March 15, 2024 • 49 mins
J. Edgar Hoover was a legendarily paranoid man -- but what if there was a reason for his intense, myopic obsession with surveillance and privacy? How about this: Did you ever wonder why the guys have done so many episodes about satellites and space fungus recentlly? In tonight's special episode, the guys present an episode from The Passage, a new podcast that takes you on a ride into the land of the dead, traveling with the Ferryman as he collects America’s most illustrious spirits and delivers them to the hereafter. This episode -- Hoover's Confession -- was written by Ben and executive produced by Matt. We hope it keeps you up at night.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noa.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
They called me Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission
Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
But hold the phone, pause your tentacles, folks. Yeah, this
is an episode that's a little bit different from what
(00:25):
we usually do. This is the return of stuff they
don't want you to know presents.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, we're presenting a really special episode today of a
show called The Passage. This is a show you can
go you can go find it right now wherever you
listen to your podcast. We highly recommend you subscribe and
listen to the other episodes because this is just one
in a very long series.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Of Oh it's an anthology right well, And you might
be asking yourself what the connection to the stuff that
I want you to know presents that I know and
love from the past, And we'll tell you it's because
much like most, if not all of those, the episode
that we're about to present to you was written by
other than Ben Bolin. They call him that, and he's
(01:10):
a fantastic writer of fiction as well as being a
conspiracy realist like the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
But yeah, then the production, sound design, all of it
top notch, just like what you're used to with the
shows that we've put out in the past under this banner.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah, this is a co creation of our pals, Dan
Bush and Nick Takowski. This is also executive produced by
none other than the Man the myth Legend, mister Matt Frederick.
There he is, Yeah, there he is.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
He's right here.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And we also have some real heavy hitter actors in this.
But I think we thought this would be interesting because
the passage asked the question what happens to historical figures
when they traverse the Mortal Veil when they joined the
Great Majority?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
What happens with Oh yeah, And in the story, you're
basically you've basically got the ferryman right for mythology, the
ferryman that takes you across the river. And in order
to pay this ferryman, each individual person who dies has
to give their story. That's all it is. That's the payment, right,
let me tell you what happened in my life. And
(02:21):
in this show, the Ferryman is always played by an
amazing actor named Dan Fogler who you'd probably know him
from Fantastic Beasts or the Web, that JK. Rowling series,
and he's just got an amazing crazy voice you're not
gonna believe when you hear it. But we've also got
an awesome actor, Stuart Skelton playing our main character in
(02:42):
this episode. Who is it?
Speaker 5 (02:45):
J Edgar Hoover? You know him? You know him?
Speaker 6 (02:48):
Uh?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
This is this?
Speaker 6 (02:50):
You know?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
This is a peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
Folks.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
We are big, big fans of the show. Every episode
that's come out as a banger. We thought this would,
in particular, would be of interest to you because it
kind of gives you a peek behind the curtain into
our mutual thought process. If you ever asked yourself, why
are these guys talking about satellites so much? Or what
is this weird obsession with space fungus? The answer is
(03:16):
we were working on this.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Well, let's not give any spoilers before we listen to
this episode, so please check it out and then we'll
return after you've experienced it.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
I am they're very man.
Speaker 7 (03:46):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
I regret to tell you that very many American.
Speaker 8 (04:04):
Lives in love.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
What bird to out from the car.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
He's dead, whether he president or.
Speaker 6 (04:15):
Not yet known.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Four hours people must get up and identification design.
Speaker 8 (04:22):
I'm here in the in between to collect their spirits
and carry them to what comes next.
Speaker 7 (04:32):
This road is.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
Not on any map.
Speaker 8 (04:37):
It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and.
Speaker 7 (04:43):
Their greatest fear. All I ask for in payment is
a tale and accounting of their lives and the great
temporary that is the land of the These are their stories.
(05:06):
This is.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
The passage.
Speaker 7 (05:56):
It's the morning of May second, nineteen seven. I need
to a pleasant, crisp spring day in.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Washington, DC.
Speaker 8 (06:07):
Yeah, that's a cloudless blue sky.
Speaker 7 (06:14):
To defeat an invisible monster. My next passenger became the monster.
It was in his DNA, after all, in the very
code of his nation. America was born out of resistance,
(06:35):
resistance to tyranny, having suffered that of a king. But
it took no time for the defenders to become tyrants themselves.
Oppression is the byproduct of fear, a force perhaps more
dangerous than any ideology or any public enemy. Fear that's
(06:56):
an infectious paranoia that in America led to a government
terrified by its own citizens. My next passenger, j Edgar Hoover,
built an army to spy on those citizens, an entire
agency and behavior spies and thought police. He was brought
(07:19):
up here at the heart of this modern world, born
on January the first, eighteen ninety five, as if created divinely,
chosen for a purpose. He believed himself to be a
great defender of the American way. Well, perhaps he was,
(07:42):
but that way has frequently been fraught with self sabotage.
His infectious brand of paranoia permeated the whole of American life.
His suspicious mind saw a great many threats on the
map where.
Speaker 8 (08:00):
His actions justified. What secrets did he protect in life?
And what truth has he taken with him into death?
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Who or what are you?
Speaker 7 (08:58):
I'm here to provide you passing.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (09:02):
I see, it was my heart, wasn't it. It was
only a matter of time. I suppose I gave my
heart to my country day in and day out, over
and over, protecting it from a world of invisible, insidious
threats hiding in the dark, protecting it more than once
(09:25):
from itself. It puts a strain on you.
Speaker 8 (09:31):
I'd be delighted to hear all about it this way. Please,
where are we going? Well, that's to be determined.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
What do you want to know?
Speaker 7 (09:44):
Just the truth, the truth, your truth? Please go on.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
Most people can't be trusted with the truth. No, some
one must guard that flame. You have to control the narratives.
See otherwise the sacred flame is snuffed and the battle
is lost before it has even begun. The truth is
more valuable and precious than life itself. Did I break laws, perhaps,
(10:21):
but only in pursuit of a greater good hum probable cause.
That's the achilles heel of this great nation. To combat
the true evil of this world, one must evolve beyond
the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public
ideas of good and bad are at best in plate rationalizations.
(10:43):
While they may seem solid enough in the light of day,
they are no use beyond the light, in that great
darkness with a monster's hide. They, the public and my enemies,
called me paranoid. They said I was jumping at shadows,
and in a very real way, they were each correct.
They slept and woke from one day to the next,
(11:06):
and I kept them safe even as they fought tooth
and claw for information they could never fully understand. There
have always been threats, you see, far beyond the assassins
or the gangsters, far beyond the reds, far beyond the
hippies and the agitators and the bumbling spies, threats even
(11:30):
worse than the bomb. For no sense in standing on ceremony,
Let's be off. Oh right, you want to know the truth,
that's my price. Fine, I'll tell you a secret, perhaps
(11:59):
the singular great secret. The monsters are real, thank you?
(12:20):
So this is it? Then the car where they shot him.
