave the alt-right a baseball bat to hit her with the the problem that Clinton and everyone else, because a big part of, I would argue,

that the largest part of why Pepe became a thing that was destined to last was that pundits and politicians, including Hillary and media people, kept talking about it as a fascist symbol and kept discussing what it was. And that anyone who grew up on the internet, who grew up around these communities, knows that you ignore them as much as possible to the extent that that's possible you don't feed the trolls you don't give them power yeah you don't and and talking about it again this is like chaos magic shit like referencing it bringing it up bringing it into the real world gives it power that's the thing that feeds it yeah yeah so that that's how it got so much more power the more cl Clinton talked about it, the more news media wrote about it.

Everyone got so excited on the 4chan. That's like – that is them winning, them seeing this thing. And then some – This goes back pre – even it being far – I can remember because I was in these spaces when they first started doing shit like raids on the Church of Scientology. Every time there would be actual news coverage of what people on the internet did, it got people so fucking excited. Because the internet had been this thing of like, of like internet forums influencing the real world through repetition and getting,

getting to grow power, but getting people who don't use the internet to talk about these same things. Yep. Uh, it was like a precursor to then what we, what we saw on the alt-right, which is,

which is a pretty, a pretty common opinion. Um, and then, and then enter, enter the Egyptian gods. Uh, Robert, Egyptian gods. Robert, do you want to discuss? How did we get to that?

That's what we're going to say next, is how this intersects with Egyptian gods. So the ancient pharaohs played a card game of ancient and terrible power. Man, did nobody watch Yu-Gugioh as a kid this is no i'm surrounded by my buddy no man robert do you wanna do you wanna do you wanna do you wanna discuss keck yeah i mean so way back in the day um and i think this even predates world of warcraft i remember it first happening on StarCraft games online.

There would be gamers from Korea, and when you were doing a Zerg rush or something, which is when you have a bunch of guys and they all attack the enemy base or whatever, they would type out their term for LOL, which was like Kek. K-E-K, yeah. K-E-K. So it would usually just look like a stream of K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K-E-K. Kek, kek, kek, kek, kek. Like over and over and over again.

This really took off in World of Warcraft where like there were Korean gold farmers were a big thing and like K-E-K was something that like everyone kind of knew what it meant because it was often the only thing you could understand as an American that like these people would be typing. And as a result of kind of all of that, it took off in internet culture as just an LOL. And specifically like one of the things that's going on here. So as the mid-aughts dawn and the internet becomes serious business and like social media really – and everybody's – even before social media is dominant. But just when everybody is taking the internet seriously, it's clear there's a lot of money in it. It's mainstream. You have this kind of second generation of internet people who got on in the late 90s, early 2000s when they were kids, who get frustrated at the fact that all of these different terms and phrases and bits of internet culture that they had identified with

are going mainstream. Normies are using them. Yeah. Yeah. And Keck is, everyone knows what LOL is. People don't know what Keck is. So in places like 4chan, that becomes a really popular thing. And Keck kind of is like, so Keck as a term for laughter is like floating around at the same time as like Pepe memes. And so whenever you like meme something into the mainstream, whenever like some 4chan op or whatever you want to call it succeeds in getting mainstream coverage. As soon as Hillary Clinton mentions Pepe on stage, everyone at 4chan goes kek because they're laughing. And they say stuff like top kek and whatnot. And eventually somebody realizes

that there's an Egyptian goddess. One of the translations of that god and goddess's name is K-E-K. Now there's a couple other translations. There's a whole bunch of issues with this, if you wanted to look at it, that's with a rational kind of brain. It's because, like, there was

this old family of gods, very old Egyptian gods. The Ogduad. They all had male and female versions. The male versions all had frog heads. Because frogs can change their gender. Yeah, because Jurassic Park taught us all. So, like,

this whole era of Egyptian gods all had frog heads. So there was one of them that was named Keck who was a god of chaos. And this also played into how 4chan was using Trump because like they liked Trump mostly as like a chaotic force that got people angry because that's what 4chan wanted to do as well. They wanted to be a chaotic force that gets people angry. So that's why they really latched on to Trump. And then when they found out that, oh, there's this god named Keck who is like the lord of like pro – what's the word? Yeah, primordial darkness. Primordial darkness, yeah.

And this idea of primordial darkness. So not even chaos as much as like pre-being. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like Uranus in like Greco-Roman faith. Like a god kind of before the gods that are more well-known. But this was a synchronicity, so they took it as the same way religions take synchronicity and create divinity. They took this as divinity.

Now again, this starts as a joke, but took this as like divinity now again this this starts as a joke but you do it enough and you start to take it seriously and there's a you get a mix of um you get a mix of of real like egyptology which is that yeah there was a god named kek like among a bunch of other gods one of the ways he was depicted was with a frog head but also like bad egyptology like i found an article on the Word Plus Press blog, Pepe the Frog Faith, which. Oh, I'm sure this I'm sure this is a bastion of archaeology. Yeah. And the title is Amateur Egyptologist Weighs In on the Frog Statue Hieroglyphs. And one of the things he points out.

Oh, are you talking about the frog statue that isn't a kek, but they thought it was kek? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a number of things. So like one of the things this guy claims is that the hieroglyphics for Keck are a frog man and then a couple of what he calls baskets. First up, they're cups, not baskets. Second, the actual hieroglyphics for Keck don't include the little frog man.

They're like two of the little cups in this weird T-shaped thing. Like, yeah, it's all, it's like, it's bad. He's an amateur Egyptologist. Like he's just a kid who was Googling stuff and like got some, either lied or got some hieroglyphics wrong. But this kind of stuff compounds. But Keck as like an idea is like, now we have a backing of an ancient God. Again, first as a joke, but then some people started to take it more seriously.

Really, really caught on uh among people because because it's funny like it's it's just funny and it is funny it's extremely funny of course it's gonna catch on on 4chan because it's hilarious yeah right so they're gonna start using this and repeating this and creating whole new memes creating like there's like there's like an eight eight part book series that's like fake books written by like someone who's like just memeing but pretending to take it seriously but like the authenticity doesn't actually matter because because it exists it doesn't actually matter how authentic it is yeah like and there's there's weird coincidences that continue to occur like one of the biggest being there's this like phrase chatelet which creeps up and all this and becomes like this exhortation that they use like

a way of like exclaiming and such and then somebody figures out that chatelet is also a song like an italo disco song i think from the 70s and the album that chatelet is on has like a frog man face on the cover um and so they're like ah it's a sign and like all of the yeah because you're gonna find frogs wherever you look now because that has become the new 23 thing. You're right. Frogs are not uncommon. Frogs are everywhere. You're going to find them everywhere now.

And there are every ancient religion everywhere in the world. I'm going to guarantee you there's some fucking frogs in it because they're everywhere and they're weird creatures. People pay attention to frogs. They've been around for a long time. Yeah. Frogs have been around a while. I think they're cute. Kermit the frog. attention to frogs they've been around for a long time yeah there's a lot of frogs have been around a while so the other the other thing that happened so people not only basically created their whole mythology around this creating different types of religion there was like kekism as a religion

the cult of kek um esoteric kekism all their own distinct differences because these people spend all their time on the internet um so they developed these things and they also found this old frog statue that they said was keck it it actually it isn't it's actually it's actually a gold called heck it um but on the base that doesn't matter it doesn't doesn't matter but on the base of the statue it had it had glyphs which appear to us modern humans as they look like someone sitting on a computer. Like they look like someone sitting in front of a monitor on a keyboard. And on the other side of the keyboard is a DNA – is like what looks like a DNA spiral. So this is like genes, right? Genes are DNA.

Memes are cultural dna this is a glyph of the god keck on a statue with someone on a computer with a dna spiral of course you're gonna take this as like some like message from the from the gods you're like yes i'm supposed to be i am supposed to be by my memeing i'm doing keck's work to put trump into office yeah it's um god that's frustrating it sure is uh it sure is but like all of those in the in-group this is like the statue was just a depiction of what the kek people and the pepe spammers were doing posting on the internet to manifest real world change and that's that's all it is if you want to see other examples of this like if you look at the ancient alien stuff there's this like famous mylan myan hieroglyph of the astronomer that's like if you if you know what a telescope is because you're looking at it a

thousand years after it was carved it kind of looks like it might be a telescope and it's part of what like people say like oh this is proof that like that this is an alien like he's looking at a fucking telescope no it was there's other explanations for it it was something like that somebody carved yeah i think there's another thing that you start running into here like i see this like not even like i see this just this is just on the internet all the time like i see leftists do this or like so like okay so you learn something and then oh it's not true but then people will keep spreading the thing because they'll say and i've had people say this like well it might have more power. It might as well be. It has more power with it, so you're still

going to believe it. Yeah, like when I talk about the fact that Wil Wheaton murdered three people in 1998. If you repeat, this is the message. Yeah, yeah. With a knife. What? It's horrible. Yeah, now, I mean, he was in Thailand at the time, so he was able to get out, and we don't

extradite, so he's got out scot-free, but yeah. Okay, word. But I mean, this is the same thing that Trump does, which we'll talk about a bit. We'll talk about it a bit. It's like if you repeat the thing enough, it becomes true for large swaths of the population. That's all truth actually needs to be for people. I think we're going to go on break and come back and close us close us up and finally finish this horrible discussion um anyway you know who won't meme fascism

well actually kfc the yeah the yeah you're right have you seen have you seen the kfc fascist posting on twitter? Yeah. There's like a Spanish KFC account that has been doing, that is up to some shit. Yeah. That's funny. I hate that that's a sentence that you got to say. Yeah, I just hate it.

Products. And we are back. I have an entire uh dark meat bucket and i am so full yeah um yep and now now i'm sad i'm sad because i'm still thinking of the fascist kfc twitter account um so we we the other thing i want to do want to mention is kind of trump's own uh power of belief kind of idea and how trump was basically using esoteric terms was able to basically create an alternate reality for millions of people to live in um and there's really no getting through to them now because they are literally just in it just in a different dimension yeah and they just don't matter there's no way to pierce that other dimension they're basically living in just a totally alternate reality there's no use saying that

it is the one that we live in um so trump was obsessed with a few of these ideas he's less than like the like he's less interested in like the woo and more interested in like the power of positive thinking power of your own belief yeah um yeah he grew up in a movement and a specific norman vincent peel stuff yeah he grew up following a specific movement and church called that falls under the umbrella called new thought um yup which is where trump's you know trump's like like very how strong trump's ego is comes from this idea of that you need to reinforce yourself and reinforce your own victories because if you do that you're gonna you're you're gonna find them right if you're looking for 23

you're gonna find it if you're looking for your own victories you're gonna force them to happen um even if they don't happen in to other people right it's but like so that's we see this happening successfully with the 2016 election we see both like all of the memeing, everything that happened in the 2016 election worked for Trump. And of course he didn't win the popular vote, but that doesn't actually matter. But it worked in getting him to office. Now, it worked less well for the 2020 election. less well for the 2020 election um but still his reassertions that he won still gave us a lot of real world results like the january 6th capital insurrection so like it's this right so this type of idea that if you reinforce if you if you reinforce this thing if you reinforce this

belief if you can if you have if you have this idea and you keep putting it out into the world, it's going to manifest some type of real-world result. And that was January 6th. That's what that was. Yeah, baby. And that's the kind of the world we live in now. media works because how the internet works they're able to create this like chaotic like like sphere of of energy and ideas that can like spread so much faster than anything used to be that everyone can segment their own reality into two degrees that we've never really seen before because of how fast information can travel now um it is a it is it is a new it's it is a relatively new thing, the way that this can operate.

So memes themselves, like Pepe and all this kind of stuff, undoubtedly had an impact on not only just the 2016 election, but just the entire political climate surrounding the whole Trump presidency. Now, to the degree to which we can credit meme magic or the god Keck, that part is meaningless because the effect is the same. The synchronicities were still experienced, and truth is just experiential. So the beliefs that we kind of hold will shape how we experience things anyway, and that will experience what the actual truth is. There is a great Robert Anton Wilson quote that is like, reality is what you can get away with. Yup. And that's, that's like, that,

that like summarizes how Trump was able to be so successful because he was able to shape reality. Right. I think me and me and Chris were talking about this the other day about how, Chris, do you want to say the thing about the Democratic Party and Republican Party and how reality is different? Okay, okay. So there's a thing – and Garrison, I think, was too young for this. But there's a very famous thing that one of the Bush administration people said about how Democrats lived in the reality-based community. And this was like a whole thing in the 2000s. This is during the Bush administration.

based community and this this was like a whole thing in the in like the 2000s this is in the bush administration and everyone loses their minds and this is like a whole meme on the democrats that's like oh we're the reality-based community and they're not but but then this is the interesting part if you look at the second part of that quote right what he's actually saying is that so the democrats are the reality-based community right they they analyze reality the republican party is the party that creates reality because other the people in control of the empire. And this is what neoconservatism was, right? And the argument here basically is that the Democrats are – they're always going to be a step behind because they're merely analyzing reality, whereas the Republicans are using the powers of the state to change and define it. And this worked for them – I would argue this is how they came into power.

