December 30, 2025 • 66 mins
Since before the dawn of recorded history, humans have been haunted by rumors of monsters beneath the waves -- and, as time wore on, it seemed at least some of those legends were based in truth. Today's question: could any sea serpents, leviathans or other cryptids remain alive in the modern day? Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Oh, friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist, oh hooy sailors.
We have investigated at length the idea of a continuing
fascination cryptids.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And I think we were all.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We were all just unanimously astounded by the idea that
there could have been large creatures out there beneath the
waves in recent periods of history, recent enough that human
beings may have run into them. Guys, I spent a
(00:37):
lot of time looking out over the ocean in one
of our previous maritime adventures. I saw some usual stuff,
but I didn't see a sea serpent.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Did you never seen one? Hope to never do, because
that is one of my all time night terrors. I
think I've mentioned being present in a giant body of
water with a sea serpent lurking just beneath the waves.
Even if it's not one that's gonna eat me, Just
the large underwater dwelling creatures freak me out, Dude.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I often stand astride the ships and look out and
imagine Jason Statham when that megalodon attacked to I don't
know mega seen the movie the movie whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
The first meg is a lot of fun. I think
the second one diminishing returns. But uh, I watched the
first one's good plane movie.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Do check it.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Well.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
The point is there were like sea serpents and all
kinds of craziness out there in the ocean. Giant sharks
like that. They there have been those, but could there
be one or some or a bunch of them remaining?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yes, yeah, far beyond our imaginings, Dear Horatio.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Before we get into.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
This classic episode, we also, of course want to shout
out folks like the Swedish musician Matthias Krantz, who this
is true story, guys taught an octopus to play piano. Ah,
we can't wait, Oh my gosh, Please tell us weird
stuff you've seen in the oceans. This is our classic episode.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
They call me Ben. We are 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. Longtime listeners or recent
listeners welcome. You'll notice that we are continuing a bit
of a maritime trend today. We didn't plan this, It
(03:03):
just happened. We're tackling one of the oldest oceanic questions
in human existence. For thousands and thousands of years, human
beings have both feared and worshiped the ocean, as well as,
of course, the things believed to live within it. So
fast forward to the current day. Good for us human species.
(03:27):
We have learned a great deal about the ocean over
the past several millennia, and we still rely on it
for food. Nowadays we can pretty often travel across it safely,
but we have by no means conquered the ocean. In fact,
we know more about the Moon right now than we
do about Earth's oceans. The briny deep, in short, is
(03:50):
still flooded with mysteries. That was not an intentional pun.
But here's the point. Today's question, is it possible that
see serpents, the legendary sea monsters of old, still exist today.
To answer this question, we have to learn what little
we do know about the ocean already. So here are the.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Facts and Just to be clear, when we're talking about
the ocean and oceans, we really mean the oceans, the seas.
The place is where there's briny water, right where it's
very deep. That's what we're referring to today. So anywhere
in the world, not just in one particular place.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Right, Yeah, So not just the Pacific, not just maybe
the Indian Ocean, but the whole shebang, you know what
I mean, like literally all of the water, or as
we'll come to find out, ninety seven percent of all
the water. So we've often heard people say things like,
you know, we know less about the ocean than we
do about outer space. That's a little misleading, but we
(04:53):
definitely do know more about Earth's moon than we do
about Earth's oceans. I mean, when you think about it,
the numbers get weird if you believe the official stories.
That's for a different episode. We've sent twelve people to
the moon since about nineteen sixty nine, yet in comparison,
we've only sent three people to the deepest part of
(05:16):
the ocean, one of them being James Cameron, who makes
an appearance in here. As a matter of fact, the
old Hollywood legend is that James Cameron mainly wanted to
do Titanic as a way of getting support for his
trip to the Marianas.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Trench, which is very cool.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, he had a cute little like pod thing that
he went down in, right, like a kind of a
future you look in under the c mini sub with
like grabberclaw arms or maybe i'm hyperbolyzing here.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
No, no, no, that's a pretty good description. I mean,
that's that's the only way to get down there. And
those people who have gone to the deepest part of
the ocean, again, we're only counting the people who came back.
You know, it's completely plausible that a lot of people
died and their bodies eventually drifted to some very deep
part of the seafloor.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, and the ones that did come back, we're all
completely mad.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
There we go nice setup that. Yeah, yeah, we know
that there. Despite the fact that there have only been
a very very small amount of people who went to
what we call the deepest part of the ocean, we
know that there is a lot, a lot down there.
The ocean takes up about seventy one percent of Earth's surface,
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research we
(06:35):
lean on a lot. In this episode, they note that
about ninety five percent of that oceanic surface the seafloor.
They call it unexplored, And it depends on what you
mean by explored, but I think it's a fair way
to look at it, especially when we learn more about
the stats and geography.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Of the ocean.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Quick question, guys, do you think they worked awkwards from
that acronym to like what words we're going to be
in it? You know, because Noah and Noah's Ark and
all that, and they're like, Okay, we got to make
this Noah thing work. It's such a good image.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I thought about that, but I didn't. I didn't nail
down the story because it would be my speculation. It
just it feels like if they're trying to purposefully spell Noah,
then they would have done a better job. There's so
many things that begin with H.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Well, some mysteries are just better left unsolved. So it's
true what we loosely describe as the ocean in swishy
quotation fingers has a volume of around one point three
three two a billion cubic kilometers. I say that doubly
because the word is spelled out several times in the
(07:48):
research materials I'm looking at just to drive home. That's
a lot of cubic kilometers, my friends, And that works
out to be about three hundred and fifty two quintillion
gallons of water. That's just like a completely unfathomable number
right there in my mind at least. And that's ninety
seven percent of the water on the entire planet. Another
(08:08):
two percent is locked up in glaciers and ice caps,
and a tiny part is in water vapor floating through
the atmosphere, and an even tinier part is inside of us. All. Oh, man,
it was there all along, it was there all along,
you guys.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
It's the majority of the human body actually, about up
to sixty percent of you specifically you, if you're human
and listening to this, about sixty percent of your body
is water.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
We are water beings on a water planet, gentlemen. And uh.
And when we're talking about, you know, the actual volume
of the oceans, we're talking about ninety five percent of
the ocean floor quote unquote unexplored, right, because we're talking
about actually going and exploring there the way you would
(08:54):
the moon or another place. It's crazy to imagine that
that's the floor part. And then there's all that volume
of water with all that depth, and think about attempting
to explore somehow the surface area at every depth that
(09:14):
you possibly can, and it just feels like it would
be impossible for humans to do. Because the average depth
of the ocean is three thousand, seven hundred and ninety
five meters or a little over twelve four hundred and
fifty feet. And just like the Earth's surface, life is
not distributed evenly across the ocean, right. You don't just
(09:38):
have whales every x meters or something, or fish every
x centimeters whatever it would be. They could be anywhere
within that depth.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Just for comparison there, when we're talking about the average
depth of the world's oceans, consider let's see, Matt, the
number you gave us is average depth of three thousand,
seven hundred and ninety five meters or a little north
of twelve thousand, four and fifty feet. The current tallest
tallest building tall skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa,
(10:14):
is two thousand, seven hundred and sixteen and a half feet,
so tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison to not the deepest
part of the ocean.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
But just the global average.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
This is a big place. We have quote unquote mapped
the ocean floor. Good job for our species, but we
did it at a really really low resolution. I'm not
going to say we cut some corners, because again it's
a very big place. But if you look at the
overall mapping of the ocean floor and you take all
(10:50):
of the scientific progress that every single civilization is made
up to, now, the most of that ocean floor mapping
has a solution of five kilometers or three miles. That
means that if something is so ridiculous, But that means
that if something is smaller than three miles big, then
(11:13):
we could totally miss it. So that's like that's the
threshold for size. So just to set up our question
or address our question a little more here, if a
sea monster existed and there was a breeding population and
they were less than three miles big, like not even long,
(11:38):
they were just big. If they were less than three
miles big, then it's possible that we could have missed them.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Think about all the crashed extraterrestrial craft that could be
down there. We'd have no idea they're not three miles long.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Well, maybe, Matt, are you proposing aquatic extraterrestrials.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
Yes, USO is my friend.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to start
wrapping my head around that idea, but probably a discussion
for another day.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Check out our episode.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, we have a previous episode on these usos, and
I don't know, maybe we should revisit that one because
there's some new information I found on that.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But yeah, clearly I should revisit that one because I
do not recall its existence at all.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
But there's a you're right, Noel, that's an episode maybe
for another day, which you can find now wherever you
get your favorite podcasts. So this mapping, it's something that
can be misleading. I think when you first hear it.
It's kind of like saying radio telescope or radio telescope
(12:43):
gives you information about space, but it doesn't necessarily give
you a visual picture. And this ocean floor mapping doesn't
necessarily give us what you would think of as a
visual picture. The job is accomplished using radar. It measures
the c surface, so it gives us this kind of
rough topography, the idea of where the bumps and the
(13:05):
dips occur. And that's pretty cool, right, But that means
that the maps of the ocean floor still are not
detailed as detailed as some of the maps of planets
in our Solar system, which is insane. We know a
little bit about Mars, if this holds true, we know
a little bit about more about the surface of Mars
(13:27):
than we do about the surface of the ocean. Nuts.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Okay, So just for like a you know, audio visual aid,
let's just talk a little bit about the layout. So,
just like the surface of the globe, the subterranean globe,
I guess we could call it, is divided into different
zones or regions. Each one has their own unique ecosystem,
(13:53):
specific creatures that are native to each of these areas,
adapted to live in these particular conditions. Of these zones
in the ocean, there are five, and we'll start from
closest to the surface and dive down. I'll start with
this one, because it's really fun to say, the epipilogic
or sunlight zone, and that ranges from the surface of
(14:13):
the water to six hundred and fifty six feet below.
It gets plenty of light, plenty of heat, and of
course all of those things decrease as you head further down.
And this is where all the cute little babies live
the fun you know, cute kind of finding nemo esque
figures of the sea, a lot of oceanic life that
humans actually interact with. Sure, and sure they're cute in
(14:37):
their own way, let's be nice. But also like coral
reefs and all these amazing built up layers of coral
and it's very much like think of it as like
the metro area of the sea. You know, this is
where like like the Tokyo or the New York City
or you know, the Atlanta nice.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
And then you go down a little bit further, you
get to the twilight zone or the mesopelagic zone. It's
between six hundred and fifty six feet and three thousand,
two hundred and eighty one feet. There's still a lot
of stuff living in this area, but stuff's getting a
little different, little little weirder. Like wolf eels. Sure, sure
(15:19):
you're familiar with those wolf eels. You can hear them
howling in the seas no matter where you are. Swordfish scary,
terrifying creatures that you can hunt for fish for them,
but it's a difficult process. The light at this point
as you're going down is dying. Sunlight is getting fainter
(15:39):
and fainter as you submerge.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
If you mapped all this on a chart, you could
definitely correlate depth with weirdness. Just putting that out there
real quick.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
I want to point out for anyone who is hearing
of wolf eels for the first time, please do yourself
with favor use your browser of choice to check out
some images of wolf eels. They do not look like
what you might assume a wolf or an eel.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Looks like I.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Had to put them in there, and yeah, their life
is getting weird with.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
It, and you can't actually hear them howling. I apologize
those Jill, Well, we.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Don't know, we don't know, we don't know. So let's
continue this journey into the murk. Now we're stepping into
the midnight zone. To bastardize the phrase from that song,
we're at the bath of Pelagic zone between three thy
two hundred and eighty one feet to twelve one hundred
(16:37):
and twenty four feet. This part of the ocean is
like that old line from Method Man, it's cold world.
You have to bring your own heat. This zone is
largely dark. This is where you start to see some
sea creatures emitting their own light through phosphorescence. It's also
like that Queen Song. Doat are under pressure? The pressure
(17:01):
in the zone reaches almost six thousand pounds per square inch,
and that's just because of what you alluded to earlier, Matt.
