January 28, 2021 • 10 mins
Humans are truly amazing creatures. And the things we can come up with, endure, and improve upon are sometimes mind-blowing. Like these two tales.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcomed Aaron Menkey'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. The story of man's ascent towards the heavens
has been told for ages. The ancient Greeks wrote of Icarus,
who flew on wings his father made out of wax.
Icarus had been warned not to fly too close to
the sun, but did so anyway, and fell into the
(00:50):
sea and drowned when his feathers melted. Master artist Leonardo
da Vinci sketched numerous flying machines of his own design,
perhaps hoping one day he might learn to soar like
the birds. And of course the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur,
who flew their revolutionary airplane at Kitty Hawk in h three.
History declares their efforts as the first recorded powered flight,
(01:11):
but one man in might consider them a little late
to the party. It happened on April seventeenth near Aurora,
a small town in northeastern Texas. The incident was first
reported by S. E. Hayden in the Dallas newspaper. The
article described what had befallen Judge Proctor's farm early that morning.
Something fell out of the sky and crashed into the
(01:32):
Judge's windmill, skittting along the dirt and past his house,
taking out his precious flower bed in the process. People
from all over Aurora came to gawk at the strange
craft that had plummeted to earth. What struck them as
even more interesting was the person who had been flying
at well, what remained of him. The body had been
badly burned upon impact, but even in such a horrible state,
(01:55):
it was clear that the pilot was not human. It
was something else. Proctor believed his farm had fallen victim
to an invading Martian. The vehicle had been heavy and
made of a silver metallic substance that hadn't been seen before.
Inside the cockpit, Proctor and the others discovered objects with
bizarre figures drawn on them, like a language from another
(02:15):
time or another world. All of this had occurred before
the start of things like the Cold War or World
War Two. Government agents didn't storm the town and abscond
with the wreckage or the body for the sake of
national security. Left with no other options, the people of
Aurora did the only thing they could think of, with
the help of a traveling preacher, they gave the pilot
(02:37):
a Christian burial. A makeshift tombstone was erected out of
a square, misshapen rock. And as for the wreckage, that
was hauled away and dumped into the well beneath Judge
Proctor's now destroyed windmill, and there it stayed for about
thirty five years until the farm was bought by a
new owner, a man named Brawley Oates. Oates decided the
well would make a good water source for both himself
(02:59):
and the rest of the farm, so he cleaned it
out and brought it back to its former glory. He
drank the water from the well for the next ten
years and used it around the property. In that time,
Oates developed some odd side effects, namely crippling arthritis, but
his hands didn't just ache or lose their strength. His
fingers became gnarled like the branches of an old tree.
(03:20):
He blamed his condition on the wreckage that had been
living in the well for the last several decades, blaming
it had contaminated the water supply. To avoid further use,
he had the well covered with the concrete slab. Then
he built a shed on top of that. It remained
dormant for years. Then, in the nineteen eighties, a story
about the town and its other worldly visitor made it
(03:42):
into Time magazine. Ed a pegu who had been a
child at the time of the incident made a shocking
admission se Hayden had made the whole story up. According
to this resident, the piece had been a pr stunt,
a way to bring in tourists since the railroad companies
had decided not to build tracks through their town. Subsequent
(04:02):
investigations by magazines, newspapers, and television shows uncovered other truths
regarding the tale. Judge Procer never had a windmill on
his farm, and the well wasn't built until ninety The
logical next place to get information would have been the cemetery,
but that proved a dead end as well. No pun intended,
(04:23):
I promise the pilot's grave had been robbed sometime in
the nineteen seventies, although the locals often walked by the headstone,
speculating about whether an alien had really been buried beneath
their feet. Clearly, someone decided to see for themselves and
dug up the grave and took whatever had been inside,
including three big pieces of metal that had been placed
(04:44):
with the body. Today the story remains a mystery. The
only artifacts left behind are the news articles of the time.