You know, I never liked Kennedy. His soul had an
odd shape, all hard in the wrong places, all soft
in the places that matter. But if, as you said,
now is the time for confessions, my friend, I confess
(12:45):
I have always wanted to ride in this car. I've
seen it before, who hasn't, the slick blue Lincoln Continental
nineteen sixty one. Never thought myself much of a car man,
but all things considered, it's nice to ride like a president.
(13:05):
Just once. Here we are at the end, and I
must be dead, and so what it's odd in life?
I never confessed I was an emperor of the dark.
(13:26):
And it was everyone else who, by hook or by crook,
came within my domain and confessed their sins to me.
Worried just came to us a minute ago. President Kennedy
is dead. He was shot and assassined at the intersection
(13:49):
of Ellman Street. Oh, turn it off. He wasn't the
first US president gun down ell He wasn't the first
gun down in this century. The first in this century
was done in by a goddamned anarchist. I was just
a boy when it happened, and I've been at war
with radicals ever since. Did I want Kennedy dead? Of
(14:13):
course I wanted him out of the office, one way
or another. I had been director of the FBI since
that idiot wore short pants. But I did not see
him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance, a buffoon,
strolling late on the stage long after the great tale began.
(14:34):
Now his father, Joe, there's a man for you. He
understood the red threat, but his coddled sons were too
busy fucking their way through the society pages to bother
with the business of leadership. Am I glad he died?
You're asking? Yes, Yes, I suppose I am, but only
(15:01):
in the way you'd be happy a neighbor's dog died
if the neighbor let the dog bark at all hours
of the night. And so we held the funeral and
went about the business of grown men, keeping our fragile
American experiment afloat. This wasn't my first presidential burial. One
(15:21):
grows inured to such things after a time, and we
had bigger concerns in the pageantry of presidents, those come
and go that keep the American public in their place,
content distracted. The idea of a president allows the lower
classes a sense of participation, and with rare exception, that
(15:41):
is all a president should or can do. The real work,
the true leavers of power, those are not for the
common I do know why he died, why he had
to be removed from the board. By that point, i'd
(16:01):
say all of us did. I may never be sure
who did it, but I do know why the events transpired.
There is a a war, you could call it a
secret conflict, one that began far before my time, perhaps
(16:26):
before the time of modern man entirely, and this war
continuous to day. The poor all fail a lap Oh, no,
my friend, no, before that, I about, yes, our greatest failure,
(16:53):
the first man in space is Soviet. God, are the
Red's crowed? We almost went public with all their earlier failures.
It would have been more accurate for them to say
the Gagarum boy became the first man to reach space.
In return, and this still would not have been entirely
the truth. The Soviets had that hammer on their flag
(17:17):
for a reason. From their perspective, every problem looked like
a nail since the days of their first empires. They
knew they had only two resources, their vast wastes of
geography and a surplus of people. And that is not
a condemnation. In fact, I would say this is the
(17:38):
genius of the Soviet mind. One almost has to envy them,
and I grant them no small measure of grudging respect
in this regard. Where we in the West hold countless
meetings and debates and protests and polls, the Soviet throws
bodies at the problem. From the Ottomans to Napoleon, from
(17:59):
Curse to Stalingrad. The Russians never shied from giving the
butcher its duw. I would never say that publicly, of course,
Yet we owe much of the modern world to their
unspeakable capacity for sacrifice. We in the West pay for
(18:19):
our sins in gold and treasure. The Soviet, the Russian,
as always and only paid in blood. So it would
come as no surprise they did the same when we
finally set our sights upon the stars, and we spent
a great deal of time covering for them in those
(18:40):
early days. That might sound odd, no, given how we
all fought with such desperation to helm the wheel of power.
But let me tell you this, Ferryman. Secrecy, secrecy, and
revelation are addictive. Learning one's secret only accelerates the effort
to learn the next, and eventually, inexorably, that addiction leads
(19:04):
to ruin. We listen, we learn, We use. We weaponized
our knowledge then, as now to our advantage we knew
we must. It would, after all, have been naive to
assume others were not doing the same. I already possessed
the libraries and the post I had the finger prints
(19:25):
and the telephone records, and a vision of a world
wherein every person, American or not, would submit their secrets
to me, such that I could further protect them from themselves.
I suppose this may seem small to you, But you
must understand control is more than a lock. It is
(19:45):
also a key. We sought and seek to build not
only the door knob, but the door itself, the house
in which the door is held, the world upon which
that house is built. In this, at least, those who
come after me will find further success. They must. We
(20:14):
had made certain breakthroughs in this endeavor, and even then
our eyes extended across the globe. We encountered strange, disturbing wonders.
I witnessed infernal, inexplicable things. Our sources indicated that during
(20:36):
the years leading up to Gagarin's flight, fully half of
all the Red Space launches met with failure, usually on
the launch powder within seconds after ignition. This reminded me
of a game my Soviet counterparts played during the Wars.
They crouched in bunkers, surrounded by enemies and horror, and
they knew surviving the bombs would only consign them to
(20:58):
the slower death of starvation. Some had survived Leningrad, do
you understand. So they would put a single precious bullet
in a revolver and spin the chamber. They took turns
putting the gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
(21:20):
The winner, they reasoned, wouldn't have to stick around and
see what happened next. The Red Space program naturally echoed
those lessons. I do not know how many of those
(21:41):
so called cosmonauts got shot out into the darkness. Most
were probably farm boys in the beginning. I imagine they
used prisoners and slaves. It's what I would have done.
I do know the Reds did not plan for most
of them, perhaps any of them, to return. It was
all for the greater good of the Union, as they
saw it, and our side. We could not have a
(22:05):
word of this reaching the American public. Again, one secret
leads inevitably to the next. Some young men in Italy
caught panicked signals from late stage experiments. As always, the
Reds grew sloppy in their desperation. We tracked the signals
(22:26):
as well. Of course, in strange quiet moments, I wondered, why,
what could it be, this unknown thing to make the
Russians throw bodies at the sky. Those poor Italian boys
little more than children. They did not understand the stakes,
(22:50):
the sheer depth of the waters in which they unknowingly swam.
Two things became clear. First, it is best to discredit,
rather than to suppress information that they of the state
is to recognize its enemy. Make a man a crackpot,
and to the public he is only another countless lunatic.
(23:11):
Yet bring him down too harshly, too visibly, and he
becomes a martyr. His story, like an infection, grows contagious.
He can spread across the world. One must poison the
tree at the root, if possible, the seed. This was
not an original sin, yet our second learning informed everything.
(23:33):
After these cosmonauts were returning to Earth, and they did
not return alone, I hand delivered a package to the
(24:03):
Kennedy boy, no guards in person. I wanted to see
his face. I wanted to watch his face as he
learned the horror of it all. I feel an almost
sexual thrill even now at the memory of his ashen expression.
(24:27):
We had little success placing assets behind the iron curtain. Luckily,
our British friends were old hands at the game, and
so it was they who first brought us whispers. This
is how it always starts, nothing more than rumor's third
hand gossip. By the time the Brits reached out to us,
they had lost a baker's dozen of agents. Each disappeared
(24:51):
without a trace, somewhere in that Red country. I did
not understand the signals. The intelligence did not square with
anything I had encountered previously. That I can admit. I
wasn't sure at first what we were seeing. Cities simply vanished.
