Everyone’s Doing It

We go to great depths today to give you curious tales. Enjoy!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Manky's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of I
Heart Radio and Grim and Mild. Our world is full
of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book,
all of these amazing tales are right there on display,
just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet

(00:27):
of Curiosities. We've all heard of planking. It took over
the internet a while back. Then there was the rather
short lived ice Bucket challenge, where friends challenge each other
to film themselves dumping a bucket of ice water over
their heads and of course then posted on social media.

(00:51):
Social media has a knack for making fads blow up,
after all, humanity becomes a much different species when put
in front of an audience. But social media didn't make
trends happen. No long before the days of TikTok and Instagram,
there were examples of human beings doing ridiculous, pointless things
solely for the sake of saying that they had done it. Consider,

(01:12):
for instance, phone booth surfing. People took photos as they
crammed as many friends as possible into phone booths, with
a record being a seemingly impossible But there is another fad,
likewise pointless, that unnecessarily grabbed everyone's attention way back in
nineteen nine. It started, as these things often do, with

(01:34):
a bet. A Harvard freshman by the name of Lowthrip
Whittington Jr. Bragged to his friends that he had once
eaten a live fish. Being good college friends, they doubted
him and bet him ten whole dollars that he could
not do it again. Not wanting to be shamed at failing,
Whittington practiced for days, swallowing life tadpoles and baby goldfish.

(01:55):
After all, practice makes perfect right. The moment of truth
came on March three of nine, inside a building of
the revered Harvard University. The student was encircled by his
friends and by Boston reporters, and there he did what
fate determined he had to do. He swallowed the goldfish whole,
after which he brushed his teeth, and then sat down

(02:16):
to a dinner of fried file at with tartar sauce.
Had this been in the modern era, the video would
have been liked and shared thousands of times, criticized for
its grossness, and undoubtedly blown up and spread to the
far corners of the Internet. But in the absence of
social media, all it did was well blow up and
spread to the far corners of the globe. Remember there

(02:39):
were reporters there, the social media of the day. Just
a month later, Marie Henson, a journalism student at the
University of Missouri, became the first woman to engage in
the goldfish swallowing craze. At the University of Pennsylvania, a
student swallowed twenty five all on his own, but not
long after a student in m I t became the champion,

(03:00):
taking down forty two. His reign was short lived, though,
as a Clark University students swallowed eighty nine goldfish in
April eighty nine, Goldfish Down the hatch. Rivalries developed between schools,
like sporting events played out on fields and rinks. Students
overcame intercollegiate obstacles by swallowing more live goldfish than their

(03:22):
rival college and universities, proving once and for all that
they were the superior institution. Of course. Life magazine even
picked it up on their March ninety nine issue, making
this fad a piece of American culture for all eternity.
It didn't take long before a Massachusetts States Senator, Drew
up a bill to and quote preserve the fish from

(03:45):
cruel and wanton consumption. And it worked. The ridiculous activity
had been thoroughly shut down, and all wayward attempts to
reignite it were punished as well. Let's just say the
stupid acts they were. As the old saying goes, give
a man of fish, and you'll feed him for a day,
But teach him to swallow one alive and whole. And well,

(04:06):
I'm not sure how that one ends. All I know
is it's more than a little curious. By the nineteen seventies,
the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet

(04:28):
Union had permeated nearly all of American pop culture, from
books like Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegutt to films like
Dr Strangelove, there was no escaping the threat of mutually
assured nuclear destruction. In nineteen seventy six, author Clive Kustler
published a thriller about a mission to the bottom of
the Atlantic Ocean, where there existed a rare mineral that

(04:49):
could advance America's defense capabilities during the Cold War. The
only problem was that the mineral had been kept aboard
the Titanic, and so a plan was devised, per the
title of the book, to raise the Titanic. Mind you,
the book came out about a decade before Robert Ballard
found the ship and discovered it had actually split into
two when it sank. It was a wild, implausible scheme

(05:12):
to return one of the most well known shipwrecks to
the surface. The thing was, Kostler's idea wasn't far fetched,
at least not to Howard Hughes and the c i A.
It started back in March of nineteen sixty eight, six
years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviets had deployed
a fleet of ships and aircraft to the Pacific Ocean.

(05:32):
They seemed to be looking for something. After some research
done by the U. S Office of Naval Intelligence, it
was believed that they were looking for a missing submarine.
The K one captain had stopped reporting in with updates,
and after three weeks without any word, the Russians feared
the worst. The vessel had been a Soviet ballistic missile

(05:53):
submarine carrying three nuclear warheads, each capable of reaching a
distance of up to nautical miles. The Russians looked for months,
assuming the Americans had sunk it, but they couldn't prove
their involvement. Then, even worse, they couldn't find their own
missing sub. Eventually, they gave up and assumed that it
was gone for good. What they didn't know was that

(06:16):
the Americans had been listening. American intelligence had detected an
implosion about fifteen hundred miles up the coast of Hawaii
on March eight, and they knew the location. It was
clear that the missing nuclear sub had been found. All
that was left to do was go down there and
get it. Unfortunately, it was in over sixteen thousand feet

(06:37):
of water. For comparison, the Titanic currently rests at about
twelve thousand, six hundred feet a roughly two point five
miles below the surface of the ocean. This K one
was another three quarters of a mile under that, and so,
just as the fictional US government had done in raised
the Titanic, the real US government started coming up with

(06:57):
options for recovering the Russian sub, including in one idea
that involved inflating giant gas balloons beneath it. Unfortunately, everything
they drafted up seemed impossible, so they turned to the
one man who knew all about making the impossible possible
Howard Hughes, but first the CIA needed to make up
a reason for the project. To the outside world. Hughes

(07:19):
would seem interested in mining the seabed for manganese, hence
the need for his new six and eighteen foot ship,
the Glomar Explorer. In reality, Hughes was going to pull
off the greatest heist in the world. He was going
to steal a Russian sub full of nukes. After testing
wrapped up in nineteen seventy four, a giant claw was

(07:39):
delivered to the Glomar Explorer via a fifty one thousand
ton barge. The plan was to have the claw mounted
under the ship, reached down and bring the sub back
to the surface, where it could be stowed in a
hollow moon pod in the lower decks. The recovery would
take place entirely underwater, too far from the prime eyes
of Soviet ships and airplanes. Unfortunately, the recovery didn't go

(08:03):
quite as planned. Hughes team worked for weeks to bring
up pieces of the sub while being observed by two
Soviet vessels in the area. Most of the sub was lost,
including the engine room and the control room. Pieces of
the claw arm broke as it was bringing the sub
to the surface, and what fell away was destroyed when
it hit the floor again. But he did manage to

(08:24):
salvage the torpedo compartment and its full array of nuclear weapons,
so the plan, dubbed Project as ore In, wasn't a
total loss. The Glomar explorer was able to bring up
several crew members as well, who were given official burials
at sea. At least that's the story the CIA told.
In fact, we wouldn't even know it all happened if

(08:44):
it hadn't been for a robbery at one of Hughes's
companies a while later, where the files for the project
were being stored. The story leaked and hit the press
soon after. Despite its partial failure, Howard Hughes had done
what nobody thought possible. He saved part of a Russian
submarine by treating it like a giant arcade claw machine game.
Who knows what would have happened if he had been

(09:06):
the one to find the Titanic. Maybe Kussler's novel wouldn't
have seemed so far fetched after all. I hope you've
enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe
for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the
show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was

(09:28):
created by me Aaron Manky in partnership with how Stuff Works.
I make another award winning show called Lore, which is
a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious.