Triforce! - Triforce! #258: A Brief History of Aliens, UFOs and Conspiracies

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Triforce! Episode 258! There's been a potentially groundbreaking discovery on alien life and the secrets of the universe but Sips just doesn't care as we explore the history of UFO sightings! Support your favourite podcast on Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SMnzk6 Music courtesy of Epidemic Sound. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

pickaxe hosts the best the hosts with the most i got a i got a question to start the day off with something oh my god last night i know we're straight into it we're straight deep and profound it's not very profound at all i was watching one of the things i think i mentioned it before that i like watching is tennis players freaking out oh yeah i don't know if you've ever mentioned that before but it is a joy to watch these people have a meltdown they're such babies they are such babies like one call goes against them it's like five minutes of haranguing the umpire and the guys it's so stupid because they're down low and the guy's up on that little sort of chair like a lifeguard looking down at them and they're like just argue it's like arguing with god or something it's so ridiculous i think i think

there's like a two-pronged thing here and the thing is like what happens is when you get taxi drivers or someone like this who spends their entire life listening to like talk radio, all of this information that's constantly, and they talk into passengers all the time, they're constantly learning things, right? And so you sit down with a taxi driver and they seem to be always able to tell you something really interesting, but usually slightly wrong or like right wing, or do you know what I mean? Slightly weird.

Sorry, hold on a sec. We were talking about yeah i know whereas with tennis players they've spent their entire life playing on a on a field but out in a tennis court hitting a racket not getting any educational information about the world and therefore they have no fucking knowledge about how to behave as an adult but that's that should be true of every sport that should be true of every sport i don should be true of every sport. Every sportsman I've ever met has specced fully into charisma and agility and nothing in wisdom or intelligence. I swear to God.

Do you remember when I met that footballer, England footballer, what was his name? Fucking Kyle Walker. Right. You met him? He was the most awful man I think I've ever met in my life. Really? Okay, hang on a second.

He was just so... Back up one second here. When did you meet Kyle Walker from the England football squad? When I did the Fallout 4 brand sponsorship deal where they wanted to appeal to every man. You know, the FIFA crowd. So you met Kyle Walker, the footballer yes and england international and you thought he was got 75 caps he's a legitimately good right back kept mbappe in his pocket for much of that i know but he's an incredibly dull and weird and boring man and i was awkward with him

obviously because you know he's like who's this fucking nerd making jokes about dwarves and things? You know, he didn't play along, really. He didn't get in on... And he was just not a nice guy, you know? Boring. Uninteresting. Well, not nice. Like, as in, was he rude? Was he mean?

He was a bit aloof. Okay. I mean, he's an international superstar as well. He wasn't smart enough to be rude. Right. Do you know what I mean? He's just too dull. Kyle Walker called out within the first five minutes of the podcast.

Kyle, if you're listening, I know you probably are. He's a big fan. I'm just saying. He's on his own on this one. I met some Olympians. God bless them. They were quite actually. They were nice.

They were really nice. They were really, really nice. That was for the sports day vid that we did a while back. That was a good stream. But they seemed really grown up and they wouldn't like slag off the umpire. But I feel like Kyle Walker would. I feel like he'd have an argument with the ref. Do you know what I'm saying?

Oh, a standard footballer. I mean, that's what they do. That's what they're trained to do. Oh, so are you saying that part of a tennis player's training is to become a man-child and argue these points? that part of a tennis player is to training is to become a man child no i just argue these points i think there's more so than than other sports are like the ultimate min maxers so i would say yes they probably are coached somewhat let me ask you this heckling with the with the refs and do you think that if you heckle a ref that's likely to go your way on the next decision or he's going

to spite you spite you and i against you again on the next decision. If you look at someone like Nick Kyrgios, Australian player, famous for his tantrums on the court, he makes John McEnroe look very tame by comparison. For older listeners like me, John McEnroe, you cannot be serious! You cannot be... That guy, he's now a well-regarded commentator and all the rest of it.

But back in the day, he was a brat. We know about actually going around on TikTok. I mean, surprisingly, these quite, quite iconic meltdowns from history is still pretty. That's still pretty memorable.

Even. Yeah. So here's my question. Anyway, I was just watching those meltdown bits. And one of the things you're not allowed to do is the audience or the crowd is not allowed to make a noise while the point is on. Like they're meant to be quiet. So when the guy's about to serve,

you're not allowed. If somebody goes, Hey, they go quiet, please. I'm like, hang on, hang on,

hang on. There are only, as far as I can tell, three sports where that is a requirement. Tennis, golf, and I guessed snooker. I can't think of many others. You're telling me I'm going to take a penalty in football and everybody's allowed to make as much noise as they like? I'm going to try and score something in rugby.

I'm trying to make a conversion in rugby. They're going to say, crowd, everybody be quiet, please. Everybody be quiet. No, no talking. Why just these sports? And it occurred to me, obviously, they're solo sports. So, you know, I guess the idea is, oh, let them concentrate, everybody be quiet. But one thing I wrote was that these sports, especially tennis and golf, were sort of the gentlemanly, sort of, you know, the etiquette-based, not for the hoi polloi and the prols. This is for the gentle folk.

But what the fuck, man? I mean, you're telling me you're a professional athlete. You do this all day, every day, and some noise when you're trying to play tennis is going to put you off? How come that's not put off? That's taken penalties. I guess what people could do,

if they had enough of them them was just not shut up. And they couldn't kick them all out, could they? Oh, they would. They would. I think they would suspend the game. Yeah. Oh, really? It's actually against the rules.

If you're in the crowd at tennis, you're not allowed to talk. They all say, quiet, please. Quiet, please. If you didn't shut up, they'd boot you out. Yeah, they'd boot you out. And I'm you out and I'm just thinking it's weird isn't it that the crowd is not allowed to make a noise at the end of the point they're allowed to applaud but why can't I shout when

when Kyrgyz are saying why can't we all cheer what's different why and tennis players are like oh someone coughed hold on it's like what's going on here you're such a baby you can't even serve with a noise in the background. It doesn't make sense. How come other athletes can do it and you can't?

I just want to understand what's going on. Yeah, I don't know. When Kyle Walker's tested his penalties, he's not having a crowd shouting at him, is he? Do they play crowd noise when he does a penalty test? I don't think Kyle Walker's taken many penalties. Well, if it was a penalty shootout and it went deep enough, I think he has taken a few, yeah.

He might be called upon. Maybe. He's got 75 caps for England. How many goals has he... I'm going to guess like two. None! He's never scored for England. How many caps do you have for England, Lewis, out of interest?

You've got a lot to say about a guy who's very accomplished. I'm just asking. Well, sport, because I've been in the Minecraft Championship. No, you haven't even though. Which one? I don't remember you ever being in a Minecraft championship. Except for Race for the Wall, but that's- you laid that one on for yourself. I'm gonna lay it on the Race for the Wall.

