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July 28, 2026 52 mins

Tales of ancient, advanced technologies have flourished in the last few decades. Is it possible that the stories of flying gods and machines contained in the Vedas — texts written in India over 3000 years ago — are based on real, now lost technological advancements? Join Ben, Matt and Noel to learn more in this week's Classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist, we are returning to you with a
classic episode. Who doesn't love hopping on a plane? Statistically
a lot of people, but humans have been in love
with the ideal flight for a long long time.

Speaker 2 (00:14):
I mean, it's pretty cool.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
We can just hop into like a giant tube that
takes off from the ground and floats through the sky
and then get out at another location. Short of some
of the inconveniences that go along with it, It's pretty miraculous.

Speaker 4 (00:26):
And simultaneously, guys, human beings have been reporting, writing down,
drawing pictures of weird vites in the sky, flying contraptions,
and then what have these things been? I always think
of Ondanakin when I when I say the word vias.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Vias that's right, yes, oh Vimana's described in the Vedas. Yes,
thank you about these are texts written in India over
three thousand years ago. They definitely made Eric Vondanikin's career
or a big part of it. And back in twenty
twenty one, we started asking ourselves was this just really

(01:05):
good fiction or the Should these just be taken as
spiritual tales or folklore or were they based on something else?

Speaker 2 (01:14):
Now, what a great setup. Let's just roll the table.

Speaker 5 (01:19):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 4 (01:43):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. Today's episode follows up on an
earlier Listener Male segment inspired by an episode of a
program known as Ancient Aliens. Ernest contacted us and asked

(02:11):
some interesting questions about mercury and ancient tombs, and then
took a turn to something that we have thought about
for years, which is, weirdly enough, a topic we've never covered,
the idea of ancient flying machines. Talk about a rabbit hole.
I know you guys have heard of, you know, like

(02:31):
Chariot of the Gods with Eric von danikin right.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
No, that it sounds amazing. I just love the expression
chariot of the Gods.

Speaker 4 (02:39):
I believe it's chariots of the gods of the goods.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (02:45):
Eric von Danakin is one of the advocates, or one
of the main voices in this sphere of hidden history
conspiracies that argues ancient civilization had technology that was even
more sophisticated than the technology we have today. This technology

(03:06):
was lost and may one day be rediscovered. So this
how does this all relate to mercury? We'll tell you
the main headline here first is that mercury was super
popular with ancient elites for a number of reasons. Here
are the facts.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yeah, so the use of mercury has been going on
for quite a long time, much longer ago than those
hatters that got their moniker of being mad from mercury poisoning. So, yeah,
mercury actually played a role in ancient civilizations across the
entire world.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
It's one of the first metals.

Speaker 3 (03:45):
That was known to humanity and that humanity figured out
a way to use. Archaeologists found mercury in an Egyptian
tomb that dated back to fifteen hundred BC, and the
Egyptians and the Chinese might have been using something called
cinnabar as a red pigment for centuries even before the
birth of Christ. So in many civilizations, mercury was almost

(04:06):
like considered a magical substance that was used to satisfy
or chase away the malevolent spirits.

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Yeah, and cinebar itself is a toxic mercury sulfide mineral
that was once commonly used as a pigment. So alchemists
of old thought that mercury had these a wide range
of mystical properties that through the use of mercury properly applied,

(04:36):
one could transform metals transmute based metals into more valuable
things like gold. They also thought it could have you know,
we talked about anti aging technology in a previous episode.
They also thought that mercury could be the key to
a much longer lifespan. There were legends of people living

(04:58):
hundreds and hundreds of years entirely due to their judicious
consumption of mercury. Greek civilization knew about mercury also used
it as a medicine. The use of mercury to treat
specifically syphilis, started around the fifteenth century continued into the

(05:18):
mid nineteen hundreds. Spoiler, folks, it's not the best syphilis
treatment out there.

Speaker 3 (05:25):
To put it mildly, now, it's sort of like cutting
off your ear, you know, to help you with some
other problem, like yeah, exactly, yeah, there you go, yeah exactly.

Speaker 4 (05:36):
I'd love to see a modern commercial for that time
in mercury as a medicine for syphilis, Like why would
the side effects be? What would they have to read
legally as the side effects?

Speaker 3 (05:51):
It would be madness, existential dread more so than usual,
and what like death instant death because of how much
you consume.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
So it would probably be something like the Who's warning,
which we'll just read an end of the commercial voice.
So I picture, you know, picture some nice music, Paul,
can you give us some like prosaic, big pharma ad
music perfect okay?

Speaker 2 (06:19):
And then the tag.

Speaker 4 (06:20):
Your life with mercury.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
Yes, the inhalation of mercury vapor can produce harmful effects
on the nervous, digestive, and immune system, lungs, in kidneys,
and maybe fatal. The inorganic salts of mercury are corrosive
to the skin, eyes, and gastrointestinal track, and may induce
kidney toxicity if ingested.

Speaker 2 (06:36):
Mercury. It's not just for thermometers.

