The Why Files: Operation Podcast - 539: COMPILATION: Weird and Bizarre Stories from the archives!

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

Prepare to have your mind blown by a collection of the strangest, most puzzling stories you've ever heard. From raining animals and ancient levitation to deadly video games and shocking decapitations, this compilation covers it all. These tales are so bizarre, you'll find yourself questioning what's real. Uncover the truth behind unsolved mysteries, government secrets, and otherworldly encounters. Join us on a wild journey through the unknown that will leave you stunned, bewildered, and craving more. Discover the world's most perplexing phenomena in this unforgettable anthology of the weird and wonderful.

You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. Thank you. This is our last compilation. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode called Anunnaki, Gods from Planet Nibiru, and the Makers of Man. Ah!

We're finally doing an Anunnaki episode! Well, we gotta come back with a banger. Banger? I hardly know her. Since when did that ever stop you? Eh, the human makes a good point. Anyway, this is a compilation of seven short episodes that are in the category of weird and bizarre.

All our episodes are in that category, Chief. Well, that's true, but these are some early ones, so... So they suck. No, they don't suck, but let's just say we've come a long way the past few years. Let's kick it off with a story about the meat shower and when spiders, frogs, and fish fell from the sky. Oh, oh, oh, oh, I sing in this one. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. I apologize for what you're about to endure.

3 plus 1, 5 plus 0, 0. Every second, about 16 million tons of water evaporates from the surface of the Earth. During that same second, 16 million tons of water falls back down to the earth as rain. But water isn't the only type of precipitation we experience due to certain weather conditions. All kinds of crazy stuff has fallen from the sky. Things like frogs, snakes, spiders, animal flesh, even blood have rained down all over the world for centuries. Oh, this is sounding ominous. Well, it's more common than you think.

In fact, in Honduras, they celebrate Yuvia de Pesas, which means rain of fish. Now, Honduras is a landlocked nation with the nearest body of water 120 miles away. Yet every spring it rains thousands of fish all over the town of Yoro. And these fish are completely aquatic. We're not talking about flying fish. Well, what do you mean flying fish? There are a few species these fish are completely aquatic. We're not talking about flying fish. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean flying fish? There are a few species of fish that can fly. Well, technically they glide, but it's pretty amazing, actually. Amazing? I'll say. It's like, it's like

a whole new world. All new stuff for me to see. I just fly along and sing this song. It's a whole new world for me. What? Anyway, fish rain, snake rain, blood rain. It's weird and it's real. Let's find out why. Welcome to the Y files, where smart folks like us come to laugh and learn. Today, we're talking about the phenomenon of raining animals.

Animal rain has been documented throughout human history. Pliny the Elder talked about a storm of frogs and fish as early as the first century A.D. In the late 18th century, French soldiers saw frogs falling from the sky during a heavy rain near the city of Lille. This story fascinated French physicist Andre Marie and Pierre. Yes, that empire, who was one of the first scientists to take these stories seriously. And Pierre speculated that violent winds could pick up large numbers of small animals and carry them great distances. He might be right. The current working hypothesis is that animal rain involves tornadic water spouts, which are tornadoes that form over water. Water spouts usually occur in the tropics, but they can occur anywhere.

Europe, Australia, Antarctica, even over America's Great Lakes. If the conditions are right, water spouts typically form as their parent clouds are developing over warm water. Did I say warm? You did. As the warm water evaporates, humid air is pulled up toward the cloud as more humid air pours in, a vortex can form these vortexes, vortices can grow to be 300 feet wide, 90 meters and 2000 feet tall, 600 meters. Large water spouts can be violent and dangerous when they reach speeds of 160

kph. They can damage ships, airplanes and put people's lives in jeopardy. Lennox, get out of there. Anything within a meter of the water surface can be lifted into the air. If the water spout is powerful enough, these animals can be carried all the way up to the parent cloud and sometimes even stay up there for miles after the water spout is long gone. Fish specifically are small, light and flat, and they're light enough that they can be buffeted up and down within a cloud for a long time. Don't you dare. I'll fly. This is what scientists believe is happening in Honduras.

A water spout is pulling fish from the ocean and carrying them far inland. Others speculate there's an underground river that's carrying the fish closer to the town. Still, something is lifting them in the air. Is it a water spout? It could be. They're common in that part of the world. But reports of fish rain have occurred all over the planet as recently as 2017 in India and Sri Lanka, but also Mexico, Wales, Saskatchewan, California, even Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Recently, on September 9th, 2016, Lisa Loughbury was out for a walk in the suburbs of Philly. Now she hears a rustling in the trees above her. She looks up and she gets smacked in the face with a five pound catfish. That's not funny. She ended up with a cut on her eye. Oh, is she all right? Well, she's all right now, but... Now the shoes are gonna fin!

People catching fish? Boring! But fish catching people? Oh, boy! Oh, it hurts! It hurts me! People catching fish boring, but fish catching people. Oh, boy. Oh, it hurts. It hurts me. Now, nobody's sure how a catfish can fall from the sky in Philadelphia. Some people have speculated that a bird was carrying it, but that had to be a pretty large bird. It could grip it by the husk. Just a few months ago, thousands of small fish rained on the town of Yawa, Australia.

What makes this so weird is that Yawa is 500 miles inland and some of the fish were alive. And the water spout theory doesn't address why some incidents of animal rain only consist of one species and not all kinds of different animals of the same size. Let's look at a few of these. Just kidding, that was just a bad movie. I rather enjoyed it. Spiders. Now, this one's not a horror movie, but it definitely looks like one. Let's go back to the terror continent called Australia on May 15th, 2015. Residents of Goulburn, Australia, witnessed millions of

baby spiders literally raining down and blanketing the countryside in silky white webs. What happened in this case is called ballooning, which is a form of spider transportation. Spiders will climb to the top of the highest tree or structure they can, then spin a web into a sort of parachute that catches a breeze which can carry them a long way. They do this to escape predators, seek food or to establish new territories. When a spider is getting ready to travel, it will raise its legs and sample the airflow. Once it's satisfied, it orients its abdomen skyward, spins a little silk and off it goes. Normally, this goes unnoticed because spiders typically travel one at a time.

But sometimes, like in Goulburn, the weather conditions were so favorable to ballooning that thousands of spiders took the air simultaneously. The same thing happened in Brazil. However, these weren't baby spiders. These were nightmare spiders. New deals. Folks in Brazil were pretty upset. I mean, before this video, I didn't know how to say the world is ending in Portuguese,

but I do now. If you want to see more of that, I'll link to some spider rain videos below. Worms. Worms from the sky is strange because it can occur in calm weather as well as stormy. And worms don't seem to mind the cold either. Thousands of worms appeared on a snowy mountain in Norway in 2015, and scientists still don't know how it happened.

The worms were first noticed by a skier who said the mountain was covered with thousands of them. He assumed they were dead, but then he grabbed a few and they were alive. How? The worms couldn't have come from the ground because under the snow was about a meter of soil, frozen solid.

So general consensus is that a violent air pocket lifted the worms and then dropped them on the mountain. But from where? Where are there thousands of live worms in the mountains in Norway? In March? Nobody knows. Sweden, same thing. Raining worms. Why? How? So I did some research and it seems that this has been happening in Scandinavia since at least the 1920s and in Europe far before that.

Nobody knows why they're under the ground. They're under the ground. Scotland 2011. So many sky worms rained on a middle school football game that they had to call off the game and go inside. There is we were everywhere. It's going to say Texas 2015 clumps of earthworms appeared in the middle of the street out of nowhere. Hundreds of them in piles in the street from where Aurora, Michigan, 2016 sky

worms to sun Arizona, twenty eighteen sky worms. Can you fly you sucker? This is sounding a lot less like weather and more like an invasion. Blood. Oh, nothing is better at whipping up a little local hysteria like raining blood. Oh, cases of blood rain or red rain had been recorded since Homer's Iliad and throughout history in Europe alone. There are hundreds of reports of blood rain going back centuries. And every time it occurred, it was considered supernatural and a bad omen. In the year 787 A.D., there was a recorded rain of blood that was later said to predict the Viking invasion of England.

In Germany, a shower of blood in 1347 was followed by the arrival of the Black Plague. So, you know, they just connected the dots. Blood rain, bad plague, bad. One of the first scientists to try to prove this phenomenon was not supernatural, was Giuseppe Maria Giovene. Blood rain fell in Italy in 1803, and Giovene correctly came to the conclusion that sand from Africa was pulled high in the atmosphere, crossed the Adriatic and mixed with storm clouds to turn the water red.

In 2001, blood rain received international attention when it fell on Kerala, India. Initial studies showed the rain had large amounts of nickel, titanium, iron and other metals. This led to a theory that the red rain was caused by an atmospheric meteor burst. And that sounds super cool. But further studies showed that the rain contained spores of a specific type of algae indigenous to Austria that had migrated to India in the upper atmosphere. After another incident of red rain in Kerala in 2012, studies have confirmed with certainty that the microalgae Trentafolia is indeed turning the rain red. So no, blood rain is not actually blood, except when it is. March 3rd, 1876 was the famous Kentucky meat storm.

That doesn't sound like a derby for several minutes. Small chunks of meat fell from the sky on a farm in Rankin, Kentucky. Enough meat to fill a large wagon. So the story goes, reports say it appeared to be beef. But according to an issue of Scientific American, two gentlemen who tasted the meat thought it was either lamb or deer. Unknown meats fell from the sky and someone ate it. Yep. And Joe Rogan wasn't there.

Nope. Gross. Yep. Studies of the meat determined it was lung tissue either from a horse or from a human infant. Oh, nobody noticed a missing baby or a missing horse. Who was in charge of this investigation? Transylvania University. Wait, wait, wait. so Dracula ate the baby. No, no, no. Transylvania University's in Lexington, Kentucky.

I'm so confused. Oh, you're not the only one. A scientific reason for the Kentucky meat storm was never settled. But locals think it came from vultures who, when threatened, will regurgitate everything in their stomachs to make a quicker getaway. And when one vulture vomits, they all do. Oh, there's so much blood. No, no, don't you start doing that. No, you're going to make...

Buzzard vomit. Okay, fine. But nine days later, on March 12th, 1876, the same thing happened in London, England. Still no explanation. Well, it does explain English cooking. Snakes, the famous snake rain occurred in Memphis in 1877. Reports say thousands of black snakes rain from the heavens and slithered all over the streets. Snakes of all sizes, some they say, were over a foot long. Oh, I really wanted this one.

I really did. Every list article and video about weird rain has this story in it. Thousands of snakes thudding to the ground, writhing around and hissing. That's YouTube gold. We had clips from Indiana Jones and Sam L. Jackson photos and B-roll that would have it would have blew your mind. But those of you who followed the Y-f file since the beginning know that even though we're a goofy channel, we do try to get the facts right. This was a huge national story in 1877. It was picked up by The New York Times and it was reprinted in newspapers all around the country.

But nobody fact checked. They just regurgitated the same story. Nineteenth century clickbait. Nothing ever changes. There was actually only one eyewitness to the Memphis snake rain, and she didn't really see them fall. They were already on the ground. She said the snakes were black and clumped together. But when rinsed with water, they turned flesh in color. They also didn't move like snakes.

She said they gathered up their bodies in horseshoe shapes and creeped along the ground. That's how worms move. Ooh, I love how to do that. The infamous snake reign of Memphis of 1877 was probably earthworms. But I did find actual newspaper stories from Pierre, South Dakota, 1870, Columbus, Kentucky, 1907 and San Francisco in 1909. All talking about actual live snakes falling from the sky. I have had it with these fucking snakes on this. My boy, I'm glad we worked that in.

Links below. Tadpoles in 2009, the entire country of Japan was covered in dead tadpoles. I mean the entire country. They were first spotted in Ishikawa, which is on the west coast of Japan. But dead tadpoles were reported in towns and villages and on cars all over the country. In one incident, a 55 year old man who was caught in a tadpole downpour described hearing a strange sound in the parking lot of a civic center in the city of the now. And upon further exploration, he found 100 tadpoles covering the windshields of cars.

Now is in the middle of the island, miles away from Ishikawa. And there are two theories for what happened here, both of which we discussed. And I believe neither of them. First explanation, waterspout. But even local meteorologists aren't buying this because the weather was clear, the winds were light. And it doesn't explain how tadpoles got scattered everywhere. The second explanation is that large birds like herons or crows or seagulls drop the tadpoles while being disturbed mid flight. Fine. But again, how does this happen across an entire country simultaneously?

Nobody knows or they won't tell us. Frogs, it's been raining frogs for a long time. Even the Bible's Book of Exodus talks about a storm of frogs as one of the plagues. It might not have been a metaphor. This is a real thing that happens periodically in different places around the world, not just in Paul Thomas Anderson movies. In 1873, Kansas City, Missouri, experienced a rainstorm that covered the entire city in frogs. Same thing happened in Minneapolis in 1901, where the frogs were so thick that travel was impossible. Lester Mass, 1953, Sheffield, UK, 1995. But we don't need to comb through old newspapers to find stories about raining frogs.

We just have to go back to 2010. In June of 2010, in Hungary, thousands of tiny frogs rained all over the country, and many of them were still alive. Can a water spout do this? If you drop a frog from a building, it goes splat. And in all the cases I mentioned, Hungary included, there were no reports of weird weather or wind or water spouts. And in this particular case in Hungary,

frogs were falling for several days across the whole country. Now some zoologists claim that this is common migratory behavior for frogs. That's fine, but then how do the frogs get on top of cars and buses and buildings? Answer me that, zoologists. Now this is an ongoing debate.

But I find it really interesting that there are all these reports of animal rain, but very little video of the animals actually falling. And lack of evidence brings out all kinds of theories from the wrath of God to alien intervention. And that brings us to Star Jelly. Star Jelly. Star Jelly. Before Hollywood icon Steve McQueen was dubbed the King of Cool, he starred in a little horror movie called The Blob. The Blob was released in 1958. And it's a well-known film to horror fans and Hollywood history buffs. What's up? What's not so well known is the inspiration for the blob.

The plot goes like this. It's a small town in rural Pennsylvania. Two teenagers are making out on Lovers Lane when they see a meteorite crash just over yonder. Later, an old feller investigates the site and naturally he pokes the meteorite with a stick. It breaks open and a small jelly like substance oozes out, attacks him and he goes screaming off for help. Twenty eight year old teenager Steve McQueen picks him up and takes him to a doctor. The rest is movie history.

But the blob was inspired by a real event. In 1950, four Philadelphia policemen reported the discovery of a dome disk of quivering jelly six feet in diameter and one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge. When they tried to pick it up, it dissolved into an odorless, sticky scum. The producer of the blob, Jack Harris, is from Pennsylvania, and he was fascinated with the local star jelly legend. An outbreak of star jelly happened as recently as 2013 at the Ham Wall Nature Reserve in

England. But star jelly occurs all over the world, so it has a lot of names. Star slime, star slubber. In German, it's called Sternrots, which means star snot. In Spanish, it's Caca de Luna, which... Moon poop! I was going to say excrement. Oh, you're such a slave to the YouTube algorithm. Grow up here.

Sky jelly is a gelatinous substance that's been found in grass, but also in branches of trees and reports of sky jelly go back centuries. And explanations range from frog eggs to bacteria to alien organic matter to the paranormal. So what is it? We don't know. Star jelly usually dissolves or evaporates as soon as it's discovered, so we don't have a lot of samples. But scientists in the National Geographic Society tested a sample in the U.S. They found no DNA at all.

So what is it? We don't know. Oh, I don't care for that at all. I don't either. Let's talk about secrets. It's human nature to want to know what we can't know, to have what we can't have. The most alluring things in life are often those that are unattainable. So true.

What? Sheila. Ooh, talk about alluring and unattainable. I guess we're doing this now. Who's Sheila? She was this angelfish that I knew when we were guppies. Oh, no. Oh, she had the most perfect gills. And on my own, her pelvic fins went all the way back.

No, no, no. I'm talking about secret places. Oh, I dreamed about Sheila's secret places. You know what I'm talking about? No, I don't. I mean, I do, but we're not... Why am I even talking to you? I lost my train of thought. Yeah, you're really floundering. Floundering. You see what I did there?

I'm on fire today, baby. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. Oh, what are you doing? Oh, come on. Can you take a joke? Oh, nice. We are mature. These are the most secret places in the world, off limits to almost everyone. And when you tell us we can't go inside or photograph or even know what's happening in these places. Well, we need to know why. You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace.

You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. You sailed beyond the horizon. In search of an island. Scrubbed from every map.

You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest. While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible.

You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover heart-pounding thrillers on Audible.

You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest while you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. Welcome to the Y-Files, where smart folks like us come to laugh and learn. Today,

we're talking about the most secret places in the world and the mysterious theories that surround them. A few weeks ago, we covered the scariest places in the U.S. that you can actually visit. The locations on this list are different. You can't visit any of these without special access, and no one really knows what's happening inside. And when you don't give the public information about something, we'll fill in the blanks. Hecklefish, you ready to behave? Oh, thank goodness. Oh, I couldn't breathe. Yeah, just give me a second here. Okay, I'm ready. Drama queen. Area 51. Oh, we're getting right ready. Drama queen. Area fifty one.

Oh, we're getting right to the meat, huh? Right to the meat. You can't do a list of secret locations without this one. Area 51 has been a perennial American obsession for more than 50 years. It's been the backdrop for countless movies, books, TV shows and YouTube videos. In twenty nineteen, this well-known but little understood location basically broke the Internet when some crazy person got millions of people to RSVP. Yes to trespassing on Area 51. Did we RSVP?

Yes, we did not. You're not as dumb as you look. Area 51 is located in Rachel, Nevada, about 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas, and is a remote detachment of Edwards Air Force Base. It's so highly classified that the military disputed it even existed for years. The Air Force finally acknowledged Area 51 as real in 2013, but nobody really knows what's happening in there. Built in 1955 as part of the Nevada Test and Training Range Complex, it was initially constructed by contractor Lockheed Martin as a test facility for the U2 spy plane. That joke worked on two levels.

I appreciate you noticing. Now, although it's never been declared top secret, the area is highly protected and deadly force is authorized against trespassers. So what's going on there? Well, the official statement is for operational security reasons, we do not provide detailed information regarding what takes place in the facility. Not good enough. I agree. The most widely circulated theory is that Area 51 houses an alien spacecraft that crashed in Roswell, New Mexico, in nineteen forty seven, along with the bodies of the pilots.

We got E.T. bodies. That's huge. The Air Force said the UFO was a weather balloon. Bulls. I don't buy it. Oh, you don't trust our super honest, transparent government and military industrial complex? I do not. Lots of people don't. Area fifty one operated in secret for decades until nineteen until 1989, when Bob Lazar, who claimed he worked there, gave a public interview where he said that the military reverse engineered alien spacecraft and utilized that technology in American military and space programs. I believe that. I know you do.

And think about how quickly technology advanced in the second half of the 20th century. Look at it this way. 20 years before Roswell, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic Ocean in the spirit of St. Louis, a single engine, single seat aircraft. And that was a huge deal. He became an international star. That's 20 years before Roswell. OK, well, about 20 years after Roswell, we were launching satellites into orbit and landing people on the moon. Fake news.

Oh, the moon landing was faked. Faked. Fine, fine, fine, fine. I don't want to get into this now. But still, the airplane was just invented about 20 years before Lindbergh. So there are huge leaps forward in technology in a relatively short period of time.

Proof. We use the alien and his stuff. Proof we use the alien stuff. Well, we have no evidence, but it's clear that technology advancements started accelerating in the 50s and 60s because of something. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments that these technological leaps come from reverse engineering alien spacecraft. Or was it something else? All right. Men withF Men with Hill.

Men with Hill is a Royal Air Force station in North Yorkshire, England, which was built to provide communications and intelligence support services to the UK and the US. Now, even though this is a Royal Air Force station in the 60s, operational control was transferred to the National Security Agency of the United States. No boys who then created the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. Does monitoring mean spying? Sure does. And there it is. Project Echelon is a surveillance program operated by the US, Australia, Canada, New

Zealand and the UK, also known as the Five Eyes. Oh, I love that fries. No, no. You're thinking of five guys. Delicious. They do have good fries, right? All right. So the five eyes and spies nice developed Echelon into a global system for the interception of private communications. And we're talking mass surveillance of high threat individuals and corporations via industrial espionage.

Who decides who's a high threat? Yeah, I thought so. Echelon is now a global network of electronic spy stations that can eavesdrop on landlines, cell phones, fax machines, computers. It can even track bank accounts. And all that data is stored in Echelon computers, which can keep millions of records on millions of individuals, companies, even countries. Barton Gelman, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for The Washington Post, summarized the leaks as follows Secret legal authorities empower the NSA to sweep in the telephone, Internet and location records of whole populations.

There are reports that every text message and phone call in the world flows through echelon and then is that added to the files of the sender and the receiver and stored for later analysis. Is this legal? Well, well is the wrong answer. It's not legal in the United States without a warrant, but this facility is not in the United States. That's a bull loophole. And officially, this project doesn't even exist, so nothing to see here. Who built this crazy thing? Lockheed Martin. That company seems to show up in an awful lot of these videos. Yeah, I noticed that too. So what do we do about it?

Can you make one of those for me? I'm terrified right now. I'm using a stolen Netflix password. Oh, I know you stole it from me. I didn't really peg you as a Oh, I know. You stole it from me. I didn't really peg you as a fan of the Twilight movies. Stop breaking my horns. I need some protection over here. Way ahead of you, pal. There you go. I don't know why,

but that feels so much better. I know it does. What do you guys think? Is Echelon real? Are you concerned about governments reading your texts and screening your calls? Let us know in the comments. Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center. Built in 1958, Mount Weather serves as the operations center for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a.k.a. FEMA. It's part of the United States' continuity of government plan, and it's a relocation site for the highest level of civilian and government personnel.

This is a five hundred and sixty four acre high security federal government facility along the Loudoun Clark County border in Virginia, built during the Cold War as a relocation site. The facility consists of two parts, the above ground FEMA complex and a six hundred thousand square foot underground facility. Reportedly, it's a fully self-contained city with its own leaders, its own police and fire departments, even its own set of laws. This underground bunker has a hospital, dining and recreation areas, sleeping quarters, a self-contained water system, emergency power plant, even a radio and television studio,

which is part of the emergency broadcasting system. People are said to be able to survive down here in isolation for years without ever leaving the compound. Sounds a lot like 2020 too soon. Mount Weather has been designed to survive conventional, chemical, biological, even nuclear attacks. Even though it's been operated and maintained for over 60 years, very little is known about Mount Weather.

The general public first learned about it in 1974 when TWA Flight 514 crashed nearby. And up until then, most federal officials didn't even know it existed. Has it ever been used? Oh, yeah. Mount Weather was briefly activated by federal agents on April 7th, 2015, after a major power outage hit Washington, D.C. It was also used during the 9-11 attacks when the entire congressional leadership

was transported there by helicopter. All of Congress in one bunker? Oh, I'd rather take my chances with the bombs. I hear ya. Nobody really knows who's on the Mount Weather list, but it's a pretty exclusive list. So how do we get on the list? Of course.

Bull. Hey, we're working our tails off over here. Do us a favor and hit the thumbs up and the like button or whatever button you got there. I mean, come on, you're doing nothing but walking around with a mask. You're angry, you're depressed. Come on, help a brother out. Mount Yamontau, Mezo, Mej, Grr, ah f**k it. Yamontau, along with Kavinsky Mountain, are claimed by the US as being secret nuclear facilities with underground bunkers because large excavation

projects have been observed by satellites. Several military garrisons were built on the site and then merged into the closed town of Mezguria. Closed town. Well, a closed town is a residential area where travel is restricted in and out. How many people live in Mezzo or whatever? Well, estimates are there are 30000 military and another 30000 non-military personnel. But nobody really knows because people haven't been able to enter or leave for over 20 years. And nobody knows.

Well, countries in the West have been asking Russia for years what's going on in there. And the story keeps changing. It is place for mining rocks. It is place for making delicious cheeses. It is like a big Home Depot. They really said that they did. I don't trust those guys. They're Russian. They don't care what you think.

The global seed vault. Oh, that looks like the thing that the Jawas drive around. It's just a big cow. Deep in an icy mountain above the Arctic Circle, between Norway and the North Pole, lies a resource of vital importance for the future of civilization. It's not coal, oil, or precious minerals, but seeds. Millions of seeds from more than 900,000 varieties of food crops are stored in the global seed vault on Spitsbergen, part of Norway's Svalbard Archipelago.

Go ahead, tell the people how many tries it took you to get that right. Go ahead, tell them. It took me 14 tries. Svalbard Archipelago. It's been a long day, folks. The Seed Vault is basically a huge safety deposit box to protect against loss during large scale regional or global crises. So if they drop bombs on us, we still got tomatoes. We still got tomatoes. The seed bank is one hundred and twenty meters inside a sandstone mountain and employs seriously advanced security systems. Seeds are packaged in these special foil

packets that allow them to last basically forever. The facility is managed by the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, but they only open the vault to make deposits. There are no permanent staff on site. A Spitsbergen was considered ideal because it lacks tectonic activity, has permafrost and it's one hundred and thirty meters above sea level, which keeps the site dry even if the ice caps melt. Also, Norway typically tries to stay out of military conflicts. He. Guy, I said they try, while the press has emphasized its use in the event of a major

global catastrophe, the sea ball will be more frequently accessed when gene banks lose samples due to mismanagement, accidents, equipment failures, funding cuts or natural disasters. And these events are actually pretty common. War and civil strife have a history of destroying seed banks. For example, the National Seed Bank of the Philippines was damaged by flooding and then later destroyed by a fire. And the seed banks of Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq have all been lost completely. From Bob's? I'd rather end on a high note.

Thanks to the Global Seed Vault, many of those seeds were recovered. Tomatoes! Tomatoes. Vatican Secret Archives. Fifty three miles of shelving, thirty five thousand volumes, millions of pages going back twelve hundred years, housed in one of the most iconic bastions of religion and culture. The Vatican's apostolic archives are the stuff of historical legend and Dan Brown books.

But they're absolutely real. The archives indexes are not public and they're only accessible to very few scholars. And then only after the deposits have been stored for at least 75 years, and they're housed in a fortress inside the Vatican. Hey, why do we have to wait 75 years to read this stuff? I'd rather not get into it. Ah, gotcha. Anyway, notable documents include Henry VIII's request for a marriage annulment,

a handwritten transcript of the Trial of Galileo, and letters from Michelangelo complaining he hadn't been paid for his work on the Sistine Chapel. They sniffed Michelangelo on his bill? Apparently they did. Ooh, what a pieta. Eh, someone out there gets it. The secretive nature of the Catholic Church and the potential information within have fueled years of wild speculation about what's inside, and there are tons of crazy conspiracy

theories about what's in the archives. Can we talk about a few? Yes, we can. Disclaimer, we are merely reporting. We are not endorsing any of these theories. I may endorse one. You may not find fine. Fine. What do you got? Many conspiracy theorists believe the archives show the Vatican is hiding proof

that Jesus didn't exist. No, boy, you're right. I'll stay out of this one. Good thinking. Another theory says the Vatican has evidence of extraterrestrials and that the pope is conspiring with aliens to implant us with computer chips. There's also this great theory about a device. I have to say it slowly. It's called the Chrono Visor.

Crow no visor. Now try saying that word fast and watch how quickly your YouTube video gets banned. Anyway, the chrono visor is a machine that allows the operator to view past and future events. And it was designed by an Italian priest and scientist who is trying to prove evidence of the crucifixion. And the archives are said to contain the three secrets of Fatima, which is a series of visions and prophecies that predict the end of the world. And of course, some people believe the archives are controlled by the Illuminati, which the Vatican is a founding member.

Fact. A conspiracy theory that turned out to be true is that the Vatican archives contained a document that absolved the Knights Templar of crimes against the church. In 2001, the Shennon parchment was discovered in the archives and the parchment is dated August 13, 08 at Shinnon, France, and contains interrogations, confessions and absolutions of the Knights. When the Shinnon parchment was made public in 2007, it confirmed the legacy of the Knights Templar by proving that Pope Clement the fifth actually absolved the group of heresy in 1308.