This is how – this is what they're still doing. Yeah, yeah. This is why every president since Ronald Reagan has just been Ronald Reagan with a mask. Yeah, but I think there's something very important here specifically about how Bush took office, right? Because Bush steals the election, right? Bush does – like the thing that Trump was trying to do is what George Bush bush did in 2000 but with a riot just with a very specific kind of riot yeah but but this is the thing the thing this is the thing that bush and the neocons understood that the trumpists kind of understand but never quite solidified because they're not like they're not sort of insider political actors

which is that okay so all of the stuff about saying something and it becoming real right there's there's sort of a limit to this if if you don't have a gun now if you have a gun then the the limits of that are you know it's it's you can do basically whatever you want because you can just you can force everyone else to also accept this as reality you know this is what the state is right there's a whole there's a whole thing this is a couple like performance theory it's like yeah so like you you saying the thing makes it so right well this is this is what a state is and this is how bush won the election because he unlike trump whose people tried to like take power directly by like storming the capital bush was smart and bush was like oh okay i i'm gonna i'm gonna declare that i won the election

and but but but instead of like openly doing it right i'm going to get the'm going to declare that I won the election, but instead of openly doing it, I'm going to get the Supreme Court to declare that I'm president. And this requires the Brooks Brothers riot to stop the count and all this other stuff. Roger Stone! Yeah, yeah, it's great. But it doesn't matter that he didn't win Florida.

If the votes had actually been counted, he would not have won Florida. But because he was able to get the court to say that he was president, he was president. And that's like – That is the concept of magic words. Yep, yep. And this is all the state is, right? The state is magic with a gun behind it.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, the state is magic. Because it's like – yeah, you're right. It's like magic can't have a hard cap. There's going to be a certain amount of people that – with Trump's reality-altering kind of power, there's a certain – there is a hard cap on how much that can influence the general population. But if you have a gun behind that, that gives it so much more enforceable power. egyptian mythology one of the attitudes they had about the pharaoh is that reality was whatever the pharaoh declared other a lot of societies have this idea towards their monarchs and the duty of his people is to make reality conform to the pharaoh's will and like that's that's what the

gop does like that's yeah that's what fascists always do i i think i think the quote surrounding like yeah the democrats are the reality-based party because they observe reality. They accept the reality that GOP has set. Yeah, and like Libs and Democrats are like, yes, they take this on prior. Like, yes, we are rational. We observe reality. Meanwhile, the Republicans are like, no, you just observe it, but we can create it. I think that is a great example of how those two parties operate politically.

Because yes, they're both right-leading parties, but here's the difference for how they actually operate, is that one of them is way more passive in their observing of reality, and one is okay

with getting their hands dirty and actually forcing this type of reality-altering changes. I will say, I think one thing to close this out is that we can tie this all the way back to the second part of the Jewel of Horror episode, which is that the Neocon project doesn't work.

And the reason it doesn't work is that basically they lose militarily, and that implodes the entire project. And if you look back at all of this stuff about how we can shape reality we can shape reality we can shape reality that stopped being true the moment that you know like they lose control of basra or like you know all like yeah when they

run into other people uh uh moktada al-sadr yeah to be unkillable by all the weapons of empire yeah yeah it's like you know and solder and solder does this by like you know solder sets up a bunch of baby clinics right he's like here's a bunch of clinics here we we will give help to pregnant mothers like are you guys really going to shoot us you know he builds a militia around this and he's and he's able to like he's one of the smartest people on the planet he's extremely good at what he does he's not he's not a good guy but like no no a monster like completely shatter the neocons like they they're dead like they don't like that that project which was like the culmination of this this incredible like

until that this incredible intellectual project incredible military project and they got their absolute ass kicked by a bunch of people doing dual power yep i think and i i i really i i do want to talk more about kind of chaos magic and there's a the pod in the future. I think this is a good grounding. But yeah, I think this is a great intro to how these concepts overlap with politics and how reality overlaps. And I'd like to disagree on the end of this with one aspect, Garrison, because you said

their reality can't be pierced, but the ancient texts speak of a spear that once pierced the side of Christ itself, and while Hitler held it, his armies were ascended, but it was stolen. And if we can find the spear of Longinus, Garrison,

we can pierce their reality. Hey, I have a fedora. I have a whip. We all have fedoras, Garrison. We can do it. Let's go. Alright. We are off to find the spear. That signs us off. the spear of destiny you can follow our adventures on happen here pod and cool so media on twitter um and yeah i'm sure we

will give you updates for our spirit ventures of the pod yeah sophie we need half a million dollars to find the spear of destiny okay okay great See you on the other side. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. the Shadows, presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill them all! This has been It Could Happen Here, a show where I just kill them all. Harrison? Chris? You wanna take over? Oh boy. I just woke up.

I haven't had coffee yet. That is incredibly spooky. Urging murder. Well, it is spooky. You're right. It's true. I didn't realize that until just now, but retroactively that makes it fine. See? Extremely spooky. What are we doing? Who we we're we're doing we're where it could happen here we're doing is this is this is this is

a a podcast where we talk about spooky stuff that happens around halloween and today we are doing the spookiest thing of all which which will be revealed shortly. Oh boy, I hope it's Wil Wheaton. It's not Wil Wheaton. Well, that's the spookiest thing. I really should have looked for that tie-in. Because there might be one. Is a CIA asset.

We might get there. I don't know. Okay. Okay. See, this is I'm hacking a fraud and I didn't actually look into this. The Wil Wheaton Connection? Nope, we missed it You and most journalists Yeah Alright, what are we doing?

On June 14th, 1947 A rancher named W.W. Mack Brazel And his son Vernon Were driving across their property When they encountered A large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, and rather tough paper and sticks.

Yeah, me too. It was just a regular night in Oregon, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brazil's back in a time where people are baffled when weird things happened instead of going, oh, it's Tuesday. Yeah.

Oh, man, what a time. Yeah, so they didn't just go straight to Twitter. No, no. He doesn't think that was actually, you know, kind of like a reasonably responsible thing to do in 1947, which is that he spends about a week, like, picking up all of the scraps that he can and, like, putting them in a box,

and then he drives it to the sheriff. Okay, sure. And the sheriff's name is George Wilcox. I love, that says a lot about the difference in urgency back then where it's like, oh, this is important. I'll spend a week getting everything together before I take it off to the sheriff. Like, before the internet,

you could really afford to sit on some shit. Yeah, you could take your time. It was an era in which, like, if you had a busy life, three things happened. Okay. Yeah, so George Wilcox, the sheriff, looks at this and is like, I have no idea what any of this crap is. Like, what is happening? So he takes it to Roswell Air Force Base for further investigation.

Ah. further investigation ah now colonel butch blanchard the the commander of roswell airfields 509th composite group you know it sends a team out to analyze the wreckage which includes an air force intelligence officer named major major jesse marcel now marcel gives a now infamous series of quotes to the media that results in the roswell daily record running the sentence quote the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Airfield announced at noon that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer. Now, this is the birth. Yeah, well, this isn't the birth of modern UFOlogy,

but this is one of their most important er events. Yeah, of course. The pictures do rule. All of the Roswell pictures are super rad because it's just random shit in a field and they're like it's aliens there's random shit in the field now this this is all happening a bit just like like scattered sort of reports of ufos that have been cropping up throughout the sort of like the post-war era yeah and the next day the air force releases a statement

saying there's no flying saucer in the wreckage it's just an air balloon it's just you know it's it's just why the balloon yeah yeah so the air force sure sure air force weather balloon yeah yeah they're lying everyone knows they're lying but this is where things get bad because what mark brazel really discovered was something even spookier and more sinister than aliens. What Mark Brazel had discovered was the American Military Industrial Complex. That is incredibly spooky. The wreck, it turned out. That's what's really spooky.

Oh, it's real spooky. It's, yeah, by the end of this episode, they will have, I had to cut two times, they almost killed everyone on Earth. Okay, well, all right. I had to cut two times. They almost killed everyone on Earth. Okay. Well, all right. So we're going to be judging folks for almost killing everyone on Earth. Like you haven't almost killed everyone on Earth. Come on. That's true.

That's true. Podcasting saves me from a life of mass extinction of the entire human race. And will eventually end all life on this planet. I believe in podcasting's potential to kill absolutely everyone yeah it's great it's it's a time it's yeah actually you know this part part of this is actually going to be about how we get to the point where everyone is podcasting on the internet about things that that runs through this this does absolutely play in to the Roswell incident. Yeah, because there's a strong line between shit like Coast to Coast FM and the old conspiracy,

the precursors to that alien UFO, whatever radio shows and shit on the wide band back in the day and podcasts where we are right now. Yep, it's great. It's a good time we're descended from great media we're going to continue to produce great media we're uh totally not just like an extremely large a much larger version of the the radio broadcast you get right

before genocide that's like that's not what's happening here it's all in fact good and cool i mean this is why i tell people to get machetes it's true that was a bad made that comment look we just gotta make sure only way is to blaze on let's move right ahead now the Air Force

is lying out of its ass but the Air Force isn't lying out of its ass because they have a flying saucer the Air Force knows precisely what they've got their hands on here because the unidentified flying object that has crashed at roswell is actually something called project mogul now to understand project mogul we need to go back a little bit yeah in in 1945 the u.s drops two nuclear bombs on japan and this does a lot of things, literally all of which are bad. And one of which is that it sets off a sort of – it sets off the thing that we all live in now, which is the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, who pretty quickly after World War II are just bitter enemies. And by 1947, there's just wars raging across the world between communist and anti-communist forces.

There's wars in China, I mean, in Greece, which I think people know. People know more about the Chinese Civil War. People know less about Greece. We're just like, the British are like, oh, the communists are going to take power. So they just give all the guns back to the fascists and they start doing the Holocaust again. And that sets off another civil war there and you know as as europe becomes you know divided between the two great powers the u.s becomes increasingly worried about the ussr acquiring their own nuclear weapons so to detect a potential soviet nuclear test the u.s embarked on project mogul project mogul sent

657 foot balloons these are like massive they're twice the size of the statue of liberty yeah those balloons are bigger than a balloon needs to be yeah they're they're too large it's too big for balloons and they so they load these balloons with like sensor and listening equipment to like detecting nuclear detonation they like they like float them into the upper jet stream and the jet stream will like push them to russia is sort of the plan behind it and this sort of works except the russians don't have nukes yet so yeah this by the way is also why the song 99 red balloons was not just a banger but also uh very realistic because we absolutely could have had a nuclear exchange over some fucking balloons oh yeah yeah yeah, yeah. Actually, I'm not sure there's any

direct balloon-related near-nuclear exchanges in this episode. No, but it could have happened. Yeah, well, you know, and what it did actually do was, you know, set off the modern UFO thing because, you know, one of these balloons, like, fails and it spews the wreckage aroundfo thing because you know what yeah one of these balloons like fails and it spews the records around and you know there's yeah this this you know this is this then you see

a bunch of the problems that are going to happen with sort of the rest of how the course of ufos go because you know you have initially the government's like we have a flying saucer and then they turn around and do this like incredibly half-assed cover-up that like everyone knows is fake and you know so you know because americans are americans they don't assume that like the u.s is you know creating a devastating new surveillance and intelligence program that would be used to further total nuclear war instead they go it's aliens yeah because we're great at occam's razor yeah yeah it's it's a time but i think what's really important here is that what brazil had actually made first contact with was america's new thermonuclear monarchy and this is something

that i think more people should talk about which is that having nukes just as a thing massively centralizes power into sort of individual people and into the executive branch because – so if you have nuclear weapons, the theory is that you have to have one person who presses the button to shoot them, and you can't have – there's not enough time for a parliament or a deliberative body to set the nukes off. And so this becomes this rationale for enormously centralizing the power of the executive branch. And this produces an absolutely terrifying new age of state secrecy filled with increasingly powerful and clandestine government agencies and bureaucracies ranging from the CIA, our good friends, to the much lesser known Atomic Energy Commission. And these agencies, the power of their secrecy is so strong that, I mean, by the 1990s, the Atomic Energy Commission's successor agency decides that they can keep secrets from the president on the basis that the president does not need to know, which is absolutely horrifying. Well, yeah. I mean, look, it's just, you've got got a democracy and that's going to be a problem because in a democracy, people presumably get to make choices. And if you don't want them to decide not to continue making weird shit to throw into the sky, then, you know, you probably should just not tell anybody anything. Yeah, well, and that that particular story is also grim. Yeah, well, and that particular story is also grim.

Just one of the things I was debating covering. They're covering up the fact that they deliberately poisoned hundreds and hundreds of people with radiation to do human testing on them. Yeah. And they're like, the president doesn't need to know this. Like, doesn't need to know about our... You know, I mean, it's like... We don't tell Sophie, guys,

a lot of the things that we do with our budget. Like, when we irradiated all those people for a podcast, we're still not telling Sophie that. Yeah, it could happen here. Black budget will remain secret. Yeah. It is a lot of money. Please continue. Now, all of the secrecy around this and the fact that these cover-ups are like the most half-assed shit anyone has ever seen

you know it continues it fuels this rampant speculation around ufos and the conspiracy theorists are also aided by the fact that people keep seeing weird flying objects we sure do we love we love to see weird shit in the sky we are very good at it yeah yeah it's we're we're incredible at seeing weird and the sky is full of weird shit. It's true. I saw a crow the other day. Anyway. In 1955, hundreds of people who are on airplanes start seeing these

just enormous flaming crosses flying impossibly high and impossibly fast in the sky. Oh no, the KKK's gained space flight. It's worse than that. The people doing this are worse than the KKK,

which is fun. What a sentence. What a sentence, Chris. It's great. In public, the U.S. government's like, whatever, these aren't a thing. They're fake, whatever. They're meteorological disturbances.

In private, the passengers who are on these jets that see these flaming crosses are all detained by the FBI and sworn to secrecy after providing accounts of what they'd seen. Awesome. And this is also part of the sort of UFO mythology. And this does actually happen.