There is so much water on top of you here.
If you live in this area and then next to
this we would our next step should we continue? James
Cameron eskiing down into the depths is what I think
(17:23):
personally is the coolest zone.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Is it cool as ice? Ben? Sort of like that
Queen Song was repurposed to be.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
It's very cold. It's not quite freezing because the water
is still liquid, but it's very very cold.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You're gonna have to convince me that it's cooler than
high pressure bioluminescence. But let's do this right.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So this is the abysso paleogic zone. Did I get
there right? I think I got it pretty close. And
that's between thirteen one hundred and twenty four feet and
nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet. And as
the aforementioned Vanilla ice reference implies, this is a very
very very cold part of the deep sea with no
natural light over seventy five percent of the ocean floor
(18:07):
is in this zone. So this is essentially like, for
all intents and purposes, the bottom.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Basically, yeah, loosely speaking, this is this is one of
the things I thought about a lot in younger days.
I always thought, where's the bottom of the continents? You
know what I mean? Where can you walk? Like if
you could walk on the ocean floor and you could see, oh,
there's where the floor has kind of a corner and
(18:35):
the wall there that's well, that's you know North America
or that's Australia. You would find it in the abyssopologic zone.
That's that's the place from which sprang the continents. But
it's still not the bottom. It's just most of the bottom,
right because just like the non water covered surface of
(18:59):
the planet, there are peaks, there are valleys in the ocean.
We call these trenches.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yes, the hatel Pelagic zone that lies down way way
down nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet to
thirty six thousand, one hundred feet. Now imagine that, what
do we say the average was around twelve thousand, thirteen
thousand feet.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
That's correct, twelve four hundred and fifty feet.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
So now we're way way down there, and the pressure
in these areas is insane. It's more than eleven thousand,
three hundred and eighteen tons per square meter. Or essentially,
think about this the equivalent of one person trying to
support the weight of fifty giant jumbo jets. You know,
(19:50):
there's we all know somebody who can bench press one
jumbo jet, but imagine doing fifty.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, it's impossible. It's you know, it calls to mind
the old mythological figure of Atlas holding the world atop
his shoulders, and mythology plays a huge role in today's
episode as well. The actual depth here gets tricky because
it depends on, you know, the trenches or the valleys
(20:21):
in the area. Of course, the Marianas Trench, which is
the deepest area of the ocean to ever be explored
by humans, sits at we would it's almost it's definitely
thirty five seven and ninety seven feet deep, but that
might not be the entire story, because again we don't
there's a ton of stuff we don't know about the ocean.
(20:44):
Just for comparison, like we did with Burj Khalifa, the
tallest mountain in the world, on the on Earth's dry
surface is Mount Everest that stands at twenty nine and
twenty six feet. So this means that the deepest ocean trench,
as far as we know, is deeper than the tallest
mountain on this planet is high. There's even with scale comparisons,
(21:10):
this quickly becomes mind boggling. We're just telling you this
to give you the map, the lay of the land.
Now we have to talk about the things that live
within this strange, strange world. Estimates show that somewhere between
fifty to eighty percent of all life on Earth is
found under the ocean.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
And we'll tell you about that life right after a
quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
And we're back now over the commercial break. I'm sure
many of us had adventures, perhaps some of us are
on the ocean right now, and you're probably wondering, hey,
fifty to eighty percent, that's a hell of a range.
Hasn't somebody done any kind of more robust research on this?
Speaker 4 (22:00):
They were probably also thinking, wow, should I really be
out right now? Especially? I mean I am on the
ocean kind of isolated, but still, but yes, Ben, I mean, really,
we keep talking about this is just given the sheer
size of the oceans of the seas what we're talking
about here, it's impossible to know exactly how many different
(22:23):
species live out there and all the different types of species,
right and humans. The scientists people who've been studying this
for you know, hundreds and thousands of years, estimate that
between a third, maybe two thirds of the things that
live in the oceans have yet to be classified. Maybe
(22:43):
they've been spotted a few of them once or twice,
but they haven't actually been you know, written down and
cataloged as hey, this is another new species, but even
more just have never been seen.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, that's interesting. I love that you point that out there, Matt,
because we know that there are tales of plenty big
fish stories abound, but having something scientifically classified means that
someone has been able to fit it into a taxonomy
of some sort. This is related to these other things
that we know, and this is kind of where it
(23:16):
lives and what it does before it dies. So we
we might not know sixty six percent of that easily.
We do know for sure two things. First, we know
that populations of undiscovered maritime animals are probably in decline
(23:37):
the way that populations of discovered and classified maritime animals
are Secondly, and pretty disturbingly, we know that we don't
know everything that's out there, but we have a wealth
of scientific research and a wealth of historical allegations, if
(23:58):
you want to call folklore something a little more spicy.
And what's interesting about all of humanity's research into the
world beneath the boats is this, It quickly descends into legend,
into mythology. Sailors have been reporting tales of gigantic sea
monsters since pretty much the first time human beings got
(24:22):
onto boats, got into the ocean, and then made it
back to land alive.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
Just think about the first time someone saw a whale,
The first time someone saw a whale while on a ship. WHOA,
That must have been mind blowing. And because you have
no way of imagining even what it is when you
observe a creature, a sea creature like that. And that's
kind of what we're going to be talking about here,
(24:51):
the early visions of something underneath the water that we
don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Can you imagine being that first part to see the
whale and then immediately after being stricken by awe and
majesty of it all, thinking man it sure would be
cool to murder that thing with a plenty stick.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Yeah, you have murder it. It might be a lot
of food perhaps, you know, that could be a motivation.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
One of the first encounters where it was if what
we know about humans remains true, then probably one of
the first encounters was somebody seeing it while they were
on the shore from a distance and then finding it
was edible. Maybe one washed up on the shore, which
could happen even before the day's widespread sonar.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Absolutely, So let's get into some of the specific examples
of strange reports of gigantic things within the water.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Now.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
The first one we're going to talk about here is
something called Leviathan. This is probably a word you've heard before.
For me, I got it from magic cards and of
the Bible. It's a fantastic word. It's been used in
the past to describe all kinds of different purported massive
sea creatures. Leviathan was described in the Bible as a giant, primordial,
(26:12):
sometimes multi headed sea serpent of sorts. It makes six
appearances in the Old Testament, and according to Biblical scholars,
in some places within the Bible, Leviathan the word refers
to an actual physical creature, and other times it functions
more as a symbolic representation of God's power or wrath,
(26:32):
which you know, those two different things. Many times are
where arguments lie within translations of the Bible. I was wondering, guys,
could I just give you a couple different descriptions of
some of the Greek mythology descriptions of sea monsters? Just
(26:56):
really fast?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Please? Can you slow it down a little bit, Matt,
not too fast. I want to be able to keep up.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Oh okay, Well, I'm gonna give you a quote of
a monstrous fish from those written in fifteen fifty five
by Olus Magus. Quote. Their forms are horrible. Their head's square,
all set with prickles, and they have long, sharp horns
(27:24):
round about like a tree rooted up by the roots.
They are ten or twelve cubits long, very black, with
huge eyes. The apple of the eye is of one cubit,
and it is red and fiery colored, which in the
dark night appears to fishermen afar from underwaters as a
burning fire, having hairs like goose feathers.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
What is that describing, Matt? That doesn't sound like any
living sea creature that I'm familiar with.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
It's describing a giant monster fish.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, that's what I thought, just making sure I was
keeping up. Okay, all right, I'll yet.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
But it's thought that perhaps what was actually seen there
was a giant squid, just due to other descriptions.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Well, but it's got, it's got. It's got horns like trees. Though,
what on a giant squid has horns like trees?
Speaker 4 (28:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
What's a cuba. That's a big measurement, right, I mean,
I know it's like an ancient form of measurement, but
it's like like a yard, right or something along those lines.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
I believe we've talked about that in a couple other episodes.
Exactly what a cube it is in the measurement.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Oh, it's like the length of your arm. Yeah, from
your elbow to your to your fingers.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Okay, yeah, just one more here from the Odyssey, if
you guys are cool with it, there's a sea monster
called the skila or skia Skyla. Maybe I can't I
can't remember from my days of learning about Greek myths,
but here's here's the quote. Her legs and there are
twelve are like great tentacles, unjointed and upon her serpent
(28:56):
necks are born six heads like nightmares of ferocity and
triple serried rows of fangs and deep gullets of black death.
Half her length. She sways her heads in air.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Oh, deep gullets of black death.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
I like that one, really creepy. But again it sounds
a little bit like it could be a giant squid
that was observed and just there was no understanding of
what it was.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
And so there are multiple, multiple examples. You know, typically
in the West, we tend to think of things that
occurred in the Atlantic or Mediterranean or Middle East, you know,
from Middle Eastern cultures, Phoenicians and so on. One example from
(29:40):
Nordic folklore would of course be the Kraken. I think
a lot of us were waiting for the kraken to
show up. This was a cryptid before the word existed,
wreaking havoc from Norway to Greenland. But the vast majority
of people of Nordic people believed in this thing, and
many thought they had seen it. Its imo was to
(30:01):
attack vessels with its tentacles wrapping around a ship, and
if unable to pull the ship down, this creature would
begin circling the vessel, creating a maelstrom or a vortex
that would drag the ship beneath the waves. Legends said
the kraken could devour the entire crew of a ship
(30:23):
in a single go. One of our first documented allegations
of this creature's existence dates back to a story written
in eleven eighty CE by a King Zvere of Norway.
And this is I want to point out here, and
I think I talked about this in a previous episode.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
The idea of a.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Creature devouring an entire ship might seem outlandish now, but
we have to remember the average size of a ship
was much smaller back then. So what would have been
considered a big ship attacked and justid by a fish
is you know, it's not as big as the megayachts
of today. But still these people, again, there are people.
(31:09):
They're as smart as anyone listening today in twenty twenty, right,
the brain, the hardware hasn't evolved all that much. So
we have to ask, if these things are so dangerous,
why would you mess with them at all. In the
case of the Kraken, it's because there was enormous profit
or potential for profit. The Kraken was accompanied by large, large,
(31:33):
ginormous schools of fish that would follow it around, and
when it surfaced, when it breached the water, fish cascaded
off the creature's back. And that meant that if your
boat was around, all you had to do was literally
have a net in the water, and then you could
get more fish than you would in months otherwise.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Pretty cool. That's a kind of a net positive sea
monster side effect. I'd be good about that. Oh man,
I didn't even catch that, but no, you know, the
krakend definitely sounds like a giant squid.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Now, yeah, we see a lot of descriptions of tentacles,
you know what I mean. We see a lot of
descriptions of a pretty agro, pretty big, many armed thing.
And of course, at this point, finally getting to say
this on air, Hail Hydra, shout out to the myth
of old More on that later, but you know, that's
(32:27):
another that's another Greek myth I believe in the story
of Hydra. The idea is that you lop off one
one head. It's a multi headed beast. You lop off
one head and two grow in its place. It's also
done a lot for the Marvel cinematic universe, which I'm
sure is what the Greeks were thinking about when they.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Wrote that, No question, they were laying the groundwork. So
next we have something from Japan, a creature, a sea
wrecking creature known as the Umi Bozoo that was rumored
to attack, specifically in calm waters, where it would rise up,
creating this kind of self contained maelstrom and described as
(33:10):
a black phantom with two huge eyes. Okay, just phantom.
I'm picturing like ghost shaped, you know, So let's just again,
We're gonna come back to this two huge eyes. And
in the lore of the time, this Omi Bozou was
thought to be a spirit of some sort rather than
an actual corporeal creature, and the only way to escape
(33:34):
this thing was to kind of almost like distract it
like a cat, you know, with like a like a
mouse toy or like a feather. But they would use
what they referred to as a bottomless barrel, and I
had to offer Mike ask Ben to clarify what the
hell that is. And it's it's pretty simple when you
think about it. A bottomless barrel is a barrel with
no bottom, a cylinder. You take out both ends and
(33:57):
it becomes bottomless and infinite, and it would just like
be all, what the hell is this? I got it?
