Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from housetop works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to the Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Joe mccornet and I'm Christian Sager. Hey. Robert
Speaker 1: lamb Our host of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, isn't
Speaker 1: with us this week. This is our first solo flight.
Speaker 1: But if you listen to the episode that we released
Speaker 1: earlier this week, you will know that we are doing
Speaker 1: a two parter on the science behind the X Files
Speaker 1: right right right, And if you didn't catch our last
Speaker 1: episode on the science of the X Files that was
Speaker 1: part one, you should probably go back and listen to
Speaker 1: that one first. It came out earlier this week because
Speaker 1: our our first one, we're the we introduced the concept
Speaker 1: of the X Files for people who aren't fans of
Speaker 1: the show, who haven't seen it themselves, so you can
Speaker 1: sort of follow along. In fact, we just got done
Speaker 1: being on periscope and somebody asked us who they wanted
Speaker 1: to know. I've never seen the show before? Can I
Speaker 1: still listen to these episodes? And the answer is absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1: We really hope they will be interesting anyway, but especially
Speaker 1: so if you're a fan of the show. Even if
Speaker 1: you're not a fan of the show. We hope there
Speaker 1: are enough interesting ideas to to keep you on the
Speaker 1: hook through this whole discussion. So, uh, if you want
Speaker 1: to go back and check out that first episode first,
Speaker 1: we recommend that. If not, and you're here and you
Speaker 1: just want to listen, feel free to continue because we're
Speaker 1: gonna roll on in. We've got We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: bugs and insects and the X Files. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about how hypnosis, which I know is one of Joe's
Speaker 1: favorite topics, and the X Files, and we're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about the possibility of alien hybrids. Right. Yeah, So just
Speaker 1: to revisit the impetus for doing this episode. We're doing
Speaker 1: it because the X Files are coming back, and I
Speaker 1: believe it's Sunday, January. They're coming back to television and
Speaker 1: we're going to get a new X Files mini series
Speaker 1: with Jillian Anderson, with David Duchovny, all the gangs, getting
Speaker 1: all that together. Mitch Pleggy, I hope so playing Skinner.
Speaker 1: Oh he's there. He's got a big old beard. I
Speaker 1: can't wait. Is he bringing his muscles? He's probably been
Speaker 1: working out for the last six month. I love Mitch
Speaker 1: peleggy Um. And we want to mention also the top
Speaker 1: one more thing about how we brought in a bunch
Speaker 1: of sources on our research this time. But but our
Speaker 1: primary resource over this past couple of episodes has been
Speaker 1: a cool book called The Science of the X Files
Speaker 1: by Gene Cavelos, who is an astrophysicist and mathematician now
Speaker 1: a science and science fiction writer. So this is a
Speaker 1: really fun book. It's been a lot of help to us.
Speaker 1: It was written in so we we've had to check
Speaker 1: on a bunch of things and and and see what
Speaker 1: needs a little bit of updating. But but that's been
Speaker 1: a big help, And I think we should get right
Speaker 1: into it because I am just jones in to talk
Speaker 1: about bugs. Yeah, I mean, insects are clearly a big
Speaker 1: theme in the X Files. They show up all over
Speaker 1: the place. We've got classics from the first season with
Speaker 1: Darkness Falls were the copper Phages, which is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite episodes, which is all about cockroaches invading us
Speaker 1: well Town and uh. And then of course the general
Speaker 1: myth arc of the show has been easy galore. These
Speaker 1: feature pretty prominently in the movie too, write So I
Speaker 1: really wanted to talk about darkness falls. But unfortunately, I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's all that much great to say
Speaker 1: about the science behind it. So the basic idea of
Speaker 1: the episode is that Mulder Scully and some tag alongs
Speaker 1: go into the woods where there have been some people disappearing,
Speaker 1: and they get assaulted by photophobic wood mites that kill
Speaker 1: people by cocoon ing them in the forest. I believe
Speaker 1: Tightus Wellover, the actor Titus Wellover is one of the
Speaker 1: one of the tag along's. I don't know who that is. Oh,
Speaker 1: he was in like dead Wood. He's in a bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. He was in Transformers Age of Extinction. Oh, well,
Speaker 1: I remember that one. Who did he play in that?
Speaker 1: He was like the bad FBI agent who wanted to
Speaker 1: be mean to Optimus Prime. I don't remember. If you
Speaker 1: saw him, you'd know him in a minute. He's a
Speaker 1: character actor that's been a ton of stuff. Did he
Speaker 1: get killed by the wood mites? Yeah? Okay, so yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: we eventually find out that these that these attackers are
Speaker 1: some sort of might or something grows in the trees
Speaker 1: and they are allergic to light. So you can protect
Speaker 1: yourself by surrounding yourself in light. But of course a
Speaker 1: lot of the plot of the episode hinges on the
Speaker 1: fact that Molder and Scully have a generator that's running out,
Speaker 1: and can they keep the lights on long enough to
Speaker 1: survive through the night. But these things kill their victims.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they kill them by cocoon ing
Speaker 1: them or just they kill them and then cocoon them.
Speaker 1: But there's there's I think there's a part where live
Speaker 1: people are pulled out of a cocoon, so it seems
Speaker 1: a cocooning process that kills. I got the impression that like,
Speaker 1: once they're cocoon to, their bodies get desiccated somehow by
Speaker 1: these by these bugs. So I wanted to find out
Speaker 1: if there were any really cool, real science facts about
Speaker 1: bugs that kill by cocoon ing. And there are no
Speaker 1: real killer wood mites that I know of. But one
Speaker 1: interesting thing I did find was not about an insect,
Speaker 1: but about a spider that kills insects with cocoons. So
Speaker 1: this was This was a July two blog post found
Speaker 1: by a science writer named Ed Young, who's a writer
Speaker 1: I like. I follow him, and he he talks about
Speaker 1: this group of spiders called the ellbrids, which use their
Speaker 1: silk line and these are his words, as a murderous
Speaker 1: garbage compactor. Okay, alright, so I'm kind of imagining that
Speaker 1: does this. Does the silk from their their web kind
Speaker 1: of cut through the enemies as its as it constricts,
Speaker 1: it crushes, crushes them to death. So most spiders kill
Speaker 1: with venom, and those that spin webs they use their
Speaker 1: webs for like locomotion dropping down from something, or for
Speaker 1: traps to catch insects in. But a scientist named William
Speaker 1: Epperhard from the University of Costa Rica noticed that the
Speaker 1: librids spend more than an hour wrapping their prey in
Speaker 1: more than eighty meters of silk. So they catch an
Speaker 1: insect and then they just started wrapping and they just
Speaker 1: keep going and wrapping it, Yeah, wrapping it and wrapping it.
Speaker 1: One species in particular, called philippin Ella vicina, uses so
Speaker 1: much silk at such great compression that it crushes the
Speaker 1: insect inside, making quote its legs break and its eyes
Speaker 1: buckle inwards. So this sounds like some kind of like
Speaker 1: medieval torture device like that that would be used to
Speaker 1: get people to talk somehow. Yeah, it's the spider version
Speaker 1: of the scavengers daughter. Yeah, exactly Scavenger's daughter was what
Speaker 1: I was thinking of. So okay, so darkness falls. Maybe
Speaker 1: these are like we never I don't think see what
Speaker 1: these insects actually look like other than just like a
Speaker 1: haze of green. Yeah, they just kind of show up
Speaker 1: as dots and a lot. But but maybe they're tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny green spiders that we've very strong cocoons that squeeze
Speaker 1: the life out of their victims. I don't think it's
Speaker 1: very plausible, but but imagine if I mean, one thing
Speaker 1: that's certainly true is that spider webbing is spider silk
Speaker 1: is incredibly strong for its size, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: very fine. But for for how fine it is, it
Speaker 1: has amazing tentsile drength. And so maybe if you've got
Speaker 1: a whole whole bunch of arachnids working in tandem to
Speaker 1: cocoon a person like this with super high compression, I
Speaker 1: don't know, could that cause injury? Maybe I'd like to
Speaker 1: I'd like to imagine it could. Yeah, maybe that's where
Speaker 1: they're going to the episode. But they just didn't have
Speaker 1: the budget to quite show the incredible eighty meters silk
Speaker 1: per victim. Then again, I don't know if if the
Speaker 1: cocoon ing in the episode really compresses the victim all
Speaker 1: that hard, it seems like that. I think you're right,
Speaker 1: they get dried out or something like that. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: another episode that has some really really great bug science
Speaker 1: in it is War of the copper Phages. Yeah, where
Speaker 1: the copper Phages is written by one of our favorite
Speaker 1: X Files writers, Darren Morgan. He only wrote like four
Speaker 1: or five episodes, but they're like all my favorite episode. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And in this one, you know, general premises, Molder goes
Speaker 1: to a small town in which cockroaches are swarming all
Speaker 1: over people and killing them, and he's coming up with
Speaker 1: all these various ways that he thinks that the cockroaches
Speaker 1: are doing, usually supernatural or or or fantastics in some way.
Speaker 1: So one of the things we should mention in the
Speaker 1: title is, well, what is the term copper phage means? Well,
Speaker 1: a copper phage it means one who feeds on excrement,
Speaker 1: because cockroaches eat their own and other species. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a lovely term. So cockroaches aren't the only
Speaker 1: copper phages, but they are. They are a type of
Speaker 1: copper fage. I've I've heard that some of our coworkers
Speaker 1: here at How Stuff Works are copper phages. That is inappropriate.
Speaker 1: I've got a great insult for somebody next next time.
Speaker 1: Somebody's got a got a really obnoxious grin that this
Speaker 1: will get past the sensors. So you could you tell
Speaker 1: them they have a copper phaging grin. That's great? So okay,
Speaker 1: So this episode basically, you know, they run around trying
Speaker 1: to come up with all these ways, and it's everything
Speaker 1: from like the copper phages that cockroaches are aliens to
Speaker 1: their tiny little robots, right, and and Scully basically debunks
Speaker 1: every single thing he comes up with over the over
Speaker 1: the phone. It's great. Yeah, Scully in the episode, molders
Speaker 1: exploring this town and doing all chasing down all the leads,
Speaker 1: and I think scullies at home eating ice cream quick, right,
Speaker 1: she just she talks to Molder on the phone and
Speaker 1: debunks all of his theories over the over the lines. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So here's what we do know about cockroaches though, in
Speaker 1: the possibility of them swarming all over us and killing us, right,
Speaker 1: cockroaches breed very quickly. We know that we know anybody
Speaker 1: who's encountered a cockroach in their home is going to
Speaker 1: be aware of this stuff. They run very fast, especially
Speaker 1: for their their size. And we know that they carry
Speaker 1: bacteria easily because the bacteria in their feces, which let's
Speaker 1: remember they eat, remains viable for a long period of time. Uh.