As for what really happened, well, it all comes to speculation,
and there the skies the limit. The human body is
(05:13):
capable of incredible feats. In two thousand, nineteen, nineteen year
old girl saved her father when the truck he was
working under slipped and pinned him to the ground. Gasolene
spilled and caught fire, threatening the man's life and his home.
His daughter, encountering the scene in her own garage, ran
to his side and lifted the truck off him, then
drove it down the street away from the house. Daniel
(05:36):
Kish lost his eyes to cancer by the time he
was thirteen months old, but today he navigates the world
in a way not often seen outside the animal kingdom.
With a click of his tongue, he can orient himself
in any direction using echo location. Like a bat, he
can determine how far away something is and what's in
front of him by measuring the time it takes for
the sound of his clicks to bounce back to his ears.
(06:00):
Many people throughout history have tested their limits too, but
few of them like Mirror and Dajo. Danjo was born
Arnold Henski's in the Netherlands, and he didn't start out
by dazzling spectators with miraculous feats. He was a normal guy,
one who worked in an office as a designer for
over ten years. But something happened in his early thirties.
(06:22):
Hensk Has discovered that he was special, more than special, invincible.
He quit his job and moved to Amsterdam, a big
city for a man with big dreams of stardom. However,
instead of singing or dancing on stage, Hensks displayed a
different kind of talent. He would swallow swords and other
sharp objects, not unlike a side show performer in a
(06:43):
traveling circus. Then Henskes took his act even further, calling
himself Mirror and Dajo, inspired by the Esperanto word meaning wonder,
and presented the audience with a series of long, sharp skewers.
He would then invite individuals to take them and plunged
them through his skin, one by one the daggers would
(07:04):
enter his back, travel through his abdomen, and come out
the other side with no visible effect. Spectators thought it
was an illusion. Of course, as he gained popularity and notoriety,
he was required to undergo examinations by a series of
doctors who checked both his physical and mental states. Dajo
believed he was being used by a god to show
(07:26):
the world a better path, a path that didn't revolve
around materialistic desires. His ability to withstand being punctured by
sharp objects was thanks to his devotion. The doctors performed
many tests on him. They took X rays of his
midsection while he had fencing foils pushed through him from
back to front. It was no trick. The foils clearly
(07:47):
penetrated the skin, muscle, and several organs on their way
to the other side, all without affecting the performer in
the slightest. Magicians who studied his methods assumed that he
had learned a way to mentor at least subdue the
pain he was feeling. Dajo even admitted he had traveled
to India. He had learned from mystics called fok ears,
who were experienced in the ways of testing the limits
(08:10):
of their flesh. However, none did what Dajo was able
to do. Doctors were stumped. One man had inexplicably survived
numerous piercings and stabbings for years, the kinds that would
have killed other men. Without a definitive explanation, some experts
believed Ajo had learned more from the fox ears than
he'd let on. It was known that one way performers
(08:32):
like him would endure repeated punctures was through the use
of scar tissue that would form around a post, similar
to how an ear piercing might heal. As long as
there was something inserted into the hole, it would remain open,
and so they believed it was possible that Dajo had
built numerous holes in his midsection with tiny objects left
inside to keep them open. When it came time to perform,
(08:53):
he'd remove them and fill the tunnels with a long
needle or dagger, and when he was done, put the
tiny plugs back in once again. Of course, this was
just speculation. No one knew how he did what he
did for sure, but one thing was certain. He didn't
perform such harrowing acts for long. In the spring of night,
when Dago was only thirty five, he swallowed a steel needle.
(09:15):
He wasn't performing, though he claimed a voice had told
him to do it. Two days later, a surgeon removed
the needle from his stomach. Danjo was told to take
it easy. Recovery would not happen overnights, but he wouldn't listen.
He went home and entered a meditative state for several days.
He was later found by his assistant dead from a
(09:35):
rupture caused by the needle he had swallowed. Mirror and
Dago believed that he could do the impossible, and for
a while he proved he could, But he wasn't as
invincible as he thought. Reality, it seems, was a little
too hard for him to swallow. I hope you've enjoyed
(09:55):
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 created
by me Aaron Mankey 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
(10:17):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Yeah,
Welcomed Aaron Menkey'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. The story of man's ascent towards the heavens
has been told for ages. The ancient Greeks wrote of Icarus,
who flew on wings his father made out of wax.