It's a fascinating document that reads like a law and order episode, actually a law and order SVU episode, if if you know what I mean. If you want to check it out, I'll put a link to the full text in the description. And if you want to see a whole video about the Knights Templar, I do. Let us know in the comments and we'll get on it. Room thirty nine. Room thirty nine, also called Bureau 39 and Office 39, is officially known as the Central Committee Bureau 39 of the Workers Party of Korea, and it's a secretive North Korean Party organization that seeks to bring in foreign currency to party leadership.

The organization is estimated to bring in one billion dollars a year or more and may be involved in activities such as counterfeiting $100 bills, producing meth, heroin, and committing international insurance fraud for big, big bucks. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. What? Can we, uh, ease into this? This, this is crazy.

Okay, okay. Uh, we'll, we'll ease into it. Office 39 was set up in the 1970s by the founding father of North Korea, Kim Il-sung, as a kind of royal slush fund. It takes its name from the office it occupies inside the Workers' Party building in the capital Pyongyang, not far from the official residence of the party leader. Much of what we know about Room 39 comes from a defector that ABC interviewed in 2018. He said he spent five years working as an agent in the Daisan Group, an umbrella corporation that smuggled ginseng, gemstones and gold into China so it could be sold on the international

markets as Chinese gold. Apparently evading United Nations sanctions was easy and China played a central part. They just changed company names and had branches in different countries. We don't know much about the internal operations of Room 39 because the defector is afraid of assassination attempts on himself and his family. But there are plenty more shady details, which I'll link below. Oh, should we be talking about this? Oh, now you're squeamish?

I was fine until the last story. Maybe we could cut this one out. It's too late now. Well, **** it. Well, how do you say I'm sorry in Korean? Jisung, hiya. Wait, I was being rhetorical. Is that is that is that really how to say it?

Yep. Why do you... Hey, we all have secrets, don't we? Yes. Yes, we do. Three plus one five plus zero zero. For 600 years, the Voynich manuscript has stumped scholars, cryptographers, physicists, computer scientists, pretty much everybody. Now a researcher in Germany has claimed to have finally decoded the most mysterious book in the world.

He did? What's it say? Well. Welcome to the Y-Files, where smart folks like us come to laugh and learn. Have the secrets of the Voynich Manuscript finally been revealed? Well, a German Egyptologist claims he solved it. Has he? He thinks so, but first some background. The Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page medieval codex written in an indecipherable language

full of bizarre drawings of strange plants, astrological symbols, and lots and lots of naked women. Oh, is there a centerfold? Actually, there is spicy. The Voynich manuscript defies classification and has also defied comprehension. Everybody's taken a shot at this cryptologists, FBI operatives, respected medievalists, mathematic and scientific scholars, skilled linguists. They've all been left stumped. Even Alan Turing took a crack at it and came up short.

I'm so sorry. A book written in an unknown language no one has been able to decode, with crumbling pages made of bound calfskin dating back to the 15th century, you'd probably picture something out of a Nicolas Cage movie. Hello. What you might not picture is a book filled with whimsical illustrations of nude women in bathtubs, bathtubs with windows, bathtubs shaped like ovaries, bathtubs oozing green liquid, bathtubs, bathtubs,

bathtubs everywhere. These, along with drawings of star shaped flowers and wild green vines, they're all kind of tucked inside the pages. The mysterious book has been divided into sections by historians, herbal, astrological, pharmacological and balneological. Balneological in the study of balls, the study of baths. That makes more sense. The herbal section is thick with elaborate drawings of unrecognized plants. They're twisted and spiky with dripping leaves and wide petals.

And one drawing, there's some kind of reptilian sea creature who looks like a mix between a dragon and a seahorse is chewing on one of the leaves. Looks like whoever made this book was also making funny tea with those plants. That would that would answer some questions in the astrological section. Pages fold out into massive charts of the night sky with complicated constellations intertwined with doodles of naked women holding stars and emerging from tubes. Well, is this the centerfold you were talking about? Yep.

No mermaids and nothing? Nope. Bit of a letdown. You need a girlfriend. Well, let's go to the store and pick one out. That's not a healthy way to start a relationship. If she doesn't work out, we'll exchange her for a new one. You can't do that.

Right, right, right, right. How many times have you said you'd like to trade your wife in for a new one? No, no, no, no, no, no. You searched for your informant, who disappeared without a trace. You knew there were witnesses, but lips were sealed. You swept the city, driving closer to the truth, while curled up on the couch with your cat. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover

heart-pounding thrillers on Audible. You sailed beyond the horizon in search of an island scrubbed from every map. You battled krakens and navigated through storms. Your spade struck the lid of a long-lost treasure chest.

While you cooked a lasagna. There's more to imagine when you listen. Discover best-selling adventure stories on Audible. Some say the astrological part is the book's most translatable section. Yarr! swimming, drowning and resting in all kinds of baths. And the baths are cake shaped baths or holes in the ground, winding river like pipes and baths shaped like a woman's reproductive system. This section is the most famous in the manuscript, and it's easy to see why people have wondered for centuries why the author was so fascinated with women in bathtubs. This is giving me some ideas for a new fishbowl design.

Nope, don't even go to you at blowing glass. Oh, I'm not blowing anything for you. The last section, the pharmacological section, is almost all text in Boina cheese. Is Boina cheese made by cows or goats? Technically, it was made by a man. I have nipples, Greg. Could you milk me? You. Voynich cheese is written from left to right. And although it's never been officially deciphered, there's definitely a structure to it. Researchers have concluded that the language has 20 to 25 distinct letters, but nobody's been able to figure out how the letters fit together. According to cryptanalyst Elizabeth Friedman in 1962, anyone who attempts to translate it is doomed to utter frustration. Same goes for trying to understand a YouTube algorithm.

Can't argue with that. The theories about the Voynich manuscript are all over the place. Some think the book was written by philosophers in a secret code only they can understand. But my favorite theory is aliens. Yep. If you Google Voynich plus aliens, you get all kinds of great stuff because it contains a language that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet. And given the fact that the ancient manuscript depicts star charts that are unknown to us, the Voynich manuscript could have been created by a being not from Earth who during the fourteen hundreds crash landed here. Knowing that humans didn't have the necessary technology to help them return to his planet, maybe the alien visitor decided to chronicle his remaining life on Earth inside the manuscript. E.T.'s coloring book. Oh, I love the Internet.

After hundreds of years of failed attempts to translate it, no theory was really off the table. But this June, one man claimed to have cracked the code once and for all. According to German Egyptologist Rainer Hanegg, Boynton Cheese is actually based in Hebrew. He concluded that the text must be a Semitic language. And given the European imagery in the book's illustrations, he narrowed the options to Arabic, Aramaic or Hebrew, which were languages spoken by the European scholars of the Middle Ages. After identifying a connection between certain Voynich characters in Hebrew,

he managed to translate the first few words and then full sentences. It will be years, Hanek says, before the full manuscript will be translated. So what's it say? Mostly gibberish. Experts in ancient Hebrew are not convinced that Hanek cracked anything. They've poked more than a few holes in his translation and said he's taken quite a few liberties with the language to try to derive meaning where it just doesn't exist. I'm wrong again. Wrong about us.

Over the past few decades, at least 60 Voynich solutions have been published. So far, all of them have been debunked. In 2019, David Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol in England, thought the book was written in a language lost to time, a predecessor to modern English and Spanish. He told Romance Studies, When I realized the magnitude of the achievement, it was like a eureka moment. And Cheshire's news hit the media like a tsunami

and was debunked with the same amount of force. Botched research and a rush to publication added up to a pretty embarrassing mess. And as stated in Ars Technica after the fallout, another day, another dubious claim that someone has decoded the Voynich manuscript. In twenty seventeen, television writer Nicholas Gibbs made international news when he claimed to have solved the mystery. Gibbs believed that the book is a woman's health manual and the language is actually made up of Latin abbreviations. Now, the woman's health book theory might hold some merit.

I mean, why else would you doodle ovaries and a bunch of fallopian tubes? Unless you're Jackie Trehorn. And Lebowski fans get it. But the Latin abbreviation idea was less convincing. Latin experts found his translations to be pretty much nonsense. This wasn't too much of a shock. Gibbs didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with. He was studying the text for a television show and lacked real experience

in historical text decoding. So TV producers think they know everything. Even the Hebrew theory has been brought up and shut down before. In 2016, two computer scientists announced that they had successfully translated the entire sentences of the book from Hebrew. How did they test their theory? Well, they typed every Hebrew letter they recognized into Google Translate. According to their findings, the first sentence of the manuscript reads, she made

recommendations to the priest, man of the house, and me, and people? Seems legit. It wasn't. Hebrew experts reviewed this work and said the translation wasn't even close. Now, while the language of the Voynich manuscript remains unknown, the book's history is slightly less mysterious, although there's still a few hundred years not accounted for. Historians at the University of Arizona have carbon dated the book to the 15th century, between 1404 and 1438, and clues such as the style of the illustrations, the University of Arizona have carbon dated the book to the 15th century between 1404 and 1438.

And clues such as the style of the illustrations, the type of pigments and paints used, and the calfskin that the text was written on all indicate it probably originated in northern Italy. The Voynich first appears in the historical record in the late 16th century when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II purchased the book. And the imperial physician's signature is visible on the first page of the text. So we know he probably had it. It then passed into the hands of George Barresque, an alchemist from Prague who referred to the book as a certain riddle of the Sphinx that was uselessly taking up space when Barresque's heir inherited the manuscript. He sent it to an Egyptian hieroglyphics expert in Rome for help decoding the text.

Did he decode it? He did not. He said it couldn't be cracked. Oh, man. Well, they weren't kidding. The manuscript then disappeared for 250 years, finally resurfacing when it was purchased by Polish book dealer Wilfred Voynich in 1912. And Voynich dedicated his life to deciphering it. And eventually the book was named after him.

For a time, some people believe that Voynich himself wrote the manuscript, hoping to sell the medieval mystery for a lot of money. But carbon dating proved this theory impossible. The book was eventually donated to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it remains today, capturing imaginations, igniting curiosities and fueling controversies. While historians and cryptologists, linguists and scientists continue their search for the Voynich manuscripts, meaning the most logical theory to me is that it was a hoax perpetrated on Emperor Rudolph by Edward Kelly, a medieval scam artist.

Kelly would go into these trances where he claimed to be able to speak to angels and other people would then write down what the angels said in their angel language. Other people spoke this angel language. No. What do they write down? Just, you know, nonsense. That is not at all helpful. It's not. If the manuscript really is a transcription of one of these angel sessions, decoding it is going to be tricky.

Do angels even have a language? Oh, some people in the comments are going to insist they do. You'll see. So the best cryptographers are stumped. Computer scientists and all their tools have gotten nowhere. And experts in ancient languages have all hit dead ends. I guess all we have left to do is wait for an angel. We were awaiting your arrival. Ancient civilizations possessed knowledge that has been lost to time.

I think that's obvious. But to be fair, most lost knowledge is probably not practical to us today anyway. I mean, who cares what bacterial infection some ancient swami cured with pine nuts and prayer when we can just use an antibiotic? And if some shaman or witch doctor discovered how I can make Windows not update the very second I start a Zoom call, well, I'd love to know that secret. But shaman are typically Mac people, so not a problem for them. But what about ancient technologies that would be of practical use today, like levitation, specifically levitating large, heavy objects? Now, that would be useful.

Many people believe levitation, specifically sound or acoustic levitation, was how ancient civilizations like the Egyptians built the pyramids. There's actual science that supports this. Let's find out why. The ruins of several ancient civilizations like the Pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge in the UK, and many others are monuments constructed of massive stones. And the first question we have to ask is why?

Why use huge, ridiculously heavy pieces of stone when the same structures could have been made with smaller blocks like bricks? Yeah, they were showing off. But we're looking at that question through a modern lens based on the technologies that are available to us today. We do know that sound can levitate objects, and I'll get into how that works a little bit later. But current acoustic levitation technology can only move tiny objects with very little mass. Nobody's building pyramids at MIT. And if you are, awesome. Some researchers think ancient cultures may have mastered levitation through sound, which allowed them to easily manipulate massive objects.

Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid. Yes, the Jedi were an ancient culture, but let's look at cultures in our own galaxy. How the Great Pyramids of Egypt were built has been the subject of debate for a long time. Aliens. The fact is, no one really knows for certain how they were constructed. How do aliens know? The mainstream theory is that it took a workforce of about 5,000 men and 20 years to build the Great Pyramid using ropes, pulleys, ramps, and cranes. And that may very well be the case, though I have my doubts.

And if you guys want a whole video on the construction of the pyramids, let me know in the comments. There's a lot to cover about pyramids. For example, they weren't built by slaves. Aliens don't need slaves. Can we can we cool it with the aliens for just a minute? But let's talk about the 10th century historian Abul Hasan Ali Al Masudi. He's known as the Herodotus of the Arabs. And Al Masudi traveled all over the world, but finally settled in Egypt's known as the Herodotus of the Arabs. And Al-Masoudi traveled all over the

world, but finally settled in Egypt, where he wrote a 30-volume history of the world. Like everyone, he was awestruck by the pyramids, and he wrote a very intriguing passage about how the giant stone blocks were transported. First, magic papyrus was imprinted with symbols and placed under each stone. Then the stone was struck with a metal rod that caused it to slowly rise above the ground. The stone then moved along a path that was paved with other stones and fenced in by metal poles. The stone traveled along this path for about 50 meters, then gently settled to the ground. This process was then repeated over and over again until the builders had the stone exactly where they wanted it. Some believe metal poles could have been used

to create high frequency sound vibrations, which would have been responsible for creating the levitation effects. Now, given that the pyramids were already thousands of years old when Al-Masudi wrote this, we have to wonder where he got his information. Was this an oral history passed down through the generations or just a great story created by a talented writer? Um, can I make a quick point? Go ahead.

May I refer you to Clark's Third Law? Right. Clark's Third Law says any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Bingo. The Great Pyramid of Giza does possess some extraordinary acoustic properties and can dramatically amplify sounds at certain frequencies. So the Egyptians clearly knew a lot about sound science and how it could be used to produce powerful effects, possibly including levitation. Did striking the rock create vibrations

that resulted in sonic levitation? Maybe the layout of stones and rods created some kind of magnetic levitation. The science for either scenario is sufficiently advanced and therefore to Al-Masoudi and to us is indistinguishable from magic. Now, the pyramids aren't the only ancient structures made of huge stone blocks. There are monuments around the world that contain stone components of such incredible size that they make the pyramids look tiny. But their construction remains a mystery. Let's look at a few more.