Speaker 1 (06:41):
That's the that's the ad right, that's it is. I mean,
we're making light of it, but mercury is a poisonous substance.
That's why we grow up being told not to break
open the thermometers, no matter how cool they are. But
back in the day, like Noel just said, this was
used in multiple civilizations. Ancient Indian civilizations knew about mercury.

(07:05):
The tomb of China's first emperor Qin Shihuang is it's
this massive complex underneath this hill, this mound, and it's
pretty much the size of a city, right of all
these interconnected underground caves containing all the things you need
in the afterlife if you're an emperor. And for more

(07:27):
than two thousand years, this guy's been entombed in this
incredibly ornate complex, and archaeologists believe that his tomb was
originally surrounded by a moat of mercury. That's a lot
of mercury, right, Like, a moat is a weird measurement
to use. I don't think I've ever measured something in

(07:49):
moat units.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
Yeah, well, yeah, in this case, it's surrounding a tomb.
I guess how large your moat is depends precisely on
how large you're tomb is or your sarcophagus or you're
you know, whatever you're inside of, because it's not the
entire building that was surrounded by a moat the way
you would imagine a castle or something in a moat.

(08:13):
But it was certainly way more mercury than you'd expect.

Speaker 1 (08:18):
He was mercury rich. Chinese tradition at the time of
this emperor's life and his burial held that mercury could
bestow immortality or a very extreme form of longevity. So
there's an archaeologist named Kristin Romi who argues that this

(08:39):
belief and the curative powers of mercury could have actually
been the cause of the emperor's death because this guy
was also I think we mentioned this on the listener mail,
this guy was also taking mercury pills on a regular
basis in hopes of extending his lifespan, and those pills
are probably what killed him at the age of thirty nine.

(09:01):
So he died like in modern terms, who would think
of that as an early death. He probably would have
lived a little longer if he hadn't been you ingesting
mercury on a regular basis.

Speaker 4 (09:12):
Yeah, and as you were saying this reverence for mercury
or use of mercury was across the globe, and in Teotihuacan,
in Mexico, there was this other weird thing that was
found with liquid mercury. It's like half a world away
in Mexico from where we're talking about, this moat was located.

(09:33):
There's an archaeologist named Sergio Gomez who accidentally stumbled upon
this hidden tunnel. Essentially there at a temple. There was
a rainstorm or something and he just happened to shine
a light down into this sinkhole that opened up, and
they discovered something very strange. There was basically a recreation

(09:56):
of the what of the underworld that is described at
least by the peoples of the time, the people who
built Tao Tequo Con who built the Temple of the
Sun and there and some of the other structures. Part
of it was large quantities of liquid mercury. And it's

(10:17):
at least it's thought right now. We can't say for sure,
but it's thought that those pools of liquid mercury were
meant to represent essentially the parts of the underworld, the
waters of the underworld. And you can imagine in your
mind if you've ever seen liquid mercury. That kind of
the color, the way this liquid metal, the way it

(10:38):
looks fill, the way it fills you know, any volume
of container that it's in.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
It's just.

Speaker 4 (10:46):
It's otherworldly almost, And you can imagine how symbolically that
would be very powerful.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
And basins of mercury would sometimes be used in divination rituals,
right because of that mirror like surface into it. This
is strange because it gives it leads us to a
couple of interesting lines of thoughts. I'm choosing that phrase carefully.

(11:12):
So first we ask ourselves what role did mercury play
in these vastly different ancient cultures. The question is still
a bit of a mystery in the modern day. We
know that, like we said, Tibetan, China, those civilizations believe
that mercury had curative powers. It also had symbolic significance,

(11:34):
for sure in Meso American society. In numerous other societies,
it was both symbolic and perceived to be medicinal. So
why is it such a popular.

Speaker 2 (11:46):
Thing in these communities.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
It gives us a couple There are a couple of
There are a couple of possibilities. So one, it's just
one of the earliest metals known, so people were more
likely to know about it and to independently discover it
through the use of centabar stuff like that. Or Two,
A very out there one is what if these civilizations
had some sort of contact that we're not aware of

(12:10):
in the modern day. I think the way we phrased
it is, so the meso American structure is built after
the tomb of the quote unquote first Chinese emperor. So,
and there's a legend that this emperor sent ships east
to explore other possible aging cures. So what if some

(12:30):
of the folks that emperor sent east ended up in
meso America and they were like, hey, we want to
teach you our ways. Also, if you guys heard of mercury,
it's super cool. Look at this bowl. There's no proof
that that happened yet, but we know mercury remains a
crucial substance here in twenty twenty one. Like, people still

(12:52):
use mercury. You know, you might have mercury in your
house if you have I don't know, a thermometer. That's
what I mostly associated with.