Speaker 1: And yes, some people like myself are allergic to cockroaches. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if they're exposed more often to them. So now
Speaker 1: is that allergy like allergic to their bites, are allergic
Speaker 1: to I don't know, some kind of particle dispersed in
Speaker 1: the air. Yeah. I believe that it's remnants of their exoskeleton.
Speaker 1: So how do I expand this? I had an allergy
Speaker 1: test done last year where they basically do that thing
Speaker 1: where they line up your arm and they shoot little
Speaker 1: uh injections of particles into your your skin to find
Speaker 1: out what you're what's your allergic little allergens exactly? Skin
Speaker 1: wheel responses, Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. And they do it
Speaker 1: on my well, at least in my case, they did
Speaker 1: it on my arm and on my back, and cockroaches
Speaker 1: were one of the like forty things. Uh and it
Speaker 1: and it welled up. So I don't know, I haven't
Speaker 1: been exposed to that many cockroaches. So I don't know
Speaker 1: where this particular trait came from, But what what use
Speaker 1: are you supposed to make of that information? It's like, well,
Speaker 1: don't get in the bathtub full of cockroaches. I think
Speaker 1: it's like more along the lines of this is an
Speaker 1: allergen that if you if you live in a place
Speaker 1: where there are known to be a lot of cockroaches
Speaker 1: and there's just no way that you're going to get
Speaker 1: rid of them, should move you, should or take medicine
Speaker 1: or you know, um, one of the things they pitched
Speaker 1: me there with that therapy. I don't know if you've
Speaker 1: heard of this, the allergen therapy where they slowly expose
Speaker 1: you more and more to the thing that you're allergic to.
Speaker 1: Way they like inject you with it with injections with cockroaches. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean it's particulate matter. Yeah, yeah, I don't know that.
Speaker 1: They have like a bag of cockroaches in the back
Speaker 1: and they're just like grinding them up with a mortar
Speaker 1: past they put them in there and put a little
Speaker 1: in the syringe. Oh man, well, I can only imagine,
Speaker 1: given all the things that I was found to be
Speaker 1: allergic to, how disgusting that that mixed bag. But anyways, yeah,
Speaker 1: so people are allergic to them. But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Cockroaches don't usually swarm, right. We don't find like hundreds
Speaker 1: of cockroaches swarming on a live person and just devouring
Speaker 1: them like they seems like. They don't usually move towards
Speaker 1: you either. You flip the lights on and they almost
Speaker 1: a yeah. Usually what it is if you see a
Speaker 1: large group of them moving at one time, Usually what
Speaker 1: that is is that they've found a suitable home, like
Speaker 1: let's say a sewage plant, right, Uh. And the cockroaches,
Speaker 1: an individual cockroach can release a pheromone that will alert
Speaker 1: other roaches to its location and to say like, hey,
Speaker 1: look we've got this whole hotel we can move into now, right. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's that. And I also want to mention something
Speaker 1: else that we've talked about. Uh. I know you've talked
Speaker 1: about on Forward Thinking, one of our other shows here.
Speaker 1: It's a show that Joe does with Jonathan Strickland and
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel Bomb about future science. Um. And I talked
Speaker 1: about it on a on another one of our shows
Speaker 1: called Stuff of Genius, which is that you can actually
Speaker 1: control cockroaches by putting backpacks on them, these little tiny
Speaker 1: backpacks that have electrodes that connect to their brain. And uh,
Speaker 1: there's a there. There actually was a kickstarter uh two
Speaker 1: years ago that would allow you to use your phone
Speaker 1: once you've hooked up a cockroach in such a way
Speaker 1: in order to basically drive the cock roach around right right. Uh.
Speaker 1: And this technology was actually developed by a guy named
Speaker 1: Dr Isao Shimu Yama at the University of Tokyo. But
Speaker 1: the kickstarter was basically coming up with a way to
Speaker 1: to make this sort of a do it yourself science
Speaker 1: kit for kids, I guess, although I'd be terrified at
Speaker 1: the idea of kids just like trying to stick electrical
Speaker 1: probes into a cockroach's head. Uh. Anyways, it's totally possible
Speaker 1: to do this. And one of the reasons why is
Speaker 1: because we're theorizing that cockroach bodies are actually one of
Speaker 1: the best ways that we might have to explore space.
Speaker 1: So a robot cockroach or a cockroach that you're controlling
Speaker 1: with a little iPhone backpack might be an ideal way.
Speaker 1: And Molder even in this episode says something like he
Speaker 1: thinks the cockroaches have been sent from some alien civilization
Speaker 1: to to explore Earth, right right, Um, so we've already
Speaker 1: built cockroach esque robots to explore volcanoes. Uh. They dispose
Speaker 1: of minds and clean them up, and they also clean
Speaker 1: out nuclear power plants. Yeah. I've actually heard about the
Speaker 1: idea of using roach like robots to uh to search
Speaker 1: in rubble after earthquakes for surviving. That seems like a
Speaker 1: good idea as well, right yeah, yeah, So well, the
Speaker 1: reason why is because there are multiple legs in the
Speaker 1: way that they're you know, nervous system is set up,
Speaker 1: they offer both stability and mobility. Uh. And they also
Speaker 1: have centralized and decentralized control systems. So the central controls
Speaker 1: of their legs, you know, it governs all their legs,
Speaker 1: their whole body's movement, but they also have de central
Speaker 1: control on each leg, allowing it to act independently. So
Speaker 1: I can see now why like malder you know, if
Speaker 1: malder knew this, I don't know if he was familiar
Speaker 1: with the that doctor's research at the time, but that
Speaker 1: he would think, oh, yeah, maybe this is like a
Speaker 1: little uh probe for an alien civilization or something like that.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's how will probe other civilizations in the future
Speaker 1: will send spaceships full of robot cockroaches. That makes a
Speaker 1: good point, and that actually ties into something I know
Speaker 1: I've said on this show before, and it's an opinion
Speaker 1: I've held for a while now that when we encounter
Speaker 1: an alien civilization, I don't think we're going to meet them.
Speaker 1: I think we're going to meet their technology. Right, whatever
Speaker 1: they send, they're much more likely, I mean much more likely,
Speaker 1: like I actually know. But my my gut feeling is
Speaker 1: that what would be more probable is that they would
Speaker 1: send feelers out throughout the galaxy, that there would be
Speaker 1: sort of unmanned probes, so weaponized bees I think is
Speaker 1: our best transition next, right, Yeah, this has been a
Speaker 1: recurring theme in the show. That's a lot of fun. Actually,
Speaker 1: it's it's in the movie. It's in some classic myth
Speaker 1: Arc episodes like Herren Vulcan, Zero Sum, and Uh. The
Speaker 1: bees appear sometimes as vectors for the intentional spread of
Speaker 1: a disease like smallpoxox is a big theme in the
Speaker 1: X Files. Yeah, but they also sometimes appear as what
Speaker 1: appears to be just a direct attack weapons, stinging people
Speaker 1: to death. So they you know, they float into town
Speaker 1: and sting the enemies of the conspiracy to death like
Speaker 1: this mobile cloud assassin, which is a decent idea. They're multifunctional,
Speaker 1: and I wanted to look into the possibility of using
Speaker 1: bees like this as a weapon in the ways envisioned
Speaker 1: in the X file. And this has actually come up.
Speaker 1: You reminded me before we came in here. This has
Speaker 1: come up on stuff to blow your mind before. When
Speaker 1: we were talking about wolfsbane and aconite. I guess I
Speaker 1: theorized that you could have a bee pollinate an aconite
Speaker 1: flower and and then potentially sting to somebody and spread
Speaker 1: the aconite. And we actually had a listener right in
Speaker 1: and say that that is absolutely not possible, with a
Speaker 1: good explanation of why they did, and we addressed it
Speaker 1: in a listener mail episode. But yeah, so, yeah, there
Speaker 1: there are many diseases that are spread by insects. That's
Speaker 1: fairly obvious. Virus is spread by arthur pods or often
Speaker 1: known as arbor viruses, and these they tend to be
Speaker 1: spread by blood sucking insects that bite or puncture the
Speaker 1: host animals skin like mosquito or fleas or lice or ticks. Yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and not by stinging insects like bees. So I would
Speaker 1: say that in principle, it doesn't seem impossible to engineer
Speaker 1: bees that deliver a virus via their sting. But I
Speaker 1: couldn't find any examples of anything like this in the
Speaker 1: real world. And uh, and I couldn't really imagine also
Speaker 1: why this would be done, because just let me back
Speaker 1: up and get into it a little bit here, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm with you. So spreading smallpox is a good way
Speaker 1: to kill lots of people if that's your goal, as
Speaker 1: as the cigarette smoking man or some other conspiracy commanding figure,
Speaker 1: if you want to cause terror havoc can kill millions,
Speaker 1: you could You could use a bioweapon. You could spread
Speaker 1: a very deadly germ like small box, the small boxes,
Speaker 1: the very ola virus. It's highly contagious and and it
Speaker 1: and it kills lots of people. I remember reading a
Speaker 1: stat that it kills like one in four people who
Speaker 1: get it. So what does Cavelos have to say about
Speaker 1: bees and smallpox in her book, Well, she says, you know,
Speaker 1: she's thinking about the question, could be be engineered to
Speaker 1: inject a virus like smallpox in its sting? And she
Speaker 1: speaks to a doctor w K y'all click and y'all
Speaker 1: click says, basically, scientists can never rule out anything. It's
Speaker 1: kind of a vague answer just through the whole thousands
Speaker 1: of years worth of research right out the window. But
Speaker 1: I guess that's that's an appropriate point with this topic,
Speaker 1: because there's nothing. There's nothing that says it would be
Speaker 1: impossible to get a virus into the venom gland be
Speaker 1: But it just doesn't seem like it doesn't seem probable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like the best way to go about
Speaker 1: it either. So Cavela speculates the bees and the X
Speaker 1: Files are the species APIs smell of Fera scuta lata,
Speaker 1: which is the African honey bee, often sometimes known in
Speaker 1: the alarmist press as the killer bees. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: was right at the height of the X Files. This
Speaker 1: was I think when the hysteria about killer bees man
Speaker 1: America was really can you remember this in the at
Speaker 1: least the news stories killer bees. Yeah, they're gonna they're
Speaker 1: gonna come and they're gonna I believe they were supposed
Speaker 1: to come up from the South, right, and they're gonna
Speaker 1: kill everybody in Texas first or something. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: the the idea is that they were introduced to South
Speaker 1: America from Africa, they became an invasive species when they
Speaker 1: got loose and they spread up from the south over
Speaker 1: the continent, and that they were they were super dangerous.