The Temple of Jupiter at Baalbek, Lebanon, contains the three largest stone blocks ever used in a manmade structure, each block is estimated to weigh as much as one thousand tons. Now, no industrial equipment in existence today could lift one. No super crane and certainly no number of people. Yet somehow they are positioned together so precisely that a sheet of paper can't fit between them. Now, nearby is an even bigger stone. It's known as Hajar Al Hibla, and it's the largest piece of stone ever cut by humans. It weighs twelve hundred tons.

It's estimated it would take 16000 men to even budget, and it would be a huge challenge of modern technology to just create it. Yet there it is. How did they do it? Nobody really knows. Let's go to the other side of the planet. On a remote plateau in Bolivia, 12,000 feet above sea level, there's a monument called Puerto del Sol or Gate of the Sun. This elaborately carved megalith is a single piece of stone that weighs 10 tons.

Cool. Well, how did it end up almost four kilometers up a mountain? And some scientists think that it may not be in its original location. And if that's so, where did it come from? Here's another. Namadal is an archaeological site on the island of Pompeii in Micronesia, and it's been called the Machu Picchu of the Pacific. It's the only ancient city ever built upon a coral reef.

And the engineering of Nan Madal is so complex, nobody can figure out how it was built. The lost city dates back to around 200 BC, and it's made up of hundreds of stacked stone logs, each about three meters long and about a meter in diameter. The logs, which are stacked kind of like firewood, create walls that are 40 feet high and 18 feet thick. That's taller than a three-story building, yet each stone log weighs

about two and a half tons. And the logs that make up the high walls, they weigh as much as 50 tons each. How they were moved and lifted into position is absolutely baffling. The locals didn't have pulleys. They didn't have levers. They didn't even have access to metal. This is Stone Age technology. So how do they do it? Well, the locals tell stories about giants who flew great canoes in the sky. Aliens. And those aliens, I mean, giants. Yeah. Use some kind of magic to levitate the logs into place.

Now, these are structures from very different and diverse cultures from all over the world. What was their secret? These societies are so old that there is no record of how these structures were constructed. But in almost every culture where megaliths exist, a legend also exists that the huge stones were moved by sound, either by striking with a rod to produce acoustic resonance, or by instruments, or by simply chanting stones into position. Let's see how that works.

For centuries, travelers from the Far East told tales of acoustic levitation. Some claim to have encountered mystics who possessed the ability to levitate themselves and objects using sound. One famous story comes from a medical doctor named Dr. Yal. He had been brought to a remote area of Tibet in 1939 to treat a Buddhist holy man suffering from an unknown illness. After spending some time with the monks, Dr. Yal eventually gained their confidence and to show their appreciation, they performed a

demonstration of sonic levitation that left the good doctor astounded. They took him to a meadow that was surrounded by high cliffs, and in the middle of the clearing, about 250 meters from a cliff, was a heavy slab of stone. Then the monks arranged 19 musical instruments, 13 drums and six trumpets in a 90 degree arc around the stone and started playing. The other monks began singing and chanting a prayer, slowly increasing the tempo. During the first four minutes, nothing happened. Then as the speed of the drumming and the noise increased, the big stone block started to

rock and sway and suddenly took off into the air and continued to rise until it landed on a hilltop about 250 meters above the ground. This demonstration was repeated multiple times for Dr. Yall, who actually took film footage of this. What? Where's the film? Oh, that's confiscated and classified. Well, that's a piece of bulls**t. I know. I actually found a paper that explains scientifically how this levitation might have actually worked.

Link below. And if you're into geometry and geodetics, you're going to love it. Sounds moving. You see what I did there? Another creation credited with acoustic levitation is the Coral Castle located in Florida. The Coral Castle is a sprawling stone compound built by Edward Leedskalnin between the years 1923 and 1951. The complex is constructed of nearly 1000 tons of rock, which leads Scullinan somehow cut, shaped, lifted and maneuvered into place all by himself. Just him. And FYI, he was five foot tall and weighed 100 pounds. Inman.

I ruined the moment, didn't I? And lead Scullinan refused to allow visitors or observers on site while he was working, so there are no eyewitness accounts detailing his construction methods. Yet alone, working mostly at night, he was somehow able to cut and transport a thousand tons of rock to use for walls and towers. He also built all kinds of buildings and sculptures, all from giant pieces of stone. An obelisk he raised weighs 28 tons, and the largest rock on the property weighs an estimated 35 tons. Now, some of these stones are

twice the weight of the largest blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza. All this he did alone and without heavy machinery. The most amazing thing to me is the stone gate. It weighs nine tons and has about a quarter inch of clearance inside the frame. It's so well balanced that you could push it open with a single finger. This is something that would be challenging for even the most experienced engineering and construction team. Yet somehow Leedskalnin was able to do it alone. Oh, this guy definitely wasn't union. Nope. Leedskalnin never specifically identified sound as a key factor in his work. But he had an interest in radio and owned all kinds of sound equipment, which he used for

unknown purposes. Now, no one ever saw him lift enormous objects, though the story goes that spying teenagers saw him float coral blocks through the air like hydrogen balloons. I love this guy. I do, too. I have discovered the secrets of the pyramids and have found out how the Egyptians and the ancient builders in Peru, Yucatan, and Asia with only primitive tools raised

and set in place blocks of stone weighing many tons. He told friends ancient masters had developed a method for overcoming the force of gravity and that as a practicing Freemason, he was exposed to this knowledge through his contacts in that secret organization. This guy built an Illuminati sandcastle with magnets. He might have with magnets or sound or both. I mean, there's actual science behind some of this. Unless you're in a vacuum, sound is everywhere. Sound is created by vibrating molecules of a medium like air or water into waves. The waves hit our eardrums or our skull

and our brain decodes the wavelengths into sound. We don't usually think of sound as having a physical presence, but acoustic waves can absolutely affect the environment. Think of a nightclub or a concert where you could just be could feel the bass. Like that. Or how ultrasound is used to pulverize kidney stones. Or how singing the right note or

wavelength with the sufficient volume or amplitude can shatter glass. There are even sound waves that can make people sick. We've got a video coming up on this, so hit subscribe, hit the bell, like, share. OK, OK, OK. Don't don't oversell it. Sorry, I get excited. Anyway, current acoustic levitation techniques use sound traveling through media, usually gas, to counteract the force of gravity. A basic acoustic levitator has two main parts. A transducer, which is really just the surface that creates the sound by vibrating, kind of like a speaker.

And there's also a reflector, which helps focus the sound waves on the object you want to levitate. Now, to get this to work, there's quite a bit of math involved. For example, the distance between the transducer and the reflector must be a multiple of half of the wavelength of the sound. This is because you need to get enough molecules lined up under the object in order to lift it. If you just blast sound at an object, all you're doing is scattering a bunch of molecules around. That won't work. But if we remember the story about the Tibetan monks, they were using this precise technique. They played specific instruments in unison, just like a transducer, focused at a specific object from a specific distance, like a reflector.

I bet if we knew the actual sounds of their instruments, we'd see a correlation between the wavelengths they emitted and the distance to the stone. Now, I'm not saying the monks actually got this to work, but I am saying the science is sound. A pun? No, no, no. It was so terrible. No, no, I didn't mean to do that. Shame on you.

So now that we've seen that sound can be used to move objects, is this enough evidence to prove how the pyramids were constructed? For some people, yes. For most, no. For me, I'm not really sure. Could the pyramids have been constructed using pulleys, ramps, and cranes like mainstream Egyptologists claim? Well, sure. But when you look at the sheer size those ramps would need to be, and the distances involved, the amount of materials required to build the scaffolding would be more than the material in the actual pyramids much more so where where are all the construction materials to me there seems like there's something going on here but we can't even talk about this without being labeled kooks any challenge of established scientific dogma

is labeled pseudoscience isn't that a bit arrogant isn't pseudoscience only pseudoscience. Isn't that a bit arrogant? Isn't pseudoscience only pseudoscience until it's actual science? But people are afraid to go up against the establishment. Kepler and Copernicus were ridiculed by their peers. Louis Pasteur's research was rejected by the medical establishment. Gregor Mendel, Nikola Tesla, initially they were rejected. Imagine the hate they'd get if Twitter existed. But that's a long time ago. Surely we've matured since then. Think about this. In 1903, when the Wright brothers and others were building airplanes, The New York Times said manned flight would not be possible for one to 10 million years. And in 1985, The New York Times said no matter how inexpensive or powerful a laptop computer

would become, nobody would want one. No, boy. And when Apple announced the iPhone, the Times said they'd probably never build it. And even if they did, nobody would buy it. And speaking of Twitter, here's what the New York Times said when it launched. Using Twitter for literate communication is about as likely as firing up a CB radio and hearing some guy recite the Iliad. Whether the service could be made into a sustainable business, quite unknown. I'm skeptical. Haven't I always told you don't

trust the media? You have. If you suggest that levitating heavy objects with sound or creating free energy is even possible, you're viciously attacked. Not just by Facebook and Twitter, but by the New York freaking Times. Aren't new ideas worth exploring? Did Steve Jobs care what people thought about him? Does Elon Musk care? No. They just went out and changed the world. So my message today is not to the corporate media or social media. thought about him. Does Elon Musk care? No, they just went out and changed the world.

So my message today is not to the corporate media or social media. They make money by getting all of us to attack each other. That's their business model. It's shameful and that's why nobody trusts them. Who cares? George Bernard Shaw said, all great truths begin as blasphemies. This message is to those blasphemers, to the recluse out there building castles with sound and magnets and his own hands, to the nerd in the garage tinkering with electronics because he knows in his heart there is a better way. This message is to the next Kepler, Jobs, Elon Musk, to the misfits and dreamers and visionaries. My message is to you. They are going to attack you. They are going to hate you. Ignore them. Keep dreaming. Keep building. Keep blaspheming. Because I can tell you with 100% certainty,

the world needs you much more than it needs the New York Times. I'm a rocket man burning bottle boot up. You smell that I could smell that underwater. Well, don't look at me. Let's get out of here. Agreed. The smells of the universe are not universal. Listen, you smell something different objects in space like comets, planets, moons, gas clouds. Each have their own distinctive aroma.

Oh, I love the smell of the universe in the morning. Me, too. We're all watching The Expanse, right? If you're not start immediately. It's the best sci fi show on TV, and it's based on a series of novels which are equally awesome. And I will link below. Anyway, The Expanse describes the moon as having a gunpowder stink. And I remember reading that and thinking, what a cool description. And it made me wonder, how did they come up with that? Does the moon really smell like gunpowder?

Turns out it does. For this video, we're going to assume the moon landing was not faked. We are going to assume the moon landing was real. You believe anything? When recalling the smell of the moon, Apollo 17's Jack Schmidt said everyone's impression of the smell was that of spent gunpowder. Now, this is strange because the makeup of lunar dust is completely different than gunpowder. Moon regolith is made up of silicon dioxide glass created by billions of years of meteor impacts. It also contains iron, calcium and magnesium. But modern gunpowder is a combination of nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.

So why the similarity? Well, nobody really knows, but it could be a sign that moon dust is chemically active. So how does the smell even happen? Well, there are a couple of theories. One is called the desert rain effect. You ever notice that awesome smell that happens after a summer rain? That smells called petrichor from the Greek words petra, meaning rock or stone, and the word Iker, which is the fluid that flows through the veins of the gods on Earth.

Plant oils accumulate on rocks during dry periods, along with another compound geosmin, which is a metabolic byproduct of bacteria found in soil. During rain, the oils and geosmin are released into the air, causing that distinctive smell of petrichor. And if there's lightning, sometimes you can sniff a little ozone. Obviously, there are no plants on the moon, but there's still stuff, right? The molecules trapped in the dry moon dust may have been activated by contact with the moist air in the lunar module, just like petrichor and the desert rain effect. Another theory is solar winds. Hot solar winds of hydrogen, helium and other ions buffet the moon's surface and may become trapped in the dust. When the ions are dislodged, such as by an astronaut's footsteps, then come in contact

with the warm air inside the lunar module, they evaporate. It's possible these ions were brought into the cabin, producing the odor. Either way, the smell didn't last long. By the time the moon dust made it back to Earth, it was completely odorless. So we'll have to take NASA's word for it. But space itself may even have a smell. Astronauts returning from spacewalks have reported smelling burnt metal or burnt meat. And no one really knows for sure what this is, but it could be molecules of metal leaching off onto spacesuits, then oxidizing when it comes into contact with actual humidified air.

Now, I think that's super interesting. So let's work our way around the solar system and see which planet smells like toasted almonds and which planet smells like the porta potty on the last day of a Renaissance fair. That reference was oddly specific. Mercury, Mercury is the smallest and closest planet to the sun named after the Greek god Hermes and translated into Latin as Mercurius, the messenger of the gods. And Mercury contains a lot of sodium, which doesn't have much of an odor. But there's also a lot of silicon dioxide present like the moon.

So we assume the smell would be gunpowder, just salty gunpowder. Venus. Venus is the second planet from the sun named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. When they named the planet, they clearly couldn't smell it. Venus has a thick atmosphere, mostly carbon dioxide. There's also a heavy clouds of sulfuric acid. That combination makes Venus smell like a burnt match and rotten eggs. Mars. Mars is the fourth planet from the sun and the second smallest planet in the solar system being larger than only Mercury. Named for the Roman god of war, Mars is often referred to as the red planet because of the iron oxide on the surface.

And despite what Matt Damon would tell you, Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere. Since Mars lost its magnetosphere billions of years ago. Solar winds are constantly stripping away atoms from the outer layer. But what atmosphere there is contains methane, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. The Martian sand smells like rusty metal because that's what iron oxide is combining the odors of the surface with the orders of the air. And Mars is probably going to smell like the exhaust of an old car with a bad catalytic converter. It's basically the same stuff. And yeah, you can't breathe that.

I'm definitely going to die up here. Jupiter. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in the solar system. It's a gas giant named after the king of the Roman gods. A Jupiter's atmosphere is 5000 kilometers thick and actually has multiple layers, each with slightly different smells. The outer layers have a lot of ammonia, which smells like horse urine. As you move closer to the surface, the atmosphere becomes more sulfuric, smelling like

skunk and horse urine. The inner layers have a high concentration of hydrogen cyanide, which smells like toasted almonds and skunk and horse urine and rotten eggs. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest in the solar system after Jupiter. It's also a gas giant named after the Roman god of wealth and agriculture. Saturn's atmosphere is 96% hydrogen and 4 percent helium, so not much of a smell. But there are trace amounts of methane, phosphine, acetylene and ammonia. And phosphine can smell like rotten fish.