Like, the FBI does actually show up to these people. Well, that's who you send in when you want people to stop wondering if something shady is going on. Yeah, yeah, it's great. When I hear the FBI is telling people to shut up about something i think well that's not worth looking into at all when you have five men in suits and sunglasses show up at your door you know that means everything is fine and normal yeah it's great you know what i don't think of

when i think of the fbi ufo cover-ups it's great yeah this is this is america's first contact with yet another new part of its clandestine military military bureaucracy area 51 area 51 is a secret military aeronautics research and development facility built on a salt flat called lake groom inside the massive nevada test and training range um, by the way, this place is massive. This place is like the size of Connecticut. It's like larger than Connecticut. It's larger than most of the eastern states. It's enormous. But you know,

something I think is very interesting about this is that for all its mystique, Area 51 is not the most dangerous facility on the Nevada test and training range. No, that's Area 52, the sub-level below where they store the real weird shit. I watched a few YouTube videos. I think I know what I'm talking about.

We are actually going to get to Area 52 when we get to this. The thing that's actually really dangerous is Areas 12, 19, and 20. That's the Nevada test site. How many areas do these motherfuckers need? There's like a hundred.

They're like sectioned off all these things yeah all the others because i mean this this is like a state-sized like testing facility right okay they get all these fucking areas but the branch davidians have one compound where they don't even do very many illegal things and suddenly it's a problem well because the thing i see how it is the branch of videos never had nukes and that that that that that's like could you imagine, though? That would have been pretty amazing. You know what? If they'd had nukes, about, like, 80 people would still be alive.

Maybe. They might have accidentally nuked themselves. Or everyone would be dead. One of the two. Yeah, those are the two. 80 people would be alive, or everyone on Earth would be dead. So Area 51 is the partner of the nevada test site which which is areas 12 19 and 20 and that's where the real dangerous shit happens which is the u.s test

nuclear weapons there okay but we i need to make it clear at the outset uh we should not be underestimating area 51 that place has done irreparable harm to the cause of world peace and very nearly caused us all to go extinct several times. So do not underestimate the power of military spy airplanes. They too can lead us all to destruction. Those are honestly way more spooky than any little gray creatures of large head you can think of. creatures of large oh yeah you can think of various planes just with cameras on them have gotten us closer to the extermination of all life on earth than basically anything else yep except for that one computer bug that the russians had that would have killed us all if not for um petrov i think his name was i forget his last name that one guy who was like yeah we're not

going to have a nuclear war right now oh there's there's a lot this is this is weirdly the soviets come out looking like oh yeah not bad in this episode yeah it's like like every every time there's almost a nuclear war it's like it doesn't happen because the soviets are like no and the americans are like we want this war and the soviets are like no we don't actually want to when it comes to atomic apocalypse stories if you if you if you tally up all the columns. Because the Soviets definitely have a few in their side, but it winds up way more fucked up nuke incidents on the U.S. side of things than the Soviet side of things. Although there was that time they built a bomb so big that it might have changed the tilt of the earth if they made it. And at the last moment, they were like, let's take half of the fissile material out of this.

This seems like a bad idea. It's great. Yeah. So speaking of bad ideas involving nuclear weapons, so Area 51... Products and services? Oh, no, I thought you were doing an ad break. We can do that.

It is time for an ad. So yeah, speaking of bad ideas you know what else will change the tilt of the earth the products and services their quality is so intent that it's like the czar bomba it is just like that explosive potential okay here's the meds yeah area 51 was founded in 1951 by the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency established as a successor to the mother of all black projects, the Manhattan Project. Ah.

Now, black projects are secret off the books military defense projects, the existence of which are kept secret even from Congress, which is a totally cool and normal thing to have in a democracy when your representative body does not know what the military is doing. Now, Area 51 is interesting because it's basically like a black project of a black project. It's so secret that the vice president, LBJ, who is not a fuck-off vice president, right? This is LBJ. No, LBJ wields some power.

He's, he's like a Cheney type. Yeah. Yeah. And a chase also going to show up in the story briefly, but yeah, like even he didn't actually really know what was going on there until like after JFK was assassinated.

So this, this place is really secret. And as best we can tell in its first four years, it was essentially the atomic energy commission i basically wanted a place to do off the books like pilot and aircraft testing and they were able to do this successfully that like we basically don't know what they did for four years but oh that's good yeah but but in 1955 the facility is taken over by an even spookier organization, the Central Intelligence Agency. Ah, our old friends.

Woo! Yeah. Now, the CIA, you know, this is 1955, and the CIA has spent the early years of the Cold War getting just its absolute ass handed to it in Europe because, you know, this is what happens when a bunch of dipshit Harvard grads in like aristocratic war proficuers. Yeah, because they keep poisoning people with acid and that's all they're doing. Yeah, but the problem is they're running into a real intelligence agency, which is the KGB,

who like... Those guys do not fuck around. They don't just poison people with acid. They do. They're much, much more intense than the early 50s, the CIA. Yeah, and so they have this real problem, which is that the CIA basically can't get intelligence

out of Eastern Europe, which is bad when your whole, like, your entire, like, state is based off of, like, fighting Eastern Europe. Yeah, that's kind of your main target. Yeah, yeah. So the solution is to fly a plane really high over Russia

and use it to take pictures. Uh-huh. Seems good. This sounds kind of banal to us in the 21st century. This is like pre-satellite. Yeah, and

we're all just sort of used to the fact that the government is spying on us at all times. We sure are. But in 1955 this is incredibly radical like the u.s the u.s has only had intelligence agencies for like 10 years and there is no precedent at all there's none no precedent for flying surveillance over a country you aren't actively at war with like the only reason you fly an airplane over countries if you're about to bomb them people should note also that like the first 10 years or so that we had an intelligence industry

every single or that we had an intent like intelligence agencies every single vote for funding them every single like vote for giving them new powers was like universally supported by both parties there was there was zero dissent about whether or not we should have a cia and they should have a giant black budget to do all sorts of scary shit that might provoke a nuclear war yeah like people were just like well of course it's really bad and i think this this is you know this is what area 51 actually is the area 51 is the place where the development of the permanent intelligence industrial complex is permanently solidified. And this all starts

with the U-2. Now, the CIA brings in Lockheed Martin and a little known but very powerful and influential defense contractor called EG&G who, I mean, they do a lot of stuff, but... God, that's such a defense contractor name. Yeah, it's like, it's the

ultimate defense contractor name, and nobody knows who they are because they make like cameras and like film equipment and stuff but like you know so these are the people who like made the cameras that could take pictures of nuclear yeah yeah yeah yeah and you know and so and so the cia brings them all to this like remote testing rage in nevada to work on a secret project called dragon lady now in its early stages area 51 is so secret that like even the air force doesn't know about it and this like really pisses off the air force's senior senior generals in particular a guy who was going to become very important to the story uh air force general curtis lemay who like that man like that i i don't say this very often about historical figures but like

if someone had assassinated general curtis lemay the world's like we would like the amount safer that the world would have been lemay was one of the architects of saturation bombing starting in world war ii and continuing uh in from up to now we didn't stop and that is that is not the worst thing he's involved in yeah yeah now but and lemay is extremely pissed off that the cia doesn't tell him about this and uh he's going to remember that that's gonna become important later in the story but eventually the cia is forced to bring the air force into area 51 for a number of reasons partially because they're flying airplanes, and partially because the U-2 is kind of a piece of shit.

And part of it is, okay, so they're learning how to fly planes really high for the first time. But the U-2, if you fly it too slowly, it stalls. Which is like, okay, that's kind of a normal airplane thing. The U-2 is an amazing aircraft because it just is one of the most

absurd pieces of aviation equipment ever designed. And watching those things take off and land is the most funny thing I've ever seen. It's wild. The other problem is the same. It has a stalling problem, but it also has a problem. If you fly it too fast, the wings will fall off. Okay. It's so fragile.

You build a plane, Chris. It's so massive and so fragile. The wings are so heavy and so fragile. You build a plane, Chris. It's so massive and so fragile. The wings are so heavy and so large. It's one of the most ridiculous pieces of equipment ever designed. It's incredible. So, yeah, the CIA needs help to get this thing working. So the result

is that Area 51, at this point, is staffed by about, it's one-third CIA, one-third Air Force, and one-third Lockheed Martin. What a combination. God, can you imagine is staffed by about it's one-third cia one-third air force and one-third locking martin what a what a combination yeah these are the god can you imagine that cafeteria the conversations yeah it's wild too because it's like okay so you have a bunch of just like spooks right a bunch of just like cia people and then there's just like a bunch of test pilots who are like just nuts and have been like yeah absolutely like people who are like genuine war heroes who like

fought in world war ii but then went turned around and like did horrible war crimes in like korea and it's yeah that's how it works yeah 20 20 like tom cruise from top gun but with horrible ptsd and 80 michael douglas from falling down he hasn't picked up a gun yet we we can mention this now so uh top the reason that top gun exists is actually also area 51 yeah yeah yeah because at one point uh the u.s like so the israelis managed to convince a a i think it was a big 23 pilot to defect and then they gave the airplane to the u.s and so the u.s spent a bunch of time like flying this big 23 around and figuring out how it worked. And that's how they, like, trained all their pilots because they suddenly knew how the MiGs worked.

And that's the origin of the Top Gun program. But then also, hilariously, the MiGs got their revenge when an Air Force general whose name is, I am not making this up, his name is General Bond. And he was like, he shows up to Air 51 and he's like, I want to fly a MiG-18. And they're like, and then he I want to fly a MiG-18 and they're like okay buddy and then he just flew into a mountain and died which is great

okay well alright nevermind that's extremely funny we have turned my opinion was he killing himself or was he just no no he was just flying it yeah

that's incredibly he was flying a MiG-18 which is like a really really fast difficult to control plane just that rules that rules so hard that's great that was very funny you just completely changed my opinion of this man

wow amazing that is that is the that is incredibly based i'm so happy unfortunately uh there's a lot of other way more depressing plane crashes that happens here and all right part of the reason it's bad is because so you know this is this whole thing is a black project. I have trouble. Imagine being depressed about anyone there dying. Oh, it's kind of. So there's a. I don't really care so much about the people. But like. So there's a bunch of like 14 of the people who are flying U2s like die.

And they crash into a mountain. Oh, well, that's fine. It's like whatever. Yeah. But the thing that sucks about it is that like the US government lies to their families for like half a century

about how they died. It's like this sucks. But then it gets even worse because again, this is the black project of like all black projects.

And that means that they have a bunch of people from Operation Paperclip because again, this is a facility run by the CIA in the 1950s. God.

And so they let these literal, a bunch of literal Nazi doctors run endurance tests on potential U-2 pilots. Now, these doctors are Nazi concentration camp doctors who had performed horrific human experiments on people in the camps. So naturally, when they do endurance tests, they torture people.

So they would do things like, they would force pilots to, like, hold their arms under ice water for like extremely long times they would track the chairs just like randomly electrocute different parts of their body and it was like yeah i mean it's a nightmare like it's yeah you know this is what happens when you give the nazis free reign over a completely secret testing facility where no one can even talk about what people did to them it's great it's great it's it's this is this is why you don't have black projects because the nazis wind up in charge of them and they torture people yeah i think we're pretty we're pretty all on the same page of not having really any projects bad

now the cia has another problem which is which is a much weirder and funnier problem which is that people keep seeing their spy planes. And part of this is the original U2s were silver, which means that they reflected the sun and thus looked like a giant flaming cross. The very first U2s are bright silver. Now they're all matte black.

Imagine a chromed out U2. It looks like a chromed a chromed out yeah you too what is the thing like it looks like it does sound incredible yeah and it's but you know like this this this is the this causes like a huge number of the ufo settings just people seeing this thing and eventually they're like wait we have to make this black because like having a spy plane that glows in the sun yes bad idea no and worse yet so you know you too can fly at like 65 000 feet which is it's way outside the range of anti-aircraft guns it is ridiculously high how high how high that plane

can go but the cia in their eternal hubris assumes that it's also too high for the soviets radar to work and so what happens instead is that they they fly a u-2 directly over the kremlin to like take pictures of where khrushchev is sleeping. And the Soviets just immediately see it. And they get really pissed off because, again, there's no precedent for flying a spy plane over a country you're not at war with. And they're like, what the fuck? Why are you flying planes? The problem is they can't actually shoot them down because the plane is too high up. So they're just sort of simmering and getting mad.

They can just see it, yeah. Yeah. But the U.S. is like, okay, this is not provocative enough, right? Like, we've now flown planes over the house of, like, a guy who can fire nuclear weapons. That's not enough. Fuck yeah. No, that's incredibly

funny, actually. It is very funny, but they're like... Yeah. So, Curtis LeMay, who's also... It reminds me of some things that... Anyway, we don't need to talk about alleged actions in front of russian embassies continue yes so lemay is this guy this guy is a threat to all humanity and he has this idea okay he wants to figure out how the he want to figure out like how the the ussr's radar system works and so his plan is he's going to get the ussr to trigger

their radar system and he's going to do this by flying 1,000 B-47 bombers over Alaska and fly them right at Soviet airspace and then turn around the moment before they get in. Guys, come on. Yeah, no, that's based. There's other ways to do trolling. No, there's not. You don't need to risk the entire population with your trolls. Yeah, you do.

Garrison, see, this is why you're not an A-level troll. The A-level trolls know that if you're not risking the entire future of possibly all life in the known universe, then you're just, you're not even really trolling. There's other ways to troll. That's just cuck shit, Garrison. Make some friends. Cuck shit. Make some friends and troll your friends it's not that hard come on

guys troll the world by by playing chicken with its continued ability it's great any life above the microbial level like the thing i think it's incredible about this too is the only reason any of this works is that the soviets like i mean soviets are not good but the soviets aren't who the americans say they are no they're sure not like Like, if the U.S. had done this against the U.S., everyone on Earth would have died. Oh, we would be so dead. We would have nuked the shit out of our life. Yeah, we'd be at the end of it. And LeMay, like, you get a sense of, like, who LeMay is.

