Speaker 1: Oh, friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist, oh hooy sailors.
Speaker 1: We have investigated at length the idea of a continuing
Speaker 1: fascination cryptids.
Speaker 2: And I think we were all.
Speaker 1: We were all just unanimously astounded by the idea that
Speaker 1: there could have been large creatures out there beneath the
Speaker 1: waves in recent periods of history, recent enough that human
Speaker 1: beings may have run into them. Guys, I spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time looking out over the ocean in one
Speaker 1: of our previous maritime adventures. I saw some usual stuff,
Speaker 1: but I didn't see a sea serpent.
Speaker 2: Did you never seen one? Hope to never do, because
Speaker 2: that is one of my all time night terrors. I
Speaker 2: think I've mentioned being present in a giant body of
Speaker 2: water with a sea serpent lurking just beneath the waves.
Speaker 2: Even if it's not one that's gonna eat me, Just
Speaker 2: the large underwater dwelling creatures freak me out, Dude.
Speaker 3: I often stand astride the ships and look out and
Speaker 3: imagine Jason Statham when that megalodon attacked to I don't
Speaker 3: know mega seen the movie the movie whatever it is.
Speaker 2: The first meg is a lot of fun. I think
Speaker 2: the second one diminishing returns. But uh, I watched the
Speaker 2: first one's good plane movie.
Speaker 4: Do check it.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 4: The point is there were like sea serpents and all
Speaker 4: kinds of craziness out there in the ocean. Giant sharks
Speaker 4: like that. They there have been those, but could there
Speaker 4: be one or some or a bunch of them remaining?
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, far beyond our imaginings, Dear Horatio.
Speaker 2: Before we get into.
Speaker 1: This classic episode, we also, of course want to shout
Speaker 1: out folks like the Swedish musician Matthias Krantz, who this
Speaker 1: is true story, guys taught an octopus to play piano. Ah,
Speaker 1: we can't wait, Oh my gosh, Please tell us weird
Speaker 1: stuff you've seen in the oceans. This is our classic episode.
Speaker 5: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 5: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 5: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 5: production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4: Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
Speaker 4: my name is Noah.
Speaker 1: They call me Ben. We are joined as always with
Speaker 1: our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you
Speaker 1: are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
Speaker 1: They don't want you to know. Longtime listeners or recent
Speaker 1: listeners welcome. You'll notice that we are continuing a bit
Speaker 1: of a maritime trend today. We didn't plan this, It
Speaker 1: just happened. We're tackling one of the oldest oceanic questions
Speaker 1: in human existence. For thousands and thousands of years, human
Speaker 1: beings have both feared and worshiped the ocean, as well as,
Speaker 1: of course, the things believed to live within it. So
Speaker 1: fast forward to the current day. Good for us human species.
Speaker 1: We have learned a great deal about the ocean over
Speaker 1: the past several millennia, and we still rely on it
Speaker 1: for food. Nowadays we can pretty often travel across it safely,
Speaker 1: but we have by no means conquered the ocean. In fact,
Speaker 1: we know more about the Moon right now than we
Speaker 1: do about Earth's oceans. The briny deep, in short, is
Speaker 1: still flooded with mysteries. That was not an intentional pun.
Speaker 1: But here's the point. Today's question, is it possible that
Speaker 1: see serpents, the legendary sea monsters of old, still exist today.
Speaker 1: To answer this question, we have to learn what little
Speaker 1: we do know about the ocean already. So here are the.
Speaker 4: Facts and Just to be clear, when we're talking about
Speaker 4: the ocean and oceans, we really mean the oceans, the seas.
Speaker 4: The place is where there's briny water, right where it's
Speaker 4: very deep. That's what we're referring to today. So anywhere
Speaker 4: in the world, not just in one particular place.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, So not just the Pacific, not just maybe
Speaker 1: the Indian Ocean, but the whole shebang, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, like literally all of the water, or as
Speaker 1: we'll come to find out, ninety seven percent of all
Speaker 1: the water. So we've often heard people say things like,
Speaker 1: you know, we know less about the ocean than we
Speaker 1: do about outer space. That's a little misleading, but we
Speaker 1: definitely do know more about Earth's moon than we do
Speaker 1: about Earth's oceans. I mean, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: the numbers get weird if you believe the official stories.
Speaker 1: That's for a different episode. We've sent twelve people to
Speaker 1: the moon since about nineteen sixty nine, yet in comparison,
Speaker 1: we've only sent three people to the deepest part of
Speaker 1: the ocean, one of them being James Cameron, who makes
Speaker 1: an appearance in here. As a matter of fact, the
Speaker 1: old Hollywood legend is that James Cameron mainly wanted to
Speaker 1: do Titanic as a way of getting support for his
Speaker 1: trip to the Marianas.
Speaker 4: Trench, which is very cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he had a cute little like pod thing that
Speaker 2: he went down in, right, like a kind of a
Speaker 2: future you look in under the c mini sub with
Speaker 2: like grabberclaw arms or maybe i'm hyperbolyzing here.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that's a pretty good description. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's the only way to get down there. And
Speaker 1: those people who have gone to the deepest part of
Speaker 1: the ocean, again, we're only counting the people who came back.
Speaker 1: You know, it's completely plausible that a lot of people
Speaker 1: died and their bodies eventually drifted to some very deep
Speaker 1: part of the seafloor.
Speaker 2: Well, and the ones that did come back, we're all
Speaker 2: completely mad.
Speaker 1: There we go nice setup that. Yeah, yeah, we know
Speaker 1: that there. Despite the fact that there have only been
Speaker 1: a very very small amount of people who went to
Speaker 1: what we call the deepest part of the ocean, we
Speaker 1: know that there is a lot, a lot down there.
Speaker 1: The ocean takes up about seventy one percent of Earth's surface,
Speaker 1: and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research we
Speaker 1: lean on a lot. In this episode, they note that
Speaker 1: about ninety five percent of that oceanic surface the seafloor.
Speaker 1: They call it unexplored, And it depends on what you
Speaker 1: mean by explored, but I think it's a fair way
Speaker 1: to look at it, especially when we learn more about
Speaker 1: the stats and geography.
Speaker 4: Of the ocean.
Speaker 2: Quick question, guys, do you think they worked awkwards from
Speaker 2: that acronym to like what words we're going to be
Speaker 2: in it? You know, because Noah and Noah's Ark and
Speaker 2: all that, and they're like, Okay, we got to make
Speaker 2: this Noah thing work. It's such a good image.
Speaker 1: I thought about that, but I didn't. I didn't nail
Speaker 1: down the story because it would be my speculation. It
Speaker 1: just it feels like if they're trying to purposefully spell Noah,
Speaker 1: then they would have done a better job. There's so
Speaker 1: many things that begin with H.
Speaker 2: Well, some mysteries are just better left unsolved. So it's
Speaker 2: true what we loosely describe as the ocean in swishy
Speaker 2: quotation fingers has a volume of around one point three
Speaker 2: three two a billion cubic kilometers. I say that doubly
Speaker 2: because the word is spelled out several times in the
Speaker 2: research materials I'm looking at just to drive home. That's
Speaker 2: a lot of cubic kilometers, my friends, And that works
Speaker 2: out to be about three hundred and fifty two quintillion
Speaker 2: gallons of water. That's just like a completely unfathomable number
Speaker 2: right there in my mind at least. And that's ninety
Speaker 2: seven percent of the water on the entire planet. Another
Speaker 2: two percent is locked up in glaciers and ice caps,
Speaker 2: and a tiny part is in water vapor floating through
Speaker 2: the atmosphere, and an even tinier part is inside of us. All. Oh, man,
Speaker 2: it was there all along, it was there all along,
Speaker 2: you guys.