Oh my gosh, and they need to sail away while
it's confused.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
That's the thing about folklore, right, we see the truth
but told slant. As Emily Dickinson would later go on
to note, what's odd about this and what differentiates this
folklore from a lot of other folklore throughout human civilization,
unlest it's human and pre human civilization, but no spoilers,
that's a different episode, is that the folklore here does
(34:29):
have often provable I will say provable seeds of the truth.
There's the little grain of sand that makes the pearl
of legend. Research shows the ocean has indisputably been home
to enormous dangerous creatures in the distant past. It's home
(34:52):
to enormous dangerous creatures now, of course, but it was
also home to things like the meglodon.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Oh yes, the ma That was a big old shark
three times the size of a great white with teeth
as big as your hand. Hope they're really extinct?
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Oh man, I don't know, Matt. I kind of hope
they're still around, not around me specifically, but just like
out in the world megalodonning even look.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
You said to yourself, the populations of sea creatures are declining.
What's that megalodon doing other than just slurping up sea
creatures or mashing them violently with its teeth that are
the size of fists.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
My heart goes out to sharks. They're amazing animals if
you look at the mechanism of their evolution and adaptation,
and also their existence seems very stressful to me, since
they the way that their gills are structured. They can't act,
they can't stand still. They always have to keep moving
and forcing water through the gills. It's stressful. But even
(35:54):
if a megaladon was around now, it would not be
the largest creature the ocean is home to proven like
kaiju size things, right, like the blue whale is sorry,
dinosaurs officially the largest single animal ever confirmed to exist.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Ooh, by the way, you guys, I remember there was
an episode a while back where space whales came up
and I was trying to wreck my brain, like where
have I seen space whales? And I said, I thought
it was as artists French artist Mobius, and then I
thought it was maybe Salvador Dali or something, and a
listener wrote in and said it was actually from an
episode of Futurama. I wish I remember the listener's name,
(36:36):
but if you're hearing this, thank you listener. My brain
was eating itself over that one, basically. But yeah, it's true.
And you know I've mentioned that I'm also I have
an abiding fear of large things that lurk beneath the depths,
and that I often have had dreams where I feel
myself as this speck in this massive ocean with like
(36:56):
huge unseen things kind of lurking about, and then like
a whale will come up under me and just sort
of scoop me up and it doesn't eat me. It's
just more of this kind of fear of its sheer size.
And it's true. The blue whale is absolutely massive. I mean,
you're gonna know it when it comes up under you
in the ocean, or when you see it, hopefully from
(37:17):
the safety of like, you know, one of those tours,
those boat tours. One hundred people can fit into its mouth,
not its guts, its mouth, its heart is the size
of a small car, maybe maybe not even a small car. Ben,
what do you think a medium car like a like
a mid sized suv.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
It's it's a car. They could comfortably seat four to
five people.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
Got it, okay?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
And the beat of that heart can be detected from
two miles away. But we've got some other things on
the list of massive underwater dwelling creatures, things like sperm whales,
the whale shark, the basking shark, and of course our
pal and yours, the giant civic octopus. Not to mention
(38:02):
the lion's main jellyfish, which can reach more than one
hundred and twenty feet or thirty six point six meters
in length.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
But the lion's main is mostly creepy tentacles, right or not?
Tentacles creepy? Are they called tentacles in a jellyfish? They're
tendrilsl Yeah, yeah, terrifying lion's main tendrils. Those really freak
(38:33):
me out. Did jellyfish give you, guys the same kind
of feelings when you're thinking about swimming in the ocean.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I think they're beautiful to look at in an aquarium tank,
but yeah, I mean they definitely because they're they're stingy boys, right,
I mean, they will mess you up and then you
got to pee on yourself.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Not all jelly hashtag. Not all jellyfish right are poisonous,
but I personally I love them. I think it's like
watching a cloud underwater, or you know, a nebula through
a telescope. Also, jellyfish, at least one tiny species of
jellyfish occupies a top ten position and Bend's list of
(39:13):
top ten animals because it's functionally immortal. You remember that
one matt it grows up and then if it's injured
or something, it returns to a juvenile phase and lives
its life again. We did an episode on real life
immortality a number of years ago now, and there is
real life immortality at least for some animals, and they're
(39:36):
all pretty crappy versions of immortality.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
But yes, I will say the jellyfish outside of their waters,
they don't hold up so well. They're super blobby and
like like a thing that you'd want to step over
on the beach, and if they are stingy ones, you
definitely would want to step over them. But it just
goes to show how specifically adapted they are for life
in the ocean. As the case with all of the
creatres we're talking about today, they don't they cannot hold
(40:02):
up outside of the water.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
But some of those mental wars are very difficult to detect,
and they've got really long tendrils, and you would never
know who's there and it could kill humans. Okay, maybe
I just have a weird thing with jellyfish.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Well well, also, that's not to sound like a jerk,
but one of the reasons I really wanted to hit
the idea of specificity of adaptation is should humans be
under the water?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
How far should we be.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Under the water? You know what I mean, Like if
you're I don't want to like victim blame or anything,
because I know life is crazy and everybody's the main
character of their own story. But the maybe maybe jellyfish
and attacking leviathans are a sign that we should we
(40:51):
shouldn't go too far into the depths. I mean, the
more you think about it, it makes sense to ask
could there still be enormous creatures out there in the brine.
One of the things we talked about off air as
we were diving into this episode was Jules vern Of course,
his famous eighteen seventy novel twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
(41:14):
Don't think too much about the unit of measurement there
just to enjoy the poetic title. There's a quote here
from vern that applies to this episode, and it's this,
either we do know all the varieties of beings which
people our planet.
Speaker 5 (41:34):
Or we do not.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
If we do not know them all, if nature still
has secrets in the deeps, for us, nothing is more
conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes
or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
So could sea monsters be real? Well, we'll dive right
into that after a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Here's where it gets crazy, and it does get crazy.
Could the monsters be real? This genuinely depends on how
you define monster. If we're talking about monsters, as in
creatures of monstrous size, then our odds of finding one
understandably go down. But they don't go down as far
as you might think, because we still have a lot
(42:30):
to learn about the ocean. But we're learning more about
it now than ever before.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
Yes, that is correct. Numerous governments and their militaries are
able to detect the movement of very large objects from
far away when it comes to things submerged in the ocean,
and as we talked about in our episode we covered
not that long ago about sonar and its effects on
(42:57):
marine animals. Earth's oceans essentially have like roaming detection networks
in the form of submarines, which is very very true,
and commercial shipping vessels. And there's also purported technology that
maybe the US military and other militaries have miked up
the oceans to a large degree. So there's affirmed.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I think it's confirmed.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
I think it is confirmed too. I know it is
confirmed at least from the US's side, but I wonder
how many other countries have something similar in place.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean, yeah, that's a very good point, Matt. And
we essentially have some form of roaming detection networks. They're
meant to detect other works of humanity more so than
other animals, but they work. That's why we spent billions
building them, and we still have found huge, occluded disturbing things.
(43:58):
So one thing that was tough for us to not
spoil in the Hear of the Fat portion of today's
show is that the source of many many sea serpent
and sea monster myths across the across the centuries turns
out probably to be based in a real thing. The
colossal or the giant squid. Today it's known as Architathus Dukes.
(44:24):
It's as old, like rumors of this are as old
as the first days of sailing, honestly, but for centuries
the only proof we had was really creepy, really circumstantial,
disturbing stuff, nearly unidentifiable carcasses wash ashore, the lone survivor
(44:46):
of a shipwreck shows up with you know, like with
missing crew members and a nineteen foot tentacle that's rotting
in the sun. And then we find, you know, giant
known creatures, especially sperm whales in the in the era
of whaling, right you know the movie Dick Days and Beyond.
(45:08):
You would find whales that had scars, like gigantic sucker
marks that were wrought by some unknown animal. Or you
would find these gigantic beaks. They looked like kiju beaks.
They looked like the beaks of a squid that no
God would ever put on this planet, right, because these
(45:29):
are very religious people finding these two And it wasn't
until maybe in your lifetime, fellow conspiracy realists, that scientists
finally got a photograph of a real life krackt and
that was just like one blurry paparazzi under the sea's photo.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
You know that was yeah, that was alive, right, it was, Oh,
there's one swimmer. I wasn't a carcass, it wasn't some remnant.
It was an actual thing swimming around. And then think
about this. It wasn't until the you know, the Mayan Apocalypse,
I'm sorry, twenty twelve when we acquired actual video footage
(46:14):
of a live giant squid existing in its in its environment,
because there was there was another time earlier than that
where a giant squid was I believe caught essentially and
pulled up to the surface.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
By the Japanese fishing vessel.
Speaker 4 (46:30):
That was the one we were just talking about, right,
was that two thousand and six? Maybe I think something
around that time where one got pulled up from from
the depths to the surface, just in the act of
a large fishing operation. But yeah, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen
as well, we acquired actual video footage of a giant
(46:51):
squid and it was creepy.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
And you know, if you guys ever seen that Noah
Baumbach movie The Squid and the Whale, it references a
diorama that you can see at the Museum of Natural
History in New York of a massive sperm whale essentially
doing battle with one of these kraken like creatures. And
it's pretty epic to look at. Still on display there
(47:14):
as far as I know.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Yeah, it was there last time I went. I love
that museum. It's I don't know. A lot of that
museum is dark when you get into the exhibits. I
like dark museums. These creatures like dark areas of the water.
They live in very deep areas of the ocean. As
far as we can tell, again, we know very little
about them. They're anywhere from thirteen hundred to three thousand
(47:38):
feet down. We know that they can grow larger than
some whales. The only predator of theirs we know about
is the sperm whale. We don't know how large these
things can get, yet we know that they are stronger
than an elephant. We know that a bite from their
beak has enough force to sever steel cables. This means
(48:02):
that if one of these made it to the surface
in the days of wooden boats, that boat would In short, well,
it's a family show, so I'm just going to say
they would be very deep trouble.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yeah, well, what if your ship has a steel hull,
It doesn't seem to matter. These daily can go through anything.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
You could puncture that. Yeah, just stay on their good side.
Speaker 4 (48:28):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
The craziest thing about this, it's a real life sea monster.
It fits some of the qualities we described, right, and.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
We know so.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Very little about it. We still have a lot of
questions about large sea animals that everybody's kind of familiar with. Right,
There's a lot of stuff we don't understand about whales.
We know even less about these things. As recently as
June of twenty twenty of this year. Last month, as
we record this, we learned new stuff about these monsters.
(49:00):
A juvenile version of them washed up on the shores
of South Africa. This is not the first time it happened,
but this creature was already thirteen feet long. That's baby
size for these guys, right. It's a mini me of
a giant squid. But it was just about two years old.
We also don't know how long they live. We don't
(49:22):
know how big they grow while they're alive. And they're
not the only thing out there. I mean, I I
say we go full Lovecraft. Let's point out that the
ocean is also home to giant deep sea worms. And
when we say giant, we mean giant. They also glow
in the dark.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
So you know, these guys well as individuals, wouldn't necessarily
be considered in the same league. Yeah, that's a sea
punt as well as the rest of these animals that
we're talking about today. They're called pyrosomes and their free
flow voting tunicates. They're also known as the unicorns of
(50:04):
the sea. But they're they're pretty big, you know, they're
big enough for a human to ride, but they also
kind of create these massive swarms. They're soft and delicate,
like some sort of like feather boa perhaps, And again,
like bend off Off, Mic pointed out that these are
(50:25):
really in kind of on a technicality, sea monster by default.