Icarus had been warned not to fly too close to
the sun, but did so anyway, and fell into the
(00:50):
sea and drowned when his feathers melted. Master artist Leonardo
da Vinci sketched numerous flying machines of his own design,
perhaps hoping one day he might learn to soar like
the birds. And of course the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur,
who flew their revolutionary airplane at Kitty Hawk in h three.
History declares their efforts as the first recorded powered flight,
(01:11):
but one man in might consider them a little late
to the party. It happened on April seventeenth near Aurora,
a small town in northeastern Texas. The incident was first
reported by S. E. Hayden in the Dallas newspaper. The
article described what had befallen Judge Proctor's farm early that morning.
Something fell out of the sky and crashed into the
(01:32):
Judge's windmill, skittting along the dirt and past his house,
taking out his precious flower bed in the process. People
from all over Aurora came to gawk at the strange
craft that had plummeted to earth. What struck them as
even more interesting was the person who had been flying
at well, what remained of him. The body had been
badly burned upon impact, but even in such a horrible state,
(01:55):
it was clear that the pilot was not human. It
was something else. Proctor believed his farm had fallen victim
to an invading Martian. The vehicle had been heavy and
made of a silver metallic substance that hadn't been seen before.
Inside the cockpit, Proctor and the others discovered objects with
bizarre figures drawn on them, like a language from another
(02:15):
time or another world. All of this had occurred before
the start of things like the Cold War or World
War Two. Government agents didn't storm the town and abscond
with the wreckage or the body for the sake of
national security. Left with no other options, the people of
Aurora did the only thing they could think of, with
the help of a traveling preacher, they gave the pilot
(02:37):
a Christian burial. A makeshift tombstone was erected out of
a square, misshapen rock. And as for the wreckage, that
was hauled away and dumped into the well beneath Judge
Proctor's now destroyed windmill, and there it stayed for about
thirty five years until the farm was bought by a
new owner, a man named Brawley Oates. Oates decided the
well would make a good water source for both himself
(02:59):
and the rest of the farm, so he cleaned it
out and brought it back to its former glory. He
drank the water from the well for the next ten
years and used it around the property. In that time,
Oates developed some odd side effects, namely crippling arthritis, but
his hands didn't just ache or lose their strength. His
fingers became gnarled like the branches of an old tree.
(03:20):
He blamed his condition on the wreckage that had been
living in the well for the last several decades, blaming
it had contaminated the water supply. To avoid further use,
he had the well covered with the concrete slab. Then
he built a shed on top of that. It remained
dormant for years. Then, in the nineteen eighties, a story
about the town and its other worldly visitor made it
(03:42):
into Time magazine. Ed a pegu who had been a
child at the time of the incident made a shocking
admission se Hayden had made the whole story up. According
to this resident, the piece had been a pr stunt,
a way to bring in tourists since the railroad companies
had decided not to build tracks through their town. Subsequent
(04:02):
investigations by magazines, newspapers, and television shows uncovered other truths
regarding the tale. Judge Procer never had a windmill on
his farm, and the well wasn't built until ninety The
logical next place to get information would have been the cemetery,
but that proved a dead end as well. No pun intended,
(04:23):
I promise the pilot's grave had been robbed sometime in
the nineteen seventies, although the locals often walked by the headstone,
speculating about whether an alien had really been buried beneath
their feet. Clearly, someone decided to see for themselves and
dug up the grave and took whatever had been inside,
including three big pieces of metal that had been placed
(04:44):
with the body. Today the story remains a mystery. The
only artifacts left behind are the news articles of the time.
As for what really happened, well, it all comes to speculation,
and there the skies the limit. The human body is
(05:13):
capable of incredible feats. In two thousand, nineteen, nineteen year
old girl saved her father when the truck he was
working under slipped and pinned him to the ground. Gasolene
spilled and caught fire, threatening the man's life and his home.