Speaker 1: It's the majority of the human body actually, about up
Speaker 1: to sixty percent of you specifically you, if you're human
Speaker 1: and listening to this, about sixty percent of your body
Speaker 1: is water.
Speaker 4: We are water beings on a water planet, gentlemen. And uh.
Speaker 4: And when we're talking about, you know, the actual volume
Speaker 4: of the oceans, we're talking about ninety five percent of
Speaker 4: the ocean floor quote unquote unexplored, right, because we're talking
Speaker 4: about actually going and exploring there the way you would
Speaker 4: the moon or another place. It's crazy to imagine that
Speaker 4: that's the floor part. And then there's all that volume
Speaker 4: of water with all that depth, and think about attempting
Speaker 4: to explore somehow the surface area at every depth that
Speaker 4: you possibly can, and it just feels like it would
Speaker 4: be impossible for humans to do. Because the average depth
Speaker 4: of the ocean is three thousand, seven hundred and ninety
Speaker 4: five meters or a little over twelve four hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty feet. And just like the Earth's surface, life is
Speaker 4: not distributed evenly across the ocean, right. You don't just
Speaker 4: have whales every x meters or something, or fish every
Speaker 4: x centimeters whatever it would be. They could be anywhere
Speaker 4: within that depth.
Speaker 1: Just for comparison there, when we're talking about the average
Speaker 1: depth of the world's oceans, consider let's see, Matt, the
Speaker 1: number you gave us is average depth of three thousand,
Speaker 1: seven hundred and ninety five meters or a little north
Speaker 1: of twelve thousand, four and fifty feet. The current tallest
Speaker 1: tallest building tall skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa,
Speaker 1: is two thousand, seven hundred and sixteen and a half feet,
Speaker 1: so tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison to not the deepest
Speaker 1: part of the ocean.
Speaker 2: But just the global average.
Speaker 1: This is a big place. We have quote unquote mapped
Speaker 1: the ocean floor. Good job for our species, but we
Speaker 1: did it at a really really low resolution. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say we cut some corners, because again it's
Speaker 1: a very big place. But if you look at the
Speaker 1: overall mapping of the ocean floor and you take all
Speaker 1: of the scientific progress that every single civilization is made
Speaker 1: up to, now, the most of that ocean floor mapping
Speaker 1: has a solution of five kilometers or three miles. That
Speaker 1: means that if something is so ridiculous, But that means
Speaker 1: that if something is smaller than three miles big, then
Speaker 1: we could totally miss it. So that's like that's the
Speaker 1: threshold for size. So just to set up our question
Speaker 1: or address our question a little more here, if a
Speaker 1: sea monster existed and there was a breeding population and
Speaker 1: they were less than three miles big, like not even long,
Speaker 1: they were just big. If they were less than three
Speaker 1: miles big, then it's possible that we could have missed them.
Speaker 4: Think about all the crashed extraterrestrial craft that could be
Speaker 4: down there. We'd have no idea they're not three miles long.
Speaker 2: Well, maybe, Matt, are you proposing aquatic extraterrestrials.
Speaker 4: Yes, USO is my friend.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to start
Speaker 2: wrapping my head around that idea, but probably a discussion
Speaker 2: for another day.
Speaker 4: Check out our episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have a previous episode on these usos, and
Speaker 1: I don't know, maybe we should revisit that one because
Speaker 1: there's some new information I found on that.
Speaker 2: But yeah, clearly I should revisit that one because I
Speaker 2: do not recall its existence at all.
Speaker 1: But there's a you're right, Noel, that's an episode maybe
Speaker 1: for another day, which you can find now wherever you
Speaker 1: get your favorite podcasts. So this mapping, it's something that
Speaker 1: can be misleading. I think when you first hear it.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like saying radio telescope or radio telescope
Speaker 1: gives you information about space, but it doesn't necessarily give
Speaker 1: you a visual picture. And this ocean floor mapping doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily give us what you would think of as a
Speaker 1: visual picture. The job is accomplished using radar. It measures
Speaker 1: the c surface, so it gives us this kind of
Speaker 1: rough topography, the idea of where the bumps and the
Speaker 1: dips occur. And that's pretty cool, right, But that means
Speaker 1: that the maps of the ocean floor still are not
Speaker 1: detailed as detailed as some of the maps of planets
Speaker 1: in our Solar system, which is insane. We know a
Speaker 1: little bit about Mars, if this holds true, we know
Speaker 1: a little bit about more about the surface of Mars
Speaker 1: than we do about the surface of the ocean. Nuts.
Speaker 2: Okay, So just for like a you know, audio visual aid,
Speaker 2: let's just talk a little bit about the layout. So,
Speaker 2: just like the surface of the globe, the subterranean globe,
Speaker 2: I guess we could call it, is divided into different
Speaker 2: zones or regions. Each one has their own unique ecosystem,
Speaker 2: specific creatures that are native to each of these areas,
Speaker 2: adapted to live in these particular conditions. Of these zones
Speaker 2: in the ocean, there are five, and we'll start from
Speaker 2: closest to the surface and dive down. I'll start with
Speaker 2: this one, because it's really fun to say, the epipilogic
Speaker 2: or sunlight zone, and that ranges from the surface of
Speaker 2: the water to six hundred and fifty six feet below.
Speaker 2: It gets plenty of light, plenty of heat, and of
Speaker 2: course all of those things decrease as you head further down.
Speaker 2: And this is where all the cute little babies live
Speaker 2: the fun you know, cute kind of finding nemo esque
Speaker 2: figures of the sea, a lot of oceanic life that
Speaker 2: humans actually interact with. Sure, and sure they're cute in
Speaker 2: their own way, let's be nice. But also like coral
Speaker 2: reefs and all these amazing built up layers of coral
Speaker 2: and it's very much like think of it as like
Speaker 2: the metro area of the sea. You know, this is
Speaker 2: where like like the Tokyo or the New York City
Speaker 2: or you know, the Atlanta nice.
Speaker 4: And then you go down a little bit further, you
Speaker 4: get to the twilight zone or the mesopelagic zone. It's
Speaker 4: between six hundred and fifty six feet and three thousand,
Speaker 4: two hundred and eighty one feet. There's still a lot
Speaker 4: of stuff living in this area, but stuff's getting a
Speaker 4: little different, little little weirder. Like wolf eels. Sure, sure
Speaker 4: you're familiar with those wolf eels. You can hear them
Speaker 4: howling in the seas no matter where you are. Swordfish scary,
Speaker 4: terrifying creatures that you can hunt for fish for them,
Speaker 4: but it's a difficult process. The light at this point
Speaker 4: as you're going down is dying. Sunlight is getting fainter
Speaker 4: and fainter as you submerge.
Speaker 2: If you mapped all this on a chart, you could
Speaker 2: definitely correlate depth with weirdness. Just putting that out there
Speaker 2: real quick.
Speaker 1: I want to point out for anyone who is hearing
Speaker 1: of wolf eels for the first time, please do yourself
Speaker 1: with favor use your browser of choice to check out
Speaker 1: some images of wolf eels. They do not look like
Speaker 1: what you might assume a wolf or an eel.
Speaker 2: Looks like I.
Speaker 1: Had to put them in there, and yeah, their life
Speaker 1: is getting weird with.
Speaker 4: It, and you can't actually hear them howling. I apologize
Speaker 4: those Jill, Well, we.
Speaker 1: Don't know, we don't know, we don't know. So let's
Speaker 1: continue this journey into the murk. Now we're stepping into
Speaker 1: the midnight zone. To bastardize the phrase from that song,
Speaker 1: we're at the bath of Pelagic zone between three thy
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty one feet to twelve one hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty four feet. This part of the ocean is
Speaker 1: like that old line from Method Man, it's cold world.
Speaker 1: You have to bring your own heat. This zone is
Speaker 1: largely dark. This is where you start to see some
Speaker 1: sea creatures emitting their own light through phosphorescence. It's also
Speaker 1: like that Queen Song. Doat are under pressure? The pressure
Speaker 1: in the zone reaches almost six thousand pounds per square inch,
Speaker 1: and that's just because of what you alluded to earlier, Matt.
Speaker 1: There is so much water on top of you here.
Speaker 1: If you live in this area and then next to
Speaker 1: this we would our next step should we continue? James
Speaker 1: Cameron eskiing down into the depths is what I think
Speaker 1: personally is the coolest zone.
Speaker 2: Is it cool as ice? Ben? Sort of like that
Speaker 2: Queen Song was repurposed to be.
Speaker 1: It's very cold. It's not quite freezing because the water
Speaker 1: is still liquid, but it's very very cold.
Speaker 4: You're gonna have to convince me that it's cooler than
Speaker 4: high pressure bioluminescence. But let's do this right.
Speaker 2: So this is the abysso paleogic zone. Did I get
Speaker 2: there right? I think I got it pretty close. And
Speaker 2: that's between thirteen one hundred and twenty four feet and
Speaker 2: nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet. And as
Speaker 2: the aforementioned Vanilla ice reference implies, this is a very
Speaker 2: very very cold part of the deep sea with no
Speaker 2: natural light over seventy five percent of the ocean floor
Speaker 2: is in this zone. So this is essentially like, for
Speaker 2: all intents and purposes, the bottom.
Speaker 1: Basically, yeah, loosely speaking, this is this is one of
Speaker 1: the things I thought about a lot in younger days.
Speaker 1: I always thought, where's the bottom of the continents? You
Speaker 1: know what I mean? Where can you walk? Like if
Speaker 1: you could walk on the ocean floor and you could see, oh,
Speaker 1: there's where the floor has kind of a corner and
Speaker 1: the wall there that's well, that's you know North America
Speaker 1: or that's Australia. You would find it in the abyssopologic zone.
Speaker 1: That's that's the place from which sprang the continents. But
Speaker 1: it's still not the bottom. It's just most of the bottom,
Speaker 1: right because just like the non water covered surface of
Speaker 1: the planet, there are peaks, there are valleys in the ocean.
Speaker 1: We call these trenches.
Speaker 4: Yes, the hatel Pelagic zone that lies down way way
Speaker 4: down nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet to
Speaker 4: thirty six thousand, one hundred feet. Now imagine that, what
Speaker 4: do we say the average was around twelve thousand, thirteen
Speaker 4: thousand feet.
Speaker 1: That's correct, twelve four hundred and fifty feet.
Speaker 4: So now we're way way down there, and the pressure
Speaker 4: in these areas is insane. It's more than eleven thousand,
Speaker 4: three hundred and eighteen tons per square meter. Or essentially,
Speaker 4: think about this the equivalent of one person trying to
Speaker 4: support the weight of fifty giant jumbo jets. You know,
Speaker 4: there's we all know somebody who can bench press one
Speaker 4: jumbo jet, but imagine doing fifty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's impossible. It's you know, it calls to mind
Speaker 1: the old mythological figure of Atlas holding the world atop
Speaker 1: his shoulders, and mythology plays a huge role in today's
Speaker 1: episode as well. The actual depth here gets tricky because
Speaker 1: it depends on, you know, the trenches or the valleys
Speaker 1: in the area. Of course, the Marianas Trench, which is
Speaker 1: the deepest area of the ocean to ever be explored
Speaker 1: by humans, sits at we would it's almost it's definitely
Speaker 1: thirty five seven and ninety seven feet deep, but that
Speaker 1: might not be the entire story, because again we don't
Speaker 1: there's a ton of stuff we don't know about the ocean.
Speaker 1: Just for comparison, like we did with Burj Khalifa, the
Speaker 1: tallest mountain in the world, on the on Earth's dry
Speaker 1: surface is Mount Everest that stands at twenty nine and
Speaker 1: twenty six feet. So this means that the deepest ocean trench,
Speaker 1: as far as we know, is deeper than the tallest
Speaker 1: mountain on this planet is high. There's even with scale comparisons,
Speaker 1: this quickly becomes mind boggling. We're just telling you this
Speaker 1: to give you the map, the lay of the land.
Speaker 1: Now we have to talk about the things that live
Speaker 1: within this strange, strange world. Estimates show that somewhere between
Speaker 1: fifty to eighty percent of all life on Earth is
Speaker 1: found under the ocean.
Speaker 4: And we'll tell you about that life right after a
Speaker 4: quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1: And we're back now over the commercial break. I'm sure
Speaker 1: many of us had adventures, perhaps some of us are
Speaker 1: on the ocean right now, and you're probably wondering, hey,
Speaker 1: fifty to eighty percent, that's a hell of a range.
Speaker 1: Hasn't somebody done any kind of more robust research on this?
Speaker 4: They were probably also thinking, wow, should I really be
Speaker 4: out right now? Especially? I mean I am on the
Speaker 4: ocean kind of isolated, but still, but yes, Ben, I mean, really,
Speaker 4: we keep talking about this is just given the sheer
Speaker 4: size of the oceans of the seas what we're talking
Speaker 4: about here, it's impossible to know exactly how many different
Speaker 4: species live out there and all the different types of species,
Speaker 4: right and humans. The scientists people who've been studying this
Speaker 4: for you know, hundreds and thousands of years, estimate that
Speaker 4: between a third, maybe two thirds of the things that
Speaker 4: live in the oceans have yet to be classified. Maybe
Speaker 4: they've been spotted a few of them once or twice,
Speaker 4: but they haven't actually been you know, written down and
Speaker 4: cataloged as hey, this is another new species, but even
Speaker 4: more just have never been seen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's interesting. I love that you point that out there, Matt,
Speaker 1: because we know that there are tales of plenty big
Speaker 1: fish stories abound, but having something scientifically classified means that
Speaker 1: someone has been able to fit it into a taxonomy
Speaker 1: of some sort. This is related to these other things
Speaker 1: that we know, and this is kind of where it
Speaker 1: lives and what it does before it dies. So we
Speaker 1: we might not know sixty six percent of that easily.
Speaker 1: We do know for sure two things. First, we know
Speaker 1: that populations of undiscovered maritime animals are probably in decline
Speaker 1: the way that populations of discovered and classified maritime animals
Speaker 1: are Secondly, and pretty disturbingly, we know that we don't
Speaker 1: know everything that's out there, but we have a wealth
Speaker 1: of scientific research and a wealth of historical allegations, if
Speaker 1: you want to call folklore something a little more spicy.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting about all of humanity's research into the
Speaker 1: world beneath the boats is this, It quickly descends into legend,
Speaker 1: into mythology. Sailors have been reporting tales of gigantic sea
Speaker 1: monsters since pretty much the first time human beings got
Speaker 1: onto boats, got into the ocean, and then made it
Speaker 1: back to land alive.
Speaker 4: Just think about the first time someone saw a whale,
Speaker 4: The first time someone saw a whale while on a ship. WHOA,
Speaker 4: That must have been mind blowing. And because you have
Speaker 4: no way of imagining even what it is when you
Speaker 4: observe a creature, a sea creature like that. And that's
Speaker 4: kind of what we're going to be talking about here,
Speaker 4: the early visions of something underneath the water that we
Speaker 4: don't know what it is.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine being that first part to see the
Speaker 2: whale and then immediately after being stricken by awe and
Speaker 2: majesty of it all, thinking man it sure would be
Speaker 2: cool to murder that thing with a plenty stick.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you have murder it. It might be a lot
Speaker 4: of food perhaps, you know, that could be a motivation.