Speaker 1: I think that was overstated. They can be dangerous in
Speaker 1: that situation. Uh, what I've read is that their venom
Speaker 1: isn't any more dangerous than that of other bees, but
Speaker 1: they are reportedly more aggressive in their swarming and stinging behavior.
Speaker 1: So they're just more likely to get really worked up
Speaker 1: and keep chasing you in attacking. And that that lines
Speaker 1: up with what we see of like the be attacks
Speaker 1: in X files pretty much like like I think I remember,
Speaker 1: like somebody walks into a room full of them and
Speaker 1: they just all immediately attack with this person, right, And
Speaker 1: so what happens when a bee stings you, Well, there's
Speaker 1: one particular type of bee in the colony that stings you.
Speaker 1: It's it's not going to be the male drone or
Speaker 1: the queen that's usually stinging you, but the female worker
Speaker 1: bee and her stinger is a modified ovipositor. So it's
Speaker 1: the same organ that in a queen becomes the the
Speaker 1: egg laying organ. But in these in these sterile sisters,
Speaker 1: in the in the sterile worker bees, it turns into
Speaker 1: these barbed needles that stab you as the bee furiously
Speaker 1: pumps in venom. And then usually the worker bee dies
Speaker 1: after this within a couple of hours, So it's literally
Speaker 1: the tiny death. So yeah, you can you can imagine
Speaker 1: why it would seem appealing as a as a sort
Speaker 1: of infectious agent delivery system because it's literally injecting you
Speaker 1: kind of like a hypodermic needle if somebody wanted to
Speaker 1: inject you with smallpox. Yeah, but bees don't get smallpox,
Speaker 1: and even if they did, it probably wouldn't infect you
Speaker 1: for a sting because it's not delivering. It's not just
Speaker 1: designed to do that. It delivers the venom. I believe
Speaker 1: this was what the our listener who wrote in about
Speaker 1: the aconite. It's just along the same lines of reasoning
Speaker 1: that even if it digested it, it's it's not the
Speaker 1: like organ isn't even connected to the rest of its
Speaker 1: uh system. Yeah, so bees are not a good candidate
Speaker 1: for delivering smallpox. But that does not mean you can't
Speaker 1: use bees as weapons. In fact, there is a fascinating
Speaker 1: history of humans doing this very thing. I checked out
Speaker 1: this book called Six Legged Soldiers Using Insects as Weapons
Speaker 1: of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood, and this book is
Speaker 1: really interesting so far. I look forward to reading the
Speaker 1: rest of it. Lockwood chronicles many historical claims of insect warfare,
Speaker 1: or to give it an academically respectable name, entomological warfare
Speaker 1: e W. And generally. Lockwood mentions that there there are
Speaker 1: three basic ways you can use insects to attack people
Speaker 1: and and cause havoc. One is what we've been talking about,
Speaker 1: the transmission of pathogenic microbes. Throwing bodies with plague ridden
Speaker 1: fleas over the walls of a city or something like
Speaker 1: that would be an example there. Or you can use
Speaker 1: them for the destruction of crops and livestock, and that's
Speaker 1: a big one and a lot of people don't think
Speaker 1: about it. Or you can use them methods of destruction.
Speaker 1: You can use them for a way they show up
Speaker 1: in in the X files. Also just direct attacks on humans,
Speaker 1: you know, sick um bees. And he he notes that
Speaker 1: in this last in this last item, just direct attacks
Speaker 1: on humans, bees are pretty good soldiers because when you
Speaker 1: think about other war animals like dogs and elephants and horses.
Speaker 1: They all, as higher mammals, have a self preservation drive
Speaker 1: that makes them, in Lockwood's words, quote, prone to desertion
Speaker 1: in the midst of combat. Yeah, it's the survival instinct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But a swarm of attacking worker bees does not have
Speaker 1: that preservation instinct, and they've evolved in a very different
Speaker 1: way from mammals with teeth and claws. Worker bees are sterile.
Speaker 1: They don't reproduce, so they don't particularly value their own survival,
Speaker 1: but they viciously attack in defense of the one among
Speaker 1: them who can reproduce, the queen. So if something bad
Speaker 1: happens to the nest, they will self sacrificially fly out
Speaker 1: and attack to protect the queen. So this is interesting
Speaker 1: because I just got done working on a piece for
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works about how you can epo genetically control ants,
Speaker 1: and when I was talking to the lead researcher on this,
Speaker 1: she was telling me that they're also looking into research
Speaker 1: with bees in similar ways. And by using the royal
Speaker 1: jelly that's fed to the queen bees, you can sometimes
Speaker 1: you know, potentially manipulate the bees into thinking they're protecting
Speaker 1: the queen when they're protecting somebody else maybe maybe that's
Speaker 1: the science behind this. Wow, So this really you really
Speaker 1: could to be army in this way. Theoretically, this is
Speaker 1: I don't want to the Well, the researcher I spoke
Speaker 1: to hadn't done this, but she was hypothesizing. It's fun
Speaker 1: to dream. Okay. So Lockwood speculates that people throughout prehistory
Speaker 1: possibly used bees as weapons and and he gives the
Speaker 1: example that early human combat might have sometimes involved hurling
Speaker 1: bees nests or wasps nests at a group of enemies.
Speaker 1: So this is like before we figured out fire, it
Speaker 1: was like maybe not fire, but before we had But
Speaker 1: I'm just imagining, like, how are we gonna attack them?
Speaker 1: Just grab that pile of bees and throw it at him. Well,
Speaker 1: he has some interesting suggestions. So he says this would
Speaker 1: be an effective way of say, you have a bunch
Speaker 1: of enemies, an enemy tribe that's hiding inside a cave
Speaker 1: or a hut or some enclosure, and you know it's
Speaker 1: risky to run in there at them, but what if
Speaker 1: you could drive them out by hurling a bees nest
Speaker 1: grenade out. Lockwood notes that there's not much physical evidence
Speaker 1: of this, so it remains mostly speculation. Though an interesting
Speaker 1: one to think about what what weapons would have been
Speaker 1: available to people in prehistory, And so he's thinking through
Speaker 1: this and he's like, well, you know, with the technology
Speaker 1: available to them at the time, they could have probably
Speaker 1: done this by say, harvesting a bee or wasp nest
Speaker 1: at night. If they approachiate during the nighttime, the insects
Speaker 1: are slowed down by cooler temperatures, or if it's people
Speaker 1: who have mastered fire, they can use smoke to calm
Speaker 1: the bees, and then they could insert the bees into
Speaker 1: a woven basket or sack and then just kind of
Speaker 1: like throw it open inside the enemy's cave exactly. Or
Speaker 1: you could plug the openings up with mud or grass. Okay, wow,
Speaker 1: that probably wouldn't kill the people that you're attacking, but
Speaker 1: it would be well maybe unless there are these pekiller
Speaker 1: bees that were speaking about earlier, but well maybe, But
Speaker 1: a lot of times the point of using bees as
Speaker 1: direct attack is not to kill the enemy because election
Speaker 1: but yeah, it's sort of it's a terrorizing or terrifying idea.
Speaker 1: You know, it depresses the enemy, it causes fear, panic,
Speaker 1: and and it causes bad tactical maneuvers. I'll get into
Speaker 1: that in just a second. I believe that this is
Speaker 1: something that you can do in that video game BioShock. Yes,
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure, right, yeah, you can throw bees at
Speaker 1: your enemy and then they all start panicking. So once
Speaker 1: historians start making records of ancient warfare into mo logical
Speaker 1: warfare definitely appears on the scene, including bees and wasps.
Speaker 1: For example, Lockwood says that the Tiv people of Nigeria
Speaker 1: developed what he refers to as a bee canon. So
Speaker 1: this was bees loaded into a large hollow horn which
Speaker 1: could be pointed facing the enemy in battle and then
Speaker 1: shake into release swarms in the opposing forces direction. And
Speaker 1: according to a book I found called World History of
Speaker 1: Bee Keeping and Honey Hunting by Ava Rain, it's also
Speaker 1: suggested that if if the enemies were close enough, the
Speaker 1: Tiv soldiers would try to pour sweet smelling powder on
Speaker 1: their enemies, and the idea was that this would attract
Speaker 1: the bees. Okay, Another really interesting ancient use of this
Speaker 1: is that Lockwood mentions that in the Mayan sacred text
Speaker 1: popel Vu, it tells of a Mayan battle strategy that
Speaker 1: involved building a fake warrior dummy with a head made
Speaker 1: out of a hollow gourd covered with a head dress,
Speaker 1: and when the enemy rushed in and smashed the heads
Speaker 1: of these dummies, they would discover not only that they
Speaker 1: were not real people, they were traps. The hollow gourd
Speaker 1: heads were filled with stinging insects, either wasps or bees,
Speaker 1: and then they just angrily swarm out an attack. This
Speaker 1: would cause a chaotic retreat, and during the route the
Speaker 1: Mayan warriors would run in and fall upon the fleeing
Speaker 1: enemy and destroy them. So a cigarette smoking man, a
Speaker 1: student of history, this is where he proposed the great
Speaker 1: usage of bees for the alien invasion. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: the X Files is one of the earliest examples I
Speaker 1: can think of of people talking uh tying government conspiracies
Speaker 1: into the the end of the Mayan long Calendar, you know,
Speaker 1: which they supposedly said it was in two thousand twelve. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And we've talked about bees before on on the show
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff that you and I both write for. There
Speaker 1: was an episode that our colleague Lauren Vogelbaum did that
Speaker 1: was about colony collapse disorder, and I'd be curious how
Speaker 1: you might people to incorporate that into X Files conspiracy mythos.
Speaker 1: Uh Yeah, I'm sure I bet it will show up
Speaker 1: in the new series. Maybe what do you want to
Speaker 1: be let's put money to Well, we'll find out if
Speaker 1: it does. We'll find out in two weeks, right, So
Speaker 1: a couple more interesting facts about bees in the ancient world.
Speaker 1: The ancient Greek military writer a Neus Tacticus wrote in
Speaker 1: an influential work in the fourth century b c. Called
Speaker 1: How to Survive under Siege, which sounds like a good read.
