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. Are we truly alone
Speaker 2: in this universe? This question can mean many different things
Speaker 2: based on the tone in which it's asked. If asked
Speaker 2: in a tone of hope and wonder, it makes us
Speaker 2: reflect on the majesty of the universe, infinite space and
Speaker 2: possibility among the stars and all that. But it can
Speaker 2: also be asked in a tone of apprehension or fear.
Speaker 2: Loneliness is comforting in a sense, because that would mean
Speaker 2: that no intelligence is beyond our own. Are a scrutinizing
Speaker 2: the planet from dark void of space? Anxiety about extraterrestrial
Speaker 2: invasions is well over a century old. First we looked
Speaker 2: to the heavens and saw gods. Then, as the industrial
Speaker 2: age took over post Enlightenment, we looked to the heavens
Speaker 2: and saw another version of ourselves.
Speaker 1: And in the HG. Wells book the War of the Worlds.
Speaker 1: Britain at its colonial peak is itself colonized by a
Speaker 1: force whose technology far strips their own. Even then, the
Speaker 1: fear of extraterrestrials was just a fantasy. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth century that these fears seemed to becoming true. First,
Speaker 1: the Roswell incident in nineteen forty seven triggered a wave
Speaker 1: of speculation about spacecraft from another world. Then, over the
Speaker 1: ensuing decades, many individuals throughout the world started sharing their
Speaker 1: own strange stories. The earliest UFO encounters were spiritual, optimistic,
Speaker 1: but starting in the nineteen sixties, something changed in the
Speaker 1: character of these stories. They started to become more sinister.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty one, the husband and wife couple Betty
Speaker 1: and Barney Hill, told the story of their own encounter
Speaker 1: with aliens, But their story had a gap in it,
Speaker 1: a lapse in memory seemingly explained by alien technology. For
Speaker 1: a brief time, the aliens had taken both of them
Speaker 1: aboard their ship and studied them like animals. More and
Speaker 1: more stories of this kind proliferated over the decades. Abductions
Speaker 1: became terrifying, scientific, and more the concept of probes, implants,
Speaker 1: bodily invasion all became fodder for the study of aliens,
Speaker 1: stoking the imagination of a public that had been absorbing
Speaker 1: alien invasion movies since the nineteen fifties. In nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: a woman named Kathy Davis claimed that, in the midst
Speaker 1: of several abduction experiences, she had been impregnated with a
Speaker 1: hybrid child, half alien, half human. Over the years, experts
Speaker 1: and entertainers have argued about the veracity of the alien
Speaker 1: abduction reports, but no one has argued that the fear
Speaker 1: these stories per is very real. The creatures of nightmares
Speaker 1: don't need to exist in physical space to provoke the imagination,
Speaker 1: so it's perhaps unsurprising that enterprising business people sought to
Speaker 1: make a profit off this fear. In the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: a Florida based insurance brokerage began providing insurance policies for
Speaker 1: people who were concerned about the risk of alien abduction.
Speaker 1: A largely sarcastic enterprise, this insurance provider issued ten million
Speaker 1: dollar policies that would pay out at a rate of
Speaker 1: a dollar per year. A few years later, the London
Speaker 1: based brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingram's and Parson started issuing policies
Speaker 1: of their own. These policies insured customers against not only abduction,
Speaker 1: but impregnation as well. This claim could be purchased regardless
Speaker 1: of your sex, as the possibilities of alien technology remain unknown,
Speaker 1: and this British company wound up selling thousands of these policies,
Speaker 1: but only came close to paying out twice, once for
Speaker 1: an Enfield man who in nineteen ninety six claimed a
Speaker 1: one point six million dollar policy, showing as evidence a
Speaker 1: claw left behind by his abductors. The second time, however,
Speaker 1: gave them pause. You see, sometime in the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the cult known as Heaven's Gate purchased one million dollar
Speaker 1: policies for each of its approximately thirty members, and this
Speaker 1: very nearly backfired in Goodfellow's face when the entire cult
Speaker 1: died in ritual suicide in nineteen ninety seven. Warry that
Speaker 1: someone would come to try to collect over thirty million dollars,
Speaker 1: the brokerage paused any new policies for a time. Since then,
Speaker 1: they have resumed their policies and have never paid out
Speaker 1: a single one. We turn to insurance to protect ourselves
Speaker 1: from unseen accidents and tragedy. The most unpredictable of these
Speaker 1: are also known as acts of God. Even though most
Speaker 1: insurance policies cover acts of God, it seems that aliens
Speaker 1: require a higher burden of proof. I think we can
Speaker 1: all agree that we live in a chaotic universe, and
Speaker 1: sometimes it can feel like we are powerless in the
Speaker 1: face of tragedy. But as history loves to remind us,
Speaker 1: there is no problem so great that a human being
Speaker 1: can't make worse. For proof, look no further than Justinian
Speaker 1: the First, a late Roman emperor who reigned during the
Speaker 1: sixth century. Now the title Roman Emperor deserves massive air
Speaker 1: quotes here because Justinian came to power over one hundred
Speaker 1: years after the city of Rome was sacked by Germanic tribes.