Speaker 1: One of the first encounters where it was if what
Speaker 1: we know about humans remains true, then probably one of
Speaker 1: the first encounters was somebody seeing it while they were
Speaker 1: on the shore from a distance and then finding it
Speaker 1: was edible. Maybe one washed up on the shore, which
Speaker 1: could happen even before the day's widespread sonar.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, So let's get into some of the specific examples
Speaker 4: of strange reports of gigantic things within the water.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 4: The first one we're going to talk about here is
Speaker 4: something called Leviathan. This is probably a word you've heard before.
Speaker 4: For me, I got it from magic cards and of
Speaker 4: the Bible. It's a fantastic word. It's been used in
Speaker 4: the past to describe all kinds of different purported massive
Speaker 4: sea creatures. Leviathan was described in the Bible as a giant, primordial,
Speaker 4: sometimes multi headed sea serpent of sorts. It makes six
Speaker 4: appearances in the Old Testament, and according to Biblical scholars,
Speaker 4: in some places within the Bible, Leviathan the word refers
Speaker 4: to an actual physical creature, and other times it functions
Speaker 4: more as a symbolic representation of God's power or wrath,
Speaker 4: which you know, those two different things. Many times are
Speaker 4: where arguments lie within translations of the Bible. I was wondering, guys,
Speaker 4: could I just give you a couple different descriptions of
Speaker 4: some of the Greek mythology descriptions of sea monsters? Just
Speaker 4: really fast?
Speaker 2: Please? Can you slow it down a little bit, Matt,
Speaker 2: not too fast. I want to be able to keep up.
Speaker 4: Oh okay, Well, I'm gonna give you a quote of
Speaker 4: a monstrous fish from those written in fifteen fifty five
Speaker 4: by Olus Magus. Quote. Their forms are horrible. Their head's square,
Speaker 4: all set with prickles, and they have long, sharp horns
Speaker 4: round about like a tree rooted up by the roots.
Speaker 4: They are ten or twelve cubits long, very black, with
Speaker 4: huge eyes. The apple of the eye is of one cubit,
Speaker 4: and it is red and fiery colored, which in the
Speaker 4: dark night appears to fishermen afar from underwaters as a
Speaker 4: burning fire, having hairs like goose feathers.
Speaker 2: What is that describing, Matt? That doesn't sound like any
Speaker 2: living sea creature that I'm familiar with.
Speaker 4: It's describing a giant monster fish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I thought, just making sure I was
Speaker 2: keeping up. Okay, all right, I'll yet.
Speaker 4: But it's thought that perhaps what was actually seen there
Speaker 4: was a giant squid, just due to other descriptions.
Speaker 2: Well, but it's got, it's got. It's got horns like trees. Though,
Speaker 2: what on a giant squid has horns like trees?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 2: What's a cuba. That's a big measurement, right, I mean,
Speaker 2: I know it's like an ancient form of measurement, but
Speaker 2: it's like like a yard, right or something along those lines.
Speaker 4: I believe we've talked about that in a couple other episodes.
Speaker 4: Exactly what a cube it is in the measurement.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's like the length of your arm. Yeah, from
Speaker 2: your elbow to your to your fingers.
Speaker 4: Okay, yeah, just one more here from the Odyssey, if
Speaker 4: you guys are cool with it, there's a sea monster
Speaker 4: called the skila or skia Skyla. Maybe I can't I
Speaker 4: can't remember from my days of learning about Greek myths,
Speaker 4: but here's here's the quote. Her legs and there are
Speaker 4: twelve are like great tentacles, unjointed and upon her serpent
Speaker 4: necks are born six heads like nightmares of ferocity and
Speaker 4: triple serried rows of fangs and deep gullets of black death.
Speaker 4: Half her length. She sways her heads in air.
Speaker 2: Oh, deep gullets of black death.
Speaker 4: I like that one, really creepy. But again it sounds
Speaker 4: a little bit like it could be a giant squid
Speaker 4: that was observed and just there was no understanding of
Speaker 4: what it was.
Speaker 1: And so there are multiple, multiple examples. You know, typically
Speaker 1: in the West, we tend to think of things that
Speaker 1: occurred in the Atlantic or Mediterranean or Middle East, you know,
Speaker 1: from Middle Eastern cultures, Phoenicians and so on. One example from
Speaker 1: Nordic folklore would of course be the Kraken. I think
Speaker 1: a lot of us were waiting for the kraken to
Speaker 1: show up. This was a cryptid before the word existed,
Speaker 1: wreaking havoc from Norway to Greenland. But the vast majority
Speaker 1: of people of Nordic people believed in this thing, and
Speaker 1: many thought they had seen it. Its imo was to
Speaker 1: attack vessels with its tentacles wrapping around a ship, and
Speaker 1: if unable to pull the ship down, this creature would
Speaker 1: begin circling the vessel, creating a maelstrom or a vortex
Speaker 1: that would drag the ship beneath the waves. Legends said
Speaker 1: the kraken could devour the entire crew of a ship
Speaker 1: in a single go. One of our first documented allegations
Speaker 1: of this creature's existence dates back to a story written
Speaker 1: in eleven eighty CE by a King Zvere of Norway.
Speaker 1: And this is I want to point out here, and
Speaker 1: I think I talked about this in a previous episode.
Speaker 2: The idea of a.
Speaker 1: Creature devouring an entire ship might seem outlandish now, but
Speaker 1: we have to remember the average size of a ship
Speaker 1: was much smaller back then. So what would have been
Speaker 1: considered a big ship attacked and justid by a fish
Speaker 1: is you know, it's not as big as the megayachts
Speaker 1: of today. But still these people, again, there are people.
Speaker 1: They're as smart as anyone listening today in twenty twenty, right,
Speaker 1: the brain, the hardware hasn't evolved all that much. So
Speaker 1: we have to ask, if these things are so dangerous,
Speaker 1: why would you mess with them at all. In the
Speaker 1: case of the Kraken, it's because there was enormous profit
Speaker 1: or potential for profit. The Kraken was accompanied by large, large,
Speaker 1: ginormous schools of fish that would follow it around, and
Speaker 1: when it surfaced, when it breached the water, fish cascaded
Speaker 1: off the creature's back. And that meant that if your
Speaker 1: boat was around, all you had to do was literally
Speaker 1: have a net in the water, and then you could
Speaker 1: get more fish than you would in months otherwise.
Speaker 2: Pretty cool. That's a kind of a net positive sea
Speaker 2: monster side effect. I'd be good about that. Oh man,
Speaker 2: I didn't even catch that, but no, you know, the
Speaker 2: krakend definitely sounds like a giant squid.
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, we see a lot of descriptions of tentacles,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. We see a lot of
Speaker 1: descriptions of a pretty agro, pretty big, many armed thing.
Speaker 1: And of course, at this point, finally getting to say
Speaker 1: this on air, Hail Hydra, shout out to the myth
Speaker 1: of old More on that later, but you know, that's
Speaker 1: another that's another Greek myth I believe in the story
Speaker 1: of Hydra. The idea is that you lop off one
Speaker 1: one head. It's a multi headed beast. You lop off
Speaker 1: one head and two grow in its place. It's also
Speaker 1: done a lot for the Marvel cinematic universe, which I'm
Speaker 1: sure is what the Greeks were thinking about when they.
Speaker 2: Wrote that, No question, they were laying the groundwork. So
Speaker 2: next we have something from Japan, a creature, a sea
Speaker 2: wrecking creature known as the Umi Bozoo that was rumored
Speaker 2: to attack, specifically in calm waters, where it would rise up,
Speaker 2: creating this kind of self contained maelstrom and described as
Speaker 2: a black phantom with two huge eyes. Okay, just phantom.