LeMay, someone asked him about this afterwards, and he says, and I quote, with a little bit more luck, we could have started World War III. Oh, man. This guy's this guy's a fucking like yeah they're all monster yeah they are they are all just yeah like like this this is so bad that like the cia sends a panel of like advisors to the president telling him that like you can't do this again because the soviets will think it's an actual attack when the cia is calling you out then yeah i think it's time to it's time to wrap up shop yeah i think we're done but the thing is like this is not like the only just absolutely

psychotic thing going on in in this period like around area 51 so in in 1956 1957 uh the u.s tests the first dirty bomb and they really don't know what this thing is going to do and it's like this is extremely dangerous you're detonating a bomb it's placed plutonium everywhere but uh just wait uh lest you think that detonating a dirty bomb was not dangerous enough in 1957 they dropped something called the hood bomb and this bomb like the blast this okay they dropped this brought this bomb in nevada right the blast of this bomb blows out windows in LA. People see, again, this is in Nevada. People see the explosion in Canada.

Great. They see it in Mexico. You can see it from 800 miles out to sea. And the funniest part is that it temporarily renders Area 51 uninhabitable, and they forgot to tell the people in Area 51 to evacuate. That is incredibly funny. Just giving everybody cancer. That actually is incredibly funny.

That actually is incredibly funny. Yeah, and then, you know, so the Area 51 people still want to work there. And so they, but this is like before they have hazmat suits. So they send a bunch of people out in lab coats with like magnets to go collect radioactive bomb fragments so people can go back to testing spy planes in 51 right that's extremely fun just killing all of their i have i have no yeah i have no problems with this yeah this is fine this is completely fine

we have probably saved a lot of lives honestly yeah well the problem the problem is though they they like area 51 was allowed to resume, and that very nearly killed us all. Yes, but the more people that die at Area 51 and get cancer, the probably odds are that that contributes to... It is slow death, I guess. That's what everyone says about radiation poisoning. It happens too slowly? Yeah. Yeah.

Now, okay, so Area 51's U-2s are, like, continuing to do flights and pissing off the Soviets. But unbeknownst to the Americans, the Soviet anti-air capacity was rapidly improving. And on May Day 1960, the U.S. pushes it too far. And they send a pilot named Gary Powers to fly over the Soviet Union, and the Soviets just, like, shoot the shit out of him. And there's actually this really cute moment where like he crashes and he survived and he's found by some random Soviet farmer and the Soviet farmer just like is like, oh, hey, cool. Just like gives him a cigarette with Lucky of the space dog on it.

And they have this like very nice moment where they smoke a cigarette together and then Powers gets arrested by the Soviet government and put on trial for espionage. Now, the interesting part about this is that so the US assumes that Powers is dead because when they designed the u2 the cia was like oh yeah if this they didn't tell the pilots but they were the cia yeah everyone will die you are done yeah yeah it's like oh but but you know powers lives through it and so they they the u.s is like claiming on live television that powers was like oh this wasn't a spy plane he was collecting high altitude weather data for the national advisory committee for aeronautics sure he was sure this lets khrushchev

has like his finest hour here is an incredible theatrical moment he gives this incredible speech that's like he's he's like he's like asking like comrades like what what would happen if soviet planes flew over detroit an immediate war and he goes on this thing about how he's accusing like he's like okay so who who said the spy plane and he's like well it couldn't be the american people it must have been the american militarist running the spy plane uh program without the knowledge of the commander-in-chief and so the u.s like keeps denying it and then khrushchev a couple days later gets this another incredible line i'm going to quote from the speech because it rules

comrades he said i must let you in on a secret when i made a report two days ago i deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane and we also have the pilot who was quite alive and kicking and the u.s just like it gets owned because they've been oh my god yeah i'm sure i'm sure the state is i'm sure the state isn't thrilled oh yeah it's like it's an enormous embarrassment for this and there's this is a couple of other great lines so gary powers gets tried for espionage and there's this there's this incredible line in this trial where uh sergey rodenko who's this uh he's an air force general and he's also part of the trial and he calls area 51 quote a criminal conspiracy between

quote a major american capitalist company an espionage and reconnaissance center and the military of the u.s and this is true you're right you're right that is true you go ahead this is this is literally what area 51 is um you know but but this is where everything goes to shit because there was supposed to be a massive like us ussr peace summit to like look at denuclearization uh-huh yeah yeah and so and and chrischev is like, okay, Eisenhower, you need to apologize for flying spy planes over our country.

And Eisenhower is like, no. And this, yeah, the conference is canceled and the world is plunged into mortal peril that will only barely survive. But barely, I mean, we did it. It's fine. Oh, yeah.

We got extremely lucky. All of this basically causes cruise ship to like start a military build-up in cuba and oh you know you can see where this is going but but don't worry lest lest you think that area 51 is only indirectly responsible for this they are in fact directly responsible for the cuban missile crisis oh good you know they they they they area 51 does they do a bunch of other stuff to like, fuck with the Cubans. Like they have this thing where they,

they send in pilots like right up to, right up to, to Cuban airspace and like have them basically trade missile locks with Soviet pilots so that they can test the Soviets, like electronic weapons capacity. And it's like, again, cool. Once again,

we only didn't die because the Soviets didn't shoot after the U S did some, like, just absolutely. Some shit. We would have absolutely shot them for doing if they'd done it to us yeah yeah if a mig had buzzed like washington dc we would have ended all humanity yeah we sure would have now they fucking knew that god that has to be so frustrating yeah like not a lot of sympathy for the ussr in my book but just being like well this is

unacceptable but if we do literally just what they're doing to us yeah so i guess we have to be chill yeah it's like yeah well speaking of doing things there's also there's also an incredible uh bay of pigs connection which is that uh richard bassell who's the guy who did uh bay of pigs was the guy who ran area 51 and what one of the reasons why it failed is that so remember when i talked about how uh the cia pissed off curtis lemay by not telling him about everyone so uh the lemay is supposed to send a bunch of b-52 bombers to support the bay of pigs and he doesn't do it and his defense is that he fucked like his defense is that he fucked up the time zones which I've missed hey we've all missed meetings because of that I'm I'm late all the time because of time zones it's that that you know what Curtis

LeMay did nothing wrong yeah in that instance it's amazing and this this causes LaSalle but yeah it doesn't work because it's a clusterf and yeah this you know this this causes basel to get kicked out of the security establishment but it it doesn't stop the u.s fucking with cuba of course not so some more areas we still haven't stopped oh yeah no we're like never going to it's incredible and and but okay so this is the time that came closest to killing us all which is that... Chris, you know what will also eventually kill us all? Products and services. That's not even a joke. That's just true.

All of these things that is being sold for fake money. So, yep. Bye. Products. And this is when Garrison goes on a rant about fiat currency. Oh, we're back. And we're talking about the Honda Fiat, which is certainly a car.

I lost it all to Fiat, please. Everyone send me what you can. I'll reinvest and give you back your money in a few days. You're going to buy one of those fucking, one of those 8-bit illustration NFTs that costs $2 million, aren't you, Garrison? Oh, you bet. See, no, wait, Robert, you can't.

I heard, I heard now that they're making physical copies. This is a brand new phenomenon. They're making physical versions of an NFT so you can actually, like, have something. Yeah, it's amazing. I'm sure it costs an extra fee. There is, there's nothing else like this. It's like art, but you actually can have it

it's the first time it's okay really garrison garrison robert you guys you can't you can't tell the public how our how how how how we funnel all of our money around for our black projects you're not allowed to explain our money laundering schemes on air you know one one surprising thing about all of this like air 51 stuff is honestly the the degree to which the the government does not deflect stuff by using alien shit more often well if they were smart they could just use alien shit more often to deflect any suspicion about what's actually happening so they sort i don't know they go back and so so part of what's going so they go back and forth on this and part of what's going on is that the the cia when when people start first reporting ufos like they have two like concerns one of which is that

it's just going to cause panic in the u.s public and they don't want they're doing the sort of like elite panic thing and they're afraid yeah it's gonna go insane or whatever sure the second thing that they're worried about is that they're really concerned that the the soviet union is going to uh block out the u.s's early warning system by sending a bunch of fake ufo reports which would be very funny yeah which would be very funny but you know but so so their initial line on ufos is like they're they try to they spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to like not believe in them because they're like this is this is treading hysteria and it's like damaging our early warning capacity because people keep reporting and also because people just keep seeing

their spy planes and so they're just like guys there's no UFOs yeah we'll get to in a little bit of some more about that because there's a lot of very weird stuff going on there but first we have to almost end the world. Alright, let's do that first and then we'll get to that. In 1962, the CIA flies a U-2 over Cuba.

And they get a bunch of pictures of nuclear weapons. And this is basically the thing that starts the Cuban Missile Crisis. Although, we need to talk about LeMay one more time because before they get these pictures, LeMay is convinced there's no nukes there. And LeMay wants to do a preemptive strike on Cuba to stop the Soviets from bringing missiles in, which again literally would have killed us all. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, but LeMay gets voted down. So the CIA sends the U2s in and this this is the thing that starts the the uh starts the cuban missile crisis you have the soviets and americans like staring each other down at sea and but again because these people are just like like because the area 51 people and the cia people are just nuts they keep sending ufos and i have they keep sending u2s over cuba and they they're sending u2s over cuba and and the americans like line on the u2s over Cuba. And they're sending U2s over Cuba. And the Americans' line on the U2s they send over is, if they shoot down a U2, we're going to invade.

Cool. And so the Soviets actually do shoot down a U2. But for the only time ever in history, the U.S. is like, wait, maybe we shouldn't end all, literally end all humanity. Yeah, that's good. And, like, we get this moment where just, like, you know, you get to actually, so you have all the, like, just horrific leadership stuff

that has got you here, but you get a moment where, like, the soul of humanity is tested in, like, a very small number of people. And it's like, if any one of these people on either side flinches, or, like, decides that they want to end all life on Earth, everyone is going to die. And this is one of the only times ever that it has actually mattered that we're not all just terrible pieces of shit.

And we didn't do it. And we didn't end all humanity. And eventually, the whole thing is wound down. Alternatively, the people in charge realized that if they were doing this, they could no longer do whatever fun stuff they did in their spare time, and it's only for selfish reasons. Oh, yeah. The leaders get no credit here at all.

The people who do get credit are just the random assholes on a ship who got sent over to the other side of the world and had to just, like, sit there knowing that they could be destroyed at any moment and then didn't panic and, like, held. Yeah. And kept everyone on Earth from dying by just not, just, like,

holding it together in a situation that would have just, like, destroyed most people. So good on, like, the crews of the ships for not killing us all. Yeah, that's always nice. Yeah, so... Depending on how I feel on a given day. Now, part of what's happening here is

the E2 is getting shot down. Makes Area 51 people go, we need to build a faster plane. Their solution to this is the a12 ox cart and the a12 oscar is interesting because this is another thing that everyone thinks is ufo but actually isn't and i mean there's a very famous ufo picture of like one of nasa's like x15 rocket jets and in the very like in the very corner of this rocket picture

the rocket jet there's there's an a12 and everyone is like oh this is ufo, picture the rocket jet, there's an A-12. And everyone is like, oh, this is a UFO. This is a UFO. And it's like, no, it's not. It's this. But, you know, the CIA keeps doing these half-assed cover-ups. But again, you can just see these out of passenger planes. If you're in a plane, you'll just see it. It's like, oh, this thing looks like a cigar just flew past.

And they try to do these cover-ups. They do look incredibly weird. Yeah, it just doesn't work and eventually in the mid 60s Walter Cronkite like goes on TV and tells the American public that the CIA have been doing a UFO cover-up cool

which is true but everyone assumes this is about aliens but it's not about aliens it has everything to do with the fact that people keep seeing the spy planes and so the Air Force gets put in charge of an investigation of ufos but the problem is that only a few top air force generals know about the a12 yeah they only a few people know about the existence of this aircraft yeah yeah and so the low-level investigators are like oh the air force is doing a ufo cover-up which they are but they assume that it's about aliens and so a bunch

of these people like turn into alien like ufo conspiracy theorists and yeah because this is you know and we're getting to see this the the u.s basically threw it sort of like the secrecy around these programs it just it keeps creating ufo conspiracies and yeah there's some okay there's some question as to how deliberately they're doing this um so the head of the national investigation committee on aerial phenomena which is like the uf us's ufo study group yep uh in 1969 is taken over by joseph brian the third who uh joseph brian the third was the cia's first chief of political and psychological warfare he seems like a solid dude to hang out with yeah yeah so so i i have no idea what that means no one does yeah there's no way to know

and there's some reports there have been a couple of books and documentaries in the last 10 years that have reported there has been a lot that yes

but it basically reported that people in the CIA deliberately fed fake UFO information to people to cause people to go even deeper into their conspiracy theory

which I absolutely believe yeah I will say this okay so this is the kind of thing the cia would do but the people who are giving the evidence are sketchy and i mean of course yeah like that yeah yeah that is kind of how that i mean they probably feed it to a lot of people and the people who talk about it well i mean so the people who are testifying about are people who allegedly did it yeah which is interesting but but the thing that well the problem is weird about those people also just sort of they're like oh i spread this conspiracy but like they cut they also want to get into the ufo scene and so yeah it's weird and it is a lot of weird conflicting interests going

on yeah and this is this is one of the problems with the cia which is that like okay so there's there's a couple of there's like some important things you need to understand about the cia is like they're bad you don't need conspiracy theories for that they're just they're bad they do a lot of bad things um the cia having done something is not in and of itself proof that they did another thing so for example like you can say the like you know you say something like the cia is a mood base right and someone asks you for evidence you can go oh well they did operation paperclip and they're involved in the development of rocket technology. But

just because the CIA did Operation Paperclip and had rockets does not mean they have a moon base. This is something that happens all the time when people talk about the CIA. And it's hard to avoid falling into. That is like a basic fallacy. You cannot use something that the CIA has

done as direct evidence they did something else unless there's a direct tie between unless unless you have evidence that the other thing happened there's other people who suck yeah yeah and the other thing is they're not omnipotent and then this is the example i always bring up because it's really funny so the cia just completely missed two two different indian nuclear weapons tests like across two decades. Not only did they not realize that there were tests going to be happening soon, they didn't even know that India

was doing tests at all. And then, yeah, so these noobs would go off and they would learn that India was doing tests when the Indian government announced it on TV. They're not actually omnipotent. I think what is also interesting, I'm not sure if you're going to bring this up shortly, but this sort of thing is definitely still happening in terms of like Air Force pilots seeing weird stuff in the sky and then going to talk about it.