He laid it on himself. Anyway, I want to talk about something as well, because I saw something this week that hit the front page of reddit as it does periodically some um whistleblower military whistleblower this comes up here from time to time this is the ufo thing right has yeah has announced that there's the u.s has um some non-earth exotic materials not of this earth and not man-made. Yeah, non-man-made. That's the claim, yeah. Right. Now, interestingly, this guy is not like, he's not on the History Channel with wacky hair saying, they built the pyramids, man.

You know, he's like a relatively normal person, much like these airline pilots that came out. There's a lot of sceptics rightly pointing out things, you know, like eyewitness testimony is dog shit. But again- These guys can fly a plane but they're not experts on viewing aerial phenomena like all kinds of things like that but this claim i mean i know that america they had some hearing where they were like we've

got to open up if you've got these files we need to see them they're in the public interest you can't just say oh no no no it's too secret for you guys if something's happened you've got to tell us about it and so there might be something there but i i doubt it i doubt it well i mean okay how do you feel about ufos generally sips pflax and when i say ufos i mean aliens not you it's uaps right that's the the more uh widely uh what does that mean unidentified aerial phenomena oh really okay sure so there's a unidentified flying object kind of implies flying saucers, but a UAP gives it a more generic... It's just an aerial phenomena. We don't know what it is. And rather than saying it's a flying object, it might be something else. It might not be an

object. It might just be a phenomena of some kind. So I think it is probably a better term. So these UAPs, the US Navy, they unsecretified. I've forgotten the word, so that's the best way I can find to put it. Declassified. Declassified, yeah. Declassified, yeah. Unsecretified, I think, is probably what they say. I think that sounds better.

Yeah. The sort of footage and these guys saying, well, look at that thing, and all this kind of stuff. But there's all kinds of things to do with parallax and something very low to the ocean looks like it's traveling much faster than it is and things look different through a flare lens and all this kind of stuff. So a lot of it was sort of, in fact, I'm pretty sure we've spoken about this before, but in terms of this new stuff, one guy's come out, like Lois says, and has said there's these exotic materials and that he's saying,

I think there was a British guy came out and said the same thing. He said, I don't know if we have an alien vessel in a hangar, but we've got objects, and we don't know where they came from or who made them, but we found them. So it's an interesting one, for sure. How do you feel about it, though? How do you feel about it?

Do you think it's real, Sips? Yeah, what do you think, Sips? I don't care if it's real or not personally i really don't care no i don't but do you think it's real i'm just not i'm not interested in it i don't know what the what the what the big deal would be if it was real like i don't know what people's expectation behind all this is like you're saying that if it turned out we'd been visited by aliens and we had some remnants of their vessels, you're not interested in that? Well, I would find it interesting enough.

If it was on the news, I would maybe read it or whatever. Are you fucking kidding me, dude? It's like the biggest question of all time. Aliens visiting Earth and you're like, eh. Really? Kind of, yeah. Oh my God. Aliens visiting Earth! And you're like, ehhh! Really?! Kind of, yeah, because I don't see why it's really that huge of a deal. It would be like, okay, wow, there's other life out there. But I'm assuming there just is other life out there anyway.

It's not going to change anything for me. Hold on. First of all, it changes everything. Like what? First of all, it changes everything. It changes everything. Like what? First of all, that we're not alone in the universe. Okay. Secondly, that these aliens, if they have come here, have figured out something that we thought previously it was like literal science fiction.

There's no way that we could really think of a serious way to get from one place to another in enough time that it wasn't like time dilated to fuck and you ended up going there and your entire civilization had died by the time you got back all this kind of shit. They've got some vessel that can travel between the stars. And not only that but there's an implication that they haven't destroyed us already. We're not

at war with them. They're not hostile. There's also like the implication that they can or at least want to communicate with us or are similar to us in some way. They might be building up to that, like saying we're going to check it out. We're going to see if they're ready. And then we'll come in and say, hey, look, there's this whole galactic community out there. You can be a part of it.

Like it would be the most fundamental shift imaginable for the entire species. If some of that stuff happened, sure. But I don't think anything like that's gonna- Not in our lifetimes anyway. I don't think it's- Or even our kids' lifetimes. I don't think anything like that is actually gonna happen. So what you're saying is that you don't actually think it's aliens?

Well, it might be, but I just don't care if it is or not. Like, there's probably something out there, but- I'm stunned. I just don't really give much of a shit. Wow. I think people get so so so bent out of shape about it like you know on this quest for truth or whatever it's like okay fine like if there is something out there who cares like god oh i see i see so what you're saying is that basically

yes because this like ufos reddit community and stuff it feels it feels like there's this huge bunch of people who are like we're so close're like, we're so close, we're gonna find out. It's like, who gives a shit? It doesn't matter. It's not gonna change your life at all. You're still just gonna be some nerd posting on Reddit. You're just gonna find some other shit to put your tinfoil hat

on about. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter. No, I don't. I am not accepting a you know what I mean. I do not know what you mean. I am absolutely stunned. This is why we mean. I do not know what you mean. I am absolutely stunned. This is why we have the three dissenting points on this podcast. No, of course. That's what makes it. If we all just went, yes, that's interesting,

then this would be a UFO podcast or UAP podcast. Wait, so you're actually really interested in UFOs? Like you read up about them? Who wouldn't be? Here's the problem. Me, for example. Right. That's what I can't believe.

I don't read up about any of that stuff. So I don't read up about it. If there's a story about it that seems credible, I'll read it. And I'm interested. I mean, I'm fascinated to think that, first of all, I am a massive skeptic when it comes to the idea that we will ever travel faster than light and get between places and warp speed and all that shit. I really don't think we'll get there. I think the distance between our star and other stars is so fucking vast and we're just not built for it.

Our brains aren't built for it. Our bodies aren't built for it. Our lifespan is too short. And I just think in terms of the resources and everything, as we understand physics, it would be so costly to get a ship full of people from one place to another at a decent percentage of the speed of

light that it would be worth the journey yeah and there's nothing nearest that we've seen but we're like nightmare i mean we are these fleshy lumps that need a very small temperature range to survive and you know we have to bring all our fucking cows with us and we need food and water and all this shit with us yeah and you know and the radiation the constant radiation constantly bombarding us so we're gonna have to have this massively thick hull in order to try and survive yeah not to mention that even traveling at that speed even in space the vacuum of space there are like little molecules knocking about like one per meter cubed or something just be one little rogue hydrogen atom drifting about. If you're traveling at the speed of light, those things are hitting the front of your ship so fast that even those tiny molecules are building up heat on the front of your vessel.