Speaker 2: I'm picturing like ghost shaped, you know, So let's just again,
Speaker 2: We're gonna come back to this two huge eyes. And
Speaker 2: in the lore of the time, this Omi Bozou was
Speaker 2: thought to be a spirit of some sort rather than
Speaker 2: an actual corporeal creature, and the only way to escape
Speaker 2: this thing was to kind of almost like distract it
Speaker 2: like a cat, you know, with like a like a
Speaker 2: mouse toy or like a feather. But they would use
Speaker 2: what they referred to as a bottomless barrel, and I
Speaker 2: had to offer Mike ask Ben to clarify what the
Speaker 2: hell that is. And it's it's pretty simple when you
Speaker 2: think about it. A bottomless barrel is a barrel with
Speaker 2: no bottom, a cylinder. You take out both ends and
Speaker 2: it becomes bottomless and infinite, and it would just like
Speaker 2: be all, what the hell is this? I got it?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, and they need to sail away while
Speaker 2: it's confused.
Speaker 1: That's the thing about folklore, right, we see the truth
Speaker 1: but told slant. As Emily Dickinson would later go on
Speaker 1: to note, what's odd about this and what differentiates this
Speaker 1: folklore from a lot of other folklore throughout human civilization,
Speaker 1: unlest it's human and pre human civilization, but no spoilers,
Speaker 1: that's a different episode, is that the folklore here does
Speaker 1: have often provable I will say provable seeds of the truth.
Speaker 1: There's the little grain of sand that makes the pearl
Speaker 1: of legend. Research shows the ocean has indisputably been home
Speaker 1: to enormous dangerous creatures in the distant past. It's home
Speaker 1: to enormous dangerous creatures now, of course, but it was
Speaker 1: also home to things like the meglodon.
Speaker 4: Oh yes, the ma That was a big old shark
Speaker 4: three times the size of a great white with teeth
Speaker 4: as big as your hand. Hope they're really extinct?
Speaker 1: Oh man, I don't know, Matt. I kind of hope
Speaker 1: they're still around, not around me specifically, but just like
Speaker 1: out in the world megalodonning even look.
Speaker 4: You said to yourself, the populations of sea creatures are declining.
Speaker 4: What's that megalodon doing other than just slurping up sea
Speaker 4: creatures or mashing them violently with its teeth that are
Speaker 4: the size of fists.
Speaker 1: My heart goes out to sharks. They're amazing animals if
Speaker 1: you look at the mechanism of their evolution and adaptation,
Speaker 1: and also their existence seems very stressful to me, since
Speaker 1: they the way that their gills are structured. They can't act,
Speaker 1: they can't stand still. They always have to keep moving
Speaker 1: and forcing water through the gills. It's stressful. But even
Speaker 1: if a megaladon was around now, it would not be
Speaker 1: the largest creature the ocean is home to proven like
Speaker 1: kaiju size things, right, like the blue whale is sorry,
Speaker 1: dinosaurs officially the largest single animal ever confirmed to exist.
Speaker 4: Ever.
Speaker 2: Ooh, by the way, you guys, I remember there was
Speaker 2: an episode a while back where space whales came up
Speaker 2: and I was trying to wreck my brain, like where
Speaker 2: have I seen space whales? And I said, I thought
Speaker 2: it was as artists French artist Mobius, and then I
Speaker 2: thought it was maybe Salvador Dali or something, and a
Speaker 2: listener wrote in and said it was actually from an
Speaker 2: episode of Futurama. I wish I remember the listener's name,
Speaker 2: but if you're hearing this, thank you listener. My brain
Speaker 2: was eating itself over that one, basically. But yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: And you know I've mentioned that I'm also I have
Speaker 2: an abiding fear of large things that lurk beneath the depths,
Speaker 2: and that I often have had dreams where I feel
Speaker 2: myself as this speck in this massive ocean with like
Speaker 2: huge unseen things kind of lurking about, and then like
Speaker 2: a whale will come up under me and just sort
Speaker 2: of scoop me up and it doesn't eat me. It's
Speaker 2: just more of this kind of fear of its sheer size.
Speaker 2: And it's true. The blue whale is absolutely massive. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're gonna know it when it comes up under you
Speaker 2: in the ocean, or when you see it, hopefully from
Speaker 2: the safety of like, you know, one of those tours,
Speaker 2: those boat tours. One hundred people can fit into its mouth,
Speaker 2: not its guts, its mouth, its heart is the size
Speaker 2: of a small car, maybe maybe not even a small car. Ben,
Speaker 2: what do you think a medium car like a like
Speaker 2: a mid sized suv.
Speaker 1: It's it's a car. They could comfortably seat four to
Speaker 1: five people.
Speaker 4: Got it, okay?
Speaker 2: And the beat of that heart can be detected from
Speaker 2: two miles away. But we've got some other things on
Speaker 2: the list of massive underwater dwelling creatures, things like sperm whales,
Speaker 2: the whale shark, the basking shark, and of course our
Speaker 2: pal and yours, the giant civic octopus. Not to mention
Speaker 2: the lion's main jellyfish, which can reach more than one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty feet or thirty six point six meters
Speaker 2: in length.
Speaker 4: But the lion's main is mostly creepy tentacles, right or not?
Speaker 4: Tentacles creepy? Are they called tentacles in a jellyfish? They're
Speaker 4: tendrilsl Yeah, yeah, terrifying lion's main tendrils. Those really freak
Speaker 4: me out. Did jellyfish give you, guys the same kind
Speaker 4: of feelings when you're thinking about swimming in the ocean.
Speaker 2: I think they're beautiful to look at in an aquarium tank,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I mean they definitely because they're they're stingy boys, right,
Speaker 2: I mean, they will mess you up and then you
Speaker 2: got to pee on yourself.
Speaker 1: Not all jelly hashtag. Not all jellyfish right are poisonous,
Speaker 1: but I personally I love them. I think it's like
Speaker 1: watching a cloud underwater, or you know, a nebula through
Speaker 1: a telescope. Also, jellyfish, at least one tiny species of
Speaker 1: jellyfish occupies a top ten position and Bend's list of
Speaker 1: top ten animals because it's functionally immortal. You remember that
Speaker 1: one matt it grows up and then if it's injured
Speaker 1: or something, it returns to a juvenile phase and lives
Speaker 1: its life again. We did an episode on real life
Speaker 1: immortality a number of years ago now, and there is
Speaker 1: real life immortality at least for some animals, and they're
Speaker 1: all pretty crappy versions of immortality.
Speaker 2: But yes, I will say the jellyfish outside of their waters,
Speaker 2: they don't hold up so well. They're super blobby and
Speaker 2: like like a thing that you'd want to step over
Speaker 2: on the beach, and if they are stingy ones, you
Speaker 2: definitely would want to step over them. But it just
Speaker 2: goes to show how specifically adapted they are for life
Speaker 2: in the ocean. As the case with all of the
Speaker 2: creatres we're talking about today, they don't they cannot hold
Speaker 2: up outside of the water.
Speaker 4: But some of those mental wars are very difficult to detect,
Speaker 4: and they've got really long tendrils, and you would never
Speaker 4: know who's there and it could kill humans. Okay, maybe
Speaker 4: I just have a weird thing with jellyfish.
Speaker 1: Well well, also, that's not to sound like a jerk,
Speaker 1: but one of the reasons I really wanted to hit
Speaker 1: the idea of specificity of adaptation is should humans be
Speaker 1: under the water?
Speaker 2: How far should we be.