This is some other aircraft usually we're able to actually prove what these things are. But military or people see stuff, they about in the news and the timing is always weird it's always when like some other like like civil arrest is happening when like we get some weird piece of information about ufos you're like oh really what what a coincidence it's an interesting thing too though because like there's this kind of like weird interplay because like a lot of like like like senators and presidents like actually believe that there's ufos and and this is like this is a weird thing because this is yes but like there's different do you mean like ufos or do you mean like aliens well like like aliens like this like there are there are a lot of people in the government who do believe in aliens and and it's this weird

tension because and a lot like everything is like like i don't know like harry reed for example was a big alien dude right but harry reed like i mean i know he's very powerful in nevada so like maybe he knew but like harry reed is not someone who knows what's happening in these black projects because they don't tell they don't tell congress right i mean he he might know because of how powerful he is but like again it's up in the even even the people who are supposed to be in charge don't know what's actually happening and that means they fall for conspiracy theories yeah they fall for conspiracy theories and at this point

it's more of a fandom than anything else it's really easy to get sucked into a fandom like that so I don't trust any congressman on any level specifically around this issue because this is solely a fandom issue it's like taking their opinion

on religion I care zero amount because it's solely a fandom issue. It's like taking their opinion on religion. It's like, I care zero amount because it's only a fandom. Yeah. And I think that the thing that is very dangerous about this, though, is that, again, Area 51 is, like, the existence of Area 51 is like an atrocity to anyone who thinks you live in a democracy. They have almost killed us, like, multiple, multiple times. And everyone is like, oh oh it's the aliens was like don't think they they literally almost ended life on earth like four times and and yeah you know but we're gonna get into they they yeah we'll get into the other horrible stuff they do in a

second but i do want to talk about the one cool thing they did oh because oh okay they did one thing that was incredibly awesome that was the greatest thing the American Empire has ever produced, which is they made the SR-71. And the SR-71 is fucking sick. This is the coolest airplane anyone has... Just, like, go Google a picture of it. It looks so cool. It can hit Mach 3.4. Like, it's just fast.

It's faster than bullets. It doesn't have any weapons on it, and its defense strategy, if someone shoots a missile at it, is to outrun the missile. Yeah, it is the strategy. It's what the X-Men's plane is based off. It's the coolest thing ever.

It's a fucking rad plane. It does look just like the X-Wing. It does look just like the X-Men's jet plane. Well, yeah, it's specifically a modified SR-71. Yeah, it's the sickest thing ever. And it's like, that was the pinnacle of the American Empire was when they made this one just absolutely incredible machine. And then they used it to do war crimes in Vietnam.

And then they were like, oh, it's too expensive. Dick Cheney, who is a demon in human form, who will one day return to the hell that spawned him and spend the rest of his days being torn apart by Satan, has the program killed because he wants to make B-2 bombers. He's like, oh, we've got to be able to drop nukes from weird triangle planes. We can't run the coolest plane of all time ever anymore. So he kills it and it's depressing and it's everything is bad now and he will rot in hell eternally for yeah of his many crimes killing the sr-71 the only good thing the americans ever did

he should have this is the only thing we should have ever spent money on as a country yeah but if look if no roads just a network of sr-71s take it was almost 300 million dollars in today's money for one yeah sure but like the F-35 is like a trillion dollars. Look at how much worse that plane looks than the SR-71. Like, every successive plane. Flying around in an F-35. They're so wet. They're so bad.

Because Professor Xavier has fucking style. Unfortunately, the other things they're building there are horrifying. One of the most important ones that I think people have sort of forgotten the real impact of is that the F-117 Nighthawk and so

Area 51 is basically where America's stealth technology is developed, which really does sound like a conspiracy, but no, this is actually what they're doing. They're doing stealth technology. The Nighthawk is really bad. The Nighthawk is really bad because it fundamentally changes the balance of power

between anti-air weapons and bombers. This means that the US can just obliterate an army of fleeing Iraqi conscripts without having to worry about someone shooting down their planes? To be fair, I do think the Nighthawk looks way better

than the previous plane we mentioned. The S-71? Ah, no, the S-71's way cooler. The Nighthawk's not a bad-looking plane, but the S-71's so cool. It is a horrible killing machine. It's all it's designed for and it looks like it. It looks like death. The plane looks like machine. It's all it's designed for. And it looks like it.

It looks like death. The plane looks like death. It's true. That's why I like the SR-71. The SR-71 just looks like a race car that flies. It's like a race car that looks like sexy death. Yeah, whereas the Nighthawk is like, we're going to murder you.

Yeah, like a government put into a plane that is death. That is what it looks like. This is part of a transition. The Nighthawk is actually an interesting transition that's happening here. The Nighthawk is tested at Area 51. But this is the first plane that can actually drop

bombs that Area 51 ever made. Up until this point, they've been doing reconnaissance aircraft. They've been doing the U-2, the F-71, the A-12, which is like a worse F-71. Yeah, they're just capable of accidentally ending the world by bridesmanship. Yeah, whereas these things- Deliberately ending it by dropping bombs. Yeah, and this is when the CIA gives control of Area 51 to the Air Force. It's 1971.

Got it, okay. Yeah, and this is also where Area 52 comes in, because Area 52, it's literally just a facility next to Area 51. And so, Area 51 is like, sorry, Area 52 is built up basically to, like, house the Nighthawks. It is interesting that, like,

the older Nighthawks look a lot more like UFOs than the newer Nighthawks. The newer Nighthawks look more like the stupid like tumblr batmobile but in a plane the older nighthawks look a lot more sci-fi um and it is interesting looking at the difference to be like if i saw the older nighthawk i'd be like oh that's a ufo if i saw the newer nighthawk i'm like oh that is like a military plane yeah well and i will say i will say this so they they start doing a lot of things to like reduce the number of ufo sightings they they produce so like they start flying they start

flying at night because it turns out it's actually really hard to see a black airplane at night yeah but but you know the the other thing that they're doing in area 51 and they've been doing this really since the 60s is area 51 is where the u.s basically develops its drones yeah and that is that that is the modern thing that pilots see and then talk about on cbs or whatever and and you know and it's interestingly so so i i i mean i've been sort of aware of this i didn't fully understand it the u.s like had drones in the 60s we've just had them for a long yeah yeah like they they they like one of the things they do with the a12 is they they put, like, they had this, like, ramjet drone on top of it, which is, like, pretty sick. Like, a ramjet drone is sick.

Like, that's, like, that's just, like, a cool thing. I mean, yeah, if it wasn't used for killing people, then all these things are cool. Yeah. But they're only designed to kill people. Well, yeah, but the fun part about the ramjet thing is they had to stop using it because it kept, it kept just, like, like, cutting the airplane, like, it kept cutting the A-12 in half. Wow. It's just, like. Okay, that kept cutting the a12 in half okay well

critical support critical support to the ramjet drone but yeah and i think the last thing we should talk about is that yeah so area 51s the the latest thing that we know that they did that is horrifying and awful is so up up until 9-11 there had been a line in the u.s military and that line was you do not put weapons on unarmed drones and after yeah yeah so after after 9-11 oh oh what a time yeah yeah and after 9-11 uh the air force and the cia basically get together and they're trying to draw up a plan to kill Bin Laden. And so their plan to do this is to put Hellfire missiles on a drone. And this is the origin of...

What a horrible series of events. Yeah, it's awful. These are like the few decisions that have impacted the course of humanity for the next century that have been responsible for so many bodies. And you can see where this is going in the initial thing, because when they're testing the missiles on this right uh in area 51

they set up like a mock version of like bin laden's house and they're setting it up so that they can figure out how many children they're going to kill when they blow this thing up yeah and yeah that's that's that's that's that's been that's been area 51's modern no the worst the worst thing to come from places like this is putting guns on robots and drones. This is the worst thing that humanity can do. Almost ending the world with nuclear weapons and then now drones.

Deciding to put bombs and weapons on little tiny things that fly and little robots that crawl around this is the worst thing imaginable that we could have we could have just not done yeah but we're like nope let's do it and now it's up the thing is even even the like 70s cia was like this is a bad idea i know it's one of one of the first laws of like it's one of the first laws of... Yeah, first law of robotics. The first law of robotics. Yep. Yeah, but we stopped talking about that years ago. Nope. And now

we have those fucking robot dogs with the fucking like 5.56 rifles mounted on their little tiny heads. No, no, no, it's 6.5 Creedmoor, Garrison. Oh, it's 6.5. Even worse. Even worse. Yep, and that's the episode. Well, go buy a 6.5 creed more rifle it'll go

right through a robot yeah i'm real excited for the robot wars yeah and then you'll be able to take the robot's ammo it's gonna suck so bad we're already in the robot wars yeah i know yeah it's well it's happened well but you know what'll never happen it would have been so much it would have been so much better if it was just aliens god what it's not yeah I will say this though if we ever do storm area 51 we should just destroy it like that place

should be razed to the ground and like left as a monument to the people it killed because yeah I mean that should be most of the states to be honest specifically area 51 we fill every inch of it with concrete and we top it with a statue of fox molder you know you know what we do is we do the thing like for the uh the theoretical uh the theoretical nuclear waste disposal sites oh yeah that is what we do it it it is also still sort of irradiated it also yeah it is still also irradiated

so yeah nothing nothing and bombs there nothing nothing nothing of value is kept here turn to turn away yep yeah well i wish it was aliens nope we all wish it was aliens it's all right well the cia that's the episode you can follow our cia exploits that happen here upon on twitter and instagram god i hate social media all right that's the episode You can follow our CIA exploits at the Happen Here Pond on Twitter and Instagram. God, I hate social media. All right. That's the episode. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Spooky! All right, we're done. Spooky! Alright, we're done. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show that this is, on the week that this is, which is the spooky week of the year where things are spooky. Today, my guest, Katie Golden. Katie, say hello to the audience. Hello audience.

Now say goodbye. Okay, bye audience. Now tell the audience that acts of industrial sabotage are always morally justified in defense of the climate. Acts of... Wait. Okay. So are you... Do you guys have a team of lawyers that I can access or... Absolutely.

They say it's fine. They say it's fine if you tell people that. Then, you know, industrial sabatooi or whatever he said is cool. I love it. Alright, everybody. I wouldn't have made that kind of claim, but you heard Katie, so, you know, there you go. We've now

made a full-throated defense of the Niger Delta Avengers. That is true. That is an upcoming episode, Chris. Katie, what are you, what upcoming episode, Chris. Katie, what are we? What are we? What are we? What are we?

We're all stardust, Robert. Oh, okay. Well, that sounds soothing, actually. Well, first, Katie of the Goldens is the host of Creature Feature and writer for Some More News. You're the host of Creature Feature. Jesus for Some More News. You write for Some More News. You're the host of Creature Feature. Jesus, Sophie, you gotta remember these things.

Yeah. Everything's always my fault. What are we doing today? What do you got? What's happening? I mean, this is your podcast, but Barely.

I thought, alright, fine. It's my podcast now welcome to uh it could happen here hosted by katie golden i thought we could talk i thought we could talk about animals because i like animals all right you got a spooky thing about an animal for us yeah i i thought uh because the theme of your podcast seems to be the future and how things could get pretty fucky in the future. I thought there are some examples of things getting fucky with animals in the current present. It could maybe be a bit of a crystal ball for things that could happen in the future with climate change that is kind of spooky all right let's do it have you guys heard of the saiga antelope uh i mean i i've heard

of antelopes and i've heard of the saiga and i guess i'm not surprised that there's antelopes in in the saiga do me a quick favor and just Google Saiga antelope and just take a gander. Take them on in. Okay. I'll describe them to the audience while you're doing that. Oh, wow. Yeah. They are kind of some of the cutest, doofiest little ungulates in the world.

They have the best little face. I know. It's weird. It looks like just a big nose. It's just a big ridiculous nose. My god, that nose looks silly. They must be endangered because they look like they're terrible at staying alive. Their face is all nose.

It's like if someone's whole face was just a nose. Like someone strapped an anteater to an animal. They look delicious. I'm just was just a nose. Like someone strapped an anteater to like an animal. They look delicious. I'm just gonna say it. I would hunt them and eat them. They kind of have like what they did with Voldemort's nostrils

in the Harry Potter movie, but like long. Yeah. They look ridiculous. Yes. They kind of look like a Star Wars animal. Yeah. Some of them their patterning makes it look like they have teardrop tattoos under their eyes, which I think means they've all killed someone in prison. That's hard. They go hard. Correctly.

Anyways, I want one. Are you going to tell us something horrible is happening to them, Katie? Yes. Are they racist? Oh, good. Are these racist antelope, Katie? We're going to milkshake duck these antelopes. Yes. Are they racist? Are these racist antelope, Katie? We're going to milkshake duck these antelopes. Yeah.

