The World Is Full of Mysterious Holes

Do you live near a mysterious cavern, pit, or abandoned mine? In tonight's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the wide world of mysterious holes, spanning the globe from the remote wilds of Canada all the way down to Antarctica.

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Episode Transcript

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. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
They call me Ben.

Speaker 4 (00:29):
We're joined as always with our super producer Paul, Mission
control decand most importantly, you are here.

Speaker 3 (00:37):
That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.

Speaker 4 (00:40):
Heads up, this episode is not for the tripophobes in
the crowd. We remember that meme, right, the fear of small,
densely placed holes.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yes, it's a weird texture, not gonna lie. Even looking
at it as a non trip of phobe sufferer, it
does creep me out a little bit that I'm not
gonna lie.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
Yeah, same, It's just it's a weird look literally, uh
and speaking weird things. In an earlier Listener mail program,
conspiracy realists, cool Guy Uh hipped us to a story
of Mel's hole, which which Noel, you brought unlist have
brought to the class, brought to the show, and we
realized as we're exploring this that Earth is absolutely riddled

(01:24):
with mysterious caverns, drops, minds, pits, boreholes, scientific experiments, and
so on. So what do you say, should we dive.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
In to the holes? A few of them? Okay, then
let's plunk it.

Speaker 4 (01:38):
Yeah, here are the facts. The world is full of holes,
and it's kind of weird that billions of people have
lived on Earth for what we would consider a long time.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
Uh. And there are still so.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
Many partially or holy holy unexplored subterranean environments out there,
Like we're still finding enormous caves.

Speaker 3 (02:06):
Remember that Disney movie Holes from the early two thousands.
This is called Holes I never saw. It's described of
Wikipedia as a neo Western comedy drama based on a
novel by Lewis Soccer from nineteen ninety eight, starring Sigourney Weaver,
Patricia Arquette, Shia Labouf, and John Voight. A couple problematic

(02:29):
figures in this Disney children's Yeah, it's about mysterious holes.

Speaker 4 (02:33):
That's pre Cannibal Shia, right, sorry, pre cannibal controversy.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
Oh yeah, he said some odd things to some lady friends. Yes,
that's right. Yeah, this is when he was a cute, little,
cute little Disney kid.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
That's right. Okay, the nineties. So you know what, I'll
put that on the list to either read the book
or watch the film because I had no idea that existed.
That would have been Yeah, okay, well we know in
real life, people just recently, just a few years ago,
found a enormous cave in British Columbia up in Canada.

Speaker 3 (03:13):
No one had any.

Speaker 4 (03:14):
Idea, at least officially, that it existed until now, like
throughout human history, and they it's so new it doesn't
have an official name yet. Its street name is the
Sarlac Pit like in Star Wars.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
Sweet, yeah, it's huge, right, it was hidden for a
long time they discovered it, which is weird to think
about that humans could still stumble upon something like that
because it's huge.

Speaker 4 (03:42):
Right, it's egregiously so, I mean, we always say humans
are good at losing things, but we should be a
little better at finding stuff too. Right in the Wells
Gray Provincial Park, this Sarlac Pit may run for as
long as five clicks, so that would be a little
over three miles. And they we humanity only found it

(04:07):
by accident. They were not looking for a cave. In
twenty eighteen, there are these people have a really interesting job.
They hop on helicopters and they count cariboo every year.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
I'm sorry, what's the official measurement of a click kilometer? Okay?
I've always just used a click as a stand in
for just a kind of amorphous unit of measure. Hey,
can you turn that up? Two clicks?

Speaker 4 (04:29):
You know?

Speaker 3 (04:30):
Yeah? Okay? Can warn something new every day? Yeah?

Speaker 4 (04:33):
Like notchez or you don't remember when in corporate America
everybody was saying dial it up or dial it back.

Speaker 3 (04:41):
Yeah, I kind of miss that that trend, at least
I just to ignore it. Yeah, it's a weird win.

Speaker 2 (04:48):
But so these folks were looking for cariboo. Yeah, and
they found a giant hole.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah, well the caribou fell in likely that's where they
were all drawn to the hole.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
It's a happy accident, Bob Ross's style, because if these
folks have been counting caribou on foot, or if they've
been searching it the wrong time of year, they would
have missed it. The helicopter pilot Ken Lanquour was the
guy who said, oh, that's weird. We should probably tell
someone just in case, you know, it hasn't been discovered yet.

(05:23):
Because this is again a very very remote part of
the world. And the Sarlac name comes from a biologist
who was on the on the bird looking at caribou.
His name's Bevin Ernst. And then they went back and
they did research and they've got aerial photography from as
far back as nineteen forty nine. And what they said is,
we would have never found this except for climate change.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
Oh yeah, because it was covered in snow and it
took that snow to melt at least sufficiently enough for
somebody to notice the depression and then they're like, oh,
hold on, maybe there's something below that snow.

Speaker 3 (05:58):
Well, there's a climate change silver lining guys, right.

Speaker 4 (06:03):
Think of all the new caves, think of all the
new holes will discover.

Speaker 3 (06:07):
There are actually.

Speaker 2 (06:08):
Several holes that we're going to be talking about today
that appear to be at least somewhat assisted by ye
old climate change.

Speaker 3 (06:15):
Of course.

Speaker 4 (06:16):
Yeah, and this one Starlac pit here is just one example,
right of a larger trend we're going to see. The
entrance to the cave is three hundred and twenty eight
feet long by one hundred and ninety seven feet wide,
and in the BBC they described that they compare the
size to a football field or a soccer field. So again,

(06:41):
just knowing how large or small the average human is,
this seems like it'd be something difficult to miss for
so long. I mean, thank goodness, they've found it in
a helicopter, not by walking on snow and falling it.

Speaker 3 (06:55):
And you'd have to repel down the cave wall to
get inside. That would be the first step of the spullunk.

Speaker 4 (07:01):
Right, yeah, just so, I mean we also we know
that they still are not sure how deep the thing
actually goes because a river runs through it, and that
river creates mist as it falls, so when they're trying
to they've got a team of people who have gone

(07:21):
in in twenty eighteen, twenty twenty, and they're still working
on it. But what this shows us is the issues
that we're all describing here. Some are in some of
these apertures in Earth or the middle of nowhere. Some
are at the bottom of the ocean. You can easily
overlook all of them. A lot of times, the first
person who finds a cave dies because they found it

(07:43):
by accident.

Speaker 3 (07:44):
You know, the old trope of the explorer discovering the
previous explorer's bones, you know, with the crumbled up map
its skeletal fist, and.

Speaker 4 (07:54):
We're we're lucky to live very close comparatively to the
largest known caverns system or the longest known cavern system
in the world, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. And people are
still finding new tunnels in Mammoth Cave. We don't know
where it goes, you know what I mean, Like Soromon said,
we shouldn't delve too deeply.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Right, Yeah, but we do know that tuberculosis patients were
kept in there, and that place is haunted.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Yikes. Well with a name like the Sarlac Pit, I
sure hope they didn't discover any of those cannibalistic humanoid
underground dwellers. Well they like in the film Chud, but
also like in the films The Descent, which I think
the first one is excellent and if you want to
the terrifying splunk into the unknown, watch The Descent. But

(08:44):
speaking of cave systems that are functional in nearby US,
have you guys ever been to a concert of the caverns.
Everyone's just screaming about it. It's apparently wonderful. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (08:54):
I was going to go to see God Speed You
Black Emperor. Yeah, that would have it.