So we'd have to, there's so much technology that we'd have to figure out that we're just like, wow, how would we even do that? If someone has done that and they are our neighbors and have found us, which is in itself a miracle that they have found us on this little twisty arm of us because even since broadcasting radio waves our our radio waves over the last 100 years have even have only gone to about you know a hundred stars or something or a thousand stars yeah and we've looked at those might be more but we've looked at those pretty closely with a big telescope and there's now theret there. Like, most of the ones we found were like, well, that planet does have water. They found one the other day. This planet the other day.

I've re- I watch a lot of science stuff and I read a lot of science stuff. Yeah. Not UFO stuff, but stuff that they've actually concrete science. Yes. Right, but the thing is- I'm interested enough in that. Like, I like finding out about planets that could sustain life or whatever i believe in all that stuff and i find it interesting interested in that that's not going to affect your life no but it's interesting enough like if i'm bored i'll read about it like it is interesting because it's you know other other

planets like i'm as interested in that as i'm interested in like the other planets of our solar system which is to say not a whole lot, but it's, I find it interesting enough, but I don't, I'm not going to spend all of my time. Let's do this in another way. One evening you step out into your garden.

Yeah. And just as the sun's going down in the sky, you see these weird dancing lights. Okay. And it's like, you get your wife and she comes out and you look up in the sky and you're looking at each other and you're like what the fuck is this and you what do you think you know what's your first feeling about that well that just what you said i'd be like oh what the fuck is this and i would probably stand there and look at it a bit longer but like

what do you want me to do with that otherwise but would you think it was aliens maybe well i might but you know i'd probably at first I would probably think it was something else. You know, like I think, oh, maybe it's like an airplane or like, you know, some sort of like military thing or whatever. You know, I wouldn't my first go to wouldn't be like, oh, my God, the invasion has started. I mean, mine wouldn't be because I have to prepare my ass. I don't think it's even likely that they'd get here Like it's so ridiculous that they would find us, travel here, land

Yeah but you're seeing it with your eyes right Right but am I seeing it, this is definitely an alien ship landing Well you have no way of knowing You see blinking, you see blinking lights in the sky Or something moving around weird in the sky Right that I'm definitely, I'm getting that. It could be anything. You saw it, you filmed it, and then you looked on the people on the internet and

news about it and there was no news about it. There was no information about it. You sent it to the government. They didn't reply. They said, this is nothing. Don't worry. Don't worry about it. Go back inside.

You didn't see anything. Yeah. Like, you know, when there's no, when there's no- Right. But what have they seen? And then the men in black turn up at your front door, and they probe you. Probe.

I'm being probed. I'm being probed. Oh, no, mummy. Hello, is that the government? I've been probed. I'll put you through to the probing hotline, sir. Hold on one minute, please. What hold music would they play on the probe hotline?

I don't know. The x-files theme tune uh right so when do you think the first uh ufo sighting was um in history um in all of history define ufo that they thought it was an alien or they didn't know what it was things in the sky unknown shit the first time they flew that hot air balloon or whatever. Right, so when was that? 1820 or something like that. Miles out. Miles out. The first one was in Rome. There's Roman histories.

And in fact, UFO sightings throughout history at every time period. Right, but hold on. We're just talking about something is in the sky and people don't know what it is. I can tell you. Look, in the work of the historian Livy, who was writing in the first century BCE, it's packed with weird shit spotted in the sky above Rome. They saw a ball of fire, phantom ships flying in the sky, and some men in white standing before an altar. All right, so this is all bollocks.

Okay, wake up. So before the Battle of Milvian Bridge, the Emperor Constantine saw a cross of light in the sky above the sun. Can I, just before you continue, can I just say, because I know Flax is very bewildered by my non, this is the kind of shit that turns me off of it, Flax. I'm interested enough if there's aliens and stuff, but it's this shit that puts me off. No, no, no. This is nonsense. And it's this shit that, on principle, I don't want to be a part of. What do you mean, puts you off? Yeah, I believe in aliens, and now I'm lumped in with these fucking maniacs that come up with this shit. No, not at all.

What I'm saying is- That's my point I'm trying to make. I'm saying, the question was that if this turned out to be definitively, yes have actually been here your response was who cares but i just explained why my response is that right so you say you're you don't want to be a tinfoil hack you don't want to you say you do believe it is but you don't want to admit it because you don't want to get lumped in with all the crazy yes right that's Right. So, it's a defensive mechanism. I don't want anyone to think, you know, hang on a second. This is a guy that I can, hey, let's go to the pub and I'll share all my crazy ideas with you. No, I'm not him.

I don't believe in it. You like the idea of aliens. But I would find it interesting enough if they did actually exist. I would be like, cool. So, you would call the alien believer. No. It's okay to be that. No. Again, the defenses have gone up again. No, he is not. I would be like, cool. So you would call it alien believer. No, I wouldn't. No. Again, the defenses have gone up again.

No, he is not. I am not. I am not. So don't get any funny ideas out there, internet. I think you've dug yourself out of this hole. It's fine. Okay. So Emperor Constitutes are a cross of light in the sky above the sun

with words in Greek reading, in this sign, obviously in the bible well it's bollocks but he saw it and he was written down and this is again this is not just a one-time thing if flags has come around to my way thousands and thousands of people have seen shit in the sky yeah it's always bollocks it's always bollocks. It's always bollocks. Nobody has seen. Okay. I don't believe any of that shit.

Honestly, from back then. What was the first UFO sighting in the US? I can tell you. It was in 1639. James Everill. James Everill, a sober, discreet man, so we're told. He was on the muddy river near Boston when he and two companions

saw a great light in the sky. It stood still, then flamed up. It was about three yards square, and then it ran across the sky and contracted into the figure of a pig. A pig-shaped entity would spend several hours reportedly zooming back and forth along the river

and Charleston as swift as an arrow. Absolute balls. When the incident was over, the gentleman found that their boat had been carried a mile along the river against the tide. That is the first UFO sighting in America. I'm calling it bollocks. I'll keep saying it.

I hear this, right? But what I'm saying is that there are thousands of these sightings throughout history but yeah people have been drinking and imbibing and taking drugs for a very long time listen before flying people saw different shit in 1609 there was someone who saw a large gourd in the sky above korea right in 1668 someone saw a silver lizard above Slovakia. Yes. People were seeing a lot of ships, a lot of globes, crosses, rods, a lot of things that they recognized as things. So it was usually spears, smoky clouds, houses.

So they see this shit up there. And because they haven't got airplanes and jets. They just have an explanation. Yeah. So they were like, what is shit up there, and because they haven't got aeroplanes and jets- They just have an explanation. Yeah, so they were like, what is that up there? And they were like, it looks like a pig! Because that's all they've fucking seen is pigs and spears and gourds. A plough in the sky! Yeah, exactly!