That's because each of the worms is actually a colony
of a thousands of individual creatures, and the individuals themselves
are super tiny. It's almost like they operating this crazy
hive mind type situation.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah. Yeah, they're like a big commune, you know, and
jellyfish often also or creatures of colony or hive. But
these giant sea worms are also we should mention because
Chekhov's gun rule. Right, we did. We did name drop Lovecraft,
so we have to follow up on that. These worms
(51:07):
are not eldritch objects of warship sleeping beneath the waves
for AONs, waiting for the stars to be right. This
is not a case of that is not dead, which
can eternal lie and with strange AONs even death may
die kind of thing. It's not We're not at Cuthulhu
level yet. But Matt Noll, while we are on the
(51:29):
subject of waking ancient creatures, it's time to ask what
about the other monsters. We have sea monster news for you.
Speaker 4 (51:40):
Well, as we stated before, we've been talking about giant monsters,
right that we've been describing monsters as something that is
monster us in its size. But there could be something
very dangerous, very frightening that isn't giant that could be
discovered down below the depths. And we have some news
(52:03):
for you. This year, scientists made a discovery that future
historians will doubtlessly call classic twenty twenty. You know why.
They found one hundred million year old microbes beneath the
seafloor in the South Pacific Geyer. This is a site
(52:24):
east of Australia where ocean currents intersect, and this is
considered to be one of the areas of the ocean
that has the least amount of life, right, some of
the deadest parts of the ocean, where it's almost there's
almost no nutrients here that animals need to survive. The
scientists dug down very far, five seven hundred meters below
(52:48):
sea level, and they found something that had been in
a Lovecraftian way, slumbering since before the age of men.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, these things looked as though they were dead. And
it's already a great find, you know, goscience. This is
already a groundbreaking discovery to find evidence of these things
that were once alive. So they brought them back to
the lab. They brought the clay cores they had dug up,
as you had mentioned, Matt, back to their lab where
(53:20):
they found these microbes, and they said, oh wow, this
is amazing. There was once life in this part of
the South Pacific, guyer, I don't know. Let's feed them,
which sounds weird, right. It's a lot like finding a
dead body and saying, let's put a sandwich by it.
Let's just come on, let's put a sandwich by it.
(53:42):
It's just between us we're all buddies here. And what
happened is that these microbes, these dead bodies, got up
and ate the sandwich. So what happened after that is
they started reproducing, They started breeding. Something that had been
dormant were millions of years just came back to life.
(54:06):
One of the scientists, and I love when scientists talked
this way. One of the scientists said that this indicates
the insane possibility. Whenever scientists used the word insane, you
know what they're you know, something rocked them. This scientist
said that these very same microbes must have been or
may have been, probably were sitting in the same place
(54:28):
for AONs, and that that is pure lovecrafty and stuff.
Lovecraft was a terrible person, not a great writer, but
a fantastic world builder. And the idea of undersea creatures
slumbering and being awoken by man, now we can say,
(54:51):
in twenty twenty, this happened. This happened. Lovecraft is in
a way real now. And that's just the beginning. If
we go back to the statistics when Matt Nolan and
I talked about it at the beginning of this episode,
we see some possibilities This story is and over given
what little we know about the ocean, again, very little,
(55:12):
it is scientifically indisputably true that we do not at
this point know every single species of life currently living
in there or you know, sleeping for dreamless dark millennia.
And given the global reach of sonar and other detection
methods radar, et cetera, sure it's plausible to say we
have a solid chance of detecting an undiscovered life form
(55:34):
if it ticks a few boxes.
Speaker 4 (55:36):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
It really needs to have a relatively large population, It
needs to be pretty frequently on the move and spend
at least some time in that smaller part of the
ocean that we talked about, that metropolis that we study
pretty extensively. And it also is helpful if it prais
a lot on other easily detected species. But if it
(56:02):
doesn't exhibit these traits, our odds of finding drop quite significantly.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
Yeah, it's true. It's gonna be hard for us to
just accidentally stumble upon something new, right if it doesn't
have that large population and all those things we just listed.
Does anybody else feel like it's a bad idea to
awaken aon's old microbes just in case? Maybe there's something
(56:29):
involved there that happened to help the extinction process with yes,
you know life on Earth.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yes, yes I do, I do, I do think that thing, Matt.
Speaker 1 (56:40):
Hull, the dice, I you know what I mean. We
are seeing this happen in other places. You know, it's
not just underwater. Well I guess it kind.
Speaker 4 (56:52):
Of is because under ice.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah, because ice. You know, it's just just fancier water.
So ice is fancy water. Great as our takeaway, please
just remember that out of all this stuff we did today.
But yeah, you know, you make an excellent point there, Nol,
because this isn't just speculation on our part. We know
(57:16):
that the discovery of extremophiles took forever creatures that live
by these geothermal vents on the ocean floor. They are
living off the energy exuded from those vents. So they're
not consuming a very well known other species. They're not
moving around a lot because they have to be by
(57:37):
those vents to survive. So with those two pieces missing,
it would take us a while to find them. And
this leaves us with two notes. You know, one is disturbing,
one is distressing. Or when's a little more emo, a
little sad. Let's go with that one. First. It may
well be that we do discover some gigantic species, some
(57:58):
real life sea monsters, sea serpent, what have you. But
we discover it after it becomes functionally extinct. We find
the last of a relic population. We find that they
are unable to breed. We find that the anthropist scene
has signed their death warrant, and we are just seeing
the dying echoes of what they once were ours.
Speaker 4 (58:20):
Look at that poorant. Yep, there's only one.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yep, look at it. The Last Kraken the new film
by Wes Anderson. The Crack was played by Edward Norton.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
And as it turns out, the Kraken a perfectly symmetrical creature,
so that really works out for his MEAs on Sam, I.
Speaker 4 (58:42):
Was really hoping you were going to say Bill Murray,
but we can give with it.
Speaker 1 (58:45):
Oh no, no, wait wait, change it. Kracking is Bill Murray.
Uh you heard it?
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Oh my god. This this can be a crossover between
the stuff they do. I want you to know Cinematic
Universe and the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe, where we have
a movie coming out in the December of this year
for Christ called Hans about a horse that could solve
math problems, played by who do we say, Daniel da
Lewis two people? Yes, that's right, Finn wolf Hard as
(59:10):
the young clever Hans, and then he grows up into
a Daniel d Lewis sized clever Hans. But yeah, I
love this idea. So this.
Speaker 1 (59:22):
It's not as Wes Anderson cute. If this happens in
real life, our species will encounter a macro level of
a type of sadness known as sounder. If you guys
have ever heard this, it's a it's a manufacturer word.
All words are manufactured, so you know tintinnabulation. I don't
care make up your own words. It's a living language.
(59:43):
But soundra is a really neat word that means the
realization that each random passer by is living a life
is vivid and complex as your own, populated with their
own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and so on, story that
continues invisibly around you, like an an hill sprawling deep underground,
and they live a life that you'll never know existed.
(01:00:05):
You might only appear once as someone passing by, or
a lighted window in the dark. So not to be
too waxing poetic, But how terrible is it that we
might find something right after we've killed it. The second
thing we have to remember, and this is the real
This is the real conspiratorial stuff here. It's a bit
(01:00:27):
of a thought experiment. A lot of the knowledge that
we have about the world's oceans comes from private corporations.
Speaker 5 (01:00:35):
It comes from.
Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Blue ocean navies, both of which are incentivized heavily to
keep secrets. So it is possible, not plausible, but possible
that something might have been found already. In the cost
of revealing it to the world, we're outweighed by the
profit motive of keeping something else a margin right, or
(01:00:57):
a promising dig or maybe you know, you're a military
you've detected something, detected some big animal on its last legs.
But if you tell people you discovered it, then they'll
know you have some sort of classified detection technology. And
then boom, billions of dollars down the Marianna's trench.
Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
There.
Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
I don't think, I probably that's not happening. That's just
that's it's like a comic book level, exciting world.
Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
I don't think you're off base of there at all.
Then I feel all of that specifically the classified detection
tech because I want to believe that there are more
efficient forms of the kinds of detection technologies that we
have now that just that can't be shared. You're right
(01:01:48):
for proprietary reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
And now again, like you say, man Matt, I really
appreciate that support there or there, I say enabling. You
might be enabling a little bit in listeners.
Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
But and that doesn't mean extraterrestrial technology. It just means
advanced technology.
Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
Yeah, agreed. And while this idea of sea monsters, have
to put it in a sentence, this idea that sea
monsters exist, they are being hidden by you know, an
oil conglomerate or a navy, a bluewater navy of some sort.
While that definitely sounds like sci fi comic book stuff
(01:02:29):
or fodder for an excellent screenplay, a sci fi channel screenplay,
the truth is stranger things have happened out there beneath
the waves. So what do you think listeners? Now we
hand you know, like the meme. You're the captain, now,
so what do you think could be out there?
Speaker 4 (01:02:51):
You have the trawler, you're in control. Yeah, honestly, what
do you think is out there? Is there anything that
you have seen when you've been out on the ocean,
or maybe in the ocean on a dive. Maybe you've
been in a submersible before. We would love to hear
about your experience. Or maybe you've worked on a rig wooh,
(01:03:14):
that would be cool. Tell us about that. Anything you
want to mention that we've discussed on this episode, or
if you want to give us a suggestion for another episode,
you can find us. We're all over social media. On
Instagram we are conspiracy stuff show on Facebook and Twitter,
we're conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Yes, all of these things are true. And in addition,
if you want to get in on the fun with
your fellow conspiracy realist, why not head over to Facebook
and join our group. Here's where it gets crazy. Easiest
thing in the world. Just name one, two, three of us,
a super producer to all of us, make a joke
that makes Ben laugh, reference something that's in an episode. Whatever,
(01:03:52):
We're pretty easy and you're in a great place to
share memes and just have conversation. Couldn't be a cooler
group of folks on there. Here's where it gets crazy
on Facebook. And hey, while you're at it, while you're
on the internet, why not go over to Apple Podcasts
and leave us a glowing review, because it really does
help kind of bump the show up in the rankings
and also helps people discover and as we're entering this
(01:04:14):
brave new world of our five days a week thing,
let us know how you dig it and do it
in a public forum so others will follow in your path.
Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
And if you are one of the people out there
who says I listened to your Facebook episode, I don't
know why I would be on that. Social media in
general is a bag of badgers. That's for the birds.
But I do have a phone, and I have a
story to tell you. Well, you are in luck, fellow
conspiracy realists. You can call us any old time of
day or night at one eight three three std WYTK.
(01:04:47):
You'll have a three ish minutes ballpark. We would love
to hear from you. Let us know whether or not
we can use your story on air. And then also,
you know, if you feel the pressure of that ticking
clock for that three minute time window, why not just
write down a couple things talking points and you refer
to those that made it easier for me when I
(01:05:09):
called into our own show for some reason. But hey,
Matt Nol. A lot of times people don't like social
media or telephones, which we totally get. If you are
one of those folks, you are still in luck. You
are trebly tr e b l Y in luck because
(01:05:29):
you can send us a good old fashioned email anytime
the spirit moves you.
Speaker 4 (01:05:34):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they don't
(01:05:57):
want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Oh, friends and neighbors, fellow conspiracy realist, oh hooy sailors.
We have investigated at length the idea of a continuing
fascination cryptids.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
And I think we were all.
Speaker 1 (00:16):
We were all just unanimously astounded by the idea that
there could have been large creatures out there beneath the
waves in recent periods of history, recent enough that human
beings may have run into them. Guys, I spent a
(00:37):
lot of time looking out over the ocean in one
of our previous maritime adventures. I saw some usual stuff,
but I didn't see a sea serpent.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Did you never seen one? Hope to never do, because
that is one of my all time night terrors. I
think I've mentioned being present in a giant body of
water with a sea serpent lurking just beneath the waves.
Even if it's not one that's gonna eat me, Just
the large underwater dwelling creatures freak me out, Dude.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I often stand astride the ships and look out and
imagine Jason Statham when that megalodon attacked to I don't
know mega seen the movie the movie whatever it is.