Speaker 3 (09:02):
Yeah. Yeah, Ken Gizzard played there as well. But it's
like a legitimate of concert venue in an underground cave
and it looks absolutely fantastic, just up the way in
Tennessee to Tennessee in Grundy County.

Speaker 4 (09:14):
And that's just the beginning. So join us tonight we
ask what are the world's weirdest, most mysterious holes. Spoiler
there are a lot. This may end up being a
two parter. Will need your help, folks. Here's where it
gets crazy. The race to be the weirdest hole is
a surprisingly robust competition. There are tons of these. We're

(09:37):
going to find mores. Technology improves as climate change continues,
as more people are searching with better and better equipment,
and frankly, as more people start to encroach into environments
that humans historically did not visit.

Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah, and like you said at the top, I guess
probably a good place to start in terms of mysterious
bizarro hole related we should go to Mel's Hole. Ben,
you put it here here, a quick and dirty recap
of Mel's Hole. And I'm just gonna take this as
an opportunity to to titter a little bit, and then
I'm gonna be a grown up from here on out.

(10:13):
And I'm not gonna laugh anymore when we refer to holes.
I'm all about it. I want to let's get weird
with it. Let's make this it's weird, whether or not
I am an immature child. But Mel's Hole, man, we
definitely kind of did a little not a deep, not
a deep spelunk, a you know, a surface kind of
exploration of Mel's hole. But according well, let's we'll kind

(10:36):
of give you the basics here up front. According to
a man identifying himself as Mel Waters in a series
of calls to Coast to Coast beginning in nineteen ninety seven,
Mel's hole was is a bottomless pit. Which is an
interesting term, right, like the idea of a bottomless pit.
You hear it in literature a lot, like, especially in
like kind of fantasy fiction type stuff, the idea of

(10:59):
a bottomless pit. It's hyperbole too, yeah, hyperboldy. It is right,
or it's in some way magical because unless it goes
out the other side of the damn planet and knows
this thing as a bottomless pit.

Speaker 2 (11:12):
I was imagining the possibility of someone thinking they've discovered
a bottomless pit by finding some kind of shaft that
goes down sufficiently long enough and then curves gradually and
slowly to where when you dropped something, you wouldn't get
that satisfying plunk, You would get like a for a

(11:33):
long time, and then just kind of as it scrapes
along a wall rather than just impacting.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
And it could also you know, we know that because
especially things are formed by natural processes, they're going to
have variances in you know, how wide or narrow they are,
so you could think you're at the bottom, but then
technically there might be a smaller part of the you know,
the floor surface that just keeps going might just be

(12:01):
at the lip of something deeper.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
And this alleged bottomless pit is meant to exist somewhere
along the Manustache Ridge near Ellensburg, Washington, in Washington State.
Of course, Water said the hole was on his property,
which is like a rural kind of you know, I guess,
homesteady kind of location, now, fourteen miles out of town, yeah, exactly.

(12:26):
And here are some of the kind of wider claims
that he made about said hole.

Speaker 4 (12:32):
Oh yeah, yeah, okay, So first he said the hole
has an unknown depth five right, all holes will have
an unknown depth until you plunge those depths or being adults. Okay,
he says that he did something similar to what Matt
is describing. There he got a fishing line and he

(12:52):
waited it at the end, and then he rolled out
more and more feet of line, like eighty thousand feet
of issue line. That's his claim that he had still
not hit the bottom by the time he ran out
a lie.

Speaker 3 (13:06):
Well, there was another one. Maybe it was this one,
but there was another one or another person that claims
they lowered down a packet of life savers, the candy
and to see if they hit water, because it would
have dissolved the life savers. Again, this is like some
of this is very apocryphal, and there are multiple kind
of varying stories about this and as well as we'll

(13:27):
get to kind of what the what the likely reality
of it is. But I thought that was interesting because
that would be a smart way of seeing if you
hit water, is to see if like something like that dissolved.

Speaker 2 (13:39):
I would use an alka selser tablet with the whole
punched in.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
It and for the yeah, I would lower a child
into it. Of course you would, you monster, I'm.

Speaker 4 (13:51):
Kidding but the so you're right, there are these other claims.
I think one thing that excited all of us about
the story and cool guy as well, were the more
paranormal things like, oh, a black light emanates from a hole. Oh,
my neighbor put a dead dog in the hole, and
then the dog came back and frolicked in the woods.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
Yeah, it was sort of a limp weird evil frolic though, right,
very pet cemetery.

Speaker 4 (14:16):
And then he says so when he in later conversations,
after his first conversation on Coast to Coast AM, which
is just an amazing radio show, he says, after I
went public with you, Art Bell, soldiers in hazmat suits
rocked up to my property. They cordon did it off,

(14:36):
and they said I had to sell it to them
or they would find a drug lab on my land.
So they hate him off. Seems a little bit. I
don't know if they would say it, they would have
said that.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
Is that an eminent domain situation where you were sort
of like forced to sell your land to the government.

Speaker 4 (14:54):
Yeah, Usually they would just say eminent domain. They wouldn't
say you are going to be framed for operating a
meth lab.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
Be a shame if somebody found her secret drugs lab.

Speaker 4 (15:06):
Yeah, it's so secret that Mel didn't know about it, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
And then they said Mel, you got to get out
of here, and he said, cool, help me get to
Australia and.

Speaker 4 (15:17):
They said done' that's the story and people.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Turns out the whole led to Australia. All we had
to do is hop in and then he bopped out
the other side.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
And in two thousand and two, inspired by this growing
local lore, a guy named Gerald Osborne and a crew
of about twenty nine other people said we're going to
go try to find a whole. There was a lot
of discourse about this on a website called melshole dot com,
which I don't think is active anymore. But they did
a really diligent effort to find it. Unfortunately, they came

(15:50):
up with no dice. Waters never specifically revealed the location
past the vague language that we gave you from the call.
And he did, however, have a ton of stories about this.
For someone who thought their life may have been threatened
by the Feds, he was pretty forthcoming about different things.
He said, you know, everybody in our area used the

(16:12):
hole as a dump. Basically as a landfill. It's where
we put our old refrigerators and dead cows and stuff.

Speaker 3 (16:20):
Dead cows just thrown in there for good measure. Yeah.
I do also like the idea that there's so many
fun little paranormal tidbits in here, that like animals avoided it,
that dogs somehow had a spidey sense of something sinister
lurking in there. I believe he even referred to the

(16:41):
idea of hearing some sort of creature, you know, lurking
and hulking around down there. Right.

Speaker 2 (16:49):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (16:50):
Heard a lot of again apocryphal stories, but what great
stories these are, especially when we look at the meta
version of this. Mel Waters have himself may be a story.
There is no historical record of anybody named Melwaters or
anything like Melwaters living in this area.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Ever, I just feel like that is the perfect ending
for one of those like Scholastic book fair scary stories,
kind of like collections, you know, and there was and
it turns out there was no Melwaters and he maybe
he lives in the hole. I don't know. We gotta
do some work shopping here, but I do feel like
there's an opportunity here for a good scary story where Melwaters.

(17:32):
Is this like maybe he was and he was dead
all along and then his head fell off.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
I think about some callers who would call into Coast
to Coast, callers who would call into this show who
give themselves a moniker, a nickname, something else that's different.
I wonder if that could be a situation where there
is a real shoeman that had this thing. It's just
his name was completely different.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
Finite, definitely. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (17:59):
I agree with you because the you know, we ask
you on this show to use a cool nickname. Your
g man name is fine too, if you're comfortable with that.
But it would make sense if someone's trying to hide
their identity in some way. However it does sound, we
do know there was a real person calling in, an
actual human being. They Melwaters is probably not the real name.

(18:24):
It doesn't sound like they're using voice modification software of
any sort. So now we have just enough of a
grain of truth. There is a person involved for these
legends to grow, and experts their opinions on this range
from amusement to like collegiate irritation. Because geologists, the vast majority,

(18:47):
will say a hole like this in this region as
described is geologically impossible.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
That's what makes it so great, because some.

Speaker 3 (18:57):
Dark mystic powers holding it up. Because then correct me if
I'm wrong. You know, we talked about the way these
kinds of deep holes can taper, but a whole of
the depth being described by mister Mel here would likely
collapse in on itself, you know, due to its own
weight and structural you know.

Speaker 2 (19:16):
Instability, unless it was bored by someone or something.

Speaker 3 (19:20):
Not stop it with technology that we have lost predecessors,
y'all spooking me out.

Speaker 4 (19:28):
Knock it off a predecessor civilization. Shout out HB. Lovecraft.

Speaker 2 (19:33):
That get gets into another set of like at least
one particular hole we're going to talk about later about
deep holes in places that are currently, at least at
the time the hole is built inhospitable.

Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yes, that's true.

Speaker 4 (19:48):
And just like Mel's hole, the existence of some of
these things is unknown or unproven. The locations are often
kept secret even when authorities know about them, to preserve
these unique ecosystems with it, because there are living things
in a lot of these places, and still the legends persist.

(20:10):
We're gonna take a break for word from our sponsors,
and then we're gonna get even weirder with it.

Speaker 3 (20:22):
There's a hole at the bottom of the sea. There's
a hole at the bottom of the sea. There's a whole.
There's a whole. There's a whole at the bottom of
the sea. Remember that from Family Guy or Stewie just
sings that joke and sings that song like over and
over and over again. You know that Family Guy bit
where they just go on and on and on. I
know the birds the word is it like that?

Speaker 2 (20:41):
I don't know the bottom of the sea.

Speaker 3 (20:43):
There's a hole the bottom of the sea. Yeah, it's
apparently it's a children's song, So this apparently is such
a thing that deserves it's in tune.

Speaker 2 (20:51):
I know there's a pineapple at the bottom of the sea.

Speaker 3 (20:53):
There it is. I know that.

Speaker 4 (20:55):
I know that SpongeBob taught me the US dollars supported
by imagination. Sorry for texting you guys.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
That just kind of why would you apologize for texting
as fire memes?

Speaker 4 (21:05):
So, uh, maybe we'll we'll get we'll get it on
our social media. But just okay, well, great setup. Because
more recent mysterious holes are not on the land surface,
they're underwater, and right now as we record, just off
the coast of Big sur California. There's a weird landscape

(21:25):
that's the size of Los Angeles, thousands and thousands of
small round divots or we're larger ones, varying size, and
animals have started taking like making these into natural shelters.
So there's you could call it an undersea suburb of California.
It's just fish and other wildlife live there.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
It's really weird to look at some of the imagery
from high up above, or at least illustrations that try
and show like what the region looks like, because it
really does look like I don't know how to I mean,
they call it pockmarked for a reason, sure, because it
really does just look like someone grated over it with

(22:08):
some nephilim sized machine that makes you know these.

Speaker 3 (22:13):
Like they rated the yards.

Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah, exactly, but on a massive scale.

Speaker 4 (22:18):
Yeah, they call it the Sir Pockmark Field as you are,
although Sir pock Mark is a funny name for later, okay.
And we owe a lot of the research to the
scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute or MBARI,
and the umbarians found found tons and tons of holes,

(22:41):
and at first they had no idea what these things
were how they came to be. They just knew they
were the hottest real estate for local maritime life, and
for decades people weren't sure what it was. One of
the first initial guesses was methane gas, you know, methane venting,

(23:02):
and that could maybe explain it, but they don't look
like methane vents. They sent some robots down to check
there were no signs or what they've described as there
was scant evidence that there would be fluids involved or
methane gas. Instead, what they said is, hang on, this
suburb may have been a long time in the making

(23:24):
because it looks like it's based on a slope, right.
The photographs from above may appear to be you know,
a relatively even horizontal surface, but because they're on this
continental slope, it looks like sediment flows down it every
so often, like on the rate of thousands of years.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
More like a trench kind of.

Speaker 2 (23:47):
It's weird. I've seen these holes described in well they
try and give averages. Right, so the majority of the
holes are fairly small, but there's another set of like
five two hundred at least according to Science Alert, that
average five hundred and seventy feet wide and sixteen feet deep.

(24:08):
So there are some like again, it's like varying sizes, right,
We're staying average on purpose here. Some are huge, some
are small, and especially the larger ones where the sediment
Ben's talking about here flows down hits like the center
of these holes and causes a tiny bit of erosion
every time on each one of those holes.

Speaker 4 (24:27):
Yeah, and some of them are some of them are
little guys, and then some of them are kaiju. And
the last big sediment flow they believe occurred fourteen thousand
years ago, maybe due to an earthquake or some other
tecton or some other shift right in the land.

Speaker 2 (24:45):
But we're talking a major event, right, not like you
know the earthquakes that La experiences all the time.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
That they expect at this point.

Speaker 4 (24:53):
Yeah, So with this erosion, we see that the mystery
appears to have been solved without know ancient civilization or Atlantis.
It's a bummer, but stick with us because it's weirder.
Did you guys see the thing about those holes out
by the azoris they look like we may have even
talked about some of these. They look like someone took

(25:15):
a a serrated pizza cutter and just rolled it across
the ocean floor.

Speaker 2 (25:23):
Whoa yeah, or like some kind of giant craft landed
and scraped.

Speaker 3 (25:27):
To the bottom. You were on fire today, Matt, or
something like.

Speaker 4 (25:31):
It has a what is it a snout of some
sort with just a single long row of teeth.

Speaker 3 (25:37):
And it just keeps going suffs.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Oh dude, no, speaking of aeration, that's exactly what it
looks like, like a sing if you had a single
blade rator.

Speaker 3 (25:49):
Is that a thing?

Speaker 2 (25:50):
No, But if you had one, that's what it would
look like.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Your beer pizza cutter. Analogy I think holds.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Yeah, but it's a serrator.

Speaker 4 (25:57):
Yeah, you're right, we could single blade arrator. I wonder
if that's the thing. I wonder if that's one of
those inventions we can make. Well, you know, like when
you only want a strip of grass.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
Well, though it would be like a planting strip, it
would be like a planter. Those exist where they punch
holes at a certain distance apart from each other, but
in a singular line.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
And this this is weird because our pals that Noah
have on their website a couple of fascinating statements about this,
and they say, they say, look, a scientist hypothesize that
the raised sediment may indicate excavation by an organism living
in the sediment, or digging and removal, perhaps via a

(26:43):
feeding appendage of a large animal on the sediment surface. Well,
shadows of Cthulhu, right.