(25:13):
There were stories again at that point, only stories of
the Reds putting whole villages to flame, every man, woman, child,
animal and building. By this time we had the Corona
satellite program. This initiative gave us eyes across the world.
We did not tell our British friends our game had rules,
(25:36):
but with their corroborating information, we examined those blurred satellite photographs.
Anew villages in the hinterlands of the U. S.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
S R.
Speaker 5 (25:47):
Were there one day and gone the next. At first,
these areas simply disappeared. Later we would learn this meant
the Reds were burying the rubble. As things got out
of hand, the Soviets grew sloppy, they always did. By
the next year, you could see patches of black on
(26:08):
the snow visible from low Earth orbit, smudgy streaks of it,
as if someone had rubbed charcoal across a blank canvas.
I could sense in these strange aerial rorschaks a growing desperation,
and then we found it. The British sent us a
(26:28):
short piece of film smuggled from rural Kazakh country, and
god knows how they got a hold of it. The
Russian satellites were landing, but what came out of them
was not a surviving cosmonaut. I am not a man
given to exaggeration, so I will not attempt to describe
(26:49):
the entity as more than what I witnessed in that footage.
The film appeared to be from a type of motion
camera COmON to Soviet propaganda arms. It is reasonable to
assume the Reds recorded this footage for release only after
they had successfully returned the man from space, so this
(27:10):
must have been a recording of the first such attempt.
From what we could gather after consulting with several American experts,
the entity appeared to be some mixture of marine invertebrate
and what we hung this world would recognize as fungi.
(27:31):
We pulled in a few disgraced micologists, leveraging evidence of
their political or sexual leanings. One man speculated the entity
reminded him of the Amanita Bisporeghera, a type of puffball
mushroom known amid enthusiasts as the Destroying Angel. Oddly appropriate,
(27:57):
we later terminated each civilian knowledge of the film. I
explained the situation to the Kennedy boy in a low
voice as he watched the clip. I informed him we
had consulted with the best minds on offer and ensured
they would not pass their knowledge on to our rivals.
I took great pains to emphasize what we must assume.
(28:21):
We were unprepared. Britain owned the pieces of the puzzle
we were now attempting to solve, which meant the Soviets
must likewise be much further along. He did not listen.
Presidents never do. Instead, the fool, he asked how many
casualties were projected. I gave him rough estimations for each landing,
(28:44):
summarizing a ballpark total. He demanded we contact our colleagues
on the other side of the curtain through the usual
tensely official channels. The idiot as if I had not
already by passed those silly gelded routes. I demurred. He
directed us to play the clip again. It lasts all
(29:08):
of forty three seconds. I noted, we must also assume
the British had likely only given us part of the recording.
That is what I would have done. And still we
played it again and again. He simply sat there staring.
(29:36):
By this point in the evening he had already consumed
his regimen of dope and pharmaceuticals, so I have no
real idea what he was thinking, but at least he watched.
I then offered him a folder of older photographs, combined
with several obscure academic works on early Sumerian astronomy that
(29:58):
had in the past few months acquired a new and
terrifying relevance. The academics responsible had all passed away long
ago or been safely imprisoned in particular asylums, where they
drew with their own shed and blood, the same obscure
constellations over and over again along the fabric of their
(30:19):
padded walls. The Kennedy boy pushed these documents to one side.
He demanded we play the footage again, this time without sound.
In the last few seconds before the camera falls to
(30:39):
the ground, you can see the fungal growths burst, dispersing
some sort of spore. As it ends to the right
of the frame, you see what I imagine to be
the cameraman's forearm sprouting similar growths to those of thee
(31:00):
the entity emerging from the craft. The Kennedy boy sat silent,
and I let that silence ride out between us, the
horrors of the film casting silver shadows across his haggard
face in the darkness. We have to go public, he said,
(31:31):
and would brook no descent. The President is the President
and his word is law. I knew then, with some
small measure of regret, this boy will die. We all knew.
(31:56):
We all knew there was something up there. I since
contacted my friends over the curtain. They gave no reply.
The space race continued. Satellites seemed to hold no issue.
Whatever it might be, this thing, this entity out there
(32:17):
in the ink, it seemed solely interested in our species,
and the Reds, may God damn them, once again threw
bodies at the problem. To this day, I'm not sure
what they did to contain the gagar and entity, not
to what degree it cooperated before everything collapsed. Our own program,
(32:37):
the human element of it, had always been a sham.
As we took every opportunity to sabotage those endeavors. We
were like children standing on a shoreline, emptying an ocean
with buckets Corona satellites failed. Each Western asset passed the
curtain one by one disappeared. Remaining scholars tore their eyes
(33:01):
out and ate them rather than read the reports from
the astronomers, who had earlier eaten their tongues, removed their
eyelids and pulled their teeth. The astronomers no longer spoke.
They rolled their teeth on the ground like dice. They
bowed at strange times toward unknowable directions. Our special little
asylum reached full occupancy. Eventually we burned these asylums to
(33:29):
the ground, with those poor academics inside, anything to stop
the chanting. On April twelfth, nineteen sixty one, the body
of Yuryga Garin returned, seemingly whole and unharmed, but the
Garan and the entity were won. Later we would learn
(33:55):
we were not the only group delving into ancient texts. Krush, Chief,
leveraging clandestine assets in the Middle Eastern theater, had acquired
some means of communication with the entity. I cannot speak
from expertise here, but from what I understand, some Eldrich
dialect of Near East got through to it, certain words
(34:17):
spells you could call them, had a limited power of compulsion.
It possesses something like intelligence, though so alien as to
be incomprehensible to the human mind. While it obeyed requests
to perform in carefully curated public events, it displayed erratic,
unpredictable tendencies. For every surviving record of a public appearance
(34:42):
by Gagarin, there are another dozen wherein the entity sport and,
as one officer later put it, ate the minds of
every one within range. By the time my Russian friends replied,
they sent only two words in English, help us. We
(35:23):
were too late. The Russians had made their covenant. As
their own academics went insane, studying calculations and branches of
physics inimical to human thought. The Reds found a brutal,
efficient solution to hold up their end of the bargain.
Gulags became farms. First, they exposed the prisoners, Then they
(35:48):
fed the guards and soldiers to the fruiting spores. Third,
those gods families as well as surrounding villages. A story
about a nuclear disaster was all one need to keep
things quiet. They reportedly achieved one promise. The entity would
not infest other astronauts. It was already here, and so
(36:12):
no current use in returning to the dark Man could
if it wished, go to space, for all the good
it would do, is say. And so the war branched
two fronts. One group, led by Kennedy, attempted to create
an outpost on the Moon in the hopes of guarding
(36:34):
against those things of the outer dark. The other, our
loose confederacy of scientists, spymasters, and scholars, sought to kill
the thing we called Gagarin. I don't know who got
to Kennedy first, someone working with me or something sent
by the entity. I suppose it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6 (37:00):
Now.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
Many died, some by their own hand, and we could
not blame them. The entity sensed you and out blast
a notion away, and it whispered to you in the night.