Speaker 2 (01:19):
The first meg is a lot of fun. I think
the second one diminishing returns. But uh, I watched the
first one's good plane movie.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
Do check it.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Well.
Speaker 4 (01:27):
The point is there were like sea serpents and all
kinds of craziness out there in the ocean. Giant sharks
like that. They there have been those, but could there
be one or some or a bunch of them remaining?
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yes, yeah, far beyond our imaginings, Dear Horatio.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Before we get into.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
This classic episode, we also, of course want to shout
out folks like the Swedish musician Matthias Krantz, who this
is true story, guys taught an octopus to play piano. Ah,
we can't wait, Oh my gosh, Please tell us weird
stuff you've seen in the oceans. This is our classic episode.
Speaker 5 (02:11):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 4 (02:35):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noah.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
They call me Ben. We are 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. Longtime listeners or recent
listeners welcome. You'll notice that we are continuing a bit
of a maritime trend today. We didn't plan this, It
(03:03):
just happened. We're tackling one of the oldest oceanic questions
in human existence. For thousands and thousands of years, human
beings have both feared and worshiped the ocean, as well as,
of course, the things believed to live within it. So
fast forward to the current day. Good for us human species.
(03:27):
We have learned a great deal about the ocean over
the past several millennia, and we still rely on it
for food. Nowadays we can pretty often travel across it safely,
but we have by no means conquered the ocean. In fact,
we know more about the Moon right now than we
do about Earth's oceans. The briny deep, in short, is
(03:50):
still flooded with mysteries. That was not an intentional pun.
But here's the point. Today's question, is it possible that
see serpents, the legendary sea monsters of old, still exist today.
To answer this question, we have to learn what little
we do know about the ocean already. So here are the.
Speaker 4 (04:12):
Facts and Just to be clear, when we're talking about
the ocean and oceans, we really mean the oceans, the seas.
The place is where there's briny water, right where it's
very deep. That's what we're referring to today. So anywhere
in the world, not just in one particular place.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
Right, Yeah, So not just the Pacific, not just maybe
the Indian Ocean, but the whole shebang, you know what
I mean, like literally all of the water, or as
we'll come to find out, ninety seven percent of all
the water. So we've often heard people say things like,
you know, we know less about the ocean than we
do about outer space. That's a little misleading, but we
(04:53):
definitely do know more about Earth's moon than we do
about Earth's oceans. I mean, when you think about it,
the numbers get weird if you believe the official stories.
That's for a different episode. We've sent twelve people to
the moon since about nineteen sixty nine, yet in comparison,
we've only sent three people to the deepest part of
(05:16):
the ocean, one of them being James Cameron, who makes
an appearance in here. As a matter of fact, the
old Hollywood legend is that James Cameron mainly wanted to
do Titanic as a way of getting support for his
trip to the Marianas.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Trench, which is very cool.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, he had a cute little like pod thing that
he went down in, right, like a kind of a
future you look in under the c mini sub with
like grabberclaw arms or maybe i'm hyperbolyzing here.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
No, no, no, that's a pretty good description. I mean,
that's that's the only way to get down there. And
those people who have gone to the deepest part of
the ocean, again, we're only counting the people who came back.
You know, it's completely plausible that a lot of people
died and their bodies eventually drifted to some very deep
part of the seafloor.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well, and the ones that did come back, we're all
completely mad.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
There we go nice setup that. Yeah, yeah, we know
that there. Despite the fact that there have only been
a very very small amount of people who went to
what we call the deepest part of the ocean, we
know that there is a lot, a lot down there.
The ocean takes up about seventy one percent of Earth's surface,
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose research we
(06:35):
lean on a lot. In this episode, they note that
about ninety five percent of that oceanic surface the seafloor.
They call it unexplored, And it depends on what you
mean by explored, but I think it's a fair way
to look at it, especially when we learn more about
the stats and geography.
Speaker 4 (06:56):
Of the ocean.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Quick question, guys, do you think they worked awkwards from
that acronym to like what words we're going to be
in it? You know, because Noah and Noah's Ark and
all that, and they're like, Okay, we got to make
this Noah thing work. It's such a good image.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
I thought about that, but I didn't. I didn't nail
down the story because it would be my speculation. It
just it feels like if they're trying to purposefully spell Noah,
then they would have done a better job. There's so
many things that begin with H.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Well, some mysteries are just better left unsolved. So it's
true what we loosely describe as the ocean in swishy
quotation fingers has a volume of around one point three
three two a billion cubic kilometers. I say that doubly
because the word is spelled out several times in the
(07:48):
research materials I'm looking at just to drive home. That's
a lot of cubic kilometers, my friends, And that works
out to be about three hundred and fifty two quintillion
gallons of water. That's just like a completely unfathomable number
right there in my mind at least. And that's ninety
seven percent of the water on the entire planet. Another
(08:08):
two percent is locked up in glaciers and ice caps,
and a tiny part is in water vapor floating through
the atmosphere, and an even tinier part is inside of us. All. Oh, man,
it was there all along, it was there all along,
you guys.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
It's the majority of the human body actually, about up
to sixty percent of you specifically you, if you're human
and listening to this, about sixty percent of your body
is water.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
We are water beings on a water planet, gentlemen. And uh.
And when we're talking about, you know, the actual volume
of the oceans, we're talking about ninety five percent of
the ocean floor quote unquote unexplored, right, because we're talking
about actually going and exploring there the way you would
(08:54):
the moon or another place. It's crazy to imagine that
that's the floor part. And then there's all that volume
of water with all that depth, and think about attempting
to explore somehow the surface area at every depth that
(09:14):
you possibly can, and it just feels like it would
be impossible for humans to do. Because the average depth
of the ocean is three thousand, seven hundred and ninety
five meters or a little over twelve four hundred and
fifty feet. And just like the Earth's surface, life is
not distributed evenly across the ocean, right. You don't just
(09:38):
have whales every x meters or something, or fish every
x centimeters whatever it would be. They could be anywhere
within that depth.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Just for comparison there, when we're talking about the average
depth of the world's oceans, consider let's see, Matt, the
number you gave us is average depth of three thousand,
seven hundred and ninety five meters or a little north
of twelve thousand, four and fifty feet. The current tallest
tallest building tall skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa,
(10:14):
is two thousand, seven hundred and sixteen and a half feet,
so tiny, tiny, tiny in comparison to not the deepest
part of the ocean.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
But just the global average.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
This is a big place. We have quote unquote mapped
the ocean floor. Good job for our species, but we
did it at a really really low resolution. I'm not
going to say we cut some corners, because again it's
a very big place. But if you look at the
overall mapping of the ocean floor and you take all
(10:50):
of the scientific progress that every single civilization is made
up to, now, the most of that ocean floor mapping
has a solution of five kilometers or three miles. That
means that if something is so ridiculous, But that means
that if something is smaller than three miles big, then
(11:13):
we could totally miss it. So that's like that's the
threshold for size. So just to set up our question
or address our question a little more here, if a
sea monster existed and there was a breeding population and
they were less than three miles big, like not even long,
(11:38):
they were just big. If they were less than three
miles big, then it's possible that we could have missed them.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
Think about all the crashed extraterrestrial craft that could be
down there. We'd have no idea they're not three miles long.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Well, maybe, Matt, are you proposing aquatic extraterrestrials.
Speaker 4 (11:56):
Yes, USO is my friend.
Speaker 2 (11:58):
Oh my gosh, I don't even know how to start
wrapping my head around that idea, but probably a discussion
for another day.
Speaker 4 (12:04):
Check out our episode.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, we have a previous episode on these usos, and
I don't know, maybe we should revisit that one because
there's some new information I found on that.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
But yeah, clearly I should revisit that one because I
do not recall its existence at all.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
But there's a you're right, Noel, that's an episode maybe
for another day, which you can find now wherever you
get your favorite podcasts. So this mapping, it's something that
can be misleading. I think when you first hear it.
It's kind of like saying radio telescope or radio telescope
(12:43):
gives you information about space, but it doesn't necessarily give
you a visual picture. And this ocean floor mapping doesn't
necessarily give us what you would think of as a
visual picture. The job is accomplished using radar. It measures
the c surface, so it gives us this kind of
rough topography, the idea of where the bumps and the
(13:05):
dips occur. And that's pretty cool, right, But that means
that the maps of the ocean floor still are not
detailed as detailed as some of the maps of planets
in our Solar system, which is insane. We know a
little bit about Mars, if this holds true, we know
a little bit about more about the surface of Mars
(13:27):
than we do about the surface of the ocean. Nuts.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Okay, So just for like a you know, audio visual aid,
let's just talk a little bit about the layout. So,
just like the surface of the globe, the subterranean globe,
I guess we could call it, is divided into different
zones or regions. Each one has their own unique ecosystem,
(13:53):
specific creatures that are native to each of these areas,
adapted to live in these particular conditions. Of these zones
in the ocean, there are five, and we'll start from
closest to the surface and dive down. I'll start with
this one, because it's really fun to say, the epipilogic
or sunlight zone, and that ranges from the surface of
(14:13):
the water to six hundred and fifty six feet below.
It gets plenty of light, plenty of heat, and of
course all of those things decrease as you head further down.
And this is where all the cute little babies live
the fun you know, cute kind of finding nemo esque
figures of the sea, a lot of oceanic life that
humans actually interact with. Sure, and sure they're cute in
(14:37):
their own way, let's be nice. But also like coral
reefs and all these amazing built up layers of coral
and it's very much like think of it as like
the metro area of the sea. You know, this is
where like like the Tokyo or the New York City
or you know, the Atlanta nice.
Speaker 4 (14:58):
And then you go down a little bit further, you
get to the twilight zone or the mesopelagic zone. It's
between six hundred and fifty six feet and three thousand,
two hundred and eighty one feet. There's still a lot
of stuff living in this area, but stuff's getting a
little different, little little weirder. Like wolf eels. Sure, sure
(15:19):
you're familiar with those wolf eels. You can hear them
howling in the seas no matter where you are. Swordfish scary,
terrifying creatures that you can hunt for fish for them,
but it's a difficult process. The light at this point
as you're going down is dying. Sunlight is getting fainter
(15:39):
and fainter as you submerge.
Speaker 2 (15:41):
If you mapped all this on a chart, you could
definitely correlate depth with weirdness. Just putting that out there
real quick.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
I want to point out for anyone who is hearing
of wolf eels for the first time, please do yourself
with favor use your browser of choice to check out
some images of wolf eels. They do not look like
what you might assume a wolf or an eel.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Looks like I.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Had to put them in there, and yeah, their life
is getting weird with.
Speaker 4 (16:11):
It, and you can't actually hear them howling. I apologize
those Jill, Well, we.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Don't know, we don't know, we don't know. So let's
continue this journey into the murk. Now we're stepping into
the midnight zone. To bastardize the phrase from that song,
we're at the bath of Pelagic zone between three thy
two hundred and eighty one feet to twelve one hundred
(16:37):
and twenty four feet. This part of the ocean is
like that old line from Method Man, it's cold world.
You have to bring your own heat. This zone is
largely dark. This is where you start to see some
sea creatures emitting their own light through phosphorescence. It's also
like that Queen Song. Doat are under pressure? The pressure
(17:01):
in the zone reaches almost six thousand pounds per square inch,
and that's just because of what you alluded to earlier, Matt.
There is so much water on top of you here.
If you live in this area and then next to
this we would our next step should we continue? James
Cameron eskiing down into the depths is what I think
(17:23):
personally is the coolest zone.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Is it cool as ice? Ben? Sort of like that
Queen Song was repurposed to be.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
It's very cold. It's not quite freezing because the water
is still liquid, but it's very very cold.
