January 12, 2018 • 55 mins
What’s going on with all these stories about strange skeletons? From legends of the crystal skull to allegations of ancient extraterrestrial remains and giants, it seems the world is chock-full of mysterious, semi-humanoid remains. Join Ben, Matt and Noel as they delve into some of the strangest cases, attempting to separate fact from fiction … and cover stories from coverups.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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. Hello,
(00:24):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Mac,
my name is Nold Baby Skeletons brand. They call me Ben.
We are with our super producer Paul Decent and you
are you that makes this stuff they don't want you
to know. Let's get morbid from the jump. Why I
was trying to do that with my nick preface. I
like it. I like it. I think it's a good nickname. Yep.
(00:47):
Well that's the thing. It'll hit you sometimes. Um, we
don't know what environment and find yourself in while you're
listening to this. But if there are other people around,
take a moment look around, don't be super creepy, don't
crazy eye contact, just look at look at them, that
the bodies around you, and realize that all of them
are you know, essentially they're they're like, uh, their flesh
(01:11):
and their organs and their eyes and their muscles and expressions.
It's all like painting over a house, and that house
is the skeleton. Everybody is essentially a body smuggling a
skeleton around kind of like that. It's super creepy. Yeah,
skeleton smugglers. And then really, the next time you talk
or move your hands, just think about it. Really, think
about your jaw and your teeth and how it's connected up.
(01:33):
I promise it won't get weird. You'll be fine. The
hip bones connected to the al Right, we are building
a very strange skeleton, and that's good because that pertains
to this episode. Right, we've examined stories of strange cadavers
and ancient artifacts and past episodes and long time listeners
(01:54):
you may recall the work we've done on legends of giants, allegations,
alien artifacts, and lost civilizations right multiple times. No, we
don't forget the video series on early Man, Dennis Ovans,
Neanderthal's Hobbits and so on. We've covered a lot of
this stuff in the past, even aliens. No way, not
(02:18):
us a couple of times. Well, today we are uh,
not restoring. We're exploring bizarre skeletons, skulls, and other remains,
physical relics that, according to some people, proved there's much
more to the historical record than what you find written
in textbooks. And hold the phone turns out. There are
a lot of bizarre skeleton stories to go around, So
(02:42):
we're going to kind of do a bit of a
grabby bag of sorts today, right, Yeah, definitely a grabby bag,
grizzly grab bag, grizzly, grabby bag grim Goldatha, which does
the etymologically that word originally meant place of bones, a
place of skulls? Yeah, is that where Goth comes from?
And that's probably the visi Goths. I'd be interested. I
(03:04):
don't know enough about Goth and we should, we should
find out. Or if you consider yourself a Goth while
you're listening to this, more power to you. Let us know.
It all goes back to Bauhaus and bell legos He
is dead and that's all I know. That's very true.
And uh like Bella Legosie. Many artifacts also have some
sort of story or legend or even conspiracy theory attached
(03:26):
to them. But today we ask how many of these
are mere legends, how many are outright hoaxes? Are any
of these stories true? It's possible. Let's dig in every day,
so so at institutions across across the world, the entire globe,
(03:52):
at dig sites in museums and laboratories. Experts are constantly
sifting through human remains, architecture, role remains, in hopes of
shedding some kind of light on our past, our species,
humanity in general, and painting a better, sharper picture of
our origin story, where we've been, where we come from.
(04:13):
And there's a good news bad news scenario here. Let's
do the good news first. Although the sound cue for
good news bad news or something like that, Yeah, let's
try it out. We should have good news as a
really really happy thing. And then oh no, let's do
it opposite. Let's do the good news queue is really
ominous like good news, yeah, and then bad news is
(04:37):
like bad news. We're gonna workshop this, Yeah, we're gonna
like it. I like the direction that's setting. But well,
I think we've given a super producer, Paul, some stuff
to work with. So, uh, you know, take it away, Paul,
this will be our good news cue. Good I like it.
What do you think good news? It feels good to me? Hey? Uh,
(05:01):
So here's the good news. It's that we are as
a species continually discovering new information, testing and revising theories,
and we're also applying new techniques. That's good news. That's
really good news because we're we're moving forward, right. The
bad news is the further back we go in time,
(05:21):
the less stuff, the less evidence we have to actually
work with. Not every skeleton becomes a fossil, That's that's
first and Foremost fossils are not rare, but much more
rare than what usually happens to a human being or
any animal that is biological that dies. And they're all
biological except for some of the stuff coming out of DARPA,
(05:43):
right right, right, Uh, the silicon based life forms. Yes,
when you're organic matter, you decay into nothingness pretty much,
into your basic chemical compounds. And this is why you
hear scientists explaining their best guesses for some animal or
hominids appearance based on a few bone fragments, maybe a jaw,
maybe some teeth, maybe a foot or a tobone, and
(06:04):
you're trying to put it all together and make a
story from what you have. Did that ever get to
you guys as kids when you would see like a
new dinosaurs discovered, Yeah, and they have the they have
a tooth, yeah, well, and a lot of times it
would be fragments from maybe the entire part of the
dinosaur but they're not put together in any kind of way.
(06:24):
You were making your best educated guests on how these
things are actually structured. Plus dinosaurs all had feathers, and
that's not cool. That ruined Jurassic Park for me. Plus
feathered dinosaurs, I I don't know why. Uh, it just
delights me. So it makes them so much more dr Seussian.
You know you say that, but you know my position
(06:45):
on feathered creatures and gener Honestly, if I were attacked
by a feathered dinosaur, I would probably be more terrified
than if I were attacked by a lizard like dinosaur.
I'll protect you, thanks, buddy, I won't. I mean, I
would be like, no, it's very good that we have
had this conversation in advance. I'm just saying I would
be in your boat of like running runaway giant feathered
(07:10):
thing python style runway well Levan trying to die for
a long time now, and uh, defending you guys from
a feather dinosaur seems like a pretty decent way to go.
Might as well be a hero stuff. They'll write songs
about you. I will I specifically, it's always like why
did you do that? Stupid things? Then? Yeah, the first
(07:32):
thing I'll do is find my loot and you know,
make some stuff. Oh boy, can we get a loot strike? Sorry, Paul.
So just a background, just a background. Every time you
could tell we're big fans of super producer Paul, but
every time we asked him for a sound cue, he's
got a window through which he observes us. And you're
(07:54):
you're familiar when you've heard, you know, back when Noel
was on the ones and twos there. Uh, we look
and we make eye contact and we try to interpret
his body language. We do an okay job. It's hard
to say. Yes, he's a little hard to read, but
we try to speculate because speculation is important. We don't
(08:16):
want to downplay when when we're saying that UM scientists
today are making their educated guests, we're not downplaying any speculation.
And there's very there's inherently going to be speculation, but
they're not just making things up. They're not attempting to
hoax people. And that's a big, big deal because in
(08:40):
the past, hoaxes were everywhere. They were ubiquitous, you know. Yeah.
The most well known example of this, arguably is the
pilt Down Man from nineteen twelve. This gentleman named Charles Dawson,
who is in an amateur archaeologist. Uh. He claimed to
have discovered what he called the missing link between humans
(09:02):
Homo sapiens and apes, and UM, well it's kind of
a long story. I guess we can get into it
really fast. Uh he you know, he contacted some other people.
They got involved, and they were looking at this skull
and the fragments from part of a jawbone and some
teeth and some primitive tools that he had discovered. They
(09:22):
looked into him and they decided, yes, this is the
missing link. And then another group of people got involved, right,
and they did some further testing. As you know, technology
is growing a little bit as because this is nineteen
forty nine. Now we were gone from nineteen twelve to
ninety nine. They've got some better tools, some better um
(09:44):
scientific testing that they can do. Right, they were using
flooring tests because in nineteen twelve Dawson and the Geological
Society that he revealed his uh discovery, no can you
throw me a woo work to uh you know discovery. Indeed, Uh,
they all agreed that this was this was the skull
(10:10):
of someone who was alive five hundred thousand years ago,
a long time, half a million years ago. But the
testing forty nine proved that not only was this much
younger fifty thousand years old, uh, it was also there's
no way it could have been the missing link between
humans and apes because at this point humans already developed
(10:33):
into this Homo sapien form. And then exactly and then
the biggest thing that the testing discovered is that the
jaw had actually, like the teeth that were inside the
jaw had been whittled down with a tool to make
it look more human because it was probably an ape,
part of the ape. It was. It was a really
bad hoax too. There was one It came from the
(10:55):
skull and jaw fragness two different species, a human and
an orangutang a rangatan uh And unfortunately with the institutionalized
racism tied up in this stuff in the in the
studio science like this is also the age of the
the infamous Fiji mermaid. You know what I mean, And
(11:15):
I don't mean to sound even more morbid, but if
you guys had an opportunity to collect like fake taxidermy animals,
you know where somebody puts like I don't know, like
a tiger with a bear or gives it a blind
eagle wings. I mean, don't don't endanger a species for it.
(11:37):
But would you would you get one of those? Or
would it creep you out? I couldn't have that in
my house. I'm sorry. I wasn't listening one. All right,
we're gonna taxidermy, knowl it's official taxidermy. Hell yeah, I'd
have some taxic I mean, you ever do a barbecue
resta around the middle of nowhere and like you sit
down and there's a taxidermy squirrel on the table. No,
(11:58):
that's a thing. Oh my gosh. I was not aware
of this, but yeah, I ben I would say if
it was, if it was creative enough, and I had
a ruin in my house that was isolated away from
anybody who if I'm presenting at my house or having
a party, they would never see it unless I made
(12:18):
sure they were going to see it, then yes, I'm
okay with that. All right? All right, Well, if you
are listening to this and it happened to be a taxidermist,
right in, let us know what the going rate is
on these Fiji mermaid esque amalgamations. You know, So when
people discovered these extraordinary skeletons throughout history, in the days
(12:42):
before the proliferation of modern scientific techniques, local communities would
often have a legend. Right, we found this group of people,
maybe they were abnormally sized, larger than we are, shorter
than we are, and they existed with this relationship to
our god or our gods, you know, and something happened
(13:06):
and here's what happened, and that's why they're dead and
we are alive. Yeah. And and now the you know,
with those legends still there, it becomes folklore or you know, legends.