Speaker 3 (13:00):
What about you guys, Yeah, same, I mean more like
in a thermostat, like it's still like an old school thermostat.
If you open it up, it's got a little tiny,
kind of level looking glass tube that's got a little
bit of mercury in it. I think people maybe use
digital thermometers more often than old school mercury ones for safety,
I guess with kids, but that certainly is still a
use for it in things, you know.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
In your home. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (13:22):
I mean there are a lot of reasons to use
mercury and other things for switching, like metal switching purposes,
you know, and traditionally it was used in things like
alarm clocks. There's there are a lot of uses for
mercury and measuring devices. I forgot about barometers. Yeah, that's

(13:42):
that's really important.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
Is that because it's it's sensitive to like it expands
and contracts, uh, you know, with temperature very well better
than others. And it also stays in a liquid form.

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Yeah, baby, Yeah, it's it's got that high density. Right,
So the height of the column and the barometer can
be a reasonable size. Your barometer doesn't have to be
a huge contraption. Like there's an interesting tidbit there. So
you could make a barometer using water. It would need

(14:15):
to be thirteen point six times taller than a mercury barometer.
So to your point, no, mercury is super convenient for this.
But back to that question, and there is a question
that other people have tried to answer. What caused ancient
civilizations to be so fascinated with this substance? And why

(14:39):
do some people believe that mercury may be more than
just an element, Why do they believe it may be
the key to some sort of lost technology of nie
unimaginable power. It's a big question, and it's one we'll
tackle after a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 2 (15:02):
Here's where it gets crazy.

Speaker 1 (15:05):
Our story about the alleged powers of mercury kind of
start kind of starts in ancient India.

Speaker 2 (15:12):
When you say.

Speaker 3 (15:13):
Absolutely, if we go back in ancient Indian lore, you
have something called the legend of Vimana. In Hindu and
Sanskrit texts or scriptures, Vimyana were flying palaces. It's one
of these things where it's like, is this a product
of the imagination, is this something that's based in lare

(15:34):
or did they actually know how to build these things.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Here's here's where it starts.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
The crafts actually have supposedly these magical abilities that almost defy,
you know, physics. In Hindu mythology, there was a demon
king named Ravana of Lanka, that's ancient Sri Lanka, who
brought something called the Pushpaka vimyana to India. The word
vimyana actually translate to traverse or to measure. Other uses

(16:04):
might imply an existence of a temple or a flying machine.

Speaker 1 (16:10):
Ding ding ding a flying machine. Yes, so this captures
the imagination, right, But there's there's something interesting. So we
said flying palace or a flying machine. It reminds me
of the popular image of angels in you know, Islamic, Judaic,

(16:33):
Christian mythology versus the actual description of angels in the Bible.
They're two very different looking creatures, right, like these wheels
spinning with all these eyes and multiple wings versus a
kindly person in a white robe with a humble halo.
The description of the flying palace or the vimyana here

(16:57):
is that it's shaped like a giant peacock. It's not
especially aerodynamic if you if you look at it, or
if you draw something according to the description. But long
story short, yes, ancient aircraft could Some civilization from thousands
of years in the past have cracked the code to flight,
you know, millennia before the Ripe Brothers, only for this

(17:20):
technology to have been forgotten in the modern day. I mean,
it's it's an awesome story. It's definitely true that it's
an awesome story. How does mercury figure into the mix.

Speaker 4 (17:32):
Though, Well, there is one Sanskrit text. It's called the
Vi Monika Shastra. And now remember we cannot, I cannot
pronounce these words correctly, so I apologize. V v A
I M A n I Ka Shastra s h A
s t r A. Now this text, at least on

(17:53):
the surface, appears to fully describe the construction of these
things called vimanas, as well as their propulsion systems, such
as a mercury vortex engine. So cool, right, so cool
mercury vortex engine. Yeah, let's do that, spin that mercury around.

(18:14):
Let's see what happens. And remember these texts, texts, not
this one in particular, but the vedas are written. It's
thought around fifteen hundred BC twelve hundred BC. That's when
the like rig veda is thought to have been created.
In some of these ancient texts that are describing some

(18:36):
of these things, this one that we're going to talk
about is a little different, but still this is a
much older text that has This is the one that
has illustrations, right Ben.

Speaker 1 (18:46):
That's correct. Yeah, And this is let's set it up
this way. So when we were talking about this earlier
in the listener mail segment, this is the text that
was referring to when I said these things are described
as fact rather than as as myth. So it's important
we'll see why this text in particular bears some scrutiny.

Speaker 4 (19:10):
Okay, so we we have to look to that show,
the old the show that holds a special place in
my heart, and hopefully it does yours to ancient aliens,
I think.

Speaker 3 (19:25):
So I gotta say that who's the host? I love
his hair and I love his spray tan.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
Georgio, Georgia. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (19:35):
There are a lot of people who kind of rotate
through as the subject matter experts on that show. One
of them is Vontanakin. One of them is Suclos. But
in that show, not yet, but in one of these episodes,
we we've got a quote from it that is describing
this text. And here it is one of the texts

(19:58):
talks about Mercury wrote and driving some sort of powerful
wind or a windmill machine. That might be some sort
of what we call a flywheel energy storage, where you
have a spinning disk and you extract energy from it slowly.
That would be the mercury that could be used to
drive some sort of propeller or what we call a

(20:22):
conducted fan.