Speaker 4 (17:39):
You're gonna have to convince me that it's cooler than
high pressure bioluminescence. But let's do this right.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
So this is the abysso paleogic zone. Did I get
there right? I think I got it pretty close. And
that's between thirteen one hundred and twenty four feet and
nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet. And as
the aforementioned Vanilla ice reference implies, this is a very
very very cold part of the deep sea with no
natural light over seventy five percent of the ocean floor
(18:07):
is in this zone. So this is essentially like, for
all intents and purposes, the bottom.
Speaker 1 (18:12):
Basically, yeah, loosely speaking, this is this is one of
the things I thought about a lot in younger days.
I always thought, where's the bottom of the continents? You
know what I mean? Where can you walk? Like if
you could walk on the ocean floor and you could see, oh,
there's where the floor has kind of a corner and
(18:35):
the wall there that's well, that's you know North America
or that's Australia. You would find it in the abyssopologic zone.
That's that's the place from which sprang the continents. But
it's still not the bottom. It's just most of the bottom,
right because just like the non water covered surface of
(18:59):
the planet, there are peaks, there are valleys in the ocean.
We call these trenches.
Speaker 4 (19:05):
Yes, the hatel Pelagic zone that lies down way way
down nineteen thousand, six hundred and eighty six feet to
thirty six thousand, one hundred feet. Now imagine that, what
do we say the average was around twelve thousand, thirteen
thousand feet.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
That's correct, twelve four hundred and fifty feet.
Speaker 4 (19:26):
So now we're way way down there, and the pressure
in these areas is insane. It's more than eleven thousand,
three hundred and eighteen tons per square meter. Or essentially,
think about this the equivalent of one person trying to
support the weight of fifty giant jumbo jets. You know,
(19:50):
there's we all know somebody who can bench press one
jumbo jet, but imagine doing fifty.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
Yeah, it's impossible. It's you know, it calls to mind
the old mythological figure of Atlas holding the world atop
his shoulders, and mythology plays a huge role in today's
episode as well. The actual depth here gets tricky because
it depends on, you know, the trenches or the valleys
(20:21):
in the area. Of course, the Marianas Trench, which is
the deepest area of the ocean to ever be explored
by humans, sits at we would it's almost it's definitely
thirty five seven and ninety seven feet deep, but that
might not be the entire story, because again we don't
there's a ton of stuff we don't know about the ocean.
(20:44):
Just for comparison, like we did with Burj Khalifa, the
tallest mountain in the world, on the on Earth's dry
surface is Mount Everest that stands at twenty nine and
twenty six feet. So this means that the deepest ocean trench,
as far as we know, is deeper than the tallest
mountain on this planet is high. There's even with scale comparisons,
(21:10):
this quickly becomes mind boggling. We're just telling you this
to give you the map, the lay of the land.
Now we have to talk about the things that live
within this strange, strange world. Estimates show that somewhere between
fifty to eighty percent of all life on Earth is
found under the ocean.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
And we'll tell you about that life right after a
quick word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
And we're back now over the commercial break. I'm sure
many of us had adventures, perhaps some of us are
on the ocean right now, and you're probably wondering, hey,
fifty to eighty percent, that's a hell of a range.
Hasn't somebody done any kind of more robust research on this?
Speaker 4 (22:00):
They were probably also thinking, wow, should I really be
out right now? Especially? I mean I am on the
ocean kind of isolated, but still, but yes, Ben, I mean, really,
we keep talking about this is just given the sheer
size of the oceans of the seas what we're talking
about here, it's impossible to know exactly how many different
(22:23):
species live out there and all the different types of species,
right and humans. The scientists people who've been studying this
for you know, hundreds and thousands of years, estimate that
between a third, maybe two thirds of the things that
live in the oceans have yet to be classified. Maybe
(22:43):
they've been spotted a few of them once or twice,
but they haven't actually been you know, written down and
cataloged as hey, this is another new species, but even
more just have never been seen.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Yeah, that's interesting. I love that you point that out there, Matt,
because we know that there are tales of plenty big
fish stories abound, but having something scientifically classified means that
someone has been able to fit it into a taxonomy
of some sort. This is related to these other things
that we know, and this is kind of where it
(23:16):
lives and what it does before it dies. So we
we might not know sixty six percent of that easily.
We do know for sure two things. First, we know
that populations of undiscovered maritime animals are probably in decline
(23:37):
the way that populations of discovered and classified maritime animals
are Secondly, and pretty disturbingly, we know that we don't
know everything that's out there, but we have a wealth
of scientific research and a wealth of historical allegations, if
(23:58):
you want to call folklore something a little more spicy.
And what's interesting about all of humanity's research into the
world beneath the boats is this, It quickly descends into legend,
into mythology. Sailors have been reporting tales of gigantic sea
monsters since pretty much the first time human beings got
(24:22):
onto boats, got into the ocean, and then made it
back to land alive.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
Just think about the first time someone saw a whale,
The first time someone saw a whale while on a ship. WHOA,
That must have been mind blowing. And because you have
no way of imagining even what it is when you
observe a creature, a sea creature like that. And that's
kind of what we're going to be talking about here,
(24:51):
the early visions of something underneath the water that we
don't know what it is.
Speaker 2 (24:58):
Can you imagine being that first part to see the
whale and then immediately after being stricken by awe and
majesty of it all, thinking man it sure would be
cool to murder that thing with a plenty stick.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
Yeah, you have murder it. It might be a lot
of food perhaps, you know, that could be a motivation.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
One of the first encounters where it was if what
we know about humans remains true, then probably one of
the first encounters was somebody seeing it while they were
on the shore from a distance and then finding it
was edible. Maybe one washed up on the shore, which
could happen even before the day's widespread sonar.
Speaker 4 (25:39):
Absolutely, So let's get into some of the specific examples
of strange reports of gigantic things within the water.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Now.
Speaker 4 (25:49):
The first one we're going to talk about here is
something called Leviathan. This is probably a word you've heard before.
For me, I got it from magic cards and of
the Bible. It's a fantastic word. It's been used in
the past to describe all kinds of different purported massive
sea creatures. Leviathan was described in the Bible as a giant, primordial,
(26:12):
sometimes multi headed sea serpent of sorts. It makes six
appearances in the Old Testament, and according to Biblical scholars,
in some places within the Bible, Leviathan the word refers
to an actual physical creature, and other times it functions
more as a symbolic representation of God's power or wrath,
(26:32):
which you know, those two different things. Many times are
where arguments lie within translations of the Bible. I was wondering, guys,
could I just give you a couple different descriptions of
some of the Greek mythology descriptions of sea monsters? Just
(26:56):
really fast?
Speaker 2 (26:57):
Please? Can you slow it down a little bit, Matt,
not too fast. I want to be able to keep up.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Oh okay, Well, I'm gonna give you a quote of
a monstrous fish from those written in fifteen fifty five
by Olus Magus. Quote. Their forms are horrible. Their head's square,
all set with prickles, and they have long, sharp horns
(27:24):
round about like a tree rooted up by the roots.
They are ten or twelve cubits long, very black, with
huge eyes. The apple of the eye is of one cubit,
and it is red and fiery colored, which in the
dark night appears to fishermen afar from underwaters as a
burning fire, having hairs like goose feathers.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
What is that describing, Matt? That doesn't sound like any
living sea creature that I'm familiar with.
Speaker 4 (27:52):
It's describing a giant monster fish.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Yeah, that's what I thought, just making sure I was
keeping up. Okay, all right, I'll yet.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
But it's thought that perhaps what was actually seen there
was a giant squid, just due to other descriptions.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
Well, but it's got, it's got. It's got horns like trees. Though,
what on a giant squid has horns like trees?
Speaker 4 (28:14):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
What's a cuba. That's a big measurement, right, I mean,
I know it's like an ancient form of measurement, but
it's like like a yard, right or something along those lines.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
I believe we've talked about that in a couple other episodes.
Exactly what a cube it is in the measurement.
Speaker 2 (28:28):
Oh, it's like the length of your arm. Yeah, from
your elbow to your to your fingers.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
Okay, yeah, just one more here from the Odyssey, if
you guys are cool with it, there's a sea monster
called the skila or skia Skyla. Maybe I can't I
can't remember from my days of learning about Greek myths,
but here's here's the quote. Her legs and there are
twelve are like great tentacles, unjointed and upon her serpent
(28:56):
necks are born six heads like nightmares of ferocity and
triple serried rows of fangs and deep gullets of black death.
Half her length. She sways her heads in air.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Oh, deep gullets of black death.
Speaker 4 (29:10):
I like that one, really creepy. But again it sounds
a little bit like it could be a giant squid
that was observed and just there was no understanding of
what it was.
Speaker 1 (29:20):
And so there are multiple, multiple examples. You know, typically
in the West, we tend to think of things that
occurred in the Atlantic or Mediterranean or Middle East, you know,
from Middle Eastern cultures, Phoenicians and so on. One example from
(29:40):
Nordic folklore would of course be the Kraken. I think
a lot of us were waiting for the kraken to
show up. This was a cryptid before the word existed,
wreaking havoc from Norway to Greenland. But the vast majority
of people of Nordic people believed in this thing, and
many thought they had seen it. Its imo was to
(30:01):
attack vessels with its tentacles wrapping around a ship, and
if unable to pull the ship down, this creature would
begin circling the vessel, creating a maelstrom or a vortex
that would drag the ship beneath the waves. Legends said
the kraken could devour the entire crew of a ship
(30:23):
in a single go. One of our first documented allegations
of this creature's existence dates back to a story written
in eleven eighty CE by a King Zvere of Norway.
And this is I want to point out here, and
I think I talked about this in a previous episode.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
The idea of a.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Creature devouring an entire ship might seem outlandish now, but
we have to remember the average size of a ship
was much smaller back then. So what would have been
considered a big ship attacked and justid by a fish
is you know, it's not as big as the megayachts
of today. But still these people, again, there are people.
(31:09):
They're as smart as anyone listening today in twenty twenty, right,
the brain, the hardware hasn't evolved all that much. So
we have to ask, if these things are so dangerous,
why would you mess with them at all. In the
case of the Kraken, it's because there was enormous profit
or potential for profit. The Kraken was accompanied by large, large,
(31:33):
ginormous schools of fish that would follow it around, and
when it surfaced, when it breached the water, fish cascaded
off the creature's back. And that meant that if your
boat was around, all you had to do was literally
have a net in the water, and then you could
get more fish than you would in months otherwise.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Pretty cool. That's a kind of a net positive sea
monster side effect. I'd be good about that. Oh man,
I didn't even catch that, but no, you know, the
krakend definitely sounds like a giant squid.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
Now, yeah, we see a lot of descriptions of tentacles,
you know what I mean. We see a lot of
descriptions of a pretty agro, pretty big, many armed thing.
And of course, at this point, finally getting to say
this on air, Hail Hydra, shout out to the myth
of old More on that later, but you know, that's
(32:27):
another that's another Greek myth I believe in the story
of Hydra. The idea is that you lop off one
one head. It's a multi headed beast. You lop off
one head and two grow in its place. It's also
done a lot for the Marvel cinematic universe, which I'm
sure is what the Greeks were thinking about when they.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
Wrote that, No question, they were laying the groundwork. So
next we have something from Japan, a creature, a sea
wrecking creature known as the Umi Bozoo that was rumored
to attack, specifically in calm waters, where it would rise up,
creating this kind of self contained maelstrom and described as
(33:10):
a black phantom with two huge eyes. Okay, just phantom.
I'm picturing like ghost shaped, you know, So let's just again,
We're gonna come back to this two huge eyes. And
in the lore of the time, this Omi Bozou was
thought to be a spirit of some sort rather than
an actual corporeal creature, and the only way to escape
(33:34):
this thing was to kind of almost like distract it
like a cat, you know, with like a like a
mouse toy or like a feather. But they would use
what they referred to as a bottomless barrel, and I
had to offer Mike ask Ben to clarify what the
hell that is. And it's it's pretty simple when you
think about it. A bottomless barrel is a barrel with
no bottom, a cylinder. You take out both ends and
(33:57):
it becomes bottomless and infinite, and it would just like
be all, what the hell is this? I got it?