And then now with with these new scientific discoveries that
we're talking about, the new techniques that we have, we
have this toolbox essentially that we can test both those
(13:29):
legends if there's any remains or anything like that, but
anything new that's discovered as well. And you can use
X ray scans, CT scans, you can carbon date things,
DNA testing if there's any organic material left. And there's
so much more um possible that we can glean from
the remains of an animal or human or whatever. Yeah.
(13:51):
And in the recent past, I think as recently as
the last few centuries or so, which is the recent past.
And this sort of field. Pseudoscience was widespread and was
often just accepted as fact, and this led people to
create fantastic stories and strange hoaxes, or to, despite their
best intentions, get things completely wrong when attempting to explain
(14:15):
in the origin or the provenance of a skeleton. That
can really muddle up the record, you know, moving forward,
because things last, Yeah, and they they stick around, just
like we hope you will. After a quick word from
our sponsor, well done and we're back. This is somewhat
(14:43):
of the here's where it gets crazy part of our show.
But what we hope will will do the best service
to this will be to explore some of the examples
a Asnal said, grabby bag and they're are so many,
many many examples here, uh, and so many purported explanations.
(15:06):
And no matter how thoroughly proven one explanation might be,
there are going to be other people who refuse to
believe the story. And let's go through some of the
top contenders, the most well known veterans of this field,
to see whether we can find some solid explanations and
warning friends and neighbors, fellow bone people, enthusiasts, bone havers, Yes,
(15:35):
fellow people also smuggling a skeleton right now, fellow keepers
of the bones, Fellow keepers of the bones. There we go.
We do want to we do want to let the
badger out of the bag. Here. We have some really
solid explanations on some of the most well known examples
of this, and uh, in many cases they're not what
(15:58):
they were purported to be yea. And in other cases
there are still questions. Even with all of the scientific
tools we have and they've been tested, there's still some
weird stuff going on. So let's jump right into this. No,
do you want to start us off? Sure do. First
example we have of strange skeleton skulls and graves is
the Star Child. Very close to my heart. Um, you
(16:20):
guys remember the National Inquirer. Yes, I'm thinking of the
Weekly World News. But but there was a time where
they were sort of neck and neck in terms of
schlocky schlocky nous am I right? Agreed? Weekly World News
is a good one, but didn't inquire sort of get
a little more legit it edged ward towards celebrity stuff. Okay,
so legit in quotation fingers for sure. But yeah, so
the Inquirer, um, the Star Child has the same sort
(16:44):
of quality to it as Weekly World News or the
early days of the Inquirer. It came to the into
the public consciousness when a paranormalist named Lloyd Pie surfaced
with a skull, claiming it was physical proof of a
human alien hybrid. And Pie said that he attained the
(17:08):
skull from Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas,
and that was in February of n and the Youngs,
according to Pie, believe the skull was found around nineteen
thirty in a tunnel, a mind tunnel about a hundred
miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, and it was buried alongside
(17:29):
the normal skeleton of human female. It's that about so.
Neurologist by the name of Stephen Novella of Yale University
Medical Schools said that the cranium had qualities exhibited characteristics
of a child who had died as a result of
(17:51):
congenital hydrocephalus, and the deformations were the result of accumulations
of surree bro spinal fluid within the skull. Estimated the
child to be about four point five to five years
at a time of death. Is just heartbreaking, you know. Yeah,
(18:11):
In the DNA testing that occurred in what was that
and then again in two thousand three it confirmed pretty
much beyond the shadow of a doubt that the skull
belonged to a male, completely human male. But you'll still
see this, you'll still see this skull or photographs of
it shown as existence of a cover up. But in
(18:32):
this case in particular, as we said, there is extensive
testing available. And yeah, I would just say looking at
the pictures online of the starchild skull that I remember
seeing in papers and in some of the more it's
not the UFO magazine. Well actually, yeah, I do remember
(18:53):
any of the magazine seeing a picture of this. Um.
It does look a little strange if you just see
the part because it's pretty much the top of the
skull and the ocular area and going down to kind
of the top job, but without really the jaw and
jaw yeah, no lower jaw, And it does look a
bit strange when you when you see it, and there's
(19:15):
there's this aspect of it as well. One more mystery remains,
at least in my opinion, guarding the star Child, and
that's the that's the DNA that tests that they conducted
upon the star Child they were able to conduct similar
DNA test on the normal female skeleton that was found
(19:38):
next to it, and that skeleton is not the star
child's mother. So there's a strange story there, and we'll
probably never know, sort of a Guardians of the Galaxy
kind of scenario spoiler alert, quite possibly. And so we
we pretty much as a species, we without knowing the
(20:01):
individual story of what happened to this poor, unfortunate soul.
We do know that it was human the entire time
this this stuff happened and probably had a very hard
and painful life. Yeah, and not a very long one,
A pretty sad story. But we can lighten it up
a little bit. Uh, did you you guys? I think
(20:23):
we may have talked about this on the air before.
See the most recent Indiana Jones film. Oh yeah, I
couldn't get through it, man. I thought it was a
pretty atrocious. You liked it? I mean, look like is
uh maybe not how I would describe it. I went
into it. I got some Indiana Jones back in my
(20:45):
life for a little bit, you know. I mean I
got all that. I got the whip, I got the gun,
I got Harrison Ford. It's been five years, right, five
years plus. I can't believe that that's not true. Is
that true? Since the Crystal skulls? Yeah, yeah, I guess
I'll remember about it. What is there's a part where
he survives a nuclear attack by climbing into a refrigerator
(21:06):
and gets blown halfway across this warehouse or whatever and
tumbles out like you know, hunky Dory or whatever. But
someone reminded me that, like Indiana Jones is sort of
a superhuman character. Yeah, because that's that's one of the
parts of the film that everybody remembers is the fridge scene.
(21:27):
It's replaced Jump in the Shark right right, and it
was hopping the fridge ridge. That's pretty good. That might
be that might be on TV tropes or something. They
remember that, and they also remember the the the endings. Yeah,
in the spoiler territory. Yeah, let's do it, okay. The
only thing that really bothered me on a personal level
about the film, um, despite the problematic the multiple problematic
(21:50):
issues with Indiana Jones overall, the fact that Ninja's show
up with no precedence, no explanation, just like in this
jungle and there's like crawling out and before you ask, no,
they're not ninja esque people. They're ninja's like Japanese ninjas.
(22:11):
Just the part where they're swinging on vines and stuff too,
like literally is swinging like Tarzan. Oh yeah, I forgot
about that part. And at the monkeys join him, I think, yeah,
just for a second, just like a dolphin. Uh seeing
that boat, they're just really just swinging. How many sharks
(22:32):
were in this movie? So so at the very end,
the reason we bring bringing this up, it's uh, Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Kingdom. Okay, Uh,
one of the big mcguffins in there is this skull,
this artifact, this unknown thing, and it is crystal and
(22:52):
it turns out that it is a have we ruined
the movie? We already gave a spoiler alert? Okay is
uh we we said more than five years right at
this point, I can IMDb, Oh, we're good, alright, we're good.
Paul just told us. Producer Paul just told us that
(23:13):
came out in no way, so we are free and clear,
and that means we can tell you that at the
very end, Uh, they find that this skull is one
of like twelve and it was removed from the actual
body the crystall embody or skeleton of this ancient alien
one of twelve and when you put it back on,
it comes right back to life, because that's how aliens work.
(23:36):
And uh, this is like most Indiana Jones stuff. It's
based on a lot of the who would you say,
nineteen twenties to forties stuff, and this one takes place
in the fifties, this film, but it pulls from the
crystal skull mythology, which actually occurred in the crystal skulls
(23:58):
of stone carving in the shape of human skull. It
could be like a few inches to life size. Some
are made of pure courts crystal. Those are probably the
most famous ones. Others might be some other type of stone,
and they some of them are genuine artifacts from meso
American cultures and they're called skull masks or death heads.
(24:20):
But the skulls we're talking about in this instance are
those to whom some spiritualists attribute extraordinary supernatural origins and
or powers. You can look in this and see the future.
You can get emanations, you can um astraally project into
the past, much like a crystal ball. Very similar. Yeah,
(24:41):
and the most famous of these is the Mitchell Hedges
skull of doom. Uh. The story goes that was discovered
by a seventeen year old Anna Mitchell Hedges in seven
while she was with her father on an excavation in
a Mayan city called Lubuntuan in Belize. And this they
were excavating this because her father thought that he would
(25:04):
find Atlantis. Yes, always looking for Atlantis. In retrospect, a
fellow named Joe Nickel proved beyond a reasonable doubt that
what actually happened is Mitchell Hedges bought the skull at
a South of These sale in nineteen forty three for
four hundred pounds. It is the British currency, not four
(25:24):
hundred pounds of like rice human yeah, rice or human
fatter human fact. I don't know, man, I mean there
were some soapmakers that were just really in need, that's true.
The story then became more or less sexy window dressing.
The British Museum studied several crystal skulls and determined that
(25:44):
they were all probably made in Germany within the past
hundred and fifty years, at least these famous ones that
are about the size of a human natural human skull
a little smaller. Uh. This the recent origin, explains how
they were made with tools unavailable to ancient meso American
people's at the time, like modern polishing wheels and stuff
like that. She's the genuine ancient objects would show haphazard,
(26:07):
very very tiny, uh scratches and abrasions. So they're beautiful
works of art, but they're not earth shattering evidence of
any law civilization other than our own. Again, not to
be dark, yeah, but they are. They are examples of
a really nice place for me where mystery kind of
(26:31):
comes into reality, at least the actual genuine Aztec artifacts.
Just imagining someone that far back in time constructing this
thing with with tools available to them, and imagine having
that in that time, having like actually holding that crystal
skull in a time when you know, the most advanced
(26:54):
technologies are fire and hand tools. I mean pretty pretty awesome.
Actually that's not true. There's all kinds of other technologies
that exists at the time, but just nothing very advanced,
and having something like that in your hands would be
so mystical. Did you you know? I agree? Did you
guys ever hear this? This has haunted me from schooling days.
(27:18):
I heard back when I was a wee type that
no Meso American culture had invented the wheel when they
were encountering other cultures. I find that a little hard
to believe. Did you guys ever hear that? No, no, no no,
I'd have to get into that. I don't know, but
that's I'm trying to imagine building the structures they built
(27:42):
without any kind of system like that. But I guess,
you know, okay, possible, because it feels incorrect to me.