They're all, um, as far as I know, they're not too racist. They have some problematic views on like, you know, gender abortion. Yeah.

That's, I mean, all antelope have really regressive attitudes towards women's reproductive health. It is frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a, but these guys look like Star Wars animals to me. They kind of look like a Star Wars animal named like a grass honker or something. Yeah. They look extremely fake. It's amazing. They look like a guy you'd meet at the bar where the aliens play jizz.

Yes. Yes, that type of music that Katie's doing is canonically called jizz. And if you are a musician who plays jizz, you are a jizz whaler. And the best thing about that is that I know all of the thought that George Lucas put to that was, oh, someone asked what the type of music they play in the cantina is. Jazz is a real kind of music. Let me just put an I in there.

It's jizz. It's jizz. It's the vowel. It's jizz. Let's change the vowel. It's jizz now. Well, that's going to be the day for me. He didn't even put an apostrophe in it, which I feel like is really lazy. It could have been j-is. Right.

It's so funny. The effort wasn't there. But yeah, these are. Okay. Sorry. No, I could talk about this for hours. I just the differences between J.K. Rowling and and George Lucas as creators who who both made very popular fiction franchises and want people to think they thought about them more than they did is absolutely hysterical because J.K. Rowling does that by creating all these convoluted backstories. And George Lucas replaced the A in jazz with an I and didn't realize that jizz was a thing.

Right. What an incredible person. It is pretty good. Sorry, Katie. No, it's fine. It's fine. So these Saiga antelope, a.k.a. jizz whalers, are found in the grasslands and semi-deserts

in Central Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They actually used to have a much wider range, but because of all the Roberts out there wanting to taste their delicious, adorable meat, overhunting... Yeah.

Just that nose on a plate. Their population declined, and it's now limited to a small territory. That's horrible. So there's still enough for me to on a plate. Their population declined and it's now limited to a small territory. That's horrible. So there's still enough for me to eat a couple is what you're saying. No, Robert, if you try to kill one, I'll kill you first. Thank you, Gare. I'm going saiga antelope hunting.

We have to protect the jizz whalers. They look stupid as shit. They can't possibly be good at stuff. Actually, with that nose, I bet their senses are incredible. They could do a lot of interesting things, yeah. Can we let Katie tell the story, you interrupting fox? Go. Sorry, we all got jizz-pilled now.

Not so cool. It's okay. I understand the excitement about these guys. I do want to paint a mental picture for the audience just so they get like why people are freaking out so they have this elephant like imagine a little antelope and they're they're small they're about two to three feet tall about 60 to 150 pounds yeah they're little babies and it looks like you took like a cute little deer and just glued like a big elephant nose to it it's not as long as an elephant trunk but it's sort of a cur glued like a big elephant nose to it. It's not as long as an elephant trunk, but it's sort of like a, it curls under like an elephant seal nose stuck to a little deer. And that snout is called a proboscis.

And yeah, it's a, they're kind of a, they have sort of a light tan white coat. They can get really fluffy in the winter. They have these really huge tubular nostrils on that nose. And that gigantic honker helps them filter dirt as the huge herds sort of trample on the ground and kick up dirt clouds. And it can also act as an AC unit that cools the Saiga antelope's blood. So as blood flows through it, you have this spacious chamber and it cools the blood and it recirculates. And then in the winter, it can act as a space heater that warms the air before they breathe it in. So AC heater, yeah, filter system. It's really a cool nose which is why it was absolutely horrifying when entire herds of the saiga antelope started dropping dead en masse

within like days of each other just like a biblical plague so there are photos what sorry robert unbelievable unbelievable you're so embarrassing sometimes katie i'm so sorry no it's it's it's fine um i'm i mean i don't know how else to sort of add levity to just the most adorable little antelope in the world just all suddenly dying. So there are photos in Kazakhstan of these fields just littered with these white lumps. And when you zoom in, you realize they're all Saiga antelope corpses just covering the ground. It's pretty bone chilling. It kind of looks like a cult death, a mass cult death like Jonestown, but antelope. I was going to say when you go grenade fishing, but yeah, same kind of

idea. Grenade fishing? Yeah. What is that? It's when you drop a grenade in a lake and then it kills all the fish and they float to the top so you can scoop them up. Oh, okay. I thought it was like you were fishing for grenades.

Fishing for grenades, yeah. Like running around a field going like, is that a grenade? Is this a grenade? Now, if you go fishing in a lake where people go grenade fishing, you may in fact catch a grenade, but no.

Right. Two grenades with one stone. Well, kind of. I'm having this image of bobbing for apples but you bob for the apples to grenade. Extra points. Careful with lakes in Iraq.

Is it because they've got grenades in them? Yeah. Wow, really? That's how you fish yeah oh okay yeah if you're lazy well i'm still obsessed with looking at these pictures okay so what caused all this this this nightmare plague that killed all of the all of the weird nose the gonzo antelope right the gonzo antelope it was kind of a mystery so in 2015 200 000 saiga died off in that year alone and like literally just were there not that many so i hate that yeah it was like the it wiped out the majority of the global population because they were already

endangered um yeah they just like keeled over, died without explanation. And so researchers were obviously horrified and confused and slightly curious. That's more than there are left. Yeah. Yeah. So there are like 100,000 left. And so they started investigating the mass deaths and they found that the cause was a bacterial infection of Pasturella multocida type B bacteria, which is a really catchy name. And it caused hemorrhagic septicemia, which is a horrible.

I looked up the symptoms. I looked up the symptoms. It's like internal bleeding and just it's like the worst cold ever, but also with your organs bleeding inside, which doesn't sound great. It sounds and honestly looks like Captain Trips. Like the the the plague from Stephen King's The Stand that killed all of the people, like just this horrible plague that makes everybody bleed out and drop where they're standing yeah that's essentially what it happened what happens also with a lot of snot like a lot of yeah that's also very captain trips yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean maybe that yeah yeah so neat fun so yeah what is thought to have happened is that basically this bacteria, Pastorella, has often been found in Saiga antelope large noses. They're also found in other like ungulate noses that have these big sort of proboscis noses.

And it lives in there, but it's normally not a problem because the immune system is able to fight it off fine and it maintains this balance but the climate i don't know if you guys have heard but climate's kind of getting weird it's like that is something i've heard of yeah i'm learning about it it may be it may be changing from what it used to be a little bit yeah it's called change of climate change of climate kind of on a global scale everything Yeah. It's called change of climate. Change of climate. Kind of on a global scale, everything getting slightly warmer. Yeah. Usually.

It's climate hottening. Climate hottening. Yeah, that's what they call it. And because of climate hottening, this bacteria, it had much more ideal kind of an environment to grow. So inside this beautiful proboscis of the antelope,

you can imagine it's moist, it's warm, it's great for bacteria. It's moist and warm and yeah, it would infest her inside the nose. Right, exactly. And so when it gets more humid on the outside, more hot and humid, that nose increases in temperature as well. And it became the perfect incubator for hosting this bacteria such that it overwhelmed the antelope's immune system and literally they just started dropping like flies from this infection like an entire herd dying within a couple of days when when you first mentioned this you're talking about how like they can use their nose as like an air conditioner i was thinking like oh maybe maybe these animals will be well-adapted to climate change since they can self-regulate.

But no, of course not. Of course it's not a good story. Yeah. No. Sad. I think that's what's so creepy about climate change to me. The obvious effects are things like more fire. We get real hot and we die because it's too hot.

We get real hot and we die because it's too hot. But things like, oh, this means bacteria loves lives, live in life and like starts eating us from the inside out. Like that's not a really, I guess, intuitive consequence of global warming. But it is one of the things that seems to be likely to happen. So it's really creepy well it's fun is when you started this and talked about like a whole herd of of of these antelopes dropping at once i thought it was going to be like oh another one of those like horrible sulfur bubbles that killed like a city's worth of animals uh in a matter of seconds because a bunch of ice melted um and i'm not sure which is creepier actually this is worse because like they died in horrible pain. Yeah. I don't think the sulfur wasn't painful, but yes, they're both horrifying.

The sulfur's at least faster. They're both very frightening, and it's also both things that like, oh yeah, that could drop some people. They could just jump right across. There's a couple of ways this could go bad for us. This is the thing me and Robert was looking a little bit into to put together the first five scripted episodes of The Daily.

In the few books we read, there were large sections about how this is going to basically just make plagues be a thing forever now. Yeah, this is going to be hard for people to really get their heads around. But imagine a plague hit in the 21st century. How scary that would be. Just really try to get your head around that. Global plague hit in in in the 21st century how scary that would be just really try to get your head around that global plague yeah people dropping it's frightening you know so this is just the world coronavirus coronavirus is technically it's not a plague right because it's not a bacteria it's not bacteria it's yeah yeah yeah i think it's viral but any disease that's gonna a lot of people a plague.

It's both. Both viral pathogens and bacterial pathogens with globalization can spread at a much faster rate than now with global warming. There's going to be more breeding ground for literally new bacterias. And with stuff melting in the ice caps and all that kind of stuff, there's just a lot of reasons to just assume that, yeah, we're just going to kind of live with plagues constantly being a problem now. Like it's just – there never is going to be a post-COVID-19 world. It's just this forever. COVID was just the first plague that really got through the defenses that were never going to hold up to the damage we're doing to the climate. Like there were a couple of plagues beforehand that like we were able to kind of tamp down on get a lid on and covid was just the system actually finally shattering and it's never going to get fixed and the plagues are just going to get

plague here and uh it'll be fun but on the upside on the upside here's the math oh okay yeah on the upside capitalism we are back i've i've unfortunately i've got to the point where i'm Matt. Oh, okay, yeah. On the upside, capitalism. We are back. I've unfortunately I've got to the point where I'm scrolling through these pictures where I've now found the mountain of dead animals that are just there. Yeah, it's horrible. Yeah, it's real fucking The Stand shit.

Yeah, it's a lot of them. A lot of them dead, just in a giant pile. Like, imagine the cutest Sesame Street character, cuter than Snuffleupagus, just in a giant pile. Imagine the cutest Sesame Street character, cuter than Snuffleupagus, just lying in heaps. That big nose has to make him extra vulnerable to fucking horrible nose bacteria. That's what we were just talking about. No, but it's sad.

It's just so sad. It's as big nose. That's just what we said. I know. Katie just explained that. I know, but it's so sad. It is big nose. That's just what we said. I know. Katie just explained that. I know, but it's so sad. It is very sad. It's very sad.

This is not an isolated case that will never happen again. Researchers warn that it's very likely stuff like this will keep happening with climate change. And they're warning that reindeer populations are at risk because reindeer actually also have a really, even though it doesn't seem like they have a huge proboscis, they have a very impressive nose. It's very spacious. It also actually works like a little space heater and warms up the air as they breathe it in. It's pretty amazing. But those same characteristics that are so beneficial to the reindeer now could actually become very dangerous for them with climate change if this bacterial

growth happens. So we're looking at potential risk to reindeer population. And there's also a lot of risk to farm animals as well, like something similar have to happen where this bacteria can infect farm animals like cows and other types of ungulate farm animals uh and so you know even if people don't care about the adorable saiga antelope which i guess would be just psychopaths, murderers, you know. But like, you know, we also have very important species like, you know, reindeer that are a keystone species and also, you know, our farm animals that, you know. Yeah, they're very important for a lot of people to basically how they live their lives are based around cultivating these animals and hunting and raising and yeah yeah yeah so i mean in my opinion every species even if no matter how obscure it is it is typically something very important for humans it just it's sort of like seven degrees of kevin bacon it's like you don't have to get too far away to realize that kevin bacon like his survival is really important to the planet um except instead of kevin bacon it's like any animal and that is

basically oh yeah all animals and all ecosystems no matter even if you feel like they're not super important the way our world works and how ecosystems work they're all incredibly intrinsic and reliant on each other so even you know that we're seeing stuff about like why don't we just like turn entire deserts into solar fields and be like well no because the desert ecosystem actually serves a very like it serves a very important purpose like you can't just be like oh deserts aren't important like no like we have an actual ecosystem that's actually very important to the surrounding area so we can't just bulldoze it and turn it into a solar field. It's just sand, Garrison, which is coarse and irritating.

And it gets everywhere. It gets everywhere. Is that an actual quote from Star Wars? Episode 2, Attack of the Clones, by Hayden Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker, the Padawan with the rat tail. Classy. I love that. Yeah, his rat tail. Amazing. The courage they used to have in Hollywood. The courage of 2003.

Really stunning. How could Padme not? How could she not want that? How could you resist? It's like that Ween song, Every Girl Wants a Guy with a Rat Tail. I'm just assuming if that were a song it would be by ween you know it's called a it's called a like a love lover i think rat tail that's right that's right

so what's up with these animals yeah you want some more animals because i talked about how those animals mostly all died um oh i'm just just thinking, do you know what's happened with them since they all dropped? There's a whole 124,000 of them left alive. Yeah. That is bleak. They're not currently all dying of this

bacterial infection. I think some of them are apparently outside of the danger zone, I guess, outside of the area where they're more north. Yeah, that's about the best you can say for any species in 2021. Some of them aren't in the danger area currently. But obviously that's going to change as global warming progresses. So, yeah, it's it's pretty grim.

It's pretty grim. It's also, I think, obviously when you think about these things, humans obviously don't have these big snuffleupagus noses, which is really sad because I'm imagining us with it, and we're way cuter. But we'd all be dead. We'd all be dead, but really adorable. Which would be better for the planet, so I don't know. But we would be way better at wailing jizz,

and honestly, I feel like that's a fair tradeoff. We would be wailing the hell out of some jizz. Man, one can dream. We would be nose deep in a big old pile of jizz. Oh, wow. Yeah. How does the Bible quantify jizz? Cubits.