Because that's their frame of reference, is pigs and gourds and ploughs. And they see some unexplained aerial phenomena, and they're like, what do you think, that's their frame of reference is pigs and gourds and flowers. And they see some unexplained aerial phenomena. Of course. Well, you always think that's a pig up there flying around. I think a lot of these things are actual space stuff, like meteorites or aurora borealis or things like this. Because that sometimes does happen further down south or further up north than it would usually do.

And that can be very strange. Like eclipses were always very confusing to people they were very confused about what that was but there's also lots of things like you mentioned earlier P-Flex there's things called sun dogs where the sun looks like it has two more suns there's like a thing called willow the wisp

which certainly happens like marsh gas a lot of people talk about marsh gas and things like that and certainly in the fog lots of strange things that that that look weird uh ball lightning is a thing that is a thing there's also this thing called fatter morgana i don't know if i said that right but when it's a mirage that happens when cold air gets trapped between warmer and it looks like the sky is reflecting what's on the surface. So I prefer, I'm a big fan of fatter Morgana. Yes.

Dummy thick Morgana. Fatter, fatter Morgana. So there's, there is actually like explanations, but obviously good old mass hysteria, but, but of course,

like, and that, that leads you onto like the idea of when the airships and balloons, like you said, were starting to be made. And in fact, that kind of had this incredible effect on people. So, for example, in 1909, there was a man named Wallace Tillinghast. What a name. He told the Boston Herald.

Hail to you, sir. It is I, Wallace Tillinghast. He said, I wish to sup here at your premises. He told the Boston Herald he had flown an amazing new plane 300 miles from Worcester, Massachusetts to New York City and back, three times further than anyone else had managed at the time. And really, in the real very early age of flying, he was one of the only people who had a plane. And in fact, he didn who had a plane and in fact

he didn't have a plane no he lied uh there was no evidence that he ever had a plane however um no one saw him on the original flight but in the weeks and months afterwards 2 000 people claimed to have seen him flying his plane on further flights between Worcester, Massachusetts and New York City. And he hadn't. He didn't exist. He didn't fly at all. I love it. So it's a very, very common thing. The other thing is, once flying machines were invented, people kept blaming certain people. People kept seeing UFOs in the sky and they were stuck before flying machines were even invented. Thomas Edison was so sick of being of getting the blame because people thought he had invented a flying machine. Yeah. He had to issue a strongly worded statement denying having invented anything.

Because everyone was blaming him for all the UFOs they were seeing in the sky. I hate when that happens. Please don't mix me up with that tilling god. Fool, sir. I flew around the Stat. I hate when that happens. Please don't mix me up with that tilling gun. Fool. Fool, sir! I flew around the Statue of Liberty at 4,000 feet. It was all at night time, so you wouldn't have seen it, but I definitely did it. This was stuff that was happening constantly. There was a guy in 1896 who saw two men peddling

a slow-moving light in the sky 1,000 feet up. Wow. Good eyesight. Another man saw it land, came across it on the ground, and met some Martians who tried to kidnap him. Yes. However, he was the strapping fella in question, was too strong, and fought them off and escaped.

Of course he did. Ridiculous. I just love the idea that the Martians have a fucking flying bicycle. Like that's what they... Well, that's what people saw as flying machines back in the day. And so that's what they saw in the sky. And then what happened after that was the First World War with zeppelins. The Germans had one zeppelin,

but thousands of people reported seeing airships in the skies over their... This was before World War I. But then during World War I, they actually did send a bunch of zeppelins over to raid and no one saw them the ultimate irony wow yeah they did have but but this was the thing like once once world war one and world war two happened yeah there was this fear the sky the skies were dangerous scary yeah yeah exactly because there were flying bombs there were silent flying bombs

there were v2 rockets coming over you know it felt like you could die from something from the sky at any time and certainly with bomb shelters and aerial raids and things like this like there was this whole culture and certainly in britain that sort of created this idea of fear of the above okay so the ufo UFOlogy founding myths happened very shortly after that. In 1947 there was a pilot called Kenneth Arnold. He was an amateur pilot, but he was quite a sober guy.

He claimed that he saw nine shiny disc-shaped objects flying around 1,200 miles per hour past Mount Rainier, not far from Seattle. I know Mount Rainierier i've seen it he was a sober and respectful man not prone to exaggeration so the reporters who interviewed him wrote the story up pretty straight the resulting coverage led to the popularization of the phrase

flying saucer as a description for ufos and poor kenneth arnold who thought he'd seen some secret military technology seemingly wishing he kept his mouth shut because two weeks later, a public information official in Roswell, New Mexico. Hello. Did the exact wrong kind of thing you're supposed to do when involved in a conspiracy to cover up the existence of alien life and issued a press release saying that the military had discovered the debris of a flying disc. So he immediately, a military official reported reported that flying discs had been discovered. The next day over in Texas, someone higher up the chain of command clarified that the objects recovered were remnants of weather balloons and radar reflexes. Yeah.

They showed the wreckage, which weighed only a few pounds, and was made of rubber strips, tin foil, rather tough paper and sticks, which doesn't sound particularly alien. But the US Army, they'd already announced they had a flying saucer and trying to walk it back didn't work. So it just continued to grow and grow and grow. In 1978, there was another thing that happened, which was Jesse Marcel, who's a Lieutenant Colonel, told ufologist Stan Friedman that it was non-Earth material, not Earth. So it's exactly the same as what happened today, except this was 50, 60 years ago. He said that this guy, and it was 30 years after Roswell, after this thing was debunked,

a Lieutenant Colonel, someone who's actually pretty senior, said to a UFOlogist that this is not of this world. And obviously, this again spawned this huge amount of UFO fever, this kind of conspiracy theory, which is in the book I'm reading. The book's called Conspiracy. I found it in the airport and I read it on the plane and it was interesting. It's got all the conspiracies in it, but this is the chapter on space that we're doing. And God, it's fascinating, right?

And obviously then the 1990s came and Area 51, which is not far from an Air Force test site in Nevada, although 700 miles from Roswell, it's not actually that close to Roswell. Was this thing that, again, was actually genuinely a secret test site. And as a result, everyone assumed that was where all the UFO stuff were. Right. The US military sort of didn't really want to talk about it, didn't really want to give proper answers about what was there, and so was not very good at debunking these alien conspiracies.

Right. So here's my question. If this stuff nowadays, we're believing it because we feel now, I think, oh, we're so smart and we know all this stuff and science has advanced so much that we're not going to make these mistakes.

Like all these things you've listed in 200 or 300 years time, I'm sure that the stuff that we claim to see and people will be saying, well, that can be clearly explained as this, that and the other, like our understanding of the atmosphere and shit that you see, and human perception is still not perfect. Like we've got a very good idea about about what things are and how it all happens, but how people perceive things and why we're so shit at deciding what something is, it's still, you know, it's not like a hard science.