And it's weird that when I was a kid, a
teacher told me that. Yeah, teachers have told me a
lot of things, especially in middle school that I've come
to find. No, no, no, no, What did they tell
(28:03):
you about the Paracas skulls? Man? Well, I had one
teacher it told me about them. Um, we're just gonna
call her Mrs Bliss, Miss Bliss, uh from like a
Judy Bloom book or something. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty
sure that's saved by the bell. But but they were found.
Did you see? Paul was getting ready. He was not
(28:25):
going to let that slide. Um, It's okay. The Paracas
skulls were found in Peru. They created all kinds of
waves throughout the internets in the world. In after this
geneticist undertook the preliminary or like the first DNA testing
on these and he reported some unknown results. And this
is reported by a gentleman uh calls himself Brian Forrester
(28:50):
and his name because that's what his parents called him,
or who you know, whoever named him? Uh. And so
he allegedly found these skulls had mitochondrial DNA with mutations
unknown in any human primate or animal known so far. Um. Well,
that that turned out not to be the case at all.
(29:11):
The story about mystery DNA simply didn't hold up to
some more cursory examination. Yeah, that's the thing. So a
lot of people were skeptical when Forrester introduced these claims
because he had a reputation the scientific community as being
(29:32):
somewhat unreliable or a bit of a sensationalist. To be clear,
neither Matt nor nor or I have spoken with Forster. No, uh,
we we should say that the skulls in question, these
procts skulls, they they're elongated. Okay, so they do look
(29:53):
strange if you're looking at one of these, Um, it's
the top of the skull from essentially the eyes upward
goes out into a cone. It's a cone head. It's
a yeah, it's a conical shape. It's similar in some
ways to the way you you see a gorilla's head.
The Simian shape of it goes up at the back.
But but even further and um more pointy, cone headed
(30:14):
and lean him back. It is not the cone cone heads.
But but maybe that's an homage. Maybe that's what dan
Ackroyd was really going for. You know, perhaps that is
you know, he's our type of person. He's a full
time uphologist now or he's heavily interesting. Yes, so yeah, okay,
(30:37):
So they said that the DNA is screwy and not
entirely human. Uh. The problem with this, and this is
a totally understandable thing to believe, but the issue with
that is the following, Uh, DNA has an expiration date.
DNA is also organic matter, and as Matt mentioned earlier,
organic matter decays, so there can also there can be
(31:01):
decaying DNA, but there can also be cases where the
DNA is somehow contaminated, not on purpose, just sort of
things happen scenario, right, And now this means that we
have to be able to separate between whether whether there's
something alien extraterrestrial somewhere locked away in the genetic code,
(31:24):
you know, and that's a show for a different day,
or whether there was something in the methodology yes, that
poisoned it. And in this case, we have a pretty
solid understanding of what was happening to create these skull shapes, right, Yeah, absolutely,
the these elongated skulls were probably, let's say absolutely most
(31:50):
likely created by binding, which is this this ancient practice
where civilizations would purposefully change the shape of their skull
to several you know, their varying versions of this, but
the most common one that you can find is this
elongated skull by actually binding it as it's growing. It's
(32:11):
like it's like an extreme version of like foot binding
and in Asian cultures. Yeah, but in this case it's well,
I guess kind of the same as foot binding in
a way that served of featuring something that is growing
in order to make it take a certain shape. Yes,
the foot binding is for a largely sexual purpose. This
(32:32):
is for like almost to show not royalty, but like
there there's a social status that was associated a lot
of times with this head binding. Right. We still don't
know entirely why this occurred. We know how they did
it with a good guess, but it is it is
fair to point out a mystery remains because maybe, you
(32:55):
know what, call us just a bunch of know nothings
from twenty seventeen. But if somebody proposed that we try
something like that with with our own kids or something
that that'd be kind of weird. Yeah, I wouldn't want
to do that. And who knows what effect it has
on the brain as it's being developed and all that,
especially if you're doing it at such a young age
(33:15):
as these, you know, as the skull itself is growing.
I wouldn't want to mess with that. And then we
have another example, the Atacama skeleton. This is this is
a really weird one. This is probably the one that
gets to me, you know. Yeah, we we have the
gentleman on our show, Dr Stephen Greer, who at least
(33:35):
introduced me to this subject with a documentary film that
he made. Um, it's a fascinating story. And this is
in particular where we get to the point where there
are still some questions that I have that I want
answered before I can make any kind of judgment call
on what I believe this thing is. It's it's really
(33:57):
it's really cool in my opinion. So okay, I don't
remember whether whether he spoke about this one in our
previous interview with him for Awn Acknowledge. Oh no, no,
in the interview he does not address, at least not
in in length. But he was the previous documentary they
would make that he had made before the one he
(34:20):
came to talk to us about. Nor can you give
us the skinny on this skeleton? The skeleton skinny? Oh man,
because skeletons are skinny. I'm a dummy. That's great, Okay.
So in two thousands three, in a deserted town in Chile,
um located in the Atacama Desert, a six inch long
uh skeleton or portion of skeletal human remains was found
(34:44):
and according to a local newspaper ben I believe they
gave it a name, isn't that right? And was found
in northern Chile by a man by the name of
Oscar Munos, who later sold the remains to a Spanish
businessman by the name of Ramon Navia Osoria. That was yeah, yeah.
(35:06):
So here is a little snippet from I f L
Science Um a great blog, and you know the i
f L stands for I Flipping Love It, I Flipping
Love Science Family Show. They went into how the skeleton
um was part of a private collection until oh nine,
and at that time was brought to a symposium in
(35:28):
Spain in Barcelona, and then in a group of scientists
had the chance to study this skeleton at length and
they used X rays, cat scans and took genetic samples
as well. Uh and the results showed that the chest
cavity of Atta actually still had um what appeared to
(35:50):
be the remains of lungs and also a heart and
exactly a heart and lungs inside this skeleton. Now really fast, Um,
if we pull up a picture of this and we
take a look at it, you can you can get
a better idea of kind of what they were working with.
So we Norman, you mentioned that it's a six inch
long skeleton, and it looks like a fully formed human skeleton,
(36:15):
everything from the footbones all the way up to the
top of the skull, including the arms and the hands,
the ribs, everything. That's where my nickname came from. No
old baby skeleton brown. Ah ha, there we are. Well,
as we'll find out, perhaps it wasn't a baby, but
it was still a baby skeleton. It was, yes, a
(36:36):
tiny skeletons got it so U it was originally this
skeleton auto was thought to be ancient. But this testing
that they were doing at this time found that the
remains were only a few decades old, um, and they
were entirely human. But there was some weird stuff that
went on with this genetic testing because ten nine to
(36:57):
ten of the DNA came back as not human. But
there's an explanation for that. Um, it's kind of weird.
But because you think ten of this was not human,
what in the heck could that be? But that just
has to do with uh. With the DNA has been
(37:18):
said earlier, it degrades over time. And also there's a
certain percentage of error that you're going to get when
you're doing DNA testing. UM, And there I guess it's
also has to do things that I don't understand. The
entire genome when it's being tested. There's certain parts that
sometimes will fall off the test. This segment, Yeah, it
(37:39):
gets a little weird and again beyond my pay grade. Um,
But the results of you know, roughly being human are
well within the expected parameters for contamination and degradation of
DNA and so entirely human fetus, but so tiny to
be so formed in the way it is. You know,
to most rivers, Atta appears to be a fetus. People
(38:02):
would say, maybe died prematurely, Maybe was born prematurely and
died shortly thereafter. However, to Matt's point, uh, the same
scientific analysis says that there were mature teeth present in
the mouth and the bones were well developed, with the
leg bones showing growth plates that you would expect to
see in a child of the age between six to eight.
(38:24):
And that's also from that i f L Science article.
And it goes on. While the testing did provide answers,
it also raised many more questions. How could a six
year old child only be six inches long? And at
this point we still do not know. We don't just
mean Matt, noelan Ben don't know, We mean no one.
No one is completely sure. Yeah, and it's hard to imagine.
(38:47):
Can you imagine when you look at a picture of
this thing, imagine it walking around and before it was
this large, after six to eight years it was smaller.
In fact, let's take a break, go check this out.
If you're as long as you're not driving or something,
go check out a photo of this and tell us
what you think after a word from our sponsors. Okay,
(39:15):
just a few more examples. I feel like we should
laundry list some of these. Uh. I have one thing
in the notes titled in those days there were giants
because that's such a dramatic phrase. You use that line
in one of the radio plays we did, Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Creepy,
the Creepy Demon monologue revealing his diabolical plot. There were
(39:36):
giants in those days? Okay, Yes, I am in love
with that phrase. Uh. And it's it's quite dramatic, but
we say it because it's cool phrase. And we also
say it because we want to recap our the thing
about ancient giants, right could cover up in which you
have heard mentioned on our show before. The idea is
that throughout human history, from the ancient days to well
(39:57):
within the past hundred and fifty years, civilizations around the
world have been discovering the skulls and skeletons of giants.
We're talking people who are nine twelve feet tall, you know,
well outside the bounds of what would be expected. People
who believe this story point to photographs that appeared in
various newspapers of note around the time, or were claimed
(40:20):
to appear in those newspapers, and proponents of this stuff
also believe the world's museums are part of a cabal
that is purposely buying up these remains and suppressing them
or storing them or destroying them. And critics point out
that a lot of the alleged photographs that you would
find in these newspapers and ones that you'll find now
online are doctored in some way or photoshopped. And I
(40:43):
can verify that several of the images that I have
found on my personal Facebook feed because of people and
you know pages that I follow, are most certainly the
works of image manipulation. You can see that there's been
resizing and uh positing of different images. In a lot
of these. You can see the edges where it's been
(41:04):
cut out. You can see where there should be shadows
but there aren't, where the shadows don't match up. Um. Yeah,
it's an unfortunate truth, but it's the truth, right. And
it's also tough to imagine that if the world is
littered with giant skeletons, some organization could keep it completely
secret from everyone. Literally. That's that's that's a big secret.
(41:25):
It's literally dozens of big secrets, the giant secrets. I
had us all down on that when there was Also
you may have heard of a three fingered mummy. This
was I had not heard of this. This was mentioned
through anout fit called Gaya TV, and they presented it
in sort of history channel ancient Aliens way, like, I'm
(41:50):
not saying it was aliens. This is definitely an alien.
I'm there saying it's an alien, but it's definitely an alien. Alien.