Okay. Cubits of jizz. That's what Noah said when he wanted to get the jizz on the ark. God's like, Noah, you must bring one cubit of jizz. Back that shit in the cubits. Two jizz of every kind. Well, Noah was big into... Now we're just dropping the pretense that it was ever about music.

All right. Sorry, Katie. No, it's all right. I asked. So, yeah, I mean, I thought another thing we could talk about is how animal folklore is really important to pay attention to and to kind of listen to as both information and warnings for the future. Because we often dismiss folklore as like, oh, you know, these are just spooky stories that we tell around the campfire.

They're just legends. They don't mean anything. We're especially dismissive, I think, when it comes to indigenous peoples. It's like, oh, your folklore. Oh, that's so cute and quaint. But yeah, we, your folklore. Oh, that's so cute and quaint, but we're not going to listen to it. Yeah, we look at it as, we really infantilize it as like,

oh, look at you primitive people still doing folklore, which is extremely disrespectful and also very naive about how things work. When you look at how heavily engineered all of the forests were in the entirety of the Americas, like from the Amazon up to the Pacific Northwest, it's a little like the architect of a building comes in and says, hey, you can't knock out that retaining wall. The building's going to collapse. And we're going to be like, ooh, Mr. Architect with his magic walls. And then the building collapses on us.

and then the building collapses on us you know there's there's a bunch of of paintings you're like there's like these drawings from like this is like the early 1600s of of people like in north america and and it'll be these drawings it's all these european guys standing on a tree and what they're watching is like it's it's one of the i forget exactly what tribe this is one of the people like they figured out how to have like a fire that's like it burns it like exactly like like perfectly in this ring around the tree does not catch anything else inside of it it's like anything else and and it's funny because it's like you you look at this and it's like okay like the people like the people who are drawing this painting cannot do this. And it's, like, it's very clear that they're just,

like, incredibly befuddled by this, but it's, like, you know, it's just sitting there. And then all the people who paint, like, all the European artists who, like, do this and stuff are like, no, no, no, it's fine. We don't know how they're doing this fire control stuff. But we're Europeans. Everything we,

ignoring everything other people say is gonna go fine and and great and we're not going to like yeah turn half the country into a dust bowl what do they got to teach us we figured out how to make boats that only kill half the people on them only half barely i mean that i mean that is a really good point uh controlled burns have been practiced by a number of civilizations for millennia uh but when european settlers came and colonized north america we're like controlled burns but we want to sell the timber and that sounds dangerous so let us handle it uh but yeah this is all immortalized in the biographical song Timber by Pitbull, which which which tells this story in lyrical version. Please continue. And in Timberland Boots.

And in Timberland Boots. That's right. Every Timberland has a piece of the story. Yeah. And Timberwolves, the hockey team is yeah okay yeah sophie's shaking her head i'm sorry sophie minnesota wolves are an nba team i'm sorry i apologize to everyone you should be uh But yeah, I mean, so in North America, especially in California, indigenous American tribes practice controlled burns for thousands and thousands of years. controlled burns, which in addition to preventing larger, more dangerous wildfires by getting rid of dead brush, it also promoted new growth of vegetation, like really important plant species

like oak and hazel. It even had unexpected effects like supporting the salmon population, because as you did these controlled burns, created a block from the sun so that the ash clouds and then that would cool down the temperatures of the streams and i know what you're thinking that hey to counter global warming we should burn everything so that i agree it's cooled down um the problem with burning everything like these uncontrolled, is they also kill living vegetation. And it's just like it burns everything in sight and leaves basically nothing. And it burns off a huge amount of carbon stores. So the great thing about controlled burns is it very slowly burns off these carbon stores in this dead wood. And then it gives it time to regrow so that you recapture the carbon

rather than just like burning all this carbon at once releasing it all at once and then it's like trying to play catch up it's like if you spill like a little bit of milk on the table and you use a paper towel and wipe it up it works but if you just just pour out the entire milk jug on the table on a sloppy Saturday, just pouring out that milk, a paper towel is not going to do anything. That's like trees and carbon. You know what I'm saying? Yes. Yeah. I do pick up what you are putting down, as they say.

It's the classic milk analogy. We should try a controlled burn on, let's say, Boston. See how it goes. Right. Why Boston? I've been there. Didn't care for it. Didn't care for Boston.

Don't see how we need it. Even North End? Yeah. Didn't care for it. They've got good cannolis there, though. I'm sure they do. You know where else has good cannolis? I don't, because I don't care for cannolis either.

Okay, well. All right. I'm actually living in Italy, and so if they find out I've been on this podcast, I'm going to get kicked out of the country. Oh, you need to be very careful. It's filled with Italians. They're everywhere. If you can get up to the Alps, there might be some Swiss nearby who can protect you. But you're in dangerous territory.

I didn't realize there are Italians here. That's scary. Yeah. It's one of the main problems that Italy has. Yeah. So, yeah. So but when basically indigenous tribes had a pretty good system of controlled burns in California. And then when, you know, colonizers came to North America, we were like, hey, stop that.

In fact, we're going to make it illegal to do controlled burns because that seems dangerous. controlled burns because that seems dangerous and they focused on fire suppression and protection of timber stores rather than you know paying attention to the way people had been doing this for thousands and thousands of years and how it kind of worked and so they just thought like hey if we just stop fires from ever happening they'll never happen but spoilers they just started happening they still happen and it's. And they're out of control. And they're big problems every year. And we learned nothing. Yep.

But another thing is that we could have learned about controlled burns much, much earlier if we had decided to listen to the Aboriginal peoples in northern Australia about fire hawks. in northern Australia about firehawks. So firehawks are raptors, that is like birds of prey, who seem to either accidentally or intentionally spread wildfire by picking up smoldering twigs and sticks from a burning area and dropping them elsewhere. And then once they start that fire they watch for all the little scared mice and rodents and lizards and just feast upon the fleeing animals it's extremely metal it does sound that does sound very fun yeah uh and so research published in 2018 detailed about how three species of birds of prey in Australia seem to do this. But of course, this is not news because Aboriginal peoples have known about this for thousands and thousands of years and have documented this in their own folklore. documented this in their own folklore, there's even a ceremony called Yabadurwa,

in which people act out birds carrying smoldering branches, which sounds amazing. But essentially, they are teaching this sort of naturalist history of how they have seen these hawks, these fire hawks, carrying these burning sticks and distributing it. And if we had listened to this, you know, earlier, we may have had more research on how, you know, maybe these birds of prey have been terraforming the Australian outback for thousands and thousands of years. And that's really cool, and it may be really informative, but unfortunately we kind of really only decided to start researching it in 2018. And those researchers started doing it

because they listened to these stories from the Aboriginal people. So, yeah. Yeah, I feel like everyone should be more okay with understanding why folklore exists and what purpose it serves. This is something I got into years ago because of the lore podcast, learning about just how folklore influences culture and politics in a whole bunch of really interesting and weird ways. And that is something I wanted to talk about more because it's a thing.

And folklore is different for us now in terms of how we have cultural stories, but it's still the same purpose, and we just kind of deny it in a way that is kind of silly. Yep. Yeah, I think there's often this idea of there is a clear distinction between fact and folklore and while it's true like we can't necessarily just take folklore for at its exact word because like it's sort of like a telephone game throughout years and years. Folklore is going to take on new shapes every generation, but we really should take it seriously as a part of a very important data set

of like this is human observational history. Maybe some of it has been sort of turned into myth, but a lot of it could be genuine observation that people are relaying over many many generations which i think is really important well thank you uh katie golden for talking about those those very silly gonzo things that are unfortunately dropping dead the little gonzo climate change genocide and then and then the other climate change issues around folklore. Where can people find you on the old internet?

Wormst. Interwebs. Wormst. Yeah. I got a podcast. I don't know if you've heard about those. It's called Creature Feature. And I talk about stuff like this all the time about animals.

It's not always about animals dying in horrible ways, but sometimes it is a good mix. You know, it's like sometimes animals being alive, sometimes animals being dead. Sometimes some animals making other animals dead in interesting ways. Those wacky animals. Yeah. You can never predict.

Never predict them. And, you know, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden. That's K-A-T-I-E-G-O-L-D-I-N. Yeah, where I just, you know, just post it on the Twitter. Doing that whole thing. To Creature Feature, find Katie on Twitter and And, uh, shoplift.

Sure. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Spooky Week.

All right. I did it. Sophie, I'm done for the day. Okay. Taking the rest off. Bye. It's okay. We have a cooler replacement for you.

We sure do. So, you know, normally this is a show about collapse, all that good stuff, yada, yada, yada. But fuck it. It's Halloween week, so we're making sure all of our stuff has a little bit of an extra spooky twist. It's like when you make a martini and you decide to actually put vermouth inside it as opposed to just kind of waving it nearby. That's what we're doing this week with spookiness being the vermouth. And mixing up our martini today is Margaret Kiljoy. Margaret, hello.

Hello. I'm a famous mixologist, so clearly this will be very good. Now, Margaret, today, for this very special episode of It Could Happen Here, on Spooky Week, you have written us,

well, you've written a short story and you're going to read it. And we're all going to read it and, and, and we're all going to enjoy it. Is that, is that accurate? Um, I hope at least I can, I can testify to the first parts and I hope for the last part. Excellent. All right. Well, with, without further ado or with minimal further ado, let's, uh, let's, let's, let's, you know, with the, with the stuff, with the stuff, Margaret, with the stuff. With the stuff, Margaret. With the stuff. Well, and this is great because this is actually a short story that you start reading of.

Oh, shit. Yeah, where's that link? You texted it to me, but I don't have my phone on me. Okay, let me put it in the chat here. Based. Impressive, to say the least. Based and fiction-pilled. Okay. I start reading the italics?

Yeah, it's the first couple paragraphs of introduction, and then you're interviewing me. All right, motherfuckers, let's get it started. The Northern Host. For all its lingering horror and misery, the wake of a war is rich terrain for a folklorist like myself. More people report more supernatural experiences during times of war than times of peace. Some of my peers have argued the stress and shock of battle leaves our brains more susceptible to mass delusion. Others claim that the veil between worlds remains thin when so many are passing from life to death.

The Second American Civil War has been no exception. Most famously, of course, soldiers from each of the three armies present at the 15-day siege of St. Louis reported a wailing man who walked among the wounded, healing some and ending the lives of others. On the Cascadian Front, rebel forces spoke of black bears who, in effect, stood sentry for their guerrilla positions. During the White Army's occupation of Washington, D.C., civilians and soldiers alike reported apparitions pouring out from the Pentagon crater every new moon. Of all the various myths and legends to spring up in the wake of the recent conflict, however, I find myself most strongly drawn to the stories of

the Northern Host. Never have I heard a myth recounted in such detail by such a wide variety Thank you. refers to the White Army by pejoratives throughout. These have been left intact for the historical record. Could you introduce yourself and tell me what you saw? Yeah, my name is Sarah Dayher. I'm 31 years old. I live in Asheville in the Appalachian region of the United States of America on stolen Cherokee land. My U.S. military rank was private. They made us all privates when they incorporated the irregulars into the army, but I only served in the Union to fight the White Army. A year later, I'm one of those crazy radicals who doesn't think the reconfiguration goes far enough. I'd never fired a gun in my life before the Irregulars, and I hope I never fire another one again. By temperament, I'm neither a lover nor a fighter. I'm just your average trans girl who likes cats and hates Nazis.

lover nor a fighter. I'm just your average trans girl who likes cats and hates Nazis. I fought in three engagements in Weaverville, Leicester, and Asheville. I think I killed two people. One of them, I know I killed him. I saw him bleed out, and I saw him taken away in a black bag. The other person was a man I shot in the thigh during the Battle of Asheville. I didn't know you could die from a bullet in the thigh, but I've spent a lot of time looking at casualty records, and someone who fit that man's general description died in that battle from a bullet to the thigh. Does that bother you? Yes? No? I don't know. I don't lose sleep over it, but I think about it a lot. I look at the docs on both of them. The first guy was a true believer, a real blood and soil type. It doesn't bother me that I mingled those two things for him.

The second man, though, I'm not so sure. He signed up because his son signed up. I don't have any kids myself, but I could see myself doing that. His son survived the war. Have you been in contact with his son? No, fuck that guy. That kid's a fucking Nazi, and I don't know how he talked his way out of the tribunals. Can you tell me what you saw at the Battle of Asheville? This was during the fascist spring offensive last year. You know, Hitler's birthday, April 20th. By that point, the White Army was pretty much done, but they weren't about to go down without doing some major symbolic damage. So there were about 40 of us, all irregulars, with our own commanders, no army oversight. Morale was down, we felt pretty abandoned. Common sentiment in the South. I was on the street out in front of the library

walking rounds. Downtown was half rubble at that point. Only the library was standing, because symbols matter and all that bullshit. So that's where we were making a stand. Neither side had artillery really by that point. The brass had just commandeered even our RPGs for the quote real fight. Air support wasn't coming, not for them and not for us. Really, the Battle of Asheville was like nothing to the rest of the world. And we knew it. So I was doing the rounds, thinking about my shit luck,

thinking maybe I was going to die and how so many people had died and what's another dead girl to add to the pile i was thinking about how at least this dead girl is going to die surrounded by or in defense of books then i heard dogs from around the side of the building one barked loud and near the other sort of distant and echoey i went to check it out turned turned the corner, and there was this naked guy. He was pale as hell, tall, tattooed, and scarred, and like I said, he was naked as the sun. I stared at him. He stared at me. I got so distracted trying to figure him out that it took me a moment to realize there were nine others behind him. Or maybe they weren't there at first?