I don't think maybe correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but the way thing, the way, like you said, all the things you've listed and the way people saw them back then they see something and your brain tries to make sense of it. And it's like, that's a flying saucer because we've been told that there are flying sources. If you go back to the Roman times, you look up and it's all that looks like the spear of athena or whatever you know they don't fucking know so we're always just trying to make sense of need an explanation like you said yeah people need an explanation right yeah right we it's no it's because that's a tangible thing that we can do something about right and we can take action on like if we don't know what something

is we're paralyzed and you know if you don't know what something is, we're paralyzed. And if you've seen these things in the sky, and there's no good thing that explains them, and the government doesn't want to talk about their spy planes that have been sent to monitor Soviet nuclear tests or other stuff that they don't want to tell you about, then UFOs fill the gap. So here's my question. If this- I know that they just decided to, like I was saying, about to desecretify a bunch of stuff. Yeah.

If it turns out that we really do have exotic materials, bits of spacecraft from aliens, it begs a few questions. First of all, why are they so shit at flying that they're question number one is how is it possible for them to travel this far are they just in their early days of nasa phase of reaching out to other inhabited worlds where they found us and this is the equivalent to i mean i think it was either chinese or japanese i think it might have been japanese moon lunar lander that fucking crashed on the moon, like blew up, and they're like, ah, shit, we fucked that up.

What if that is where they are now for this? Well, this is it. These are such interesting questions, aren't they? Because where exactly, like, if we were to send a probe to a random planet... It's going to blow up. It's going to fucking blow up. It might not go great.

Yeah, we're not going to make it. It's going to be, we're going to, oh, we miscalculated, sorry, we were wrong. Yeah. Oh, going to blow up. It's going to fucking blow up. It might not go great. We're not going to make it. Oh, we miscalculated. Sorry, we were wrong. All the materials were wrong. What if that is why we've got this shit? It's because this is their early fumbling steps at exploring other worlds, and they've looked at us through their super telescope, and they're like,

oh, it looks like there's fucking an atmosphere there, and there might even be life. Let's go check it out. And they send over their probe and of course it fucking crashes because it's had to travel light years to get here. And now we're left with these bits of metal and, uh, or whatever it is, exotic materials. And we're like, aliens are here. They've been here. I don't know if they would travel that far. I don't know if it's possible. They might just be sending over little probes or drones or something. And maybe as the years go by their shit gets better. But it still is fascinating to think.

From my perspective, the thing I'm most interested in is, first of all, that there is life in our neighborhood, which is amazing if we had neighbors. That would be amazing. Second of all, they might share some technology with us and say, hey, we figured some stuff out that you guys haven't, and maybe we've even figured out some stuff that they haven't. You never know. And they will be like, oh, this is amazing. And thirdly,

that they were able to find us and that we could communicate with them. Just imagine the entirety of our world history, all our art and culture, all our music. Imagine if there's another group of people out there who have all their own stories and history and music and culture that we could do in exchange and you could read about

the history of Garlarbon 4. Yes. And it'd be like, wow, this is like a whole new history. And you'd have people studying alien history and learning all about all their myths and legends and everything. It would be incredible. They might even have a whole bunch of movies we've never seen. We'd have

to get them dubbed into English because it'd all be in Glarbon, but they'd be bloody good movies I bet. I want to see that. I want to see what someone else has been up to. The idea that someone else has evolved and is similar to us, that they're sending out probes and they're fascinated by what's out there. They're intelligent. We could communicate with them.

Endless possibilities. My imagination goes crazy. So that's why I'm interested. What if they're just killer bugs, though? Well, of course. But why would killer bugs send metal probes? Because they just want to conquer the entire universe. You would just send a pod that lands and out pop the spiders and you're away with it.

You've got to assume that if they figured out how to get off their planet and survive in space, and they are biological, and if they're not, that's one of the human ways that you could think that we would transfer ourselves into robot bodies to survive the roughness of space. I think there's a lot of work and effort and energy. Look at how little we're spending on space exploration right now. Look how much trouble the Earth is in. We can't afford to look up. A lot of people don't look up.

afford to look up a lot of people don't look up and and that's actually even part of this theory really is like that most people don't even look at the sky unless they have something to look at right i look at the sky all the time i look out my window and there's the sky but do you know what it's filled with planes going into heathrow that's all it is all day long well uh not not so much this summer by the sounds of things why what's happening this summer there's a lot of strike action going on oh shit that could be painful so do you want to know where the men in black comes from the idea of these

so apparently following the Watergate scandal this government black helicopter became this symbol of faceless government authority and you know these unmarked helicopters would fly around and do stuff, right? And so they became this kind of idea. But apparently, one of the things that was happening was the Idaho- in 1995, the Idaho

Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth- Yes. Told the New York Times that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was landing black helicopters on ranchers' land in order to enforce the Endangered Species Act at gunpoint. She held hearings on it and everything. So apparently this was a thing that was happening. These black helicopters were flying around in backcountry America just to get out to these wild areas, I guess,

and make sure that the ranchers were... People would just get off the helicopters with guns and say, stop endangering these animals' lives? Stop endangering the species! Yeah, I think so. And they'd say, we'll do. I think there's a little bit of Bardemindhoff here as well. Like chemtrails are a bit of a...

So the Bardemindhoff phenomenon is the tendency to spot something more often once you're aware of it. And you see it all the time, right? Like, I learned about this thing the other day and then suddenly i'm seeing it everywhere and i'm like damn did i just gloss over this before are you sure it's bottom minehole that's what it says because that was like a german group i don't know maybe maybe that's that's what it says in this book and i get that i i remember um after we had our first kid i was like wow everybody's having babies.

But it's only because I was aware that we'd had a baby. You know what I mean? Like before that, I hadn't really paid any attention to babies. It's like when you buy a new set of trainers, you're suddenly like looking at everyone else's trainers. Yeah, everybody's copying me. I got them first. But the thing is that Baader-Meinhof was like, I think they were like a German terrorist organization or something like that. Are you thinking of something different?

No. The thing is, these things are all very different. The Red Army Faction, the Baader-Meinhof Group, which is B-A-A-D-E-R-M-E-I-N-H-O-F, was a West German far-left Marxist-Leninist urban guerrilla group founded in 1970. Jesus. So I don't think it's...

Is it Baader-Meinhof? Yes. This phenomenon was named after them because someone that's on an online message board heard about Baader-Meinhof? Yes, this phenomenon was named after them because someone that's on an online message board heard about Baader-Meinhof, the terrorist group, and then started seeing them everywhere and wrote a story about their experience. I see.