But it's not an alien, right, but his hand I
might be an Yeah, this is most likely another hoax,
because apparently Guya has been accused of hoaxing or misrepresenting
(42:11):
things in the past. However, we are not we haven't
spoken with the people a Guy, and I'm not very
familiar with their work. These are just criticisms I've read,
and it may be possible that those criticisms are subjective
or not true. I just I just want to be fair.
I don't I don't want to hate on guy too much.
But I've definitely seen some things that they've published that
(42:32):
are bogus. You've seen some things, Okay, the last one
maybe is the well one of the last ones is
the Kishtim dwarf. Small human fetus known as Alyoshenka was
found by an elderly woman in Russia. It had an
unusual appearance and it gave rise to rumors and extra
(42:53):
terrestrial or origin. Local population supported the rumors and they
would charge reporters for interviews. Least two Japanese companies made
documentaries about it in April of two thousand and four.
Scientists who studied this these remains said it was a
premature female human infant with severe deformities. Other eyewitnesses said, no,
(43:16):
deformities can't explain this. There are too many, especially deformities
in the skull. They said it wasn't a hoax. It
was a genuine mummified body that was once living tissue.
But the argument was, you know, some people just didn't
want to walk away from the idea that this was
extraterrestrial and was a cover up. But right now, the
best guest for this, and there's not a whole bunch
(43:38):
uh stuff written about this discovery in English, but the
best guess is that it may be attributed to something
called the nineteen fifty seven kished Um disaster, which I
had never heard of and I feel ashamed for not
knowing about this. Shame for shame, Ben, but you know,
for shame on all of us week. We had to
look it up. And as it turns out, there was
a radioactive contamination incident that occurred on the twenty nine
(44:01):
September in n at Mayak, which is a plutonium production
site in Russia for nuclear weapons and also nuclear fuel
reprocessing for the Soviet Union. And it measured as a
level six disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale or INEZ,
(44:21):
that's how I'm gonna choose to say it, uh, and
it made it the third most serious nuclear accident ever recorded,
behind the Fukushima Dai nuclear disaster and the Chernobyl disaster.
I just want to take a tiny little sidebar um Paul,
superproducer Paul, and myself and the super producer Alex and
super producer Tristan all went and saw this movie Stalker,
(44:44):
this Tarkovski film, and it was all shot in and
around these Russian nuclear sites, and it is some bleak,
bleak stuff. It's a really excellent film, quite uh cerebral
and um plotting and very drony, but very much worthier time.
I would check out if only for just the visuals
of like these sites. And as it turns out, it's
(45:04):
a filmmaker and a couple of the members of the
crew died from radiation radiation later in life, circumstances pretty
well associated with them splashing around in these uh these
super fun site like ponds. Was this recent? Was this
still in the theater? Then he came out, it came out,
(45:25):
so it was probably made in like you know, sent
actually was made three times. That's a whole another story.
But yeah, anyway, I was actually a fan of There's
a video game series called Stalker. There were a couple
of them. One of them is called Stalker Shadows of Chernobyl,
and it feels very different or very similar to that,
but I wonder if it's actually a completely different. Well,
the character the Stalker in the film is like his
(45:47):
whole deal as he guides people through. These sites in
the film have a supernatural connotation. But anyway, sidebar, I
just really really enjoyed the film and it made me
think of some of the scenes and it's good for
people to see, well maybe not good, but it's important
for people to see the level of destruction and the
(46:07):
level of lasting effect. These sorts of technologies can have
upon the world, especially on children who are being born right,
and not to mention animals right or plant life. And
we know that this stuff lasts. And as much as
we would like to pretend that we exist in our
own islands, everything is eventually connected, you know what I mean.
(46:29):
A disaster from one place, if it's big enough, as
a disaster everywhere. There was one more thing I found
that it was interesting. It's a bit of a bit
of a crime story, and this is the last one
I have. I started looking at mass graves of ordinary
skeletons who met extraordinary ends. I found one in a
(46:51):
state in India, Utarkand at an altitude of about sixteen
thousand feet in the Himalayas, someone found as many six
hundred skeletons buried in a place called rupe Kunn's Lake
or Skeleton Lake. They date from either the ninth century
to the fifteenth century, and the local community had a
legend about this. They said. The remains include those of
(47:13):
King Jazz the Wall because it was disobedient during a
pilgrimage and with his wife, the queen and his royal entourage,
and this angered the Hindu goddess Mata, so to gain revenge,
she in a local deity named Latu, created thunderstorms and avalanches,
reigning gigantic stones on the king and his army. And
(47:34):
it turns out the legend might contain a grain of
truth because the scientists say it's possible the skeletons cracked
skulls were all struck by stones, hailstones, and that they
died in a blizzard or other natural catastrophe. Wow. Not
the best way to go. Yeah, not the best way
to go at all, and maybe not a legend at all,
but we see how the legend gets built off of it.
(47:57):
You know, I think it's really important to know that
most legends art from a grain of truth. Right, So
it's the pearl inside the clam. I love that. That's
very Are you secretly auditioning for a Disney movie Pixar
character that I can see you? Yeah, I inde. I
(48:18):
love it. I don't want to cut you off, but please.
The last one that I just wanted to mention here,
and I'm not even really going to get into it
all the way, but I think you should look up
a place called little More Priory. Little More is one word,
little more is one word. Yes, and it was a
(48:39):
priory church that also what is the what not in
a nunnery? What is the is that a priory the
place where nuns convent, maybe a convent of sorts, where
there were a lot of nuns who lived in this area.
And this is in Yeah, it's a small it's specifically
a smaller one and it's run by prioress. Prioress, that's exactly.
(49:02):
That's where that word came from. Okay um, So this
place in the fifteen hundreds, apparently there was some strange
stuff going on with the prioress, the person who ran
this joint, and the nuns who were in there. There
was some misdeeds, let's say, in the eyes of the
people who were in charge of it. There's some serious
(49:24):
sinning who was occurring. Believe the bishop shut it down.
The bishop did shut it down. But they're ninety two women.
The remains of ninety two humans, most of them women
and some children were found buried here and unceremoniously. Some
of them were faced down. One was buried with a
(49:44):
child appeared to be an unborn child or you know,
a child that was born and deceased. And yes, and
then several other women who were prostrate on the ground
which appeared to be maybe which is and there's this
whole series of strange stuff that went on with all
of these deaths and or you know, skeletons buried face
(50:07):
down an unconsecrated ground. Very very strange that those are
the usual signs I recognize, at least that's how they
usually put me in. Okay, yeah, well whatever, anybody's got
to roll over. I don't know why everybody thinks that's
gonna work. Anyway, look up a little more priority. There's
more to it. Uh, there's more to it, but just
(50:28):
check it out. And we're uh, we're getting the signal
from ourselves. We've been thinking about mortality for a while now,
so we're going to go, uh, we're going to venture
off and we're going to ask for your help because
we know that there are multiple other stories like this,
and we are actually having we're actually having a really
(50:51):
interesting time tracing any possible explanations for this. So, for example,
I don't we didn't have time to put it in
the show today, but there are a bunch of of
red haired mummies in uh strange places where you wouldn't
expect to find a red haired mummy, right uh. And
one of the explanations for that would be that the
(51:12):
sunlight transforms the hair, turns the hair red. And then
there are other people who say, no, no, no, that's
not good enough. What are these red haired people doing
in this part of the world, with red hair being
relatively rare trait. So we have just dipped our We
have dipped our conceptual fokasha just a little bit into
(51:35):
the olive oil sauce of mystery. Oh not all these
comparisons are gonna work. Uh. In conclusion, it appears the
most famous cases of mysterious skulls can be largely explained
by mundane causes such as genetic disorder, injury, hoaxes, or,
in the case of pracas uh, purposeful deformation for cultural purposes.
(51:58):
And you know, in that one case, there's a pretty
compelling argument for freak meteorological occurrences. But also those skeletons,
other than their grizzly strange death are perfectly normal. And
I feel like I have to make a point about
coaxing here. Sure, there are loads of individuals who claim
they've discovered something unusual, only for it later to be proven,
(52:20):
you know, not to be an alien or not to
be an extraterrestrial or Nephel Nephelim or whatever. But that
does not automatically mean they are con artists, and they
may genuinely believe what they have discovered, and so it
would be unfair for us to automatically ascribe some kind
of motive or internal motivation to these people. Oh yeah, absolutely.
If if I was the person who came across that
(52:43):
Autocoma skeleton, I would absolutely think there was something strange
going on and wanted to be tested immediately. Let's go
right now and let's get this thing tested. Um yeah, absolutely,
And a lot of these examples, I would the star
child skull. I would also want to look into that.
If you know, I didn't have an understanding of some
(53:03):
of the human genetic deformations that occur that I have now,
and I'm I'm, you know, lucky to have that information
in my life. Well said Matt. Well said indeed, And
I am inspired by that, and I follow your lead
in these sorts of things because I'm inspired by you two.
Oh boy, well, we're both inspired by nol. Who do
(53:23):
I get to be inspired by? Oh wait, I am
inspire me daily. Oh stop it, oh man, we're having
an inspira thon again and aspire off and inspire off
and uh Paul nodded, He's eaty in a sandwich or
something really good salad too. I'm hungry, all right, Yes,
(53:46):
So we are off to uh, we are off to
feed our skeletons, hungry for the truth, hungry for the truth. Yes, no, indeed,
and dried cranberries and dried cranberries and Philly cheese steaks
and all all the all the beautiful things about staying alive.
So we're we're going to head off, but never fear,
we will be back uh next week. I do want
(54:09):
to give a shout out to the Mysteries of the
Unknown Time Life book series, because they have a test
in there that lets you ask yourself whether you are
descended from an alien hybrid and if there's any interest,
I'm sure that Time Life will be okay with us.
Maybe we could quiz each other one day and read
the questions. It's it's stuff like do you like thunderstorms?
(54:32):
Do you have extravertebrae? And it shows you how to
account them. It's weird, but we'll we'll check it out.
I'm sure if you enjoy this show, you are you're
probably aware of that Time Life book series in the meantime.
If you'd like to find Matt Nold and I, you
can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook,
(54:53):
you can find us on Instagram. You can check out
every show we've ever made on our website Stuff they
don't want you to know dot Com. And if you
don't want to do any of that stuff and you
just want to send us a suggestion for an episode,
or a comment, or you know, an evite, whatever, you
can find us. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com.
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. Hello,
(00:24):
and welcome back to the show. My name is Mac,
my name is Nold Baby Skeletons brand. They call me Ben.
We are with our super producer Paul Decent and you
are you that makes this stuff they don't want you
to know. Let's get morbid from the jump. Why I
was trying to do that with my nick preface. I
like it. I like it. I think it's a good nickname. Yep.
(00:47):
Well that's the thing. It'll hit you sometimes. Um, we
don't know what environment and find yourself in while you're
listening to this. But if there are other people around,
take a moment look around, don't be super creepy, don't
crazy eye contact, just look at look at them, that
the bodies around you, and realize that all of them
are you know, essentially they're they're like, uh, their flesh
(01:11):
and their organs and their eyes and their muscles and expressions.
It's all like painting over a house, and that house
is the skeleton. Everybody is essentially a body smuggling a
skeleton around kind of like that. It's super creepy. Yeah,
skeleton smugglers. And then really, the next time you talk
or move your hands, just think about it. Really, think
about your jaw and your teeth and how it's connected up.
(01:33):
I promise it won't get weird. You'll be fine. The
hip bones connected to the al Right, we are building
a very strange skeleton, and that's good because that pertains
to this episode. Right, we've examined stories of strange cadavers
and ancient artifacts and past episodes and long time listeners
(01:54):
you may recall the work we've done on legends of giants, allegations,
alien artifacts, and lost civilizations right multiple times. No, we
don't forget the video series on early Man, Dennis Ovans,
Neanderthal's Hobbits and so on. We've covered a lot of
this stuff in the past, even aliens. No way, not
(02:18):
us a couple of times. Well, today we are uh,
not restoring. We're exploring bizarre skeletons, skulls, and other remains,
physical relics that, according to some people, proved there's much
more to the historical record than what you find written
in textbooks. And hold the phone turns out. There are
a lot of bizarre skeleton stories to go around, So
(02:42):
we're going to kind of do a bit of a
grabby bag of sorts today, right, Yeah, definitely a grabby bag,
grizzly grab bag, grizzly, grabby bag grim Goldatha, which does
the etymologically that word originally meant place of bones, a
place of skulls? Yeah, is that where Goth comes from?
And that's probably the visi Goths. I'd be interested. I
(03:04):
don't know enough about Goth and we should, we should
find out. Or if you consider yourself a Goth while
you're listening to this, more power to you. Let us know.
It all goes back to Bauhaus and bell legos He
is dead and that's all I know. That's very true.
And uh like Bella Legosie. Many artifacts also have some
sort of story or legend or even conspiracy theory attached
(03:26):
to them. But today we ask how many of these
are mere legends, how many are outright hoaxes? Are any
of these stories true? It's possible. Let's dig in every day,
so so at institutions across across the world, the entire globe,
(03:52):
at dig sites in museums and laboratories. Experts are constantly
sifting through human remains, architecture, role remains, in hopes of
shedding some kind of light on our past, our species,
humanity in general, and painting a better, sharper picture of
our origin story, where we've been, where we come from.
(04:13):
And there's a good news bad news scenario here. Let's
do the good news first. Although the sound cue for
good news bad news or something like that, Yeah, let's
try it out. We should have good news as a
really really happy thing. And then oh no, let's do
it opposite. Let's do the good news queue is really
ominous like good news, yeah, and then bad news is
(04:37):
like bad news. We're gonna workshop this, Yeah, we're gonna
like it. I like the direction that's setting. But well,
I think we've given a super producer, Paul, some stuff
to work with. So, uh, you know, take it away, Paul,
this will be our good news cue. Good I like it.
What do you think good news? It feels good to me? Hey? Uh,
(05:01):
So here's the good news. It's that we are as
a species continually discovering new information, testing and revising theories,
and we're also applying new techniques. That's good news. That's
really good news because we're we're moving forward, right. The
bad news is the further back we go in time,
(05:21):
the less stuff, the less evidence we have to actually
work with. Not every skeleton becomes a fossil, That's that's
first and Foremost fossils are not rare, but much more
rare than what usually happens to a human being or
any animal that is biological that dies. And they're all
biological except for some of the stuff coming out of DARPA,
(05:43):
right right, right, Uh, the silicon based life forms. Yes,
when you're organic matter, you decay into nothingness pretty much,
into your basic chemical compounds. And this is why you
hear scientists explaining their best guesses for some animal or
hominids appearance based on a few bone fragments, maybe a jaw,
maybe some teeth, maybe a foot or a tobone, and
(06:04):
you're trying to put it all together and make a
story from what you have. Did that ever get to
you guys as kids when you would see like a
new dinosaurs discovered, Yeah, and they have the they have
a tooth, yeah, well, and a lot of times it
would be fragments from maybe the entire part of the
dinosaur but they're not put together in any kind of way.
(06:24):
You were making your best educated guests on how these
things are actually structured. Plus dinosaurs all had feathers, and
that's not cool. That ruined Jurassic Park for me. Plus
feathered dinosaurs, I I don't know why. Uh, it just
delights me. So it makes them so much more dr Seussian.
You know you say that, but you know my position
(06:45):
on feathered creatures and gener Honestly, if I were attacked
by a feathered dinosaur, I would probably be more terrified
than if I were attacked by a lizard like dinosaur.
I'll protect you, thanks, buddy, I won't. I mean, I
would be like, no, it's very good that we have
had this conversation in advance. I'm just saying I would
be in your boat of like running runaway giant feathered
(07:10):
thing python style runway well Levan trying to die for
a long time now, and uh, defending you guys from
a feather dinosaur seems like a pretty decent way to go.
Might as well be a hero stuff. They'll write songs
about you. I will I specifically, it's always like why
did you do that? Stupid things? Then? Yeah, the first
(07:32):
thing I'll do is find my loot and you know,
make some stuff. Oh boy, can we get a loot strike? Sorry, Paul.
So just a background, just a background. Every time you
could tell we're big fans of super producer Paul, but
every time we asked him for a sound cue, he's
got a window through which he observes us. And you're
(07:54):
you're familiar when you've heard, you know, back when Noel
was on the ones and twos there. Uh, we look
and we make eye contact and we try to interpret
his body language. We do an okay job. It's hard
to say. Yes, he's a little hard to read, but
we try to speculate because speculation is important. We don't
(08:16):
want to downplay when when we're saying that UM scientists
today are making their educated guests, we're not downplaying any speculation.
And there's very there's inherently going to be speculation, but
they're not just making things up. They're not attempting to
hoax people. And that's a big, big deal because in
(08:40):
the past, hoaxes were everywhere. They were ubiquitous, you know. Yeah.
The most well known example of this, arguably is the
pilt Down Man from nineteen twelve. This gentleman named Charles Dawson,
who is in an amateur archaeologist. Uh. He claimed to
have discovered what he called the missing link between humans
(09:02):
Homo sapiens and apes, and UM, well it's kind of
a long story. I guess we can get into it
really fast. Uh he you know, he contacted some other people.
They got involved, and they were looking at this skull
and the fragments from part of a jawbone and some
teeth and some primitive tools that he had discovered. They
(09:22):
looked into him and they decided, yes, this is the
missing link. And then another group of people got involved, right,
and they did some further testing. As you know, technology
is growing a little bit as because this is nineteen
forty nine. Now we were gone from nineteen twelve to
ninety nine. They've got some better tools, some better um
(09:44):
scientific testing that they can do. Right, they were using
flooring tests because in nineteen twelve Dawson and the Geological
Society that he revealed his uh discovery, no can you
throw me a woo work to uh you know discovery. Indeed, Uh,
they all agreed that this was this was the skull
(10:10):
of someone who was alive five hundred thousand years ago,
a long time, half a million years ago. But the
testing forty nine proved that not only was this much
younger fifty thousand years old, uh, it was also there's
no way it could have been the missing link between
humans and apes because at this point humans already developed
(10:33):
into this Homo sapien form. And then exactly and then
the biggest thing that the testing discovered is that the
jaw had actually, like the teeth that were inside the
jaw had been whittled down with a tool to make
it look more human because it was probably an ape,
part of the ape. It was. It was a really
bad hoax too. There was one It came from the
(10:55):
skull and jaw fragness two different species, a human and
an orangutang a rangatan uh And unfortunately with the institutionalized
racism tied up in this stuff in the in the
studio science like this is also the age of the
the infamous Fiji mermaid. You know what I mean, And
(11:15):
I don't mean to sound even more morbid, but if
you guys had an opportunity to collect like fake taxidermy animals,
you know where somebody puts like I don't know, like
a tiger with a bear or gives it a blind
eagle wings. I mean, don't don't endanger a species for it.
(11:37):
But would you would you get one of those? Or
would it creep you out? I couldn't have that in
my house. I'm sorry. I wasn't listening one. All right,
we're gonna taxidermy, knowl it's official taxidermy. Hell yeah, I'd
have some taxic I mean, you ever do a barbecue
resta around the middle of nowhere and like you sit
down and there's a taxidermy squirrel on the table. No,
(11:58):
that's a thing. Oh my gosh. I was not aware
of this, but yeah, I ben I would say if
it was, if it was creative enough, and I had
a ruin in my house that was isolated away from
anybody who if I'm presenting at my house or having
a party, they would never see it unless I made
(12:18):
sure they were going to see it, then yes, I'm
okay with that. All right? All right, Well, if you
are listening to this and it happened to be a taxidermist,
right in, let us know what the going rate is
on these Fiji mermaid esque amalgamations. You know, So when
people discovered these extraordinary skeletons throughout history, in the days
(12:42):
before the proliferation of modern scientific techniques, local communities would
often have a legend. Right, we found this group of people,
maybe they were abnormally sized, larger than we are, shorter
than we are, and they existed with this relationship to
our god or our gods, you know, and something happened
(13:06):
and here's what happened, and that's why they're dead and
we are alive. Yeah. And and now the you know,
with those legends still there, it becomes folklore or you know, legends.
And then now with with these new scientific discoveries that
we're talking about, the new techniques that we have, we
have this toolbox essentially that we can test both those
(13:29):
legends if there's any remains or anything like that, but
anything new that's discovered as well. And you can use
X ray scans, CT scans, you can carbon date things,
DNA testing if there's any organic material left. And there's
so much more um possible that we can glean from
the remains of an animal or human or whatever. Yeah.