Speaker 3 (26:50):
M hm, saying out down there, he's got a heat,
he's got to dig for sea truffles.

Speaker 4 (26:55):
I just want, I want a large, previous, unknown maritime
animal to be discovered right in the modern day past
the colossal squid, I get it. I'm not trying to
be spoiled about it, but it'd be great to have
another one too.

Speaker 3 (27:12):
It can be squid like, right, it can certainly have
tentacles and perhaps demonic wings and giant glowing red eyes.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
Well, I have a feeling that's gonna happen sooner than
we may think, and like absolutely is gonna happen, because
I'm sure we haven't talked about it openly, I don't think.
But the vast majority of the focus in the future
on UAP is planning to be underwater, so like usos

(27:43):
are the unidentified some merged objects. So I really do
feel like as more and more eyes are on the
bottom of the ocean in different places and far flung
places that humans don't generally go to or feel like
they need to research because there's not gonna be some
to undersee mining in those regions or something. We're gonna
discover stuff.

Speaker 4 (28:04):
We talked about this a little bit with Amua Mua
and the research in Papua New Guinea which continues today. Right, Also,
the FEDS are showing a strange amount of interest in
the Galileo project, and I don't love it well. Which
one is that the Galileo Project is the one out
of Harvard that is trying to search for technological signatures

(28:26):
from other civilizations. But the people, a lot of the
people who are associated with Galileo are also increasingly focused
on this underwater USO search, right, Unidentified submerged object or
trans medium object.

Speaker 3 (28:44):
You guys, A quick quick minor de realm and not
really And I'll definitely keep this in the back pocket
for strange news. But did you read about that Harvard
study that suggests that aliens might be living among us
in disguise, either underground or on the moon. What? Yeah.
The Human Flourishing Program of Harvard University also said that

(29:06):
UFOs might be alien spaceships that are visiting to meet
their alien friends living on Earth. So I don't know
much about this human flourishing product. Even like Giant, you know,
well respected Ivy League universities could have programs that would
seem fringy, but that, yeah, it's going to be one
that might rather be a Harvard. I'm fascinating. I want
to read more, but I just wanted to mention that,
especially given the underground aspect of these findings, what they

(29:31):
call them, crypto terrestrials. We'll get into it. They did it.

Speaker 4 (29:34):
You're right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember hearing this is Yes,
this is great for strange news. We also know that
the exploration of these weird underwater holes we just gave
you two examples, there are many, many more, and given
the sheer vastness of the seas, it is statistically inevitable
that there's more stuff out there we do not know about.

(29:58):
You know, creature that lie dead yet dreaming, right, waiting,
estivating for their opportunity to consume the minds of the
surface world, sunk in cities, hidden caverns that go on
and on for unlit miles. I'm feeling it. Yeah, I
hope we find more.

Speaker 3 (30:15):
Yeah, you are bro I'm loving it, thanks man.

Speaker 4 (30:18):
We also know that there are so many different types
of mysterious holes. It may be surprising for some of
us in the audience today to learn that some of
the more mysterious ones are made by people. We know
exactly when they were made, we know ostensibly why they
were made, and in a few cases there are rumors

(30:40):
about why they were actually sealed back up after spending
you know, the equivalent of billions dollars.

Speaker 2 (30:47):
But yeah, come on, now, we got to know how
deep this thing goes. We got all these egg heads
telling us what's at the center of this thing we
call Earth. Why not drill down there and see for ourselves.

Speaker 4 (30:59):
Memory back to the space race in the Cold War,
and someone, maybe in a boardroom or at a meeting
in Soviet Russia, says, well, if the Americans are going
to try to beat us to the moon, why don't
we race to the bottom. They built the cola super
deep borehole. This was in response to another weird hole

(31:20):
the US was building. But it's from the late sixties
the early nineteen nineties. They built the deepest artificially created
hole on Earth, and then they sealed it up.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
Yeah, because what will they find down there?

Speaker 3 (31:34):
Oh man, you know, we'll get the official version.

Speaker 4 (31:39):
It's weird because it's like the race to build the
highest skyscraper. Are people just running toward hyperbole? But there
is a lot of science involved.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
You know.

Speaker 4 (31:48):
It does teach us a lot about geology. The end
goal is to reach Earth's mantle. Everything that humans have
done is terms of digging into the surface. We have
never dug a hole deep enough to get to the mantle.
Where's still just a bunch of crusty folks because we're
in the crust, the crust of the hole.

Speaker 3 (32:10):
Stop it will continue to please. Fine, this is making
my day really quickly. Are we about to leave the sea?
Are we leaving the sea? Yeah? We're in the man
made holes as we leave the sea. The song that
verages at the top of the segment the hole in
the bottom of the sea is what they call a
It's like an escalating song. So the last verse is
there's a smile on the flea, on the fly, on
the war on the frog, on the bump on the

(32:32):
log in the hole on the bottom of the sea.
So yeah, it goes verse by verse adding it another
dumb thing, and it's been done many many different ways
by many many different children's performers. So perhaps there could
be a sinister aspect to the Hole in the Bottom
of the Sea song. If anyone out there in conspiracy
Land wants to write one up, send it our way.
That seriously at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Sounds like it speaks to the fractal nature of the universe. Guys,
it gets as bigger as it gets smaller.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 4 (32:58):
Oh, wheels within worlds within worlds, all the universe and
a grain of sand. No wow, Yeah, so this also
you could tell we've got Friday energy here today, folks.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
We hope you enjoy it. Effie. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (33:12):
The mantle of Earth is forty percent or more of
the planet. There's radius of four thousand miles.

Speaker 3 (33:21):
It is. It just it's right like a layer cake.

Speaker 4 (33:24):
It's right under the crust, and it sort of heaves
up and down. Picture it kind of breathing or rotating.
Because Earth is very much alive. Shout out to the
Gaya superorganism hypothesis, and the crust, the part that humans
are mainly concerned with. It's uneven and it's just a
little tiny portion. It's like the crust on a krim brewlay.

(33:47):
It's three to twenty five miles thick.

Speaker 3 (33:49):
Are you all picturing those infographics from your middle school
textbooks right now? The kind of bisected earth you know,
with like the different layers labeled than the the me
your mints and all of that stuff. It's boom, Yeah,
it's burned into my memory.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
I'm going to be a dummy. I need someone to
write in or call us to explain how humanity understands
that the mantle is one eight hundred miles thick and
understands what is deeper than that mantle right towards the course, right,
But we're saying the deepest hole here that we've ever

(34:27):
dug is an attempt to reach the mantle, right, and
we we I guess we failed, or maybe they were
successful to hit the mantle and that's why they stopped
because the mantle is something different.

Speaker 3 (34:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:41):
Officially, so yes, geologist fulcanologists, we want to hang out
with you. Officially, the hole took about twenty years to
reach a depth of around seven and a half miles.
But when you're hearing this right, you might be thinking
of the wrong kind of this is just not when

(35:02):
it gets down to the business. It's just nine inches
in diameter because of all the pressure from the rock
right increasing temperature. The Americans had their own thing, Project
Mohole in nineteen fifty eight, but they quit in sixty six,
and the Russians just kept going. Man, that that seven

(35:24):
point five miles or so, that is at best maybe
halfway to the mantle, probably less o.

Speaker 3 (35:30):
Ooh, guys, quick point of scientific clarification. The a lot
of mantle studies and just in general the bisection of
the layers of the earth are but through the study
of seismic waves. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, and vibrations.
So it's like learning to cover up. Yeah. I also
that that's not convinced.

Speaker 2 (35:51):
Well, it's not that I'm not convinced, it's just yeah,
I don't know. There's this this feeling that we really know,
we really understand. I keep thinking back to my the
science textbooks from elementary school, middle school, even college that
are just so, yeah, this is exactly what the Earth

(36:13):
is made up of. These are the elements that may
make it up.

Speaker 4 (36:16):
And sometimes they turned out to be confidently incorrect.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
How much have we learned about things like particle physics
that were just fully wrong back then or absolutely often
enough to where it changes our understanding of all the
stuff we learned as kids.

Speaker 3 (36:33):
Well, but think about all of the materials that are
extruded by the Earth during different seismic events, you know,
like rocks that have risen due to convection and things
like that. Like, that's another way they can study it too.
It's like, maybe we spits up every now.

Speaker 4 (36:49):
Maybe we've only been focusing on the bad volcanoes. Maybe
there are volcanoes that erupt nod magma stuff, you know,
like flower flowers. I don't know, you know, it'd be
cool if there was a volcano that erupted and in
chocolate volcano, a chocolate volcano, or a secret a secret
civilization of underground folks who are just like, hey, we're

(37:11):
not sinister. It took us a while to find the.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Door at the center of the Bubba Gub Kingdom. I
love this world.

Speaker 2 (37:18):
I don't want anyone to think that I, or Re
or anybody here is saying that we just don't believe
the science. I think it's more it's tough for me
to believe that we have such a full understanding of
some of these things at this moment rather than saying,
to our best knowledge, this is what the makeup of
the earth and layers are.

Speaker 4 (37:38):
Yeah, we also know that the science has to continue.
And again, what defeats the human mind and a lot
of these pursuits is just the immensity of scale. It's
just the sheer size difference here.

Speaker 3 (37:54):
And we know.

Speaker 4 (37:55):
Okay, so these incredibly ambitious, brilliant people in Russia build
the world's deepest hole and eventually, okay, here's the legend.
The modern legend is just like the dwarves and morea,
the Soviets dug too deep in pursuit of eldritch powers,
and they found mysterious fossils, and then, without hesitation, they

(38:20):
sealed up the hole and vowed never to reopen it
lest the world be imperiled.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
They found an iPhone down there, they found it's.

Speaker 3 (38:30):
A future hole.

Speaker 4 (38:32):
They found a box of old playboys. Right, No, no,
we've got to keep.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
This for us. Oh no, Matt, my picture when you
say they found an iPhone down there that they found
like it shouldn't. There shouldn't be an iPhone down there.
No man has ever been down there.

Speaker 2 (38:46):
In nineteen ninety seven or whatever.

Speaker 3 (38:49):
I'm sorry, that's what I thought you were getting hit
And it was some sort of portal. Yes, thank you,
just making sure we're on the same page.

Speaker 4 (38:55):
We're on the same page. They did find really weird,
unexpected things. Four miles down they found two billion year
old fossils of microscoptic planked And that part is true.

Speaker 3 (39:07):
It also stumbled upon the microscopic plant. Yeah, they're just
like paper.

Speaker 4 (39:15):
Yeah, and they said, oh crap, it's a rock. So
we also know that the hole is sealed. That part
is also arguably true. But the real reason for sealing
it up, the official one at least comes from the
Smithsonian has a great summation of it. They say, quote,
the Cola hole was abandoned in nineteen ninety two when

(39:37):
drillers experienced higher than expected temperatures three hundred and fifty
six degrees fahrenheit instead of the two hundred and twelve
degrees that they had mapped up to that point. So
what that means is, again, because this is a living,
dynamic environment, it's changeable, that it means maybe things could

(39:58):
have gone wrong quickly. What does that higher temperature indicate.

Speaker 3 (40:02):
I love the way they put it. It's such a
visual thing. The idea of the surrounding materials were so
hot and essentially almost liquid. I guess you know that
the temperature would absolutely annihilate their equipment. It was dangerous
as hell to occupy. The more liquid the environment became,
the harder it was to maintain that that drill. And

(40:24):
the thing I liked with the Smithsonian said was it's
like trying to keep a pit in the center of
a pot of hot soup. Because I got immediately picture
trying to do that. It would require constant churning, you know,
and the moment you stop it just you know, closes
in on itself.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
I'm gonna make a hard stance here, guys, I say
you you do stop and then you put new equipment
down there that's soup based rather than rock based.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
Yeah, laterle you switched to it like a latter situation.

Speaker 2 (40:54):
I don't know, Come on, man, a straw you know
what I mean?

Speaker 3 (40:58):
Super beat straw beat soup.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Or at least something that could get through that more
easily to continue on its journey down that's weighted. I
don't know, right.

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 4 (41:10):
We're calling Russia and that soup quote comes to us
courtesy of Benjamin Andrews, who's the curator for the National
Rock and Work Collection at the National Museum in Natural History.
So he does know what he's talking about.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yeah, he also does. It makes all of his He
does all of his science explaining through soup metaphors, which
I think is really powerful because that's something we could
all get behind.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Dude, I had carrot soup last night.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
It's so good. Did you make it yourself? No, it's
not hard. You just you know, pure the crap out
of the carrots and then add some nice cream a little.

Speaker 4 (41:46):
Oh, of course, of course I put garlic in everything. Actually,
all the stereotypes are true.

Speaker 3 (41:52):
Indian spices go really well, and a carrot soup. I
made a carrot and coriander soup one time. It was fabulous.
And well.

Speaker 4 (42:00):
All the experts, of course, agree on this Russian super
boor story.

Speaker 3 (42:04):
Uh, just like it.

Speaker 4 (42:08):
The temperature makes way more sense than the idea of
an Eldritch conspiracy. But the Eltritch love crafting conspiracy story
is so tantalizing that it's just too good not to
not to contemplate. And we have to ask, would it
be a would it be possible to cover us up
something of that magnitude.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
If so, what would you cover up? And why have
you guys seen the new kind of reboots of the
Godzilla Kong universe. I believe Legendary Pictures is responsible for
Hollow Earth. Yeah, the Hollow Earth thing. And there's like
the idea of these these creatures living in this like past,
the land that time forgot that exists deep, deep, deep,

(42:47):
deep deep within the earth. I think that's you know, uh,
you know, certainly inspired by this type of thinking. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (42:54):
Also that great TV show Land of the Lost.

Speaker 3 (42:58):
In the Land of the Lost, yeah, banging theme song,
Yeah the Loss. Maybe, Well, nostalgia is a heck of
a drug.

Speaker 4 (43:08):
As we explored in some other episodes, We're going to
take a break for word from our sponsors and we're
gonna hit you with some even crazier news. Not all
mysterious holes are on Earth. You know, you ever meet
someone you're like, Wow, your holes are out of this world.

Speaker 3 (43:31):
One time, it's a really good pickup line, man, I'm
gonna try that. Oh really, did you know? The Land
of the Loss is get created by the same team
that did hr puffin stuff, Sid and Marty Croft. As
it's now that I think back on it. It's very
puppet based, just like Puff and Stuff was, but lots
of crazy dinosaur puppets and things. But I want to

(43:52):
go back on what There was a Will Ferrell movie
reboot of it, but the show from the I believe
the seventies is gonna be a fun, fun revisit.

Speaker 4 (44:01):
I like the Slee Stack. I love a villain. The
slee Stacks were the the reptilian humanoid creatures, all right,
shout out Slee Stacks.

Speaker 3 (44:10):
Oh. It reminds me of the time Machine, the HG.
Wells novel where you had the Murlocks and the Eloys
or whatever, and which was the Murlocks were the underground
dwellers that like really couldn't hang in the sun.

Speaker 4 (44:22):
The yeah, the Morlocks were they can.

Speaker 3 (44:26):
They come and snatch up the Eloy's animal.

Speaker 4 (44:28):
Industrial class who became the Rulers and HG. Wells a
whole other bag of badgers. But just this week, you
guys news broke about weird holes on the planet Mars.
Strange pits are being discovered there. There's a lot of
Martian news that's pretty interesting. Some water actually froze on

(44:49):
there right pretty recently.

Speaker 3 (44:51):
But now this isn't just your average crater, right. You know,
we think of the surface of Mars is you know,
pocked with these craters, but those are more what's the
word superficial then what you're talking about, Ben, Right, Well,
we yeah, we don't know how deep they go.

Speaker 2 (45:05):
But the exciting part is they might go really deep
because they're on the side of a ginormous extinct volcano.
And if they do go really deep, there's some cool
implications for us humans.

Speaker 4 (45:19):
Yeah, picture this fellow would be astronauts. Your new home
on Mars. Why it's not a mobile home. It's not
a split level condo. No, your very own lava tube.
It's like a new kind of shotgun house because.

Speaker 3 (45:35):
It might need to work on the brand.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Well, I'm imagining it like lava tube apartment complexes, right,
I mean this is it's a real build.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Floors into the structure, right, it's like a silo. You
think of it like that.

Speaker 2 (45:52):
But it's a stark outlook.

Speaker 4 (45:55):
Yeah, it depends on it's definitely not going to be
a pleasant life for the pioneers, and it also depends
on the size of the lava tube. I mean it's
an esthetic choice. Would you personally want to have the
privacy of your own smaller lava tube or do you
want to share a gigantic one and have a studio apartment.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
That's what it would be. You'd get like one loft
type floor. Because how wide are we talking? And the
depth I understand various, But are they of uniform width
or is that pretty all over the place too?

Speaker 4 (46:24):
You know what, Noel, actually don't have that handy, but
we know this indicates it's probably there are probably more
than one pits of this nature, and if they go
down farough, then they could be the new home for
future human astronauts. Not because of the pleasant decor, but

(46:45):
because they will solve one of the biggest problems with
humans on Mars. The first one is getting people tomorrow safely.
The second is keeping them alive on that planet. And
one of the big problems with keeping them alive is
the radiation. You are a smacked bad on Mars.

Speaker 3 (47:05):
Yeah, and you know you mitigate that with you know,
a suit of some kind of guys. Are we also
thinking that this might indicate there are cave systems on Mars.

Speaker 2 (47:14):
That's the hope, right, I guess. So the hope is, oh,
and by the way, the hole that was seen by
the Mars Or Coronassance orbiter was only a few meters
across according to popular mechanics.

Speaker 3 (47:26):
Okay, it's like enough. That's not enough for a dwelling.

Speaker 4 (47:30):
Yeah, it could be just an entrance, right, it might
be really big in the beginning, right, Like have you
ever walked into I love the homes that have that
mysterious appearance, you know, you you open a door and
it seems to be a tiny structure. I was in
a place one time. No, it was definitely a bunker.
I was called a nice I was gonna call a

(47:52):
secret house for some reason. It's definitely bunker. You know,
one person, like a little door you would open and
all their all you see there is a steep incline
of stairs, and when you got downstairs, it was like
an entire actually really nice house.

Speaker 3 (48:08):
You know. It's interesting. A lot of the big houses
in Hollywood or like in like Malibu and stuff. Like
from the street view, the facade or the front part
of the house that you see looks like a pretty
modest home, but the whole the rest of the house
is built on the back of this cliff and it
just goes down, down, down, down, and continues jutting out,
you know, over the sea, and they're insane, but like,

(48:30):
if you actually just go out of the street, it
looks like a meager, little kind of bungalow.

Speaker 4 (48:36):
We're hoping, we're hoping that the humble appearance belies a
greater interior, and we're hoping it leads to a cavern system.
Like you're saying that it's a radiation from space on Mars.
Due to the thin atmosphere, it's forty to fifty times
higher than anything you will experience in an environment here
on Earth. And this also has a bigger question because

(48:58):
it's not just about humans these environments. If the stuff
we know about cave systems is similar to what we
know about Mars, they could have been the perfect place
for maybe a form of Martian life.

Speaker 2 (49:14):
Yeah, well, because we don't know how far back the
potential for life goes. We do because we estimate how
old Mars is right in relation to the star that
we all orbit around.

Speaker 4 (49:26):
Again, how confident are we in that?

Speaker 3 (49:29):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (49:30):
Pretty confident?

Speaker 3 (49:31):
I hope. I wait, so you don't have geology.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
No, what I'm saying is I hope. I'm I feel
so dumb because I don't. No, I do. I don't know, man,
I think I get all jumbled up because it just
the confidence of knowing how long a star has been
around makes sense to me in a weird way that
the center of the Earth doesn't. Because we've observed we
can actually observe the star. We cannot observe the center

(49:57):
of the Earth. We can get hints of it through things,
as you're saying, like what.

Speaker 3 (50:02):
It's actions and effects.

Speaker 2 (50:04):
What sounds, what waves it makes? Right, But we can
look out there at the star and we can go
kind of spend time backwards in a lot of ways
with our models. But just sorry, I'm just still thinking
about Mars and this radiation thing. Yeah, because the fact
that that planet doesn't have a magnetosphere, and we just

(50:24):
experienced a major coronal mass ejection that hit the Earth,
and the only reason why we didn't have major problems
is because our planet has that handy magnetosphere that that
stops things from happening, and that creates that stops the
radiation in these bursts from hitting us.

Speaker 3 (50:41):
Freaking Goldilock zone stuff. It's wild that these conditions are
just so perfectly conducive. Does not frying or dying of
radiation point.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
But we're like, yeah, man, let's get to this rock
that's not shielded at all and hopefully we can be
okay and these maybe volcanoes.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Yeah, well doubt what we get there. Did you know
you can get a whole hazarmat soup for just one
hundred and forty bucks. Ah, the price went down, I guess.
So now I will say I was sort of taken
a little bit aback because the image on the site
mirror safety dot com includes a really dope respirator mask
that is not included that is two fifty on its own.

Speaker 4 (51:19):
Ah. Yeah, the mask one of the key parts. We
also know that there are pits like this on the
Moon as well, or similar things, right, And just like that,
it's difficult to explore a cavern here on Earth when
you can get actual boots on the ground. It's even
more difficult to explore something so very far away. But

(51:40):
the Moon pit temperatures get this estimated around sixty three
degrees fahrenheit, so actually very amenable for human presence. If such,
if similar conditions could exist on Mars, then it would
go a long long way to making the dream of
second human planet a reality or you know, you pick

(52:04):
your poison returning to the original planet.

Speaker 2 (52:07):
Hey, it's gonna ben. I think you're right, dude.

Speaker 3 (52:12):
What was it? Bray, who wrote Hindline wrote Red Planet, right, Yeah,
Red Planet. It's just I don't know, I haven't read
it in a long time, but it is a I
do recall it being a really cool, uh highline novel
about colonizing Mars, and I'm pretty sure there are some
cave situations and when they kind of get into exploring

(52:33):
the you know, the it's a little bit more of
a Mars. I think that's been terraformed and that has
you know, actual life. It's able to support life to
some degree. But probably worth a revisit thinking about this stuff.

Speaker 4 (52:43):
Yeah, you know, one of the most recent books about
Mars that I really enjoyed was The Strange by Nathan ballingrud.
I don't even want to spoil it, man, I'm not
even sure what genre it is. Nathan uh who I've
spoke with over a few years. Nathan is very much
considered a horror writer. Like he he had several things

(53:07):
adapted from from his previous anthologies. But I wouldn't call
The Strange a horror novel. God, I want to know
if anybody else has read that one, because it stays
with me. It's like kind of a Western all right,
you know what that sounds great?

Speaker 3 (53:23):
No, I've I have pledged y'all sit right here out
laugh for all to hear, to read a book this year.
By end of the year's time, I will have read
a book. Damn you. Maybe that'll be the one.

Speaker 4 (53:37):
Yeah, okay, So the brief, the brief backstory I want
to keep us too long on this is that uh there,
it's an altered universe. But people live on Mars now
and the project to get humans to Mars has lost steam,
it has failed. It's dying civilization and the stressful planet.

(53:59):
So I think that kind of Ah, it's so good.
I might read it again. Yeah, but as we're speaking of,
you know, we've been going for a while now. We
said this might end up being two parter. There's several
other places we have to go or at least shout out.
One of them is the son Dong Cave in Vietnam.
It is the largest cave in the world is also
the most unexplored. It is super difficult to get in.

(54:21):
Only one thousand people per year can visit, and it's
three grand per person just for the tour. And this thing,
despite its huge size, it wasn't discovered till nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 3 (54:33):
Dudes, bro, that's less than the Star Wars Galaxy Star Cruiser,
Hotel Debacle situation, fake spaceship five thousand dollars a person
for two days. I think you've outlined a pretty solid
bargain there, my friend, dude.

Speaker 4 (54:48):
Look, please, please, folks, if you have not heard of
this before, it's spelled son spaceed doo n G cave,
please check out the videos or the three D tours.

Speaker 3 (55:00):
It is probably the.

Speaker 4 (55:02):
Closest thing humanity is found to a underground world or
a hollow earth. The scale is a mint. I want
to go so bad.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
It's one of my favorite parts about the parts of
elden Ring that I did finish, where you'll find some
well and then you hit a lever and you just
go down, down, down, down down for ages, and then
you're in this like I think maybe it's one place
in particular, but I bet it happens more than the ones,
and you're just in this underground thing where it like
has a night sky. It's unbelievable, the scale of it,

(55:33):
and then it's inhabited by these like weird crystally people
that murder you instantly with impunity. Yeah, you gotta get
your levels right, You sure do, buddy, And I never
quite got the balance hit that figure. Get good, as
they say, Yeah, yeah, I never. I never got good.
I stayed bad, oh man bad, like Michael Jack. Well,
we can't say that anymore. Bad to the boat. Skyrim

(55:55):
is much more on my speed. It's a little it's
a little more forgiving.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
They also have one of those places, a cave that
seems to almost have a sky because of the mycelium and.

Speaker 3 (56:06):
Sky re blackreach. I don't think i've gotten there yet.
I don't think i've seen it in any of my playthroughs.
So that's exciting because I love that. I just started
the Dawn Guard and it gives you a whole other
set of environments which kick butt. So I love discovering
new things because that game can't get a little samy
if you're just fast traveling between the villages to sell
your stuff. I like it. I love everything about it.

(56:28):
It's a great game.

Speaker 4 (56:29):
I kept my old PS four entirely because I have
one hundred percent play through in there, and sometimes I'll
just turn it on and it's weird.

Speaker 3 (56:37):
RPG that turned into the SIMS.

Speaker 4 (56:40):
Now, I just like walk around and I kid you,
not soup, you know, I find I go grocery shopping
in this fate whatever, what's your.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
Go to soup? I like to make a vegetable stew
or vegetable stew's good. Yeah, yeah, it's just got good stats.
But Ben, I mean, was it Fallout four? They kind
of sim fives the hell out of that game. It's
sort of pissed some people off with all of the
settlement buildings and stuff like. It's kind of annoying. It's
something that I've really ever gotten into. But I love

(57:10):
the idea of just exploring the world you've built for yourself. Ben.

Speaker 4 (57:14):
It's a weird one, but it's better spending money right
going outside. So we also know, all right, there are
so many other things we have to get to that
will may they may have to be in a second episode.
But this cave in Vietnam first got explored in two
thousand and nine, and people still don't know how far
it goes or where it goes. And then they've got

(57:35):
the stories of the burning pits like Centralia, Pennsylvania, the
Mouth of Hell, or the Gate to Hell, the Darvaza
gas creator in Turkmenistan. Those I don't think are mysterious.
We know human error created them. But the biggest mystery
is when are they going to stop burning? Even now
we're not entirely sure.

Speaker 3 (57:56):
I mean that sounds like hell to me. You know,
it's just constantly on fire, yeah, all the time. I mean,
give me a break.

Speaker 4 (58:07):
We also we also have to go back to a
great hobby horse of ours over the years, Antarctica. I
don't know why I said it, like that Antarctica stuff
like the ice cube, neutrino observatory down there in the street.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
You say observatory to match your pronunciation of Antarctica. I
love it. I love it. But I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 (58:31):
We're great, But we remember the ice cube, the neutrino observatory, right,
I don't.

Speaker 3 (58:36):
Know if I do, but that's I mean, it sounds fancy.

Speaker 4 (58:39):
I know.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
The neutrino is a real serious, tiny particle, right.

Speaker 2 (58:44):
It's literally a giant cube of a bunch of different sensors.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
Oh, I got a ray of Yeah, I got you.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
And there's a particular individual whose name I cannot think
of right now, who is a you know, self styled
whistleblower who says he was working there and believes that
it is not just an observatory, it's these are not
just detectors in the ice. These are also things that
can work together to emit some type of energy.

Speaker 4 (59:13):
Then Bob Blazar, definitely he's talking about a different thing.
I know, I remember what you're talking about. That they
were making energy.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
Like a sonic we like a sonic weapon like or
something like that.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
An energy weapon similar to the ones alleged to exist
at HARP.

Speaker 3 (59:30):
HARP is what was coming to mind, right right.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
You can find this, but I've never seen it substantiated
by anybody else.

Speaker 4 (59:36):
I know. It's Eric Hecker Raytheon contractor, and he claimed that,
similar to earlier HARP theories, that the ice cube neutrino
observatory actually created some earthquakes.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Yes, and at least do other weird energy.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
Could be harnessed, you know, intentionally if if if the
mood struck them. So that's the thing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:00):
Check out our episodes on that. You can also check
out What's beneath the Antarctic ice that was that was
a groovy one for us. In our video days as well,
we were talking a little bit off here about just
how how weird Antarctica is. We foreshadowed this a little bit.
This is a great time for Antarctic science because of

(01:00:21):
climate change. Right, it will ultimately lead to large scale
disasters as the ice sheets, as the ice sheets start
transforming away from being ice sheets.