And so, right, it's called frequency illusion. That's a better way to say it. Oh, okay. It's like one of these cognitive biases or whatever. Chemtrails is a classic thing, though. Like, planes always leave trails, but people didn't notice them until they thought they were some sort of psychological you know chemical population control some bullshit do you mean yeah um and the moon landing is another one which is a really interesting conspiracy no it's not it's idiots well but the thing is like what happened

was it was a whenever anything big happens there's always a small group of people so this happened with the soviets as well right there was this there was this theory in in soviet russia at the time that they hadn't sent a man into space you know there were still there's people who were resistant to that right in the same way that people in the u.s were resistant to the idea that the moon landing was real like people just sometimes don't want to believe but how much of it was the movie capricorn one because that that film um with elliot gould and and a bunch of other people telly servalis is in it uh oj simpson is in it oddly enough is about the faking of a moon landing where they film it oh that's probably part of it that came out in 1977 yeah so i don't know i don't know if that was a big apparently it was still a fringe

conspiracy until 2001 when fox news broadcast a documentary under the title did we land on the moon which was hosted by fucking more tucker carson it was hosted by mitch pilleggi who was the bald guy from the yes fucking idiot i mean the thing is yes mitch pilleggi so the thing is he's just an actor like he he's not a source of information but people have watched a lot of the x-files and of course things like the x-files did a lot of work for this sort of yes the x-files popularized it for this sort of our generation i I think. For sure. Because conspiracy theories have always been around. The JFK assassination, for example, I was literally thinking about that this morning

because it was just one of those things that just popped into my mind. A friend of mine is very into JFK conspiracy stuff. Not as a nut, but he's just interested in trying to figure out what what about this stuff is actually true right um and you know not he's he's trying to keep a distance from the uh lunatic fringe who you will see if you go to the location of the shooting in dallas there are people selling their manifestos about what happened and stuff really yeah i'm not surprised i'm not surprised were they just going to you want to buy my explanation for here? You get it? Government's trying to take over.

You probably get people like that at, like, Ground Zero and stuff like that, too. Oh, 100%. 100%. They're just grifters, you know? They're just trying to make some money from selling their bullshit theories. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's one of those things where I think conspiracy theories now, the internet obviously created these communities, much like groups of far-right nuts have been able to congregate together and find forums and websites.

Where instead of just having to go to a group meeting with a bunch of people in your area and be a fascist bastard, now you can do it online from the comfort of your home. So it's a lot easier. It's the same with conspiracy nuts. And there's a big crossover between the far right and conspiracy theories. Sometimes it's written very well and it's written in a very convincing way. And sometimes they layer it on. They're like, well, you know, aliens are real and also chemtrails and crop circles. I've layered on some conspiracy theories.

They definitely, and they use very modern language to to make it sound convincing and but it's always but it's but the thing is about it that's the most interesting to me is looking at the history and just seeing how history repeats itself yeah there's always been credible people from the military even fucking buzz aldrin was talking about it. No, no. Was it Buzz Aldrin? No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Not saying... There's a misappropriated...

I think that's the word. Misattributed quote where he's saying that we didn't go to the moon. Are you talking about that one or the fact that they saw... I can't remember. So they saw when they were on one of the flights. I think it was either... I think it might've been Buzz Aldrin or it might've been Neil Armstrong. When he took an early flight around the earth, he said that he could see all these sort of stars and things around the capsule.

Right. And everybody was like, oh, that's aliens. They've sent out their little aliens to have a look at us while we're in space. Of course they did. But it's not. It was just all bits of like sparks and debris and shit like that. Like it's very easily explained. Well, exactly.

That's the thing that, see, they've co-opted that story. And that's what I had heard and believed. Right.'s very easy if for you to not check this stuff and just to have it all piled on and making and and i mean the ufo community i mean obviously some are like the flat earth but you can see it in flat earth as something which is completely bogus but yet the way they present it sucks a lot of people in. And you can just imagine that you can use that as a template

and be like, look, this is bollocks. They're doing it here as well. But with UFOs, it's harder to say that it's definitely not the case because there's no... You know, it's like religion.

It's hard to disprove it. Yeah. I mean, so the thing with Flat Earth in particular particular the reason i think it appeals to a lot of people i follow a couple of twitter accounts that sort of debunk flat earth stuff um and debunk um evolution stuff so these are people who will say things like the famous question and you can google this and the answer is right there if we evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys right it's like one of the number one questions that these anti-evolution nuts say. And for Flat Earthers, the main thing that they have is, well, the Earth looks flat to me, and there's a combination of distrust in anyone

telling them that something is the case. If they can't see it with their own eyes, how could it be true? And that is the essential nature of the Flat Earth theory, is that if you stand on the Earth and it's flat, the Earth is flat. They don't understand the scale of the planet, how far away or how high you'd have to be to see the curvature. You've really got to go up to near space. You can't see it from an aeroplane. You are too low to see the curvature of the Earth. It is such a big thing. You cannot wrap your tiny brain around it. And unfortunately, a lot of people have this ego where if they can't see it, they don't understand it. It's obviously just not true. It's much easier for them to believe that it's not true and we're being lied to because they can imagine that and they can understand that, but they can't understand

something that they can't see with their own two eyes. And that's the problem I think with science as we get more and more advanced, is you cannot explain it to the average person, you can't demonstrate it to them, so they just don't believe it. Right. They think it's a load of bollocks. But what's the- And that's where a lot of these conspiracies come from.

What's the benefit of believing that the Earth is flat, though? Like, what- Exactly. What's the point? Like, does it- Well, it's affirming for other people- Yeah, you're in on something. For you to see other people to be- for you to be right, and for you to be surrounded

by people in a community right right also believe that but even if you're not in the community lewis i think the the important thing is that i honestly think it's ego i honestly think people's egos are so fragile and a lot of conspiracy theorists are very fragile people mentally they're very fragile they're distrusting they're scared all the time. They're paranoid. They think, and they're stupid and they probably know they're not very bright. You'd have to be particularly stupid to believe the earth is flat. You really would. I mean, if you even look casually at some of these videos and I've watched a lot of them and I've seen all these fucking flat earth memes, I'm all over it. I love reading about it. And for a while I talked about this before I was really

into it because I was fascinated at how something so stupid could become so popular. They're just not very bright. And they don't want to admit that they're not very bright. They act like they're educated. Absolutely. And I think that the people who fall for UFOs and actually believe it are probably less... It's not the same, but it's easier to fall into

because even smart people that you know lieutenant colonels in the military and and senators you know also are believers right but they didn't know how to be smart and also fall for this stuff right i mean we we saw with the tiktok hearings that the idea that a senator said this they're fucking morons they're absolute morons i saw the the tiktok guy in the u.s being grilled he was like you're telling me the tiktok is on my wi-fi right now he's like yeah he's like wow what is he doing on my wi-fi the guy doesn't know he doesn't know what wi-fi is he doesn't know what the internet is why is he asking these questions but these these are the

this is the problem is that this guy will not accept i I don't understand how this works, explain it to me. He's made up in his mind how this works. He knows what's good and bad. And I think that's the same problem with a lot of these conspiracies. A lot of these UFO people, I think, are just wishful thinkers. I think it's relatively harmless. And I don't think it's anywhere near as bad as the people who think the government is out to get them.