(13:51):
And in the recent past, I think as recently as
the last few centuries or so, which is the recent past.
And this sort of field. Pseudoscience was widespread and was
often just accepted as fact, and this led people to
create fantastic stories and strange hoaxes, or to, despite their
best intentions, get things completely wrong when attempting to explain
(14:15):
in the origin or the provenance of a skeleton. That
can really muddle up the record, you know, moving forward,
because things last, Yeah, and they they stick around, just
like we hope you will. After a quick word from
our sponsor, well done and we're back. This is somewhat
(14:43):
of the here's where it gets crazy part of our show.
But what we hope will will do the best service
to this will be to explore some of the examples
a Asnal said, grabby bag and they're are so many,
many many examples here, uh, and so many purported explanations.
(15:06):
And no matter how thoroughly proven one explanation might be,
there are going to be other people who refuse to
believe the story. And let's go through some of the
top contenders, the most well known veterans of this field,
to see whether we can find some solid explanations and
warning friends and neighbors, fellow bone people, enthusiasts, bone havers, Yes,
(15:35):
fellow people also smuggling a skeleton right now, fellow keepers
of the bones, Fellow keepers of the bones. There we go.
We do want to we do want to let the
badger out of the bag. Here. We have some really
solid explanations on some of the most well known examples
of this, and uh, in many cases they're not what
(15:58):
they were purported to be yea. And in other cases
there are still questions. Even with all of the scientific
tools we have and they've been tested, there's still some
weird stuff going on. So let's jump right into this. No,
do you want to start us off? Sure do. First
example we have of strange skeleton skulls and graves is
the Star Child. Very close to my heart. Um, you
(16:20):
guys remember the National Inquirer. Yes, I'm thinking of the
Weekly World News. But but there was a time where
they were sort of neck and neck in terms of
schlocky schlocky nous am I right? Agreed? Weekly World News
is a good one, but didn't inquire sort of get
a little more legit it edged ward towards celebrity stuff. Okay,
so legit in quotation fingers for sure. But yeah, so
the Inquirer, um, the Star Child has the same sort
(16:44):
of quality to it as Weekly World News or the
early days of the Inquirer. It came to the into
the public consciousness when a paranormalist named Lloyd Pie surfaced
with a skull, claiming it was physical proof of a
human alien hybrid. And Pie said that he attained the
(17:08):
skull from Ray and Melanie Young of El Paso, Texas,
and that was in February of n and the Youngs,
according to Pie, believe the skull was found around nineteen
thirty in a tunnel, a mind tunnel about a hundred
miles southwest of Chihuahua, Mexico, and it was buried alongside
(17:29):
the normal skeleton of human female. It's that about so.
Neurologist by the name of Stephen Novella of Yale University
Medical Schools said that the cranium had qualities exhibited characteristics
of a child who had died as a result of
(17:51):
congenital hydrocephalus, and the deformations were the result of accumulations
of surree bro spinal fluid within the skull. Estimated the
child to be about four point five to five years
at a time of death. Is just heartbreaking, you know. Yeah,
(18:11):
In the DNA testing that occurred in what was that
and then again in two thousand three it confirmed pretty
much beyond the shadow of a doubt that the skull
belonged to a male, completely human male. But you'll still
see this, you'll still see this skull or photographs of
it shown as existence of a cover up. But in
(18:32):
this case in particular, as we said, there is extensive
testing available. And yeah, I would just say looking at
the pictures online of the starchild skull that I remember
seeing in papers and in some of the more it's
not the UFO magazine. Well actually, yeah, I do remember
(18:53):
any of the magazine seeing a picture of this. Um.
It does look a little strange if you just see
the part because it's pretty much the top of the
skull and the ocular area and going down to kind
of the top job, but without really the jaw and
jaw yeah, no lower jaw, And it does look a
bit strange when you when you see it, and there's
(19:15):
there's this aspect of it as well. One more mystery remains,
at least in my opinion, guarding the star Child, and
that's the that's the DNA that tests that they conducted
upon the star Child they were able to conduct similar
DNA test on the normal female skeleton that was found
(19:38):
next to it, and that skeleton is not the star
child's mother. So there's a strange story there, and we'll
probably never know, sort of a Guardians of the Galaxy
kind of scenario spoiler alert, quite possibly. And so we
we pretty much as a species, we without knowing the
(20:01):
individual story of what happened to this poor, unfortunate soul.
We do know that it was human the entire time
this this stuff happened and probably had a very hard
and painful life. Yeah, and not a very long one,
A pretty sad story. But we can lighten it up
a little bit. Uh, did you you guys? I think
(20:23):
we may have talked about this on the air before.
See the most recent Indiana Jones film. Oh yeah, I
couldn't get through it, man. I thought it was a
pretty atrocious. You liked it? I mean, look like is
uh maybe not how I would describe it. I went
into it. I got some Indiana Jones back in my
(20:45):
life for a little bit, you know. I mean I
got all that. I got the whip, I got the gun,
I got Harrison Ford. It's been five years, right, five
years plus. I can't believe that that's not true. Is
that true? Since the Crystal skulls? Yeah, yeah, I guess
I'll remember about it. What is there's a part where
he survives a nuclear attack by climbing into a refrigerator
(21:06):
and gets blown halfway across this warehouse or whatever and
tumbles out like you know, hunky Dory or whatever. But
someone reminded me that, like Indiana Jones is sort of
a superhuman character. Yeah, because that's that's one of the
parts of the film that everybody remembers is the fridge scene.
(21:27):
It's replaced Jump in the Shark right right, and it
was hopping the fridge ridge. That's pretty good. That might
be that might be on TV tropes or something. They
remember that, and they also remember the the the endings. Yeah,
in the spoiler territory. Yeah, let's do it, okay. The
only thing that really bothered me on a personal level
about the film, um, despite the problematic the multiple problematic
(21:50):
issues with Indiana Jones overall, the fact that Ninja's show
up with no precedence, no explanation, just like in this
jungle and there's like crawling out and before you ask, no,
they're not ninja esque people. They're ninja's like Japanese ninjas.
(22:11):
Just the part where they're swinging on vines and stuff too,
like literally is swinging like Tarzan. Oh yeah, I forgot
about that part. And at the monkeys join him, I think, yeah,
just for a second, just like a dolphin. Uh seeing
that boat, they're just really just swinging. How many sharks
(22:32):
were in this movie? So so at the very end,
the reason we bring bringing this up, it's uh, Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Kingdom. Okay, Uh,
one of the big mcguffins in there is this skull,
this artifact, this unknown thing, and it is crystal and
(22:52):
it turns out that it is a have we ruined
the movie? We already gave a spoiler alert? Okay is
uh we we said more than five years right at
this point, I can IMDb, Oh, we're good, alright, we're good.
Paul just told us. Producer Paul just told us that
(23:13):
came out in no way, so we are free and clear,
and that means we can tell you that at the
very end, Uh, they find that this skull is one
of like twelve and it was removed from the actual
body the crystall embody or skeleton of this ancient alien
one of twelve and when you put it back on,
it comes right back to life, because that's how aliens work.
(23:36):
And uh, this is like most Indiana Jones stuff. It's
based on a lot of the who would you say,
nineteen twenties to forties stuff, and this one takes place
in the fifties, this film, but it pulls from the
crystal skull mythology, which actually occurred in the crystal skulls
(23:58):
of stone carving in the shape of human skull. It
could be like a few inches to life size. Some
are made of pure courts crystal. Those are probably the
most famous ones. Others might be some other type of stone,
and they some of them are genuine artifacts from meso
American cultures and they're called skull masks or death heads.
(24:20):
But the skulls we're talking about in this instance are
those to whom some spiritualists attribute extraordinary supernatural origins and
or powers. You can look in this and see the future.
You can get emanations, you can um astraally project into
the past, much like a crystal ball. Very similar. Yeah,
(24:41):
and the most famous of these is the Mitchell Hedges
skull of doom. Uh. The story goes that was discovered
by a seventeen year old Anna Mitchell Hedges in seven
while she was with her father on an excavation in
a Mayan city called Lubuntuan in Belize. And this they
were excavating this because her father thought that he would
(25:04):
find Atlantis. Yes, always looking for Atlantis. In retrospect, a
fellow named Joe Nickel proved beyond a reasonable doubt that
what actually happened is Mitchell Hedges bought the skull at
a South of These sale in nineteen forty three for
four hundred pounds. It is the British currency, not four
(25:24):
hundred pounds of like rice human yeah, rice or human
fatter human fact. I don't know, man, I mean there
were some soapmakers that were just really in need, that's true.
The story then became more or less sexy window dressing.
The British Museum studied several crystal skulls and determined that
(25:44):
they were all probably made in Germany within the past
hundred and fifty years, at least these famous ones that
are about the size of a human natural human skull
a little smaller. Uh. This the recent origin, explains how
they were made with tools unavailable to ancient meso American
people's at the time, like modern polishing wheels and stuff
like that. She's the genuine ancient objects would show haphazard,
(26:07):
very very tiny, uh scratches and abrasions. So they're beautiful
works of art, but they're not earth shattering evidence of
any law civilization other than our own. Again, not to
be dark, yeah, but they are. They are examples of
a really nice place for me where mystery kind of
(26:31):
comes into reality, at least the actual genuine Aztec artifacts.
Just imagining someone that far back in time constructing this
thing with with tools available to them, and imagine having
that in that time, having like actually holding that crystal
skull in a time when you know, the most advanced
(26:54):
technologies are fire and hand tools. I mean pretty pretty awesome.
Actually that's not true. There's all kinds of other technologies
that exists at the time, but just nothing very advanced,
and having something like that in your hands would be
so mystical. Did you you know? I agree? Did you
guys ever hear this? This has haunted me from schooling days.
(27:18):
I heard back when I was a wee type that
no Meso American culture had invented the wheel when they
were encountering other cultures. I find that a little hard
to believe. Did you guys ever hear that? No, no, no no,
I'd have to get into that. I don't know, but
that's I'm trying to imagine building the structures they built
(27:42):
without any kind of system like that. But I guess,
you know, okay, possible, because it feels incorrect to me.