Oh my gosh, and they need to sail away while
it's confused.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
That's the thing about folklore, right, we see the truth
but told slant. As Emily Dickinson would later go on
to note, what's odd about this and what differentiates this
folklore from a lot of other folklore throughout human civilization,
unlest it's human and pre human civilization, but no spoilers,
that's a different episode, is that the folklore here does
(34:29):
have often provable I will say provable seeds of the truth.
There's the little grain of sand that makes the pearl
of legend. Research shows the ocean has indisputably been home
to enormous dangerous creatures in the distant past. It's home
(34:52):
to enormous dangerous creatures now, of course, but it was
also home to things like the meglodon.
Speaker 4 (34:58):
Oh yes, the ma That was a big old shark
three times the size of a great white with teeth
as big as your hand. Hope they're really extinct?
Speaker 1 (35:08):
Oh man, I don't know, Matt. I kind of hope
they're still around, not around me specifically, but just like
out in the world megalodonning even look.
Speaker 4 (35:19):
You said to yourself, the populations of sea creatures are declining.
What's that megalodon doing other than just slurping up sea
creatures or mashing them violently with its teeth that are
the size of fists.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
My heart goes out to sharks. They're amazing animals if
you look at the mechanism of their evolution and adaptation,
and also their existence seems very stressful to me, since
they the way that their gills are structured. They can't act,
they can't stand still. They always have to keep moving
and forcing water through the gills. It's stressful. But even
(35:54):
if a megaladon was around now, it would not be
the largest creature the ocean is home to proven like
kaiju size things, right, like the blue whale is sorry,
dinosaurs officially the largest single animal ever confirmed to exist.
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Ever.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
Ooh, by the way, you guys, I remember there was
an episode a while back where space whales came up
and I was trying to wreck my brain, like where
have I seen space whales? And I said, I thought
it was as artists French artist Mobius, and then I
thought it was maybe Salvador Dali or something, and a
listener wrote in and said it was actually from an
episode of Futurama. I wish I remember the listener's name,
(36:36):
but if you're hearing this, thank you listener. My brain
was eating itself over that one, basically. But yeah, it's true.
And you know I've mentioned that I'm also I have
an abiding fear of large things that lurk beneath the depths,
and that I often have had dreams where I feel
myself as this speck in this massive ocean with like
(36:56):
huge unseen things kind of lurking about, and then like
a whale will come up under me and just sort
of scoop me up and it doesn't eat me. It's
just more of this kind of fear of its sheer size.
And it's true. The blue whale is absolutely massive. I mean,
you're gonna know it when it comes up under you
in the ocean, or when you see it, hopefully from
(37:17):
the safety of like, you know, one of those tours,
those boat tours. One hundred people can fit into its mouth,
not its guts, its mouth, its heart is the size
of a small car, maybe maybe not even a small car. Ben,
what do you think a medium car like a like
a mid sized suv.
Speaker 1 (37:35):
It's it's a car. They could comfortably seat four to
five people.
Speaker 4 (37:38):
Got it, okay?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
And the beat of that heart can be detected from
two miles away. But we've got some other things on
the list of massive underwater dwelling creatures, things like sperm whales,
the whale shark, the basking shark, and of course our
pal and yours, the giant civic octopus. Not to mention
(38:02):
the lion's main jellyfish, which can reach more than one
hundred and twenty feet or thirty six point six meters
in length.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
But the lion's main is mostly creepy tentacles, right or not?
Tentacles creepy? Are they called tentacles in a jellyfish? They're
tendrilsl Yeah, yeah, terrifying lion's main tendrils. Those really freak
(38:33):
me out. Did jellyfish give you, guys the same kind
of feelings when you're thinking about swimming in the ocean.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
I think they're beautiful to look at in an aquarium tank,
but yeah, I mean they definitely because they're they're stingy boys, right,
I mean, they will mess you up and then you
got to pee on yourself.
Speaker 1 (38:48):
Not all jelly hashtag. Not all jellyfish right are poisonous,
but I personally I love them. I think it's like
watching a cloud underwater, or you know, a nebula through
a telescope. Also, jellyfish, at least one tiny species of
jellyfish occupies a top ten position and Bend's list of
(39:13):
top ten animals because it's functionally immortal. You remember that
one matt it grows up and then if it's injured
or something, it returns to a juvenile phase and lives
its life again. We did an episode on real life
immortality a number of years ago now, and there is
real life immortality at least for some animals, and they're
(39:36):
all pretty crappy versions of immortality.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
But yes, I will say the jellyfish outside of their waters,
they don't hold up so well. They're super blobby and
like like a thing that you'd want to step over
on the beach, and if they are stingy ones, you
definitely would want to step over them. But it just
goes to show how specifically adapted they are for life
in the ocean. As the case with all of the
creatres we're talking about today, they don't they cannot hold
(40:02):
up outside of the water.
Speaker 4 (40:03):
But some of those mental wars are very difficult to detect,
and they've got really long tendrils, and you would never
know who's there and it could kill humans. Okay, maybe
I just have a weird thing with jellyfish.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
Well well, also, that's not to sound like a jerk,
but one of the reasons I really wanted to hit
the idea of specificity of adaptation is should humans be
under the water?
Speaker 2 (40:29):
How far should we be.
Speaker 1 (40:30):
Under the water? You know what I mean, Like if
you're I don't want to like victim blame or anything,
because I know life is crazy and everybody's the main
character of their own story. But the maybe maybe jellyfish
and attacking leviathans are a sign that we should we
(40:51):
shouldn't go too far into the depths. I mean, the
more you think about it, it makes sense to ask
could there still be enormous creatures out there in the brine.
One of the things we talked about off air as
we were diving into this episode was Jules vern Of course,
his famous eighteen seventy novel twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
(41:14):
Don't think too much about the unit of measurement there
just to enjoy the poetic title. There's a quote here
from vern that applies to this episode, and it's this,
either we do know all the varieties of beings which
people our planet.
Speaker 5 (41:34):
Or we do not.
Speaker 1 (41:35):
If we do not know them all, if nature still
has secrets in the deeps, for us, nothing is more
conformable to reason than to admit the existence of fishes
or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species.
Speaker 2 (41:51):
So could sea monsters be real? Well, we'll dive right
into that after a quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1 (42:08):
Here's where it gets crazy, and it does get crazy.
Could the monsters be real? This genuinely depends on how
you define monster. If we're talking about monsters, as in
creatures of monstrous size, then our odds of finding one
understandably go down. But they don't go down as far
as you might think, because we still have a lot
(42:30):
to learn about the ocean. But we're learning more about
it now than ever before.
Speaker 4 (42:36):
Yes, that is correct. Numerous governments and their militaries are
able to detect the movement of very large objects from
far away when it comes to things submerged in the ocean,
and as we talked about in our episode we covered
not that long ago about sonar and its effects on
(42:57):
marine animals. Earth's oceans essentially have like roaming detection networks
in the form of submarines, which is very very true,
and commercial shipping vessels. And there's also purported technology that
maybe the US military and other militaries have miked up
the oceans to a large degree. So there's affirmed.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
I think it's confirmed.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
I think it is confirmed too. I know it is
confirmed at least from the US's side, but I wonder
how many other countries have something similar in place.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
I mean, yeah, that's a very good point, Matt. And
we essentially have some form of roaming detection networks. They're
meant to detect other works of humanity more so than
other animals, but they work. That's why we spent billions
building them, and we still have found huge, occluded disturbing things.
(43:58):
So one thing that was tough for us to not
spoil in the Hear of the Fat portion of today's
show is that the source of many many sea serpent
and sea monster myths across the across the centuries turns
out probably to be based in a real thing. The
colossal or the giant squid. Today it's known as Architathus Dukes.
(44:24):
It's as old, like rumors of this are as old
as the first days of sailing, honestly, but for centuries
the only proof we had was really creepy, really circumstantial,
disturbing stuff, nearly unidentifiable carcasses wash ashore, the lone survivor
(44:46):
of a shipwreck shows up with you know, like with
missing crew members and a nineteen foot tentacle that's rotting
in the sun. And then we find, you know, giant
known creatures, especially sperm whales in the in the era
of whaling, right you know the movie Dick Days and Beyond.
(45:08):
You would find whales that had scars, like gigantic sucker
marks that were wrought by some unknown animal. Or you
would find these gigantic beaks. They looked like kiju beaks.
They looked like the beaks of a squid that no
God would ever put on this planet, right, because these
(45:29):
are very religious people finding these two And it wasn't
until maybe in your lifetime, fellow conspiracy realists, that scientists
finally got a photograph of a real life krackt and
that was just like one blurry paparazzi under the sea's photo.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
You know that was yeah, that was alive, right, it was, Oh,
there's one swimmer. I wasn't a carcass, it wasn't some remnant.
It was an actual thing swimming around. And then think
about this. It wasn't until the you know, the Mayan Apocalypse,
I'm sorry, twenty twelve when we acquired actual video footage
(46:14):
of a live giant squid existing in its in its environment,
because there was there was another time earlier than that
where a giant squid was I believe caught essentially and
pulled up to the surface.
Speaker 1 (46:28):
By the Japanese fishing vessel.
Speaker 4 (46:30):
That was the one we were just talking about, right,
was that two thousand and six? Maybe I think something
around that time where one got pulled up from from
the depths to the surface, just in the act of
a large fishing operation. But yeah, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen
as well, we acquired actual video footage of a giant
(46:51):
squid and it was creepy.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
And you know, if you guys ever seen that Noah
Baumbach movie The Squid and the Whale, it references a
diorama that you can see at the Museum of Natural
History in New York of a massive sperm whale essentially
doing battle with one of these kraken like creatures. And
it's pretty epic to look at. Still on display there
(47:14):
as far as I know.
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Yeah, it was there last time I went. I love
that museum. It's I don't know. A lot of that
museum is dark when you get into the exhibits. I
like dark museums. These creatures like dark areas of the water.
They live in very deep areas of the ocean. As
far as we can tell, again, we know very little
about them. They're anywhere from thirteen hundred to three thousand
(47:38):
feet down. We know that they can grow larger than
some whales. The only predator of theirs we know about
is the sperm whale. We don't know how large these
things can get, yet we know that they are stronger
than an elephant. We know that a bite from their
beak has enough force to sever steel cables. This means
(48:02):
that if one of these made it to the surface
in the days of wooden boats, that boat would In short, well,
it's a family show, so I'm just going to say
they would be very deep trouble.
Speaker 4 (48:15):
Yeah, well, what if your ship has a steel hull,
It doesn't seem to matter. These daily can go through anything.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
You could puncture that. Yeah, just stay on their good side.
Speaker 4 (48:28):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (48:28):
The craziest thing about this, it's a real life sea monster.
It fits some of the qualities we described, right, and.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
We know so.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Very little about it. We still have a lot of
questions about large sea animals that everybody's kind of familiar with. Right,
There's a lot of stuff we don't understand about whales.
We know even less about these things. As recently as
June of twenty twenty of this year. Last month, as
we record this, we learned new stuff about these monsters.
(49:00):
A juvenile version of them washed up on the shores
of South Africa. This is not the first time it happened,
but this creature was already thirteen feet long. That's baby
size for these guys, right. It's a mini me of
a giant squid. But it was just about two years old.
We also don't know how long they live. We don't
(49:22):
know how big they grow while they're alive. And they're
not the only thing out there. I mean, I I
say we go full Lovecraft. Let's point out that the
ocean is also home to giant deep sea worms. And
when we say giant, we mean giant. They also glow
in the dark.
Speaker 2 (49:42):
So you know, these guys well as individuals, wouldn't necessarily
be considered in the same league. Yeah, that's a sea
punt as well as the rest of these animals that
we're talking about today. They're called pyrosomes and their free
flow voting tunicates. They're also known as the unicorns of
(50:04):
the sea. But they're they're pretty big, you know, they're
big enough for a human to ride, but they also
kind of create these massive swarms. They're soft and delicate,
like some sort of like feather boa perhaps, And again,
like bend off Off, Mic pointed out that these are
(50:25):
really in kind of on a technicality, sea monster by default.