But we finally figured it out. The answer came from
(37:23):
a suicide note. A physicist a med a seizure scrawled
the equation with her blood as her temperature plummeted. From
what I understand, her blood later caught on fire during
a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds had
(37:44):
their own asylum program, which I had anticipated, but had
not at that point confirmed, their asylum in a forgettable
suburb of Saint Petersburg. Burned to the ground. After the fire,
you could still read her blood driven into the stone
(38:06):
of the ruins. We had finally found a way to
injure it. I stood there in person when we took
it down. The official story is a plane crash. On
March twenty seventh, nineteen sixty eight. The Gagarin entity was
(38:30):
destroyed via the detonation of a low yield nuclear device.
While not successfully obliterating its physical frame, the radiation had
a sterilizing effect on the creature such that its spores
could not disperse, allowing a group of soldiers close enough
(38:52):
to eventually finish the chop. Fifty brave men at the
cost of their own life. Lives. Those men whose names
I never know are heroes. It spoke to me as
(39:13):
its body failed in English.
Speaker 9 (39:20):
It aped my own voice the thing, the entity. It
smiled that famous Gagarrens smile, and it said to me,
I like it here.
Speaker 5 (39:38):
Whoever they call you, I'll see you soon. See the
smile of frozen rictus, A caricature held fast. I watched
it burn, and I wondered as I watched what had spoken?
(40:00):
Is it me? Why did it speak in my voice?
Was it in my thoughts? Had it eaten my mind
as it had countless others? Pronoia again, My critics will
say from their safe, smug, warm and ignorant fiefdoms. Yet
(40:21):
the pawn mocks the movements of the bishop, forg just
forward one step at a time and never sees the
chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal.
(40:42):
Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become
a ghost all its own? I believe it can. I
have labored with middling success to save mankind from that
dark forest.
Speaker 10 (40:59):
I spent years reading, researching what that thing might have been,
what it wanted, what it wants? And I have failed.
Speaker 5 (41:18):
This is my confession. Each time a new launch occurred,
I trembled in the night, and so, arriving at the darkness, now,
I must consign myself to that Greek majority. I hope
(41:39):
my last thought will be of something kind and not
the damning certainty that kept me away from the night
sky for more than a decade. We are truly not alone.
The monsters are real. One day, one year, one century
(42:03):
or the next. This will be our ruin no time
like the present, I suppose. M hmm, no stars, no purgates.
Where's the you know, the heaven, the hell? All of that.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
Seems h this is your stop.
Speaker 5 (42:37):
You're just going to leave me here of all the
goddamn things.
Speaker 7 (42:55):
No, I told you, little liberal, I don't mean we'll
see soon you'll join me.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yes, I am the last line of defense. I am
the great opposition. No more you know an extension. You
one of a million hungry tenders. No, no, take me backdriver.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
Everything depends on.
Speaker 8 (43:42):
Perhaps Hoover was merely responding in real time to marvelous
threats beyond human understanding. Perhaps he was mankind's great savior.
He certainly believed that the numbers who died needlessly, both
in sir to Gagarin's monster and those in service to
(44:04):
Hoover's mad desire to win, may beg to differ, as
did all of the others who faced him in Lost. Well,
it's it's not for me to judge. It is merely
my job to carry him on to the next realm
and listen to his passage.
Speaker 11 (44:40):
The passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman, This episode
features Stuart Skelton as Jay Edgar Hoover. Written by Ben
Bowen with additional writing by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakowski.
Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
First Assistant director, script supervisor and production coordinat Sarah Klein.
(45:01):
Music by Ben love It, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.
Casting by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and
sound designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing
by Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound. Our
supervising producer is Josh Than. Created by Dan Bush and
Nicholas Dakowski. Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a
(45:22):
production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Oh I am so excited that you just listen to
that entire thing, Ben, I have questions for if you
don't mind, Oh.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Sure, yeah, I will. It's thankfully it's fiction, so I
can also just make up the answers.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Well, that's what I was gonna say. How much of
that is a true story?
Speaker 3 (45:51):
No comments? I mean some of it is. Some It
is true that Urika Garren is officially the first person
to make it in space and return. It is true,
according to proponents of lost cosmonaut theory, that well, it
is true that these two Italian kids playing around on
a radio heard what very much sounded like cosmonauts crashing
(46:14):
to their death. And it is true that Jaeger Hoover
was a real pill.
Speaker 10 (46:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
I mean, that's the thing, like we you know, we've
talked about Hoover on this show extensively, and Noel, you
and I have talked a bit about Hoover on our
pure show Ridiculous History. That's the thing that I think
really draws us all to the passage because in this show,
(46:40):
you're hearing some pretty well researched historical figures taking a
step just past the street light of fact, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Oh yeah, Well, and these are stories that make up
the American mythos, the fabric of what it means to
be an American and how it has been as an American.
And it's really fascinating. If you listen to the rest
of the series, you're gonna hear what job Maybe we
just name off a couple of them. Jim Jones is
one of the characters you're gonna hear from Octavia Butler,
(47:13):
love that one. Robert Johnson, that's the devil at the
crossroads learning to play an instrument so well, right, is
a great ye Oppenheimer's in there. Just amazing stuff. So
we highly recommend you listen to the rest of the
series and let them know what you think, to leave
(47:33):
a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Those reviews, by the way, do matter a great deal,
and we tried not to every episode ask for reviews
on things, but it would it would be a big
deal to us and to the team that did such
fantastic work if you could just take a little bit
of time just drop some stars our way. We are
(48:01):
grateful for your time and we appreciate you tuning in.
And I hope the story is.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Not true just for anybody who grew up watching this
is so silly. Anybody who grew up watching Freaks and
Geeks or anything like that, or we're into that. Martin
Starr plays Timothy Leary in this series, and it just
he's on my fa It made my year when I
found out he was actually cast and was willing to
do this so he's.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
In all kinds of other cool stuff too. I really
like him and as Guilfoil and what's it called Silicon
Valley Man, he's awesome yep.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
And you can also let us know what you think directly.
We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 8 (48:37):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
You can find us in the handle conspiracy stuff, where
we exist on Facebook, YouTube and x fka, Twitter, on
Instagram and TikTok. We are conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Hey, you want to call us, call one eight three
three std WYTK. It's a voicemail system. You've got three
minutes and let us know. If you don't want to
do that, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noa.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
They called me Ben.
Speaker 3 (00:05):
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul Mission
Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here.
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.
But hold the phone, pause your tentacles, folks. Yeah, this
is an episode that's a little bit different from what
(00:25):
we usually do. This is the return of stuff they
don't want you to know presents.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Yeah, we're presenting a really special episode today of a
show called The Passage. This is a show you can
go you can go find it right now wherever you
listen to your podcast. We highly recommend you subscribe and
listen to the other episodes because this is just one
in a very long series.