What? So Saturn probably smells like dead fish and skunk and rotten eggs. What's with all the rotten eggs? Good question. Eggs are very high in two proteins, globulin and keratin. When globulin decays, a toxic chemical is released hydrogen sulfide, which has a very potent sulfur smell. I mean, you know it when you smell it. And keratin also has very high levels of an amino acid called cysteine, which is also

full of sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide happens to be one of the most common compounds in the solar system. So rotten eggs everywhere. Uranus, Uranus, Uranus. Please, please don't say it that way. You say tomato. I say Uranus, tomato, Uranus, potato. Do you mind? I couldn't ahead. I couldn't resist. Uranus is the seventh planet from the sun, named for the Greek god of-

Butts! Greek god of the sky. It's probably the smelliest planet in the solar system. Stop it. The upper atmosphere is mostly hydrogen, so not much of a smell. But as you get closer to the surface, it gets pretty ripe. Have we, uh, probed Uranus? Yes, we have.

Oh, I hope they were gentle. So why does Uranus smell so bad? Well, the cloud tops of Uranus are made of hydrogen sulfide, that gas responsible for the foul smell of rotten eggs and human flatulence. A little lower in the atmosphere, you'll find methane and ammonia. So Uranus smells like a public toilet? It does. Hehehehe.

Neptune. Named after the Roman god of the sea, Neptune is the eighth and farthest planet from the sun. At 17 times the mass of the earth, it's slightly more massive than its twin Uranus. Does it smell as bad as Uranus? Well, most of the compounds are frozen in the atmosphere, so really just hydrogen and helium are present. Neptune doesn't have much of a smell at all.

That's too bad. I got more jokes. I'm sure you do. Everywhere else. A few honorable mentions. Dwarf planet Pluto is a near vacuum with nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide. So deadly, but odorless. One of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, is covered in ice, but underneath it has an ocean of

liquid saltwater. And it was recently discovered that plumes of methanol are ejected from the surface so it could smell like a martini. I'm Steve-O and this is the Pooh Cocktail Supreme. Comets mostly smell like burnt metal and of course, rotten eggs and lots of asteroids contain formaldehyde and cyanide. So they could smell like pickles and marzipan. No sounds like what my ex-wife ate when she was pregnant.

You've been married three times. I didn't know that. Well, I had a life before you came along, you know. OK, OK, take it easy. Sorry, sorry. I'm still working through some things. Anyway, the center of our galaxy is the dust-clad Sagittarius B2. And in that cloud, scientists have discovered a substance called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries and the smell of rum. So, not so bad.

So, here's what we learned today. What's that? The worst smelling thing in the solar system is your radius. I hate you. In 1981, an arcade in Portland was the scene of countless gamers coming down with migraines, having heart attacks, seizures and strokes. Local teens were suffering from amnesia and having hallucinations, all due to a mysterious game that seemed to arrive out of thin air. The game was called Polybius, and even though playing the game was dangerous, it was

highly addictive and caused some teens to become hyper aggressive. Fights started breaking out of the arcade. One player was stabbed to death. All traced back to people who played Polybius. Now, why would the government allow the public to play such a dangerous game? Well, because the government created it. Let's find out why. If you've never heard the urban legend about Polybius, here's how it goes.

In 1981, a Portland arcade received a video game called Polybius, here's how it goes. In 1981, a Portland arcade received a video game called Polybius that had gameplay unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. The player would stare at random geometric patterns and strange shapes, causing them to fall into a sort of hypnotic state. The game was known for its psychedelic images, unsettling soundtrack, and subliminal messages. And if you play Polybius, it could cause all kinds of physiological effects, amnesia, anxiety, night terrors, aggression, insomnia. It could also cause physical effects like migraine headaches, nausea, vertigo, even heart attacks and strokes.

Polybius was created by a company named Sinuslöschen, which in German roughly translates to sense deleting. And after playing, two Portland teenagers disappeared without a trace. Some say they were abducted. Others say they were recruited. Whoa. This game was so addictive that players would line up around the block and get into physical fights in order to play it. And people reported that the Polybius machines were watching players and collecting data about them.

And that data was periodically retrieved by men in black suits who service the machines. And the story goes that these men in black could change the game's attributes in order to elicit different responses from the players. Mind control. Yep. Grab my hat, please. Thank you. The game was only released in two arcades and only for a short time. Then it disappeared as quickly and as quietly as it arrived, never to be seen again.

Now, this is an urban legend and it's a good one. But how much of it is true? Well, actually, more than most people think. But it wasn't just any game. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Zur and the Kodan Armon. To get to the truth of the story of Polybius, you have to dig pretty deep. And if you Google Polybius, you'll get a bunch of blurry images of an arcade cabinet. There's no way to tell if these are photoshopped or an actual physical cabinet existed. If one did exist, I doubt there's photos of it. Also, there's only one known screen capture of the game's title

screen. The screen cap shows the name of the game, the year, copyright, and says it was developed by a company named Sinneslöschen. Now, in German, this translates to sensory deprivation or sense deleting, but it's not a good translation, so probably not a native German speaker. There's also no evidence of a company ever existing in Germany with the name Sinuslöschen. No company anywhere had that name, so no help there. Now, the font used for the title itself is actually unusual for the time. The memory required to produce this effect was pretty significant in the early 80s. Only games from huge companies like Nintendo and Williams were known to put so many resources into a title screen. And the screen font is very close to a font used by Williams,

but a couple of letters don't quite match. So again, not much to go on. Now, there are a few sources that say Polybius was mentioned on Usenet as early as 1994. Now, for you young bucks, Usenet newsgroups were a type of global message board used during the early days of the Internet. And if something was happening on the Internet, there was a newsgroup about it. Google has archived messages going back to the beginning of Usenet, but searches for Polybius come up empty. And what about the gameplay itself? Sources claim that Polybius was vector-based, similar to games like Tempest or Battlezone. Now, Tempest was a huge game at the time and known for its unique graphics.

So it's reasonable that people who were playing arcade games in that time remember Tempest, I definitely do. And Battlezone was used by the military as a training tool for tank crews. The Army's version was called the Bradley Trainer. So the government creating arcade games? That's absolutely true. Now what about the story that people would get sick

playing vector-based games like Polybius or Tempest, or actually die after playing certain games? Turns out, this is also true. An open mind is easy to expand. It might even be a good idea to heed the advice that one game player carries on his shirt. Maybe it's a warning. In 1982, 14-year-old Michael Lopez was playing Tempest with friends at the Malibu Grand Prix Arcade in Beaverton, Oregon. He began to feel a weird sensation in

the back of his head, and he started losing his vision. He became dizzy, stumbled outside the arcade, and threw up all over the parking lot. He then collapsed a few blocks from his home, screaming in pain. Now, apparently, the game's flashing lights and visual effects triggered a migraine or a seizure. Okay, but then there's the case of Jeff Daly, who died after playing the game Berserk that same year. Now, Daly had an unknown congenital heart condition. Apparently the stress of trying to break the game's high score triggered a heart attack.

Same for Peter Bukowski of Calumet City, who also died of heart failure while playing Berserk. Also in Calumet City, two teenage boys got into a fight over a game and one stabbed the other to death. And then there's Brian Morrow, who was playing Asteroids for 28 straight hours trying to break the record. He got sick and collapsed. Now, Morrow was pounding Coca-Colas for hours, so it's understandable that he gets sick from that. Now, he survived. But when these stories stack up, you can see how they can lead to paranoia about the effects of playing video games. Now, it seems weird now, but in the early 80s, video games were a new phenomenon. And like always, parents are suspicious of anything new, fun and seemingly addictive,

like playing video games. Can you really blame them? Now, a game developer's job is to make a game so fun and immersive and addictive that you wanna throw money at it. I mean, that's just as true now as it was back then. Whether it's putting coins in a slot or microtransactions in a mobile game, the psychology is the same. Game companies want you to give them money

and they wanna give you hits of dopamine. Cool. A role of a game company or any corporation is to make money. So nobody disputes that. They're transparent about it. But people tend to be more suspicious of the government than they are of corporations because the government not so transparent. No. And the government agencies really conduct top secret operations using video games at arcades.

That's a rhetorical question, right? It is because the answer is yes, they did. The FBI's records indicate that the agency actually was monitoring and raiding arcades in Portland at the same time that players were collapsing. Arcades had reputations of being places for drug activity, gambling and petty crime like pickpocketing. Now, though the stories were sensationalized in the media, of course, people really were gambling over pinball games. Kids really were buying and smoking weed in arcades.

So how does this factor into the Polybius legend? Well, during one sting operation, the FBI placed microphones and cameras inside video games to gather evidence on criminal activity. One of the games they used was Tempest. Tempest again! Yep. Now, the FBI didn't care that Tempest was a vector game. All they cared about was that the cabinet had large bevels and a lot of room behind the glass.

Perfect for cameras. And this FBI operation was so extensive that in the early 80s, there was actually a shortage of Tempest cabinets in the Pacific Northwest because the feds were all over it. And apparently the feds weren't very discreet about picking up their camera footage. Agents dressed in suits and ties would show up at an arcade, open the machine and pull out videotape and then leave. They didn't even bother with the coins. Do nods.

OK, but what about the CIA conducting mind control experiments? Can that possibly be true? That's another rhetorical question. Of course it's true. It's true. The CIA became convinced the communists had found the key to brainwashing. Now the Americans had to unlock the mystery of mind control.

Early in the Cold War, the CIA was convinced the communists had discovered a drug that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program called MKUltra. The goal was to find a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies. MKUltra, which operated in the 1950s and 60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Now, some experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. And subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electric shock to very high doses of LSD. Gottlieb realized that mind control was a two part process.

First, you had to destroy the existing mind. Then you had to find a way to insert a new mind into the void. Now, the CIA didn't get too far creating minds, but they did a hell of a job destroying them. The top secret nature of MKUltra makes it impossible to measure the human cost of the experiments. Why is that? Oh, because the CIA destroyed the files. It doesn't sound legal. It's not. That's your government people. Enjoy. Now,

we don't know how many people died during MKUltra, but we know some did. And many lives were permanently destroyed. And the U.S. government has been experimenting on people against their will for as long as the government has existed. So it's not far of a stretch to think they would use video games for this purpose. Maybe they have. They have. Maybe they are. They are. What the United States government did was shameful and I am sorry. Now these stories are all true but none of them are actually connected to a game called Polybius. No such game has ever been found and if you find a game called Polybius it's either fan made or it's a hoax. Freeware developer Rogue Synapse is known for creating fictional arcade games like the one from The Last Starfighter. They created a game named Polybius in 2007, and

their version attempts to recreate the gameplay described in the urban legend, including psychedelic visuals and subliminal messages. It's pretty creepy. It's kind of fun. I'll link it below. You can play. It's free. Yeah, no, no, thanks. I'm good. Coward. Oh, speaking of The Last Starfighter, that's a movie from the 80s where an intergalactic space force uses a video game to recruit star pilots. This probably leaked into the Polybius legend. Allegedly, players were disappearing and it was said they were either abducted by the government or were actually recruited by the government. I've seen them come and I've seen them go, but you're the best, my boy.

Light years ahead of the competition. So the name Polybius was probably chosen specifically to troll people who were into conspiracies. What Polybius was a Greek philosopher born in 200 B.C. in Megalopolis, and he's known for puzzles and cryptography. And you might have heard of the Polybius Square, which is a type of cipher named for him. Polybius also famously said you should never believe anything unless it could be verified with hard evidence and witnesses. Irony. So, yeah, I think whoever started this story was trolling us.

Now, the urban legend of Polybius emerged in February of 2000 when a listing for the game showed up on coinop.org, a website that covers arcade games. Now, the entry for Polybius listed the game as having been copyrighted in 1981, but no copyright exists. And it talks about bizarre rumors and says the game's history is unknown. The person believed to have created the post and this entire legend is Kurt Collar, the owner of Coinop. After Coinop created their listing for Polybius, Collar tipped off GamePro magazine about it. GamePro referenced Polybius in an article about secrets and lies in video games. And as to whether Polybius was a secret or a lie, GamePro said the story was inconclusive.

That was a big deal. In the early 2000s, GamePro was one of the largest gaming magazines in the country. So this generated interest. A few months later, the story landed on Slashdot. And if you remember the Internet in the early 2000s, a mention on Slashdot was a huge deal. A legend was born. Now, since then, Polybius has been all over the media. The subject of countless investigations is even's even been referenced in pop culture. Hmm.

Never saw this one before. When an unsolved mystery gets as much attention as this, there's going to be people claiming that they were involved. One notorious hoaxer is someone named Steven Roach, who posted on Coin Op that he worked on the game. Did he? No. His story has been investigated and debunked, but it got him plenty of attention.

And if Kurt Kahler invented the story to drum up traffic for his website? Worked like a charm. Worked like a charm. So is the story of Polybius true? Well, the psychology behind addictive games and social media platforms like Facebook are certainly a form of mind control. The U.S. government has a long history of experimenting on its citizens, so there's no doubt in my mind that the government is doing that right now. People can become addicted to video games and have gotten sick and even died playing them. Government agents were using arcade games in secret operations. All of these things happened,

and they all happened in Portland about the same time. So no, I don't think the game ever existed, but the rest of the story is completely true. And that's why as far as urban legends go, the story of Polybius is just about perfect. One five zero zero. How do you join a cult without knowing it? Well, here's how it happened to thousands of people in San Francisco just a few years ago. You're with a trusted friend, maybe on a hike or sitting in a bar, just hanging out. Then out of nowhere, your friend asks, can you keep a secret? Well, of course, you reply that you can.

Your friend then hands you a small black sleeve about the size of a credit card. On one side of the sleeve embossed in gold is a geometric pattern. On the other side, the words absolute discretion inside is a security card printed with a website and a code. Later that night, you go to the site and enter the code. And the website responds with, congratulations, you've been invited to the latitude. And what happens next changes you forever. After entering your code, you set up an appointment to visit the San Francisco house. You're ordered to tell no one and come alone.