Speaker 1: Under the water? You know what I mean, Like if
Speaker 1: you're I don't want to like victim blame or anything,
Speaker 1: because I know life is crazy and everybody's the main
Speaker 1: character of their own story. But the maybe maybe jellyfish
Speaker 1: and attacking leviathans are a sign that we should we
Speaker 1: shouldn't go too far into the depths. I mean, the
Speaker 1: more you think about it, it makes sense to ask
Speaker 1: could there still be enormous creatures out there in the brine.
Speaker 1: One of the things we talked about off air as
Speaker 1: we were diving into this episode was Jules vern Of course,
Speaker 1: his famous eighteen seventy novel twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Speaker 1: Don't think too much about the unit of measurement there
Speaker 1: just to enjoy the poetic title. There's a quote here
Speaker 1: from vern that applies to this episode, and it's this,
Speaker 1: either we do know all the varieties of beings which
Speaker 1: people our planet.
Speaker 5: Or we do not.
Speaker 1: If we do not know them all, if nature still
Speaker 1: has secrets in the deeps, for us, nothing is more
Speaker 1: conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes
Speaker 1: or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species.
Speaker 2: So could sea monsters be real? Well, we'll dive right
Speaker 2: into that after a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy, and it does get crazy.
Speaker 1: Could the monsters be real? This genuinely depends on how
Speaker 1: you define monster. If we're talking about monsters, as in
Speaker 1: creatures of monstrous size, then our odds of finding one
Speaker 1: understandably go down. But they don't go down as far
Speaker 1: as you might think, because we still have a lot
Speaker 1: to learn about the ocean. But we're learning more about
Speaker 1: it now than ever before.
Speaker 4: Yes, that is correct. Numerous governments and their militaries are
Speaker 4: able to detect the movement of very large objects from
Speaker 4: far away when it comes to things submerged in the ocean,
Speaker 4: and as we talked about in our episode we covered
Speaker 4: not that long ago about sonar and its effects on
Speaker 4: marine animals. Earth's oceans essentially have like roaming detection networks
Speaker 4: in the form of submarines, which is very very true,
Speaker 4: and commercial shipping vessels. And there's also purported technology that
Speaker 4: maybe the US military and other militaries have miked up
Speaker 4: the oceans to a large degree. So there's affirmed.
Speaker 1: I think it's confirmed.
Speaker 4: I think it is confirmed too. I know it is
Speaker 4: confirmed at least from the US's side, but I wonder
Speaker 4: how many other countries have something similar in place.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, that's a very good point, Matt. And
Speaker 1: we essentially have some form of roaming detection networks. They're
Speaker 1: meant to detect other works of humanity more so than
Speaker 1: other animals, but they work. That's why we spent billions
Speaker 1: building them, and we still have found huge, occluded disturbing things.
Speaker 1: So one thing that was tough for us to not
Speaker 1: spoil in the Hear of the Fat portion of today's
Speaker 1: show is that the source of many many sea serpent
Speaker 1: and sea monster myths across the across the centuries turns
Speaker 1: out probably to be based in a real thing. The
Speaker 1: colossal or the giant squid. Today it's known as Architathus Dukes.
Speaker 1: It's as old, like rumors of this are as old
Speaker 1: as the first days of sailing, honestly, but for centuries
Speaker 1: the only proof we had was really creepy, really circumstantial,
Speaker 1: disturbing stuff, nearly unidentifiable carcasses wash ashore, the lone survivor
Speaker 1: of a shipwreck shows up with you know, like with
Speaker 1: missing crew members and a nineteen foot tentacle that's rotting
Speaker 1: in the sun. And then we find, you know, giant
Speaker 1: known creatures, especially sperm whales in the in the era
Speaker 1: of whaling, right you know the movie Dick Days and Beyond.
Speaker 1: You would find whales that had scars, like gigantic sucker
Speaker 1: marks that were wrought by some unknown animal. Or you
Speaker 1: would find these gigantic beaks. They looked like kiju beaks.
Speaker 1: They looked like the beaks of a squid that no
Speaker 1: God would ever put on this planet, right, because these
Speaker 1: are very religious people finding these two And it wasn't
Speaker 1: until maybe in your lifetime, fellow conspiracy realists, that scientists
Speaker 1: finally got a photograph of a real life krackt and
Speaker 1: that was just like one blurry paparazzi under the sea's photo.
Speaker 4: You know that was yeah, that was alive, right, it was, Oh,
Speaker 4: there's one swimmer. I wasn't a carcass, it wasn't some remnant.
Speaker 4: It was an actual thing swimming around. And then think
Speaker 4: about this. It wasn't until the you know, the Mayan Apocalypse,
Speaker 4: I'm sorry, twenty twelve when we acquired actual video footage
Speaker 4: of a live giant squid existing in its in its environment,
Speaker 4: because there was there was another time earlier than that
Speaker 4: where a giant squid was I believe caught essentially and
Speaker 4: pulled up to the surface.
Speaker 1: By the Japanese fishing vessel.
Speaker 4: That was the one we were just talking about, right,
Speaker 4: was that two thousand and six? Maybe I think something
Speaker 4: around that time where one got pulled up from from
Speaker 4: the depths to the surface, just in the act of
Speaker 4: a large fishing operation. But yeah, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen
Speaker 4: as well, we acquired actual video footage of a giant
Speaker 4: squid and it was creepy.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you guys ever seen that Noah
Speaker 2: Baumbach movie The Squid and the Whale, it references a
Speaker 2: diorama that you can see at the Museum of Natural
Speaker 2: History in New York of a massive sperm whale essentially
Speaker 2: doing battle with one of these kraken like creatures. And
Speaker 2: it's pretty epic to look at. Still on display there
Speaker 2: as far as I know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was there last time I went. I love
Speaker 1: that museum. It's I don't know. A lot of that
Speaker 1: museum is dark when you get into the exhibits. I
Speaker 1: like dark museums. These creatures like dark areas of the water.
Speaker 1: They live in very deep areas of the ocean. As
Speaker 1: far as we can tell, again, we know very little
Speaker 1: about them. They're anywhere from thirteen hundred to three thousand
Speaker 1: feet down. We know that they can grow larger than
Speaker 1: some whales. The only predator of theirs we know about
Speaker 1: is the sperm whale. We don't know how large these
Speaker 1: things can get, yet we know that they are stronger
Speaker 1: than an elephant. We know that a bite from their
Speaker 1: beak has enough force to sever steel cables. This means
Speaker 1: that if one of these made it to the surface
Speaker 1: in the days of wooden boats, that boat would In short, well,
Speaker 1: it's a family show, so I'm just going to say
Speaker 1: they would be very deep trouble.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, what if your ship has a steel hull,
Speaker 4: It doesn't seem to matter. These daily can go through anything.
Speaker 1: You could puncture that. Yeah, just stay on their good side.
Speaker 4: I mean.
Speaker 1: The craziest thing about this, it's a real life sea monster.
Speaker 1: It fits some of the qualities we described, right, and.
Speaker 2: We know so.
Speaker 1: Very little about it. We still have a lot of
Speaker 1: questions about large sea animals that everybody's kind of familiar with. Right,
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff we don't understand about whales.
Speaker 1: We know even less about these things. As recently as
Speaker 1: June of twenty twenty of this year. Last month, as
Speaker 1: we record this, we learned new stuff about these monsters.
Speaker 1: A juvenile version of them washed up on the shores
Speaker 1: of South Africa. This is not the first time it happened,
Speaker 1: but this creature was already thirteen feet long. That's baby
Speaker 1: size for these guys, right. It's a mini me of
Speaker 1: a giant squid. But it was just about two years old.