Speaker 4 (00:49):
Of Oh it's an anthology right well, And you might
be asking yourself what the connection to the stuff that
I want you to know presents that I know and
love from the past, And we'll tell you it's because
much like most, if not all of those, the episode
that we're about to present to you was written by
other than Ben Bolin. They call him that, and he's
(01:10):
a fantastic writer of fiction as well as being a
conspiracy realist like the rest of us.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
But yeah, then the production, sound design, all of it
top notch, just like what you're used to with the
shows that we've put out in the past under this banner.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
Yeah, this is a co creation of our pals, Dan
Bush and Nick Takowski. This is also executive produced by
none other than the Man the myth Legend, mister Matt Frederick.
There he is, Yeah, there he is.
Speaker 5 (01:39):
He's right here.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
And we also have some real heavy hitter actors in this.
But I think we thought this would be interesting because
the passage asked the question what happens to historical figures
when they traverse the Mortal Veil when they joined the
Great Majority?
Speaker 1 (01:59):
What happens with Oh yeah, And in the story, you're
basically you've basically got the ferryman right for mythology, the
ferryman that takes you across the river. And in order
to pay this ferryman, each individual person who dies has
to give their story. That's all it is. That's the payment, right,
let me tell you what happened in my life. And
(02:21):
in this show, the Ferryman is always played by an
amazing actor named Dan Fogler who you'd probably know him
from Fantastic Beasts or the Web, that JK. Rowling series,
and he's just got an amazing crazy voice you're not
gonna believe when you hear it. But we've also got
an awesome actor, Stuart Skelton playing our main character in
(02:42):
this episode. Who is it?
Speaker 5 (02:45):
J Edgar Hoover? You know him? You know him?
Speaker 6 (02:48):
Uh?
Speaker 5 (02:48):
This is this?
Speaker 6 (02:50):
You know?
Speaker 3 (02:51):
This is a peak behind the curtain.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
Folks.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
We are big, big fans of the show. Every episode
that's come out as a banger. We thought this would,
in particular, would be of interest to you because it
kind of gives you a peek behind the curtain into
our mutual thought process. If you ever asked yourself, why
are these guys talking about satellites so much? Or what
is this weird obsession with space fungus? The answer is
(03:16):
we were working on this.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Well, let's not give any spoilers before we listen to
this episode, so please check it out and then we'll
return after you've experienced it.
Speaker 6 (03:41):
I am they're very man.
Speaker 7 (03:46):
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion,
the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
Speaker 5 (04:01):
I regret to tell you that very many American.
Speaker 8 (04:04):
Lives in love.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
What bird to out from the car.
Speaker 5 (04:11):
He's dead, whether he president or.
Speaker 6 (04:15):
Not yet known.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Four hours people must get up and identification design.
Speaker 8 (04:22):
I'm here in the in between to collect their spirits
and carry them to what comes next.
Speaker 7 (04:32):
This road is.
Speaker 5 (04:35):
Not on any map.
Speaker 8 (04:37):
It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and.
Speaker 7 (04:43):
Their greatest fear. All I ask for in payment is
a tale and accounting of their lives and the great
temporary that is the land of the These are their stories.
(05:06):
This is.
Speaker 6 (05:09):
The passage.
Speaker 7 (05:56):
It's the morning of May second, nineteen seven. I need
to a pleasant, crisp spring day in.
Speaker 6 (06:04):
Washington, DC.
Speaker 8 (06:07):
Yeah, that's a cloudless blue sky.
Speaker 7 (06:14):
To defeat an invisible monster. My next passenger became the monster.
It was in his DNA, after all, in the very
code of his nation. America was born out of resistance,
(06:35):
resistance to tyranny, having suffered that of a king. But
it took no time for the defenders to become tyrants themselves.
Oppression is the byproduct of fear, a force perhaps more
dangerous than any ideology or any public enemy. Fear that's
(06:56):
an infectious paranoia that in America led to a government
terrified by its own citizens. My next passenger, j Edgar Hoover,
built an army to spy on those citizens, an entire
agency and behavior spies and thought police. He was brought
(07:19):
up here at the heart of this modern world, born
on January the first, eighteen ninety five, as if created divinely,
chosen for a purpose. He believed himself to be a
great defender of the American way. Well, perhaps he was,
(07:42):
but that way has frequently been fraught with self sabotage.
His infectious brand of paranoia permeated the whole of American life.
His suspicious mind saw a great many threats on the
map where.
Speaker 8 (08:00):
His actions justified. What secrets did he protect in life?
And what truth has he taken with him into death?
Speaker 6 (08:33):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (08:53):
Who or what are you?
Speaker 7 (08:58):
I'm here to provide you passing.
Speaker 6 (09:02):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (09:02):
I see, it was my heart, wasn't it. It was
only a matter of time. I suppose I gave my
heart to my country day in and day out, over
and over, protecting it from a world of invisible, insidious
threats hiding in the dark, protecting it more than once
(09:25):
from itself. It puts a strain on you.
Speaker 8 (09:31):
I'd be delighted to hear all about it this way. Please,
where are we going? Well, that's to be determined.
Speaker 5 (09:42):
What do you want to know?
Speaker 7 (09:44):
Just the truth, the truth, your truth? Please go on.
Speaker 5 (09:56):
Most people can't be trusted with the truth. No, some
one must guard that flame. You have to control the narratives.
See otherwise the sacred flame is snuffed and the battle
is lost before it has even begun. The truth is
more valuable and precious than life itself. Did I break laws, perhaps,
(10:21):
but only in pursuit of a greater good hum probable cause.
That's the achilles heel of this great nation. To combat
the true evil of this world, one must evolve beyond
the constraints the masters of this world would impose. Public
ideas of good and bad are at best in plate rationalizations.
(10:43):
While they may seem solid enough in the light of day,
they are no use beyond the light, in that great
darkness with a monster's hide. They, the public and my enemies,
called me paranoid. They said I was jumping at shadows,
and in a very real way, they were each correct.
They slept and woke from one day to the next,
(11:06):
and I kept them safe even as they fought tooth
and claw for information they could never fully understand. There
have always been threats, you see, far beyond the assassins
or the gangsters, far beyond the reds, far beyond the
hippies and the agitators and the bumbling spies, threats even
(11:30):
worse than the bomb. For no sense in standing on ceremony,
Let's be off. Oh right, you want to know the truth,
that's my price. Fine, I'll tell you a secret, perhaps
(11:59):
the singular great secret. The monsters are real, thank you?
(12:20):
So this is it? Then the car where they shot him.
You know, I never liked Kennedy. His soul had an
odd shape, all hard in the wrong places, all soft
in the places that matter. But if, as you said,
now is the time for confessions, my friend, I confess
(12:45):
I have always wanted to ride in this car. I've
seen it before, who hasn't, the slick blue Lincoln Continental
nineteen sixty one. Never thought myself much of a car man,
but all things considered, it's nice to ride like a president.
(13:05):
Just once. Here we are at the end, and I
must be dead, and so what it's odd in life?
