Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 2: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 2: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. On May fourth of
Speaker 2: the year two thousand, a lone worker at the Pentagon
Speaker 2: sat bored at their computer desk, sifting through routine emails.
Speaker 2: They were surprised when they saw one with a subject
Speaker 2: line that read I Love you in all caps with
Speaker 2: no spaces. Their heart skipped a beat as they consider
Speaker 2: that maybe they had a secret admirer. They clicked the email,
Speaker 2: which was blank, but it had an attachment with the
Speaker 2: same name, a love letter. Perhaps the worker clicked on it.
Speaker 2: This was no secret admirer, though, but a trojan virus,
Speaker 2: one of the first of its kind. Within a day,
Speaker 2: it had infected ten percent of all computers on the planet,
Speaker 2: deleting millions of files. A little while earlier across the world,
Speaker 2: in the Philippines, computer college student O'Nell de Guzman was
Speaker 2: staring at his thesis proposal in shock.
Speaker 1: There were red marks all over it. His professor had
Speaker 1: completely rejected it. Entitled Email Password Sender Trojan, it was
Speaker 1: a proposal for a computer virus that would steal a
Speaker 1: user's dial up credentials so that the sender could access
Speaker 1: the Internet freely. At this point in history, in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, only about twenty five percent of the
Speaker 1: world's population was actually online. In more developed Western countries,
Speaker 1: users paid for internet access as much as they do today,
Speaker 1: with a flat monthly fee, but in developing nations like
Speaker 1: the Philippines, users had to pay hourly rates. O'Nell and
Speaker 1: his fellow students imagined a future where everyone could gain
Speaker 1: access to the Internet for free. They believed that it
Speaker 1: was a human right, and he thought his virus was
Speaker 1: a good way to make sure that that happened. But
Speaker 1: his professor disagreed, writing this is illegal on the paper
Speaker 1: and saying that the college wasn't in the business of
Speaker 1: training burglars. For someone like Ohnell, this was just encouragement.
Speaker 1: Though the older, stuffier generation was willing to follow the
Speaker 1: rules and remain under the heel of the more developed nations,
Speaker 1: this younger generation was willing to take matters into their
Speaker 1: own hands, and so O'Nell went ahead and he coded
Speaker 1: the virus anyway. The trojan would also present itself as
Speaker 1: a love letter from a secret admirer, praying on the
Speaker 1: human desire for love and attention. O'Nell also made it
Speaker 1: so that it would exploit a weakness in Microsoft Outlook.
Speaker 1: This was the email software that the vast majority of
Speaker 1: the world used at the time. The weakness was that
Speaker 1: the software didn't show what kind of a file an
Speaker 1: attachment was, so users wouldn't notice that the file wasn't
Speaker 1: a dot TXT or word document file, which is what
Speaker 1: you'd expect a love letter to be, but a dot
Speaker 1: VBS file, which is an executable program file, a program
Speaker 1: such as a virus. O'Nell uploaded the program, which came
Speaker 1: to be known as I Love You, and used it
Speaker 1: to steal the Internet provider login credentials from wealthier users.
Speaker 1: It's unclear if he realized that the program would also
Speaker 1: delete all their files in the process, but what does
Speaker 1: seem to have been intentional was that the virus would
Speaker 1: then send itself to all of the contacts in the
Speaker 1: user's address book, giving O'Nell even more potential targets. However,
Speaker 1: he couldn't have imagined how effective this would be. It
Speaker 1: made the virus travel exponentially, racing across the Philippines, Asia, Europe,
Speaker 1: and the Americas within days. It showed how networked the
Speaker 1: world really already was at that point, and also how
Speaker 1: truly desperate for love many Peas people seemed to be.
Speaker 1: It didn't matter if the person was rich or poor,
Speaker 1: successful or not. All kinds clicked on the attachment. The
Speaker 1: virus soon led to email servers going offline in important
Speaker 1: government centers such as the British House of Commons, the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: and multiple American military bases. This cost billions worldwide in
Speaker 1: both lost revenue and expensive additional hours as it professionals
Speaker 1: had to come in and try to recover the lost
Speaker 1: files while also patching the various computer systems that were
Speaker 1: vulnerable to I Love You Naturally. The FBI launched a
Speaker 1: manhunt and soon narrowed the source of the bug to
Speaker 1: the Philippines, and before long, Filipino law enforcement was banging
Speaker 1: on Onell's door. Onell was put on a world stage
Speaker 1: as reporters questioned him about the virus. He said he
Speaker 1: had no idea the virus would travel so far, but
Speaker 1: he wasn't sorry. He believed the Internet should be free.
Speaker 1: US law enforcement tried to charge him with fraud, but
Speaker 1: that would require him to have broken laws in both
Speaker 1: the US and the Philippines, and the Philippines had no
Speaker 1: laws against hacking at the time, so O'Nell went free. Curiously,
Speaker 1: he did not go on to an elaborate life of crime,
Speaker 1: or even a job in cybersecurity. No. When a reporter
Speaker 1: tracked him down in twenty twenty, he was working in
Speaker 1: a curiously mundane place, a cell phone repair store. It
Speaker 1: was September of nineteen forty four in a quiet town
Speaker 1: in Illinois, and Aileen Kearney had just crawled into bed.
Speaker 1: She had almost fallen asleep when suddenly she smelled a
Speaker 1: sickeningly sweet odor wafting in from the open window. At first,
Speaker 1: she thought that it was just the flowers outside in
Speaker 1: the garden, but the smell kept getting stronger. Eventually Aileen
Speaker 1: tried to get up and investigate, but found that she
Speaker 1: couldn't her legs were paralyzed. Aileen screamed for her sister, Martha,
Speaker 1: who was staying in the other room. When Martha came
Speaker 1: running in, Aileen asked if she smelled anything, and Martha
Speaker 1: said no, But she was so alarmed by Aileen's sudden
Speaker 1: paralysis that she immediately called her husband for help. A
Speaker 1: few minutes later, there was frantic knocking on the front door.
Speaker 1: Martha opened it and found her husband on the doorstep,
Speaker 1: sweating and terrified. He told Martha that he had just
Speaker 1: seen a tall man in dark clothing lurking outside Aileen's
Speaker 1: bedroom window. He tried to chase the man, but the
Speaker 1: man got away. Martha took her husband into Aileen's bedroom
Speaker 1: to see what was wrong with her. But now that
Speaker 1: the man outside the window was gone, so were Aileen's symptoms.
Speaker 1: Her legs were no longer paralyzed, and the sweet odor
Speaker 1: she was smelling was gone. Convinced that the strange man
Speaker 1: outside the window had been poisoning her, Aileen called the police,
Speaker 1: and the next morning, the so called anesthetic prowler was
Speaker 1: front news. The strange affair, though, was only beginning. Once
Speaker 1: ailing story ran, the police were suddenly inundated with similar reports.
Speaker 1: That same night, another woman in town had heard a
Speaker 1: plopping noise followed by a strange smell, and her hands
Speaker 1: and legs had started tingling. The night before that, a
Speaker 1: couple had both been awoken in the middle of the
Speaker 1: night by an unusual smell. When they tried to get
Speaker 1: out of bed, they found that they were completely paralyzed
Speaker 1: and couldn't move for over an hour. A few days later,
Speaker 1: a woman came home and found a small white cloth
Speaker 1: pressed against her screen door. Without thinking, she sniffed it
Speaker 1: and was overwhelmed by an unusual smell, and then she
Speaker 1: felt an electric shock run through her body and she
Speaker 1: fell to the ground, paralyzed for two hours. The wave
Speaker 1: of attacks became a statewide crisis, and the anesthetic Prowler
Speaker 1: soon became known by a much more catching name, one
Speaker 1: named after the town the events were happening in, the
Speaker 1: mad Gasser of Mattoon. The local police examined and ruled
Speaker 1: out every possible suspect, escaped mental patients, known pranksters and criminals,
Speaker 1: even a high school chemistry teacher. They analyzed the cloth
Speaker 1: the woman had found on her screen door, but strangely,
Speaker 1: there were no traces of chemicals on it at all.
Speaker 1: They even brought in chemical weapons experts from the army,
Speaker 1: who were unable to locate any poisonous gas residue at
Speaker 1: any of the affected homes, and even though a few
Speaker 1: people had claimed to have seen the mad Gasser and
Speaker 1: dozens had reported symptoms, no one had actually been hospitalized,
Speaker 1: and there was no physical evidence of any chemical attacks
Speaker 1: at all. Over the course of two weeks, more than
Speaker 1: two dozen gas attacks were reported to local police, and
Speaker 1: the panic spiraled out of control. Armed vigilantes roamed the
Speaker 1: streets at night looking for the mad Gasser. Women were
Speaker 1: afraid to leave their homes without carrying baseball bats for
Speaker 1: self defense, and then, just as suddenly as the reports
Speaker 1: had begun, they went away. The police received their final
Speaker 1: work port of a gaser attack in mid September. Despite
Speaker 1: calling in state and federal investigators for assistance, the authorities
Speaker 1: never found out who or what was responsible for these
Speaker 1: strange incidents. The mad guesser, if he even existed at all,
Speaker 1: was never caught. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour
Speaker 1: through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched and
Speaker 1: written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced by
Speaker 1: Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the people
Speaker 1: who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
Speaker 1: You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Speaker 1: Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well
Speaker 1: as ebook and audiobook. And if you're looking for an
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Speaker 1: same stories, but without the interruption for a small monthly fee.
Speaker 1: Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com,
Speaker 1: slash grim and Mild, and until next time, Stay curious,
Speaker 1: m HM.