That's because each of the worms is actually a colony
of a thousands of individual creatures, and the individuals themselves
are super tiny. It's almost like they operating this crazy
hive mind type situation.
Speaker 1 (50:45):
Yeah. Yeah, they're like a big commune, you know, and
jellyfish often also or creatures of colony or hive. But
these giant sea worms are also we should mention because
Chekhov's gun rule. Right, we did. We did name drop Lovecraft,
so we have to follow up on that. These worms
(51:07):
are not eldritch objects of warship sleeping beneath the waves
for AONs, waiting for the stars to be right. This
is not a case of that is not dead, which
can eternal lie and with strange AONs even death may
die kind of thing. It's not We're not at Cuthulhu
level yet. But Matt Noll, while we are on the
(51:29):
subject of waking ancient creatures, it's time to ask what
about the other monsters. We have sea monster news for you.
Speaker 4 (51:40):
Well, as we stated before, we've been talking about giant monsters,
right that we've been describing monsters as something that is
monster us in its size. But there could be something
very dangerous, very frightening that isn't giant that could be
discovered down below the depths. And we have some news
(52:03):
for you. This year, scientists made a discovery that future
historians will doubtlessly call classic twenty twenty. You know why.
They found one hundred million year old microbes beneath the
seafloor in the South Pacific Geyer. This is a site
(52:24):
east of Australia where ocean currents intersect, and this is
considered to be one of the areas of the ocean
that has the least amount of life, right, some of
the deadest parts of the ocean, where it's almost there's
almost no nutrients here that animals need to survive. The
scientists dug down very far, five seven hundred meters below
(52:48):
sea level, and they found something that had been in
a Lovecraftian way, slumbering since before the age of men.
Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, these things looked as though they were dead. And
it's already a great find, you know, goscience. This is
already a groundbreaking discovery to find evidence of these things
that were once alive. So they brought them back to
the lab. They brought the clay cores they had dug up,
as you had mentioned, Matt, back to their lab where
(53:20):
they found these microbes, and they said, oh wow, this
is amazing. There was once life in this part of
the South Pacific, guyer, I don't know. Let's feed them,
which sounds weird, right. It's a lot like finding a
dead body and saying, let's put a sandwich by it.
Let's just come on, let's put a sandwich by it.
(53:42):
It's just between us we're all buddies here. And what
happened is that these microbes, these dead bodies, got up
and ate the sandwich. So what happened after that is
they started reproducing, They started breeding. Something that had been
dormant were millions of years just came back to life.
(54:06):
One of the scientists, and I love when scientists talked
this way. One of the scientists said that this indicates
the insane possibility. Whenever scientists used the word insane, you
know what they're you know, something rocked them. This scientist
said that these very same microbes must have been or
may have been, probably were sitting in the same place
(54:28):
for AONs, and that that is pure lovecrafty and stuff.
Lovecraft was a terrible person, not a great writer, but
a fantastic world builder. And the idea of undersea creatures
slumbering and being awoken by man, now we can say,
(54:51):
in twenty twenty, this happened. This happened. Lovecraft is in
a way real now. And that's just the beginning. If
we go back to the statistics when Matt Nolan and
I talked about it at the beginning of this episode,
we see some possibilities This story is and over given
what little we know about the ocean, again, very little,
(55:12):
it is scientifically indisputably true that we do not at
this point know every single species of life currently living
in there or you know, sleeping for dreamless dark millennia.
And given the global reach of sonar and other detection
methods radar, et cetera, sure it's plausible to say we
have a solid chance of detecting an undiscovered life form
(55:34):
if it ticks a few boxes.
Speaker 4 (55:36):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (55:38):
It really needs to have a relatively large population, It
needs to be pretty frequently on the move and spend
at least some time in that smaller part of the
ocean that we talked about, that metropolis that we study
pretty extensively. And it also is helpful if it prais
a lot on other easily detected species. But if it
(56:02):
doesn't exhibit these traits, our odds of finding drop quite significantly.
Speaker 4 (56:07):
Yeah, it's true. It's gonna be hard for us to
just accidentally stumble upon something new, right if it doesn't
have that large population and all those things we just listed.
Does anybody else feel like it's a bad idea to
awaken aon's old microbes just in case? Maybe there's something
(56:29):
involved there that happened to help the extinction process with yes,
you know life on Earth.
Speaker 2 (56:36):
Yes, yes I do, I do, I do think that thing, Matt.
Speaker 1 (56:40):
Hull, the dice, I you know what I mean. We
are seeing this happen in other places. You know, it's
not just underwater. Well I guess it kind.
Speaker 4 (56:52):
Of is because under ice.
Speaker 1 (56:54):
Yeah, because ice. You know, it's just just fancier water.
So ice is fancy water. Great as our takeaway, please
just remember that out of all this stuff we did today.
But yeah, you know, you make an excellent point there, Nol,
because this isn't just speculation on our part. We know
(57:16):
that the discovery of extremophiles took forever creatures that live
by these geothermal vents on the ocean floor. They are
living off the energy exuded from those vents. So they're
not consuming a very well known other species. They're not
moving around a lot because they have to be by
(57:37):
those vents to survive. So with those two pieces missing,
it would take us a while to find them. And
this leaves us with two notes. You know, one is disturbing,
one is distressing. Or when's a little more emo, a
little sad. Let's go with that one. First. It may
well be that we do discover some gigantic species, some
(57:58):
real life sea monsters, sea serpent, what have you. But
we discover it after it becomes functionally extinct. We find
the last of a relic population. We find that they
are unable to breed. We find that the anthropist scene
has signed their death warrant, and we are just seeing
the dying echoes of what they once were ours.
Speaker 4 (58:20):
Look at that poorant. Yep, there's only one.
Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yep, look at it. The Last Kraken the new film
by Wes Anderson. The Crack was played by Edward Norton.
Speaker 2 (58:33):
And as it turns out, the Kraken a perfectly symmetrical creature,
so that really works out for his MEAs on Sam, I.
Speaker 4 (58:42):
Was really hoping you were going to say Bill Murray,
but we can give with it.
Speaker 1 (58:45):
Oh no, no, wait wait, change it. Kracking is Bill Murray.
Uh you heard it?
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Oh my god. This this can be a crossover between
the stuff they do. I want you to know Cinematic
Universe and the Ridiculous History Cinematic Universe, where we have
a movie coming out in the December of this year
for Christ called Hans about a horse that could solve
math problems, played by who do we say, Daniel da
Lewis two people? Yes, that's right, Finn wolf Hard as
(59:10):
the young clever Hans, and then he grows up into
a Daniel d Lewis sized clever Hans. But yeah, I
love this idea. So this.
Speaker 1 (59:22):
It's not as Wes Anderson cute. If this happens in
real life, our species will encounter a macro level of
a type of sadness known as sounder. If you guys
have ever heard this, it's a it's a manufacturer word.
All words are manufactured, so you know tintinnabulation. I don't
care make up your own words. It's a living language.
(59:43):
But soundra is a really neat word that means the
realization that each random passer by is living a life
is vivid and complex as your own, populated with their
own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and so on, story that
continues invisibly around you, like an an hill sprawling deep underground,
and they live a life that you'll never know existed.
(01:00:05):
You might only appear once as someone passing by, or
a lighted window in the dark. So not to be
too waxing poetic, But how terrible is it that we
might find something right after we've killed it. The second
thing we have to remember, and this is the real
This is the real conspiratorial stuff here. It's a bit
(01:00:27):
of a thought experiment. A lot of the knowledge that
we have about the world's oceans comes from private corporations.
Speaker 5 (01:00:35):
It comes from.
Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Blue ocean navies, both of which are incentivized heavily to
keep secrets. So it is possible, not plausible, but possible
that something might have been found already. In the cost
of revealing it to the world, we're outweighed by the
profit motive of keeping something else a margin right, or
(01:00:57):
a promising dig or maybe you know, you're a military
you've detected something, detected some big animal on its last legs.
But if you tell people you discovered it, then they'll
know you have some sort of classified detection technology. And
then boom, billions of dollars down the Marianna's trench.
Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
There.
Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
I don't think, I probably that's not happening. That's just
that's it's like a comic book level, exciting world.
Speaker 4 (01:01:27):
I don't think you're off base of there at all.
Then I feel all of that specifically the classified detection
tech because I want to believe that there are more
efficient forms of the kinds of detection technologies that we
have now that just that can't be shared. You're right
(01:01:48):
for proprietary reasons.
Speaker 1 (01:01:50):
And now again, like you say, man Matt, I really
appreciate that support there or there, I say enabling. You
might be enabling a little bit in listeners.
Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
But and that doesn't mean extraterrestrial technology. It just means
advanced technology.
Speaker 1 (01:02:08):
Yeah, agreed. And while this idea of sea monsters, have
to put it in a sentence, this idea that sea
monsters exist, they are being hidden by you know, an
oil conglomerate or a navy, a bluewater navy of some sort.
While that definitely sounds like sci fi comic book stuff
(01:02:29):
or fodder for an excellent screenplay, a sci fi channel screenplay,
the truth is stranger things have happened out there beneath
the waves. So what do you think listeners? Now we
hand you know, like the meme. You're the captain, now,
so what do you think could be out there?
Speaker 4 (01:02:51):
You have the trawler, you're in control. Yeah, honestly, what
do you think is out there? Is there anything that
you have seen when you've been out on the ocean,
or maybe in the ocean on a dive. Maybe you've
been in a submersible before. We would love to hear
about your experience. Or maybe you've worked on a rig wooh,
(01:03:14):
that would be cool. Tell us about that. Anything you
want to mention that we've discussed on this episode, or
if you want to give us a suggestion for another episode,
you can find us. We're all over social media. On
Instagram we are conspiracy stuff show on Facebook and Twitter,
we're conspiracy stuff.
Speaker 2 (01:03:31):
Yes, all of these things are true. And in addition,
if you want to get in on the fun with
your fellow conspiracy realist, why not head over to Facebook
and join our group. Here's where it gets crazy. Easiest
thing in the world. Just name one, two, three of us,
a super producer to all of us, make a joke
that makes Ben laugh, reference something that's in an episode. Whatever,
(01:03:52):
We're pretty easy and you're in a great place to
share memes and just have conversation. Couldn't be a cooler
group of folks on there. Here's where it gets crazy
on Facebook. And hey, while you're at it, while you're
on the internet, why not go over to Apple Podcasts
and leave us a glowing review, because it really does
help kind of bump the show up in the rankings
and also helps people discover and as we're entering this
(01:04:14):
brave new world of our five days a week thing,
let us know how you dig it and do it
in a public forum so others will follow in your path.
Speaker 1 (01:04:22):
And if you are one of the people out there
who says I listened to your Facebook episode, I don't
know why I would be on that. Social media in
general is a bag of badgers. That's for the birds.
But I do have a phone, and I have a
story to tell you. Well, you are in luck, fellow
conspiracy realists. You can call us any old time of
day or night at one eight three three std WYTK.
(01:04:47):
You'll have a three ish minutes ballpark. We would love
to hear from you. Let us know whether or not
we can use your story on air. And then also,
you know, if you feel the pressure of that ticking
clock for that three minute time window, why not just
write down a couple things talking points and you refer
to those that made it easier for me when I
(01:05:09):
called into our own show for some reason. But hey,
Matt Nol. A lot of times people don't like social
media or telephones, which we totally get. If you are
one of those folks, you are still in luck. You
are trebly tr e b l Y in luck because
(01:05:29):
you can send us a good old fashioned email anytime
the spirit moves you.
Speaker 4 (01:05:34):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com. Stuff they don't
(01:05:57):
want you to know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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