Speaker 1: We also don't know how long they live. We don't
Speaker 1: know how big they grow while they're alive. And they're
Speaker 1: not the only thing out there. I mean, I I
Speaker 1: say we go full Lovecraft. Let's point out that the
Speaker 1: ocean is also home to giant deep sea worms. And
Speaker 1: when we say giant, we mean giant. They also glow
Speaker 1: in the dark.
Speaker 2: So you know, these guys well as individuals, wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 2: be considered in the same league. Yeah, that's a sea
Speaker 2: punt as well as the rest of these animals that
Speaker 2: we're talking about today. They're called pyrosomes and their free
Speaker 2: flow voting tunicates. They're also known as the unicorns of
Speaker 2: the sea. But they're they're pretty big, you know, they're
Speaker 2: big enough for a human to ride, but they also
Speaker 2: kind of create these massive swarms. They're soft and delicate,
Speaker 2: like some sort of like feather boa perhaps, And again,
Speaker 2: like bend off Off, Mic pointed out that these are
Speaker 2: really in kind of on a technicality, sea monster by default.
Speaker 2: That's because each of the worms is actually a colony
Speaker 2: of a thousands of individual creatures, and the individuals themselves
Speaker 2: are super tiny. It's almost like they operating this crazy
Speaker 2: hive mind type situation.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, they're like a big commune, you know, and
Speaker 1: jellyfish often also or creatures of colony or hive. But
Speaker 1: these giant sea worms are also we should mention because
Speaker 1: Chekhov's gun rule. Right, we did. We did name drop Lovecraft,
Speaker 1: so we have to follow up on that. These worms
Speaker 1: are not eldritch objects of warship sleeping beneath the waves
Speaker 1: for AONs, waiting for the stars to be right. This
Speaker 1: is not a case of that is not dead, which
Speaker 1: can eternal lie and with strange AONs even death may
Speaker 1: die kind of thing. It's not We're not at Cuthulhu
Speaker 1: level yet. But Matt Noll, while we are on the
Speaker 1: subject of waking ancient creatures, it's time to ask what
Speaker 1: about the other monsters. We have sea monster news for you.
Speaker 4: Well, as we stated before, we've been talking about giant monsters,
Speaker 4: right that we've been describing monsters as something that is
Speaker 4: monster us in its size. But there could be something
Speaker 4: very dangerous, very frightening that isn't giant that could be
Speaker 4: discovered down below the depths. And we have some news
Speaker 4: for you. This year, scientists made a discovery that future
Speaker 4: historians will doubtlessly call classic twenty twenty. You know why.
Speaker 4: They found one hundred million year old microbes beneath the
Speaker 4: seafloor in the South Pacific Geyer. This is a site
Speaker 4: east of Australia where ocean currents intersect, and this is
Speaker 4: considered to be one of the areas of the ocean
Speaker 4: that has the least amount of life, right, some of
Speaker 4: the deadest parts of the ocean, where it's almost there's
Speaker 4: almost no nutrients here that animals need to survive. The
Speaker 4: scientists dug down very far, five seven hundred meters below
Speaker 4: sea level, and they found something that had been in
Speaker 4: a Lovecraftian way, slumbering since before the age of men.
Speaker 1: Yeah, these things looked as though they were dead. And
Speaker 1: it's already a great find, you know, goscience. This is
Speaker 1: already a groundbreaking discovery to find evidence of these things
Speaker 1: that were once alive. So they brought them back to
Speaker 1: the lab. They brought the clay cores they had dug up,
Speaker 1: as you had mentioned, Matt, back to their lab where
Speaker 1: they found these microbes, and they said, oh wow, this
Speaker 1: is amazing. There was once life in this part of
Speaker 1: the South Pacific, guyer, I don't know. Let's feed them,
Speaker 1: which sounds weird, right. It's a lot like finding a
Speaker 1: dead body and saying, let's put a sandwich by it.
Speaker 1: Let's just come on, let's put a sandwich by it.
Speaker 1: It's just between us we're all buddies here. And what
Speaker 1: happened is that these microbes, these dead bodies, got up
Speaker 1: and ate the sandwich. So what happened after that is
Speaker 1: they started reproducing, They started breeding. Something that had been
Speaker 1: dormant were millions of years just came back to life.
Speaker 1: One of the scientists, and I love when scientists talked
Speaker 1: this way. One of the scientists said that this indicates
Speaker 1: the insane possibility. Whenever scientists used the word insane, you
Speaker 1: know what they're you know, something rocked them. This scientist
Speaker 1: said that these very same microbes must have been or
Speaker 1: may have been, probably were sitting in the same place
Speaker 1: for AONs, and that that is pure lovecrafty and stuff.
Speaker 1: Lovecraft was a terrible person, not a great writer, but
Speaker 1: a fantastic world builder. And the idea of undersea creatures
Speaker 1: slumbering and being awoken by man, now we can say,
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty, this happened. This happened. Lovecraft is in
Speaker 1: a way real now. And that's just the beginning. If
Speaker 1: we go back to the statistics when Matt Nolan and
Speaker 1: I talked about it at the beginning of this episode,
Speaker 1: we see some possibilities This story is and over given
Speaker 1: what little we know about the ocean, again, very little,
Speaker 1: it is scientifically indisputably true that we do not at
Speaker 1: this point know every single species of life currently living
Speaker 1: in there or you know, sleeping for dreamless dark millennia.
Speaker 1: And given the global reach of sonar and other detection
Speaker 1: methods radar, et cetera, sure it's plausible to say we
Speaker 1: have a solid chance of detecting an undiscovered life form
Speaker 1: if it ticks a few boxes.
Speaker 4: That's right.
Speaker 2: It really needs to have a relatively large population, It
Speaker 2: needs to be pretty frequently on the move and spend
Speaker 2: at least some time in that smaller part of the
Speaker 2: ocean that we talked about, that metropolis that we study
Speaker 2: pretty extensively. And it also is helpful if it prais
Speaker 2: a lot on other easily detected species. But if it
Speaker 2: doesn't exhibit these traits, our odds of finding drop quite significantly.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's true. It's gonna be hard for us to
Speaker 4: just accidentally stumble upon something new, right if it doesn't
Speaker 4: have that large population and all those things we just listed.
Speaker 4: Does anybody else feel like it's a bad idea to
Speaker 4: awaken aon's old microbes just in case? Maybe there's something
Speaker 4: involved there that happened to help the extinction process with yes,
Speaker 4: you know life on Earth.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes I do, I do, I do think that thing, Matt.
Speaker 1: Hull, the dice, I you know what I mean. We
Speaker 1: are seeing this happen in other places. You know, it's
Speaker 1: not just underwater. Well I guess it kind.
Speaker 4: Of is because under ice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because ice. You know, it's just just fancier water.
Speaker 1: So ice is fancy water. Great as our takeaway, please
Speaker 1: just remember that out of all this stuff we did today.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you know, you make an excellent point there, Nol,
Speaker 1: because this isn't just speculation on our part. We know
Speaker 1: that the discovery of extremophiles took forever creatures that live
Speaker 1: by these geothermal vents on the ocean floor. They are
Speaker 1: living off the energy exuded from those vents. So they're
Speaker 1: not consuming a very well known other species. They're not
Speaker 1: moving around a lot because they have to be by
Speaker 1: those vents to survive. So with those two pieces missing,
Speaker 1: it would take us a while to find them. And
Speaker 1: this leaves us with two notes. You know, one is disturbing,
Speaker 1: one is distressing. Or when's a little more emo, a
Speaker 1: little sad. Let's go with that one. First. It may
Speaker 1: well be that we do discover some gigantic species, some
Speaker 1: real life sea monsters, sea serpent, what have you. But
Speaker 1: we discover it after it becomes functionally extinct. We find
Speaker 1: the last of a relic population. We find that they
Speaker 1: are unable to breed. We find that the anthropist scene
Speaker 1: has signed their death warrant, and we are just seeing
Speaker 1: the dying echoes of what they once were ours.