And almost inevitably, it's an anti-Semitic conspiracy. The Jews are controlling our minds, as usual. That's the way a lot of these conspiracy theories go. Oh my God, that was the very first thing in this book, actually. The very first thing in this book, the first conspiracy theory ever, is about some, was it 1144, the first anti-Jewish conspiracy. And the Jews have had an awful time throughout a thousand years of conspiracy theories about them being behind fucking everything. It's still the number one root of all of these conspiracies.

And I've said this before, the further down you dig, the quicker you get to anti-Semitism. It's unbelievable. It's partly because in medieval times, the Jews were kind of going around and they were the new people in these villages, right? And then when something went wrong, it was like, let's blame the new people, the people who are the minority or the people who were on the fringe

or the people who were doing their own different religion to ours, you know? And as a result, they got this kind of, they were the scapegoat for anyone. Catholicism, I think it was Martin Luther, was a big anti-Semite, hated the Jews. Because of course, a lot of Catholics, and by extension, then probably a lot of Christians, felt that the Jews were the ones who had killed Jesus. They got him killed. So they saw them as their enemy, if you like.

And this is obviously, this conspiracy theory, unlike ufos and flat earth is terribly damaging you know exactly this is not some harmless shit this is like awful but here's another one for you there's another one fight it the reason that people always associate jews with banking right and you know a lot of people nowadays on the left still do this, is this idea that, oh, they've always been into money. Everybody used to lend money. And then the church, the Christian church said, usury and lending money is against God. Jesus was against it. Look, it's right here in the Bible. He turns over all the money lenders tables. So who was left to lend money? People who weren't Christian. Who was not Christian living in your country back then?

Probably Jews. So they started banks and all of a sudden they're like oh those fucking the penny pinching midas jews that's where that came from so it's always always been there and it's still alive and well now okay so this is actually how the very first you're doing it properly here so what happened was there was this there was this kid though his name was william from thorpewood near norwich okay which obviously doesn't exist anymore because of us cutting it down over the years. We've got to make those boats. He was a 12-year-old boy who was found dead in 1144. Now,

what happened was this knight had borrowed a load of money from the local Jews because that was the only person he could borrow it from. He went off on one of the Crusades, came back unsuccessful and owed a load of money. So he killed the Jew to avoid paying him back.

Jesus. And was perfectly open about it, and he said, the reason I killed the Jew was because he had sacrificed this boy in some demonic ceremony. That's still a conspiracy theory to this day. And it's still, and he he exactly and that that set off a chain of events that he got out of it because he blamed the jew of being this you know awful person right killed child killer you know he he everyone started use do it basically blaming everything on the jews you guys have played crusader kings right oh yeah yeah do you remember you can borrow money from the jews in your kingdom and then expel them

yeah and you don't have to pay them back that's literally in the game that's literally history because that's what they used to do they borrow a lot of money and be like you know what get them out of here and we don't owe them money who and then you'd let them back in a few years later and you know you do the same thing again like they were they were gaming it just the way i do in ck2 yeah these kind of small effects have a ripple right and they get written about and so you know and and people wrote these long treatises on how how the the jews had done this terrible child killing you know and stuff like this and so they kind of per like percolate and permeate through the centuries and that they feed they feed each other right as a reputation you hear about this story or you read

this book or someone's written this thing in and people are educated that this was the truth this happened and for you know and so people people are stupid yeah they don't know what the weird thing is of course there's no child sacrifice in judaism right but here's the here what the weird thing is? Of course, there's no child sacrifice in Judaism. Right. But here's the weird thing, is that, you know the way that this is really popular? You see this, I see this fucking on TikTok all the time. Luckily, I don't see it in its raw form, but I see it in the debunking form. So people doing a stitch with these idiots,

saying things like, this is a famous one. Look at all these pyramids, all built around the earth at the same time. And nowadays, we don't know how to build pyramids. So how did they do it back then? We absolutely could build a fucking pyramid, dude. Okay, we could build a pyramid. There's no technology that's gone into pyramid making that is beyond us.

Yeah, they built one in Vegas, didn't they? We built one in Vegas right there, baby. There's one in Dick's Sporting Goods, isn't there, in Texas somewhere? Very big one, right? Yeah. So this is a popular thing. We don't know how to do these things nowadays. The aliens knew.

Where did this knowledge go? Also, there's this thing, I think it's called the Cathar or something like that, which is this idea that there was this ancient civilization and there's still evidence of it today. And they built buildings. We don't know how they built them. We don't know how to replicate them. We don't know how to replicate them. We absolutely do.

Okay. You could not show us a single building throughout history. The modern technology and engineering could not also build. And the materials that they use are the same fucking ones we could use nowadays. It's laughable. So I'd forgotten where I was going with this. No, but what you're saying is that basically they use all these tricks. Because if you're someone who

is is talking to someone who's a conspiracy theory nut they'll get they'll say what about this and you'll explain that and they'll say well what about this and you're like oh my god I've remembered I've remembered you on like one thing right that you're not ready for yeah and then you feel like no I can't explain that one can you

I lost the whole conversation exactly here's the thing. The further away it happened, the more gravitas it has. And I think if you can point to, look, they've been writing about this since the 15th century. You're like, wow, as if we knew more back then. I would be less interested in something written in Roman times, an account of something as being true. It'd be fascinating because it's historical. But I wouldn't say, wow, they wrote about this in Roman times. It of something as being true it'd be fascinating because it's historical but I wouldn't say wow they wrote about this in Roman times it must be true I'm like no it's far less

likely to be true and accurate than it would be nowadays we have far more capacity to to understand things nowadays that than they did back then so I don't know why people always put gravitas on stuff that happened in the past and I think think the conspiracy theory about the Jewish sacrificing babies, obviously that came from the past. So in a way, it has that gravitas of the past, as in it's important somehow. It's written down, right? Exactly.

This has been in a book from 1400. Just because something was written down, it must be real. Exactly. It's interesting. And that, you know know i guess like i don't want to shit on people who believe in things do you mean because some of it is true sure children is that weird oh no no like some conspiracy theories are true like like the um like like us getting like you know testing tested drugs on people or, you know, doing mind control experiments with LSD or like sending people in to do coups all over the place.