Speaker 1: That's a that's a surviving watching that Stephen Sagal movie. Touche.
Speaker 1: Uh No, No, he gives this cool tactics. So he says,
Speaker 1: if you're in a city this under siege and the
Speaker 1: army outside is digging tunnels under your walls to get
Speaker 1: into the city, you should you should meet the tunnels
Speaker 1: and chuck some bees and wasps down into the tunnels
Speaker 1: with the enemy soldiers. These guys just have bees like
Speaker 1: at the ready. Though it seems like like they've just
Speaker 1: got like pockets full of bees. Well they did it
Speaker 1: first because another thing that Lockwood points out in his
Speaker 1: book is that the Romans used bee hives as a
Speaker 1: common catapult payload. So they put beehives in a catapult
Speaker 1: and then throw it at enemy fortifications, and he says
Speaker 1: that they did it so much that it might have
Speaker 1: contributed to a documented decline in the number of bee
Speaker 1: hives found in the Roman Empire towards the end the
Speaker 1: late period in the Empire. Well, you can't say they
Speaker 1: weren't creative. But to bring it back to smallpox, if
Speaker 1: we're talking about warfare today, just using bees as direct
Speaker 1: attack weapons is not going to be especially powerful compared
Speaker 1: to lots of other things you could do. A violent,
Speaker 1: terrorizing attack you can do with bullets, bombs, poison gas,
Speaker 1: and other chemical weapons. The only reason I can imagine
Speaker 1: a modern conspiracy would want to use bees as a
Speaker 1: direct attack weapon is maybe just for effect, because it's
Speaker 1: like a weird and frightening image to hurt enemy morale. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean I think in the X Files, the idea
Speaker 1: was that it was something that you just wouldn't even
Speaker 1: suspect was a weapon, Right, that's kind of part of it. Uh,
Speaker 1: they're all around us man, Yeah exactly. Or that you'd
Speaker 1: already been stung and infected with the smallpox virus and
Speaker 1: you didn't even know it. Uh, yeah, I don't know. Uh,
Speaker 1: it sounds to me, like, based on what you've what
Speaker 1: you've said that it would have been far more effective
Speaker 1: for them to just use mosquitoes exactly right, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it would be much more effective if they were
Speaker 1: going to try to engineer an insect delivered weapon against
Speaker 1: the people of Earth. It would make much more to
Speaker 1: use mosquitoes or fleas as a disease vector, or to
Speaker 1: introduce a crop destroying pest like you know, locusts or
Speaker 1: med flies or something to just ruin all of our
Speaker 1: food crops. And so if you're the cigarette smoking man,
Speaker 1: that is the more fruitful pun intended avenue of attack. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: why don't we take this opportunity to take a break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: one of the one of the most disturbing episodes of
Speaker 1: The X Files that I've ever seen and I think
Speaker 1: happened in the show's history. Okay, we're back. So we
Speaker 1: are going to talk about very briefly, the episode of
Speaker 1: The X Files called Home. Now, if you haven't seen
Speaker 1: this one, it's I would say it's the darkest episode
Speaker 1: of The X Files I've ever seen. Oh, it was
Speaker 1: so disturbing. I mean, there are parts of it that
Speaker 1: are kind of funny in retrospect, but when you're actually
Speaker 1: watching it, it is messed up. It is like, it's
Speaker 1: like they let the Texas Chainsaw Massacre uncensored onto network television. Well,
Speaker 1: one of the things I love about about this episode
Speaker 1: is that, yeah, it's definitely influenced by Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Speaker 1: which is too bad Robert doesn't hear with us because
Speaker 1: we know that's one of his favorite movies. But also
Speaker 1: that you don't actually see any of the violence. It's
Speaker 1: all implied, it's all off camera, but it is. It
Speaker 1: just it is shot in such a way that it
Speaker 1: sticks in your head and your imagination fills in the blanks.
Speaker 1: I think Fox actually apologized for this episode, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I didn't like it was so disturbing that after they
Speaker 1: aired it, they were like, are bad, We're never going
Speaker 1: to do that again. Well, so, the essential premise of
Speaker 1: Home is that I don't even remember where they are
Speaker 1: what stayed there, and I guess it doesn't matter. But
Speaker 1: there's this uh family that lives off sort of in
Speaker 1: the middle of nowhere in this small town, and and
Speaker 1: it turns out that they are all the children of
Speaker 1: closely related parents who have a high incident of genetic disease. Right,
Speaker 1: so they're all kind of like, uh, well, they're all
Speaker 1: ancestral relatives, but they're also sort of crazy and it's
Speaker 1: unclear like how they're all related in some ways. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is playing on the old trope that
Speaker 1: if you know, if closely related relatives reproduced together, that
Speaker 1: their offspring will will be messed up in one way
Speaker 1: or another. Well so, yeah, so Cavelos actually like took
Speaker 1: a look at this because Home is one of those
Speaker 1: pretty I would say it's like one of those up
Speaker 1: there popular best of episodes of the X Files. Whenever
Speaker 1: you look at those lists of like top ten, top
Speaker 1: twenty episodes, I think a lot of people just enjoy
Speaker 1: the perversity of the idea that an episode like this
Speaker 1: was aired on Fox in the I I have to
Speaker 1: say that I really enjoyed it, you know, recently watching it,
Speaker 1: I think it holds up to any of our model
Speaker 1: in horror movies, even you know, twenty years later. But
Speaker 1: um so Cavelos looks at this and she finds that, yeah,
Speaker 1: when you have related couples, each of them carry the
Speaker 1: same negative recessive traits, right, which makes the chance that
Speaker 1: their child will inherit two copies of those traits even higher. Right. So,
Speaker 1: at the time this was in when Cavelos wrote the book,
Speaker 1: eleven point seven percent of offspring from first cousin marriages
Speaker 1: have a physical defect or had a physical defect, whereas
Speaker 1: eight point five percent of unre related couples, people who
Speaker 1: you know, were not cousins or brothers, sister u had
Speaker 1: these similar physical defects. Okay, so that seems like the
Speaker 1: difference isn't actually all that huge, yeah, exactly. But she
Speaker 1: goes on twenty percent of children that are born from incest,
Speaker 1: so father daughter relationships or brothers sister relationships die in childhood,
Speaker 1: and thirty three percent suffered disabilities. So it seems somewhere
Speaker 1: along there that there's a there's a discrepancy between the
Speaker 1: definition of a physical defect and disability, right, because the
Speaker 1: percentages are a little different. Those are probably not the
Speaker 1: terms that we would use today to be sensitive about.
Speaker 1: I agree, Yeah, that's what's used in the literature of
Speaker 1: the time, exactly. And and too she calls out too,
Speaker 1: in particular Mechel Gruber and new Lexova syndrome, and they're
Speaker 1: both mentioned in the episode. I believe there's a scene
Speaker 1: where they find this is gruesome. In the episode, they
Speaker 1: find a dead baby I think, right, and Scully is
Speaker 1: like testing it and she just finds that it's got
Speaker 1: all of these UH diseases, all these genetic diseases inside
Speaker 1: and just say something like it's got like every every
Speaker 1: every inherited disease you can have or something. Um. So,
Speaker 1: both of those mechel Gruber and new Lexova are caused
Speaker 1: by recessive genetic traits and this you know, the traits.
Speaker 1: Traits that go along with this include small malformed heads
Speaker 1: and actually missing parts of the brain or spinal cord.
Speaker 1: And there are even some cases where there's a skin
Speaker 1: covered sack on the back of the head that has
Speaker 1: a malformed portion of the brain in it, along with
Speaker 1: deformed limbs. And that kind of lines up with what
Speaker 1: we saw of the little the baby monster that they find,
Speaker 1: and that's dug up right, the actual UH. I guess
Speaker 1: family and home are human looking, right, Well. I wanted
Speaker 1: to take a look into this and see how it
Speaker 1: lined up with today's numbers. And there's a great article
Speaker 1: over on Ion nine that's called why in breeding really
Speaker 1: isn't as bad as you think it is. I gotta
Speaker 1: love Ionine with those headlines types that's clicking. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so they said, and this was relatively recently. I want
Speaker 1: to say, in the last two or three years, cousins
Speaker 1: breeding go from a point one percent chance to a
Speaker 1: twenty chance of a genetic disease like cystic fibrosis. So
Speaker 1: I think that this is what cystic fibrosis is probably
Speaker 1: what Cavellos was referring to back in the nineties as
Speaker 1: quote physical defect right, um, and that's very different from
Speaker 1: the numbers above. Uh. They also cite in that piece
Speaker 1: that there's a guy named Alan Biddles at Australia's Murdock
Speaker 1: University and he specifically studies incestual birth defects. He studied
Speaker 1: it for thirty years. Can you imagine that that's your
Speaker 1: line of study. You go to work every morning and
Speaker 1: you're looking at that. He says, he's the expert on this.
Speaker 1: He says, there's a two percent risk of birth defects
Speaker 1: in the general population, okay, but there's a four percent
Speaker 1: chance in first cousin relationships, so you automatically say two
Speaker 1: for okay, So there's double the risk of birth defects, right, Well,
Speaker 1: or you could look at it the other way, is
Speaker 1: what they say in this ion Ion article that there's
Speaker 1: only a nineties six percent chance that these children are
Speaker 1: born healthy. Right, So maybe it depends on how you
Speaker 1: look at It's like a cup half empty, half full
Speaker 1: kind of thing, right. Um, So of children born from
Speaker 1: first cousin relationships are just fine. But biddles found that
Speaker 1: only one point two percent of them suffered from an
Speaker 1: increase in infant mortality rates. So that's significantly lower than
Speaker 1: what Cavellos was reporting back in the nineties. Huh yeah, um,
Speaker 1: And this is a good opportunity for us to bring
Speaker 1: up what a chimera is. Be familiar with this from mythology,
Speaker 1: the chimera. The chimera, well, I mean the chimera I
Speaker 1: believe combines different types of animals into the same animal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a good D and D monster. It's a part lion,
Speaker 1: park goat, and part dragon. But in the scientific sense,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a genetic condition, right, the exactly you've
Speaker 1: you've incorporated the genome of multiple different individuals into one body.
Speaker 1: It's an organism that has two different sets of DNA
Speaker 1: usually originating from the fusion of different zygoats or eggs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's basically how you defined it. And and it's important
Speaker 1: to denote here a chimera in a human chimera is
Speaker 1: not to be mistaken for a mosaic. A mosaic is
Speaker 1: when an organism contains different populations of cells from a
Speaker 1: single zygot or egg. It's also not a hybrid. And
Speaker 1: this is important because we're gonna talk a lot about
Speaker 1: hybrids later and chimeras will come up again. Hybrids contain
Speaker 1: genetically identical cells from two different species. Okay, So the
Speaker 1: reason I bring this up is Cavelos talks about the possibility,
Speaker 1: well maybe, uh, maybe all of this ancestual relationship in
Speaker 1: the family and home led to them being chimeras. So
Speaker 1: they have the tissues of multiple genotypes. Uh. And and
Speaker 1: so there's this idea that they've got the DNA of
Speaker 1: two different people. Uh. And it's possible that a fertilized
Speaker 1: twin egg was absorbed by its sibling uh And that
Speaker 1: these can then incorporate twins of different sexes. Right, So
Speaker 1: you could be a male twin of a female twin.
Speaker 1: You could absorb your female twin and Cavelas actually talks
Speaker 1: about instances where this has happened and the person grows
Speaker 1: up and they find part like reproductive organs and weird
Speaker 1: places inside their bodies from a totally different gender than
Speaker 1: what they they were born to. H Yeah, so who knows,
Speaker 1: maybe that's something that was going on with the home
Speaker 1: people in there. They're crazy Texas Chainsaw Masca Ranch. Okay,
Speaker 1: now I think it's time for us to take a
Speaker 1: quick break to hear from our sponsor. But when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will be going into the depths of
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Speaker 1: We don't spell it differently here that's stamps dot com
Speaker 1: enter stuff. Okay, we're back. So Joe, I gotta ask you,
Speaker 1: after going over home and the science behind incest and
Speaker 1: birth defects, is there any way that I can just
Speaker 1: scrub my mind clean of this? Is? Can I forget,
Speaker 1: just push this out of my head? Nope? Probably not really.
Speaker 1: But if if you're I've seen this many times on
Speaker 1: the TV show are you Are you sure? This is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite things that happens on the TV show. Okay,
Speaker 1: So imagine somebody wakes up in a field and they've
Speaker 1: got this field where lay no, the field where you died?
Speaker 1: O the fielder I died? Yeah, that was really bad
Speaker 1: X files joke. They wake up in center field on
Speaker 1: on a baseball stadium. Uh. And they wake up and
Speaker 1: they've got some missing time. They've got a problem. Oh no,
Speaker 1: some time disappeared from my life and I and I
Speaker 1: can't figure out what happened. I have no memory of it.
Speaker 1: What is Mulder recommend? Well, I'm gonna go with the
Speaker 1: regression hypnosis. That's right, Thank god, I have deeper regression hypnosis.
Speaker 1: I'm still only catching up. I'm up to the beginning
Speaker 1: of the fifth season and he's already done this four times. Uh,
Speaker 1: and that's per Those are four episodes, I want to say.
Speaker 1: In jose Chunks from Outer Space, it's at least three
Speaker 1: times in that episode he does it. Yeah. And jose Chungs,
Speaker 1: which is probably my favorite episode, hose Chungs from Outer Space,
Speaker 1: he does it to the same girl at least three times.
Speaker 1: And so what what is the idea of regression hypnosis? Well,
Speaker 1: as depicted in the episodes, and we're going to distinguish
Speaker 1: between what happens on the X Files and what might
Speaker 1: happen in real life. On the episodes, you've got a
Speaker 1: hypnotist or some kind of therapist who practices hypnotism, who
Speaker 1: puts somebody into a hypnotized state, so they'll tell them
Speaker 1: to relax and and say some kind of like patterns
Speaker 1: of words that put them into an altered state of consciousness,
Speaker 1: and then the person gets kind of dreamy and starts
Speaker 1: remembering things. Wait a minute, they in the hypnotist says
Speaker 1: where are you now? And the person under hypnosis says,
Speaker 1: I'm being lifted up above the ground and I'm floating
Speaker 1: through walls in a spacecraft and I'm laying there while
Speaker 1: the aliens do experiments on me. And this is what
Speaker 1: happens in the show pre Beviously, this person had no
Speaker 1: memory of an event, and then suddenly, by being hypnotized,
Speaker 1: they have access to memories that weren't available to them
Speaker 1: consciously before. Yeah. This is um connected to the Satanic
Speaker 1: panic that was happening around the eighties as well as
Speaker 1: the same kind of thing. Robert and I talked about
Speaker 1: it in the episode we did on Satanic Panic. I
Speaker 1: believe the book that popularized this was called Michelle Remembers, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it very much the same idea, except for instead
Speaker 1: of aliens, it was demon worshippers. Nice. So, in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen nineties, when Chris Carter was first developing the
Speaker 1: idea of the X files. He got into the work
Speaker 1: of the Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mac, And Johnny Mac
Speaker 1: was deep into the study of alien abductee experiences at
Speaker 1: the time. I think he got into it in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. So Mac worked personally with more than two
Speaker 1: hundred different people who claimed to have experiences of alien abductions.
Speaker 1: He interviewed them and he tried to understand with their
Speaker 1: experiences and the effect of abduction experiences on personality, consciousness,
Speaker 1: and worldview. And the interesting thing is altruistic, I guess. So. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mac was a respected academic and psychiatrist before he embarked
Speaker 1: on this alien abduction research. So he wasn't. He wasn't
Speaker 1: somebody people thought of as a kuk, at least not
Speaker 1: before this. But his work drew a lot of controversy.
Speaker 1: He was even investigated by the Harvard medical faculty at
Speaker 1: one point, who were afraid that he was causing harm
Speaker 1: to his patients by confirming the reality of their delusions.
Speaker 1: So so what was his attitude really too? Yeah, yeah
Speaker 1: it was. It was he just like a shyster or no,
Speaker 1: I don't get that since at all, But he but
Speaker 1: he also it's hard to pin down exactly to what
Speaker 1: extent he believed in the reality of the alien abductions.
Speaker 1: For example, he gave a quote to the BBC where
Speaker 1: he it sounds like he's trying to avoid the hurance
Speaker 1: of having gone full Molder, so he he says, he says,
Speaker 1: I would never say, yes, there are aliens talking to people,
Speaker 1: but I would say there's a compelling, powerful phenomenon here
Speaker 1: that I can't account for in any other way. That's mysterious.
Speaker 1: Yet I can't know what it is, but it seems
Speaker 1: to me that it invites deeper, further inquiry. So I mean,
Speaker 1: that's a respectable point of view. I guess you're just saying, like, well,
Speaker 1: here's an interesting phenomenon. Lots of people claim to have
Speaker 1: experienced something I don't really understand, and I don't know.
Speaker 1: I've said this before in the Satanic Panic episode and
Speaker 1: other episodes where we talk about people having kind of
Speaker 1: out of body experiences as such. Uh that it's not
Speaker 1: that I don't believe, but I do believe that they believe.
Speaker 1: You know, in a lot of situations, it's so real
Speaker 1: for them it doesn't matter whether it was real or
Speaker 1: not it's it's affecting them regardless. But despite that quote,
Speaker 1: I've read in other places, and I've seen videos of
Speaker 1: Mac talking like on on TV interviews and IT conferences
Speaker 1: where he kind of comes off as committing a little
Speaker 1: more to the reality of alien abductions than that quote
Speaker 1: would lead you to believe. So it seems like he
Speaker 1: he was sort of presenting maybe some different kind of
Speaker 1: levels of confidence in the reality of alien abductions at
Speaker 1: different times. So back to Chris Carter. Chris Carter, of course,
Speaker 1: I don't know if we established he created the X Files. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so Carter claims that in the early nineties, Mac
Speaker 1: invited him to sit in on a regression hypnosis session
Speaker 1: with somebody who claimed to have had an alien abduction experience,
Speaker 1: and Carter found this experience very disturbing. It really stuck
Speaker 1: with him what he saw, and I'm sure inspired a
Speaker 1: lot of these things and the X Files where we
Speaker 1: see people undergo regression hypnosis. But but what was regression
Speaker 1: hypnosis really as practiced by Mac and the people who
Speaker 1: endorsed it. Well, Mac wrote a book. It was called
Speaker 1: Abduction Human Encounters with Aliens, and in max own words,
Speaker 1: it quote describes a clinical map of the abduction territory.
Speaker 1: And I read through some parts of the book to
Speaker 1: see what mac had to say about the experiences, and
Speaker 1: he sort of describes typical features of his interviews with
Speaker 1: adductees or experiencers as he likes to call them. And
Speaker 1: while I think he maintained that the majority of his
Speaker 1: research was based on sort of standard face to face conversation,
Speaker 1: just talking to people, interviews, conscious memories, he did employ
Speaker 1: the use of regression hypnosis to get new details. He
Speaker 1: liked to call it instead of hypnosis, he called them
Speaker 1: relaxation exercises. So he describes that this was like where
Speaker 1: he'd he'd go through a series of patterns where he
Speaker 1: encouraged the subject to focus on breathing and relax all
Speaker 1: the parts of the body and visualize a safe space,
Speaker 1: and then have the subject mentally returned to that safe
Speaker 1: space periodically. Sounds like yoga. That sounds like shivasana, what
Speaker 1: I do after I cool down after a yoga session.
Speaker 1: You know, I've noticed before some some mimilarities between what
Speaker 1: people describe from the experience of hypnosis and what people
Speaker 1: describe experiences of yoga or meditation, And so there seemed
Speaker 1: to be some similarities there, and maybe in introducing very
Speaker 1: mildly altered states of consciousness just by intentional relaxation of
Speaker 1: the body and the mind. Yeah, and so anyway back
Speaker 1: to mac during the session, once he got people into
Speaker 1: these relaxation exercises, he would attempt to help the patient regress,
Speaker 1: to go back into memories that have been repressed by
Speaker 1: the conscious mind and recover new details, like what what
Speaker 1: are we recovering here? Because I keep thinking about this.
Speaker 1: Are you familiar with the comedian Kyle Kanane. No, well,
Speaker 1: I've heard the name. He's one of my favorite comedians
Speaker 1: that he is. His latest album, he has this bit
Speaker 1: where he talks about repressed memories and using hypnosis to
Speaker 1: bring them back, and he jokes because he's like, I
Speaker 1: wish I could repress memories. He says something on the
Speaker 1: lines of, oh you can repress memories. Tell me how, wizard?
Speaker 1: So I want to I want to know what are they?
Speaker 1: What are they bringing back up? Other than well, I mean,
Speaker 1: the idea of repressed memories goes way back in in psychology.