Speaker 4: Look at that poorant. Yep, there's only one.
Speaker 1: Yep, look at it. The Last Kraken the new film
Speaker 1: by Wes Anderson. The Crack was played by Edward Norton.
Speaker 2: And as it turns out, the Kraken a perfectly symmetrical creature,
Speaker 2: so that really works out for his MEAs on Sam, I.
Speaker 4: Was really hoping you were going to say Bill Murray,
Speaker 4: but we can give with it.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, wait wait, change it. Kracking is Bill Murray.
Speaker 1: Uh you heard it?
Speaker 2: Oh my god. This this can be a crossover between
Speaker 2: the stuff they do. I want you to know Cinematic
Speaker 2: Universe and the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe, where we have
Speaker 2: a movie coming out in the December of this year
Speaker 2: for Christ called Hans about a horse that could solve
Speaker 2: math problems, played by who do we say, Daniel da
Speaker 2: Lewis two people? Yes, that's right, Finn wolf Hard as
Speaker 2: the young clever Hans, and then he grows up into
Speaker 2: a Daniel d Lewis sized clever Hans. But yeah, I
Speaker 2: love this idea. So this.
Speaker 1: It's not as Wes Anderson cute. If this happens in
Speaker 1: real life, our species will encounter a macro level of
Speaker 1: a type of sadness known as sounder. If you guys
Speaker 1: have ever heard this, it's a it's a manufacturer word.
Speaker 1: All words are manufactured, so you know tintinnabulation. I don't
Speaker 1: care make up your own words. It's a living language.
Speaker 1: But soundra is a really neat word that means the
Speaker 1: realization that each random passer by is living a life
Speaker 1: is vivid and complex as your own, populated with their
Speaker 1: own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and so on, story that
Speaker 1: continues invisibly around you, like an an hill sprawling deep underground,
Speaker 1: and they live a life that you'll never know existed.
Speaker 1: You might only appear once as someone passing by, or
Speaker 1: a lighted window in the dark. So not to be
Speaker 1: too waxing poetic, But how terrible is it that we
Speaker 1: might find something right after we've killed it. The second
Speaker 1: thing we have to remember, and this is the real
Speaker 1: This is the real conspiratorial stuff here. It's a bit
Speaker 1: of a thought experiment. A lot of the knowledge that
Speaker 1: we have about the world's oceans comes from private corporations.
Speaker 5: It comes from.
Speaker 1: Blue ocean navies, both of which are incentivized heavily to
Speaker 1: keep secrets. So it is possible, not plausible, but possible
Speaker 1: that something might have been found already. In the cost
Speaker 1: of revealing it to the world, we're outweighed by the
Speaker 1: profit motive of keeping something else a margin right, or
Speaker 1: a promising dig or maybe you know, you're a military
Speaker 1: you've detected something, detected some big animal on its last legs.
Speaker 1: But if you tell people you discovered it, then they'll
Speaker 1: know you have some sort of classified detection technology. And
Speaker 1: then boom, billions of dollars down the Marianna's trench.
Speaker 4: There.
Speaker 1: I don't think, I probably that's not happening. That's just
Speaker 1: that's it's like a comic book level, exciting world.
Speaker 4: I don't think you're off base of there at all.
Speaker 4: Then I feel all of that specifically the classified detection
Speaker 4: tech because I want to believe that there are more
Speaker 4: efficient forms of the kinds of detection technologies that we
Speaker 4: have now that just that can't be shared. You're right
Speaker 4: for proprietary reasons.
Speaker 1: And now again, like you say, man Matt, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate that support there or there, I say enabling. You
Speaker 1: might be enabling a little bit in listeners.
Speaker 4: But and that doesn't mean extraterrestrial technology. It just means
Speaker 4: advanced technology.
Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed. And while this idea of sea monsters, have
Speaker 1: to put it in a sentence, this idea that sea
Speaker 1: monsters exist, they are being hidden by you know, an
Speaker 1: oil conglomerate or a navy, a bluewater navy of some sort.
Speaker 1: While that definitely sounds like sci fi comic book stuff
Speaker 1: or fodder for an excellent screenplay, a sci fi channel screenplay,
Speaker 1: the truth is stranger things have happened out there beneath
Speaker 1: the waves. So what do you think listeners? Now we
Speaker 1: hand you know, like the meme. You're the captain, now,
Speaker 1: so what do you think could be out there?
Speaker 4: You have the trawler, you're in control. Yeah, honestly, what
Speaker 4: do you think is out there? Is there anything that
Speaker 4: you have seen when you've been out on the ocean,
Speaker 4: or maybe in the ocean on a dive. Maybe you've
Speaker 4: been in a submersible before. We would love to hear
Speaker 4: about your experience. Or maybe you've worked on a rig wooh,
Speaker 4: that would be cool. Tell us about that. Anything you
Speaker 4: want to mention that we've discussed on this episode, or
Speaker 4: if you want to give us a suggestion for another episode,
Speaker 4: you can find us. We're all over social media. On
Speaker 4: Instagram we are conspiracy stuff show on Facebook and Twitter,
Speaker 4: we're conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, all of these things are true. And in addition,
Speaker 2: if you want to get in on the fun with
Speaker 2: your fellow conspiracy realist, why not head over to Facebook
Speaker 2: and join our group. Here's where it gets crazy. Easiest
Speaker 2: thing in the world. Just name one, two, three of us,
Speaker 2: a super producer to all of us, make a joke
Speaker 2: that makes Ben laugh, reference something that's in an episode. Whatever,
Speaker 2: We're pretty easy and you're in a great place to
Speaker 2: share memes and just have conversation. Couldn't be a cooler
Speaker 2: group of folks on there. Here's where it gets crazy
Speaker 2: on Facebook. And hey, while you're at it, while you're
Speaker 2: on the internet, why not go over to Apple Podcasts
Speaker 2: and leave us a glowing review, because it really does
Speaker 2: help kind of bump the show up in the rankings
Speaker 2: and also helps people discover and as we're entering this
Speaker 2: brave new world of our five days a week thing,
Speaker 2: let us know how you dig it and do it
Speaker 2: in a public forum so others will follow in your path.
Speaker 1: And if you are one of the people out there
Speaker 1: who says I listened to your Facebook episode, I don't
Speaker 1: know why I would be on that. Social media in
Speaker 1: general is a bag of badgers. That's for the birds.
Speaker 1: But I do have a phone, and I have a
Speaker 1: story to tell you. Well, you are in luck, fellow
Speaker 1: conspiracy realists. You can call us any old time of
Speaker 1: day or night at one eight three three std WYTK.
Speaker 1: You'll have a three ish minutes ballpark. We would love
Speaker 1: to hear from you. Let us know whether or not
Speaker 1: we can use your story on air. And then also,
Speaker 1: you know, if you feel the pressure of that ticking
Speaker 1: clock for that three minute time window, why not just
Speaker 1: write down a couple things talking points and you refer
Speaker 1: to those that made it easier for me when I
Speaker 1: called into our own show for some reason. But hey,
Speaker 1: Matt Nol. A lot of times people don't like social
Speaker 1: media or telephones, which we totally get. If you are
Speaker 1: one of those folks, you are still in luck. You
Speaker 1: are trebly tr e b l Y in luck because
Speaker 1: you can send us a good old fashioned email anytime
Speaker 1: the spirit moves you.
Speaker 4: We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they don't
Speaker 4: want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 4: more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 4: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.