Speaker 1: Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild.
Speaker 2: Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
Speaker 2: is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
Speaker 2: right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. The test of any
Speaker 2: solid relationship is how well two people communicate. Are they
Speaker 2: withholding and distant or do they share everything openly? And
Speaker 2: that doesn't just go for couples either. Communication between friends
Speaker 2: and business partners is also very important, but good communication
Speaker 2: is perhaps most crucial between two divers. After all, if
Speaker 2: you want to know if you're about to swim into
Speaker 2: a dangerous cave system, or if there's something wrong with
Speaker 2: your oxygen tank that you can't see, you need a friend.
Speaker 2: In May of nineteen eighty four, a pair of Navy
Speaker 2: divers happened to be working on underwater repairs to the
Speaker 2: whale enclosures in San Diego Bay. For those times when
Speaker 2: they needed to communicate with the surface, they used a
Speaker 2: specially designed underwater comms device known as a wet phone.
Speaker 2: But one day the divers heard someone yelling at them.
Speaker 2: He kept shouting out out. The voice was unmistakable. There
Speaker 2: was no way this was a trick of the ear.
Speaker 2: Someone was frantically telling the men to get out of
Speaker 2: the water. But one of the divers, a Navy veteran
Speaker 2: named Miles Braggett, shot to the surface and asked his supervisor,
Speaker 2: who told me to get out. The supervisor, though, was
Speaker 2: perplexed he hadn't said anything over the wet phone. But
Speaker 2: Braggett wasn't the only one. Sam Ridgeway, a veterinarian and
Speaker 2: the co founder of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, had
Speaker 2: an office near the San Diego Bay. He'd also heard
Speaker 2: the talking in the area, about one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: feet away on an adjacent pier. Ridgeway soon got word
Speaker 2: of the phantom voice hunting bracket and started listening more
Speaker 2: closely at the sounds of the bay. As it turned out,
Speaker 2: the warnings to get out of the water hadn't come
Speaker 2: from the wet phone after all, nor had the supervisor
Speaker 2: shouted them from the surface. In fact, the voice didn't
Speaker 2: belong to a person. It belonged to a whale. One
Speaker 2: specific whale, a beluga named No S Nose had been
Speaker 2: legally captured in nineteen seventy seven by Inuit hunters when
Speaker 2: he was very young. His name no Si spelled nc
Speaker 2: was an allusion to a Canadian fly called noseums or
Speaker 2: biting midges. They were plentiful in Manitoba, where he was captured.
Speaker 2: Ridgeway wanted to learn more about Nose's capabilities, so he
Speaker 2: and his team taught him to speak on command while
Speaker 2: simultaneously recording his sounds. What they learned was that the
Speaker 2: whale also had been listening to them. He'd been studying
Speaker 2: the voices coming from the people on the shore and
Speaker 2: then learned how to recreate them himself. He'd heard the
Speaker 2: diving supervisors saying out so many times he figured out
Speaker 2: how to say it too. Ridgeway found that Nose's whale
Speaker 2: calls were several octaves higher than his more human like sounds.
Speaker 2: In other words, this beluga didn't just learn to say
Speaker 2: human words, he also changed his voice to sound more
Speaker 2: like a human being. Much of Ridgeway's research was done
Speaker 2: using a special sensor implanted in Nose's nasal cavity. The
Speaker 2: instrument was able to tell him how the whale was
Speaker 2: able to sound like a person. To generate the normal
Speaker 2: chirps and clicks that they're known for, whales pass air
Speaker 2: over a set of vibrating flaps in their heads called
Speaker 2: phonic lips. But to sound like a person, nose increased
Speaker 2: the air pressure in his nasal cavity while changing the
Speaker 2: shape of those phonic lips, allowing him to achieve a
Speaker 2: lower pitched tone. This action didn't just alter his voice either,
Speaker 2: It caused his head to swell to.
Speaker 1: The point where it looked like it might pop. He
Speaker 1: put himself through all of that just so that he
Speaker 1: could sound like a human being for short periods of time.