You arrive at a nondescript building and swipe your card through the electronic lock. The door opens. You're now in a narrow hallway painted matte black. From invisible speakers, an ominous pulsing sound is heard. On the walls are two red lights which fade in and out in time with the sound. High above you in the room, like every room in the latitude, is a camera. You are being watched. At the end of the hall is an ornate Victorian mantle of some kind, but where you'd expect to find a fireplace is the entrance to a wooden slide, and the slide curves down into the darkness so there's no way to tell where it leads. There's no sign or instructions or nothing?

Nope. How do you know this doesn't lead to something awful like sharks or snakes or a K-pop concert? You don't. To go any further inside the latitude, you must literally go down a rabbit hole with no idea what awaits you at the bottom. After a quick and gentle trip down the slide, you're deposited into a basement room called the flux chamber. On one side of the room is a series of doors. On the other is a bright neon sign that says, and under that sign behind glass is a ticket taker. But the

glass is so heavily frosted that you can't really see the person's face. You simply hear their voice. You're given a claim ticket and asked to turn over all your personal belongings, your wallet, purse, phone, keys, everything in your pockets. You're told this is for your own safety. I don't like where this is going. Once you've complied with this request, you hear a door unlock. You enter and close the door behind you. It's dark, so dark that you have no idea if you're in a huge room or a closet. You can't see your hands in front of your face. And it's so quiet that it almost feels like the air is being sucked out of the room. And after a second or two, you hear a muffled click as the door locks you in. You now have no choice but to go forward

into the black without your wallet, without your phone, without your eyes. In the black, you feel your way around everything. Floor to ceiling is covered in thick carpet. And as you move forward, the passageway gets smaller and smaller, closing in around you. You can no longer stand. You have to literally crawl forward. If you're claustrophobic or afraid of the dark, panic is going to set in pretty quickly. Now, moving slowly on your hands and knees, you hear music playing. You keep moving

and see a hint of light. You reach the end of the passage and you draw back a heavy black curtain. You're now in a small six-sided room lined with books, all of which say the latitude and all the pages are blank. A voice from somewhere tells you to place a book on a podium and open it. The lights go out and suddenly the blank pages of the book you chose begin to show you a story. This is called the fable. The fable talks about an ancient society that walled itself off from the rest of the world. But 12 brave citizens dug a tunnel under the wall in order to bring their philosophy to other cultures. Now, after the fable is told, you see the words absolute discretion.

The lights come back on and you're instructed by name to move on. So you enter another small door and continue crawling through the dark. Again, you crawl. Yeah. Who started this cult? The knee doctor. I don't see how you crawl to another secret room, which has a stack of business cards that say, Do you have knee and joint pain? Call Jeffrey Rosen, M.D., Latitude Orthopedics. Heh heh heh.

Ha? Heh heh. You like that, huh? Heh heh heh. The next room you find looks like an old office. There's a couch, coffee table, and a vintage phone. The phone has one button that blinks for your attention. You pick up the receiver. You exit the room, gather your belongings, walk back out to the street. On the ground, embedded into the sidewalk itself is the mysterious hex logo of the latitude. People walk by going about their day completely unaware of the absolute bizarre

experiences going on inside. You yourself aren't quite sure what just happened. Then your cell phone rings. The voice on the other end of the phone tells you you've been chosen for a special mission. Over the next few hours, a series of calls and texts directs you around the city on sort of an urban scavenger hunt. Now, at one point, you're told to go to a local bar, give the bartender your card and say nothing. The bartender then slides you a heavy brass coin and on the coin it says absolute discretion. A few minutes later, you get a text sending you to another address.

And when you arrive, you see the hex logo stamped in the cement. This is the place you get another text with a door code. You try it. It works. You see the hex logo on the stairwell. You walk up the stairs following the clues that have now become familiar. And when you reach your designated floor, it's just a row of offices. But one of the doors has a key card lock and the door is labeled Den Arcadia. So you try your card.

It works. The room is covered in ornate psychedelic murals, and in the middle of the room are five vintage arcade games. So you put in your coin and start playing. Now, at first, the game plays normally, but after a minute or so, it glitches out and you see a mysterious glowing figure. Who disturbs my coma?

This is Quas, the gatekeeper of the Latitude. Now Quas gives you a secret word. He then instructs you to go home to your glowing box and enter the signal. Back home, you enter the code on the Latitude website. You're then shown a video of Professor Walter Kinley. The Latitude for us has a double meaning, as you can see. On the one hand, Latitude means geographic breadth, width, a sense of leeway.

The professor welcomes you to the Latitude Society as a compere, and he then gets on a boat and sails away. You then choose a society secret name called a moniker, and you now have access to all the perks of the Latitude Society. Like what kind of perks? Well, you can go to their e-commerce store and buy Latitude merchandise like T-shirts,

key chains, and other swag. Ah, there it is. You can also attend secret gatherings called Praxises. You can participate in other events which are called jaunts. But most importantly, you can now invite others to join the society. For about $30 each, you can purchase those mysterious Latitude security cards. And as long as you use absolute discretion, you can buy as many cards as you like. This is a pretty complicated way to sell merch.

It is. And this is one of the reasons for the downfall of the Latitude, at least this version of it. To learn what went wrong and what happened to the Latitude Society, we have to pull back the curtain. And that leads us to the Latitude's founder and chief visionary. His name is Jeff Hull. You know, like for some people, heaven and hell is reality.

Jeff Hull is a Silicon Valley tycoon slash artist. He worked for his father's financial firm and made a bundle when they sold the business for half a billion dollars. Hull went on to create a company called Nonchalance, which specializes in real world immersive storytelling, things like escape rooms or murder mysteries is this type of entertainment. Nonchalance uses the urban landscape as a canvas on which to paint these interactive narratives. Another well-known nonchalance experience was called the Jejeune Institute.

Its format was similar to the latitude, but maybe a little more sinister. June needs its own video. But if you're interested in things like this, I'll link you to a documentary in the description. The TV show Dispatches from Elsewhere, starring Jason Segel, is based on the June Institute. So check that out if you want to learn more about how these immersive experiences work. So what was the intention of the Latitude Society? Was it a game? Yes? Was it a game?

Yes. Was it a business? Yes. But was it a cult? Well? What are the things that like a cult would do? You know, separate yourself from your friends. Well, absolute discretion might be that, right? Ask for money. Oh shit. Like, you know, they have like, it was a gift shop beforehand, but now all of a sudden it's like, if you want to continue on. In the early days of the Latitude Society, the intent was to create amazing, immersive experiences to attract corporate clients who wanted to commission their own experiences, whether for entertainment, team building or marketing. Jeff Hull believed he could use the Lat latitude as proof of concept to raise funding. And he needed to. The society cost about $3,000 per day to operate, and Hull put about $2 million of his own money in. But after three years, the latitude couldn't

sustain itself. So Hull introduced some controversial policies. Initially, members could invite anyone they wanted to for free, but eventually invitation cards cost $25, which was soon raised to $32 per card. Members didn't like this. Then Hull announced that there would be a membership fee of about $300 per year. This caused full-scale outrage. Members argued that when they invited someone to join, they were giving them a gift and asking them to pay for their gift was rude. So everyone just wanted all of this for free? They did. End rates. Well, Jeff Hull kind of felt the same way. The Latitude Society had over 3000 members, but even if all of them paid

their membership dues, paid for invitation cards, bought merchandise, you still fall way short of the hundred thousand dollars per month the Latitude needed to be self-sustaining. So what did that guy do? The only thing you do with a failing startup. He shut it down. But this was easier said than done. Jeff Hull and the Latitude Society were so good at creating an experience so immersive that members couldn't distinguish it from reality. Now, whether intentional or not, that's how cults are created. I totally underestimated the power that the story can have upon certain people. No matter what kind of life you lead, most of it falls into the mundane day in, day out, and you're going through the motions. So when someone invites you to join a mysterious secret society, it's only natural to be intrigued.

And this secrecy is attractive. People love to belong. And if it's something exclusive, that creates scarcity. It makes you feel special. Now, I remember when the only way to join Gmail was if someone invited you. And when Facebook launched, you could only join if you were a student currently enrolled in college. You know, we preach over and over about how labeling people is bad, but if we're honest, we all have labels that we've given to ourselves that we're proud of. Maybe it's our country,

our political party, our religion, or our favorite sports team. We want to be in a tribe. Now, during a latitude gathering or praxis, there's going to be crazy rituals like chanting, dancing, costumes, all kinds of things that would look silly to outsiders. But latitude members fully committed to their roles. These experiences were special to them. They were important to the tribe. And the invitation system is genius. People want to be Promethean, meaning they want to be the holders of knowledge who teach that knowledge to others. So think about an obscure band or TV show that you discovered before anyone else. It made you feel cool to be early, to be first.

The person who initiates you into the latitude society is called your ascendant and you are their descendant. Tribes have hierarchies and people like rising in the ranks. The more people you bring into the society, the more descendants you have, the higher you rise in the tribe. Genius. There's a specific model of identifying cults developed by Stephen Hassan, and it's called the bite model of control, B-I-T-E. That's behavior, information, thought, and emotion. So let's see how the latitude shapes up. I was actually a little bit nervous that I was going to be kidnapped or that, you know, there was going to be some kind of crazy pagan ritual with some kind of sacrifice or something like that.

I didn't really know what to expect. At the top of the behavioral control section of the BITE model is regulate an individual's physical reality. Latitude does this by design. Then there's isolation from non-members. Absolute discretion certainly covers this. Then there's controlling what clothes you wear. Now look at this shot of the Latitude's Elder Council. Notice everyone's wearing a latitude sash and on the sash are various pins and insignia showing your rank in the organization's hierarchy. Even Jeff Hull himself is wearing what looks to be a military uniform. Now, this is similar to what the leader of Scientology wears. Did you just beat me?

Had to. We had to call it the Tom Cruise thing. The Tom Cruise thing? That's psychology. Hey, look, if you say the S word, they're going to come after us with lawyers and video cameras. Good point. I in the Byte model is information control. Cults use deception.

Latitude does this. Information is not freely available to outsiders. Spying is used. Cult generated propaganda is created. Also, information is shared unproportionately. One ex latitude member complained that she had to give the society all kinds of personal information about herself. But when she asked how that information was going to be used and who had access to it, she was told she didn't need to know.

Now, latitude checks all of these boxes. T is thought control. Members are encouraged to didn't need to know. Now, latitude checks all of these boxes. T is thought control. Members are encouraged to take on a new identity. Techniques are used to alter mental states. Members are required to take the cult's doctrine as truth. Meditating, chanting, praying, and rituals are used to instill a new map of reality. Checks all the boxes. All the boxes. E is emotional control. This includes making you feel like the cult can help you reach your full potential.

Another thing cults do to manipulate emotion is shunning those that leave. In an excellent article in Vice, one former member talks about how after she left the society, her roommates stopped telling her where they were going and they treated her as suspicious. The Latitude Society checks a lot of these boxes. Even active members posted anonymously on Reddit asking others, is this a cult? They were worried that they, like most cult members, joined by accident. That's pretty scary. Did the founder of the Latitude Society, Jeff Hall, set out to form a cult? Well, I don't think he did. But whether intentional or not, he seems to have an intuition for how to manipulate people.

Now fortunately, I don't think he tried to do any harm, nor did he try to enrich himself. He could have taken advantage of his members, but he didn't. So this leads to a deeper and potentially dangerous question. A religion is defined as a group of people adhering to a specific set of beliefs. A cult is defined as a group of people adhering to a specific set of beliefs. Yeah, that's the same definition. It is. But religion is widely accepted.

Cults, not so much. Nobody can argue that religions have or had cruel practices. And many people who leave cults felt that while they were in them, their lives were better. So what's the difference between a cult and a religion? I don't have the answer. Do you? In 2011, Dutch scientists connected mice to a brain scanner and cut their heads off.

They discovered that mice remained conscious for up to four seconds after decapitation. Other studies show that small mammals remained aware for up to 29 seconds. Now, if this is also true for humans, it would provide enough time for a pretty gruesome experience, and might also explain some pretty grisly stories from history. So does a human head remain conscious after being separated from its body? It sure does. Let's find out why. A common method of execution throughout history has been beheading, and it's easy to see why. It sends a powerful message that kept citizens in line for thousands of years.

Throughout history, we find many stories about how some decapitated heads still move their eyes or make facial expressions, usually of anguish or despair. Some have even made sounds despite being severed from the rest of their body. There's even a famous story about a man who attended the execution of his friend during the French Revolution. The seconds after the guillotine fell, the man retrieved the severed head and asked it a series of questions. And through blinking and facial expressions, the victim allegedly communicated with his friend. This type of post head chopped off consciousness is called lucid decapitation. So scientists and doctors started to ask the question, does a person really stay conscious and aware after losing their head? Well, the answer is not only is it possible,

but it's medically proven. Debate on the subject started ever since Charlotte Corday was guillotined in 1793 for murder. The executioner's assistant lifted her head by the hair and slapped it on both cheeks for some reason. And eyewitnesses reported that, quote, her face took on an angry expression. And for a moment or two, there was a look of a ghastly stare, which implied that the head was aware of its ignominious situation. Ignominious. It means humiliating. I know what it means.

Anyway, French doctors argue that witnesses were confusing nervous spasms with voluntary motion. And very little research was conducted on the subject until 1905, when a French doctor named Barreau was allowed to make an investigation of a severed head. His subject was a criminal named Henri Longuil. And immediately after guillotining, here's what Dr. Barreau wrote in his journal. After the decapitation, the eyelids and lips spasmed for about five seconds. And immediately after guillotining, here's what Dr. Barreau wrote in his journal. up with even movement, quite distinct and normal, such as with people awakened or torn from their thoughts. Next, Longuil's eyes definitely fixed on mine, and the pupils focused. I was not then

dealing with a vague dull look. I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again. I called out again, and once more, without any spasm, the eyelids lifted, and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with more penetration than the first time, since there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted a third call, but there was no further movement,

and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead. Um, you okay there, sport? Hello? Oh boy, not again. Sorry, folks, the human gets a little squeamish. We'll be back after these messages. By the mid 20th century, the government of France wasn't so sure beheading was as painless as its supporters claimed in the 1950s, a study by doctors, Prada, Lever and Fournier concluded that death by guillotine is not instantaneous. The report said every vital element survives decapitation. The last man to be guillotined in France was Tunisian-born killer Hamida

Dhanjoubi in 1977. Dhanjoubi became the last person in Western Europe to be executed by the state before France officially abolished capital punishment in 1981. Now, French authorities had already banned public executions after the heading of Eugene Weidman in 1939. This event was secretly filmed by a member of the crowd in Versailles. And once the horrible film made the rounds, the government preferred to do its killing in private. However, there is one decapitated head which still sort of lives on at the

University of Lisbon's Facility of Medicine. Diogo Alves was Portugal's first serial killer and one of the last people to be executed in the country in 1841. His severed head was actually cut off and studied by scientists following his hanging and is now preserved in a glass jar in the medical school. They had this head for 150 years? Yep. Well, why keep it?