And it's weird that when I was a kid, a
teacher told me that. Yeah, teachers have told me a
lot of things, especially in middle school that I've come
to find. No, no, no, no, What did they tell
(28:03):
you about the Paracas skulls? Man? Well, I had one
teacher it told me about them. Um, we're just gonna
call her Mrs Bliss, Miss Bliss, uh from like a
Judy Bloom book or something. I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty
sure that's saved by the bell. But but they were found.
Did you see? Paul was getting ready. He was not
(28:25):
going to let that slide. Um, It's okay. The Paracas
skulls were found in Peru. They created all kinds of
waves throughout the internets in the world. In after this
geneticist undertook the preliminary or like the first DNA testing
on these and he reported some unknown results. And this
is reported by a gentleman uh calls himself Brian Forrester
(28:50):
and his name because that's what his parents called him,
or who you know, whoever named him? Uh. And so
he allegedly found these skulls had mitochondrial DNA with mutations
unknown in any human primate or animal known so far. Um. Well,
that that turned out not to be the case at all.
(29:11):
The story about mystery DNA simply didn't hold up to
some more cursory examination. Yeah, that's the thing. So a
lot of people were skeptical when Forrester introduced these claims
because he had a reputation the scientific community as being
(29:32):
somewhat unreliable or a bit of a sensationalist. To be clear,
neither Matt nor nor or I have spoken with Forster. No, uh,
we we should say that the skulls in question, these
procts skulls, they they're elongated. Okay, so they do look
(29:53):
strange if you're looking at one of these, Um, it's
the top of the skull from essentially the eyes upward
goes out into a cone. It's a cone head. It's
a yeah, it's a conical shape. It's similar in some
ways to the way you you see a gorilla's head.
The Simian shape of it goes up at the back.
But but even further and um more pointy, cone headed
(30:14):
and lean him back. It is not the cone cone heads.
But but maybe that's an homage. Maybe that's what dan
Ackroyd was really going for. You know, perhaps that is
you know, he's our type of person. He's a full
time uphologist now or he's heavily interesting. Yes, so yeah, okay,
(30:37):
So they said that the DNA is screwy and not
entirely human. Uh. The problem with this, and this is
a totally understandable thing to believe, but the issue with
that is the following, Uh, DNA has an expiration date.
DNA is also organic matter, and as Matt mentioned earlier,
organic matter decays, so there can also there can be
(31:01):
decaying DNA, but there can also be cases where the
DNA is somehow contaminated, not on purpose, just sort of
things happen scenario, right, And now this means that we
have to be able to separate between whether whether there's
something alien extraterrestrial somewhere locked away in the genetic code,
(31:24):
you know, and that's a show for a different day,
or whether there was something in the methodology yes, that
poisoned it. And in this case, we have a pretty
solid understanding of what was happening to create these skull shapes, right, Yeah, absolutely,
the these elongated skulls were probably, let's say absolutely most
(31:50):
likely created by binding, which is this this ancient practice
where civilizations would purposefully change the shape of their skull
to several you know, their varying versions of this, but
the most common one that you can find is this
elongated skull by actually binding it as it's growing. It's
(32:11):
like it's like an extreme version of like foot binding
and in Asian cultures. Yeah, but in this case it's well,
I guess kind of the same as foot binding in
a way that served of featuring something that is growing
in order to make it take a certain shape. Yes,
the foot binding is for a largely sexual purpose. This
(32:32):
is for like almost to show not royalty, but like
there there's a social status that was associated a lot
of times with this head binding. Right. We still don't
know entirely why this occurred. We know how they did
it with a good guess, but it is it is
fair to point out a mystery remains because maybe, you
(32:55):
know what, call us just a bunch of know nothings
from twenty seventeen. But if somebody proposed that we try
something like that with with our own kids or something
that that'd be kind of weird. Yeah, I wouldn't want
to do that. And who knows what effect it has
on the brain as it's being developed and all that,
especially if you're doing it at such a young age
(33:15):
as these, you know, as the skull itself is growing.
I wouldn't want to mess with that. And then we
have another example, the Atacama skeleton. This is this is
a really weird one. This is probably the one that
gets to me, you know. Yeah, we we have the
gentleman on our show, Dr Stephen Greer, who at least
(33:35):
introduced me to this subject with a documentary film that
he made. Um, it's a fascinating story. And this is
in particular where we get to the point where there
are still some questions that I have that I want
answered before I can make any kind of judgment call
on what I believe this thing is. It's it's really
(33:57):
it's really cool in my opinion. So okay, I don't
remember whether whether he spoke about this one in our
previous interview with him for Awn Acknowledge. Oh no, no,
in the interview he does not address, at least not
in in length. But he was the previous documentary they
would make that he had made before the one he
(34:20):
came to talk to us about. Nor can you give
us the skinny on this skeleton? The skeleton skinny? Oh man,
because skeletons are skinny. I'm a dummy. That's great, Okay.
So in two thousands three, in a deserted town in Chile,
um located in the Atacama Desert, a six inch long
uh skeleton or portion of skeletal human remains was found
(34:44):
and according to a local newspaper ben I believe they
gave it a name, isn't that right? And was found
in northern Chile by a man by the name of
Oscar Munos, who later sold the remains to a Spanish
businessman by the name of Ramon Navia Osoria. That was yeah, yeah.
(35:06):
So here is a little snippet from I f L
Science Um a great blog, and you know the i
f L stands for I Flipping Love It, I Flipping
Love Science Family Show. They went into how the skeleton
um was part of a private collection until oh nine,
and at that time was brought to a symposium in
(35:28):
Spain in Barcelona, and then in a group of scientists
had the chance to study this skeleton at length and
they used X rays, cat scans and took genetic samples
as well. Uh and the results showed that the chest
cavity of Atta actually still had um what appeared to
(35:50):
be the remains of lungs and also a heart and
exactly a heart and lungs inside this skeleton. Now really fast, Um,
if we pull up a picture of this and we
take a look at it, you can you can get
a better idea of kind of what they were working with.
So we Norman, you mentioned that it's a six inch
long skeleton, and it looks like a fully formed human skeleton,
(36:15):
everything from the footbones all the way up to the
top of the skull, including the arms and the hands,
the ribs, everything. That's where my nickname came from. No
old baby skeleton brown. Ah ha, there we are. Well,
as we'll find out, perhaps it wasn't a baby, but
it was still a baby skeleton. It was, yes, a
(36:36):
tiny skeletons got it so U it was originally this
skeleton auto was thought to be ancient. But this testing
that they were doing at this time found that the
remains were only a few decades old, um, and they
were entirely human. But there was some weird stuff that
went on with this genetic testing because ten nine to
(36:57):
ten of the DNA came back as not human. But
there's an explanation for that. Um, it's kind of weird.
But because you think ten of this was not human,
what in the heck could that be? But that just
has to do with uh. With the DNA has been
(37:18):
said earlier, it degrades over time. And also there's a
certain percentage of error that you're going to get when
you're doing DNA testing. UM, And there I guess it's
also has to do things that I don't understand. The
entire genome when it's being tested. There's certain parts that
sometimes will fall off the test. This segment, Yeah, it
(37:39):
gets a little weird and again beyond my pay grade. Um,
But the results of you know, roughly being human are
well within the expected parameters for contamination and degradation of
DNA and so entirely human fetus, but so tiny to
be so formed in the way it is. You know,
to most rivers, Atta appears to be a fetus. People
(38:02):
would say, maybe died prematurely, Maybe was born prematurely and
died shortly thereafter. However, to Matt's point, uh, the same
scientific analysis says that there were mature teeth present in
the mouth and the bones were well developed, with the
leg bones showing growth plates that you would expect to
see in a child of the age between six to eight.
(38:24):
And that's also from that i f L Science article.
And it goes on. While the testing did provide answers,
it also raised many more questions. How could a six
year old child only be six inches long? And at
this point we still do not know. We don't just
mean Matt, noelan Ben don't know, We mean no one.
No one is completely sure. Yeah, and it's hard to imagine.
(38:47):
Can you imagine when you look at a picture of
this thing, imagine it walking around and before it was
this large, after six to eight years it was smaller.
In fact, let's take a break, go check this out.
If you're as long as you're not driving or something,
go check out a photo of this and tell us
what you think after a word from our sponsors. Okay,
(39:15):
just a few more examples. I feel like we should
laundry list some of these. Uh. I have one thing
in the notes titled in those days there were giants
because that's such a dramatic phrase. You use that line
in one of the radio plays we did, Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Creepy,
the Creepy Demon monologue revealing his diabolical plot. There were
(39:36):
giants in those days? Okay, Yes, I am in love
with that phrase. Uh. And it's it's quite dramatic, but
we say it because it's cool phrase. And we also
say it because we want to recap our the thing
about ancient giants, right could cover up in which you
have heard mentioned on our show before. The idea is
that throughout human history, from the ancient days to well
(39:57):
within the past hundred and fifty years, civilizations around the
world have been discovering the skulls and skeletons of giants.
We're talking people who are nine twelve feet tall, you know,
well outside the bounds of what would be expected. People
who believe this story point to photographs that appeared in
various newspapers of note around the time, or were claimed
(40:20):
to appear in those newspapers, and proponents of this stuff
also believe the world's museums are part of a cabal
that is purposely buying up these remains and suppressing them
or storing them or destroying them. And critics point out
that a lot of the alleged photographs that you would
find in these newspapers and ones that you'll find now
online are doctored in some way or photoshopped. And I
(40:43):
can verify that several of the images that I have
found on my personal Facebook feed because of people and
you know pages that I follow, are most certainly the
works of image manipulation. You can see that there's been
resizing and uh positing of different images. In a lot
of these. You can see the edges where it's been
(41:04):
cut out. You can see where there should be shadows
but there aren't, where the shadows don't match up. Um. Yeah,
it's an unfortunate truth, but it's the truth, right. And
it's also tough to imagine that if the world is
littered with giant skeletons, some organization could keep it completely
secret from everyone. Literally. That's that's that's a big secret.
(41:25):
It's literally dozens of big secrets, the giant secrets. I
had us all down on that when there was Also
you may have heard of a three fingered mummy. This
was I had not heard of this. This was mentioned
through anout fit called Gaya TV, and they presented it
in sort of history channel ancient Aliens way, like, I'm
(41:50):
not saying it was aliens. This is definitely an alien.
I'm there saying it's an alien, but it's definitely an alien. Alien.