Speaker 3 (01:00:35):
But sure it's not a Chinese hoax though, ben ice
climate change.

Speaker 4 (01:00:41):
Oh yeah, okay, okay, because I'm fifty to fifty on ice.

Speaker 3 (01:00:46):
That would be a great campaign to mount ice. Isn't real?
Show me? The show proved me wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Well, if you want another thing to search about Antarctic
ice and Arctic ice, you can look up a thing
that is known as the moud rise m a U
d ri i s E paulinya, which is spelled p
o l y n y a. It is just an
interesting thing about well, this one, the moud rise one

(01:01:16):
is a specific hole that opens up periodically in the
Antarctic ice pretty near the shore of Antarctica, and scientists,
for a long time we're trying to figure out why
the heck this thing opens and kind of closes and
again this isn't an ice sheet. So if you imagine
ice on the sea forming right as a sheet, and
then this hole opens up, the thing is the hole

(01:01:38):
is sometimes the size of New zealand sometimes the size
of Maine.

Speaker 3 (01:01:43):
It's huge. It's the scale again. So when are we going.
Let's just I got to hit up Arii first and
get some spelunking gear. But I'm down.

Speaker 2 (01:01:54):
Well, let's do We got to do it in the
winter time, so I don't know what winter is in Antarco.

Speaker 3 (01:02:01):
Yeah, isn't it kind of per moment? Does it really change? Yes? Much?

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Yeah, the ice sheet forms and like goes juts out
into the sea and then recedes back.

Speaker 3 (01:02:11):
I see, I see, I see, I make I see. Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:02:14):
So the uh the slight discoursion here. It is so fascinating.
We also had an episode on how murder is handled
in Antarctica for crime in general, and it's a.

Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Gray area kind of right, like it's yeah, it's weird.

Speaker 4 (01:02:33):
Well, who gets jurisdiction, right, because there's so many of.

Speaker 3 (01:02:35):
Those research stations that are under different national whatever. Technically
it's like an embassy or something, right.

Speaker 4 (01:02:41):
Right, And despite the earlier ambitions of New Swabia, there
is no government that owns Antarctica. And I got so
close to being able to travel there, not once, but twice.
It's still on the list. It's just kind of uh,
you know, not selling cheap skate. It's a little pricey.

Speaker 3 (01:03:01):
But I gotta say, though, Ben, you're quite the adventurer.
You've had some adventure Tarctic. We gotta go, man. I'm
just saying, yeah, you to your list. You'll be up
there with like a Teddy Roosevelt esque kind of you know,
naturalists type figure. You know.

Speaker 4 (01:03:16):
I'm just saying, well, let's let's all go. Let's Antarctica.

Speaker 3 (01:03:20):
Paul.

Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
I'm going to assume you're in, so I'll just venmo
you for the tickets.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
I'll just bring my puffy coat. I'll probably just and Matt,
sorry Matt to suffer through that riffing there.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
But what I'm bringing my ice climbing stuff so I
can get over this ice wall that everybody.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
Sp spiky shoes, and what about those those picks, those
like pyth looking things, those are sick. Yeah. The carabineers, well,
Carbiners is the little clickie boys that connect those for
the rope. You gotta have kidding you think We're not
going to bring garbineers all the way out here. We

(01:04:01):
forgot the Caribean. How will I clip my keys to
my belt? I'll certainly lose them in the Arctic tundra.

Speaker 4 (01:04:10):
I will pitch that I don't love reality TV, but
I will pitch this for us as a documentary, as
a limited series documentary on Netflix.

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
It rival of the North. Dude.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
No, it'll be the It will be the biggest thing
to hit Discovery since ice road truckers. It'll be ice
wall climbers.

Speaker 3 (01:04:28):
Yes, there it is amateurs, not even amateur, like what's
what's below amateur?

Speaker 4 (01:04:33):
Our qualifications include enthusiasm.

Speaker 3 (01:04:36):
Yes, exactly, that's enthusiasm, naked, frozen, and afraid. Oh man.

Speaker 4 (01:04:46):
Yeah, and look, we also know their deep, deep water
filled sinkholes like Elzaton.

Speaker 3 (01:04:53):
Gravity to it, doesn't it looks a beautiful Yeah, the
blue hole out there in the water. Man.

Speaker 4 (01:05:01):
We think though, that the most out there question is
something we can answer a little bit.

Speaker 3 (01:05:07):
It could there be something like a hollow earth.

Speaker 4 (01:05:10):
Science again seems pretty certain about the nature of the
planet's interior, so a fully hollow earth feels like something
that either doesn't make sense or we would have heard
about before.

Speaker 2 (01:05:23):
But what about eight miles deep?

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
Exactly? All right?

Speaker 4 (01:05:27):
We never got there about what about a huge, absolutely
locked off, self contained subterranean environment that is miles and
miles miles and miles long enough or wide enough. The
breadth of it is such that if you are a
human sized human walking around in there, you'll think, holy smokes,

(01:05:48):
there is a hollow earth.

Speaker 3 (01:05:49):
I'm in it. Even if it's like the size of U.

Speaker 4 (01:05:54):
I'm not going to pick a really big one the
size of New Hampshire hm, or forget it, the size
of you'd be like, wow, this is real, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:06:02):
What if there's a Texas sized dome that is covered
in some kind of heat resistant mineral that formed over
millions and millions of years.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
And it's so on board, dude.

Speaker 2 (01:06:14):
They're down there and they're just like, uh, well, we're
the most people and actually life's pretty great. And the
moment that they encounter humanity.

Speaker 3 (01:06:27):
Yes, instant porn addiction, you know, like, well, they probably
have their own kind of predilection. That's a good point.

Speaker 4 (01:06:36):
They probably would be like, no, we call ourselves the people, yeah,
because that's how those things work.

Speaker 3 (01:06:41):
We actually we call you the dirt walkers. Oh, that's right,
because their language would definitely immediately resemble ours one to one.

Speaker 4 (01:06:50):
Right, And you know, the the real question is the
size and scale. It's then therefore possible we could even say,
plus that there are undiscovered subterranean areas like we're describing,
big enough for humans to consider them another world, you know, unless,
of course, there's something they don't want you to do.

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
Yeah, and undiscovered countries of sorts. Shout out to Max
Williams for the Star Trek.

Speaker 4 (01:07:18):
Ref And as we said earlier, this is probably going
to be a continuing series for us. We would love
your help, fellow conspiracy realist. We come to you hat
in hand asking you the best part of the show
to tell us about the caverns, pits and holes in
your neck of the Global woods. Especially you know what,
bonus credit if they are include bizarre claims and legends

(01:07:42):
like the tuberculosis camp.

Speaker 3 (01:07:45):
Oh you can find us. We're on the internet and
you can hit us up at the handle of conspiracy Stuff,
where we exist on Facebook, on YouTube, where we have
video content of delightful varieties rolling out every single week.
I think they are anyway, and we think you will too.
Also on x the social media platform formerly not as Twitter,

(01:08:07):
on Instagram and TikTok, you can find this a conspiracy
stuff show.

Speaker 2 (01:08:11):
Hey, do you want to call us? Our number is
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want you to know in letter format that you have
to translate into numbers on your phone.

Speaker 3 (01:08:23):
Good luck.

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