Sometimes it's just really hard to throw things away. Okay, so chopping off your head doesn't result in immediate death, but just how long do you actually survive? Some doctors have said a human head could survive up to 15 minutes, but it's probably just a few seconds. When the brain runs out of oxygen, this is called anoxia, and all motor functions stop, though the headless body lives on for about another minute until the heart stops pumping. But if we look at some other animals, some of them can survive for longer than you think. Cockroaches can live for weeks without their head, and if the wound is able to seal itself off, well, it just keeps on going.

Headlessly, a decapitated snake's head can still bite you and release venom. Without its body, headless frogs still jump, snapping turtles still snap. For hours. Just the heads. But the craziest headless animal has got to be the chicken. Specifically, Miracle Mike. Oh, the movie with the male strippers. No, no, no, no. That's magic, Mike. I don't think you're right about that. I am. Miracle Mike was a chicken who belonged to a farmer in Colorado named Lloyd Olson. And Lloyd was planning on having a little chicken dinner.

But after chopping off Miracle Mike's head, he kept walking around. The farmer kept walking around? No, Miracle Mike, the chicken. What? Yep. He was able to balance himself, run around, and was still trying to peck for food. So Lloyd decided to keep him as a pet. Oh, no.

This isn't real. Oh, no, this isn't real. Oh, it is. Lloyd fed Miracle Mike a mixture of milk and water with an eyedropper to keep him alive and even dropped small grains of corn down Mike's neck hole. Gross. Just get a puppy for crying out loud. This is crazy. What's even crazier is Miracle Mike lived for 18 more months without his head.

He went on tour, made public appearances. He was even on the cover of Time Life magazine. That's a terrible way to become famous. Miracle Mike was considered to be very healthy. The only reason he died was because one of those corn kernels got stuck in his neck hole. Right. It is a lesson in this somewhere.

Probably. But I don't know what it is. Three plus one, five plus zero, zero. After six long years of fighting, the Allies finally defeated the German war machine in 1945. In July of that year, the leaders of the Allies, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, met at the Potsdam Conference to decide what would become of Germany and how to divide the spoils of war. Now, publicly, the Allied leaders were friendly and respectful, but privately, it was a different story. When the cameras were off, there was anger, mistrust and hours of arguing. Stalin felt that Churchill was weak and deceitful.

And Roosevelt threw a fit when he heard Stalin's demands for war reparations. Even though the Soviet Union and the United States were allies, they weren't friends. The Potsdam Conference marked the end of the last war, but it was the beginning of a new one. On August 4th, 1945, just a few days after Potsdam, the United States Ambassador William Avril Harriman received a gift from a group of Soviet children who belonged to the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization.

The Vlad-a-what? They were like Russian Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, but more patriotic. I, Gorskaya Natalya, am in the ranks of the All-Union Pioneer Organization named after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Young pioneers, be ready for the fight for the cause of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Always ready! Whoa. Yeah. Something tells me these kids don't sell cookies. Nope. Intense. The kids presented

the ambassador with an impressive gift to commemorate the friendship of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, a hand-carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States. The ambassador was so pleased with the carving that he hung it in his office at the official ambassador residence in Moscow, the Spazzo House. What Harriman didn't realize is that the wooden carving was more than just a decoration. Now hanging on the wall, just behind the ambassador's desk, was a state-of-the-art, high-frequency listening device that was completely undetectable. Ambassador Harriman held private meetings with military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials there.

He had top-secret conversations with generals, the secretary of state and the president. And the Russians, they could hear every word. Oh, boy. How long before they found this bug? Seven years. Oh, for crying out loud. Yep. The intelligence community called the device the thing. You've got to be kidding. And the thing was on the office wall of five different ambassadors over seven years.

How did they finally find it? Well, by accident, actually. And that's what makes the thing so interesting and so effective. This was an electronic listening device that didn't require electricity. Diplomats serving at the American embassy in Moscow were very concerned about Soviet spying. All staff, from the cooks to the cleaners, were background checked. They were constantly sweeping for bugs. And even people visiting the embassy were given cards on arrival that warned them that they should assume all rooms and even outdoor spaces were being monitored.

Even with all these security measures in place, the Soviet secret police were somehow able to listen to the American ambassador's private conversations for years, completely undetected. The thing was created by Leon Theremin, a Russian inventor most famous for developing one of the world's first electronic musical instruments, which he called the theremin. Name checks out. It's all about branding. I don't think I've ever heard of it. Theremin. Oh, you have. Yeah, okay, I know that one.

Bring back David Tennant! Sorry, sorry, I get emotional about Doctor Who. I understand. In the 1920s, theremin was touring the world, showing off his invention. He even performed with the New York Philharmonic and at Carnegie Hall. Now, eventually, he set up a lab in New York and developed one of the first metal detectors for Alcatraz Prison. He also created an electronic burglar alarm

and was the first person to demonstrate interlaced video. Now, this was advanced stuff for the 1920s. Theremin was churning out inventions, working with Thomas Edison, and really making a name for himself. But in 1938, he suddenly disappeared. When Leon Theremin suddenly and mysteriously disappeared from New York in 1938, it was reported that he was executed.

But eyewitnesses said that they saw him talking to several tough-talking Russians who encouraged him to return to the Soviet Union. Did he go back? Well, the other option was a firing squad. He went back. He did. In Russia, Theremin was put in a Siberian gulag and given a choice. He could work a gold mine, breaking big rocks into smaller ones,

or he could work at a shurashka, which is a secret lab for detained scientists and engineers. He chose the lab? He did. At the secret lab, Theremin was tasked with developing new surveillance technology to bug the U.S. embassy and the Spaso house. His first success was an infrared microphone called a boron eavesdropping device, which inspired the modern laser microphone. And it worked by emitting a low power IR beam to detect vibrations on glass windows. Now, the boron system worked well, but it required good line of sight, which the Russians didn't have at the Spaso house in Moscow.

They needed to get something inside. So Thurman invented the thing, the first resonant cavity microphone. The thing was light, hollow, and it was made of wood so it would vibrate when sound passed into it. Now, this is a lot like how a guitar body generates sound when strings vibrate. But the thing was shaped so that sound wouldn't amplify outwards like a guitar, but instead sound waves were focused on an interior membrane that acted as a microphone. And the microphone was attached to a small antenna, which could broadcast radio waves. But radios need power to broadcast. And that's why the thing is so unique. It didn't have its own power source and wasn't connected with wires. Instead, it was activated externally.

The NSA calls this technique illuminating a device. And when the Russians knew an important meeting was happening at the embassy, they would park an unmarked van somewhere close by. And then using a strong radio transmitter, agents could activate the thing's antenna remotely and listen to conversations at will. Once the thing was no longer illuminated, it was completely inert. And this was genius, cutting edge and highly effective. And that's why it operated for years undetected until.

In 1951, a full six years after the thing was installed in the American embassy in Moscow, a British Army radio operator was randomly scanning frequencies coming from the Moscow airport and suddenly heard what sounded like an American conversation. As he tuned the signal, he realized he recognized one of the voices as the British air attache. Now, completely by accident, he had tuned into the KGB frequency. Now he alerted the embassy who conducted a full bug sweep, but they found nothing. Then about a year later, another operative was scanning Soviet military radio traffic when he picked up a conversation in English that seemed to be coming from the Spaso house.

The new ambassador, George Kennan, called in a special anti-espionage unit to perform a sweep. But this time they focused on radio traffic. So Kennan went to his office and pretended to dictate an important message to his secretary. The American radio tech switched on their equipment and picked up the signal almost immediately. And it was coming from something very close by. It's coming from inside the house. Exactly. A few minutes later, they triangulated the signal and found the source hanging right there on the wall.

It was the thing. So you remember my name now, do you? During those seven years, the thing gathered top secret information from some very high level guests, including General Eisenhower, White House staff and a dozen congressmen. A member of the Soviet team that monitored the Spaso house later said the thing allowed the KGB to get specific and very important information, which gave us certain advantages in the prediction and performances of world politics in the difficult period of the Cold War. That night, a radio technician slept with the thing under his pillow just in case the KGB tried to retrieve it. The next day, it was sent to Washington to be studied.

And what did the Russians say about this? Oh, nothing. The Americans and the British didn't say a word for years. No? What did they do with it? They reverse engineered it to use on the Soviets. Yeah this? Oh, nothing. The Americans and the British didn't say a word for years. No? What did they do with it? They reverse engineered it to use on the Soviets. Yeah, I saw that coming. Whatever information the thing provided to the Russians, it eventually came back to bite them.

In May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Soviet airspace. A few weeks later, at a UN National Security Council meeting, the Soviets accused the United States of spying and drafted a resolution that would have the U.N. officially condemn the U.S., call the violation of Soviet airspace an aggressive act and force American flights to stop. So for three days, the Soviets presented arguments attacking the U.S. The United States was accused of warmongering, being an untrustworthy nation and threatening world peace. The Soviets argued that countries who spied on each other should

be condemned and espionage and surveillance are considered acts of aggression. Right, right, right, right. The Americans quietly took the punishment. Then on day four, when it was finally time for the U.S. to present its rebuttal, it simply brought out the thing. Ambassador Large counters repeated denials of Soviet spy activities with a concrete and dramatic example. He tells how the Soviet planted a listening device in America's Moscow embassy, concealed inside a wooden carving of the Great Seal, presented as a gift by the Russians. The thing was top secret for almost 10 years, but now the entire world was shown spying goes both ways. The U.N. voted against the Soviet Resolution 702. And now, thanks to a wooden carving delivered by children as a gift of peace and friendship,

the Cold War was in full swing, and nuclear war seemed more likely than ever. When the helicopter rescue team arrived at the Dyatlov Pass in February 1959, the nine missing hikers had been dead for weeks. The more the investigators tried to piece together what happened, the more the story didn't seem to add up. Their tent had been cut open from the inside and abandoned, but there was no sign of a struggle. And over a half mile away, two victims were almost completely naked, though temperatures were 30 below zero that night. Other bodies were found even farther away. Two had fractured skulls. two victims were almost completely naked, though temperatures were 30 below zero that night. Other bodies were found even farther away. Two had fractured skulls. Two more had major chest injuries. One was missing his eyes and another was missing her tongue. And reports show that

two of the hikers had been exposed to unusually high amounts of radiation. Soviet investigators listed the cause of death as a compelling natural force and closed the case a few weeks later. The Dyatlov Pass incident has been a mystery for over 60 years and theories include a military cover-up, a KGB operation gone wrong, a Bigfoot attack, and of course aliens. Now one researcher believes he knows what happened that night. Others are not so sure. Let's find out why. In the winter of 1959, nine Russian adventurers were on a 200-mile cross-country hiking expedition making their way through the Siberian wilderness.

This was difficult terrain, but the seven men and two women were young, fit, and highly experienced skiers and mountain climbers. They were led by 23 year old Igor Dyatlov, a promising student studying engineering at the Euro Polytechnic Institute. A few others in the group were classmates of his at UPI. Now, before he left, Dyatlov told his friends back home that he would send them a telegram as soon as the team returned. Well, that letter was never sent and none of the group was ever seen alive again. The hikers documented everything. They kept journals, and they took tons of pictures.

They took selfies? Tons of them. Now, sure, there was lots of snow and frigid temperatures, but everyone was in good spirits, and things seemed to be going predictably until February 1st. That day, the group was making its way through Dyatlov Pass, though back then it didn't have a name, and as they tried to push through, they were hit with high winds and snow. The decreasing visibility pushed the group off course,

and they accidentally ended up on the side of a mountain called Kolatsiakl by the region's indigenous people. Kola, Kulats? Kolatsiakl. Right. We got a translation? Dead Mountain. Oh boy. This is a photo of the group,

in deep snow with almost zero visibility, digging out a platform for their tent. This is the last photo of them alive. The final entry in the group's diary reads, It is difficult to imagine such a comfort on the ridge, with shrill howling wind, hundreds of kilometers away from human settlements. And then, nothing. During their journey, members of the group sent postcards and letters to family and friends,

informing them of their progress. But weeks had gone by without a single word, so people began to worry. On February 26th, almost a month later, a search party was finally able to locate the campsite. And when they did, it was obvious something had gone terribly wrong. The tent where the entire group slept was discovered under a thin layer of snow. It had been cut open from the inside, but there was no sign of a struggle. Food, clothes, gear were still neatly stacked inside the tent. A meal had been set up, but there was no sign of a struggle. Food, clothes, gear were still neatly stacked inside the tent.

A meal had been set up, but the food was untouched, and there were no bodies. The next day, nine sets of footprints were found leading down the mountain into the woods. The tracks were evenly spaced and they weren't deep, and this told investigators that the group was moving calmly and orderly. They weren't scrambling, they weren't running, and they weren't fighting.

But the tracks were odd. They weren't made with boots. The tracks were made by people wearing socks or barefoot in sub-zero temperatures. Searchers then came across a cedar tree where they found the remains of a campfire. And near the fire, buried in the snow, were the first two victims of Dyatlov Pass, Doroshenko and Krivonishenko. They were almost naked, wearing only underwear, though temperatures were 30 degrees below zero that night.

Krivonishenko had blackened fingers and third degree burns on his shins and feet. And for some reason in his mouth was a chunk of flesh that he had bitten off his right hand. The tree limbs above the fire were broken over five meters above the ground and pieces and in his mouth was a chunk of flesh that he had bitten off his right hand. The tree limbs above the fire were broken over five meters above the ground, and pieces of flesh were found in the tree bark, and scraps of clothing were found in the branches. Now, why would they climb a tree?