Speaker 1: By the time Justinian was crowned in five twenty seven,
Speaker 1: the Empire was in the late stage of its long,
Speaker 1: slow collapse. While the western territories had virtually all fallen
Speaker 1: to different armies, the weakened eastern half had reformed around Constantinople. Now,
Speaker 1: like a lot of people of his day, Justinian was
Speaker 1: obsessed with the past. He talked constantly about returning the
Speaker 1: empire to its former glory, something a lot of people
Speaker 1: thought was possible. To accomplish his lofty goals, he levied
Speaker 1: heavy taxes, which he used to raise armies and revitalize
Speaker 1: long dead trade networks. Feeding his armies required massive amounts
Speaker 1: of grain, which he purchased, largely from Africa. Justinian's early
Speaker 1: military campaigns were surprisingly successful, and he was actually making
Speaker 1: some headway on rebuilding the empire when disaster struck. It
Speaker 1: came in the form of an inconspicuous but deadly stowaway
Speaker 1: Ursinia pestis, also known as the bubonic plague. The microbe
Speaker 1: was carried by rats or some people think the fleas
Speaker 1: or other animals, which traveled within the grain supplies that
Speaker 1: Justinian imported in five pin forty one. They caused an
Speaker 1: outbreak in the Egyptian port of Pelusium. If Justinian had
Speaker 1: acted quickly, he might have stopped the disease in its tracks,
Speaker 1: but he ignored the warnings, and within a year the
Speaker 1: plague was in Constantinople. Now I should note that this
Speaker 1: wasn't the first bubonic outbreak in history, and it certainly
Speaker 1: wouldn't be the last. Scientists believe the back materia has
Speaker 1: been killing humans since around three thousand BCE. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: most famous outbreak of bubonic plague is known as the
Speaker 1: Black Death, which didn't hit Europe until the fourteenth century.
Speaker 1: All that said, Justinian's outbreak in the sixth century was
Speaker 1: special because of how far and how quickly it spread.
Speaker 1: His armies and their supply trains carried the disease across
Speaker 1: three continents, resulting in the first plague pandemic. The effects
Speaker 1: were disastrous, especially for Constantinople. At one point, the capitol
Speaker 1: was losing five thousand people a day. Justinian had his
Speaker 1: soldiers dig massive pits to hold all the bodies, while
Speaker 1: other corpses were dumped onto ships and just pushed out
Speaker 1: to sea. Justinian himself fell ill sometime in five point
Speaker 1: forty two. We don't know how badly he suffered, but
Speaker 1: for most people, the bubonic plague wasn't pretty. Early symptoms
Speaker 1: included fever, swelling around the growing armpits and neck, and
Speaker 1: dark boils and pustules. This rapidly progressed to delirium before
Speaker 1: most victims fell into a coma and then died. Not Justinian, though,
Speaker 1: with treatments, he managed to survive and While you might
Speaker 1: think that the brush with death would cause him to
Speaker 1: refocus on eradicating the disease, that's not what happened. After recovering,
Speaker 1: Justinian was more determined than ever to reclaim Rome's former glory.
Speaker 1: He continued to raise taxes despite the fact that the
Speaker 1: economy was cratering and most people couldn't even afford to eat,
Speaker 1: and instead of using the money for the public, he
Speaker 1: poured the funds into his military campaigns, which, of course
Speaker 1: furthered the spread of the pandemic. The epidemic took almost
Speaker 1: a decade to fade away, and outbreaks continued for the
Speaker 1: next few hundred years. While estimates vary, somewhere between twenty
Speaker 1: five and fifty million people were killed, roughly a quarter
Speaker 1: of the empire's population. As you might expect, that level
Speaker 1: of loss caused Justinian's trade networks to collapse, foiling his
Speaker 1: military exploits. He had dreamed of returning the Roman Empire
Speaker 1: to its former glory, but wound up hastening its demid
Speaker 1: guy But at least historians give credit where credits due
Speaker 1: to this day, the pandemic of five point forty one
Speaker 1: is remembered as Justinian's plague. I hope you've enjoyed today's
Speaker 1: guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free
Speaker 1: on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by
Speaker 1: visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by
Speaker 1: me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I
Speaker 1: make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast,
Speaker 1: book series, and television show, and you can learn all
Speaker 1: about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until
Speaker 1: next time, stay curious.