Speaker 1 (20:23):
Okay, okay, let's pause, let's pause.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
Okay, that's true.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
That was said on that show. That is true. So
we know that we know that flywheels are a real thing.

Speaker 2 (20:37):
We know that.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
We know that it's true that mercury at very low temperatures,
think like four degrees kelvin, which is negative four hundred
and fifty two something fahrenheit, or for people in the
rest of the world, negative two hundred and sixty nine
degrees celsius. When you get to that very low temperature,
mercury can function as is superconductor. And as for the

(21:02):
rest of the stuff described there, What a cool story.
It is true that that is such a cool story.
You'll see versions of this story going even further afield
into like Indiana Jones Hellboy territory. There's this argument that
in World War two, Nazi German forces took an expedition

(21:23):
into Tibet and into India to retrieve this ancient technology,
which they understood to be something called real VRL, and
they would later use their discoveries to power their own
fantastical flying machines. So shout out to the Nazi Bell.
Here's another thing that's true. There really was a German

(21:43):
expedition to Tibet and India in nineteen thirty eight to
nineteen thirty nine, and it was weird.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
It was a weird expedition.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
The Germans were into all kinds of spooky stuff, weren't they.
I mean really, they put a lot of stock in
the supernatural.

Speaker 4 (21:58):
Yeah, we've talked about this before in a previous episode
that you could go listen to now. I can't remember
what it was called the Nazi Magic Made. No, we
didn't know.

Speaker 3 (22:07):
That's We've got that coming up as a classic. We
did an intro for that the other day.

Speaker 4 (22:11):
Oh yeah we did.

Speaker 2 (22:12):
No.

Speaker 4 (22:13):
I can't remember if the Magic one. There's so much
Nazi content, you guys, I can't remember if.

Speaker 3 (22:18):
Got that premium Nazi content.

Speaker 4 (22:20):
It's either the Diglock Bell episode or the Magic one.
There's one of those where we.

Speaker 6 (22:25):
Go in into could be that so so we do
know that this was an expedition in nineteen thirty eight,
nineteen thirty nine and then, and that there were some strange,
seemingly strange reasons for going.

Speaker 4 (22:41):
And we know this to be true. Let's just let's
let's say what it was. The Germans at that time
wanted to figure out whether or not Tibet could be
used as a staging ground for attacks on British India. So, right,
so could we actually go from Tibet to attack.

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Our enemies gorilla style?

Speaker 4 (23:01):
Yeah, so that makes sense, that's military strategy. They also
wanted to prove this other guy's idea, Heinrich Himmler. They
wanted to prove his idea that there was some group
of pure blooded Arians at least that's his that's his
concept there had settled into Bet and according to what

(23:23):
we know, there was a This expedition was thought to
be a success.

Speaker 2 (23:28):
Right.

Speaker 4 (23:29):
They came back with all kinds of samples from from
the area inti Bet, of the floor and the fauna
of that locality. But the big question is did they
come back with some kind of I don't know, mercury
engine and flywheel system that would change the trajectory of
the German military machine.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
That sounds cool.

Speaker 4 (23:48):
Maybe maybe that's what the bell was. Good luck proving it,
but we tried, we tried, We did try.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, yeah, did they discover some thing that could have
changed the course of the war, with the only problem
being the timing, you know what I mean, like where
they just too late with the secret knowledge they had
gleaned from some hyperborean society of old. Again, a wonderful story.

(24:18):
We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
And we'll be back. And we've returned.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
I promise this is the last time I will say
what a cool story this whole thing is, because I
do think it's a cool story and I love it.
The problem is it is maybe not a true story.
Let's go let's go back to that Indian literature, right,
Matt Nol. The vadas you guys mentioned.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Those are very real, Right, those are real, correct, the
Hindu Vadas. It's it's you know, I mean, there's a
sacred text.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
But it's a.

Speaker 3 (25:00):
Lot more fun than the Bible. I'm not gonna lie
because it's like almost more like reading Greek mythology, where
you have all these gods who have these incredible powers
and they're fighting for supremacy, you know, in this mystical
world with all kinds of vehicles. It's like I can
imagine there being action figure playsets made out of some
of these incredible gods epic battles that supposedly took place

(25:24):
in ancient times. These sagas are widely thought to be
mythological stories or allegories to be taken, you know, as
ways to model, you know, learn lessons, almost like Esop's
fable type situations which we'd used to teach children life lessons.
But in the Ancient Aliens program, they pause it that

(25:45):
these might there might have been some truth to this stuff,
that maybe there were these ancient forgotten flight machines and
these gods kind of battling it out in the skies.