I never confessed I was an emperor of the dark.
(13:26):
And it was everyone else who, by hook or by crook,
came within my domain and confessed their sins to me.
Worried just came to us a minute ago. President Kennedy
is dead. He was shot and assassined at the intersection
(13:49):
of Ellman Street. Oh, turn it off. He wasn't the
first US president gun down ell He wasn't the first
gun down in this century. The first in this century
was done in by a goddamned anarchist. I was just
a boy when it happened, and I've been at war
with radicals ever since. Did I want Kennedy dead? Of
(14:13):
course I wanted him out of the office, one way
or another. I had been director of the FBI since
that idiot wore short pants. But I did not see
him as some grand nemesis. He was an annoyance, a buffoon,
strolling late on the stage long after the great tale began.
(14:34):
Now his father, Joe, there's a man for you. He
understood the red threat, but his coddled sons were too
busy fucking their way through the society pages to bother
with the business of leadership. Am I glad he died?
You're asking? Yes, Yes, I suppose I am, but only
(15:01):
in the way you'd be happy a neighbor's dog died
if the neighbor let the dog bark at all hours
of the night. And so we held the funeral and
went about the business of grown men, keeping our fragile
American experiment afloat. This wasn't my first presidential burial. One
(15:21):
grows inured to such things after a time, and we
had bigger concerns in the pageantry of presidents, those come
and go that keep the American public in their place,
content distracted. The idea of a president allows the lower
classes a sense of participation, and with rare exception, that
(15:41):
is all a president should or can do. The real work,
the true leavers of power, those are not for the
common I do know why he died, why he had
to be removed from the board. By that point, i'd
(16:01):
say all of us did. I may never be sure
who did it, but I do know why the events transpired.
There is a a war, you could call it a
secret conflict, one that began far before my time, perhaps
(16:26):
before the time of modern man entirely, and this war
continuous to day. The poor all fail a lap Oh, no,
my friend, no, before that, I about, yes, our greatest failure,
(16:53):
the first man in space is Soviet. God, are the
Red's crowed? We almost went public with all their earlier failures.
It would have been more accurate for them to say
the Gagarum boy became the first man to reach space.
In return, and this still would not have been entirely
the truth. The Soviets had that hammer on their flag
(17:17):
for a reason. From their perspective, every problem looked like
a nail since the days of their first empires. They
knew they had only two resources, their vast wastes of
geography and a surplus of people. And that is not
a condemnation. In fact, I would say this is the
(17:38):
genius of the Soviet mind. One almost has to envy them,
and I grant them no small measure of grudging respect
in this regard. Where we in the West hold countless
meetings and debates and protests and polls, the Soviet throws
bodies at the problem. From the Ottomans to Napoleon, from
(17:59):
Curse to Stalingrad. The Russians never shied from giving the
butcher its duw. I would never say that publicly, of course,
Yet we owe much of the modern world to their
unspeakable capacity for sacrifice. We in the West pay for
(18:19):
our sins in gold and treasure. The Soviet, the Russian,
as always and only paid in blood. So it would
come as no surprise they did the same when we
finally set our sights upon the stars, and we spent
a great deal of time covering for them in those
(18:40):
early days. That might sound odd, no, given how we
all fought with such desperation to helm the wheel of power.
But let me tell you this, Ferryman. Secrecy, secrecy, and
revelation are addictive. Learning one's secret only accelerates the effort
to learn the next, and eventually, inexorably, that addiction leads
(19:04):
to ruin. We listen, we learn, We use. We weaponized
our knowledge then, as now to our advantage we knew
we must. It would, after all, have been naive to
assume others were not doing the same. I already possessed
the libraries and the post I had the finger prints
(19:25):
and the telephone records, and a vision of a world
wherein every person, American or not, would submit their secrets
to me, such that I could further protect them from themselves.
I suppose this may seem small to you, But you
must understand control is more than a lock. It is
(19:45):
also a key. We sought and seek to build not
only the door knob, but the door itself, the house
in which the door is held, the world upon which
that house is built. In this, at least, those who
come after me will find further success. They must. We
(20:14):
had made certain breakthroughs in this endeavor, and even then
our eyes extended across the globe. We encountered strange, disturbing wonders.
I witnessed infernal, inexplicable things. Our sources indicated that during
(20:36):
the years leading up to Gagarin's flight, fully half of
all the Red Space launches met with failure, usually on
the launch powder within seconds after ignition. This reminded me
of a game my Soviet counterparts played during the Wars.
They crouched in bunkers, surrounded by enemies and horror, and
they knew surviving the bombs would only consign them to
(20:58):
the slower death of starvation. Some had survived Leningrad, do
you understand. So they would put a single precious bullet
in a revolver and spin the chamber. They took turns
putting the gun to their heads and pulling the trigger.
(21:20):
The winner, they reasoned, wouldn't have to stick around and
see what happened next. The Red Space program naturally echoed
those lessons. I do not know how many of those
(21:41):
so called cosmonauts got shot out into the darkness. Most
were probably farm boys in the beginning. I imagine they
used prisoners and slaves. It's what I would have done.
I do know the Reds did not plan for most
of them, perhaps any of them, to return. It was
all for the greater good of the Union, as they
saw it, and our side. We could not have a
(22:05):
word of this reaching the American public. Again, one secret
leads inevitably to the next. Some young men in Italy
caught panicked signals from late stage experiments. As always, the
Reds grew sloppy in their desperation. We tracked the signals
(22:26):
as well. Of course, in strange quiet moments, I wondered, why,
what could it be, this unknown thing to make the
Russians throw bodies at the sky. Those poor Italian boys
little more than children. They did not understand the stakes,
(22:50):
the sheer depth of the waters in which they unknowingly swam.
Two things became clear. First, it is best to discredit,
rather than to suppress information that they of the state
is to recognize its enemy. Make a man a crackpot,
and to the public he is only another countless lunatic.
(23:11):
Yet bring him down too harshly, too visibly, and he
becomes a martyr. His story, like an infection, grows contagious.
He can spread across the world. One must poison the
tree at the root, if possible, the seed. This was
not an original sin, yet our second learning informed everything.
(23:33):
After these cosmonauts were returning to Earth, and they did
not return alone, I hand delivered a package to the
(24:03):
Kennedy boy, no guards in person. I wanted to see
his face. I wanted to watch his face as he
learned the horror of it all. I feel an almost
sexual thrill even now at the memory of his ashen expression.
(24:27):
We had little success placing assets behind the iron curtain. Luckily,
our British friends were old hands at the game, and
so it was they who first brought us whispers. This
is how it always starts, nothing more than rumor's third
hand gossip. By the time the Brits reached out to us,
they had lost a baker's dozen of agents. Each disappeared
(24:51):
without a trace, somewhere in that Red country. I did
not understand the signals. The intelligence did not square with
anything I had encountered previously. That I can admit. I
wasn't sure at first what we were seeing. Cities simply vanished.