I don't know. Most of them were men, mostly of the tall, Norse-looking variety, but there was a Middle Eastern man and three women, including one who by my read was Latinx. No dogs anywhere that I could see. The man closest to me, he asked me something in a language I didn't know. I just kind of stared. He asked me another question in another language. What, I asked.

Who are you? Who are we fighting, he asked. His accent was thick and I couldn't place it for the life of me. I mean, I know now, but I sure as shit didn't know it then. We, I asked. What? I was due back out front because I was a sentry doing the rounds and this sure needed reporting. But what the hell was I going to tell people?

Who are we fighting? Where are we? You're in Asheville. Who are you? Ah, the American conflict, the man said. Behind him, others nodded. Their movements were sloppy, dreamlike. They were drunk, I later realized. One of them had dried blood running down from her lip onto her not-insubstantial belly. You're fighting the nationalists, the first one said. We're here to help you. Who are you? I asked. This third time, he actually answered. My name is Belgier. We are the dead. We are the Ein Hayar, from Valhalla. Every day, we are sent to a battle to fight, and we die. The others behind him nodded, definitely drunk.

Now, I know there were good folks on our side who were into european paganism but you have to understand that a lot more of the fash were into that shit than anybody else if they hadn't been naked and drunk i might have mistaken them for the enemy and shot them valhalla i said reciting the tiny bit i knew that That's where Vikings go if they die in battle, feast every day and fight every night in Odin's hall until the end of the world where you like also fight and die but a wolf eats the sun or something. Close enough, Balgir said. I mean, Odin only gets half the battle dead and Viking isn't a good name for us. But sure. And you're here because we are to take arms alongside you, fight your enemies, and die today. Am I going to die today? Only the seers and the gods know that.

I'd been calling myself a witch half my life, but honestly that was mostly because I liked tarot and astrology and panograms and shit. I've never been someone who took the supernatural all that seriously. But nothing in the world made sense like it used to. Fascists had just been driven out of DC. Cascadia had not only seceded, but was in a civil war of its own now. Mexico was gone and replaced by self-governing states of almost every stripe in the political rainbow. China had backed white supremacists and other nationalist types in an American civil war. And anti-government leftists were fighting alongside weirdos like me in the damn U.S. Army. I can't say those things were as weird as naked dead don't-call-us Vikings

talking to me in the street, but somehow all of that was just comparably bizarre. Come, let us arm ourselves and fight together, you and I, Belger said. So that's how I met the northern host. Most people don't believe me, assume it was just some kind of drunk wingnuts. Maybe some irregulars I'd never met before. But I saw what I saw, and I believe it. The rest of us who survived, they saw it too. And how did it go?

Yeah, pardon? The battle. How did it go? We got the Einherjar into Irregular's garb and armed them. There were plenty of guns at that point, in the forgotten hellhole of Front. Bullets, not so much, but plenty of guns. They were all comfortable with firearms, though one fellow groused about what he wouldn't do for an axe and shield, and another said what we had was fine, but monofilament web guns were better than any combat shotgun.

To hear them tell it, fuck it, why am I pretending like I don't believe them? I believe them with every bit of my soul, and damn what people think of me for it. The northern hosts fight every night, and every night they are in a different time and place. Most battles in human history were in the past, they said, which sounds optimistic, doesn't it? But they said they fought in every century up to the 24th. Nothing happens after the 24th century. Ragnarok, most likely. The end of the world, wolves eating the sun and the moon, all that. They stood guard with me out front. Around midday, we got hit with an EMP. We knew that was coming. It didn't screw us up much. We had a hardened phone in the basement, and all our weapons operated just as well in dumb

mode as smart mode, including our own EMPs. The white army showed up, maybe a hundred men. All men. That's their whole shtick. They came in on motorcycles and ATVs and horses. More shtick. Look how fucking folksy they are. We hit them with the EMPs anyway, leveled the field, took out the ATVs. The bikes were retrofitted, no electric, and a horse? You can't EMP a horse. I don't know if there was a skirmish in that war that didn't start with both sides ritually knocking the other one back to basically the 20th century. I think the tactical EMP is the reason there's anything left of this country. We took a few potshots while they were still at range,

but we didn't have the ammo to waste on anything else. Don't think we did any damage. They took up position further up the hill in the ruins of the old basilica. Then we waited. We should have mined the church. That old thing was blown half to shit anyway. It wouldn't have made the world any worse if we'd either leveled it or hidden explosives throughout. But you know, ethical war or whatever, don't mine churches. The other side leveled every mosque, synagogue, and quote, heretic church they got their hands on, not to mention libraries and universities and even the

goddamn Statue of Liberty because they hated immigrants. But we were supposed to be fighting a quote, ethical war. Those two words don't got nothing to do with one another and everyone knows it. So they holed up in the basilica and we pulled back into the library and we had one of those good old-fashioned standoffs where people die slowly from sniper fire, and everything is awful. That's when Laura got shot, right in the head, because we missed a spot when we bulletproofed the facade. She's dead.

She had natural red hair, but she always died at Redder, and her favorite show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and she liked to drink water out of long stem glasses. She was, I think she was 37, way past drafting age. She volunteered. It was her first engagement. She was only there because she loved books. Had plenty of time to avoid looking at her corpse while she was in there with us dead. Dwight was another one of my friends in the unit, one of my favorite people hands down. Total weirdo, and he was all obsessed with that Viking shit and dark ages in general. Both his parents had come over from Sweden, though his dad was originally from Nigeria. Dwight had one degree in medieval studies and another in African history,

and I can't tell you how many times during basic he'd run down the details of this or that ancient battle, whether in Europe or Africa. If there were guns involved, he didn't care about it, but if there were swords and armor or spears and shields, he was all in. He started talking to the Vikings first thing. He was the first person to believe them, to really believe them, and his faith was contagious. While we were pinned down, he asked them everything. Mostly, they were quiet, even taciturn. But there was one thing they were very insistent on, and that I overheard them talking about. Nazis don't go to Valhalla.

But why not, Dwight asked. It takes two things to go to Valhalla, the spokesperson said. You have to die in battle, and you have to venerate Odin. A bunch of those fuckers are Odinists, he said. No, they aren't. They're nationalists, fascists, racial separatists, they're all kinds of things, but they don't venerate Odin, whatever they think. What do you mean? They only know one half of Odin. They know the masculine side, the heterosexual side, the Christian side. They worship a bastardization of our God, a bastardization first created by a nationalist Christian 800 years ago that's only gotten further afield since. Our Odin practices women's magic, the magic of the sexually penetrated. We also worship female gods of war and male gods of the hearth and gods

who change their gender when they're bored. Nazis don't understand that, any of it. In life, we raided sometimes, traded other times. We also did all sorts of things that won't fit your modern sensibilities. Things that, were I alive, you might kill me for. But we're not Nazis, and people who worship a Christian version of our God most certainly do not go to Valhalla. It was as if the man had used up every word allotted to him for the day, because I don't believe a one of them spoke again before the battle began in earnest. And how long was that? Uh, another hour maybe? The sun was still right overhead when the white army rushed us. It was a bullshit move, rushing us. One part overconfidence and one part desperation, if you can imagine that. They knew they were losing the

war at that point, but they had us more than two to one, and we all know the KKK commanders don't give two shits about the lives of their men. That's when I put a bullet in a man's leg. While he was in the street, running. It was a good shot. He was running, and I led the target and everything. I'd been aiming for center body mass, but still. At least 100 yards against a moving target. I was proud of that shot at the time, on a technical level, even if I'm not sure I'm proud of it anymore, now that I know the man's name. We expected the charge. What we didn't expect was the ordinance that knocked the reinforced front off its hinges. But that happened, and almost all the fighting happened right there on the first floor, among the empty shelves. The whole thing felt like it

lasted half an hour. I've looked it up since. From the time of the first blast to the time the last shot was fired, we're talking about three minutes and twelve seconds. We thought they were going to pour in through the door after they blew the fuck off, so James got in there with our one functioning automatic, and he took at least ten of the fash down with him before someone got him in the neck. It was a feint, and they blew a hole in the side of the building while that was going on, and that's where they got in. Close quarters combat is a whole different beast. A worse one, maybe. Maybe a better one? I go back and forth on that sometimes, instead of sleeping. I think about the pros and cons of various types of absolute horror. Is it better to see your death

coming, or to get picked off without knowing it? I would have thought the Vikings would expend themselves right off. I mean, Vikings. They were starting to sober up by that point, but still, they'd been drinking, and they were already dead, and they were doomed to die. But they were smarter than that, never risked themselves unnecessarily. Your next assumption of a comrade you know is doomed is that they'll sacrifice themselves to save others. None of that either. They knew they never risk themselves unnecessarily. Your next assumption of a comrade you know is doomed is that they'll sacrifice themselves to save others. None of that either. They knew they were the best trained soldiers on the field, and that in order for us to win, they had to be in the fight as long as they could. They were smart like that. Assholes like that. I stationed myself in the back. I fancy

myself more of a sniper than the assault sort, so I watched the whole thing go down. I also only hit three targets out of 117 bullets I fired, but that's another story. I watched us win. We took casualties of 50%, half of those were KIA. But we defeated a force twice our strength. I watched the Einherjar bayonet men and shoot them, and I saw one of the Viking women break a man's face apart with her fists. Soon after, a bullet found her heart and she collapsed with a smile on her lips. She disappeared. Like, literally, she phased out of existence, beaming up Scotty.

We pushed them back onto the pavement. When I say we, I'm honestly not being fair, because I didn't do much of it myself. We had them scattered and running, most of them. Dwight was out there, waving a pistol in one hand and swinging a wooden stock rifle like a club in the other. A viking with a shotgun stood beside him. I think the same fashy little shit killed them both, maybe in the same three-round burst. I tagged the fashy in his belly, and his friends helped him get away, and the remaining Nazis ran. He survived his wound. Why do we have so much information about the war?

Does it do me any good to know who I killed and who I didn't? And Dwight? Dwight lay alone in the concrete. Face down. There wasn't much blood, but he was dead. Two ravens sat atop him, one on each shoulder. I've never seen a raven in Asheville in my life, not before, not since. There were two of them, as big as people say those things are.

They barked and they sounded like dogs. One was loud, like it was right where I was. The other was distant, echoing. Then they flew away, directly up and toward the sun, and I tried to watch to see where they went, but you can't look directly at the sun like that. I looked back down, and Dwight was gone. Okay, so his body was still there, but there was something about him that was gone, and I don't know how to tell you what it was. That was that. We won, sort of. They didn't storm the library, which I guess means we won, but sometimes I'd think I'd burn every single book in that

place that would bring back Laura or Dwight or any of the rest of my friends. The war was over at that point, even if we didn't know it yet. So what did they die for? I guess for symbols. Maybe symbols matter that much. I don't know. I deserted after that. Half the survivors of the Battle of Asheville died less than a week later up in Pittsburgh, and I suppose I'd be dead if I'd gone, and it probably makes me a coward that I didn't. It's not that I was afraid of dying. It's that I was afraid of dying in battle. Because I believe in Odin now. It's hard not to believe in a god without venerating him. I don't want to go to Valhalla. I don't want to fight ever again, let alone every night. I don't want to serve with the Hyen alone every night. I don't want to serve with

the Hyena Yarr at the Twilight of the Gods sometime in the 25th century. If I don't want to do that, then I don't want to die in battle. Dwight, though, I expect he's happy. I expect he dies every day with a smile on his lips and meat in his belly. He won't have to fight alongside the monsters of the human race, either, because as I learned in Asheville, Nazis don't go to Valhalla. All right. That was awesome, Margaret. Thank you. Yeah, thanks. Dan, I'll put a bunch of applause noise here, because this is not translating over.

Yeah. And an air horn. Definitely an air horn. Definitely an air horn. Stick an air horn in that motherfucker. Stick a couple motherfucking air horns. I don't think the air horn's gonna be that as good. Garrison. Okay.

Air horn. Your show. Thank you. Thank you, Garrison. Uh-huh. Margaret, how long ago did you write that? I wrote that, I believe, in 2017. Maybe 2018.

Oh, yeah. Well, it's not gotten less relevant. Yeah. Oh, man. There's definitely some times where I've wished for a platoon of Vikings. Yeah. To deal with some shit. Yeah.

vikings um yeah to deal with some shit yeah uh well this has been it could happen here and this has been spooky week i hope you enjoyed this scary story that's also relevant to our theme of collapse margaret uh you want to tell the people where they can find you yeah i'm on twitter at magpie killjoy i'm on instagram at margaret killjoy i'm on patreon at patreon.com slash Margaret Killjoy, where this story and many other stories are available for anyone who sponsors me at a dollar a month. And if you make less money than I do, then just message me and I'll give you all my shit for free.

And I have an upcoming, because you've asked me to plug things and I'm definitely just going to go ahead and plug things. Hell yeah. I have a book coming out from AK Press. It's a reissue of my anarchist utopian book a country of ghosts if you like my very i like writing war stories but i specifically like writing war stories that are actually sad and how about how war is horrible um and so a country of ghosts is such a book and this story will eventually i'm excited to say i just signed the contract for AK Press is going to put out

a short story anthology of mine which will include this story that sounds incredibly rad yes great publisher not biased at all in that no no nor towards stories of the second American Civil War

with super strong characters i've been introduced to just today yes um all right we'll check out margaret's book parentheses s uh uh and and um check out this show when it comes back someday one day you'll never know when but you'll hear a whisper on the wind, and there will be, or it'll be the next weekday after this. One of those days. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now

until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow Broth.

Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of rife. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. to find legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.