Speaker 1 (25:56):
Right, yeah, yeah, And there appears to be a misstep
in that presentation or the way it's framed. The argument
about forgotten flight machines sites ancient Indian literature and primarily
mentions a text called the Viemannika Shastra. Right, and again

(26:19):
to Matt's earlier point, we are not native speakers of
this language. What is this shastra? So it begins by
covering the definition of an airplane of flying craft. It
talks about pilots of these crafts, it talks about aerial
roots these craft would take, and more. It's markedly different

(26:41):
from the Vedas in that it is not It is
written as though it is factual, and as though it
is almost an engineering guide or depiction of real life
events and artifacts.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
It's claimed to.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
Be a small fragment of a much larger work called
the Yantra Sarvaswa, which translates roughly to all about machines.
It's one fortieth of this much bigger thing, right, so
we're only we're only seeing.

Speaker 2 (27:12):
Part of the work. Here's here's the thing.

Speaker 1 (27:15):
This Vimanika Shastra is real. It is real, It is
in Sanskrit, and it does claim that the vi mignanas
mentioned in other texts are advanced flying machines. But the
Vimanika Shastra itself is not ancient by any means.

Speaker 4 (27:35):
No, no, And this is where we kind of burst bubbles.
And I'm sorry for that, but it's just what we
kind of have to do. So for this text, we
have to jump way way back to nineteen fifty two
AD or CD. Yeah, correct, that's nineteen fifty two, like
right after my parents were born. That's when this text

(27:58):
was first revealed by person named G. R. Josier. Gr
Josier that is the name there. And it was claimed
to have been written by someone named Pendit Subaraya Shastri,
who probably, at least according to the story, dictated it
between nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty three. Now, Shastri claimed

(28:22):
that he was receiving this information from a spirit guide.
So what you're actually finding in that text, according to
the person that wrote it, it's dream like visions that
are being translated. Now, a very skeptical person can immediately
look at that and go, oh, come on, well, then, okay,

(28:43):
this is all made up. This is just somebody's imagination,
somebody's creativity at work. But when you think about almost
any ancient text, there is a good amount of visioning
that's occurring, of divine inspiration, at least if you believe
the story of the actual text and how it was created.

(29:04):
So it's you know, you can't completely discount it, right.
But at the same time, we know this text's origin
and we know that it was again inspired in some
way through someone's imagination.

Speaker 1 (29:21):
Right, yeah, it was inspired perhaps divinely inspired.

Speaker 2 (29:26):
Yeah, to their mind.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
Spiritually inspired, and maybe in that perspective it was based
on earlier, pre existing wisdom, sort of like when Adam
Weishoppt formed the Bavarian Illuminati and said, really, what I'm
doing is continuing an ancient tradition.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
I'm not making a new thing.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
So Shastri most likely does not believe that he's.

Speaker 2 (29:54):
Making a new thing out of whole cloth.

Speaker 1 (29:58):
Here's the other thing he is. Josier, you know, describes
Shastri as a guy's gifted with sensory.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
Abilities beyond that of mere mortals.

Speaker 5 (30:15):
He was.

Speaker 1 (30:17):
It's tough to talk about this without trying to phrase
it in our modern experiences, but if you have lived
in a city for any length of time, you may
at one point have seen people who seem to be
a little bit unbalanced or mentally unwell, who are perhaps

(30:38):
appearing to hear things that other people don't hear, or
loudly addressing someone or something that other people can't see.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
Right.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
Yeah, Well, there used to be a time that those
folks were considered like seers or prophets, and now they're
largely treated as you know, folks with mental illness, which
you know, obviously is is a real thing.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yeah, so this person in the early nineteen hundreds was
known to you know, spontaneously address people or spontaneously share
verbally these inspirations or these messages they received. At the time,
that was seen as a legitimate source of information. But

(31:22):
it leads us to a modern controversy, doesn't it, Because
those what this means is no matter how you slice it,
those various claims about ancient flying machines in Indian literature,
whether they're craft mentioned in actual text from antiquity, or
whether they're more modern hoaxes, all of this leads to
an enormous controversy. In twenty fifteen, during the one hundred

(31:46):
and second Indian Science Congress in Mumbai. The Indian Science
Congress is like another another scientific conference, right, you've heard
of these before. Academics, researchers, scientists. They get together and
they present papers, right, and they have q and a's,
and they discuss and review one another's ideas. And the

(32:07):
goal of this is to spread the awareness of the
latest science with the hope that maybe two different fields
of research will be able to lend some sort of
insight to one another.

Speaker 2 (32:20):
It's a beautiful idea.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
Things didn't go the way the congress planners wanted them
to go in twenty fifteen because somebody brought up this
brought up this shastra and argued that ancient ancient aircraft
using exotic power sources like a mercury moor were real.