(25:13):
There were stories again at that point, only stories of
the Reds putting whole villages to flame, every man, woman, child,
animal and building. By this time we had the Corona
satellite program. This initiative gave us eyes across the world.
We did not tell our British friends our game had rules,
(25:36):
but with their corroborating information, we examined those blurred satellite photographs.
Anew villages in the hinterlands of the U. S.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
S R.
Speaker 5 (25:47):
Were there one day and gone the next. At first,
these areas simply disappeared. Later we would learn this meant
the Reds were burying the rubble. As things got out
of hand, the Soviets grew sloppy, they always did. By
the next year, you could see patches of black on
(26:08):
the snow visible from low Earth orbit, smudgy streaks of it,
as if someone had rubbed charcoal across a blank canvas.
I could sense in these strange aerial rorschaks a growing desperation,
and then we found it. The British sent us a
(26:28):
short piece of film smuggled from rural Kazakh country, and
god knows how they got a hold of it. The
Russian satellites were landing, but what came out of them
was not a surviving cosmonaut. I am not a man
given to exaggeration, so I will not attempt to describe
(26:49):
the entity as more than what I witnessed in that footage.
The film appeared to be from a type of motion
camera COmON to Soviet propaganda arms. It is reasonable to
assume the Reds recorded this footage for release only after
they had successfully returned the man from space, so this
(27:10):
must have been a recording of the first such attempt.
From what we could gather after consulting with several American experts,
the entity appeared to be some mixture of marine invertebrate
and what we hung this world would recognize as fungi.
(27:31):
We pulled in a few disgraced micologists, leveraging evidence of
their political or sexual leanings. One man speculated the entity
reminded him of the Amanita Bisporeghera, a type of puffball
mushroom known amid enthusiasts as the Destroying Angel. Oddly appropriate,
(27:57):
we later terminated each civilian knowledge of the film. I
explained the situation to the Kennedy boy in a low
voice as he watched the clip. I informed him we
had consulted with the best minds on offer and ensured
they would not pass their knowledge on to our rivals.
I took great pains to emphasize what we must assume.
(28:21):
We were unprepared. Britain owned the pieces of the puzzle
we were now attempting to solve, which meant the Soviets
must likewise be much further along. He did not listen.
Presidents never do. Instead, the fool, he asked how many
casualties were projected. I gave him rough estimations for each landing,
(28:44):
summarizing a ballpark total. He demanded we contact our colleagues
on the other side of the curtain through the usual
tensely official channels. The idiot as if I had not
already by passed those silly gelded routes. I demurred. He
directed us to play the clip again. It lasts all
(29:08):
of forty three seconds. I noted, we must also assume
the British had likely only given us part of the recording.
That is what I would have done. And still we
played it again and again. He simply sat there staring.
(29:36):
By this point in the evening he had already consumed
his regimen of dope and pharmaceuticals, so I have no
real idea what he was thinking, but at least he watched.
I then offered him a folder of older photographs, combined
with several obscure academic works on early Sumerian astronomy that
(29:58):
had in the past few months acquired a new and
terrifying relevance. The academics responsible had all passed away long
ago or been safely imprisoned in particular asylums, where they
drew with their own shed and blood, the same obscure
constellations over and over again along the fabric of their
(30:19):
padded walls. The Kennedy boy pushed these documents to one side.
He demanded we play the footage again, this time without sound.
In the last few seconds before the camera falls to
(30:39):
the ground, you can see the fungal growths burst, dispersing
some sort of spore. As it ends to the right
of the frame, you see what I imagine to be
the cameraman's forearm sprouting similar growths to those of thee
(31:00):
the entity emerging from the craft. The Kennedy boy sat silent,
and I let that silence ride out between us, the
horrors of the film casting silver shadows across his haggard
face in the darkness. We have to go public, he said,
(31:31):
and would brook no descent. The President is the President
and his word is law. I knew then, with some
small measure of regret, this boy will die. We all knew.
(31:56):
We all knew there was something up there. I since
contacted my friends over the curtain. They gave no reply.
The space race continued. Satellites seemed to hold no issue.
Whatever it might be, this thing, this entity out there
(32:17):
in the ink, it seemed solely interested in our species,
and the Reds, may God damn them, once again threw
bodies at the problem. To this day, I'm not sure
what they did to contain the gagar and entity, not
to what degree it cooperated before everything collapsed. Our own program,
(32:37):
the human element of it, had always been a sham.
As we took every opportunity to sabotage those endeavors. We
were like children standing on a shoreline, emptying an ocean
with buckets Corona satellites failed. Each Western asset passed the
curtain one by one disappeared. Remaining scholars tore their eyes
(33:01):
out and ate them rather than read the reports from
the astronomers, who had earlier eaten their tongues, removed their
eyelids and pulled their teeth. The astronomers no longer spoke.
They rolled their teeth on the ground like dice. They
bowed at strange times toward unknowable directions. Our special little
asylum reached full occupancy. Eventually we burned these asylums to
(33:29):
the ground, with those poor academics inside, anything to stop
the chanting. On April twelfth, nineteen sixty one, the body
of Yuryga Garin returned, seemingly whole and unharmed, but the
Garan and the entity were won. Later we would learn
(33:55):
we were not the only group delving into ancient texts. Krush, Chief,
leveraging clandestine assets in the Middle Eastern theater, had acquired
some means of communication with the entity. I cannot speak
from expertise here, but from what I understand, some Eldrich
dialect of Near East got through to it, certain words
(34:17):
spells you could call them, had a limited power of compulsion.
It possesses something like intelligence, though so alien as to
be incomprehensible to the human mind. While it obeyed requests
to perform in carefully curated public events, it displayed erratic,
unpredictable tendencies. For every surviving record of a public appearance
(34:42):
by Gagarin, there are another dozen wherein the entity sport and,
as one officer later put it, ate the minds of
every one within range. By the time my Russian friends replied,
they sent only two words in English, help us. We
(35:23):
were too late. The Russians had made their covenant. As
their own academics went insane, studying calculations and branches of
physics inimical to human thought. The Reds found a brutal,
efficient solution to hold up their end of the bargain.
Gulags became farms. First, they exposed the prisoners, Then they
(35:48):
fed the guards and soldiers to the fruiting spores. Third,
those gods families as well as surrounding villages. A story
about a nuclear disaster was all one need to keep
things quiet. They reportedly achieved one promise. The entity would
not infest other astronauts. It was already here, and so
(36:12):
no current use in returning to the dark Man could
if it wished, go to space, for all the good
it would do, is say. And so the war branched
two fronts. One group, led by Kennedy, attempted to create
an outpost on the Moon in the hopes of guarding
(36:34):
against those things of the outer dark. The other, our
loose confederacy of scientists, spymasters, and scholars, sought to kill
the thing we called Gagarin. I don't know who got
to Kennedy first, someone working with me or something sent
by the entity. I suppose it doesn't matter.
Speaker 6 (37:00):
Now.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
Many died, some by their own hand, and we could
not blame them. The entity sensed you and out blast
a notion away, and it whispered to you in the night.