Speaker 1: I mean, Freud talked about repression of of memories. You
Speaker 1: know that you would you would hide memories of traumatic
Speaker 1: childhood experiences that really influenced who you are. But I
Speaker 1: think you didn't have to be like a strict Freudy
Speaker 1: and to believe in repressed memories. I'm not sure how
Speaker 1: much science there is behind the idea of a repressed
Speaker 1: memory now. I think that's highly debated. But anyway, what
Speaker 1: Max said he would do is that he claimed the
Speaker 1: value of regression and hypnosis is not necessarily to get
Speaker 1: people to recall like whole experiences that they never otherwise remembered,
Speaker 1: but to sort of flesh out the details have already
Speaker 1: established memories, and also for therapeutic purpose. We've seen this
Speaker 1: on plenty of television shows before, Like you were in
Speaker 1: a bank when it was robbed, but you couldn't at
Speaker 1: the time, you didn't necessarily pay attention to all the
Speaker 1: details of what certain people were wearing. But if we
Speaker 1: use hypnosis, we can make you go back to the
Speaker 1: president of that event exactly. And that's what he advocates.
Speaker 1: So in one sense, I would say the kinds of
Speaker 1: regression hypnosis we see on the X files are probably
Speaker 1: not even an accurate portrayal of what the advocates of
Speaker 1: regression hypnosis would say they do, so it's it's not
Speaker 1: even accurately showing what the people who think it works
Speaker 1: would say. Even though Chris Carter participated in this, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know what participated. You watch she sat there,
Speaker 1: But but you bring up a good point. Is there
Speaker 1: any reason to think it's a good way to get
Speaker 1: accurate information about what happened in the past, and if
Speaker 1: only details, I couldn't find any reason to think that
Speaker 1: this is a good way. Mac gave some defenses, so
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna give some of his defenses of
Speaker 1: of regression hypnosis. In Appendix A of the book I
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, the one about his clinical work with the
Speaker 1: people who claim to have had abduction experiences, he defends
Speaker 1: the quality of the memories brought back through regression hypnosis
Speaker 1: by saying they met three criteria. Number one, he said
Speaker 1: that the memories that that were brought out through regression
Speaker 1: were usually against self interest, meaning that they were like
Speaker 1: more embarrassing or more damaging to self regard of the patient.
Speaker 1: Thus this he's sort of arguing for this, I think
Speaker 1: that they wouldn't have a motivation to fabricate these memories.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like flattering to the person, kind of
Speaker 1: like when you've got that roommate in college who drank
Speaker 1: too much of the night before and did something really bad, right,
Speaker 1: and then they say, oh, I blacked out. I don't
Speaker 1: remember any of that. Oh, I guess it could be
Speaker 1: kind of like that, But it would be like saying
Speaker 1: if you didn't believe what he was saying until he
Speaker 1: started saying things that were really not flattering to his
Speaker 1: self in right, and then you can be like, oh,
Speaker 1: this probably did happen to ted, because you know, he's
Speaker 1: admitting that he pooped in his pants. Okay, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second criterion is that he said that the memory
Speaker 1: is recovered through aggression are more consistent with independent reports
Speaker 1: of other abductees. So once he do a regression on people,
Speaker 1: they started giving details that sounded a lot more like
Speaker 1: what all of the other people reported in their abduction stories.
Speaker 1: This was similar with the satanic panic stuff as well. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then the third criterion he gives is that memories
Speaker 1: brought up through regression tend to cause a much stronger
Speaker 1: emotional affect and bodily reaction in the subject. People really
Speaker 1: see seemed to be having strong feelings about what was
Speaker 1: going on in the memories recovered through their regressions, and
Speaker 1: so I think that bait. Even despite these defenses, I
Speaker 1: would have a persistent concern about the idea that hypnosis
Speaker 1: or any similar like relaxation exercise is going to recover
Speaker 1: accurate information that was not previously available to you if
Speaker 1: you didn't already remember it. Why is this exercise bringing
Speaker 1: these memories back? And why don't we have or physical
Speaker 1: evidence that these memories are better than the memories you
Speaker 1: consciously remembered at first? Look? Okay, but what would you
Speaker 1: say to using regression hypnosis to recollecting one of your
Speaker 1: past lives? This comes up in an episode of The
Speaker 1: X Files. I mean, this is all this episode I
Speaker 1: was joking about them. Yeah, exactly the field where I
Speaker 1: died where I But I think Mulder remembers being what
Speaker 1: somebody's in a Civil war soldier or something like that,
Speaker 1: and some other women who who they're currently like pursuing
Speaker 1: that's part of like a terrorist seller or something like that.
Speaker 1: Is was his wife. I believe Sully was like his general. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is where some of these accounts get way fishier
Speaker 1: than the ones I've already talked about For example, there
Speaker 1: is a writer named Alexa Clay and she grew up
Speaker 1: with John Mack. He was her mother's partner. And she
Speaker 1: had an interesting article on mac that I read, and
Speaker 1: I want to read a quote from her article, she says,
Speaker 1: I remember one summer evening at a beach house on
Speaker 1: Martha's vineyard, when I was about eleven. We all watched
Speaker 1: as John regressed my aunt back into a past life.
Speaker 1: She lay on the couch recalling an incident in which
Speaker 1: she was a forest ranger who witnessed the death of
Speaker 1: a few people during some kind of avalanche. My aunt
Speaker 1: later told me she was fully conscious of the experience,
Speaker 1: but couldn't control what she was saying. It was like
Speaker 1: she was watching herself tell a story. John later tried
Speaker 1: to hypnotize my brother so that he wouldn't be afraid
Speaker 1: of spiders. It seems like two very different things. They're
Speaker 1: recollecting your past life as a ranger and not being
Speaker 1: afraid of spiders. Yeah, and so I gotta say, um,
Speaker 1: you know again. Just we end up working on a
Speaker 1: lot of different things here at how stuff works on
Speaker 1: brain stuff Ben bowl in our colleague, from stuff they
Speaker 1: don't want you to know did an episode on hypnosis
Speaker 1: and how it works and whether it works, and and
Speaker 1: you know there is some legitimacy to hypnosis. I don't wanna. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think say that that you know it doesn't work
Speaker 1: at all. You should go watch that episode. It's a nice,
Speaker 1: like little three four minute summary of of how it works.
Speaker 1: And we've even had some hypnosis experts come on and
Speaker 1: say that they're really happy that, you know, we broke
Speaker 1: down the actual science of it. But in this case,
Speaker 1: I think this is a little bit beyond what it's
Speaker 1: capable of. Yeah, I think this is a common thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, based on my understanding, I think hypnosis is
Speaker 1: capable kind of like meditation or yoga or something of
Speaker 1: introducing a mildly altered state of consciousness where your your
Speaker 1: brain is just kind of working a little bit different
Speaker 1: than it normally normally would. But I don't really see
Speaker 1: much evidence that it really has these these dramatically powerful
Speaker 1: effects of people like this would claim. Um, So you
Speaker 1: think like maybe Mac was kind of a figure I'm
Speaker 1: thinking of Philip Symore Hoffman and the Master. No, No,
Speaker 1: I don't get that feeling, because in his writing end
Speaker 1: to Speech, Max seemed to me like he was an
Speaker 1: extremely smart, thoughtful, even a wise person. But I read
Speaker 1: his reasoning for accepting a lot of the subduction testimony
Speaker 1: and it just doesn't sound very convincing to me. It
Speaker 1: seems like he was a smart, thoughtful, good natured guy
Speaker 1: who wanted to believe. Do you think though? And you
Speaker 1: just hit on the prime X Files slogan he wants
Speaker 1: to believe. I want to believe. Do you think though?
Speaker 1: That he would have believed in alien human hybrids if
Speaker 1: one of his patients pulled that memory up. Well, a
Speaker 1: lot of patients did talk about things like that, did
Speaker 1: they really? Yeah, this is a common feature of alien
Speaker 1: abduction reports, especially at the time. I don't I don't know.
Speaker 1: It seems like alien abduction reports have sort of dropped
Speaker 1: off in in recent years as far as I can tell.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'm wrong about that, but maybe it's just that
Speaker 1: there's not as much coverage on them because the media
Speaker 1: landscapes changed too. Yeah, it could be. But at the
Speaker 1: time Mac talks about working with a lot of people
Speaker 1: who would say that the alien would say, take uh,
Speaker 1: sperm samples from them, or take eggs from them, or
Speaker 1: implant them with with eggs or in some way have
Speaker 1: some kind of reproductive interaction with the person. Well, that
Speaker 1: is a perfect segue for us to talk about our
Speaker 1: last and I think probably one of the things that
Speaker 1: The X Files is known most for topic wise, which
Speaker 1: is the alien hybrid conspiracy, right, mixing aliens and human
Speaker 1: beings together in some way or another. Yes, this is
Speaker 1: one of the biggest overarching plot points in the whole series,
Speaker 1: is that, oh man, it gets so convoluted by the end,
Speaker 1: who knows what's actually going on? But without spoiling too
Speaker 1: much for the people who haven't actually seen the series yet,
Speaker 1: basically there's there's a running theme of aliens wanting to
Speaker 1: hybridize or create some kind of some kind of blended
Speaker 1: offspring with Homo sapiens on planet Earth, or to maybe
Speaker 1: go somewhere else, or to maybe take over the Earth,
Speaker 1: or who knows what. So alien human hybrids. Is there
Speaker 1: any reason to to track with the science on this
Speaker 1: that's offered by the show? Is there anything to it? So?
Speaker 1: Here's the thing about the show is that, I mean
Speaker 1: it was on for nine seasons, right, and over the course,
Speaker 1: they had so many different rationale and scientific explanations for
Speaker 1: what was going on with the hybridization that it was
Speaker 1: all over the place. I completely lost track of it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you try to add it all up, it doesn't
Speaker 1: really make sense in terms even of the fictional construct
Speaker 1: of the show. Right, But um, Cavelos takes all these
Speaker 1: ways and she breaks them down one by one, and
Speaker 1: there is some viability to some of these ideas, although
Speaker 1: obviously we don't have alien DNA that we can be
Speaker 1: experimenting with, so she's working along the lines of what
Speaker 1: we know about genetics in general. Okay, Um, so she
Speaker 1: has five ways the show proposes that you can make
Speaker 1: a hybrid and alien human hybrid. Let's try to go
Speaker 1: through these and not get too bogged down. Sorry, one
Speaker 1: quick question before we breathe through these. Uh, this does
Speaker 1: have to assume, right that the aliens would be DNA based. Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 1: you really just there's no way you could hybridize with
Speaker 1: an alien species that wasn't DNA based. Yeah, that's absolutely
Speaker 1: an assumption that they make here. Alright. So the premise
Speaker 1: essentially of the show, the overall premise for these hybrids,
Speaker 1: is that grays, which are you know, the generic aliens
Speaker 1: that we're all used to seeing with the big eyes
Speaker 1: in the big gray heads, Right, they're the ones in
Speaker 1: the sketch artist interpretation of exactly. Yeah. Uh, those are
Speaker 1: in fact hybrids of humans and aliens. Those aren't actually
Speaker 1: aliens in and of themselves. Uh. And there it seems
Speaker 1: to be that the reason why they're making these hybrids
Speaker 1: is so that there's a specific immunity to biological threats
Speaker 1: that might exist on Earth, to the aliens that are
Speaker 1: trying to colonize the planet. Okay, that's as much as
Speaker 1: I think makes sense of the of that part um.