His daughter, encountering the scene in her own garage, ran
to his side and lifted the truck off him, then
drove it down the street away from the house. Daniel
(05:36):
Kish lost his eyes to cancer by the time he
was thirteen months old, but today he navigates the world
in a way not often seen outside the animal kingdom.
With a click of his tongue, he can orient himself
in any direction using echo location. Like a bat, he
can determine how far away something is and what's in
front of him by measuring the time it takes for
the sound of his clicks to bounce back to his ears.
(06:00):
Many people throughout history have tested their limits too, but
few of them like Mirror and Dajo. Danjo was born
Arnold Henski's in the Netherlands, and he didn't start out
by dazzling spectators with miraculous feats. He was a normal guy,
one who worked in an office as a designer for
over ten years. But something happened in his early thirties.
(06:22):
Hensk Has discovered that he was special, more than special, invincible.
He quit his job and moved to Amsterdam, a big
city for a man with big dreams of stardom. However,
instead of singing or dancing on stage, Hensks displayed a
different kind of talent. He would swallow swords and other
sharp objects, not unlike a side show performer in a
(06:43):
traveling circus. Then Henskes took his act even further, calling
himself Mirror and Dajo, inspired by the Esperanto word meaning wonder,
and presented the audience with a series of long, sharp skewers.
He would then invite individuals to take them and plunged
them through his skin, one by one the daggers would
(07:04):
enter his back, travel through his abdomen, and come out
the other side with no visible effect. Spectators thought it
was an illusion. Of course, as he gained popularity and notoriety,
he was required to undergo examinations by a series of
doctors who checked both his physical and mental states. Dajo
believed he was being used by a god to show
(07:26):
the world a better path, a path that didn't revolve
around materialistic desires. His ability to withstand being punctured by
sharp objects was thanks to his devotion. The doctors performed
many tests on him. They took X rays of his
midsection while he had fencing foils pushed through him from
back to front. It was no trick. The foils clearly
(07:47):
penetrated the skin, muscle, and several organs on their way
to the other side, all without affecting the performer in
the slightest. Magicians who studied his methods assumed that he
had learned a way to mentor at least subdue the
pain he was feeling. Dajo even admitted he had traveled
to India. He had learned from mystics called fok ears,
who were experienced in the ways of testing the limits
(08:10):
of their flesh. However, none did what Dajo was able
to do. Doctors were stumped. One man had inexplicably survived
numerous piercings and stabbings for years, the kinds that would
have killed other men. Without a definitive explanation, some experts
believed Ajo had learned more from the fox ears than
he'd let on. It was known that one way performers
(08:32):
like him would endure repeated punctures was through the use
of scar tissue that would form around a post, similar
to how an ear piercing might heal. As long as
there was something inserted into the hole, it would remain open,
and so they believed it was possible that Dajo had
built numerous holes in his midsection with tiny objects left
inside to keep them open. When it came time to perform,
(08:53):
he'd remove them and fill the tunnels with a long
needle or dagger, and when he was done, put the
tiny plugs back in once again. Of course, this was
just speculation. No one knew how he did what he
did for sure, but one thing was certain. He didn't
perform such harrowing acts for long. In the spring of night,
when Dago was only thirty five, he swallowed a steel needle.
(09:15):
He wasn't performing, though he claimed a voice had told
him to do it. Two days later, a surgeon removed
the needle from his stomach. Danjo was told to take
it easy. Recovery would not happen overnights, but he wouldn't listen.
He went home and entered a meditative state for several days.
He was later found by his assistant dead from a
(09:35):
rupture caused by the needle he had swallowed. Mirror and
Dago believed that he could do the impossible, and for
a while he proved he could, But he wasn't as
invincible as he thought. Reality, it seems, was a little
too hard for him to swallow. I hope you've enjoyed
(09:55):
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 created
by me Aaron Mankey 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
(10:17):
learn all about it over at the World of Lore
dot com. And until next time, stay curious, Yeah,
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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