Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Robert Lamban. This is the Monster Fact,
Speaker 2: his short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 2: focusing in nonithical creatures, ideas and monsters and time. The
Speaker 2: Marvel Comics universe is full of giant monster conquerors with
Speaker 2: crazy powers, and yet a giant by the name of
Speaker 2: Ulivar manages to stand out. A creation of stan Lee,
Speaker 2: Larry Lieber and Jack Kirby from a nineteen sixty edition
Speaker 2: of Journey into Mystery. The story, as recounted in Monsters
Speaker 2: Creatures of the Marvel Universe explored by Kelly Knox, actually
Speaker 2: begins with another giant alien conqueror, Gigantes, the Atlantean, who
Speaker 2: arises from his undersea kingdom to lay claim to coastal
Speaker 2: San Diego and also presumably the world. After poking around
Speaker 2: the surface world for a bit staking out the claim,
Speaker 2: if you will, Gagantis returns to the waters to report
Speaker 2: back home to Atlantis, and here he encounters an even taller,
Speaker 2: even more intimidating giant standing in the ocean. It is Oulvar.
Speaker 2: Oulvar stands a good thousand feet or three hundred and
Speaker 2: four point eight meters tall and absolutely towers over the
Speaker 2: puny Atlantean far beneath him. In a booming voice, it
Speaker 2: proclaims that Earth is now the property of the planet
Speaker 2: Centaurus too, so hands off. This, of course, leaves Gagantis
Speaker 2: with no other option but to return home to the
Speaker 2: ocean depths in defeat. It's only then in the comic
Speaker 2: that it's revealed that Oulvar is not an alien conqueror
Speaker 2: at all, but a giant decoy built by humans to
Speaker 2: scare away there would be conquerors. The illustrations in Knox's
Speaker 2: book revealed that Oulvar was atomic powered and commanded from
Speaker 2: a central control room inside the body. Yet this is
Speaker 2: not a fighting robot like your mecha godzillas or your vultrons. No,
Speaker 2: Olvar was nothing but a highly successful technological bluff. Later
Speaker 2: we learned that Olivar was eventually dismantled, so complete was
Speaker 2: his victory, and his head now rests on the ocean floor.
Speaker 2: Now I love this story the moment I read it.
Speaker 2: Such a ridiculous twist, but I was at a loss
Speaker 2: as how to really tie it into anything on the
Speaker 2: monster fact aside from decoys and scarecrows. Which we may
Speaker 2: come back to this Halloween on stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 2: But then I heard the story of Italian fishermen and
Speaker 2: conservationist Paolo Fancioli, as detailed in a twenty twenty Guardian
Speaker 2: story by Giorgio Giglioni. Italian law already banned environmentally destructive
Speaker 2: trawling nets in its waters. In Tuscan, authorities took to
Speaker 2: dropping blocks of concrete on the seafloor to dis disrupt
Speaker 2: the nets of illegal trawlers, but Foncioli and others noticed
Speaker 2: that these were space too far apart to make much
Speaker 2: difference with permission. He began to sink more blocks of stone,
Speaker 2: but decided to take things in a more artistic direction.
Speaker 2: A local quarry donated one hundred blocks of granite, and
Speaker 2: local artists volunteered to shape them into stone guardians that
Speaker 2: now occupy an underwater sculpture garden to both deteri illegal fissures,
Speaker 2: but also to attract scuba diving tourists like Oulivar. They
Speaker 2: serve as stone guardians on the seafloor, though they're a
Speaker 2: direct physical deterrent rather than a communicative one. Now another
Speaker 2: possible connection to make with the real world. In Ulvar.
Speaker 2: Here would be the concept of using artistic creations, such
Speaker 2: as sculpture, to warn future generations about radioactive sites. The
Speaker 2: landscape of Thorn's concept by architect Michael Brill, proposed in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety three, is one of the more evocative of
Speaker 2: these proposed for the US Department of Energy report for
Speaker 2: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant or WIPP. It envisioned a
Speaker 2: series of jagged concrete thorns emerging from the ground of
Speaker 2: a radioactive site. This was one of several proposed long
Speaker 2: term nuclear waste warning messages from the nineteen ninety three
Speaker 2: Sandia National Laboratories report that included other threatening works of
Speaker 2: stone or earth, but no giant aliens, at least with
Speaker 2: the fictional Ulvar example. Humans knew who to direct the
Speaker 2: message at Gigantis, the Atlantean in the comics. They'd already
Speaker 2: met him, It'd seen him around the surface world. But
Speaker 2: creating a non linguistic message for human beings ten thousand
Speaker 2: years in the future is another matter altogether. Finally, Ulvar
Speaker 2: can be thought of as a kind of tongue in
Speaker 2: cheek opposite to the pioneer plaque that would be later
Speaker 2: placed on board the nineteen seventy two Pioneer ten nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy three Pioneer eleven spacecraft, serving as a kind of
Speaker 2: time came, but also potentially as a message to alien beings.
Speaker 2: This is what we are, and here is what we were.
Speaker 2: All of our's message, however, is simply, don't mess with us.
Speaker 2: We're a thousand foot tall monsters. Tune in for additional
Speaker 2: episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always, you
Speaker 2: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Speaker 2: Mind dot com.
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.