Speaker 3 (32:43):
Yeah, And the organizers of this conference allowed a non
Jay Bodas and his co presenter, a person by the
name of Amaya Jadhav, to submit and present a paper
that claimed that aircraft more advanced than the world has
ever known existed in ancient India, and in various interviews,

(33:06):
these researchers claimed that the craft were massive and could
fly to other planets, apparently also again kind of defying
what we know about physics of aircraft, fly backwards, left, right, up, down, out,
maneuvering modern airplanes. I mean, these are things that we
have yet to achieve. So in December of twenty fourteen,

(33:28):
ram Prasad grand Hiraman, who was a scientist at NASA's
Aims Research Center, created a petition that would prevent the
paper from being presented at this conference. So by December
thirty first, two hundred and twenty scientists and academics had
signed this petition. Grand Chereman criticized the paper as being

(33:51):
pseudoscience and said the mythology should not be mixed with science.

Speaker 1 (33:56):
Yeah, because again this is this is a congress that
is meant to advance scientific understanding, and part of the
review process is to evaluate the merits of these claims.
Other experts dunked on the proposals in this paper and
this Shastra text left and right. One of my favorites

(34:18):
is an author named JB. Hare who was working for
the Sacred Text Archive. He had some especially snarky stuff
to say about the aerodynamics of the craft described in
the Vermonica Shastra. He said, quote, they are absurdly non aerodynamic,

(34:38):
brutalist wedding cakes with minarets, huge ornithopter wings and dinky propellers,
which is like hot fire level, hot fire level insult
in academia.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
You know.

Speaker 4 (34:54):
Well again, like it depends on the propulsion system, guys, issue,
they've got some kind of special mercury unknown technology propulsion system.
If it's true, Like there's stuff in there that may
be some kind of electromagnetic field that functions outside of

(35:19):
our understanding of modern physics, like it wouldn't matter how
it was shaped, if it could slip through matter in
a different kind of way because it's not being affected
by gravity or whatever. But which is again way out
there in conceptual and not currently possible or even conceivable.

(35:39):
But it wouldn't matter if it looked like a brutalist
wedding cake with spiky things on the side. You know,
you could just be a bubble essentially.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah, that's a fair point because also we would add
to this, it depends on the medium in which this
kind of craft would be uh would be moving, right,
So if it's in space, it's functioning in a very
different environment. So maybe maybe there's something to that along
with the propulsion mechanism. I mean, those are those are

(36:12):
fair points.

Speaker 4 (36:14):
Because some of them look like like return capsules essentially.
For sure, some of NASA's technology that was being developed
in the fifties and sixties, it looks very similar to that,
just kind of turned upwards, so the point is up
rather than you know, if it was well, no, because
it was returning. If they're returning, the pointy side is

(36:35):
still pointed up anyway.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
So when we put the pieces together with all this
in mind, it looks currently as if the story of
ancient mercury powered flying machines is either an honest mistake
in the reading of text or a dishonest, purposeful attempt
to shoehorn ancient mythology into a modern cultural framework. So like,

(37:01):
there are these questions, right, these important questions. If, for example,
there were real ancient flying machines, then where were they?
Where are they? How come no other culture has written
about them?

Speaker 6 (37:16):
You know?

Speaker 3 (37:16):
This makes me think of as in a science purely
sci fi context, what was the Alien prequel Prometheus, Yes,
it kind of It kind of makes me think of
that kind of like it's it's ancient technology created by
these like giants that were essentially.

Speaker 2 (37:33):
Gods, you know what I mean.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
I mean, I know there was problems with that movie,
but I like the base level lore of it and
the way those creatures looked and the way their tech worked,
And what was that Like the pilot guy that was like,
you know, designed by hr Geeker that you saw in
the original Alien movie that kind of made an appearance
in Prometheus. This very much makes me think of that
kind of I wonder if that was inspired by this stuff.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
I mean I'm almost certain that it was in some way, right,
because in that movie and Prometheus, it's it's planet seeding, right,
It's it's like the seeds of life are planted by
these by this pilot and by you know, maybe the
species are correct.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
Or were they They were called something the gray weird
blue gray guys.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
It's been a.

Speaker 1 (38:16):
While, yeah, they were called the uh engineers the humans.

Speaker 4 (38:22):
Well, yeah, and you can imagine and you know, in God,
I guess when when the actual battles were occurring in
some of these things. You can imagine that seeing technology
that is so far beyond your understanding would just it
would be a mind blowing thing. Reminds me of I

(38:43):
think the filth, Yeah, the filth by Grant Morrison, when
when people encounter technology that is so strange and outside
of their realm of understanding, they just the the human
mind just chooses to not remember it, or it's as
though it didn't exist, or you can't see it because
because it's just so far beyond your your capabilities of observation,

(39:04):
Like you can imagine that stuff, right. That's why Ancient
Aliens is such a successful show, I think, because part
of it makes sense.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
Yeah, yeah, I can, I can. I can go with
you there, because if we imagine, if we imagine those
events from the perspective of people who lived during that
time period, then you can easily imagine how weird some
stuff may have looked. Like if you're from a culture

(39:37):
that's never seen an elephant, for instance, and then you
get into a scrap and the other side comes rolling
up on you riding elephants, You're gonna freak out. That's like,
that's insane, you know, and that's inspired so many like
sword and Sorcery fantasy fight scenes. Is the idea of

(40:00):
somebody encountering something like an elephant for the first time.