But we finally figured it out. The answer came from
(37:23):
a suicide note. A physicist a med a seizure scrawled
the equation with her blood as her temperature plummeted. From
what I understand, her blood later caught on fire during
a particularly extraordinary lunar eclipse. We learned the Reds had
(37:44):
their own asylum program, which I had anticipated, but had
not at that point confirmed, their asylum in a forgettable
suburb of Saint Petersburg. Burned to the ground. After the fire,
you could still read her blood driven into the stone
(38:06):
of the ruins. We had finally found a way to
injure it. I stood there in person when we took
it down. The official story is a plane crash. On
March twenty seventh, nineteen sixty eight. The Gagarin entity was
(38:30):
destroyed via the detonation of a low yield nuclear device.
While not successfully obliterating its physical frame, the radiation had
a sterilizing effect on the creature such that its spores
could not disperse, allowing a group of soldiers close enough
(38:52):
to eventually finish the chop. Fifty brave men at the
cost of their own life. Lives. Those men whose names
I never know are heroes. It spoke to me as
(39:13):
its body failed in English.
Speaker 9 (39:20):
It aped my own voice the thing, the entity. It
smiled that famous Gagarrens smile, and it said to me,
I like it here.
Speaker 5 (39:38):
Whoever they call you, I'll see you soon. See the
smile of frozen rictus, A caricature held fast. I watched
it burn, and I wondered as I watched what had spoken?
(40:00):
Is it me? Why did it speak in my voice?
Was it in my thoughts? Had it eaten my mind
as it had countless others? Pronoia again, My critics will
say from their safe, smug, warm and ignorant fiefdoms. Yet
(40:21):
the pawn mocks the movements of the bishop, forg just
forward one step at a time and never sees the
chessboard from above. I've thought about that moment a great deal.
(40:42):
Can you be haunted by a moment? Can it become
a ghost all its own? I believe it can. I
have labored with middling success to save mankind from that
dark forest.
Speaker 10 (40:59):
I spent years reading, researching what that thing might have been,
what it wanted, what it wants? And I have failed.
Speaker 5 (41:18):
This is my confession. Each time a new launch occurred,
I trembled in the night, and so, arriving at the darkness, now,
I must consign myself to that Greek majority. I hope
(41:39):
my last thought will be of something kind and not
the damning certainty that kept me away from the night
sky for more than a decade. We are truly not alone.
The monsters are real. One day, one year, one century
(42:03):
or the next. This will be our ruin no time
like the present, I suppose. M hmm, no stars, no purgates.
Where's the you know, the heaven, the hell? All of that.
Speaker 6 (42:32):
Seems h this is your stop.
Speaker 5 (42:37):
You're just going to leave me here of all the
goddamn things.
Speaker 7 (42:55):
No, I told you, little liberal, I don't mean we'll
see soon you'll join me.
Speaker 5 (43:04):
Yes, I am the last line of defense. I am
the great opposition. No more you know an extension. You
one of a million hungry tenders. No, no, take me backdriver.
Speaker 6 (43:24):
Everything depends on.
Speaker 8 (43:42):
Perhaps Hoover was merely responding in real time to marvelous
threats beyond human understanding. Perhaps he was mankind's great savior.
He certainly believed that the numbers who died needlessly, both
in sir to Gagarin's monster and those in service to
(44:04):
Hoover's mad desire to win, may beg to differ, as
did all of the others who faced him in Lost. Well,
it's it's not for me to judge. It is merely
my job to carry him on to the next realm
and listen to his passage.
Speaker 11 (44:40):
The passage stars Dan Fogler as the Ferryman, This episode
features Stuart Skelton as Jay Edgar Hoover. Written by Ben
Bowen with additional writing by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakowski.
Our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams.
First Assistant director, script supervisor and production coordinat Sarah Klein.
(45:01):
Music by Ben love It, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.
Casting by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and
sound designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing
by Jan Campos. Additional sound editing by Racket Sound. Our
supervising producer is Josh Than. Created by Dan Bush and
Nicholas Dakowski. Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a
(45:22):
production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
Speaker 1 (45:32):
Oh I am so excited that you just listen to
that entire thing, Ben, I have questions for if you
don't mind, Oh.
Speaker 3 (45:38):
Sure, yeah, I will. It's thankfully it's fiction, so I
can also just make up the answers.
Speaker 1 (45:45):
Well, that's what I was gonna say. How much of
that is a true story?
Speaker 3 (45:51):
No comments? I mean some of it is. Some It
is true that Urika Garren is officially the first person
to make it in space and return. It is true,
according to proponents of lost cosmonaut theory, that well, it
is true that these two Italian kids playing around on
a radio heard what very much sounded like cosmonauts crashing
(46:14):
to their death. And it is true that Jaeger Hoover
was a real pill.
Speaker 10 (46:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (46:20):
I mean, that's the thing, like we you know, we've
talked about Hoover on this show extensively, and Noel, you
and I have talked a bit about Hoover on our
pure show Ridiculous History. That's the thing that I think
really draws us all to the passage because in this show,
(46:40):
you're hearing some pretty well researched historical figures taking a
step just past the street light of fact, you know
what I mean?
Speaker 1 (46:49):
Oh yeah, Well, and these are stories that make up
the American mythos, the fabric of what it means to
be an American and how it has been as an American.
And it's really fascinating. If you listen to the rest
of the series, you're gonna hear what job Maybe we
just name off a couple of them. Jim Jones is
one of the characters you're gonna hear from Octavia Butler,
(47:13):
love that one. Robert Johnson, that's the devil at the
crossroads learning to play an instrument so well, right, is
a great ye Oppenheimer's in there. Just amazing stuff. So
we highly recommend you listen to the rest of the
series and let them know what you think, to leave
(47:33):
a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Those reviews, by the way, do matter a great deal,
and we tried not to every episode ask for reviews
on things, but it would it would be a big
deal to us and to the team that did such
fantastic work if you could just take a little bit
of time just drop some stars our way. We are
(48:01):
grateful for your time and we appreciate you tuning in.
And I hope the story is.
Speaker 1 (48:06):
Not true just for anybody who grew up watching this
is so silly. Anybody who grew up watching Freaks and
Geeks or anything like that, or we're into that. Martin
Starr plays Timothy Leary in this series, and it just
he's on my fa It made my year when I
found out he was actually cast and was willing to
do this so he's.
Speaker 2 (48:24):
In all kinds of other cool stuff too. I really
like him and as Guilfoil and what's it called Silicon
Valley Man, he's awesome yep.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
And you can also let us know what you think directly.
We try to be easy to find online.
Speaker 8 (48:37):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (48:37):
You can find us in the handle conspiracy stuff, where
we exist on Facebook, YouTube and x fka, Twitter, on
Instagram and TikTok. We are conspiracy Stuff show.
Speaker 1 (48:48):
Hey, you want to call us, call one eight three
three std WYTK. It's a voicemail system. You've got three
minutes and let us know. If you don't want to
do that, why not instead send us a good old
fashioned email.
Speaker 3 (49:00):
We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com
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Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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