MKUltra and all that shit. But that's the danger, I think, when we talk about what's the danger of these conspiracy theories, really, is that you can basically, it's like saying fake news. You can have an actual conspiracy that is actually real and damaging and just say oh this is clearly just a conspiracy hoax these guys are crazy like you could sneak a genuine conspiracy under the radar quite easily if the only people investigating this shit are fucking deranged yeah i mean you could see good you could see you could see harmless ones and you could see harmful ones. Like anti-vax, you know, not vaccinating your kids

and then them dying of measles is pretty bad. Exactly. Stuff like this. Like, you know, I think that we live in a world of these alternative facts, which is kind of abhorrent to me, even that phrase, right? Alternative facts just means opinions. And we always respect, oh, respect my opinion. It's like

well if your opinion is fat an alternative fact uh then uh it's not really helpful to anyone i think there are things you are allowed to have an opinion about you can have an opinion about whether liverpool should fire their manager or you can have an opinion about whether semi-skimmed milk is as good as full fat. Those are opinions. I see. Whether you like Marmite or not, that's an opinion. Well, whatever they are, subjective. Right.

It's literally, oh, I do like it. I don't think it's as good. That's an opinion. But if you're talking about whether the earth is flat or not, you are not allowed to have an opinion. You don't have an opinion. One is true. The other is not.

You don't get to fucking pick. It drives me up the wall. This is true. This is actually a good point. Thank you. All right, good. Well, we've solved it. I think we've actually now we can sit back.

We put this podcast out. It was another one of those ones where we fixed everything. What did we not fix today? I think we fixed conspiracy nuts. Yeah. So when you see on the front page of Reddit that some guy has seen something in the sky or filmed something in the sky or has

some lieutenant colonel's come out, just know that this has happened before and it will happen again. Yes. And it's pretty unlikely until I see the president shaking hands with a little green man or woman that I'm actually going to believe. So it's a tall, skinny, gray man smoking weed in the president's face.

I would like to see that. Yeah. Do you want to end the podcast or do you want me to just read very quickly this email that I thought was good? No, please go for it. Read a good email. Okay. It's very long, so I'll sum it up for you guys. This is called the Great Stirrup Controversy. Right.

Right. This is from Matt. If I pronounce your name wrong, Mattus, I apologize. Oh, he has a YouTube channel. Mattus. Okay. He has a laser, M Laser History, his YouTube channel. Check it out. So his last name is laser which is

awesome by the way um so the the idea is that um so i'll summarize this is the most interesting paragraph um the greek stirrup controversy is a large debate among medievalists about the scale of change the introduction of the stirrup brought about in europe this is a throwback to our ranking technologies episode we glossed over stirrups in the best tech episode. We glossed way over stirrups. I mean, we talked about the domestication of animals and stuff like that, which I suppose this would be a part of, but...

He had a lot of problems with the rest of the podcast as well, but we're not talking about that. But he has a BA and an MA in medieval history, so whatever, from Cambridge. Yeah, whatever, buddy. We played Civilization, okay? So I think we know what we're talking about. Well, we watched Game of Thrones as well, and I think there's-

And Game of Thrones, yeah. So the crux of the debate is that the introduction of the stirrup to Europe, primarily by the invading nomadic tribes of the Avars in the sixth century, brought about the development of feudalism. Before the stirrup, most European armies were infantry. The Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, all infantry-based. Cavalry existed, but small numbers, limited effectiveness, because they haven't got fucking stirrups.

You do anything, you're going to fall off your horse. The stirrup turns up, and suddenly the most effective fighting force became the mounted horse rider. I know I saw a thing about cavalry as, like, the tanks of the era. Like, you cannot stand against these things. I mean, imagine 400 heavy horse, armoured, with armoured lads on the back of the era. Like you cannot stand against these things. I mean, imagine 400 heavy horse armoured with armoured lads

on the back charging you. You're just a peasant with a spear. I would be so scared. You're going to soil yourself straight away. It's not like in Braveheart where they win with some sticks.

It's brutal. You're going to die to the heavy cavalry. Medieval heavy shock cavalry could not exist without the stirrup. And the most famous type of combat, jousting,

would be impossible. As such, thanks to the stir stirrup a class of horse riding landed nobility emerged which could traverse the country so far to collect taxes more efficiently fight more effectively and so there became a class divide and the birth of chivalry and feudalism right um so i thought that was interesting that is interesting yeah man they must have had to hype these guys up to the gills, to get them out there to fight. Kilphee, you've got to really fucking hate somebody to kill them with a sword or a mace or whatever, right? I mean, is it still better than the internet or electricity or printing press,

though? Is it fixed? Stirrups are still... Would an alien race that didn't develop stirrups is still would an alien race that didn't develop stirrups have managed to get here

is what I'm asking so is that our first question tell us about your stirrups we assume I mean rightly so but we assume

that any alien race is going to follow the same sort of path as we did but they might be totally different to us maybe they didn't

ever get feudalism because they never had horses on their planet. Yeah, maybe they just came like, you know, maybe they're just like little puddles of goo who just did things differently. I mean, I'm not sure that the advent of feudalism was a positive thing. I think it was a fucking disaster. I mean, think how many people died because of feudalism. But you think that held us back? Yeah, 100%.

I don't know, like, you can't say it, though, like that. I can. It was probably necessary at the time, though, because I don't think anybody was ready to just skip over it and head, like, you know, directly into- Consider this. What was the- The Victorian civilization. What was the system of government that the Greeks and the Romans had, right?

They had a republic and democracy and shit. You had elected people, you had senators and all this kind of stuff. And then we were like, nah, fucking kings, innit? Fucking kings. Yeah, but they were still going around and rounding people up and crucifying them and they had the legions and stuff. Eh, you're gonna do what you're gonna do. What I'm saying is, they did that under a monarchy, but I mean, we still have the monarchy

in this country today. And you want to complain about that? Well, there you go. The fucking stirrup. There's your enemy tweet at stirrup. Fuck you. Okay Very colorful ending to a Very interesting guy. We really did we fixed a couple of things. I was an interesting one though I think we I think we've spoken about bits and pieces of this stuff in the past but never at length like we've done this podcast isn't no such thing as a fish sorry i went through and did a load of facts and read read stuff out of a book no it was really it was good it was uh i

don't think a single poop joke was made or a dick joke either so it's got i mean it's first time this is highbrow i enjoyed this I enjoyed this airport book I bought. It's called Conspiracy, A History of Bollocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them by Tom Phillips and John Ellidge. Oh my God. Ellidge. There you go. You can check it out.

Do you think those guys get a lot of big, long biblical emails? I have to credit them because, you know, I've read it literally out of their book. It's interesting. I've read another couple of books I can tell you about actually in the next couple of weeks. I've been reading books. Anyway, I'll tell you. I'll tell you about it next week. Okay.

All right. Okay. You do that. Okay. Yeah. Bye then, everyone. All right. Bye.

Bye. Bye.