Speaker 1: So okay, yes, some viruses can attack particular species, right, So,
Speaker 1: for instance, smallpox, which comes up in the show all
Speaker 1: the time, only attacks human beings. Uh. And here's a
Speaker 1: direct quote from Kevelus his book. A virus can only
Speaker 1: enter a cell if the proteins projecting from the surface
Speaker 1: of its envelope find matching receptors on the cell. So
Speaker 1: this is important to consider as we go forward with
Speaker 1: all of these things. It's a lot like in the
Speaker 1: last episode on The X Files when we were talking
Speaker 1: about the parasites and how parasites are very specific about
Speaker 1: what other species that they they're parasitic of. Right there,
Speaker 1: they're not like the face huggers that can apparently just
Speaker 1: get on any old animal that has a mouth. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: And likewise we're going to find that this is the
Speaker 1: case with a lot of these biological threats or genetic
Speaker 1: manipulations that are being purported on the show. Uh So,
Speaker 1: I guess the premise here is that these aliens would
Speaker 1: are trying not to be susceptible to our diseases because
Speaker 1: they're not from here. But again, so why that wouldn't
Speaker 1: make sense? Right, if they're not from Earth, why would
Speaker 1: they be susceptible to a disease like smallpox which hasn't
Speaker 1: evolved to be tailored to their anatomy. Yeah, Earth based
Speaker 1: diseases don't typically affect every species on Earth that they're
Speaker 1: very often aimed at one species, So even even more
Speaker 1: so the difference between alien life forms and Earth life forms,
Speaker 1: and even hybrids however you know they're made, would probably
Speaker 1: be susceptible to the same disease as the human beings
Speaker 1: are susceptible to, right, or or that the aliens were
Speaker 1: susceptible to so changing the receptors on ourselves, you know,
Speaker 1: they would prevent the necessary processes from regular life happening
Speaker 1: to you know, manipulations on this scale. It messes up
Speaker 1: everything is a domino effect. Umvelos also reminds us of
Speaker 1: one other thing before we get into these five theories.
Speaker 1: She says, it wasn't until the nineteen eighties when genes
Speaker 1: were first transferred successfully from one species to another. So
Speaker 1: that might be one of the reasons why this was
Speaker 1: such a kind of popular idea on the show at
Speaker 1: the time, right that it was just being pioneered and
Speaker 1: it was sort of like it was like science fiction
Speaker 1: coming to life. Well, there were a lot of gene
Speaker 1: thrillers in the nineties. It was an era of Jurassic
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park in the nineties was you know, the as
Speaker 1: far as I know, the first real cloning based science
Speaker 1: fiction movie that was a big success. There might have
Speaker 1: been one before that, I can't remember, but that was
Speaker 1: like the thing that brought that to the public's attention,
Speaker 1: and that's the era of the X Files. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: all right, So our first way to create a hybrid
Speaker 1: what what would you imagine easiest way to create a
Speaker 1: hybrid Make two different animals of different species have sex
Speaker 1: and see if they get pregnant. You did it. Yeah, breeding,
Speaker 1: it's that simple, right, But it's not that simple because, uh,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of the words species means that it's
Speaker 1: reproductively isolated. So I think there are a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons that our concept of a species is sometimes kind
Speaker 1: of fuzzy. But yeah, that that's the most common definition
Speaker 1: is these animals won't naturally in the wild and probably
Speaker 1: can't breed with each other and produce viable offspring, especially
Speaker 1: not producing offspring that can breed through to the next generation. Exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because and I was about to get to that, is
Speaker 1: that almost all of the species, or rather the offspring
Speaker 1: that are created from any mixed species interactions, are sterile,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't lead to a lot. So a mule,
Speaker 1: for is like our best example, right, when a male
Speaker 1: donkey and a female horse get together, they have a mule,
Speaker 1: but those mules are usually sterile. We've done combinations of
Speaker 1: horses and zebras, We've had lions and tigers, camels and llamas. Yes,
Speaker 1: those are all possible, but their offspring are almost always sterile.
Speaker 1: And humans can't produce offspring with any other species, even chimpanzees.
Speaker 1: Now chimpanzee shares ninety nine point five percent of our DNA,
Speaker 1: And there has been some speculation there is something out
Speaker 1: there called the human z. This is a popular urban legend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is, uh, some somewhere along the line, somebody figured
Speaker 1: it out. There's both. There's there's speculation that it was
Speaker 1: done in Russia and in China, but that human zes
Speaker 1: were created in labs somewhere the combination of those two species.
Speaker 1: This hasn't never been proven. There's reports, but there's no evidence. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's number one breading. Okay, number two. Do you
Speaker 1: remember that episode Red Museum on X Files? And then
Speaker 1: there's also the episodes seven thirty one. Basically the idea
Speaker 1: here is that a doctor injects children with alien substances
Speaker 1: and says, oh that these are just vitamins, just giving
Speaker 1: you vitamins, but they're really trying to make them into
Speaker 1: hybrids where they flint stone vitamins. Yeah, they tasted their
Speaker 1: chewy and sugary. So it's a serum in these episodes,
Speaker 1: and I guess the fictional science and the show says, well,
Speaker 1: the serum contains antibodies that are mixed with quote synthetic corticosteroids.
Speaker 1: Corticosteroids how you say, well, I don't know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I have no idea of steroids and co cortico. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 1: let's go with it costco steroids. Anyways, so the show says,
Speaker 1: uh that these children are rather not the show, But
Speaker 1: Cavela says, this wouldn't make the children hybrids, but just
Speaker 1: injecting them, right, Yeah, all you're doing is you're mixing
Speaker 1: alien and human molecules together, right in a in a
Speaker 1: similar system. So theoretically, the different antibodies that are in
Speaker 1: this serum, they may help fight off a range of diseases,
Speaker 1: but they're not. Again, they're probably not going to fight
Speaker 1: off any range of diseases that are on Earth because
Speaker 1: they're gonna be the alien antibodies are going to be
Speaker 1: adapted for diseases from wherever they're from. Yeah, okay. The
Speaker 1: other thing is that our human bodies would probably react
Speaker 1: to alien antibodies as if they were invaders, right, so
Speaker 1: our immune system would try to destroy them. So this
Speaker 1: doesn't go a long way towards helping the hybrid possibilities either. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, our our immune system often reject sent attacks
Speaker 1: donated human tissue. If somebody wants to give you an
Speaker 1: organ that it very likely could be a problem that
Speaker 1: your immune system will not like that organ being in there, right,
Speaker 1: so aliens are probably out. Although Cavelis has she she
Speaker 1: actually brings back the cote coasteroids that we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: She says that maybe that's what helped. Maybe maybe one
Speaker 1: of these X files writers did some research and thought
Speaker 1: this would work out. So Cota coasteroids are hormones, and
Speaker 1: they helped to control our metabolism, mineral balance in our
Speaker 1: inflammatory processes. Okay, they're injected specifically to decrease our immune responses.
Speaker 1: So there's some idea here that maybe you would inject
Speaker 1: those those would lower the immune responses, which would then
Speaker 1: allow the alien antibodies to somehow coexist without being attacked
Speaker 1: by our immune system to do magic, and yeah, the
Speaker 1: magic would happen. They also, the cota steroids also elevate
Speaker 1: our moods, they stimulate our appetites. They also have pretty
Speaker 1: bad long term effects, most muscle wasting, mood swings, slow healing,
Speaker 1: weakened bones, and the formation of fatty deposits on the
Speaker 1: surface of our skin. So you know, it doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like an ideal way to go about making a hybrid. No,
Speaker 1: not at all. So you said, are there a couple more? Ways?
Speaker 1: There are three more, all right, the Erlan Meyer Flask.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that episode in the first classic Mythos
Speaker 1: episodes of The X Files. It was back when the
Speaker 1: myth Arc episodes were exciting. As the series goes on,
Speaker 1: the Monster of the Week episodes, sometimes they're still good,
Speaker 1: but the myth Arc episodes become more and more disappointing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I tend to agree with you. It's funny
Speaker 1: because I go back now and almost all my favorite
Speaker 1: episodes or Monster of the Week stuff. But anyways, in
Speaker 1: the Earlan Meyer Flask, the premise there for the hybridization
Speaker 1: was that they were cloning alien bacteria that also contained
Speaker 1: an alien virus, and they were taking the genes from
Speaker 1: that virus and inserting them into terminally ill human beings.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get these the original hybrids.
Speaker 1: You remember on the show that we're like, they looked
Speaker 1: like people, but they had green blood and in human
Speaker 1: street wouldn't have the poison blood. Like if they started bleeding,
Speaker 1: people around them would get burning on their eyes and
Speaker 1: start choking. Yeah. Yeah, and they were like strong and
Speaker 1: they could like I think one guy like could breathe
Speaker 1: underwater or something like that. So there are all these
Speaker 1: weird abilities. So all right, Cavellas helps us break this
Speaker 1: down again again. And alien virus probably wouldn't be made
Speaker 1: of the same DNA building blocks as those of us
Speaker 1: in human beings, right, so they would be incompatible genetic
Speaker 1: let's call them languages. But they mentioned that this alien
Speaker 1: DNA contains this is in the episode, they contained two
Speaker 1: additional nucleotides or basses. And there actually are possible other
Speaker 1: nucleotides that exist on Earth than the ones that are
Speaker 1: in human DNA. Right, but they're not used in the
Speaker 1: DNA of any organism that we know of. But if
Speaker 1: you use these in some way, it would be sort
Speaker 1: of like taking the alphabet. Let's stick with this alphabet
Speaker 1: analogy and giving it two more letters, right, so you
Speaker 1: add uh just to make believe or brand new letters
Speaker 1: to the alphabet. One day, all of a sudden, you
Speaker 1: have all these new possible combinations, right, all these combinations
Speaker 1: or even ways in which you could shorten other things
Speaker 1: because of these added extra elements to the language. Well,
Speaker 1: they hypothesized. Cavella's hypothesizes that one of these might be
Speaker 1: used as an infectious virus. Right, so one of these
Speaker 1: different combinations of the alphabet of DNA is used to
Speaker 1: create an infectious virus that leads to this hybridization. Just
Speaker 1: getting complicated, is it's complicated? Right? Uh so, all right,
Speaker 1: there's still compatibility problem. Like no matter how you do it,
Speaker 1: it's like if you're trying to play like an Xbox
Speaker 1: game on a PlayStation, right, it's at first we put
Speaker 1: the PlayStation game in the case of a Nintendo we game,
Speaker 1: or if you blow on it, it still doesn't work. Um.