Was visibility so poor that they were looking for a way back to the tent? Were they gathering wood for the fire? Or were they trying to get away from something? Rescuers expanded the search area and about 200 feet away, they found three more bodies, including Igor Dyatlov. They were positioned as if they were running away from the tree, trying to get back to the tent. Investigators said all of them had died of hypothermia as they had no damage except for superficial injuries and what would be caused by exposure to cold. But this doesn't explain why Dershenko, who was found under the tree, had skin that was brownish purple or why he had gray foam and gray liquid coming out of his mouth. It didn't explain the burns, the flayed limbs, or why someone would bite off a chunk of their

own hand. The second set of bodies was also confusing. One of them had multiple skull fractures consistent with falling and tumbling over and over again, but there were no bloody rocks or stumps or any evidence anywhere that a fall had occurred. The only explanation at this point that despite being highly experienced in outdoor winter survival, they had suddenly fled into the dark and the cold without adequate preparation and were frantically trying to make do before succumbing to the elements. That's only five.

What? That's only five out of nine hikers. Did they find any out of four? They did, but not until months later. And when those bodies were discovered, the story gets even stranger. Four bodies were still missing for months, but in May when the snow began to melt, a local hunter found a makeshift snow den in the woods

about 250 feet from the cedar tree. A deep hole was cut in the snow and the floor was made of branches. Pieces of clothing were found scattered around the den. Black sweatpants with the right leg cut off, the left half of a woman's sweater. Another search team arrived and they uncovered the four remaining victims lying together in at least 10 feet of snow. Autopsy reports say that these people died not of exposure, but of massive injuries.

And at this point, criminal investigators were brought in to determine if there was foul play. Three of the bodies had severe injuries, crushed body cavities, broken ribs, and internal hemorrhaging. One had a skull fracture so severe that foul play was eliminated because no human could generate the kind of force to create this level of damage. Instead, the injuries were consistent with being in a car crash or near the explosion of a bomb, but no soft tissue damage was found and no external injuries.

A careful inventory of clothing recovered showed that some of the victims were wearing clothes taken or cut off the bodies of the others that died before them. Avalanche. Well, that's what they originally thought. But an avalanche would have flattened the whole campsite. But if you look at the photos of the tent, the searchers found, you can see that the skis and ski poles are still upright. There was no damage to the tree line and there was no debris. And people who die of avalanches usually asphyxiate.

But postmortem analysis shows no sign of this. They either died from injuries or died of cold. But either way, when they died, they were still breathing. The locals say that the Otloff Pass doesn't get avalanches. None were reported before the incident, and none have been reported since. And what's even more strange is two of the hiker's eyes were missing, and one of them was missing her tongue. Avalanches don't do that.

They don't. And maybe the strangest detail of all, two of the hiker's clothing had significant levels of radiation. They were radioactive? Yep. Now, despite all of the strange evidence, the case went nowhere due to what was called an absence of a guilty party. The investigation was closed a few weeks later. The final conclusion was that the cause of death was an unknown, compelling force which

the hikers were unable to overcome. And that was it. That was it. But the victim's families weren't satisfied. So they started demanding answers from the Soviet government. How did the Soviets respond? Well, all files, journals and photographs were classified. The area was made off limits and all evidence collected was destroyed. Of course. But there is no shortage of theories about what happened.

We can. Theories about what happened at the Dyatlov Pass, there are some good ones. I'll cover a few, but I'll link to the full list in the description. The first theory is aliens. Be patient. Sorry, sorry. Go, go ahead. Remember that a lot of the hikers were students at the Europe Polytechnic Institute or connected with UPI in some way? Well, UPI was constantly turning out recruits for nuclear research and the Soviet military. Ooh, I like where this is going.

First theory, the KGB connection. Alexei Radikin wrote a book called The Outlaw Pass where he claimed that three of the hikers were KGB agents on a mission to uncover a secret cell of CIA operatives. During the Cold War, a favorite Soviet tactic was to plant radioactive material in places it didn't belong just to set the Americans on fruitless

searches. Now, Rattigan says that two or three of the hikers were hired by the KGB to deliver radioactive tainted clothing to CIA agents. And the oldest member of the group at age 37, Semyon Zolotaryov, joined the group at the last minute. He was a combat veteran with years of military service who eventually went to work for the NKVD, or the Soviet secret police. And before transferring to the physics department at UPI, he worked in Moscow at a top-secret scientific facility known as PO Box 3394.

And Yuri Krivonishenko worked at P.O. Box 404 slash 10, where a massive nuclear accident occurred in 1957. Alexei Radikin is convinced that this group was not gathered by accident. The histories of at least three of the hikers show a lot of KGB connection. The true objective of their mission, unknown to the other members, was to deliver radioactive samples to a group of agents of the CIA and take pictures of the spies. At the beginning of the journey, all the hikers had cameras and journals.

We saw them. But when Kolevatov's body was discovered, his journal and camera were missing, and he was one of the suspected spies. Now, theory number two. Like, who's this guy? Whoa! Now, theory number two, like who's this guy? In 2014, the Discovery Channel released a documentary called Russian Yeti, The Killer Lives, and they used the Dyatlov incident to make their case that the hikers had disturbed the natural habitat of a yeti.

And they used this photo as evidence. The doc went on to say that the Yeti was the reason the bodies were missing. Eyes and a tongue. Now, this photo has been authenticated. was evidence. The doc went on to say that the Yeti was the reason the bodies were missing eyes and a tongue. Now, this photo has been authenticated. It's absolutely real, but it doesn't look much like a Bigfoot to me. And that documentary was well, it was garbage. So next theory, aliens, ball lightning. This theory says that the reason for the tent being cut from the inside was not to escape, but to set up a camera on a makeshift tripod. Dyatlov himself had experimented with telescopes and was interested in space flight

and astronomy. The local Mansi people had reported seeing glowing golden orbs in the sky that same night and another hiking group camping 50 kilometers away also reported orange floating orbs in the exact same place at the exact same time. There are even recovered photos from one of the cameras that shows some type of lights in the sky. Lev Ivanov, the lead investigator of the incident, said, I suspected at the time and I'm almost sure now that these bright flying spheres had a direct connection to the group's death.

He also reported that the treetops in the area were burned above a certain height. In 1990, after Ivanov retired, he published an article claiming that the Soviet government forced him to abandon this theory, and they removed everything from the report that mentioned UFOs, orbs, or anything unusual. He insisted the deaths were due to heat rays

or balls of fire associated with orbs. Yes! Another scientific theory is that a rare weather event of the deaths were due to heat rays or balls of fire associated with orbs. Yes. Another scientific theory is that a rare weather event generated infrasound that caused the hikers to suddenly become disoriented and anxious. Donnie Eicher, who spent five years researching the incident and actually visited the site, believes that a wind phenomenon called a Carmen Vortex Street could have produced a terrifying, powerful sound, which is proven to induce irrational fear in humans. We have a video about this on the channel out below.

Nice plug. Now, if hit with infrasound, the group might have fled the tent and fallen victim to the cold before they realized what was happening. Now, those are just a few of the theories that have been circulating for years. Some say a weapons test went wrong. Others say the military killed the group and staged the scene. Carbon monoxide poisoning is another theory

or a bad mushroom trip. Though toxicology reports discount those theories. If you believe the reports. If you believe the reports. Nobody has been able to come up with a definitive answer. That is, until this year. Two scientists think they've solved the mystery of Dyatlov Pass, and they used the

movie Frozen to prove their theory. Did you just say they used Frozen? Yeah. The Disney movie? That's right. Let it go, let it go, a do do boo do do do do. That one? Yeah, that one.

Oh, this I gotta hear. Though the avalanche theory has been mostly dismissed, a new theory has been proposed that the hikers were hit by a very specific and rare kind of avalanche. Johan Gomm, a scientist who studies snow phenomena, was watching the movie Frozen when... Let it go, let it go, I'm a fish and I like water, let it go. You done? I love that movie. Gome noticed that Disney had created very realistic snow movement,

so he worked with studio animators to develop a model that shows how the group could have been hit by what's called a delayed slab avalanche. This kind of avalanche occurs when you affect the warm, wet snow at the bottom of a slope. This causes the entire face of snow to eventually move at once now think about when you have two books stacked on top of each other you could tilt them and they'll stick together until you reach a certain angle top book slides now an avalanche only requires a 20 degree slope to trigger it now the diatlov camp was built at 23 degrees gohan believes that when they cut into the snow to build their tent, it started a countdown. They initiated a chain reaction of micro-disturbances that took a few hours to propagate.

Trapped under the slab, the group might have panicked and cut their way out. The injuries sustained by some of the group would have been consistent with another slab hitting them at full force. Yeah, but what about all the, you know, the weird stuff? Well, Gomes says, We say that this is possible that such a slab avalanche would have injured them the way they were injured. Everything that happened after the avalanche

is out of the scope of our paper. Inconvenient. Though it wasn't snowing that night, the hikers did have journal entries about howling winds. These were most likely katabatic winds. And katabatic winds fall down a slope and quickly gain speed due to gravity. And the winds are hurricane force. And they were absolutely detected by local weather stations that night.

So the hikers cut their camp into the snow, which disturbed the slab. Then katabatic winds started blowing snow on top of the slab above the tent. And over the course of hours, the weight of the snow above camp reached critical mass, causing the entire slab to fall. Now, using the Disney snow animation, it was shown that just a small avalanche, maybe five by five meters, would have been enough to cover the camp, but not enough snow that the rescue team would have noticed, especially since they didn't arrive on scene for 26 more days. So given this new information, can we piece together what happened to the outlaw and his friends that night? I think we can. KGB UFOs, orbs of light. These are fun theories, but I think this is what happened. The slab avalanche hits, covering them in a few feet of snow.

The nine campers cut their way out of the tent. Yeah, but... What? Why leave all this stuff in the tent and go out in the cold in their skivvies? Well, it was discovered that they had a second stash of supplies in the forest. So they escaped the avalanche, knowing they have backup supplies. They retreat to the trees and start a fire. The young trees at the bottom of the slope were icy and wet,

so they climbed the cedar in search of dry wood, but with temperatures 30 below zero, they had very little time to save themselves. The two most poorly dressed were probably the first to go. The burned skin probably from being desperately close to the fire, and with hypothermia setting in, they were losing sensation and didn't realize they were being burned. Krivonishenko, losing feeling and probably becoming delirious, bites his hand to test for sensation and he dies within an hour.

Seven survivors cut the clothes away from their friends and dress themselves in whatever they can scavenge from the bodies. Three of the group, including Dyatlov, try to make it back to the tent. But the steep incline and loose snow make it a difficult task. They soon freeze to death in the struggle uphill. The remaining four decide to build a snow shelter for the night. They find deep snow in a ravine a couple of hundred feet away, but their bad luck continues,

and they pick a spot near a fast-running stream that never freezes. The stream cuts away the snow above their shelter, causing the roof to collapse. They're thrown onto the rocky stream bed and buried under 10 or 15 feet of snow. Now, in general, snow weighs about 20 pounds per cubic foot, a little over a pound per inch of depth. A section of snow that's 20 feet by 20 feet with a depth of 10 feet, that weighs between 85,000 and 100,000 pounds. That's 50 tons falling on you.

So it's like being crushed under a tank. So your injuries would be severe. The missing eyes and tongue probably caused by scavenging animals or just by three months of decomposition near running water. What about the radiation? Right. The lanterns they used, which were found at the site, contained small amounts of thorium, which is radioactive.

And remember, at least two of the hikers worked at a nuclear facility and helped with cleanup after an accident that was almost as bad as Chernobyl. So in retrospect, the nine campers made only one mistake, the placement of the tent. Everything else was by the book. They conducted an orderly evacuation to safer ground. They took shelter in the woods, started a fire and dug out a snow cave. The textbook wrong decision in an avalanche is to stay put. Unfortunately, that wrong decision might have saved their lives. Now, today, Dyatlov Pass is a popular tourist destination.

People come from all over the world to follow the group's footsteps and see where the tent once stood. People say prayers at the stream and leave flowers under the cedar tree where its broken branches are still visible. And just before the team embarked on their adventure, Krivonishenko wrote a poem addressing the entire group. It's been over 60 years since Dyatlov and eight of his courageous friends died on Dead Mountain. But I'm sure they'd be proud to know that not only did they leave their footprints on the map of Russia, but on the map of the entire world. Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. My name is AJ.

That's Hagglefish. How's it hanging? Really? How's it hanging? Long and loose and full of juice. Well, that's disturbing. This has been a Y-Files compilation episode. I hope you were able to learn some new stuff.

But if you didn't, I still appreciate you checking in. This is our last week off. We're back next week with a video about the Anunnaki. A few plugs. Remember, The Y Files is also a podcast. Twice a week, I post deep dives into the stories we cover on the channel and the episodes that wouldn't be allowed on the channel. It's called The Y Files

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with my face on it or a shirt with my face on it or a mouse pad with my face on it or a mug with my face on it or my face with my face on it or one of these squeezy hecklefish talking fish toys those are the plugs we're back next week with a brand new episode about the adonaki until next time be safe be kind and know that you are appreciated. Next week. I played Bolivia, scenario 51 A secret code inside the Bible said I was I love my UFOs and paranormal fun As well as music, so I'm singing like I should But then another conspiracy theory becomes the truth, my friends. And it never ends.

No, it never ends. I fear the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's home with MKUltra. I'm being only two away. Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone on a film set? Were the shadow people there? The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man. I'm told, and his name was cold. And I can't believe I'm told And his name was cold And I can't believe

I'm dancing with the fishes And the fish are Thursday nights Wednesday, Jay too And the white balls of the beat All through the night All I ever wanted was To just hear the truth So the white balls of the beat

All through the night The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come To a god, the secret city underground Mysterious number stations, planets are both two Project Stargate and where the dark watchers found We're In a simulation Don't you worry though The black knight said a lie

He told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish Heck of a fish On Thursday nights when they chase you And the white balls of the green All through the night All I ever wanted Was to just hear the truth And the wild boars have been beat all through the night

All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the wild boars have been beat all through the night Hens will fish on Thursday nights when they chase you And the wild boars have been beat all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the world falls on repeat all through the night Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance

Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance. Gertie loves to dance on the dance floor, because she is a camel. And camels love to dance when the feeling is right on wasting time. Gertie loves to dance, Gertie loves to dance. Good luck then Good luck then