Speaker 1: See was only the tip of the iceberg, though. The
Speaker 1: Vancouver Aquarium was also once home to a beluga named
Speaker 1: Legosi who could say his own name. Nosey spent twenty
Speaker 1: two years in captivity, though finally passing away in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety nine, but he only spoke like a human for
Speaker 1: about four of those years, beginning in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 1: Once he reached a certain age, he simply stopped talking
Speaker 1: that way. So pay close attention the next time you're
Speaker 1: in the ocean. If someone starts shouting at you to
Speaker 1: get out of the water. It might not be because
Speaker 1: a shark is nearby. It could just be a whale
Speaker 1: with something to say. Humanity has evolved over millions of
Speaker 1: years to become what we are today. Our bone structure
Speaker 1: is different from what it once was, our speech patterns
Speaker 1: have changed, and even the shape of our teeth is
Speaker 1: not what they used to be. Remnants of previous generations
Speaker 1: have been discovered all over the world, including skulls and
Speaker 1: bone fragments from Ostrellopithecus and paranthropists. But in eighteen ninety
Speaker 1: a French anthropologist stumbled across a major discovery, one that
Speaker 1: forced humanity to ask itself an important question, did we
Speaker 1: used to be taller? His name was George Vauche de
Speaker 1: la Pouge. He was a former magistrate and prosecutor who
Speaker 1: eventually became a professor of anthropology in eighteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: although he would be remembered by history as the man
Speaker 1: whose work in eugenics eventually inspired the Holocaust in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties. In eighteen ninety, de la Pouge traveled to
Speaker 1: the small commune of Castelnaut le Lais in the south
Speaker 1: of France. Its population numbered fewer than a thousand people.
Speaker 1: But for such a tiny town, it held a massive secret,
Speaker 1: one that De la Pouge was going to uncover. It
Speaker 1: was wintertime and he was excavating a Bronze Age cemetery
Speaker 1: when he came across a unique find. Right there in
Speaker 1: the ground was a set of bone fragments. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: this being a setmetery, that wasn't surprising. But these pieces
Speaker 1: were different. For one, they were much older than the
Speaker 1: bones surrounding them. The fragments dated back to the Neolithic period,
Speaker 1: sometime between ten thousand and four thousand, five hundred BC.
Speaker 1: He had found them at the bottom of a tumulus
Speaker 1: or an ancient burial mound. But the bones weren't just old.
Speaker 1: They were also large, very large, much larger than the
Speaker 1: bones of any other individual buried nearby. So De la
Speaker 1: Pouge wrote about them for a nineteenth century science journal
Speaker 1: called Le Nature. In his article, he described the three
Speaker 1: pieces that he'd found. The first segment had come from
Speaker 1: a femur and measured five and a half inches in length.
Speaker 1: The second fragment was broken off of a tibia. It
Speaker 1: was nearly eleven inches long, and the third piece had
Speaker 1: come from a humerus Twice the size of a normal one.
Speaker 1: In fact, scientists compared these remains to the bones of
Speaker 1: regular sized humans and found that all three of them
Speaker 1: were twice as big. According to De la Pouge, the
Speaker 1: person they belonged to would have been eleven and a
Speaker 1: half feet tall when they died. This unknown subject eventually
Speaker 1: came to be known as the giants of castell Know.
Speaker 1: The fragments were eventually taken to the University of Montpierre,
Speaker 1: about three miles away from where they were found. They
Speaker 1: were studied by several professors and scholars, but one in
Speaker 1: particular made an interesting proclamation. His name was Paul Louis
Speaker 1: Andre Quyney, and he taught pathological anatomy at Montpierre School
Speaker 1: of Medicine. Doctor Keeney examined the bones De la Pouge
Speaker 1: had found and noted that they came from what he
Speaker 1: described as a very tall race. Perhaps they were not
Speaker 1: an anomaly among a civilization of normal sized human beings.
Speaker 1: Maybe there were more giants yet to be found. Well,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what happened. A few years later, in a
Speaker 1: Montpierre cemetery, another ancient burial ground was found by workers
Speaker 1: who had been excavating a waterworks reservoir, they discovered a
Speaker 1: number of human skulls that were described in the papers
Speaker 1: as being twenty eight, thirty one and thirty two inches
Speaker 1: in circumference, and buried beside them were more oversized bones,
Speaker 1: which were soon sent to Paris to be studied. The
Speaker 1: one expert claimed that they had come from a race
Speaker 1: of giant men who were somewhere between ten and fifteen
Speaker 1: feet tall. There could still be more giant bones waiting
Speaker 1: to be unearthed in France or elsewhere in the world.
Speaker 1: Around the same time as the Giants of Castile Know
Speaker 1: was found, it was widely believed that a race of
Speaker 1: giants had also lived in North America thousands even millions
Speaker 1: of years ago. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour
Speaker 1: of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast
Speaker 1: dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey
Speaker 1: in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award
Speaker 1: winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series,
Speaker 1: and television show, and you can learn all about it
Speaker 1: over at the Worldolore dot com and Until next time,
Speaker 1: stay curious,