But it's not an alien, right, but his hand I
might be an Yeah, this is most likely another hoax,
because apparently Guya has been accused of hoaxing or misrepresenting
(42:11):
things in the past. However, we are not we haven't
spoken with the people a Guy, and I'm not very
familiar with their work. These are just criticisms I've read,
and it may be possible that those criticisms are subjective
or not true. I just I just want to be fair.
I don't I don't want to hate on guy too much.
But I've definitely seen some things that they've published that
(42:32):
are bogus. You've seen some things, Okay, the last one
maybe is the well one of the last ones is
the Kishtim dwarf. Small human fetus known as Alyoshenka was
found by an elderly woman in Russia. It had an
unusual appearance and it gave rise to rumors and extra
(42:53):
terrestrial or origin. Local population supported the rumors and they
would charge reporters for interviews. Least two Japanese companies made
documentaries about it in April of two thousand and four.
Scientists who studied this these remains said it was a
premature female human infant with severe deformities. Other eyewitnesses said, no,
(43:16):
deformities can't explain this. There are too many, especially deformities
in the skull. They said it wasn't a hoax. It
was a genuine mummified body that was once living tissue.
But the argument was, you know, some people just didn't
want to walk away from the idea that this was
extraterrestrial and was a cover up. But right now, the
best guest for this, and there's not a whole bunch
(43:38):
uh stuff written about this discovery in English, but the
best guess is that it may be attributed to something
called the nineteen fifty seven kished Um disaster, which I
had never heard of and I feel ashamed for not
knowing about this. Shame for shame, Ben, but you know,
for shame on all of us week. We had to
look it up. And as it turns out, there was
a radioactive contamination incident that occurred on the twenty nine
(44:01):
September in n at Mayak, which is a plutonium production
site in Russia for nuclear weapons and also nuclear fuel
reprocessing for the Soviet Union. And it measured as a
level six disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale or INEZ,
(44:21):
that's how I'm gonna choose to say it, uh, and
it made it the third most serious nuclear accident ever recorded,
behind the Fukushima Dai nuclear disaster and the Chernobyl disaster.
I just want to take a tiny little sidebar um Paul,
superproducer Paul, and myself and the super producer Alex and
super producer Tristan all went and saw this movie Stalker,
(44:44):
this Tarkovski film, and it was all shot in and
around these Russian nuclear sites, and it is some bleak,
bleak stuff. It's a really excellent film, quite uh cerebral
and um plotting and very drony, but very much worthier time.
I would check out if only for just the visuals
of like these sites. And as it turns out, it's
(45:04):
a filmmaker and a couple of the members of the
crew died from radiation radiation later in life, circumstances pretty
well associated with them splashing around in these uh these
super fun site like ponds. Was this recent? Was this
still in the theater? Then he came out, it came out,
(45:25):
so it was probably made in like you know, sent
actually was made three times. That's a whole another story.
But yeah, anyway, I was actually a fan of There's
a video game series called Stalker. There were a couple
of them. One of them is called Stalker Shadows of Chernobyl,
and it feels very different or very similar to that,
but I wonder if it's actually a completely different. Well,
the character the Stalker in the film is like his
(45:47):
whole deal as he guides people through. These sites in
the film have a supernatural connotation. But anyway, sidebar, I
just really really enjoyed the film and it made me
think of some of the scenes and it's good for
people to see, well maybe not good, but it's important
for people to see the level of destruction and the
(46:07):
level of lasting effect. These sorts of technologies can have
upon the world, especially on children who are being born right,
and not to mention animals right or plant life. And
we know that this stuff lasts. And as much as
we would like to pretend that we exist in our
own islands, everything is eventually connected, you know what I mean.
(46:29):
A disaster from one place, if it's big enough, as
a disaster everywhere. There was one more thing I found
that it was interesting. It's a bit of a bit
of a crime story, and this is the last one
I have. I started looking at mass graves of ordinary
skeletons who met extraordinary ends. I found one in a
(46:51):
state in India, Utarkand at an altitude of about sixteen
thousand feet in the Himalayas, someone found as many six
hundred skeletons buried in a place called rupe Kunn's Lake
or Skeleton Lake. They date from either the ninth century
to the fifteenth century, and the local community had a
legend about this. They said. The remains include those of
(47:13):
King Jazz the Wall because it was disobedient during a
pilgrimage and with his wife, the queen and his royal entourage,
and this angered the Hindu goddess Mata, so to gain revenge,
she in a local deity named Latu, created thunderstorms and avalanches,
reigning gigantic stones on the king and his army. And
(47:34):
it turns out the legend might contain a grain of
truth because the scientists say it's possible the skeletons cracked
skulls were all struck by stones, hailstones, and that they
died in a blizzard or other natural catastrophe. Wow. Not
the best way to go. Yeah, not the best way
to go at all, and maybe not a legend at all,
but we see how the legend gets built off of it.
(47:57):
You know, I think it's really important to know that
most legends art from a grain of truth. Right, So
it's the pearl inside the clam. I love that. That's
very Are you secretly auditioning for a Disney movie Pixar
character that I can see you? Yeah, I inde. I
(48:18):
love it. I don't want to cut you off, but please.
The last one that I just wanted to mention here,
and I'm not even really going to get into it
all the way, but I think you should look up
a place called little More Priory. Little More is one word,
little more is one word. Yes, and it was a
(48:39):
priory church that also what is the what not in
a nunnery? What is the is that a priory the
place where nuns convent, maybe a convent of sorts, where
there were a lot of nuns who lived in this area.
And this is in Yeah, it's a small it's specifically
a smaller one and it's run by prioress. Prioress, that's exactly.
(49:02):
That's where that word came from. Okay um, So this
place in the fifteen hundreds, apparently there was some strange
stuff going on with the prioress, the person who ran
this joint, and the nuns who were in there. There
was some misdeeds, let's say, in the eyes of the
people who were in charge of it. There's some serious
(49:24):
sinning who was occurring. Believe the bishop shut it down.
The bishop did shut it down. But they're ninety two women.
The remains of ninety two humans, most of them women
and some children were found buried here and unceremoniously. Some
of them were faced down. One was buried with a
(49:44):
child appeared to be an unborn child or you know,
a child that was born and deceased. And yes, and
then several other women who were prostrate on the ground
which appeared to be maybe which is and there's this
whole series of strange stuff that went on with all
of these deaths and or you know, skeletons buried face
(50:07):
down an unconsecrated ground. Very very strange that those are
the usual signs I recognize, at least that's how they
usually put me in. Okay, yeah, well whatever, anybody's got
to roll over. I don't know why everybody thinks that's
gonna work. Anyway, look up a little more priority. There's
more to it. Uh, there's more to it, but just
(50:28):
check it out. And we're uh, we're getting the signal
from ourselves. We've been thinking about mortality for a while now,
so we're going to go, uh, we're going to venture
off and we're going to ask for your help because
we know that there are multiple other stories like this,
and we are actually having we're actually having a really
(50:51):
interesting time tracing any possible explanations for this. So, for example,
I don't we didn't have time to put it in
the show today, but there are a bunch of of
red haired mummies in uh strange places where you wouldn't
expect to find a red haired mummy, right uh. And
one of the explanations for that would be that the
(51:12):
sunlight transforms the hair, turns the hair red. And then
there are other people who say, no, no, no, that's
not good enough. What are these red haired people doing
in this part of the world, with red hair being
relatively rare trait. So we have just dipped our We
have dipped our conceptual fokasha just a little bit into
(51:35):
the olive oil sauce of mystery. Oh not all these
comparisons are gonna work. Uh. In conclusion, it appears the
most famous cases of mysterious skulls can be largely explained
by mundane causes such as genetic disorder, injury, hoaxes, or,
in the case of pracas uh, purposeful deformation for cultural purposes.
(51:58):
And you know, in that one case, there's a pretty
compelling argument for freak meteorological occurrences. But also those skeletons,
other than their grizzly strange death are perfectly normal. And
I feel like I have to make a point about
coaxing here. Sure, there are loads of individuals who claim
they've discovered something unusual, only for it later to be proven,
(52:20):
you know, not to be an alien or not to
be an extraterrestrial or Nephel Nephelim or whatever. But that
does not automatically mean they are con artists, and they
may genuinely believe what they have discovered, and so it
would be unfair for us to automatically ascribe some kind
of motive or internal motivation to these people. Oh yeah, absolutely.
If if I was the person who came across that
(52:43):
Autocoma skeleton, I would absolutely think there was something strange
going on and wanted to be tested immediately. Let's go
right now and let's get this thing tested. Um yeah, absolutely,
And a lot of these examples, I would the star
child skull. I would also want to look into that.
If you know, I didn't have an understanding of some
(53:03):
of the human genetic deformations that occur that I have now,
and I'm I'm, you know, lucky to have that information
in my life. Well said Matt. Well said indeed, And
I am inspired by that, and I follow your lead
in these sorts of things because I'm inspired by you two.
Oh boy, well, we're both inspired by nol. Who do
(53:23):
I get to be inspired by? Oh wait, I am
inspire me daily. Oh stop it, oh man, we're having
an inspira thon again and aspire off and inspire off
and uh Paul nodded, He's eaty in a sandwich or
something really good salad too. I'm hungry, all right, Yes,
(53:46):
So we are off to uh, we are off to
feed our skeletons, hungry for the truth, hungry for the truth. Yes, no, indeed,
and dried cranberries and dried cranberries and Philly cheese steaks
and all all the all the beautiful things about staying alive.
So we're we're going to head off, but never fear,
we will be back uh next week. I do want
(54:09):
to give a shout out to the Mysteries of the
Unknown Time Life book series, because they have a test
in there that lets you ask yourself whether you are
descended from an alien hybrid and if there's any interest,
I'm sure that Time Life will be okay with us.
Maybe we could quiz each other one day and read
the questions. It's it's stuff like do you like thunderstorms?
(54:32):
Do you have extravertebrae? And it shows you how to
account them. It's weird, but we'll we'll check it out.
I'm sure if you enjoy this show, you are you're
probably aware of that Time Life book series in the meantime.
If you'd like to find Matt Nold and I, you
can find us on Twitter. You can find us on Facebook,
(54:53):
you can find us on Instagram. You can check out
every show we've ever made on our website Stuff they
don't want you to know dot Com. And if you
don't want to do any of that stuff and you
just want to send us a suggestion for an episode,
or a comment, or you know, an evite, whatever, you
can find us. We are conspiracy at how stuff Works
dot com.
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