Speaker 4 (40:04):
So or imagine just an explosion from a simple explosive
device for the first time when you're in a battle, right,
I mean, just what that would do to your mind?

Speaker 1 (40:15):
People on horses, that's crazy too, you know. Back in
the days, that was very surprising in an unpleasant way
for many people. And sadly that surprise probably didn't last
long because neither did they.

Speaker 4 (40:29):
Guys, we didn't even talk about the nuclear nuclear bomb,
nuclear war. Serious.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
I know, saving it.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
I think it's its own thing. Because to talk about that,
we also have to talk about ancient traces of radiation,
like the first nuclear reactor, which is real and.

Speaker 2 (40:52):
Not man made.

Speaker 1 (40:53):
There's a nuclear reactor that's super ancient. But I think, yeah,
ancient nuclear war is an episode for another day. I
know it sounds like we have clearly dismissed the ideas
of ancient flying machines, but there are some important considerations here,
some important caveats. First, what we what we've really done,

(41:14):
is made a pretty good case that the text people
are basing a lot of these claims on is not
near as old as it is sometimes assumed to be.
But second, we have to remember humanity is very, very
very good at losing things, so good at losing stuff.

(41:35):
We have lost technology before, and it's usually rediscovered at
some point.

Speaker 4 (41:40):
Right.

Speaker 1 (41:41):
There are examples like Greek fire, Damascus steel, And then
there are things that looked really advanced for their time period,
like the anti Cathera mechanism. You guys remember that one,
of course?

Speaker 2 (41:52):
Yeah? Sure, So like where does.

Speaker 4 (41:55):
That turn out?

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Well?

Speaker 4 (41:56):
Yeah, yeah, there's some really cool newer concepts about the
origins of that that we could definitely, Yeah, we should
definitely bring that back up. So I know where we
need to get out of here. I want to bring
up one other thing when it comes to vimanas for
this episode. Weirdly enough, several of us independently found an

(42:21):
article out of Medium that I've been I think we
have to bring.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
Up Okay, all right, yeah, so so Medium if anybody
doesn't know what we're talking about.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Medium dot com is.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
A website, a platform where people can write and post
their own material.

Speaker 2 (42:39):
Right, So I did put this in the notes, and
I think we all we all found it.

Speaker 1 (42:44):
We were looking for the most out there story, right Gosh, Matt,
you brought it up all the honors with the headline.

Speaker 4 (42:53):
We'll start it with the headline.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
Let's start with the headline.

Speaker 4 (42:56):
A five thousand year old ancient Indian viamana found in
Afghanistan cave. Eight American soldiers stuck in time well.

Speaker 2 (43:06):
Time well is all.

Speaker 4 (43:07):
Caps disappeared in attempt to remove it. So the soldiers
disappeared in a time well when they were trying to
remove the vimana. Now, this is written by Sathish Ramyan,
and if you can read it, I would just recommend
you go to Medium and read the story. There's nothing

(43:28):
really sighted in it when it comes to what is
happening or the facts, But it has some incredible things said. Ultimately,
it has to do with exactly what the title says,
just kind of expanded a little bit, and it includes
Barack Obama and I think Nicholas Sarkozy and Angola Merkle
all going to Afghanistan in twenty twelve for a weird thing,

(43:53):
which would be which in this case, the weird thing
is that there's a Vimana stuck in a time well
with a bunch of other American soldiers.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
What's a time well? Is that like a wormhole or
a portal?

Speaker 4 (44:03):
It explains the time well. It appears to be an
electromagnetic radiation gravity field, first postulated by Albert Einstein as
the unified field theory and long rumored to be behind
the infamous American World War Two experiment in teleportation called
the Philadelphia Experiment. Heard of it, Heard of it? So yeah,

(44:24):
I mean, cool stuff, cool story again, but there's just
no I where's it coming from? Who's who was actually
stating some of this stuff there? There are references cited
at the bottom down here, but there's nothing to actually
in any way to prove that this even kind of happened.

Speaker 2 (44:46):
Well, it could have been covered up.

Speaker 4 (44:49):
It could have been But dude, stheash, how did you
find out about it? That's what I want to know.

Speaker 1 (44:56):
So I guess though, I am so into stories like this,
and it would be amazing if these were true. It
would be amazing if this kind of technology was discovered
and if people could prove that it existed.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
But at this point we have two big takeaways.

Speaker 1 (45:17):
First, we know again that document that is cited so
often as ancient research is not in fact ancient.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
It's not saying it's untrue.