Speaker 1: So the compatibility problem basically comes down to the protein
Speaker 1: envelopes that contain DNA, right, And in this case it
Speaker 1: would contain alien DNA. It probably wouldn't enter our cells,
Speaker 1: but they do come up with cavelus. Again, she's always
Speaker 1: like going the extra mile, trying to help the show
Speaker 1: out to get there. She says, what if the alien
Speaker 1: DNA was placed into the protein envelope of an earth
Speaker 1: virus like smallpox? So maybe that's what this whole smallpox
Speaker 1: thing is about. It's not they're using the protein envelope
Speaker 1: of it to deliver alien DNA. That's her hypothesis. It
Speaker 1: could potentially get the virus into our human cells. But again,
Speaker 1: the DNA would have to be like our own human
Speaker 1: DNA for it to do anything more than just physically
Speaker 1: get there. Okay, okay, but what about all this green
Speaker 1: toxic blood? I mean, why why would the blood turn green?
Speaker 1: And is that even possible through hybridization? Well, believe it
Speaker 1: or not, not through hybridization, but yeah, it is possible
Speaker 1: to use transgenics in order to give species green blood
Speaker 1: that don't have them. That has been done. Um so
Speaker 1: in this particular instance, it's done. It's been done on fish.
Speaker 1: There's a green fluorescent protein uh in jellyfish. And if
Speaker 1: you take that gene and you insert it into fish,
Speaker 1: you know, I make I make it sound like it's
Speaker 1: that easy, you just insert it. Obviously there's a lot
Speaker 1: more to it than that. But yeah, they their blood
Speaker 1: turns green. So this is these are like glow stick fish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I think you break them in half and
Speaker 1: then you dance with them in a brave I wouldn't
Speaker 1: break it in but I think what the reasoning was
Speaker 1: was that they were doing this to these fish that
Speaker 1: so that they could like under a microscope, see things
Speaker 1: better than they could with its regular hue. And I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure how that works, but yeah, so there
Speaker 1: was like an actual reason. It wasn't just like, hey,
Speaker 1: can we make this green? You know, like they were
Speaker 1: they were they were seeing like what kind of benefits
Speaker 1: they could get out of it. This also goes along
Speaker 1: with the breathing under water thing. Okay, so there's this
Speaker 1: episode It might be in the Erlan Meyer flask where
Speaker 1: like one of these hybrid guys like because there's horrible
Speaker 1: heart car chase and he crashes his car off of
Speaker 1: like a pier and lands in the water and they
Speaker 1: can't find his body. And then it turns out like
Speaker 1: he's been for two days, he's just been sitting at
Speaker 1: the bottom of this uh bay uh. And they explain, well,
Speaker 1: it's because he's an alien hybrid. He can breathe underwater.
Speaker 1: Why didn't he swim somewhere? Well, I think I think
Speaker 1: he was injured or something like that. I don't remember
Speaker 1: the details there. But so, all right, we can't change
Speaker 1: our respiratory system with transgenics, right, But Calas hypothesizes another
Speaker 1: way that this could be explained. All right, so crocodiles,
Speaker 1: you know that how crocodiles can survive for long periods
Speaker 1: of time underwater. Well, the way that they do that
Speaker 1: is the ions in them bind to hemoglobin in a
Speaker 1: different way than they do in human beings, and this
Speaker 1: releases oxygen even when they're underwater and they're not bringing
Speaker 1: in oxygen. Cavelos hypothesizes that if you inserted a crocodile
Speaker 1: gene into humans, we may be able to do the
Speaker 1: same thing. So it wouldn't change our respiratory process. It
Speaker 1: would just change the way that hemoglobin and ions in
Speaker 1: our body react together. It wouldn't trade lungs for gills exactly. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So that's number three, this kind of transgenics, I guess,
Speaker 1: is how we could encapsulate that again. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't think that you could like hybridize an alien and
Speaker 1: a human together, but you might be able to make
Speaker 1: your blood green. Things that aren't exactly like superpowers. The
Speaker 1: fourth way, you remember back in home we were talking
Speaker 1: about chimeras, right, Well, what if we had alien human chimeras?
Speaker 1: So remember, a chimera is an organism that has two
Speaker 1: different sets of DNA and they usually originate from the
Speaker 1: fusion of two different zygotes or eggs, right, So what
Speaker 1: if we had an alien egg and human egg and
Speaker 1: we fuse those together. They're nice, So maybe then we've
Speaker 1: got this alien hybrid. Okay, let's see where Kevels goes
Speaker 1: with this. She says, uh, well, right now, that we
Speaker 1: can make from cells of the space same species or
Speaker 1: from different ones chimeric cells. Right, We've done this with
Speaker 1: mice before. We've made a mouse that is a chimera
Speaker 1: of two different species of mouse, and that was created
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen sixty one, so this has been
Speaker 1: going on for a while now. Chimeras, however, are not
Speaker 1: usually like fifty fifty blends of species, right, It's not
Speaker 1: like one half of you as mouse and the other
Speaker 1: half of you is shark, right, like you're you're you're.
Speaker 1: It's a little different from that. So like they've they've
Speaker 1: made goat sheep chimeras before, and those look like sheep,
Speaker 1: but they've got like the same briskly fur of goats. Okay,
Speaker 1: so it's not like it's not like I guess we're
Speaker 1: imagining like you'd have a blend of perfect features. So yeah,
Speaker 1: she says, it's possible you could use the same chimeric
Speaker 1: techniques that you use to make these goat sheep or
Speaker 1: these these weird mice, uh, to make a human female
Speaker 1: carry an alien human human hybrid to term. But look
Speaker 1: this the science that she throws down in there. This
Speaker 1: is why I think the book is really good, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't translate well for this medium on a podcast.
Speaker 1: It's way too complicated to get into here. I think
Speaker 1: we could do a whole episode just on the idea
Speaker 1: of chimeric fertilization and like getting a chimeric baby to term. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe we should. Sometimes it sounds very stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind, so it's possible. We got one more. This
Speaker 1: is the last one, and this is what she calls
Speaker 1: the fully integrated hybrid, which is in the TV show.
Speaker 1: It's along the lines of like when we see um
Speaker 1: like clones of people, right, there's like multiple like there's
Speaker 1: multiple Joes. There's like twelve different Joes and they all
Speaker 1: look exactly like you, but they're all alien human hybrids.
Speaker 1: And she hypothesizes that this is because every cell contains
Speaker 1: DNA from both of the organisms. Okay, so that's kind
Speaker 1: of hard to imagine, but yeah, yeah, I agree, it
Speaker 1: seems like it would be pretty difficult. The idea that
Speaker 1: she's pitching here is that you would create a single
Speaker 1: transgenic or hybrid cell, right, and then from there you
Speaker 1: would use that with what we have as like modern
Speaker 1: cloning technique. So think of like Dolly the Sheep um.
Speaker 1: So we know we can clone an animal from an
Speaker 1: embryo cell by taking its nucleus out and transferring DNA
Speaker 1: into from it into an open right. That's how it's
Speaker 1: sort of how Dolly the Sheep worked. Right, There's a
Speaker 1: transplantation of a cell's nucleus into an ovum with its
Speaker 1: own nucleus removed. So this is her pitch for this
Speaker 1: is that we would do something similar. We'd we'd have
Speaker 1: an alien hybrid cell and then we would clone a
Speaker 1: being based off of that cell. But it's more difficult.
Speaker 1: Uh So, for instance, like with Dollars sheep, it was
Speaker 1: particularly difficult because it was adult cells. They've already differentiated.
Speaker 1: There's all different kinds of ways that you can get
Speaker 1: DNA into a cell though, and again like this this
Speaker 1: could be a whole hour long episode of stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind. But we can do things like using
Speaker 1: high voltage electricity to allow DNA to enter into a cell,
Speaker 1: or we micro inject these directly into cells with tnc
Speaker 1: tiny little needles, or this one sounds like my favorite,
Speaker 1: this has been done shooting cells with high velocity microscopic
Speaker 1: DNA bullets the gene gun. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So she
Speaker 1: pitches like, those are all ways that we could potentially
Speaker 1: have these alien human hybrids. But let me go back
Speaker 1: to the beginning and say on the show, it doesn't
Speaker 1: add up, right, they don't. They don't stick to one
Speaker 1: of these and follow it all the way through. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of a mishmash of all of these things.
Speaker 1: Uh so, maybe the aliens themselves and the X Files
Speaker 1: really haven't ironed this out yet. There, that would be
Speaker 1: a wonderful thing that I don't know, have we ever
Speaker 1: seen that in science fiction where there's just a completely
Speaker 1: disorganized attempt to attack and take over the Earth. It's
Speaker 1: just like the aliens really can't get it together. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't know. Independence day, No, they're so
Speaker 1: highly coordinated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I want to see
Speaker 1: that maybe Plan nine from outer space that seems like
Speaker 1: an attempt to take over the Earth that is kind
Speaker 1: of thrown together at the last minute. Although I think
Speaker 1: you blame that on Edwood more than you could on
Speaker 1: the Aliens. Yea, I guess so. So there you have it,
Speaker 1: the Science of the X Files. We've got two episodes
Speaker 1: and I think we're looking at almost three hours worth
Speaker 1: of science of the X Files. Goodness here for you.
Speaker 1: If you have any questions or comments for us, If
Speaker 1: you want to let us know some of your hypotheses
Speaker 1: on ways in which science modern science could apply to
Speaker 1: X Files episodes. Some of the science we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: alien hybridization, the be weaponization, whatever it is, let us know.
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