Speaker 1 (45:27):
It's just saying we know the provenance of it, and
it likely occurred in the early nineteen hundreds and was
later revealed in the nineteen fifties to the public. The
second thing we know, however, is that technology does get lost.
The thing is a lot of it ends up being
rediscovered or just as often reinvented by someone else later

(45:49):
on down the line. So this possibility, that very real
possibility of lost technology. I would argue that is the
core of what makes the ancient flying machines lore so
compelling and so fascinating. While mercury powered ancient flying machines

(46:10):
probably never existed, based on what we know at this point,
it's enormously difficult to say that we somehow know all
the technology, techniques and research of ancient peoples and civilizations.
Like there are stone works that are still around today
and Peru and other parts of the world where people

(46:31):
we have theories about how they were able to build
these seamlessly constructed stone walls with no mortar or anything
like that that lasted centuries and centuries and centuries. Well,
we're not sure because people back then we're just as
intelligent as people now, and they figured stuff out just

(46:52):
like us. So I'm going to say, I don't know
about you, guys. I am super open to getting some
hard proof about an ancient flying machine.

Speaker 2 (47:01):
That would be so cool.

Speaker 4 (47:03):
Please please send send us anything if you've got it.
If you actually have something, we want to read it.

Speaker 1 (47:12):
And with this our episode draws to a close. We
passed the We passed the Mercury Vortex torch to you, folks.
What do you think Is there any real lost technology
out there left waiting to be rediscovered? And if so,
what do you think it is?

Speaker 2 (47:33):
Where? Where could it be found? Right?

Speaker 1 (47:36):
Is it?

Speaker 2 (47:36):
Maybe? I don't know.

Speaker 1 (47:38):
This goes so many directions, you know, like is there
is there a city or community that was buried beneath
the waves that is home to like a ton of
anti Cathera mechanisms or something like that.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
It's again cool stories, dude.

Speaker 4 (47:55):
Have you guys heard have you guys heard of the
I think it's every twenty six second the earth like
blips essentially sends out a small seismic had those tiny
seismic event every twenty six seconds. And it's been happening
for decades and decades and decades or is discovered at
least several decades ago, and it continues and it's it's

(48:19):
allegedly at least according to some research that's occurred in
the two thousands, maybe the twenty tens, where it's off
the coast of it's like the kind of the mid
west coast of the continent of Africa. Allegedly it's coming from.

Speaker 2 (48:39):
There, Guinea specifically, right, so I think it's off.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
The coast of Guinea. Yeah, kay, I can't recall right
now the place, but allegedly the Earth is just like
doing this pulse and seismologists geologists are unsure what it is.
The best theories that its waves crashing against this one
particular place. But I don't think as waves, y'all.

Speaker 1 (49:03):
Every twenty six seconds, some ancient civilization left a very
weird snooze button.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
They're just not They're just not hitting the button.

Speaker 1 (49:14):
Yeah, it's fascinating because that's one of those things, you know,
I think when you read read about this. It's also
been called a micro sizsm right, like a very small
seismic event that is probably undetectable by humans without technology.

Speaker 2 (49:31):
But whenever you read about this thing, the.

Speaker 1 (49:34):
Main I would say, the weirdest part is that no
one is sure exactly why it's happening, right, We don't know, right, yeah, exactly,
So let us know what you think. Why is the
earth pulsing every twenty six seconds? Are there ancient pieces
of technology? If not flying machines? Are there ancient pieces
of lost technology that might be rediscovered? We want to

(49:57):
hear from you. We try to make ourselves easy to
find online.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (50:01):
You can find this in the usual social media locations
of note where we are conspiracy stuff or conspiracy stuff
show on Instagram. You can also join our Facebook group
Here's where it gets crazy to get in on the
real time conversations with your fellow conspiracy realists. Yes, we
also have a phone number you can reach us one

(50:22):
eight three three STDWYTK. If you call the number, you
will get a voicemail and you can leave a message.
Here's what we recommend. Tell us the name you want
us to call you, doesn't matter, if it's your real name,
something you'll recognize when we say it on air. Let
us know if you're okay with us using your voice
on the air, then go ahead and tell us your

(50:43):
story anything, whatever it is, whether it's just an experience
you've had, whether it's an idea for an episode, anything.
Just give it right up at the top there, and
then anything you want to say, just directly to Noel
and Ben and I put it at the end if
you can, and try to keep it under three minutes,
and also trying to keep it to one message. That'll
increase your chances of actually getting on the air. Matt,

(51:05):
and if I did my first callback the other day,
oh nice, A lovely gentleman, a music teacher who had
some real cool ideas about coded messages being sent to
the Nazis by contemporary composers. Turns out didn't have as
much sand to it as we would have liked, but
we had a nice conversation and he sent me some

(51:27):
cool follow up articles. So really, yeah, you will potentially
maybe not even get a callback from me or Ben
who knows.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
That's absolutely true. We always love to hear from you,
And as Matt said, if there is a story that
you need to tell that is longer than three minutes,
please please please don't feel like you have to edit yourself.
Squeezing a ten minute story into three minutes worth of
time is, you know, sometimes a dubious endeavor. So if

(51:55):
you have something else to tell us, you don't like
social media and phone numbers don't quite launch your vim
Yanna is one other way you can always contact us.
That's our good old fashioned email address where we are
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 4 (52:27):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
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